Ultimate WordPress Hosting Comparison (2021) | The BEST WordPress Host for Any Budget!
– Hey guys, my name is Christian Taylor. Welcome back to Craylor
Made where I like to talk about all things branding,
marketing and entrepreneurship. Now I know a lot of you
guys who watch my channel have been looking forward
to this comparison for a very long time. If you're new to the channel,
I wanna quickly clarify and say that this comparison
video includes hosts that I was genuinely interested in, or hosts that I personally
use and recommend. I did a comparison video
last year where I compared what I felt were the most
popular web hosts out there, names like HostGator and Bluehost. But this year I wanted to
try something different. I wanted to strip away the
hype and included a company not just because they
rank highly on Google, but because they have
something unique to offer. So with that said, let's
jump into the video. This video is gonna be
divided into three categories: budget, standard and premium. So first, we're diving
in with budget hosts and there's no better host to
lead off with than Namecheap.
I've used Namecheap for all
of my domain names for years and when it comes to domains,
I can't recommend them enough. I've also had the pleasure
of using Namecheap for web hosting for many WordPress sites, and it's one of the
best values you can buy. Now there's a reason I didn't
say it's the best quality you can buy, but Namecheap is hands down my favorite web host
if you're just looking to get your website started
at an affordable cost. Namecheap offers two possible hosting solutions for WordPress. There's the Shared Hosting Plans, and then there's the EasyWP
Managed WordPress Plans. Now these offer drastically
different experiences and I have the most
experience running WordPress on the Shared Hosting Plans,
so let me start out with those.
For $2.88 per month, you can
get a shared hosting account that hosts up to three websites and gives you 20 gigabytes of storage. Namecheap shared hosting
gives you a fairly standard cPanel hosting experience. cPanel is an industry
standard control panel that a lot of web hosts
use, and while it may look a bit busy and cluttered at first, it's not hard to figure out and it's smooth and well thought out.
While you could get
started with your website for $2.88 per month, I
would highly recommend purchasing the middle
plan called Stellar Plus, for one reason and one reason
only, daily automated backups. You'll learn in this comparison that a daily automated backup solution is extremely important
to me at any web host. If you're hosting a WordPress website, you want to have it backed up regularly. That's because you
never know when a plugin might decide to go rogue
and corrupt the entire WordPress installation, or a
WordPress update might fail and having that daily backup
always ready for you to restore with one click is very important to save you a huge headache. Trust me, I've been there. For $4.88 per month,
Namecheap's Stellar Plus plan features automated daily
backups, easy one-click restore and support for unlimited websites. The only downside, which
is a rather big downside, is that the backups are
on an account level, not a website level.
So when Namecheap says that you
can host unlimited websites, let's say you've got three
or four WordPress sites hosted on your account, if
you use the one-click restore, you'll be rolling back all
the websites on your account, not just the affected one. The only way around this is
to download the backup file, then you have to dig
through this huge zip file, find the correct website folder and upload it back to the server, and that's not gonna be fun at all. Now, earlier I mentioned
that Namecheap has another hosting product for WordPress.
I won't spend much time talking about it but their EasyWP Hosting
plan is a cool offering for WordPress websites, if you
want the absolute easiest way to get started with WordPress. I mean, they make it dead simple. You just click a few
buttons on the setup screen and your WordPress site
is installed for you. Now I personally would only
recommend Namecheap EasyWP if you absolutely need the easiest WordPress install experience, because EasyWP doesn't offer any sort of automated backup solution, so you'll have to find a WordPress plugin to do that for you, and
that's just gonna add to the cost and complexity of your site.
I can assure you that it's
not hard to install WordPress on the Standard Shared Hosting plans. It takes just a little
bit more digging around, but it's still totally automated, and the Namecheap support
team can walk you through it if you need any help. Speaking of getting help, you definitely get what you
paid for with Namecheap. They do offer 24/7 live
chat support, which is nice, but don't expect amazing quality support. Chat reps often take 15 to
20 minutes to get back to you on stuff, and while they do
get around to helping you and fixing the issue, it's
definitely not speedy. The uptime and reliability
also isn't great. I haven't had issues in a
few months, but last year, I had some serious uptime
issues with Namecheap that actually caused me to switch my sites away from them entirely. My site would regularly
go down for 15 minutes here or there, which
I can't have happening on a regular basis.
