Want to skip the read and directly find your answer. For most people the best web hosting for WordPress is BlueHost.
Today around 40% of the web is powered by WordPress. I myself use WordPress to build and manage my websites. WordPress doesn’t require you to have any knowledge of programming languages.
WordPress has made it easier to launch businesses, promote individual brands with minimal investments and much more benefits.
The inception of WordPress drastically changed the way we looked at the complexities of having our own piece on the Internet.
Almost 455 million websites across the globe are run through WordPress managed hosting: According to a study.
WordPress has made the reach became wide, easier and affordable for most.
When starting off with your web journey through WordPress; it is vital to choose the correct hosting provider. With my experience with different providers I’ve simplified this for you.
Whichever host you are going to choose for your requirements, do keep these 3 important points in mind:
- Speed : also referred as “load time”
- Uptime: The close to 100, the better. Above 99.90 to be considered
- Customer Support: the providers should actively help you with your host queries
BLUEHOST Review- The best choice for beginners
Bluehost is one of the largest Web hosting providers. According to data, around 2 million sites across the globe are powered by BLUEHOST. The web hosting providers are being recommended by WordPress for over the last 15 years; making it the premium consideration for most of the users.
BLUEHOST is a perfect choice for a beginner making a new website from scratch. Singing up for BlueHost comes with one-click WordPress installation, one free domain for one year and you can make your site live within 15 minutes.
BlueHost offers plans starting as low as $2.95/month for your WordPress Hosting. This is incredibly cheap. You have to sign-up for a 3-year contract plan for the best deals. Lock in the best deals as you get and as per your requirements.
Yes, you will be on shared hosting with this plan. If your site or any other site on the same server gets a huge spike in traffic then the site may slow down, but honestly, this never happens. If any site starts to affect any other website on the same server BlueHost, asks them to upgrade their plan. The site doesn’t slow down.
Let’s look at the major service features.
- Avg.Uptime : 99.95%
- Avg. Load Time : 249ms
- Support : 24/7 live chat, phone
- Features : One click WordPress install, Free domain for one year, free SSL
- Website : BLUEHOST.COM
You can get your website and start your online business, blogging anything you wish easily without worrying even if you’ve not done this before. I’ve guided you about this in my post about HOW TO MAKE YOUR FIRST WEBSITE IN 15 MINUTES.
Having a look around your WordPress Dashboard can easily make your things understand and how to manage your manage, if any issues you can easily reach BlueHost customer support anytime.
Taking advantage of the multiple WordPress themes available, you can make your website look according to your business requirements and the target audience.
The best part includes in the plan is a free CDN (Content Delivery Network) to boost your website performance and security. The free SSL certificate makes your website secure and gives it a recognized (HTTPS://) status. Plus there are tons of options to utilize as per your requirements if you are willing to spend few bucks. Explore the BLUEHOST plans and Bluehost WordPress Marketplace.
Noteworthy features you can get from your BLUEHOST Web Hosting plan:
- One-Click WordPress Install
- Unlimited traffic
- 50GB Storage
- Free SLL(https://) certificate
- $200 in free marketing credits (Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising)
- 24/7 customer support
All the above-mentioned features and services you can get with a BLUEHOST hosting plan. For a basic entry-level website 50 GB space is more than enough space. This is also almost twice than you’ll get from any other plans.
WP Engine Review – The Best for Managed WordPress Hosting
WP Engine is best for managed hosting plans. The premium platform for the pro users with multiple options to choose from. WP Engine is the industry leader in Managed Hosting platforms. The company provides excellent customer support. You get a platform developed with exclusive tools designed for your WordPress site to get all the best available features.
WP Engine isn’t recommended if you are just starting off with WordPress or a small website or just a blog. It will be overpriced. The plans start from $30 and keep going up as per your requirements. Whereas if you just need a small website or blog you should go for BLUEHOST or Siteground which will cost around $2.45-$15 as per your need.
WP Engine gives you the luxury to create high-performance sites without having to keep a developer. Businesses can easily be run and the hassle-free customer service provided by them makes everything easier.
If you are an enterprise business, need a high-performing website with blazing speed, with the best uptime speed, and best-in-class secure platform; WP Engine is for you.
The major highlights of their service.
