Looking for a web hosting service that's reliable, fast, and secure for your website? We’ve tried the best options out there.
You’ve made a conscious decision to build an online presence after a period of planning and maybe even a hint of procrastination, but where do you begin? Choosing the best web hosting provider is a great place to start, which doesn’t have to be an overly time-consuming task.
A whole bunch of questions might be buzzing around your head: Do you need shared hosting or some other type? Might you best be served by a simple website builder? How much storage do you really require? What about an SSL certificate?
As of June 2021, we have reviewed (and are continuously re-reviewing) more than 160 web hosting providers, a number that includes best website builders (as well as static site generators and landing page creators).
So, in short, we know what stuff the absolute top website hosting companies are made of. No one has reviewed more web hosting providers than us online.
We’ve provided detailed summaries for each web hosting provider and highlighted their respective strengths and features, things that may be important for your choice, plus information on pricing and why each particular web host may be ideal for you.
Top 8 Best Web Hosting Services:
Bluehost is one of the only three web hosts that has been recommended by WordPress, and that says a lot about the platform. It offers a plethora of hosting plans and a competitive 99.99% uptime.
If you're creating a new blog or starting new websites, one of the first things you need is a trustworthy, high-quality, and secure website hosting service.
If you spend a few minutes searching for the “best web hosting providers,” chances are Bluehost will be on your radar immediately.
So, why is there so much buzz about Bluehost? Powering more than two million websites worldwide, Bluehost is a renowned brand name in affordable web hosting. It’s easy to use, even for first-timers, and fantastic price discounts speak for them.
You can carry out a search on Google for “the best web hosting solutions,” and Bluehost will appear top on the SERPs due to its popularity. Read more...
Hostinger Founded in 2004, the bootstrapped company hit the 10 million users mark a decade later, achieving ICANN accreditation and localizing services in 39 countries. Now, Hostinger serves more than 29 million customers and sees an average of 20,000 new users sign up each day — roughly a new customer every five seconds.
Headquartered in Lithuania, the company's team of roughly 250 employees maintains several international offices and a strong force of remote workers to ensure Hostinger services and support are always running and responsive. As such, Hostinger can offer around-the-clock live chat support and a 99.9% service uptime guarantee.
The company concentrates on resource-rich shared hosting and scalable virtual servers. The former boasts WordPress-friendly optimizations and an intuitive drag-and-drop website builder, along with daily or weekly backups and a free domain name for annual plans.
Hostinger clearly aims to strike the perfect balance on price versus performance. Instead of offering subpar services at the lowest price in the industry, the company equips its infrastructure with high-powered solid-state drives and recently even completed a self-imposed challenge to achieve a perfect score on Google PageSpeed Insights. Finding SSDs and that level of performance at a price lower than most competitors is a striking victory for the company.” Read more...
Founded in 2002, HostGator is a Houston, Texas-based Web hosting company that powers 950,000+ registered domains worldwide. The company provides shared, VPS, reseller, and dedicated web hosting. They have additional offices and data centers in Austin, Texas, India, and Brazil. HostGator was among the first group of large web hosting companies to take part in green hosting, which involves using eco-friendly technologies to offset carbon and reduce environmental waste.
Not only this, access to the industry’s leading cPanel will further facilitate you activating a CDN (Content Delivery Network), SSL, creating business email addresses, and much more at a single click.
They’ve hosted more than 8 million domains, and have more than 850 employees to support their customers around the clock. In fact, as their shared plans include 24/7/365 access to their support staff — via live chat, email, and telephone — if support is a top priority, then HostGator could be the company for you. Read more...
Greengeeks is an environmentally friendly hosting provider, founded by Trey Gardner in 2008. With 11 years of experience, it's a Los Angeles, California, United States-based web hosting company and promises to provide a better hosting experience to customers from over 150 countries. Green Geeks not only preserves the beauty of nature, but also has many features, including unlimited SSD disk space, bandwidth, domains, emails, and MySQL database amounts.
Worried about the carbon footprint of your website? GreenGeeks eco-friendly hosting has a positive overall footprint because they replace 3 times the amount of energy your website uses, by purchasing wind power credits (renewable energy, or green energy). They offer Shared, Reseller, VPS, and WordPress hosting that are designed for the fastest, most secure, and scalable hosting available with data centers located in Chicago, Pheonix, Toronto, Montreal, and Amsterdam.
Speaking of their customer base, Green Geeks has over 40000 customers worldwide with 500k websites hosted. Let’s find out more about Greengeeks. Read more...
DreamHost started as a project of some enthusiastic undergraduates of Harvey Mudd College of Claremont, California in 1996. These students were Dallas Bethune, Josh Jones, Michael Rodriguez. One year later in 1997, The name DreamHost was conceived and registered and DreamHost came into being an officially recognized hosting company.
Before long DreamHost was being counted as one of the renowned and reliable hosting companies of the USA. It garnered fame especially for being non-eig hosting and a cheap-and-powerful-hosting providing company.
