If you’re planning on creating an online presence, reliable web hosting is essential. There are literally hundreds of web hosts available today providing thousands of varieties of web hosting services. Plans range from free with limited options to expensive web hosting services specialized for business. The plan you choose will depend primarily on how you plan to use your website and how much you have budgeted for hosting.
Choosing the right hosting plan will mean having access to the right allocation of resources to keep your website loading quickly and reliably for your visitors. Think about how many businesses these days operate primarily online; their sales and business leads come from their website. If someone lands on a website and there’s a problem — it takes too long to load or doesn’t appear at all — potential customers won’t wait around. They’ll bounce off that site in search of a one that works correctly and can deliver what they are looking for, seamlessly.
Your selection of an appropriate and reliable web hosting service provider is an important step in coming online, especially if you are launching a business website. Hosts not only make your site available to others, but they also offer services related to managing these servers and its software, support, bandwidth, speed and so on.
In this article, I’ve listed the 15 Best webhosting services of 2021 and also the cheapest ones. To come up with my list I had to first research about the different pricing, the uptime and loading time of websites hosted under each different web hosting service, reliability and also the support. I highly recommend the first two on my list, however it will be upto you.
Bluehost
Kinsta
Hostinger
Hostgator
A2 Hosting
WP Engine
Cloudways
Siteground
Dreamhost
Ipage
GreenGeeks
GoDaddy
So let's get into more details...
Bluehost is a web hosting company owned by Endurance International Group founded in 2003 by Matt Heaton and located in Salt Lake City, UT. It is one of the 20 largest web hosts, collectively hosting well over 2 million domains. They are an official “WordPress.org” recommended hosting provider since 2005. They have a staff of 750 people working around the clock. Being a recommended web host by Wordpress.org, they feature 1-Click installations in all their plans.
They are listed as one of the official recommended hosting providers for WordPress blogs and offer an abundance of great tools, bonuses, and resources to WordPress customers.
Bluehost offers five main types of hosting plans:
Shared hosting
VPS hosting
Dedicated hosting
WordPress hosting
Cloud Sites
If you are looking for something inexpensive and basic, shared hosting is probably what you need. This is what most beginners and small businesses are shopping for. Dedicated hosting is the most expensive option, appropriate for large commercial firms that need full control of their resources.
Basic: Beginning at $3.49 per month, this plan jumps up to $7.99 per month at the regular price.
Plus: This plan is regularly $10.99 per month.
Choice Plus: This plan is $23.99 per month.
These prices are all pretty good. But with this deal, you can make sure you get the best price! At the Basic level, you get one website, 50GB of space, and unmetered bandwidth. You also get one domain, five parked domains, and 25 sub-domains. Additional features include 5 email accounts with 100 MB of storage each.
With the Plus or Choice Plus plans, you get unlimited websites and unmetered space and bandwidth, which is awesome. You get one domain included, and you can have unlimited parked domains and sub-domains.
The highest level plan is Business Pro. It includes up to $180 in extra annual benefits, including two Spam Experts, one premium SSL, one dedicated IP address, domain privacy, enhanced performance, and SiteBackup Pro.
Standard: $19.99 your first month, up to $29.99 after that
Enhanced: $29.99 your first month, up to $59.99 after that
Ultimate: $59.99 your first month, up to $119.99 after that
These prices are in line with typical costs for VPS hosting industry-wide. The speed for the first two plans is 2 CPU cores, up to three and four cores for the top plan. You get 30GB SAN storage at the lowest tier, up to 120GB at the highest level. RAM ranges from 2 GB up to 8 GB. You get 1 TB of bandwidth at the Standard level, up to 3 TB at the Ultimate level. Each tier includes one domain. The Standard tier includes one IP address; you get two with the rest. Every plan is backed by 24/7 support and a money-back guarantee.
Standard: $79.99 your first month, $119.99 per month after that.
Enhanced: $99.99 your first month, $159.99 per month after that.
Premium: $119.99 your first month, $209.99 per month after that.
With the Standard plan or Enhanced plan, you get a 4 x 2.5GHz CPU. The Premium plan offers you a 4 x 3.3GHz CPU. Storage is ranging from 500GB to 1 TB (mirrored), and RAM starts at 4 GB at the Standard level, ranging up to 16 GB at the Premium tier. You get 5 TB of bandwidth at the Standard tier, 10 TB at the Enhanced tier, and 15 TB at Premium. One domain is included with every plan. You get three IP addresses at Standard, four at Enhanced, and five at Premium. All plans are backed by 24/7 service and a money-back guarantee.
