Best Web Hosting For WordPress 2024 (Full Analysis)
It sucks when you buy a service,
only to find out that there was a cheaper,
a faster or in some cases a straight up better option
available for the same price. And if you've ever used Bluehost
or GoDaddy as your hosting provider,
you know exactly what it feels like. That's why I tried over 20
web hosting companies last year alone. So now you don't have to. Of course, with web hosting,
a lot comes down to preference and specific needs,
but some plans might be an overkill for your business, or you might simply
prioritize different features.
That's why I'm going to start with some basic recommendations
that will make your web hosting decisions easier and better,
just by knowing three key elements, then I won't just recommend you
a generic brand name. I'll go over these specific hosting plans
you should choose in three price ranges Free to $5, 10 to $20, and $20 and up. Finally, I'll tell you what to avoid
so you don't end up sad, regretful, and fighting with the support team
for a refund in your time. The most important thing
when it comes down to any web
hosting service is, well, the server. How good is the hardware
and how good is the software and how many of them bad bois
do they have around the world? Understand the server and you'll understand
what type of provider you're dealing with. To illustrate my point, here's a speed chart
comparing the loading time of the cheapest plan of every web hosting provider
I currently have available. Why is it so different? Server hardware and software for software, you want to look
for providers that use Litespeed servers because of the three most popular
solutions on the market right now.
Litespeed is by far
the fastest, and even has additional tools that you can use
to make your site faster for free, but they're only available if your server
runs on Litespeed software. For hardware, ideally,
you want providers that use NVMe storage instead of SSD or,
God forbid, mechanical hard drives. The reasoning again,
and the storage is seven times faster than SSD
and he crazy 35 times faster than HDD. The faster your server reads and writes
files, the faster and more enjoyable is it to work with.
Finally, take a look at how many servers
they have around the world. If they only offer hosting
in the United States and your visitors are from Singapore, Denmark, or India,
it will take additional physical time for the information to travel back
and forth, making your website seem slow. Ideally, you want the provider
to have servers as close as possible to your customer base
or better yet, all around the world. Exhibit B here's
the same chart arranged by loading speed, and here are the providers
that run on Lightspeed and NVMe Storage. Yeah,
the difference in speed is unreal, yet the pricing is even more surprising. So now last year, just like every year, I did
look at Hostinger and normally Hostinger is my go to recommendation
on the channel for anyone. Why is this? Well, typically Hostinger is what I call
the "good enough" provider. They're easy "enough" to use
and create websites like this or this or even this. Yeah fancy, in less than 20 minutes,
with minimal technical skills. They're fast "enough". So your website will load just fine and there's "enough" support to get you
through the technical difficulties.
If you aren't confident in your technical
abilities. Now, I'm specifically talking
about their shared web hosting plans because while they do have different types
of web hosting available, I feel that everything apart
from their web hosting packages are not the the flagship value products
that Hostinger is best at. Now, looking back at my list,
Hostinger offers Litespeed servers, NVMe storage and plenty of data centers
around the world, I feel like their web hosting plans are currently the easiest
to use on the market. They include absolutely everything
you need to get started, and these start at just $2.69 month
for a bare bones version, or $3.59
for a slightly more powerful plan that can handle more users on your site
at the same time. Here's a handy chart to showcase
how much more resources you're
getting with each of these basic plans.
For a bit of context. Imagine one user on average
takes up around seven megabytes of Ram, so you can theoretically host
around this number of people on your site at the same time
before running out of resources and running into some serious performance
issues. And obviously,
you can freely upgrade or downgrade between these plans
throughout your subscription period. No problems at all. But this is where it gets interesting
though, because Hostinger is a provider that's best utilized if you have never
created a website before. This means their biggest upside
is their biggest downside. Everything you need for
your website comes bundled together. Whether you like it or not. And this can cause some problems
since you're paying for more than just web hosting. For example, if you're a tech savvy user,
you can set up a virtual private server for $2.99 from A2 Hosting, which outperforms Hostingers cloud startup plan for $9.99.