This is why I wanna stress that Namecheap is a budget web host. You get what you pay for,
and if you need hosting to get the job done and launch
your blog or company site, Namecheap is totally fine to do that. The next budget host I'd
recommend is Dreamhost. Now, if I had to quickly describe Dreamhost versus Namecheap, I would say that Dreamhost
is slightly more polished and the support is higher quality. Dreamhost offers basic shared
hosting for $4.95 a month, and you can also get three years of basic hosting for $93.24. Dreamhost uses their own
proprietary management panel that is crazy simple, a bit
too simple for my preferences. I find that things are
so watered down and basic that I have a hard time
finding what I'm looking for. But I think it's just
because I've spent years working with cPanel,
and I'm used to seeing a lot of icons and options.
So the Dreamhost
performance is pretty great, but what about backups? Dreamhost's backup solution is not great. For their basic shared hosting
plan, they say they keep up to two weeks of daily
backups, but the panel to restore backups doesn't give you much flexibility, letting you pick from three options: restore the most recent backup,
restore a mid-range backup, or restore the oldest backup. One thing I really like about
Dreamhost's backup system is that backups are made per domain name. So unlike Namecheap, it is
possible to restore the backup for just one site but not all of the sites on your hosting account at once. However, perhaps the most
worrying thing is the big notice at the top, saying, "We make no guarantees about
keeping backups of your data".
So you'll either be relying
on them for backups, or you'll need to get your
own third party solution, such as a WordPress plugin. Dreamhost support is pretty good. In my experience, it's a bit
speedier and more friendly than Namecheap, but it's not 24/7. Their live chat operates seven days a week from 5:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Pacific time, which I think is pretty
reasonable for shared hosting. So who is Dreamhost for? Well, I'd say Dreamhost is for anyone who's on a tight budget but
support is important to you. If you want a speedy site on the cheap with a support team ready to help you, I think you'll be happy with Dreamhost. All right, onto the final budget host, and that is Hostinger. I'll try to make this one quick. I've had a mixed
experience with Hostinger. You can get some really
cheap hosting from Hostinger if you look for a good sale to pop up, but don't be fooled when
you go to the Hostinger site and see that they have
a timer counting down.
That's not a sale, that's just
the timer on their website that resets every time to try
and pressure you to buy now. I don't like that. You'll know it's a decent
sale when you can buy 12 months of the cheapest plan for around $22 to $25 per year. If your goal is to be as
cheap as humanly possible, you can get web hosting
for as low as $0.92 a month if you purchase four years of hosting. So that breaks down to $44.19
for four years of hosting. If you're looking for
the cheapest possible web hosting out there,
Hostinger's for you. If you're just working
on a tinkering project or maybe a basic website
that you wanna throw up and leave up long term, but
you don't need beefy hosting, this is perfect for you. Hostinger does have decent
support for the price. It's not great because
oftentimes you're waiting a bit before you talk to someone,
but it is a 24/7 live chat and once someone picks up, they actually do reply pretty darn fast.
Keep in mind that Hostinger
charges $0.95 per month if you want daily backups, so it's not included in the hosting but it is there as an option if it's something you're interested in. Hostinger runs a heavily
skinned version of cPanel with a huge core. Their file management system
is awful, it's terrible. If you ever need to mess with
the files of your website for whatever reason, I
would get an FTP Client, because their online system is atrocious. So who is Hostinger for? Well, I'd recommend Hostinger if you're the extreme couponer type person who truly wants the cheapest acceptable web hosting possible. If you don't mind paying for four years of web hosting upfront and you realize that you're
getting okay budget hosting but nothing that's gonna
knock your socks off, Hostinger's for you. All right, now it's time to transition to the standard host category. When researching a new host to
switch to a few months back, I came across A2 Hosting. So for my testing on A2
Hosting, I tested two plans within their Shared hosting: the basic plan, which
is now called Startup, and the premium tier shared
hosting, now called Turbo Boost.