Basic: Starts at $2.95 with a 36 months subscription
Plus: Starts at $5.45/mo with a 36 months subscription
Choice Plus: Starts at $5.45/mo with a 36 months subscription
These plans look the same as their shared hosting plans, and they cost the same.
However, at the end of 2018 Bluehost introduced a new category: WordPress Pro.
e)WordPress Pro
These plans are quite expensive compared to their simple WordPress hosting and what some competitors offer (many hosts sell WordPress hosting plans at the same prices as general-purpose shared hosting plans).
WordPress Pro at Bluehost is a big deal, however, and one of the company’s most popular services (with more than a million sites hosted by the company).
The Pro plans are running on high-performance VPS and offer improved site speed.
Start your 30-Day free trial today
One of the most significant selling points for me was their security and integration with Cloudflare — a content delivery network (CDN). This CDN prevents DDoS attacks and fake traffic from all kinds of different sources.
Go to Bluehost.com and click Get Started
Choose the plan you want ($2.95/month is cheapest)
Either enter a new name or select one you own
Enter your account information, account plan, and billing information
I would uncheck the add-ons Sitelock Security and Codeguard Basic
Click Submit and you’re ready to go!
I recommend you get started with their Basic Plan for $2.95/month, which is 63% off their regular price.
Kinsta is a hosting provider who offers premium managed WordPress hosting powered by the Google Cloud platform with some fantastic features.
Their hosting services are designed for everyone, from startups to larger companies.
As we all know, as far as websites go, speed is everything. A faster page loading time not only correlates with higher conversions, longer average visitor duration and decreased bounce rates, but also much better SEO. We’ve written lots on the subject of speed here.
It’s a cloud-based service build on top of the Google Cloud Platform, so the servers are fast, and redundancy is built in. There’s a support team that is, according to the marketing claims at least, fully fluent in WordPress, in case you need some help.
Its most distinguishing feature is that it exclusively offers Google cloud server hosting. This makes its infrastructure fundamentally different to the traditional shared or dedicated hosting of its competitors.
How? Well, instead of hosting through a single server in a data centre, cloud hosts utilise virtual server space that taps into a complex network of physical servers. This offers users some pretty cool advantages in terms of speed, reliability, scalability and flexibility.
Whilst there are a few cloud server hosts around, Kinsta utilises Google’s private fiber network. It’s one of the biggest in the world and able to reach speeds of 10,000TB per second in some regions.
In fact, Kinsta offers an SLA-backed 99.9% uptime guarantee. If that’s not enough, Kinsta also pairs this with continuous monitoring and uptime checks every minute. If they fail to correct error response codes within 30 minutes, your account will be credited. This guarantee holds true, 24/7, every day of the year.
d)Simple Set-Up And Migration - Kinsta is completely hands-off and offers unlimited website migration.
e)Awesome Technical Support
One of Kinsta’s biggest strengths is their support team. Instead of needing to go through a series of level 1 or level 2 support reps, Kinsta users always have real experts directly at their beck-and-call.
Kinsta offers 24/7 support via the Intercom widget, a live chat and ticket solution. It’s actually a pretty nifty system with an automatically stored chat history and window that stays open even as you navigate through different pages in the dashboard.
Kinsta’s Starter Plan is $30 per month ($25 if paid annually) and comes with 1 WordPress install, 20,000 site visits, free SSL and CDN, and 5 GB of disk space.
If you are a more substantial business and need to scale your hosting as you grow, they have a tier of 10 different plans. These increase your number of websites, SSD storage, and monthly visitors.
All plans come with free unlimited migrations from several different hosts, automatic daily backups, manual backup points, 24/7 support, and their white-labeled cache plugin.
Once you select their $60 per month Pro Plan, you get extra hosting features including their free “White Glove Migrations.” These features allow you to fill out a form, and their team of engineers will set up your site for you.
Overall if you’re serious about your WordPress speed and security, Kinsta is a strong pick. If you’re an agency developer that wants to host multiple client sites and scale as you grow, Kinsta is a great option.