Now, I know what you're thinking "Emit, why are you recommending Hostinger
if it's so slow?" Well, then don't even get me started on the fact that this $2.99 VPS
from A2 Hosting also outperforms
Hostingers cloud enterprise for $29.99, because you're definitely not
going to like that. In reality, the point I'm trying to make
is since Hostinger is a one stop shop, they include a domain domain, website hosting,
website backups, SSL certificates, email services,
24/7 support, A CDN, a drag and drop website builder,
virus protection, and a control panel. The VPS I've compared it to only charges you for the web hosting
and it looks like this. You don't get anything else
included in the bundle, so every time you pay for Hostinger,
you're paying for the whole bundle. Even the things you might already have
and don't like or even use. This is the reason I say the cheaper plans
are the better flagship value product, as you get the same exact extras
in the more expensive plans, but you simply pay more
for the same thing.
However, by going for the business plan
and paying a one time payment of $172. This is, by the way,
using my discount code for 10% off that you can find in the description down
below. You'll be set for four years in advance,
and if we compare this with similarly priced options
from other shared web hosting providers, I think it's clear why I find Hostinger
to be the winner in the up to $5 range. But if you never created a website before, I think there's a better option
for you and it's completely free. WebHostMost allows you to use professional web hosting services that aren't garbage. Yeah, I know, they're very surprising. The only limit is you have to make do with 125MB of storage space,
which isn't a lot, but if you're smart in the way you do things, it's enough
to make websites like this. WebHostMost offers excellent uptime and speed.
Even with the free plans, because again,
they utilize Litespeed servers offer NVMe storage and have data centers
in the US, Europe and India. Of course, I did
dig deep into their terms of service. Because I'm not stupid…
and even contacted their CEO because I am suspicious of free stuff
on the internet, especially since there are no ads
featured on your free website and you do not need to use a credit card
to sign up. From everything I was able to gather
on the company, the people behind it, and from six months of testing,
it checks out. It's legit. It's a great dip
your toes product to understand. If you want to build a site yourself
or hire someone to do it for you. Do not pay more than $5 per month on web hosting
when you're just starting out.
That's my general rule of thumb
that I recommend to everyone, but that rule goes straight out the window
when we're talking about e-commerce. The 10 to $20 range
is generally the starting price for a good e-commerce option,
as well as plans you should upgrade to. If you're seeing spikes of more than 500
people on your site at any given moment. Why 500? Well, here's what happens when I send over a 1000 bots to a website
hosted on my Hostinger business plan. The wreck havoc for ten minutes. Yeah, the site crashed. Sure. It's just a few minutes of downtime here
and there, but it's not stable anymore. The 500 simultaneous users take up all of
the available RAM and the website shuts down.
So we need more RAM. My favorite providers in the 10
to $20 range are A2 Hosting and InterServer. A2 Hosting has a great value plan
for $11.99, called the Run Plan. You can find it through my link
in the description or by going into their manage
WordPress hosting options. What sets it apart from the competition
in a similar price range, you might ask? Again, it's server hardware.
I mean, these are servers
we're talking about. It's always going to be server
hardware for the run plan. A2 hosting is specifically using AMD's
epic 7282 CPUs released in late 2019. If we compare it against
something like WPX, which is almost twice the price and claims to be the world's
fastest hosting, their plans
run on Intel Xeon Gold 6312U CPUs. This means A2 hosting
offers around 6.3% faster single thread performance,
and this doesn't mean that WPX is bad. No, they're using good hardware.
They're just more expensive than A2. But if we add something like Bluehost with their $7.45
a month e-commerce plan to this chart, you can see how far ahead
the WPX and A2 hosting are and why there's such a large difference between providers
in terms of quality and performance. Even though the price isn't
all that different, so coming in at quite the low price
and better performance than most competitors,
even in the 15 to $20 range. That's why I believe A2
hosting has such a good deal here. The quality of hardware you're getting
versus the price you're paying for it, the ratio is great. And like the previous suggestions,
they also use NVMe storage paired with Litespeed for some quite affordable
and seriously fast web hosting.
Of course, it's
not all rainbows and sunshine. The only bad parts about this
plan are one. The $11.99 price is only for your first
three years, and you have to pay upfront. So it's $431 for the first three years, and then it's $899 for the three years
after that, making the average price $18.5
over a six year period. And two, it's for one website only. If you go with the Run plan,
which is the best value in my opinion, but absolutely everything else. We good. And we were really good. I mean,
I really didn't have many complaints. I have been specifically using this plan
for 12 months now, and during the 12 month period, the biggest downtime
I experienced was just 40 minutes. Everything else was quite rare. Events of several minutes of downtime here
and there.