- Avg.Uptime : 99.95%
- Avg. Load Time : 280ms
- Support : 24/7 live chat, phone
- Features : One click WordPress install, Free automated migration, free SSL, Great range of Premium WP Themes
- Website : WPEngine.com
Managed hosting plans with WP Engine starts at $25 a month with a year contract. You can also sign up as a monthly paying account with no more than $30 a month. That’s not a huge difference. You get 10GB of storage and 50GB of bandwidth with the Startup plan. This is more than enough for a small-range website and can handle 25,000 monthly visitors. As per the requirement and your business size you can easily upgrade to Growth or Scale plans.
There is a huge range of options with WordPress themes that are provided with all the plans you choose. WP Engine is the ultimate choice for Managed Hosting services. This is my top recommendation.
There is three more range of options available at WP Engine.
- Plus Managed Hosting : Plus plan included automated plugins and testings. You can efficiently control the upgrades and manually control the changes if needed. The plan starts at $28.33 a month.
- Secured Hosting : Comes with everything included with the Plus Plan and including a advanced firewall and added protection from hackers. If a load of sensitive information is shared through your site or business this plan is for you. Plan starts at $44.17 a month.
- Ecommerce Hosting : If you are running a ecommerce business or want to start one. This is the best Managed Hosting service you are going to get. Structured themes dedicated to your requirements and tons of options to choose from. The plan starts at merely $30 a month.
WP Engine Managed WordPress Hosting is everything for most people. Tailored for the best of professional needs from individual businesses to large organizations.
Hostinger Review: The best choice for cheap WordPress Hosting
Hostinger is the best choice and an excellent WordPress hosting provider. They stand out for their unmatched uptime speed at such a low cost. The hosting plan starts at as low as $1.99 a month.
With even this cheapest range of prices, Hostinger is offering the features provided the hosting provider is no less. The resource is enough for a WordPress site to get online and perform well.
To get the cheapest plan you need to sign a four-year contract. This is one long-term commitment you have to make. This is okay if you are just getting started with a website. The total price tag with those tags won’t look hefty at all compared to other hosting providers.
If you opt for a WordPress Starter plan you can get one free domain for a year, CDN, free email accounts, and an SSL certificate which is one click to enable as you make your site live. All the requirements are fulfilled to getting started.
Hostinger’s starter plans are not for creators who need to manage a hefty workload through the website. In the entry plan, you get 10GB of storage, a couple of databases, and weekly backups.
If you need to make regular updates on the site then this is not the plan for you. The weekly backup won’t work for you.
At the lowest cost, you are getting among the highest uptime speed provider with 99.90% promised. No doubt they provide a great uptime speed. At such cheap rates for WordPress hosting the services and features are impeccable.
The drawback is their customer service response time. At times they can be slow. You can be assured of your queries getting answered and sorted, but sometimes it may take a little while. It’s not lighting fast.
The major highlights of their service.
- Avg.Uptime : 99.74%
- Avg. Load Time : 345ms
- Support : 24/7 live chat, phone
- Features : One click WordPress install, free SSL, free email account
- Website : Hositnger.com
The bottom line is if you are looking for a cheap WordPress hosting provider, or you are just starting off with a website, or you don’t need to update the site quite often, then Hostinger will be the right choice for you. Getting such great features at this low cost is the best offer you can have. Click here to register now with the best rates.
SiteGround Review: Affordable Managed Hosting with best support available
SiteGround comes with affordable plans for Managed hosting services. This is the best option for small businesses or for considerable visitors to be handled on your website. If you are not ready to commit to expensive Managed hosting then this is the best option one has got.
You get managed hosting plans at the magnitude of shared hosting with the support with it that comes outdo everything. Winning two Stevie awards for customer service is no joke.
SiteGround is among the few hosting service providers recommended by WordPress with outstanding reviews from their users. The automatic updates, enhanced security with world-class platform-specific support when used efficiently, is more than enough to get your website up and running in no time.
Hosting over 2 million domains and making website owners less stressed and more productive with their hosting service SiteGround is among the best choice for WordPress websites. I like the advantages that come with their WordPress hosting plans, like automatic updates, enhanced security, free CDN for faster website loading, and free SSL certificates.
