Choosing a fast and efficient web hosting service for your new WordPress website is very important. In fact, it’s one of the most important decisions you’ll make when setting up your social media campaign.
There are many excellent service providers recommended for hosting WordPress websites. Which one to choose?
Here’s a list of companies that make it onto the world’s Top 10 Best WordPress hosting service providers and more information on what to look for when making your pick.
Top 10 WordPress web hosting service providers.
Average load time | Uptime commitment | Shared hosting price | |
CloudWays | 27 ms | >99.99% | From $11.00/month |
Bluehost | 249 ms | >99.95% | $2.95/month |
DreamHost | 1 190 ms | >99.62% | $2.59/month |
GreenGeeks | 465 ms | >99.95% | $2.95/month |
HostWinds | 897 ms | >99.97% | $5.24/month |
HostGator | 267 ms | >99.97% | $3.98/month |
Hostinger | 345 ms | >99.74% | $1.59/month |
Kinsta Cloud | 345 ms | >99.74% | $0.99/month |
Site Ground | 756 ms | >99.99% | $6.99/month |
WP Engine | 337 ms | >99.99% | $25/month* |
CloudWays! We are a cutting-edge cloud hosting platform that provides businesses and individuals with reliable and scalable hosting solutions. Our state-of-the-art infrastructure is powered by leading industry providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, and Linode, among others, ensuring that our customers’ websites and applications are always available and responsive.
Our user-friendly dashboard allows our customers to manage their hosting accounts easily, and our expert support team is always on hand to help with any technical issues or queries. With flexible pricing plans and a range of advanced features such as server cloning and SSL deployments, CloudWays is the ideal choice for anyone looking for hassle-free, high-performance cloud hosting.
#2.Bluehost
Bluehost hosting services was founded in 2003 by Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth in Provo, Utah. Today, it’s one of the most-recognised brand names in the web hosting environment and powers over 2 million websites worldwide. By doing a large volume of business, Bluehost is able to offer steep price discounts.
Bluehost provides a full range of hosting services as well as marketing training, SEO services, social media marketing, content creation, graphic design services, email, domain names and local business listings to grow traffic.
Bluehost caters to everyone; from novice WordPress bloggers to established e-commerce sites.
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Current Deals at Blue Host
#3.DreamHost
Founded in 1996 in Los Angeles, DreamHost is a well-known hosting service provider among developers, designers and digital marketers in the United States. It has grown to host over 1.5 million websites and has over 400 000 active customers.
DreamHost offers a lot for a small price tag. In fact, DreamHost is one of the cheapest hosting providers recommended by WordPress. For an affordable price, you get unlimited storage and bandwidth, backups, 24-hour support and free SSL certificates. DreamHost is recommended for everyone, in particular for WordPress websites across all types of industries.
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#4.GreenGeeks
Launched in 2008, GreenGeeks is the industry’s leading eco-friendly green web hosting provider, putting three times the power consumed back into the grid in the form of renewable energy. GreenGeeks offers an environmentally-friendly hosting solution to website owners in over 150 countries.
Its specially-engineered hosting platform offers Shared, Reseller, VPS and WordPress hosting that is designed to be fast, secure and scalable. The green hosting company guarantees 99.9% uptime and offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.
GreenGeeks’ panel is intuitive and well organised. It comes with Softaculous which is a cPanel visual interface that allows you to install dozens of apps and CMS like WordPress, PrestaShop, Drupal, Joomla or Magento.
A few limitations include a lack of advance options like staging and team management as well as limited back up features. It’s also not the cheapest provider on the list of the Top 10 WordPress hosting service providers.
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#5.HostWinds
Founded in 2010 and based in the United States, HostWinds offers a powerful and flexible web hosting service at a reasonable price. HostWinds offers robust tools for building attractive, functional WordPress websites. Its suitable for everyone, from small businesses and professional WordPress bloggers to large businesses and ecommerce sites.
HostWinds is renowned for excellent uptime rates and super-fast loading times. On the up-and-up, HostWinds is making a name for itself with a reputation for solid performance, affordable prices, terrific customer service and generous features. Many features that other hosting competitors charge extra for are free with Hostwinds’ budget-friendly plans.
Pros | Cons |
Very good uptime rates Excellent reseller and VPS hosting plans Affordable monthly rate with good price-to-quality ratio Award-winning customer service Minecraft server hosting | Windows server option not available on every plan
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#6.HostGator
Founded in 2002 in Florida, US, HostGator is a leading web hosting service provider. It’s success was so explosive that in 2012, Endurance International Group (EIG) acquired the business for $225 million. EIG also owns Bluehost.
HostGator offers WordPress hosting solutions which are tailor-made for beginner bloggers and webmasters. You’ll find their site is full of tutorials, walkthroughs and there is a lot of support to help you navigate DNS and data centers.
HostGator’s shared hosting plan is affordable and comes with unlimited storage, bandwidth, free domain for the first year and a free SSL certificate. Customer support is good and includes instant live chat.
One area where HostGator is criticised is many extra services are tacked on with additional fees, including backups and security. The renewal rates also rise aggressively after your first term expires. HostGator pricing comes with big discounts in the first year as well as a free domain. However, you can get a nasty surprise with the cost of renewals.
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#7.Hostinger
Founded in 2004 in Lithuania, Hostinger offers dedicated WordPress hosting plans which allow users to build a generous number of websites. It hosts almost 30 million websites in 39 countries with 7 different locations; US, UK, Lithuania, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore and Netherlands.