Hostinger is one of the cheapest shared hosting providers on the market today.
They started in 2007 as 000webhost.com, a free web hosting service with no advertising. Then, in 2011, the Hostinger web hosting brand was born.
By May of 2014, Hostinger had already exceeded a user base of ten million people. By January of 2017, the user base had grown to 29 million people.
Unlimited or free services don’t mean anything if your site can’t stay online.
Our site with Hostinger had strong uptimes, fast speeds, great support, and more.
Uptime is the most important thing to check out when considering a web host.
Hostinger performs pretty well in this area but does have drops in uptime every few months or so (October, June and May 2019). Overall they perform quite good by keeping their websites up and running.
Last 12-month average uptime:
January 2020 average uptime: 99.95%
December 2019 average uptime: 99.98%
November 2019 average uptime: 99.99%
October 2019 average uptime: 99.65%
September 2019 average uptime: 100%
August 2019 average uptime: 100%
July 2019 average uptime: 100%
June 2019 average uptime: 99.83%
May 2019 average uptime: 99.89%
April 2019 average uptime: 100%
March 2019 average uptime: 99.94%
February 2019 average uptime: 100%
Fast page loading times are vital for any website user’s experience with a site.
Have you ever tried to open a web page only to get stuck waiting for the site to load for what seems like ages?
We all have.
Moreover, you probably didn’t stick around for long. If a website takes more than three seconds to load, 40% of people abandon it, according to Neil Patel.
Hostinger offers tons of different payment options like Visa, Paypal, Mastercard, Discover, Bitcoin, Maestro, American Express, and JCB.
They also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can try them out and get your money back if the performance or experience is sub-par.
Be aware that not all products are refundable, and some products have special refund terms, according to Hostinger’s Refund Policy. We’ll save the details for the cons section below.
Everyone needs a helping hand sometimes, even experts, so it’s important for web hosts to have a good support system.
Clicking ‘Help’ on Hostinger’s Control Panel opens the service knowledgebase. This groups content by well-chosen topics (Setup & Install, Account & Billing, Hosting & Website, Privacy & Security, Domains, Emails) and has a search box to help you find whatever you need.
There’s not a lot of content displayed up-front, unfortunately. The various knowledgebase sections have only four or five articles listed, and even these don’t always cover the most common topics. (The highlighted Emails articles have nothing to do with creating or managing email accounts, for instance, and mostly cover setting up email accounts on various device platforms.)
Using Search gets you access to more articles, though, and they proved to be more useful. Searching for ‘permissions’ gave us advice on setting file and folder permissions, as well as referring to specific error messages (‘403 forbidden’). Entering ‘change PHP version’ immediately highlighted the correct cPanel module. The content of these articles is basic, but enough to point users in the right direction.
Hostinger includes a free website builder (although the popular website builders are better) in their services with any plan you choose. There are tons of different templates to choose from, too. Once you’ve chosen a template, you can customize everything on your pages using the Hostinger website builder.
Hostinger offers a modern, easy-to-use interface where you can find everything you need in one location.
That way, you can track logins, update billing information, manage your domains, and monitor emails from your dashboard.
The control panel isn’t a traditional cPanel, but large icons make it simple to find exactly what you need and when you need it.
If you sign up for one of the top two Hostinger plans, you’ll gain access to unlimited email accounts for free.
Managing those accounts right from the control panel means that there’s no guesswork about spam filters, usage, and more.
Hostinger has 3 shared hosting plans starting at $0.99/month for the Single plan. For up to 100 websites it has the Premium plan for $2.89/mo. All the benefits and daily backups are available with the Business plan for $3.45/mo.
Long story short — these prices are super low. The ones you see right now are like this because of a special sale — and I don’t think there’s a major hosting provider with a better deal right now. Although being so cheap I’d highly recommend you think twice before going for them. My best option is Bluehost as I never experienced any issues with them with their low price of $3.95/month
HostGator might be one of the biggest, oldest web hosting companies in the industry, but they’re still making improvements, posting an average uptime of 99.98% over the past 24 months.
Their basic shared hosting plans come with unlimited storage, bandwidth, free domain (for the first year), and a free SSL certificate. They also have great customer service, who connected through a live chat instantly and answered each question within a few seconds each.
HostGator’s uptime performance used to be an issue in years past. But not anymore, based on our 24 months’ worth of tracking.
