The best web hosting services are the basis for your site's presence online, allowing it to have a permanent base and provide the service or function you want it to.
An ever-growing list of hosting providers can, however, pose a challenge for even the most experienced IT professionals, particularly given their multitude of additional features and pricing options. Our guide offers assistance in identifying the ideal host for you or your business's needs.
In evaluating providers on the market, we considered factors including — but not limited to — technological features, service reliability, price, maintenance, the level and quality of support, available storage and bandwidth, focuses on specific platforms (such as WordPress), and security.
A fair number profiled also offer some of the best website builders as an added bonus, but make sure to check if there are additional options that your site might not ever need. All those listed below are competent and effective hosts across a range of hosting types, regardless of your budget or specific requirements.
Make sure to read our entire guide to the best web hosting services, and ensure you know everything you need to before making your final choice - we're here to help you pick out the most suitable solution.
Top 3 best web hosting services available now
What are the best web hosting services?
In our opinion, Hostinger is the best web hosting service across features, reliability, support, and pricing, with its shared hosting plans starting at just $2.75 a month. It offers excellent scalability and added features across plans, while its WordPress hosting is worth the price thanks to automatic installation and ongoing support.
Hostwinds and Bluehost follow in second and third, followed by HostGator, InMotion Hosting, Namecheap, Liquid Web, DreamHost, GreenGeeks, Domain.com, and WP Engine. For those looking for a web hosting service and website builder, Wix and Weebly are leading options.
The best web hosting services you can buy today
Hostinger not only provides one of the best free web hosting services via its 000webhosting brand, but also offers some of the best and most affordable cloud web hosting plans. These are just some of the reasons why it has earned the trust of over 30 million users.
It also relies on its own technology, and does not let third parties have a say in performance and feature management or control. Hostinger offers Google Workspace, bundled with the WordPress Business plan, and it can also be purchased separately.
Customers can choose between three plans. Cloud Startup, the opening package, offers two CPU cores, 200GB of SSD storage, and 3GB of RAM, with a monthly cost of $9.99 if you go for its four-year subscription ($18.99 when you renew). Of course, you can also opt for shorter lengths, albeit at higher costs in the long run.
Cloud Professional, the second, mid-level option, expands the offering to four CPU cores, 250GB of SSD storage, and 6GB of RAM, while Cloud Global adds even more resources: eight CPU cores, 300GB of SSD storage, and 16GB of RAM.
Each plan tosses in a lifetime SSL certificate and Cloudflare protection, free of charge. There are no limitations on supported bandwidth, and daily backups are included regardless of your chosen plan. Read our comprehensive Hostinger review to learn more about what we made of it, and why we ranked it top of this list.
Hostwinds is the master of dedicated hosting, whose servers boast powerful configuration features that cater to general and high-demanding power users, whether regular websites or heavy-duty, resource-draining gaming servers.
The highly customizable provider offers several base options you can tailor to your own needs. Even its cheapest packages, suited for the most typical users, come with a four-core single processor and 8GB of RAM.
Additional features include specifying the number of operating systems (i.e. standard CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, or Windows Server), various RAID configuration options, and more.
All plans include full server management, so you can relax and not trouble yourself with any sysadmin duties, making Hostwinds suitable for less tech-savvy users. It also provides server monitoring and nightly backups, and guarantees to never throttle traffic thanks to a 1Gbps network link available to all users, regardless of what bandwidth option they’ve selected.
We had a bone to pick with Hostwinds on a couple of matters — its SSL certificate installation could be clearer, and its pricing could be less confusing — but its excellent performance and selection of plans more than make up for these. For more information on the web host, read our full Hostwinds review.
This US-based company offers affordable yet effective shared hosting, with a variety of plans and options to suit most businesses. That's why Bluehost has become one of the best web hosting services available in the market for all hosting needs.
Whether you want a very basic, Weebly-based website builder to get your small business's online presence up and running with minimal fuss, or something more complex with additional apps via Mojo Marketplace, Bluehost should give you plenty of value for your subscription money.
We also like that there are plenty of customer support options available, on the off-chance that you need help or things go wrong. An inexpensive host that doesn’t skimp too much on features or performance, Bluehost offers the same level of consistent performance despite having comparatively fewer features than many other web hosts.
It also has a range of potentially useful add-on services for search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising management, and managed WordPress hosting, making it a solid choice for those willing to pay a little more for good support.
Read our full Bluehost review to learn more about the platform, and why we rank it so highly.