Noteworthy features you can get from your SITEGROUND Web Hosting plan:
- One-Click WordPress Install
- Performance optimized for WordPress Sites
- Free SLL(https://) certificate
- Best customer support
- Free CDN
- Simplest migration of website
- Unlimited free email accounts
The StartUp plan starts at a mere $4.99/month. If you are new to WordPress this would be the best choice of plan for you. If you are migrating your website from another server to SiteGround, and your website is of any other kind than a blog you can go with GrowBig plan or GoGeek plan. Go Big plan also comes at the small cost of $7.99/month and the GoGeek plan comes at $14.99/month.
With GoBig and GoGeek plans you get a lot of extended features like on-demand backup, improved caching, staging area, and a lot more features to let your website deliver the best possible performance.
The company offers a 30-day money-back guarantee if you are not satisfied with the service.
Kinsta Review: Best for scaling up and huge traffic websites
If you have a WordPress website with even over a hundred thousand monthly visitors or your website is having a huge surge in traffic drastically and want to scale up anytime to this extent. Close your eyes and go ahead with Kinsta.
Kinsta is the best alternate for WP Engine. If anything doesn’t get with your requirements or you need something more from what you can get at WP Engine, Kinsta is the place you go.
What separates Kinsta from all the hosting providers is their auto up-scaling feature at the time of unplanned surge of traffic. Your website may start to get thousands of visitors if you can make go any of your content viral. In any such case, Kinsta automatically allocates more CPU and RAM to your website.
This means you don’t ever need to worry about your website slowing down or crashing in any case when you get an influx of readers and visitors. Instead, Kinsta makes sure the performance always remains intact.
This is great for websites where you get a large number of visitors on any occasion or content keeps getting viral or you make frequent announcements or give our information that attracts visitors.
Noteworthy features you can get from your KINSTA Web Hosting plan:
- One-Click WordPress Install
- Great performance
- Never have to worry for site crash
- The best Up-Scaling feature
- Free SLL(https://) certificate
- Free CDN
- Staging area on any plan you choose
Kinsta offers you to choose from over 10 plans. You can go with any of those suitable for your website or business. The major focus of their service is website performance and with over 25 data centers across the world, they have been able to achieve this.
The plan starts at $30 a month. Even the Starter plan is suitable for a small business website. For any website which requires more features than WP Engine, Kinsta provides. You can choose plans for managing traffics in millions without any issue and in just one click.
The premium services do cost a bit high. If your need is such big and you are a pro or your business requirement has to be fulfilled then Kinsta is your best choice. If you just want a small blogging website or you are new to WordPress then BlueHost is where you would like to start.
On Kinsta you pick the plan based on traffic. Every plan has mentioned the amount the traffic surge it can easily manage.
Nexcess Review: Best budget Managed Hosting and Website Staging
Nexcess offers you sufficient resources for running your enterprise website. If you are looking for a managed WordPress service and you want an alternative for WP Engine, Nexcess is the perfect choice for you.
A strong backbone designed by the Liquid Web to powerhouse your website. You want to host multiple enterprise websites or run your organizational business through the web, Nexcess services won’t disappoint you.
The best feature among all is the Staging area you get for testing your sites before moving it to live. You cannot afford any error to be shown on your live website, so Nexcess makes it unbelievably easy to test. Without worrying that you may make errors on the live-running website, you can test as many times as you require and make the changes to perfection before going to live.
The plan and pricing feature is also unique which gives users the flexibility to scale up as per the requirement of their website. The plan starts as low as $9.50 if you sign up for a year. If you don’t want to commit for longer periods, the plan still is as below as $19. The cheapest plans are available for a managed WordPress hosting provider.
With different managed WordPress hosting providers like SiteGround you will need to upgrade your plan to get staging area and automated backup features, but with Nexcess all this comes with the basic plan. On the other hand, if you upgrade at Nexcess you’ll get more hosting resources.
Nexcess is the alternate for WP Engine and among the most premium Managed WordPress hosting providers. It takes care of lots of your maintenance through automatic plugin updates, even at their basic plan, Spark. For the same feature with WP Engine, you’ll have to upgrade your plan.