On top of that, their customer service was fast and friendly. They’ll help move your site over to their service for free. And beginners will like a lot of the simple, intuitive options directed their way.
HostGator has posted a 99.98% uptime over the last 24 months. They’ve been consistent with 99.98–100% uptime for several months.
That’s not even the best part, though. They’re consistent for a reason: their uptime guarantee says that if they drop below 99.90%, you can receive one month of credit on your account.
Last 12-month average uptime:
January 2020 average uptime: 99.97%
December 2019 average uptime: 99.89%
November 2019 average uptime: 100%
October 2019 average uptime: 100%
September 2019 average uptime: 100%
August 2019 average uptime: 99.99%
July 2019 average uptime: 100%
June 2019 average uptime: 99.99%
May 2019 average uptime: 99.95%
April 2019 average uptime: 99.98%
March 2019 average uptime: 99.99%
February 2019 average uptime: 100%
HostGator provides a knowledge base, phone, email, and live chat support. The last option is the fastest, connecting us to a service rep within about 15 seconds.
HostGator is so confident in their service that they extend the industry-average 30-day refund policy an extra two weeks or so to 45 days.
That means you can use them for over a full month and still get your purchase price back if any issues pop up.
HostGator’s shared hosting plans are fairly bare-bones. You’re getting enough for one site, but not a whole lot of extras on top of it.
Fortunately, they do offer a few extra security features like the ability to add SiteLock monitoring to your site. This service will run daily, looking out for any potential site breaches or hacks and let you know instantly when they find it.
If this isn’t your first site, and you’re trying to move an existing one over, HostGator’s got your back.
You’ll have 30 days after sign-up to get in touch and have them help move any site files, databases, scripts, and even a domain name over for you.
This includes a full cPanel transfer. So if you happened to have multiple site installs (like subdomains for one large site), you’re covered.
Slow Page Speed (Over 1 Second to Load)
Lots of Extra Fees for ‘True’ Backups, Gmail, and Malware
Industry-Standard Pricing ‘Tricks’-In addition to extra fees, HostGator pulls two pricing tricks that are pretty standard in the industry. The first is advertising a low rate like $2.75/month, only for you to realize that it requires you prepaying for a full three years to actually get it. Otherwise, you’re looking at $10.95/month for an actual single month’s worth of service.
Shared Hosting: HostGator has three shared hosting plan option to choose from:
Hatchling plan: This plan starts at $2.75 per month. You get one domain name, unlimited disk space and storage, SSL certificate, and unlimited subdomains.
Baby plan: This plan starts at $3.95 per month. It supports unlimited storage, bandwidth, and domain names.
Business plan: This plan starts at $5.95 per month. It supports unlimited storage, bandwidth, and domain names. It comes with a free dedicated IP, SSL, and a toll-free number.
A2 Hosting now has several shared, WordPress, VPS, reseller, and dedicated hosting packages for Linux and Windows. It also sells domain names and offers other web hosting solutions for business.
A2 Hosting has been around since 2001 and has delivered some of the fastest server speeds we’ve seen over the past 24 months.
Uptime has slipped over the past few months, however. And the renewal rates jump pretty aggressively after your first purchase period ends. However, if you need a fast web hosting service at relatively cheap pricing ($2.96/mo) with the ability to scale once your website grows, A2 Hosting might be a very good option if not Bluehost.
A2 Hosting has 3 shared hosting options, the cheapest Lite plan starts at $2.94/month. It includes a free SSL certificate, unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, and even free site migration. But you’re limited to 1 website and 25 email accounts using this Lite plan.
If you need more than one website and unlimited email accounts you can upgrade to Swift plan for $4.90 a month. This option will also include free automatic backups.
Turbo plan will get you all the unlimited features, Turbo-speed servers, Railgun optimizer for HTML, and LiteSpeed Cache plugins. This Turbo option starts from $9.31 a month.
Unfortunately, to get the advertised low price you’ll need to sign for the longer term — 24 or 36 months. If you’re serious about your website or project, that’s not that big of a deal. But take a good look at the shopping cart, the advertised price is nowhere to be found.
Over time, WP Engine has grown into an extremely popular WordPress hosting.
Many things have changed since WHSR shifted out. Various new features were added as technology advances, the company is funded by a large group of investors including Automattic (the folks behind WordPress.com), and many bloggers and WP experts regard them as one of the best managed WordPress hosting (there were also some who go against them, more about that later).
