I keep this page up to date with my opinions of the best choices for inexpensive, secure, WordPress hosting with a decent level of support. The links below are affiliate links, so I get a payment if you buy service from them after following those links. I’ve personally worked with all these providers, and only list companies I honestly think are best. They frequently run sales, so compare their current prices. The differences among them are not sharp enough to outweigh a 60% discount. Also pay attention to their regular prices, because unless you want to move your website every couple years, that’s the price you’ll pay long-term.
Recommended for Hosting
- My current hosting company, Greengeeks.com, has environmentalism as a major selling point. They advertise carbon-negative web hosting. Their support is excellent, and they meet my criteria for cost, security and so on. However, their administration screens aren’t as nicely organized as the other choices here — they use the older cPanel admin interface. So I rate them as a good choice for the slightly more technical user, or if you can put up with a little inconvenience in the service of the environment. Once your site is set up, you use these screens infrequently. GreenGeeks is also currently having serious problems with spam filtering on their email accounts — a lot of spam is getting through. I’m talking with them about it, but meanwhile, if you want to have an email account in your domain (“me@mydomain.com”), either don’t sign up with GreekGeeks, or have the domain’s email hosted elsewhere, e.g. G Suite.
- Hostgator.com gets good ratings, and has a relatively lower regular price for equivalent service. They will offer you “professional” email service for an added fee, but I don’t recommend it. The “non-professional” email service included with hosting is fine. Administration screens are top-notch, very well organized.
- Dreamhost.com comes highly recommended for reliability and support. Among the top-rated services, they have good pricing and there are frequent sales. They offer a discount for paying for multiple years of hosting at a time, which is not an introductory offer — it’s just their regular deal — unlike others listed here. They are my current hosting provider for some sites. Their administration screens are not as easy to use as some, but acceptable.
- Siteground.com gets excellent marks for performance and service in tests (and in my personal experience). I used them for my own websites previously. I was happy with them except that when the introductory discount ran out, they wouldn’t renew it at the same rate. Their regular prices are a lot higher than the others listed here.
There are many decent companies out there, and the picture changes over time. I tend to trust the top ten lists posted by PC Magazine. Read reviews.
Questions to ask when evaluating hosting providers
To find a provider that’s generally good and that suits your needs, review the information on their website with these questions in mind. If you can’t find the answers there, use their sales chat function to find out the remaining answers.
What’s the price for basic shared hosting?
Generally there will be a reduced introductory rate. Find out how long this rate is good for (in some cases you can lock it in by pre-paying the entire amount for three years or whatever).
Find out what the rate is going to be after the introductory period. If you have trouble finding this information, you may not want to do business with the company, as the fact they’re making it hard to find suggests the answer is not good. If you’re forced to ask them, they may reply that they can’t guarantee what the rate will be at that time. Ask them what it is right now for their customers past the introductory period.
How many domains can you host for that price?
And how much more would you have to pay if you want more than one?
You might only want one website so you might not care. But it’s nice to at least be aware of the answer. Your needs might change, or you might want to go in with a friend who also needs a website and split the costs for a single account that hosts both your sites.
What is the charge for domain registration?
And does this price include privacy service?
Nearly all hosting providers also offer domain registration service. You don’t have to register the domain the same place it’s hosted, but it’s generally more convenient to do so, just to have one less account to manage. If the hosting company is good otherwise but charges an unreasonable amount for domain registration, you can always register with a low-cost provider like Porkbun.
Many hosing plans include one domain registration with the hosting package, but often that’s only for the first year, so find out what it is after that.
Does the plan include email accounts?
And how many, and how much storage space?
If you don’t care to have an email address in your own domain ( you@yourname.com ) you can skip this. But it is often a nice thing to have — it looks professional. Also, a disadvantage to free email accounts such as Gmail is that your data are not private — your messages are being “mined” to sell information about you to advertisers.
Note: Proton provides free, private email accounts for personal use.
Are there storage limits?
For email and website files. Unless your site is very large or you host extra-large files, like video clips, you are unlikely to run into these limits, but it’s good to know what they are.
Are there bandwidth limits?
And what happens when you hit them? It’s unlikely your website will be super busy at first, but it’s best you know what happens if something you post goes viral and thousands of people are hitting your server.
Do they automatically apply some form of caching?
Caching is an easy way to improve website performance. Many hosting companies have a CDN or other caching schemes that they apply to your website by default. That’s generally a good thing.
Transfer existing website/email?
If you already have hosting somewhere else, find out whether this company can copy over your data for you. Ask the question this way: “I have hosting on (fill in the blank) now. As part of setting up my account, can you to copy everything from that site for me — websites, databases, email accounts, extra files stored on the server — and if yes, is there an extra charge for doing this?”
Do they support cPanel?
There’s a more or less standard way to organize the functions you need to control your website and other hosted data, like email accounts. If you ask about this, sometimes you may be told, “We have a custom interface that’s better than cPanel.” If so, follow up with this question: “I believe your custom UI is probably easier to use than cPanel, but can I still use cPanel if I choose?”
The reason this is important is, if you choose to leave this hosting company and migrate your data to another company’s server, the old hosting company’s use of cPanel makes it possible to automate this task. This is especially convenient if you have multiple email accounts, since old emails can then be copied over without knowing each user’s individual password.
This is not a make-or-break question, especially if you have no hosted email accounts, but you might consider it as a tie-breaker. There are other ways to transfer your website data, and other ways to copy over old email, which are described elsewhere on this website. cPanel just makes it easier.
Recommended for “Sandbox” Test
If you haven’t chosen a domain name yet or just want to dip your toe in the WordPress pool without committing any resources, the following sites let you set up a limited-time “sandbox” WordPress site in a subdomain of their site, and customize it however you like. Unless they are also listed in the above section, these sites are recommended only for testing — they’re not necessarily the best hosting companies.
- sandboxcms.com — I tried it and it was very simple to set up a demo site — you just have to create an ID and choose the WordPress version (choose the highest number available). Email functions seem to be disabled, even if you set up an SMTP plugin.
Not Recommended
Bluehost used to be good, but I no longer can recommend them. I used to host my sites there, but after they were unable to solve frequent slowdowns and error messages on the shared server, I closed my account and moved everything to a different provider. Everything I’ve heard since then has confirmed this was a good choice.
WordPress.com is probably the largest service specializing in WordPress hosting. I don’t recommend them, because they’re more expensive (unless you like your website free with truly horrific advertising on it), and because they have everything locked down to just a few approved site designs.
Godaddy.com is also popular and not recommended. They’re not the very worst hosting provider, but when website developers talk about the very worst, they’ll say things like, “Even Godaddy has better performance.”
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When signing up, be cautious about buying extra services which in many cases may be included by default, so you have to opt out. These can push the price way up, and really all you need is hosting. The following, in particular, you don’t need to buy:
- Site monitoring: is available at no cost.
- “Professional” email (if regular email is included)
- “Professional” SSL/TLS certificates (unless you’re a bank, the free certificates are fine)