Noteworthy features you can get from your NEXCESS Web Hosting plan:
- 2 TB bandwidth with any plan (which is more than any other hosting provider offers)
- Free CDN
- Unlimited email accounts
- Free SLL(https://) certificate
- Staging area
- 24/7 phone, live chat and email support
Nexcess has very flexible options to choose the best plan which can easily fulfill the needs from small business to enterprise websites. The performance is always on top.
Every plan has every feature included, you just need to choose the plan according to the number of websites you want to host and the space needed. There are seven different options available for you to choose from.
You won’t get all the features available at WP Engine, but you get enough hosting resources to successfully host your managed WordPress website.
If you need Managed WordPress hosting at an affordable price, Nexcess Spark should be your choice. This has all the resources to kickstart your website and as the website reach and requirements grow the upscaling features will look after your needs and you can stay with Nexcess easily.
A2 Hosting Review : Best for site migration and uptime speed
A2 hosting is serving customers since 2001 and is known for delivering great uptime speed to the websites hosted on their platform. The plans provided are developer-friendly and options are available to choose the best plan suitable for your website needs. Their anytime money-back guarantee is the most unique feature they offer.
With many WordPress hosting providers, you get free migration features. This means you can use multiple plugins to automate the task.
Whereas A2 Hosting has a team of human support dedicated to this which makes the process smooth and easy for anyone migrating their website from another host.
Either you want managed hosting services or shared hosting services A2 provides you with both options. And a vast option to choose from plans is a plus. Free migration comes with any of the services you opt to choose from.
Noteworthy features you can get from Your A2 Web Hosting plan:
- 100 GB storage
- Free Cloudflare CDN
- Unlimited email accounts
- Free SLL(https://) certificate
- Staging area
- 24/7 phone, live chat and email supprot
- Virus scanning and hack defense
Yes, you read it right, 100 GB storage with also the Startup plan, which is way more than any other hosting provider offers. The unlimited email account feature comes with any of the plans you choose to opt for. Unlimited email option is also not provided by every hosting provider with their basic plan.
While A2 Hosting is a good option if you want to host a single site or want to migrate to a different host. As the STARTUP plan is at just $2.99. You can choose to upgrade the plan to Turbo to get more features and for easy maintenance which will cost you $9.99 a month. With this upgrade, you will be easily able to maintain traffic upto over 8 times compared to the Startup plan. This is definitely a benefit.
In the end, A2 hosting is great for all the above reasons, but the renewal cost is more than you would have to pay with any other hosting provider. Comparing to WP Engine or Nexcess their multiple features and options out-shadow A2 Hosting at many features. You also don’t get a free domain with the hosting plan, to keep in mind while starting with A2 hosting. If you are migrating then this won’t be an issue and you can easily go ahead and be a part of a quality host.
Get in touch with A2 Hosting today.
How you can choose the Best Hosting Provider for WordPress?
The above are the best options to choose from that I have collected after doing research on over a dozen of Hosting providers. Out of these which will you choose?
To know this you must know what are your requirements and what priority service you are looking for. Nowadays you can host WordPress with any hosting provider. Above I have focused on which provide WordPress hosting as their basic service.
The selection of the right WordPress hosting provider is vital as per the requirement of your website. As this will be the heart and soul of your site and how it will perform. Each host has something unique and some common features.
The final selection solely depends on how those features will prove beneficial for your website and result in improving the web user experience.
There are a few major factors to look upon when selecting which hosting providers to go with. Below I have walked you through the major criteria to look upon according to your requirements to select the best hosting provider for your WordPress Website.
Shared vs Managed hosting
The first question you need to ask yourself is – Do you want shared hosting or managed hosting service? This is a major factor in the selection of your hosting provider.
With shared WordPress hosting, you will be doing the backend maintenance and updates by yourself in order to run your site to its best of capabilities. In WordPress with little practice, this won’t be a hectic task for anyone.
The WordPress interface is designed to make updates and maintenance smooth and easy. You don’t need to learn coding or anything such for this. Every function can be found in your WordPress interface.
If you are just getting started with WordPress or need a website for just blogging BLUEHOST shared hosting is the choice for you without having any doubts.
If you don’t want to do the backend maintenance and updated it by yourself, then you can opt for Managed hosting. This will be costing more.