Is WP Engine as good as the words from streets? Let’s find out.
Solid server performance — Hosting uptime above 99.99%
Fast server speed — Time-to-first-byte (TTFB) below 250ms
Try out with no risk — 60-day money back guarantee
Good billing practice — Users can refund or cancel account easily
Reseller-friendly — Transfer billing to your clients
Agile developer environment — Development and staging sites ready
Genesis Framework and StudioPress themes included
Expensive addon features
No email hosting — Users will need to pay extra to third party (such as Google Suite or Rackspace) to host their emails
No direct access to .htaccess file
Self-help site migration service only
Major SEO issue with “Redirect Bot” default setting
Slightly expensive — Price increased in March 2018
Costly for owners running multiple WP sites
WP Engine has 3 WordPress hosting plans to choose from unless you need a custom plan, in which you’ll have to reach out to the team to create.
Personal: $34 per month
Professional: $99 per month
Business: $249 per month
Custom Pricing for large businesses
Founded in 2011, Cloudways is a well-established competitor in the managed cloud web-hosting space.
With thousands of clients and a big reputation in the business, is Cloudways a good option to choose? In this review, we will find out.
First things first, Cloudways website truly is a work of a master. It is presented in a pleasing and user-friendly fashion, which is sure to appeal to many visitors, including myself.
When it comes to speed, Cloudways users are unlikely to have any issues — a GTmetrix test shows that the time it takes for the main website to load is less than average at 5.7 seconds and takes a mere seven requests. Users’ experience might differ depending on the plan they purchase, but the hourly billing rates mean they can experiment with what they need and how much they’re willing to pay for it.
When first visiting Cloudways, you’ll be prompted to use their three-day free trial without entering any credit card details. What you’re not told, however, is that you can only get a server of up to 2 GB. What’s useful is picking out the features you need (server size, cloud provider, and the application you want to use) and getting the price calculated in real time at the bottom of the screen. Available cloud providers are DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform. You’ll have to verify your account through both your email address and your phone number before you can proceed
For its primary service (managed cloud web hosting), Cloudways offers 5 different providers of cloud servers which you can choose from:
DigitalOcean — Starting at $10/month
Linode — Starting at $12/month
Vultr — Starting at $11/month
Amazon Web Services (AWS) — Starting at $34.91/month
Google Cloud Platform — Starting at $33.30/month
SiteGround is a popular shared hosting provider that offers its users multiple different hosting options.
These include WordPress hosting, cloud hosting and even dedicated servers.
Overall, SiteGround hosting ranks near the top of all web hosting companies for both uptime (99.99%) and speed (673ms). Their customer support team is knowledgeable, fast, and friendly. All plans come with a CDN, SSL certificate, and email accounts.
Here is an in-depth breakdown of all the Pros and Cons.
1.30-day money-back guarantee
2.Free daily automatic backups & restore
3.Automatic WordPress installation (and officially endorsed by WordPress.org)
4.Managed WordPress hosting on all plans
5.Innovative speed technologies (SSD, HTTP/2, PHP7, NGINX + more)
6.Free SSL certificate & Cloudflare CDN
1.Limited data storage
2.Strict data over-usage policy
Easy Website Building Tools: SiteGround provides two options to launch a site — first, you can start from scratch or migrate an existing site. If you are building a new site, even more possibilities are available -WordPress, WooCommerce, Weebly website builder, and any of hundreds of other apps
Custom Control Panel: Not a long time ago, SiteGround was using cPanel as its main hosting management interface. And it was great. Many users have chosen SiteGround entirely for the reason. However, the provider decided to create a custom user area to adapt it to the changing needs of its customers. Related or not, the switch came the same year as cPanel increased its prices.
Different Levels of User Accounts: As SiteGround switched from cPanel to custom control panel, it added a possibility to create different levels of user accounts. It’s possible to add collaborators or clients to your team with varying levels of privileges.
Good Performance — 99.99% Uptime in Last 24 Months: SiteGround’s uptime performance has been nearly perfect over that time. Their 99.99% average puts them among the most reliable hosts we’ve reviewed.
Reliable uptime like this keeps website visitors happy. But more importantly, it means your site is almost guaranteed to be working around the clock so you won’t miss out when your customers want to make a purchase, either.
