Web Hosting Comparison: Compare Price & Performance

Most people will agree with me that web hosting services are one of the essential ingredients that can help improve the performance, security, technical support, uptime, and reliability of your website. Despite the benefits and advantages of web hosting services, do you know that it can be a pain to select the perfect one for your site?

The simple way – take a look at my web hosting comparison chart and compare their price, uptime & performance.

There are tons of hosting to choose from, and all of them will portray themselves as reliable web hosting company.

No doubt, you can’t use all of them at once, but with the comparison of the top ones in the market, you will be able to select the perfect one for you. Below is a comparison of the top 10 best hosting services, types of web hosting available, and how to choose the best. Read on!

10 Best Web Hosting Services Compared

1. Bluehost

They are one of the web hosting companies that are popular among website owners. Bluehost now hosts over three million websites. They are often a perfect option for new sites looking for a low-cost hosting that offers reliable service. Over the past two years, they have maintained a very high speed and uptime of 405 ms and 99.99%, respectively. Also, they offer 50 GB storage and unmetered bandwidth. The company offers a three-year plan cost $2.75 per month with a $7.95 renewing price. They offer free SSL, domain, 24/7 customer support, and email account. Also, Bluehost provided managed WordPress, a virtual private server, and dedicated hosting plans for websites with higher traffic.

2. SiteGround

This web hosting company is known to have one of the best customer supports. They are officially recommended by WordPress and presently hosting more than two million domains. Our data shows that SiteGround has a speed of 673 ms and an uptime of 99.99%. All their plans offer free email account, daily backups, website builder, Cloudflare CDN, SSH access, and SSL. The cheapest plan is the StartUp plan, and it will cost you $3.95 per month with a renewal costing $11.95 monthly. The plan is for beginners, and you will get 24/7 support, unmetered traffic, and 10 GB webspace. The SiteGround services are extensive, and they include dedicated, cloud, WordPress, enterprise, and WooCommerce hosting servers.

3. Hostinger

Here is one of the hosting companies with the cheapest plan. The last two years’ data shows that this hosting service offers a loading time of 350 ms and an uptime of 99.95%. Although you can pay as little as $0.99 per month, Hostinger does not compromise too much on their performance and quality. There is a variety of hosting plans available, and all of them comes with free SSL certificate, 24/7 support, and easy website builder. The plan you choose will determine the bandwidth, storage space, and the number of databases and the email account you get. Note that you will get limited processing memory and power, and a free domain will not be included if you select the cheapest plan. Additionally, this hosting company offers other services such as Windows VPS, WordPress, email, cloud, and virtual private server hosting.

4. A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting is one of the fastest shared web hosting services. Throughout 2-years, they have been able to deliver an average speed of 317 ms and now hosting over 500,000 websites. The host uses LiteSpeed cache and has an uptime of around 99.93%. This is an ideal hosting service for web developers because they work with the major content management systems like Magento, OpenCart, Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla. All their hosting plans include free site migration, SSL, and unlimited disk space. Lite plan is the cheapest, and it cost $2.96 monthly. You will need to pay $7.99 per month for renewal. When you choose this plan, unlimited bandwidth, over 20 email accounts, free Cloudflare CDN, one domain name for one year, and one website will be included. You can contact the support team via tickets, email, phone, and chat 24/7. A2 Hosting also offers reseller, VPS, and dedicated hosting plans.

5. GoDaddy

They are one of the biggest companies that are providing hosting services. GoDaddy is powering more than 44 million websites. Whether your website is big or small, you can quickly meet your needs with this hosting service. After gathering data about their page speed and uptime over the last two years, we found out that they have 554 ms speed and 99.97% uptime. GoDaddy comes with a GoCentral website builder, unmetered bandwidth, DDoS protection, security monitoring, and developer-friendly tools like multiple PHP versions, cPanel, Python, MySQL, and CloudLinux. 24/7 support, SSL certificates, email accounts, and site backups are also included. Their cheapest plan costs $4.33 monthly, and you will need to pay $8.99 monthly for its renewal.

6. Hostgator

If you are looking for the best cheap cloud-based host, Hostgator can fill the vacuum. They host more than two million websites currently. Over the last two years, we gathered data about their speed and uptime, and they provided a speed of 399 ms and a stable uptime of 99.99%. This host offers built-in cache, unmetered storage and bandwidth, 24/7 support, easy WordPress installation, free SSL certificate, and unlimited email account on all plans. Also, if you sign up for 12 or more years, you will be given a free domain for one year. A Gator Website Builder is also included to help you build a custom website. The twelve months payment plan is the cheapest as you will be charged $2.74 monthly with the renewal costing $10.95 per month. They also offer users dedicated, VPS, and WordPress hosting plans. $100 Bing Ads credit and $100 Google Adwords are also included.

7. WP Engine

If you are looking for the most popular and best-managed WordPress hosting, here you have it. The cheapest plan is $30 per month. It also has some other plans, such as a Growth plan that costs $115 monthly, a Scale plan that costs $290 per month, and a custom plan for large businesses. This hosting company provides services to WordPress users only. With the WP Engine, most of the maintenance tasks are done automatically. You can get 10 GB storage space, 24/7 support, 35+ StudioPress themes, and Genesis Framework. Features such as global CDN access, Prod environments, SSL certificates, Stage, and Dev are also included. Take note that you will have to pay more if you want to get more from WP Engine.  