Few add-on benefits that you can get with the Managed WordPress hosting plan:
– Staging area for testing your sites
– Exceptional customer support 24*7
– WordPress updates automated
– Security updates
– Automated back-ups
In the Managed hosting service your hosting provider will ensure keeping your WordPress interface tailored with all the updates, you won’t have to do anything manually. Instead of getting the plug-ins installed and keeping it updated for enhanced performance you can just focus on your website front-end structure.
The add-on with the Managed hosting is the customer service you get. The team is dedicated to accompanying any of the queries you face as any of the back-end defaults will be the hosting service provider’s fault. So they will make sure nothing such happens.
WP Engine is one hosting provider which only provides you with Manage hosting service. They are the original managed WordPress hosting provider. The need of your business will be crucial for this decision of yours. In the case of any website for businesses or organizations choosing a Managed WordPress hosting should be the only choice to consider.
Kinsta is another managed WordPress hosting that cannot be neglected if you want an alternative for WP Engine. The plus with Kinsta is you can handle an extremely high volume of traffic without any worries.
Site Migration and Customer Support
WordPress website basically works on the hosting provider services and features they will be providing. There can be any time in your business you would want to migrate your site to a new host.
You may have started small and the business and website may expand overtime and the requirements will keep on increasing. These factors should always be kept in mind. These factors will determine how much of a headache you will have to face or how seamlessly the work goes on.
Few web hosting providers can help you in these processes best and serve you to fulfill the process with their customer support to make the migration hassle-free. They will have a dedicated team of technicians who will be eager to help you if your face any such issues. This will make your task simple and surely speed up the process.
There may be few hosting providers who may even charge you few extra bucks for migrating your website.
Getting timely support and service is vital as there may be glitches you face in the technical part or any plug-ins-related questions for making many processes easier for you. Good customer service is always a requirement when opting for any WordPress hosting provider.
On every hosting provider’s services, you may see there is a mention of 24*7 customer support. Yes, customer support is available, but you need to see how fast they respond and solve the issues.
For a shared hosting service, Siteground does have the best customer support. Bluehost is also a good option to choose for. They have live chat support which can easily solve small queries in real-time. A2 also has one of the best customer support when talked about shared hosting features.
For shared hosting Siteground also provides free migration tools which is a plus.
When talking about Managed hosting service providers WP Engine beats them all. No other can outrank them. They also provide a free migration plugin. Once installed, the plugin takes care of all the migration tasks.
WP Engine is dedicated to its customers and their customer support is of class. This is one of the major reasons they retain their customers longer.
So when looking for a web hosting provider do check for these features. Customer support will play a vital role in staying longer with the hosting service. When needed to migrate your site do check if they provide free migration and support during the process which can make your task easier.
Website Traffic/Number of visitors per month
How many visitors does your website get every month. If you are starting a new website how much traffic are you expecting. The answer to this question you need to know when looking for a WordPress hosting provider.
Your choice of plan and hosting plan will be dependent on the amount of traffic you have a handle on your website. A website with 10,000 visitors a month will surely have a different plan and pricing from a website with 50,000 visitors. As the amount of traffic increases or you will have to move up the ladder of the hosting plans.
There are many hosting providers which offer plans with one major parameter mentioned in each of the plans they have; i.e., the amount of traffic they will handle. For example, Siteground has the number of visitors they can manage for each hosting plan mentioned. This makes your choice easier and also elaborated in terms of your site don’t have to face any downtime.
Siteground gives an estimated number of traffic handled with the plan you choose. They give this estimated number in their Shared hosting plans also which not many of the WordPress hosting providers do.
How do you estimate for other hosting providers in shared hosting who don’t give any estimate. Like Bluehost, Hostinger, A2. They don’t set any hard limits to the number of visitors. But it is also not true that any shared hosting can manage unlimited traffic. That is physically not possible for a server.
If one of the websites on the same server of one shared hosting plan starts to get an unexpected boost in traffic or even a gradual increase over time, this will surely affect the performance of other websites on the same server. In such case, the hosting provider will itself ask you to upgrade your plan.
In the case of a Managed Hosting provider. They are more stable and comes with a bit larger bandwidth. Here also you need to look for the amount of traffic then opt for a plan.
Kinsta is one hosting provider which solely has categorized its plans in reference to the amount of estimated traffic you website has. If you even have over a million visitors every month then also you need not worry, Kinsta has a plan for it.