Above-Average Load Time (673ms): Their above-average loading time of 673ms isn’t the fastest we’ve seen, but it does place SiteGround near the top 10 at speed.
Good Customer Support Experience (2017–2021): We’ve been monitoring SiteGround for over two years now in total, and we’ve never had any major issues with their support. They provide a knowledge base for customers to find their own quick answers. Otherwise, you can call in over the phone or use the 24/7 live chat.
Free Site Migration for 1 Website: They’ve created a free WordPress Migration plugin that you can upload to any site.
Free SSL Certificate and Content Delivery Network (CDN): SSL helps to protect any information sent back and forth between the user’s device and the website, including personal details like IP addresses or credit card numbers. If left unsecured, hackers and others could easily intercept this information. So Chrome is looking out for web users’ best interest here.
SiteGround Shared hosting cost
Shared hosting is the most common type of hosting out there. It’s probably the one you should be using, unless your site is really big or has special technological requirements.
The StartUp plan costs $14.99 a month for 10GB of storage (only 1 website allowed). GrowBig is $24.99 and comes with 20 GB of storage & more backup options. The GoGeek tier is $39.99 and has 40 GB of storage and advanced features (e.g. Git). SiteGround doesn’t limit the traffic your site can get.
The prices for these plans are the same as the shared hosting prices:
StartUp: $14.99 a month for 10 GB of storage, unlimited traffic and 1 website allowed.
GrowBig: $24.99 a month for 20 GB of storage, unlimited traffic, unlimited websites and more caching options.
GoGeek: $39.99 a month for 40 GB of storage, unlimited traffic, unlimited websites and more caching and Git repo.
DreamHost hosts over 1.5 million sites and is nearly 25 years old.
Their performance hasn’t slipped during that time, maintaining above-average uptime (99.94%) and page speeds (648ms).
DreamHost’s main shared hosting plan comes with popular apps like WordPress, website builder options including their own, and others like Wix or Weebly. These plans have unlimited bandwidth and disk space. And you get a full 97-day money-back guarantee to test the service out.
1.Generous 97-day money-back guarantee
2.Free Domain and Privacy (on unlimited plan)
3.Unlimited disk space & data transfer
4.Free SSD storage Fast servers (PHP7, SSD & built-in caching)
5.Free SSL & CloudFlare CDN
6.DreamPress high performance WordPress hosting
1.Don’t offer cPanel control panel
2.There’s no phone support
Above Average Speed (648ms): DreamHost’s 648ms average loading time over the past 24 months has been good. It puts them in the upper half of hosts we’ve tested, but well below the top five who have literally cut this average in half (between ~317–405 ms). The silver lining is that DreamHost has been able to hold this average consistently. In September 2017, they posted a 1,316 ms loading time that had us worrying. But ever since then, things have been smooth sailing. So you should be able to expect the same.
Above Average Uptime (99.94%): DreamHost’s 24-month average uptime is also above average at 99.94%: That’s a pretty good result, but it’s not even the best part.DreamHost has an uptime guarantee. Like other hosts, if your monthly average falls beneath that threshold, you’ll get a credit for the cost of the service.
97-Day Money-Back Guarantee: Their money-back guarantee is good for up to 97 days. That’s over a full three months to really make sure you’re happy. DreamHost doesn’t have any hidden terms or hoops to jump through that might jeopardize your refund, either. There are only a few cases where your refund might be deducted or not given, but most are pretty standard.
There are only two plans to choose from:
Shared Starter. This is great for those just starting out. It includes one website, a .com domain name for a low price, unlimited traffic, fast SSD storage, SSL certificate, and the option to upgrade to add an email account. This plan starts at $2.95/month.
Shared Unlimited. This plan is great for those with multiple websites. Enjoy unlimited websites, a free domain name, unlimited traffic and SSD storage, multiple SSL certificates, and email hosting. This plan starts at $7.95/month.
iPage was founded in 1998 and hosts over a million websites across two data centers in the US.
Their uptime has been above average at 99.96% over the past few 24 months, while their page loading times are an average of 746ms. iPage’s single shared hosting plan is among the cheapest we’ve reviewed at $1.99/mo for three years. They also have two WordPress-based plans with a few extra features like SiteLock and automatic malware removal.