DreamHost is one of the oldest web hosting services to date. Hosting over 1.5 million websites with 400,000 customers and 750,000 WordPress installations—I think DreamHost is one of the best web hosting services for most website owners. Read more...
Although many hosts try to advertise that their shared hosting is “cloud hosting” it’s often not—it’s usually more of a “clustered hosting” situation. Again, the difference is that true cloud hosting doesn’t involve sharing a single server but a setup where resources are split up over many different virtual servers. So, that’s something to keep in mind when you see hosts saying that their customers can “host in the cloud.” In reality, that may just be trying to take advantage of a hosting buzzword.
Another interesting fact about the cloud is that it’s typically cheaper than hosting in a shared environment. The reason for this is that cloud hosting is typically unmanaged, and there is very little support. Also, there are fewer physical machines to manage so that also helps drive the costs down. Really, the main downside to cloud hosting is that it can be difficult to manage for someone who doesn’t have a lot of expertise in dealing with virtual servers. Read more...
7. Liquid Web:
US-based Liquid Web has grown into a $100 million web hosting business that now manages 1.5 million sites for 45,000+ customers across its ten global data centers. Liquid Web is a leader in customer loyalty for the hosting industry. They are purpose-built for mission-critical sites, stores, and applications. Liquid Web is globally recognized for its outstanding support, named Heroic Support. Every hosting service offered by Liquid Web is available on highly secured, powerful, fastest, and performance-tuned servers for trouble-free hosting solutions. Their WordPress hosting plans come with a staging environment, automated updates as well as an easy-to-use dashboard for easier website management, due to this reason many top organizations such as FedEx, Motorola, Red Bull, United Way, ESPN, Audi, and many others use Liquid Web.
Liquid Web doesn’t rely on caching to ensure speed, instead, they focus on PHP workers which are responsible for executing your website’s PHP. Every plan has at least 10 dedicated PHP workers and some of their managed WooCommerce plans ⇣ come with up to 300 PHP workers.
All managed WordPress hosting plans come with pre-installed plugins, automatic updates, website staging, nightly backups, iThemes sync, iThemes Security Pro, free SSL, and all the essential features. Read more...
8. Elementor:
Elementor was born in Israel in 2016. It gained immense popularity in a short time span owing to its innovative drag and drop interface making it one of the most popular WordPress website builder plugins.
Since the Elementor WordPress Plugin launch, it has more than 5 million successful installs till now. It is also actively used in almost 180 countries. And it is rated 3.1 in the Trustpilot Elementor review, which is quite good.
Elementor has a free and paid version. Unlike the free versions of most other page builders, the Elementor free version packs enough powerful features to help you transform your boring website into a professional-looking one.
So if you’re just starting out and don’t have the budget to spice up your website, the Elementor free version is a great tool for you. But if you’re looking for more advanced features and an all-in-one solution for your website design needs, you might find more value in the Pro version, which we’ll talk about later. Read more...
5 must-know tips about buying a web hosting service
From our experience, we believe these are the five key things to consider when selecting yours:
1. You almost always get what you paid for If your website is primarily a hobby on the side then this shouldn't matter as much. However, as an essential business tool, it's often a false economy to go for the cheapest hosting deal (or a free one) on offer but that doesn't mean that all cheap deals are bad.
2. Beware of pricing tricks. The overwhelming majority of web hosting vendors offer low prices at the beginning of their contracts, but jack up the pricing after the introductory period ends, which can be 24, 36 or even 60 months after signing up. Always look for the total cost of ownership. As for the above, it doesn't mean that paying five years in advance is a bad thing.
3. Just how trustworthy is the hosting provider? Just about anyone can pretend to be a real web host and just be reselling someone else’s products. So, look to see how long they’ve been around, if they have a contact address, who owns them, are they making realistic promises on the website and so on. Google is your friend here.
4. Know your limits. How comfortable are you with creating your own website? Do you need external help to understand the numerous ramifications (including legal and commercial ones) that publishing one entails?
5. Consider web builders You don't need web hosting to get online, and site builders offer an interesting and compelling alternative. However, you can't migrate your content easily if you want to leave because of their proprietary nature.
Conclusion:
Out of hundreds of web hosting companies, I have narrowed it down to my top 10 picks for the best web hosts.
If you’re inexperienced or know you’ll need a bit more guidance, look no further than Bluehost.
Cloudways is a top choice for WordPress sites that need reliable speed and security.
Looking to maximize your budget? DreamHost offers the best rates for month-to-month hosting, while Hostinger provides some of the overall cheapest hosting plans around.
If you know you don’t need any extra bells and whistles from your hosting provider, HostGator is the best option for your simple website.
For websites where you need to count on fast loading speed, Elementor and Hostinger are great options, particularly for shared hosting and VPS hosting, respectively.
Got serious growth on your mind? Liquid Web is the hosting provider best suited to scale alongside your site.
Bluehost is one of WordPress’s recommends web hosts, but you can also get managed WordPress hosting from the specialists at WP Engine, who also come highly recommended by WordPress.
And for any companies or operations that value ethical, eco-friendly hosting, GreenGeeks is the provider whose values match your own.
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