WP Engine also has a number of estimated visitors the server can handle mentioned with each plan. The traffic of over 400,000 can easily be accustomed to their plans. For more traffic than this also they have a custom plan available depending on your needs. The largest of websites can easily be run on these Managed WordPress hosting providers.
So look into your needs and get started with the right WordPress hosting for your website.
Uptime and speed
When you opt for creating and hosting your website on WordPress, you are already getting an edge over any other type of hosting. WordPress is specially designed in this form to give the best possible performance.
Still, you would like to see the uptime and speed your website can have through the WordPress host you choose. All have a great uptime speed, and few can have exceptional.
Most hosting providers have inbuilt caching functionality which is surely an add-on to have for increasing your website loading speed.
Hosting providers like SiteGround and WP Engine have caching inbuilt and a few others have an option to install a plug-in to enable the same.
One more feature to look into is the Content Delivery Network(CDN). CDN helps your website reach visitors faster. This is possible by having multiple data centers. With CDN your content is accessible from the nearest available data center for the web user.
Few plans as I have mentioned above do come with free CDN with their plans. Having a CDN will definitely boost your website performance and any single-point hardware performance will never affect your website performance as the content is so widely distributed.
Bluehost, Siteground, WP Engine, Nexcess all include free CDN with all their hosting plans. This one small functionality will boost your website performance and the loading time of your website will be reduced to the minimum.
One point to mention: All the above-mentioned WordPress hosting providers guarantee an excellent uptime speed.
For example, Hostinger and Siteground commit an uptime of 99.9 percent with all of their plans. And the rest of those also are always over 99.5 percent.
One thing also matters is how well you have optimized your website which will surely reflect your website speed. Even with the best hosting provider and service the speed and page loading time to be reduced is depended on how you have created your WebPages.
Any faulty or broken plugin present on your live website will adversely affect the performance. Also how well you have optimized the images and videos on the webpages which will determine the size of the webpage. Better webpage creation is directly proportional to enhanced performance.
Also, backend maintenance is crucial. If you are on the shared WordPress hosting plan you are doing everything on your own. In this case, you will have to look after the website closely and keep it healthy.
In the case of Managed WordPress hosting the maintenance is done by your hosting provider. This is surely easier, but are you ready to spend extra bucks?
You should go for Managed services if you have a large website or running a business through the same. Else if you just are getting started with the web go for a shared hosting plan. And my recommendation to get started is always Bluehost.
Conclusion
For running a WordPress website you should opt for a service provider dedicated to WordPress. As of now every other hosting provider also has an option to host WordPress sites. But I would not suggest those.
So which WordPress hosting provider and plan is the best to go for? This will solely depend on your needs. What are you looking for? Are you just getting started or thinking of migration or any other parameter you are looking for? The final selection will be based on these factors of your requirement.
Just to recap:
- BLUEHOST : The best choice for beginners
- WP Engine : The Best for Managed WordPress Hosting
- Hostinger : The best choice for cheap WordPress Hosting
- SiteGround: Affordable Managed Hosting with best support available
- Kinsta : Best for scaling up and huge traffic websites
- Nexcess : Best budget Managed Hosting and Website Staging
- A2 Hosting : Best for site migration and uptime speed
If you are getting started with WordPress and creating your first website Bluehost is the one I recommend and is surely the best for you. The platform is suitable for any newcomer. Bluehost is among the largest and the most recommended platform even by WordPress.org
If you are running a mid-size or large organization and want a Managed WordPress hosting provider. You must go with WP Engine. Most of the powerful websites are being hosted with WP Engine.
Hostinger is the option to go for if you do not want to spend much. When you want to look for another option than Bluehost to get started with WordPress Hostinger is the choice. Here to get the best rates you will have to sign up for a longer period. You can also go for a monthly plan, this would also not make any dent in your pockets.
Looking for cheaper lite Managed hosting plans you can look upon Stieground, they have a considerable amount of options to choose from.
Another option for WP Engine can be Nexcess, their plans and services are very reasonable. The features that come with even their basic plan Spark is good enough to host a Managed WordPress website.
I have researched and found the above-mentioned seven hosting providers are the best options to choose from as per your website requirements. Tell me which of the WordPress Hosting provider are you going to choose for your Website?