BEST Web Hosting for Beginners Compared!
– Web hosting is one of
the most important things that affects your website's performance. But with so many options
at different price points, which one should you choose? I'm taking a look at
the top shared web hosts to determine which one
is best for beginners. This video is sponsored by Airlift, a new free WordPress plugin that provides impressive speed
optimizations with one click. But more on that later. So what exactly do I mean when I say web hosting for beginners? There's so many web
hosting options out there, ranging from shared hosting
to dedicated servers. But if you're just getting
started with your website, you'll need some basic shared hosting. There are hundreds, if not thousands of
options to choose from, but I curated the top
five most popular options, and I tested GoDaddy, Bluehost, Hostinger, DreamHost, and A2 Hosting. There's a few things I look for before I even sign up for a web host, and that's pricing, and whether the host provides automatic daily backups.
I would not buy hosting that doesn't include
automatic daily backups. There's a number of reasons for this, especially if you're a beginner. So I included the cheapest
plan from each host that includes automatic daily backups. At DreamHost and GoDaddy.
that's the base plan. But at Hostinger or
Bluehost and A2 Hosting, it's the next tier up. The hosting plans run
between 7 and $15 a month, billed annually. So let's dive into the testing and see which web hosts are best. Starting with the setup process, Hostinger, GoDaddy, and Bluehost all have a wonderful setup experience. To clarify, I'm using WordPress
on every hosting account, and these three hosts have
intuitive WordPress setup wizards that help you pick a theme, plugins, and customized colors
and fonts on your site.
I'll caution you that GoDaddy
and Bluehost are aggressive with the upsells during checkout. Most web hosts try to
sell you extra stuff, but it's so bad at GoDaddy and Bluehost that you may end up subscribing to add-ons and inflating your renewal
bill without even realizing it. It seems like anytime I
test either of these hosts, they've added things to my cart or checked boxes to subscribe
me to add-ons by default. And if I'm not paying attention and I just blow through the setup process, I'm gonna miss it and have a really
expensive bill next year. Thankfully, you won't have this issue at Hostinger, DreamHost, or A2. Hostinger her has a world-class
WordPress setup Wizard. And DreamHost has a solid wizard as well, though it's not as slick or
comprehensive as Hostinger's. A2 has the weakest setup process, and I had to go into cPanel and use Softaculous to install WordPress. If you're well versed in web hosting, this is not a big deal.
But since my mission is
to find the best host for a beginner, A2 falls
short in this area. Once WordPress is up and running, each host has a slightly
different dashboard to manage Your hosting. Hostinger and DreamHost have developed their own proprietary panels, and GoDaddy, Bluehost, and A2 Hosting all have dashboards
built on top of cPanel, often linking directly to
cPanel for various tasks. I'm not a fan of cPanel. I think it's cluttered,
stale, and confusing, and I don't think it's beginner-friendly. Bluehost has done a great job minimizing the amount of time
you have to spend in cPanel. You can do just about everything in their easy-to-use dashboard, so it's not a big deal that they use cPanel in the background.
GoDaddy and A2 link out
to cPanel for most tasks, though A2's new TurboHub panel
is actively being developed as a way to minimize the
time you spend in cPanel, similar to Bluehost's setup. Hostinger's panel is my personal favorite. They've invested a ton of resources into developing an in-house solution that's intuitive and beginner-friendly. DreamHost's panel is also easy to use, but sometimes I have
trouble finding things, and I don't think it's quite as smooth as Hostinger's dashboard. One button that's always easy to find is the Subscribe button. It's free to click
Subscribe and hit the bell, and you'll be notified
when I upload new videos. Now, ease of use is important, but what about the uptime
and reliability of each host? Most of the hosts offer
a 99.9% uptime guarantee, meaning if your site is not
up at least 99.9% of the time, they'll compensate you
with a prorated refund for the downtime.
This incentivizes your host to ensure that servers remain
as reliable as possible, because they're contractually on the hook to compensate you for downtime, and that means they lose out on revenue. DreamHost stands out, offering
a 100% uptime guarantee, which is something I don't see often. In practice, I think a
99.9% uptime guarantee is all you really need, because it's nearly impossible for a server to remain up 100%
of the time in perpetuity. These hosts require you
to reach out to them and call them out on the
downtime to get compensated.