HostGator is the web hosting service whose trump card has “budget” written all over it. Several pricing plans are available for each and every pocket and project profile, with at least two of them — Hatchling and Baby — offering attractive features.
These plans include unmetered bandwidth and disk space, support for file transfer protocol (FTP) and email accounts, MYSQL databases and subdomains. You will also enjoy the benefits of cPanel-based website management, and $150 of Google and Bing Ads credits.
The package comes with at least two guarantees, one relating to 99.9 percent uptime and the other a 45-day money-back guarantee. One main “drawback” HostGator is guilty of, together with other providers of budget plans, is the fact that its cheapest plan covers only one website. Its security is not great either, especially compared to the competition.
However, this is hardly a cause of alarm when the next plan in line costs only a fraction more, and even then it will hardly leave a dent in your hosting budget. Read our HostGator review to learn more about the service.
InMotion Hosting is a veteran in the hosting business, and it's easy to see why, as it offers a long list of features, bundles and pricing plans for every user and budget.
Site loading performance is simply superb, and comes packaged with access to a dedicated team of professionals, who offer high-level support at any time. What separates InMotion's hosting from the crowd is its propensity to offer bonus features at no extra charge.
These include protection from DDoS attacks and malware, email spam shield, and an option for the creation of functional backups. Hosting is powered by cPanel and Softaculous platforms, which act as its seals of quality.
Finally, all of this is easily checked by any user within a 90-day guarantee period, which is more than enough time in which to make up your mind about InMotion’s offer. You can also refer friends to earn a year of free web hosting.
Our full InMotion Hosting review gives further details on the web host and its features.
As the ancient Latin saying goes, nomen est omen ("the name speaks for itself") and, as you could probably deduce, Namecheap focuses on providing affordable services without cutting any corners on quality.
It certainly succeeds in this, as you’ll see if you purchase one of its more advanced packages. The entrance-level plan, at only $2.88 a month ($1.18 a month for the two-year plan), doesn’t get you much — only 20GB of storage space and 30 email accounts. However, its price is a real bargain, and it does throw in free CDN support, one domain name, and coverage for three websites.
Increase your budget limit to $4.88 a month ($1.98 a month for the two-year plan) and you’ll get access to unrestricted SSD storage, unlimited websites, and auto-backups. At $8.88 a month ($4.80 a month for the two-year plan), you’ll receive 50GB SSD, cloud storage that guarantees zero interruptions, ultimate stability, and top-notch data protection.
As well as a 99.9% uptime guarantee and above-average speeds, Namecheap is beginner-friendly, and does its best to ease you into the platform with helpful information in its welcoming email, alongside a huge online knowledge base. Find out more in our detailed Namecheap review.
Liquid Web does an awesome job of providing various expert managed hosting services for all types of users and requirements. These range from WordPress and email hosting to WooCommerce and dedicated, as well as VPS and cloud hosting options.
Its capabilities shine in most of its plans. Take its WordPress solution as an example — you’re not only getting automated WordPress updates, but also plugin updates, which are first applied in an isolated environment to avoid any potential problems affecting you later, before being forwarded to your site.
Its data centers, run entirely on managed hardware and network infrastructure, allow Liquid Web to provide a wide variety of powerful features. These include a professional-level virus and spam defense system, deep system monitoring, key software installation, updates, support, and free external migrations.
Its incredibly expedient and professional customer support is the cherry on top, and while Liquid Web doesn't come cheap, good things rarely do, with this provider certainly justifying the cost. Learn more about the service and its features by reading our full Liquid Web review.
Having your own hosted email account is important, as it connects your email address and messages to your organization’s domain name, and establishes an air of professionalism.
It also gives you more control over your own data, and circumvents automatic scanners for targeted advertising, which are typically used by free email providers. Dreamhost has got you covered in all these areas, so look no further for your email hosting needs.
Its services come at some very reasonable rates. The monthly option will only cost $1.99 a month per mailbox, while the annual subscription will set you back even less — just $1.67 a month per mailbox.
Dreamhost’s superior standalone email hosting comes with 25GB of storage, email syncing between desktop and mobile devices, and handy webmail software, regardless of whether you've chosen a monthly or annual subscription.
Finally, to make sure all your emails are not just spam-free, but also protected against malware and viruses, its smart anti-spam filter adapts to all new threats.
GreenGeeks is proud of its dedication to eco-friendly hosting, proclaiming itself to be the "world’s #1 green energy web hosting provider". These aren’t just empty words: GreenGeeks has a 300% energy offset scheme, which means that for every amperage pulled from the grid, it invests three times that in renewable energy.