1. Cheap, Inexpensive Hosting: Currently, the iPage starts at $1.99/month. The value, as you’ll see in a minute, is good, too. They only have one shared hosting plan, so nothing is ‘held back’ to try and force you to upgrade.
The only catch is that you’ll have to pay for three full years upfront to get that $1.99/month price point. Otherwise, the regular (read: “renewal”) rate is $7.99/month.
2. Lots of Third-Party Applications: As mentioned, iPage’s ‘core’ offering is solid. Here’s a brief rundown of everything you get for that $1.99/month (times three years).
All hosting plans come with a free domain registration for the first year. This saves you ~$15/year right off the top.
You’ll also get a free email address and SSL certificate, too. Each email account is branded for your domain, includes email forwarding, autoresponders, spam filters, virus checking, and even POP3/IMAP accounts so you can set everything up with Outlook.
3.30 Day Money-Back Guarantee: It’s always comforting to hear that there is a 30 day money back guarantee. Some web hosts play trickery and will not give your money back in full. Not iPage.
If you are not satisfied for any reason, you can get your money back in full. No questions asked.
4. 100% Uptime in the Last 30 Days: You can see the uptime chart below. For 30 days 100% is a great score! The level they aim at is 99.99%. I remember a downtime about two months ago. That lasted for one minute.
5. Live 24/7 Chat Support: The customer service team was always quick to answer any and all questions, and when there was a minor hiccup with the service (completely my own fault), their techs were on hand to give me the kind of step by step instruction that had me back up and better than ever.
Just like with other web hosts, chat support will look into your issue. However, with anything complicated, you will have to wait for email support to take care of it.
6.Decent Loading Time (746ms): Over the last 24 months, iPage’s loading times have been an average of 746ms.
That means they take a bit under a second to load a page, which is definitely a good sign in the Internet world
Studies have shown a correlation between fast page speeds and higher conversion rates. Lower page speeds have the opposite effect: lower conversion rates and revenue.
1. Lots of Extra Fees for Additional Services: t’s true that iPage’s core offering is solid. You basically get unlimited storage and bandwidth, plus access to dozens of different popular apps.
You also get a free domain for the first year, SSL certificate, and email.
The first additional fee that pops up is the renewal rate down the road. A renewal rate of $7.99/month isn’t terrible — we’ve seen others well over $10+/month.
However, it’s when you combine this with a few other additional fees that your pricing starts to snowball.
2. No Free Site Migrations: Most of the 30 web hosts we’ve reviewed will move an existing site to their servers for free. This is especially nice if you’re not a technical person and don’t want to waste time trying to figure out how to move site files, re-point your domain, and more.
iPage, however, does not offer any free site migrations. Instead, they will only move a site for a $150 one-time fee. That’s on the high side, compared to other hosts. Bluehost, for example, will charge you $150 but they’ll move up to five sites for that one price.
3. It’s Not Really “Unlimited” (Better for Smaller Sites): Most of the features listed on iPage’s shared hosting plan are “unlimited.”
Of course, nothing is truly “unlimited” in this world. The same holds true here, too.
But first, some good news: There are no ‘overage’ fees for using a lot of resources like disk space, assuming you’re using it correctly within iPage’s terms.
They have two main WordPress hosting plans:
WP Starter: This plan costs $3.75 per month. It comes with a free domain name for a year, unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, customized control panel, and pre-installed themes and plugins.
WP Essential: This plan costs $6.95 per month. It includes everything in the Starter option, plus WordPress expert support, automatic malware removal, and SiteLock professional security.
GreenGeeks was founded in 2008 by Trey Gardner, and they’ve now shot up to hosting over 300,000 websites (with data centers in the U.S., Canada, and the Netherlands). On their website, GreenGeeks goes on to make two bold claims:
99.9% uptime
100% customer satisfaction
30-day money-back guarantee
Free domain name
Unlimited diskspace & data transfer
Free site migration service
Nightly automatic data backups
Fast servers (LiteSpeed using SSD, HTTP/2, PHP7, built-in caching + more)
Free SSL certificate & Cloudflare CDN
Setup & domain fees aren’t refundable
Confusing (a bit misleading) pricing
Customer Service
With GreenGeeks’ managed VPS plans, they are guaranteeing their customers that they will always be monitoring your website and server. This means that if anything goes down, or an error occurs, they need to be available to fix the issue for you. GreenGeeks lives up to this promise by providing customer service agents to customers 24/7. Often, the tech will resolve the issue before the customer even becomes aware that the website has gone down.