So you'd have to be closely
monitoring your site to see any tangible benefit of a 100% uptime guarantee over 99.9%. Regardless, it goes to show you how much DreamHost cares
about their product, and that's not something that
can be said about Bluehost. To my surprise, Bluehost does not offer any uptime guarantees whatsoever
on their shared hosting. They were open and transparent about this when I reached out to them
via live chat to double-check. This is a huge red flag to me, because if a host isn't on the hook to compensate clients for downtime, there's no incentive for
them to focus on reliability. When it comes to the speed of web hosting, it's hard to compare this
with shared hosting accounts. There's just so many variables:
from your site's content to how many sites are hosted on the exact server your
shared account is on. your server speed can
affect the performance of the WordPress admin dashboard, since saving changes often
requires pages to reload. But the biggest concern
with hosting performance is how fast your website
loads for visitors. And honestly, it's more
about finding hosting that's good enough and
optimizing your site with caching and image compression to make pages blazing fast.
You can manually optimize
your site's HTML, CSS, image sizes and more. But this is quite a headache
and definitely not something you should have to deal
with as a beginner. Thankfully, there's a free
plugin called Airlift. And you just install it, let it analyze and optimize your site, and enjoy a massive speed boost. After testing it on my own websites, I'm convinced that every WordPress site would benefit from Airlift.
If you've tried
optimization plugins before, you may know that a lot of
them can break your site. But Airlift was designed from
the ground up to avoid this. It's a 'set it and forget it' solution, but you can fine-tune the
settings if you'd like to. You can also contact Airlift's
support if you need help, but I honestly don't think you'll need to. Whether your site feels a bit sluggish, or it's already fast
and you just wanna see how much faster it can
get, Airlift is for you.
It's completely free. And I'll have it linked
below so you can get started. Thanks to Airlift for
sponsoring today's video. And now let's dive into
managing your website at each of these hosts. Three of the most common tasks you'll need to do with your hosting is access the file
manager, restore backups, and use a staging environment. All five hosts provide a nice solution for in-browser File management. GoDaddy, Bluehost, and A2
solutions are identical since they're all powered by cPanel. Managing backups is where
things start to differ. Hostinger's business plan retains
daily backups for 14 days, and you can also access weekly backups going back an additional four weeks past the 14 days of daily backups. It's super simple to do
a full website restore to your chosen backup, or you can download both full
backups and database backups.
You can also generate backups on demand. And I use this feature all the time if I'm about to make major
changes to my website. DreamHost backs up your data daily, but they don't tell you exactly
when the backups were taken. And you can only choose to restore to the most recent backup,
a mid-range backup, which is anywhere from one
day old to two weeks old, or the oldest backup, which
is more than two weeks old. There's also no way to
create a backup on demand. A2 hosting retains backups for 30 days, and you can generate a
backup at any time in cPanel if you'd like.
Bluehost manages backups with CodeGuard, which is a third-party service. The CodeGuard basic add-on
I bundled with my hosting offers one gigabyte of backup storage instead of a fixed
number of retention days. I prefer hosts that guarantee they'll store my daily
backups for X number of days, because this model that
uses a storage bucket could mean that if you have a large site, maybe you only have enough storage for three or four days worth of backups, and that could be constantly changing depending on the size of your site. And finally, GoDaddy takes
automatic daily backups of your site on all plans, but they only retain one day of backups unless you upgrade your retention plan. This starts at $2 a month
for seven days of retention. This is really what should be included with the hosting at a minimum. The final site management feature I tested was staging environments. If you aren't familiar with
the staging environment, it's basically a clone of your
website on a temporary URL, so you can make your
changes to your website without public visitors
seeing them on the live site.
Then when you're finished
making your changes, you can push them from
the staging environment to the production environment, rolling out all of your
changes seamlessly. And that way someone's not
seeing the logo change one hour, and then the next hour
the color has changed, and then the next hour, you've
half-built a new homepage. You can just do everything you need and push it out in one change. This may not be something
all beginners need, but it's a feature I like to have. It's offered by Hostinger,
Bluehost, and A2.
Hostinger makes it super easy to spin up a staging environment on a custom domain in their dashboard. Bluehost creates a folder under /staging, meaning you can access your staging site by going to your domain.com/staging. This works, but I'd prefer
a separate URL entirely. A2 lets you set up a staging
environment with Softaculous, which is the same wizard you used to install WordPress within cPanel.