All in all, less than two hours
of downtime in 12 months. That's 99.98% uptime. Pretty much as close to 100%
as you can get. The interface is easy to use. I was able to create my website
within an hour of purchase, and most of that time was spent
looking at loading bars, because A2 hosting automates
a lot of the setup process for you. And the last reason why I value
A2 hosting over any other competition is the fact that A2 hosting offers
phone support in most of the world, depending on the language
that you're speaking.
While I personally like to use the 24/7 live chat support, I know there are plenty of people
that prefer phones. So get A2 hosting over
Hostinger or WebHostMost If you plan to do any e-commerce
whatsoever or your website has surpassed the 500 simultaneous users mark
because you will need the four gigabytes of RAM that A2
hosting is offering to guarantee smooth operation
for more than 500 users at a time. However, I do understand that A2 hosting gets more expensive as time goes on,
and some people simply prefer stable monthly pricing
instead of a large upfront payment. Or maybe the four gigabytes of Ram
that this plan is offering is still not enough for you, and
you want more resources for a good price. That's why I have my second recommendation in the still intact server
and their boost floor plan. That comes in at $19.95. If you pay monthly
and you can pay monthly, there is no need to prepay
for a large amount of time upfront.
It offers eight gigabytes of RAM. This is the most out of any provider
we've talked about so far, so it's capable of massive,
massive website loads. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of users daily,
and while it doesn't have quite as powerful of a CPU as A2 hosting does,
it does offer twice as many cores. Essentially doubling your available power eight gigabytes of Ram and four CPU cores
with a Litespeed server go a long way in offering excellent
website speed at higher loads, while A2 hosting is faster
within certain user accounts. Inter server is able to keep the speed
within reason as far higher user capacity.
Pair this with their fair pricing,
which can go down to $16 a month if you prepay for three years. But you shouldn't because the power
of InterServer is in its flexibility. And if you plan to prepay,
just get A2 hosting instead. However, do keep in mind that one InterServer
only offers servers in the United States, so international users kind of get shafted
here due to travel time. I would recommend inter server to US
based websites only, and two, the control
panel is a bit outdated. It's definitely harder to use and navigate
than other solutions on the market, but the performance to price ratio
definitely makes up for it. It's not what I call a beginner host,
but I have made several tutorials and quick start guide
so you can get started the easy way. Okay, I'll let you in on a secret now. The web hosting prices work is this. If you have a lot of skill,
you can achieve good results for cheap. If you have no skill. It will take you a lot of money
to achieve the same result.
There's simply no way around it. So far, for every single web hosting provider
I recommended. I've assumed you have little to no server
management knowledge, so we bypassed that by paying more for automatically
configured and managed servers, which cost more. At the 20
plus dollar range. You basically have two choices: choice one
almost infinitely scalable, relatively cheap solutions
from Amazon, Google or Microsoft that will require a specialized person
or team to manage. These solutions are used by giants
like Spotify, Netflix, Twitch, Facebook, etc. it's the best you can get,
and they pretty much grow infinitely
with the demand of your business. But doing even basic
stuff is quite complicated. You have tutorials on YouTube that span
15 hours or playlist like 70 videos, just to grasp the very,
very basic of one of these platforms. Choice
two infinitely scalable, quite expensive, but very easy to use solutions
like ScalaHosting. You can manage these solutions yourself,
but if you ever get an IT department, they'll have access and the tools
necessary to do custom work as well.
Think of it
like buying a pre-built computer where you just need to push a button
and it works. If you want to upgrade, someone will come
to your house and swap out the parts. If something breaks, you get support
and you're never responsible. You're just the user versus selecting
parts and building the computer yourself. Then you can upgrade at any time,
but you don't get any support and you have to manage it all yourself
and if something breaks, well, that's your fault. Deal with it any way you know how to.