A2 Hosting did change
the name of their plans after I signed up, but it
appears that the features and what they offer are unchanged from the plans that I'm using. Both plans are that classic
cPanel hosting experience you first saw at Namecheap, so you know exactly
what you're getting into from a management panel perspective. I can say right away
that I wouldn't recommend A2 Starter web hosting. I'll talk more about the
premium Turbo tier in a second, but when it comes to the
entry level offering, I would stay away from it. This is mainly because
I don't see enough value for the price. The starter plan is $11 per
month if paid month to month and as mentioned earlier,
it's a fairly vanilla cPanel setup with nothing special. It's decent quality hosting, although I am particularly
bothered that I only experienced a 98.88% uptime over my eight weeks of constant uptime monitoring.
I prefer to see hosts with
at least a 99.99% uptime, so that was definitely
a bit disappointing. The backup system works
similarly to Dreamhost. A2 does daily backups with
their server rewind feature and while they do let you
restore it on your own in cPanel, they say that backups are
provided on a best effort basis and they encourage you
to keep your own backups. When it comes to A2's support, the quality when you actually
reach a rep is fantastic.
The reps are knowledgeable and they really care about your needs. Out of all the hosts I've mentioned in this comparison so far,
A2 has the best chat reps. My issue with A2 support
is that their ETAs are wildly inaccurate. I typically see an ETA
between 25 and 70 minutes to talk to someone, when in
reality, I'm typically connected to an agent in 10 minutes every time, even when it told me
there's a 70 minute wait. Since the actual wait time is reasonable, I may be able to recommend
them from a support standpoint, but it's not a good feeling
as a customer to be told you need to wait 70
minutes to talk to someone, even if you know it's not accurate.
A2 offers 24/7 live chat support, which is especially awesome since the reps are so knowledgeable and
know what they're doing. When I asked A2 about this,
they said they're serious about their 24/7 live support. You can even chat with
a rep on Christmas Day. So I said I wouldn't
recommend the Starter plan from a value standpoint, but what about the other plan I mentioned? The Turbo plan felt
speedier in my testing, and my StatusCake test
confirms that the load time is definitely faster, and the uptime is much more acceptable at 99.99%.
So the Turbo plan is
noticeably higher quality than the Starter plan, but is it worth the $21 a month price tag? No, it's not worth the
asking price when I tell you about the next host, which is the host that I personally use
for all of my websites. But before we move on, I just wanna say that A2 is a solid quality
web host that you can trust. If you really like the features and value proposition of A2, I can absolutely recommend
them from a quality standpoint. It's not for me, I just
don't see enough value there for the price, but if they
really look good to you, I would say go for it.
So now it's time to talk about
my personal favorite web host and that's Cloudways. Cloudways is hands down
the most unique web host in this comparison. To put it simply, Cloudways
allows you to rent a VPS, or Virtual Private Server, from
one of five cloud platforms and gives you a simple,
intuitive management panel to host your websites. If that sounds intimidating,
let me break it down for you. With conventional shared web
hosting, a hosting company is putting, let's say,
100 websites on a server. You're sharing your hosting
with other customers.
If another customer's website
gets a surge in traffic, guess what? The performance of your
website can be affected. It could also be that someone's
website on the same server is targeted with an attack,
and this could once again affect the performance of your website. A VPS is a way to isolate
this, and while it's not a dedicated server,
it's a way to get close while not breaking the bank.
A dedicated server, which is
actually the physical server you picture in your head at a data center, might have 20 VPSs running on it, and each VPS is fully isolated, meaning if someone else's VPS gets hacked or receives a surge in traffic, it can't affect your
VPS because the damage can never escape their VPS. So that's where Cloudways come in. They'll sell you a VPS from
DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, Amazon Web Sevices or
Google Cloud platform, but they manage it for you so you never have to feel intimidated, and you never have to feel
like you have the weight of managing a VPS. It feels like any other
type of web hosting. You pick the account you want, sign up, click a button to install WordPress and you're up and running. But here's the insane thing,
Cloudways doesn't limit the amount of websites
you can put on a server and it's truly your server, so you can do whatever you want with it. I have a two gigabyte
DigitalOcean server with Cloudways that hosts all 10 of my
websites, and let me tell you, the performance is nuts for the price.