That said, its offering is bland at best, but its shared hosting does stand out. Specifically, it not only provides unlimited resources — web storage, bandwidth, databases, and email — but adds Cloudflare CDN integration, the Softaculous app installer, shared SSL, LSCache, nightly backups, and a free domain for a year.
Furthermore, it provides a user-friendly website editor, and a phone line if you need direct contact with its customer support team. The prices aren’t hefty either, with the three-year deal on its Lite packages costing you an equivalent of only $2.49 a month, after which the price increases to $10.95 a month.
This plan is the best for small websites and blogs that are just getting started, as it only covers one site. If your needs are greater, you can pick one of two other options. Starting at $4.95 a month (increasing to $15.95 a month after the initial pricing period), the Pro package will get you twice the performance.
If you opt for Premium at $8.95 a month (which renews at $25.95 a month), you’ll get four times the power, a free dedicated IP, and a free premium SSL. All the packages are covered by a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Domain.com is among the more cost-effective and reliable web hosting providers, with its shared hosting plans attracting the most attention. The Basic plan includes unlimited storage and plenty of bandwidth that you can build on, albeit for only one website.
Other features include five FTP logins, ten databases, ecommerce solutions, and one Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate free of charge, with pricing starting at $3.75 a month. At $6.75 a month, you can get your hands on the Deluxe option, which covers as many sites as you want, extends the number of FTP logins to 25, and offers databases on 25 sites too.
The Ultra account removes all limitations, and is available at a monthly rate of $13.75. Unlike many competitors, Domain.com has no monthly pricing options, and only offers one-year, two-year, and three-year packages. It doesn’t have any differences in pricing based on the monthly price equivalent.
Another hosting provider whose focus is evident from its name, WP Engine specializes in managed WordPress hosting.
This means it will guide you through and even handle the whole process itself where possible — setting up, optimizing and securing, updating and troubleshooting your WordPress website. One helpful capability is test-running newly released WordPress updates in an isolated environment, before forwarding them to your site.
WP Engine also gives you access to extras, like integrated performance tests with helpful tips, and a staging area where you can try out new plugins or themes without messing up your site. If you thought such a terrific platform wouldn’t cost a lot, you’d be very wrong — the basic plan runs at a whopping $30 a month ($25 if you choose the annual billing cycle).
However, it helps to know that it’ll get you outstanding managed hosting, optimized Dev/Stage/Prod environments, Evercache, Global CDN, automated SSL certificates, and exceptional 24/7 customer support.
The best website builders with web hosting
Wix is a popular website builder that prides itself on its simple and intuitive yet quality and content-rich editor. It has several hundred meticulously designed templates, in addition to already predefined websites.
Its templates might be its most shining feature, but are hardly the only one. You’ll also get a built-in image editor filled with various filters, as well as ecommerce templates. Along with the absence of transaction fees on sales, these make Wix an excellent solution for online stores.
Although specializing in website building software, Wix offers attractive hosting plans too. Its free plan is very limited in terms of storage space and bandwidth (up to 500MB each), and imposes its branding on your website, but gives you a taste of what it can offer.
When you’re ready for something more, you can invest in one of its paid plans: Wix Connect Domain at $4.50 a month, Wix Combo at $8.50 a month, or the most popular, Wix Unlimited, at $12.50 a month.
The latter will get you unlimited bandwidth, 10GB of storage space, the $60-worth Visitor Analytics app and $60-value Site Booster app, and one free domain for a year. Wix even has a VIP option, as well as business and ecommerce premium plans for the most demanding users.
Take a look at our Wix review to learn more about the company, its services and what we made of it.
Just like other hosting providers share target audiences, Weebly wants to attract the same users as Wix, who are looking to build a website.
Weebly aims to be more intuitive, its powerful drag-and-drop builder allowing even the least experienced users to build a site. More experienced users will raise their thumbs at the sight of the vast template database, which turns website building into a Lego-like affair.
As for hosting, options start with the free version, with several restrictions its only “price tag”. You’ll be limited to 500MB of storage, and be unable to remove ads from your website. If it bothers you, you better look in the direction of the Professional plan.
Even this package offers you a glimpse of a wide range of features which Weebly hands out freely — starting from the support for building your own web store with functional coupons, customer reviews and inventory management, all the way through to organizing email marketing campaigns.
Read our Weebly review to find out more about the platform and what it offers.