8. iPage

This web hosting company is powering more than one million websites and provides a dedicated virtual private server and shared hosting server. The WordPress hosting offers WP starter and WP essential plans with pre-installed plugins and themes. On the other hand, the VPS hosting plan offers basic, business, and optimum plans with full root access, two dedicated IP addresses, mirrored SAN storage, and enhanced cPanel control panel. As for the dedicated plan, it includes startup, professional, and enterprise plan with free five dedicated IP addresses, Intel Xeon processors, and more. iPage offers a one-size-fits-all shared hosting plan which costs $1.99 monthly. The renewal cost around $7.99 per month. All the plans come with a free domain for 1-year, unlimited storage, and domains, and unmetered MYSQL databases, bandwidth, webmail, and email addresses. Also, a website builder of about six pages, daily server backups, and free 24/7 support and SSL, are included. iPage offer a custom control panel instead of a standard cPanel provided by other web hosting companies.

9. Dreamhost

Here is a web hosting service with no higher renewal, and their tentacle spreads to more than 100 countries around the world. Dreamhost is powering more than one million five hundred applications, blogs, and sites. Their speed and uptime are around 648 ms and 99.94% over the last two years. If you are looking for a hosting company that gives an option for a monthly plan and not yearly plan alone, this host can bridge the gap as a month sign up cost $4.95. With the basic plan, you will get 50 GB storage, free domains, unlimited bandwidth, and one website. Also, you will get a website builder but have to pay extra to have an email if you are on the basic plan. The support is also reliable, unlimited data transfer, a variety of domain management tools, and more are included. A three-year plan is available, and it costs $2.59 monthly. The renewal requires you to pay $4.95 per month.

10. Greengeeks

This company offers three types of hosting, and they are a reseller, WordPress, and shared hosting plans. The cost of the plans varies with the minimum price starting from $2.95 per month. Greengeeks comes with unmetered bandwidth, free domain, unmetered disk space, daily backups, and 24/7 support. The uptime is around 99.98%, and the load time is approximately 445 ms. They also provide free site transfer, cPanel access, PowerCacher, and free Wildcard SSL.

How to Choose the Perfect Web Hosting Service

Consider your technical needs

What is your potential growth and size? What does your site need to function? Also, what type of hosting do you need? Answering these questions will help you arrive at the technical needs. If you are a small business that uses Etsy, Shopify, and other external e-commerce sites, shared hosting is a perfect option. It will also be an excellent option for sites that are mostly based on text and personal sites. If you have a resource-intensive website with high-traffic, the ideal web hosting type is a dedicated host. It is also suitable for you if you have a large business with server administrators. If your website needs more customization than the one available on the shared host service, the virtual private server should be ideal for you. In case you don’t have the technical skill to build a website as a beginner, go for the website builders. 

Consider the web hosting pricing

Price is important when considering choosing a web hosting for your website. However, don’t sacrifice performance and support when making your decision. If you are a newbie, you can consider shared web hosting, which I can say is the most affordable of them all. But if you have been in the game for a while and need to scale up, other options such as the collocated hosting, VPS hosting, among others, can be a perfect choice price-wise. Additionally, ensure you understand the payment options and plans available.

Compare the features

The features to consider include the storage, bandwidth, security, technical support, and more. Make sure you go for a web host that provides the necessary services needed to run your website. It includes email support, blog integration such as WordPress, analytics, FTP access, and other back-end tools. Also, ensure the host offers acceptable security tools and the amount of hard-drive storage space that works for your website. I often encourage people to go for a web host service that provides storage that gives room to growth and expansion. Take note; you don’t necessarily need ample storage space if you have a simple website. Also, some services implement a limit on bandwidth, while others offer unlimited bandwidth. If your site has many pictures and heavily visited, you will need a host with lots of bandwidth than the ones that are mostly text-based. Also, there are some web hosts that offer support, and some don’t provide support. If you are not tech-savvy, a host that offers support is ideal for you.

Research the reputation and claims of the web hosting service provider

Then I review the hosting provider, I always take a deep look at real user reviews. Remember that no hosting service will tell you their drawback. All of them will claim to be reliable and reputable, but you need to confirm that. You can find out about the claim of a hosting provider by testing the speed of the websites using a particular web hosting service. You can contact the hosting company for examples of sites that use their services. Don’t limit yourself to the speed; you should also check the uptime claims. Also, read what other customers are saying about the support team and customer service of the company. Look for recent and unbiased reviews. Not all the reviews you see online are real because some are written and operated by the web hosting companies themselves. The best way to get genuine reviews is by asking on Quora, Reddit, from friends, and other people with the knowledge.

Head-to-Head Web Hosting Comparisons

Wrap Up

Trust me, free hosting is not a good option, so ignore it. Even though you can use free hosting for small sites with little traffic, you should still know that it is not worth it. We have narrowed the tons of web hosting services available down to the best 10 you can select from. If you are a beginner or don’t want to spend much on web hosting, you will find your choice here. Also, if you have a large business and need a hosting service that fits perfectly into your website needs, you will find your own choice. Just remember to consider your website’s technical requirements, the features, pricing, and other essential factors before making your final decision.

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