Sure, I am paying $22 a
month for this server, but let me explain why it's so great. I'm running 10 websites
on it without a problem and some of the sites are
particularly high traffic. I recently had to scale my server up from the initial one
gigabyte DigitalOcean server to two gigabytes, because the
traffic had increased enough to require more power, and that's really the beauty of Cloudways. You are in control of your server. You can scale it up or down when needed and let's say that
DigitalOcean has a meltdown and starts having problems,
I can clone my server to one of the other four cloud platforms that Cloudways offers, and
I've essentially switched web hosts entirely with no hassle, and I've kept the same
great management panel.
Speaking of the management
panel, why is it so great? Well remember how I keep
talking about backups? Cloudways backs up your
website daily automatically. It's built into the price
and each site is backed up independently, so you can restore
the backup of each website when you want without having to have all the websites restored if
you have a problem with one. Another killer feature of Cloudways is the staging environment
for WordPress websites. A staging environment allows
you to conveniently clone your WordPress website to
a temporary sub-domain, where you can install new
plugins, configure a new theme or make changes that may take
you some time to work out without doing it to your live website. You can take your time with
it, make the changes you need and with the click of one
button, you can immediately push the new changes up to your live website. What if you're a freelancer
and you wanna host all of your client websites
on a Cloudways server? Well, with Cloudways'
permissions, you can actually give your client a Cloudways
login where they can log in and access just their own
website without seeing the other sites on your server.
If you need to migrate one
or many WordPress websites from another host to Cloudways,
they have a fantastic, free WordPress plugin that automatically migrates your website in a snap. It truly is the best migration
system I've ever used because it's free to use, you
can do it in your own time, and you don't have to wait
several days for a support rep to manually move your website over, like you see at other hosts. It's these premium features,
paired with the fact that you have your own
server all to yourself that make Cloudways worth every penny. The only two shortcomings to Cloudways would be their support and
frequent glitches with the panel. While they do offer
24/7 live chat support, the reps do not speak very clear English and they seem to lack
courtesy and social skills. I've had reps just end the chat on me without asking if there was anything else they could do to help, or one time, the rep has just fixed an
issue but didn't feel the need to send me a message
telling me it was resolved, so I'm just scratching my
head, assuming that the rep was still working on the problem,
but it was actually fixed.
They do always fix my issue in the end, so I wouldn't worry about the support not taking care of your
problem, but it could definitely be a smoother experience. The next con is that the panel
does have bugs and quirks. Sometimes you click on
something and it doesn't work or it gets stuck and you
have to refresh the page and try again. Overall though, Cloudways
offers the best quality service you can get for the price,
and with plans starting at $10 a month, there's
something for everyone. Now we're moving onto the premium tier, and we're taking a look at WP Engine.
There's a reason WP Engine
is considered a premium host and that becomes obvious
as soon as you look at their pricing page. Their cheapest plan is $30 a
month, and unlike Cloudways where you have an entire
server to yourself and can host as many
websites as you'd like, WP Engine comes with some strict limits. $30 a month gets you 10
gigabytes of storage, 25000 visits per month to your website, and you're allowed to host one website. Yes that's right, one
website for $30 a month. It gets even more strange when
you look at the next plan up. It goes from $30 a month to $115 a month? I mean, is this a joke? So if you outgrow 25000 visits per month, you suddenly need to pay $115 a month to keep your website up? All right but seriously,
who's WP Engine for? What's the point of it? Well, WP Engine is for anyone
wanting the absolute best WordPress hosting experience you can get.
If you want to just give
a company your money, have amazing, fast, 24/7 support
there whenever you need it, and have your site hosted by a company who knows WordPress well and
is committed to the stability and uptime of your website,
WP Engine is for you. Think of it this way. Where Cloudways and a lot of other hosts function on a power system,
meaning if your site requires more guts to function reliably, you need to upgrade the server
or jump to the next plan with better processing speeds, that's how hosting typically works. WP Engine takes a totally
different approach. You pay them for up to x amount of visits to your websites per month,
and as long as you're under the visit cap, it's their job
to make your WordPress website run fast and reliably. It doesn't matter if you do ecommerce or have a membership
site or a WordPress site that's more taxing and
demanding of a server.