Once again, there's a
pattern at A2 Hosting that it's just not beginner-friendly. I'm well-versed in cPanel and Softaculous, so I know my way around. But if you're new, I think it's confusing, and you're gonna struggle to know where to look to find things. There's no way to access staging
environments in TurboHub, and right now that dashboard is very much still under development. When it's further along, it
could be a great solution, but right now, I would assume that you're gonna have to use cPanel for just about everything. Another important aspect
to evaluate with hosting is customer service. I'll be honest, none of these hosts provide extraordinary customer service, and that's because these are
starters' shared hosting plans. You get what you pay for, and you're not gonna find
world-class customer service when you're paying less than $20 a month.
But sometimes you need help. So which host does best? I'd have to give the advantage
to Hostinger for two reasons. First, they recently
introduced an AI chatbot that's massively helpful. And I know what you're thinking.
Nobody likes a chatbot. The last thing you want to do
is open the Live Chat widget, ask your question, and get all
these useless help articles sent to you by a bot that's
just trying to stop you from speaking with a human. But I promise you, Hostinger's
chatbot isn't like that. I have been blown away by some of the highly personalized
responses it's given me.
And in many cases, it has solved my issue without me having to speak to a human. But when you do have to
wait for a human response, times can take an hour or so. But this leads me to the second reason I give Hostinger the
edge in customer service, and that's because of the
hybrid support system they use. It's like live chat, but
if you close the tab, you get distracted, you walk away, they'll just email you.
And you can respond to the
email in your own time. Or if you open the dashboard and you're working on your site again, you can reply through the
widget in the dashboard. I've had way too many times where I start a live chat with a host and response times take a while, so all of a sudden it's an hour later and I need to get going, I need to move on to other stuff. And I'm faced with just
abandoning the live chat without the issue being resolved, or asking if they can open a ticket. So Hostinger really solves this problem. The reps are helpful once
you get through to someone, and they've always been
able to sort out my issues. DreamHost's reps are helpful as well, but the wait times and response times on the live chat are slow. And unlike Hostinger, you have to pick between a live chat or a support ticket.
So if you pick a live chat, you may be waiting at
your desk for a while to get a resolution. A2 Hosting support is
similar to DreamHost: not the best response times and not a great experience overall. A2, GoDaddy, and Bluehost
offer phone support in addition to live
chat and email support. This may be a value-add for some, if you prefer speaking
to someone on the phone to get hands-on help. I will say that Bluehost
support has always been useless when I reach out for help. They've refused to help
me migrate my site, and just send me help articles and tell me to do it myself. And GoDaddy support is
always trying to upsell you.
Even when you reach out
to technical support, it often feels like you're
speaking with a sales person rather than a support engineer. Looking at the pricing of each plan, they're all between 10 and
$15 a month billed annually, with the exception of DreamHost, which comes in lower at $7 a month. And once again, I wanna make it clear that this is not the most
fair price comparison, because I've chosen the
middle plan at some hosts and the base plan in others. And this is because I
would never recommend purchasing hosting that doesn't include
automatic daily backups. So I picked the cheapest plan at each host that includes backups. There's a little caveat with Bluehost. They do offer an upsell to include automatic
backups in the base plan, and this ends up still being
cheaper than the middle plan.
So that's what I did with my
price calculation for Bluehost. Most of these plans only host one website, but A2's Drive plan can
host unlimited websites, and Hostinger's Business Plan
can host a hundred websites. In the end, my recommendation for the best beginner
hosting is Hostinger. As long as you go for the business plan to get automatic daily backups, you're going to have a great experience. Everything from the WordPress Setup Wizard to the dashboard to the AI chatbot gives Hostinger the edge over others. It's also a great value. You get 200 gigabytes of storage and can host up to 100 websites. So this could be a good option if you're working on multiple projects. If you're on a tight budget and need to keep costs as low as possible, I'd go for DreamHost. It packs a serious punch for the price, still offering a well-designed dashboard and the 100% uptime guarantee. I also appreciate that DreamHost offers
a 97-day refund policy, and you don't have to speak
with a human to get a refund.
If you're unhappy with your
service in the first 97 days, just go in your dashboard,
cancel the service, and you'll automatically
get a full refund. And no matter who you choose, I'd stay away from GoDaddy and Bluehost. Both companies have a track
record of overcharging you for the level of service they provide, and they're constantly
trying to upsell you more and more add-ons. But wherever your site is
hosted, give Airlift a try. It's completely free, and
I'll have it linked below. If you're ready to start
building your website, I just launched a free course
on building a WordPress site from start to finish. You can check out the first episode here..