ScalaHosting is that managed solution
that starts at $26.95 for the basic package,
but this is the real deal. These plans come with Intel Xeon Gold 644Y processors,
which are fast even by A2 hosting or WPX standards. You get a dedicated IP address, meaning
you're the only person that has this IP address. Giving your business a unique identity
and reducing the chances of your business emails landing in the spam
folder due to shared IP spam.
ScalaHosting plans are consistently
some of the fastest web hosting available, and they are capable of handling
extremely large user data volume. Basically, you don't need to switch plans. Ever. You'll always have your usage displayed,
and you will be able to simply add more resources
without switching plans. You will be hosted on a redundant network,
meaning if your server experiences an outage, the redundancy will take effect to keep your website online at all times
and you'll have full control over your server,
meaning you can use whatever you want. Litespeed, Apache, NGINX.
Everything is open for business
and you even have root access. You'll be able to host
more than just websites like company apps, email servers,
customer management software, etc. it's free game. You can go for as much as a 128GBs of RAM with 24 core CPUs for $3,000 a year, or for as little as two cores and four
gigabytes of Ram, which is $500 a year. As you can see, Scala provides
a lot better pricing if you go for powerful plans
that require a lot of resources. That's why I recommend you use this. If you want to futureproof your business
and have Scala pretty much take care of your
IT needs, if you can afford it, there's no one better solution. However, there are plenty of companies
that are worse, a lot worse. In general, the more marketing for a company
you see, the worse it is. There are plenty of hosting companies that
have bought their servers in like 2009 and have spent the past 15 years just marketing their outdated crap since they know their servers perform
like garbage anyway, they oversell them and hope people
who bought them will simply not use the server to their fullest potential,
or not use it at all.
Just sitting there empty. In my experience, these corporate giants
that offer the worst price to performance ratio manageable are Bluehost,
HostGator, GoDaddy, and Namecheap. Like every single test
I do, these companies consistently score the lowest,
and they're not even cheap. On the other hand, we have companies
that do offer good performance for way too much money and the kind of lock
you into their service, meaning you can never take your website files
and host them somewhere else. It's literally impossible. So as soon as you stop paying,
your website dies forever. While with traditional hosting
you can you own your website, you can pack up your files
and move servers any time we want.
This category includes easy
to use platforms like Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify. Sadly, their business model
relies on people who don't really know that 20 to $30
a month is a lot for website hosting. As we talked about already,
you can get professional business grade stuff with crazy good security
and features for that kind of money. Instead of a basic plan, if you skip to this part of the video,
I do recommend you watch the rest of it because you are
missing some critical information. But here's a quick chart detailing
and summarizing the choices I recommend.
If you're even first time
website owner or builder and have no idea what you're doing
before buying. Feel free to use the free tier of WebHostMost and test stuff out. It's on par with paid options. You just have to not go overboard
with the size of your website and stick to the 125 megabyte limit. For 80% of you watching Hostinger and their business plan
is the best package. $3.59 a month can buy. Good software, good hardware, all of the features
you need, and it's easy to use. This plan performs the best until you start hitting
500 people on your site at all times. For more than that,
you'll need more power, and A2 hosting can give you that power. Want to do e-commerce or want a faster
website than most people on the internet have? A2 hosting and their Run plan for $11.99
is what you're looking for.
It's a straight up upgrade
to Hostinger in every single way, but make sure you actually need the two CPU
cores and four gigabytes of Ram. Otherwise, you're just overpaying. And on the subject of money,
if you don't want to pay a large sum upfront for 4 or 3 years, and you'd much rather pay a smaller amount
each month instead. Well, then InterServer and their $19.95
boost for plan is your best friend.
It's an absolute beast
when it comes to performance. You get plenty of resources to work with,
and best of all, it's monthly payments. Cancel
any time you're done with your project and you will not be charged any more. And finally, ScalaHosting
build it yourself plan or any of their premade cloud
hosting ones are enterprise level solutions
that are the perfect balance. Newest hardware, superb
security and business oriented features. It's pretty much infinitely scalable
to grow together with your business, because you can add additional resources
at any point in time. It's easy
to use the fastest solution on the market, but it's a bit pricey
and now you have the knowledge to host your website, so make sure to use the links
in the description to get discounts.
And after you're done, come back! I have plenty of tutorials showcasing how
to get started on any of these providers. Good luck!.