What is web hosting?
Web hosting is the term used for the service undertaken in putting a website on the internet. This includes all the content, from images to videos and text. Depending on your requirements, preferences, limitations, and the size of your budget, there are plenty of solutions to choose from.
However, not all providers are equally good, and finding the right one for you can be difficult and time-consuming. There are a lot of web hosts, all providing detailed lists of features and add-ons including control panels, website editors, mailing lists, ecommerce support, scalability, testing environments, various support levels, security methods, and marketing credits.
Therefore, you’ll first need to understand what you’re looking for. It all comes down to whether you need all of these features, or only some. For more information, read our feature asking what is web hosting?, which tells you all you need to know about choosing the right provider.
What are the different types of web hosting?
Depending on the size of your business and its hosting needs, you’ll determine whether you should go for a shared, cloud-based, or dedicated server. The difference is mainly in how much resources are given to your website exclusively, and how much is shared by websites across the hosting platform.
A new business will do fine on a shared service, as it won’t cost much but will offer a decent service. The main downside is that server resources are shared with a number of other users, which might affect loading speeds.
If needs be, you can always upscale to a virtual private server (VPS), which mimics a dedicated server but within a shared hosting environment. You can learn more about this type of hosting in our guide, which outlines everything your business needs to know about VPS web hosting.
If you need the resources assigned specifically to your site, then a true dedicated server is the only way to go. This removes the burden of worrying about other websites that you may be sharing your resources with. One thing to keep an eye on when picking a dedicated server platform is its service-level agreement (SLA), which defines the commitment you can expect from the provider.
In addition to areas typically covered, like the uptime guarantee, support hours, response times, security levels, and compensation when the guarantees weren’t fulfilled, the SLA may include other features that may not be included in the basic cost, such as daily or weekly backups.
Additionally, observe whether the host offers enough scalability to keep up with your growing business needs. After all, who knows how much storage space, RAM, or additional servers your website will require in a few months or years? You don’t want to be stuck with an option you’ll have to replace altogether when it can no longer support you.
Finally, consider cloud hosting as an option. This more modern method has certain advantages over traditional ones, including more flexibility and scalability, as well as being more environmentally friendly, since it doesn’t require as much infrastructure or space as on-site servers. Our guide to the best cloud hosting services outlines our most recommended providers in that space.
How to choose the best web hosting service
There are several things you should pay attention to when deciding on which web host to go for.
1. What you’re getting for the price
If you’re looking to host your hobby website or a blog, you can get away with choosing the cheapest or even a free hosting service. On the other hand, large businesses require serious power, and therefore a more substantial investment. Don’t compromise on what could cost you more in the long run.
2. Discounts and renewals
You’ll notice that a large majority of the best web hosting services offer low-price packages in the first billing term, only to renew at a (sometimes substantially) higher price after the introductory period ends. Don’t be fooled: always read the fine print.
If the full price isn’t displayed clearly on the pricing page (usually crossed out above or below the discounted price), it will show up in the cart during the purchasing process. Taking advantage of an introductory discount may be a good option, especially if the low price is offered for a longer period like two, three, or four years. It all depends on how much you are willing to pay in the long run.
3. The provider’s credibility
Unfortunately, not everyone is honest: sometimes you’ll have scammers pretending to be actual web hosts try and take your hard-earned money, and either provide no service or a very poor standard of service. Make sure to do your due diligence by checking the provider’s contact address, owner information, launch date, reputation, and credible reviews.
4. Your own experience and limitations
Consider how much help you’ll need. Do you have expert knowledge or prior experience, or are you a complete beginner? Your choice should depend on how user-friendly the platform is, if it has a control panel (if you need one), as well as on the level of support offered, whether in setting up the site or the legal and commercial ramifications.
5. Web editors
Sometimes you can skip the web host altogether and go for a powerful website building service instead, that can also get your website online. That said, such services may have limitations, primarily in terms of advanced features like migrating websites, as well as the amount of supported bandwidth and storage space.
Which web hosting is better? Paid or free?
The short answer is paid hosting, especially if you’re running a big organization. A free service is perfectly suitable if you have a personal website or blog, but a business usually requires a more complex hosting platform, so you shouldn't cut corners here.
A paid hosting service will typically provide your website with an SSL certificate, which shows to visitors that your business is serious and trustworthy. You’ll also get more bandwidth and storage space, not to mention necessary backups.
If you're set on finding a free service, read our guide to the best free web hosting providers.