As long as you're under
the monthly visit limit, WP Engine will take care of it. The WP Engine panel is
smooth and well thought out and it's hands down the
best hosting experience I've ever had. They take daily automatic backups with one-click easy restore and they take the concept
of a staging environment to the next level by offering a development environment as well. By having two staging
environments available, you can use one slot to work
on a major website redesign that may take several weeks,
and you can use the other slot to work on more minor changes to your live WordPress website. Just like Cloudways, you can
add a user to your account with different permissions
and access rights. WP Engine is truly the
iPhone of web hosting. It just works. It works well, and if you
have any questions whatsoever, there's the best support team
ever there to help you 24/7. The only issue I could find with WP Engine is the massive price gap in their plans. I really don't like that you
have to jump from $30 a month to $115 a month if you require more than 25000 views per
month on your website.
But in the end, who is WP Engine for? Well, WP Engine is for
business owners and bloggers who value a quality hosting experience above everything else. If price is no factor for you and you're simply searching
for the best of the best, WP Engine is the way to go. And finally, we're closing out
the comparison with Flywheel.
When you visit Flywheel's
website, you might think you accidentally just went
to WP Engine's website because the pricing and plan structure is exactly the same as WP Engine. That's because Flywheel
was acquired by WP Engine, so there are definitely some similarities between the two options. But after speaking to the WP Engine team, they told me that Flywheel
is still operating as an independent company, and
while they vouch for Flywheel being WP Engine quality, it will be a slightly different experience and there are differences. Flywheel offers a cheaper
plan for $15 a month that gives you just enough power to start your WordPress website.
So if this luxury hosting experience sounds like it's for you but
you're just getting started, Flywheel is a no brainer. Flywheel is nearly identical to WP Engine in every other way. The powerful hosting and
highly responsive support team is the same, and you
get access to the same automated daily backup system, additional users with
permissions and intuitive panel. I will say that Flywheel is more focused on upsells than WP Engine. They have this stats
tab that they charge you $25 a month to access, and
I think that's a bit lame when Google Analytics can
provide you all the stats you could ever need absolutely free. Flywheel also has a new white
label add on for $99 a month, which gives you access to a bulk plan that's cheaper per website, and access to a full billing suite so you can automatically
charge your clients each month, and you can set the price that they pay.
That's not something
that I can see paying for as a seasoned freelancer,
but I guess if you manage a lot of WordPress clients,
that might make sense to pay $99 a month for the convenience. As long as you can break
even or maybe turn a profit, that might be something
cool to mess around with. Now I will say that
Flywheel feels a little bit behind the curve on some features when it comes to the panel. They only have a single
staging environment, and not the additional
development environment that WP Engine offers. So I'd say if you're just starting off but you want a web host who
will treat you like royalty, go with the $15 a month
plan from Flywheel. If you're a freelancer and
you wanna take advantage of the new white label
feature, go with Flywheel. But if you would fall into any other plan and want the most premium
host, I'd stick to WP Engine for the extra features they offer. So in conclusion, which
web host is right for you? Well, if you're on a budget,
I would personally recommend the Namecheap Stellar Plus plan.
But Dreamhost and Hostinger
are also great options for their own reasons. If you're looking for
serious, reliable web hosting that can do it all and
grow with your website, I would recommend Cloudways. I personally selected DigitalOcean
for my Cloudways server but again, I really don't
think you can go wrong with any of the options
that Cloudways offers. I would recommend starting
with the smallest server and scaling up only as
needed, so that way, you aren't paying for more than you need. And finally, if you're
looking for the absolute best WordPress hosting money can buy, go with WP Engine or Flywheel. So which WordPress host do you guys use? I'd love to know your thoughts
in the comments down below and if you like this video, do be sure to hit that subscribe
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I release new videos. With that said, I will
catch you guys next time..