If you have questions or general comments, you can connect to customer service agents in multiple different ways. You can send them a message via live chat, call them, or review their FAQs on their website’s knowledge base. Agents tend to respond very quickly to live chat, within one or two minutes. They generally are very knowledgeable about technology and can get to the root of your issue right away.
Uptime is important when it comes to VPS. If a webpage takes more than a few seconds to load, it is likely that the visitor will become impatient and will leave the site. This is a lost customer to you and therefore means less revenue.
GreenGeeks guarantees an uptime of 99.90%. However, it has been proven that they can easily exceed this, as their average yearly uptime is 99.98%. This will equal out to downtime of around 4 hours per year. These downtime periods are usually very short, and often remain undetected because they are resolved so quickly
If you are not completely satisfied with your VPS plan, you will have a 30-day money-back guarantee. This includes the cost of the plan, and not the start-up fees, domain fees, or cost of add-features.
GreenGeeks claims to be a green web hosting provider, which is a bonus to some customers. They substantiate this claim by the amount of energy that they save during their daily operations, as GreenGeeks offsets its energy usage by 300%. The company purchases wind power credits, three times the amount that they use to power their business. GreenGeeks is a Green Power Partner with the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Shared web hosting ⇣: $2.95 — $11.95 per month.
WordPress hosting ⇣: $2.95 — $11.95 per month.
VPS hosting ⇣: $39.95 — $109.95 per month.
Reseller hosting ⇣: $19.95 — $34.95 per month.
Dedicated server hosting ⇣: $169 — $439 per month.
GoDaddy is exceptionally well-known in the hosting space, typically serving as site owners’ introduction to the world of web hosting. The company makes it incredibly easy and affordable for folks to choose a domain name, sign up for hosting, and start building their online business or personal web property.
While known for its domain, email, and shared hosting services, GoDaddy offers options for virtual and dedicated servers as well. Pre-built templates come with the hosting company’s basic WordPress offering, or upgrade to managed WordPress services for top support or help with your online store.
Good Uptime of 99.97%: GoDaddy might be known for domain names, but they’ve figured out how to deliver some rock-solid uptime on their shared hosting plans, too.
There was a dodgy month in October 2019 with 99.84% uptime. But then they followed that up with a consistent 99.99% — 100% streak to bring the 24-month average up to 99.97% .
Great Page Loading Speed: We’ll admit: we didn’t see this coming.Years ago, you wouldn’t associate cheaper web hosts like GoDaddy with good performance. Yet, that’s exactly what they’ve done. Our GoDaddy test site has posted an average page loading time of only 554ms over the past 24 months.
Basic Cheap Plan is Good Value on Paper: When we originally reviewed GoDaddy, their cheapest shared hosting plan was too expensive, and the features were too limited. It seems like they’ve done a complete 180-degree turn since then, though.Now, the Economy plan pricing is only $1.00/month. No discount code needed.
GoDaddy has become relatively infamous for the number of upsells used to increase the price you’re ultimately going to pay.
The top hosts we’ve reviewed will throw in features like an SSL certificate on every plan. These have become commonplace and are basically required to run a site today.
Unfortunately, GoDaddy doesn’t offer any of these in their base plans, which leads to a lot of the upsells along the way.
GoDaddy’s Economy plan pricing starts at $1.00/month for twelve months.
However, all of their plans follow the industry-standard pricing trick where they double or triple the price when it’s time to renew.
This same Economy plan, as an example, will jump to $8.99/month when you renew.
You don’t get any extra features or better performance. But you will have to pay more.
Economy Plan: One website for $1.00/month with a 12-month commitment (renews at $8.99/month). You get 100 GB storage, unmetered bandwidth, free business email and a free domain name for the first year.
Deluxe Plan: Unlimited websites for $7.99/month with a 36-month commitment (renews at $11.99/month). It comes with all of the Economy features, plus unlimited storage and subdomains.
Ultimate Plan: All Deluxe features and more for $12.99/month with a 36-month commitment (renews at $16.99/month). Includes two times the processing power and memory, a free SSL certificate for the first year, premium DNS, and unlimited databases.