Hostinger offers affordable pricing combined with generous bandwidth and powerful features for building professional WordPress websites. Its panel is modern and intuitive and its menus are well laid out and easy to use. Upsells are kept to a minimum.
Hostinger scores poorly on uptime and page speed performance relative to other leading WordPress hosting companies. This makes Hostinger hosting less than ideal for serious ecommerce sites. Hollinger hosting solutions are fine for more run-of-the-mill website owners who are happy to trade off speed and uptime for very attractive pricing.
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#8.SiteGround
SiteGround was launched in 2004 by university students in Bulgaria. It is highly regarded for its solid performance on speed, features and service and now hosts nearly 2 million domains. It has several data centers across 4 continents.
SiteGround is one of the fastest and most consistent hosting providers and its loading time is impressive. SiteGround is also highly regarded for its impressive customer service. It’s not the cheapest hosting company to use which makes it more suitable for serious high-performance projects and high-traffic websites, including ecommerce sites, large corporate websites and professional bloggers.
SiteGround uses high-speed SSD disks which gives it the edge of top speed and offers a caching system which enhances the speed of dynamic content. It’s backend is easy to use and modern, and its visual interface can be customised to your needs.
You can create as many databases as you need with size limits based on the plan you choose. If you need more, there is the option of unlimited cloud hosting.
SiteGround comes with a higher-than-average price tag but the cost can be justified against the hosting company’s excellent uptime, high-speed hosting, advanced features and outstanding customer support. It just may not be ideal for website owners working with a small hosting budget.
Pros | Cons |
| Higher-than-average price but good price-to-quality ratio Extra cost for migrations, although you can use a free WordPress migration plug-in
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#9.WP Engine
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is one of the world’s leading WordPress hosting service providers. It hosts over 70 000 domains in over 140 countries, offering a world-class digital experience to professional enterprises and WordPress website developers. WP Engine uses Google Cloud and AWS servers so you can choose between 20 different hosting locations.
WP Engine offers high-speed hosting without downtime. Its hosting capabilities are highly reliable and its platform is easy to use and well-integrated. WP Engine offers website owners a modern, user-friendly interface, integrated CDN, caching plugins, advanced security and excellent backup options that provide a highly satisfactory user experience.
WP Engine is a WordPress-only hosting solution. You can’t host any other CMS. It’s priced on the expensive side and is more suited to professional websites with bigger budgets.
One issue with WP Engine that is a concern for big sites with seasonal traffic is its visitor limits. WP Engine limits monthly visits based on what plan you are on and it can be quite costly if your monthly visits exceed the plan limit.
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#10 Kinsta
Kinsta Cloud Hosting is a high-quality, reliable, and user-friendly web hosting service that has been crafted with your needs in mind.
At Kinsta Cloud Hosting, we strive to provide our clients with a seamless hosting experience that saves them time, money, and energy, while also ensuring that their websites run smoothly and efficiently.
Our exceptional cloud-based hosting platform is optimized for speed, security, and performance; and we use the latest industry-standard technologies to ensure that your website is always up-to-date and highly responsive.
With Kinsta Cloud Hosting, you can rest assured that your website is in good hands and that we are always available to help you with any hosting-related questions or issues that you may have. Join thousands of satisfied customers today and experience the difference that Kinsta Cloud Hosting can make for your website!
Sure, here is a pros and cons table for Kinsta Cloud:
Pros | Cons
* Excellent performance with Google Cloud Platform infrastructure | * Relatively expensive compared to other providers
* Automatic daily backups with 14-day retention | * Limited choice of data centers (only 7 locations available)
* Easy-to-use custom control panel | * No support for Windows-based applications or websites
* Free migration service | * No phone support for non-enterprise customers
* Expert support available 24/7 via live chat | * No email or ticketing support, only live chat and phone
* Built-in caching and CDN (content delivery network) for fast loading speeds | * Limited storage space compared to other providers
Overall, Kinsta Cloud provides excellent performance and reliability with expert support available around the clock. However, its relatively high cost and limited data center options may make it unsuitable for some businesses. Additionally, the lack of support for Windows-based applications and websites could be a deal breaker for some customers.
3 Most important criteria for WordPress hosting
The top 3 most important criteria to look at when choosing the best WordPress hosting service are speed, uptime and customer support.
1 Speed
Also known as load time, site speed is vital to the success of your WordPress website. Users want results fast and a slow website will not only damage your company’s reputation, it will put people off returning to it or staying on it.
Website visitors are spoilt for choice of sites that are fast and give them results instantaneously. They’re not patient with slow sites, unless it’s a site they really do need to stay on to get what the need like applying for a travel visa or getting a Covid-19 vaccination appointment.
Speed is particularly important if you want to connect with potential customers on your site via chatbots. Fast load time impacts on whether your hosting service can handle high traffic volumes. If there is a spike in traffic numbers to your site, you need to know your hosting service will be able to handle it.
Why site speed is so important
The average user expects a website to load in under 2 seconds. Seems unreal but that’s a fact!
A slow website speed not only negatively impacts on your SEO, giving you a lower search engine ranking; it also can lead to fewer new and returning customers.
According to a report by Radware, a 2-second delay during a transaction can lead to abandonment rates of over 85%. The total cost of abandoned shopping carts for online retailers has been estimated at more than $18 billion per year.
Take Amazon as an example. If Amazon slowed its loading speed down by even 1 second, it could lose up to $2 billion in sales each year.
5 reasons why fast hosting is critical to the success of your WordPress site
If your WordPress website loads slowly, you will suffer from:
- lower search engine rankings
- higher bounce rates
- lower page view numbers
- lower conversion rates
- lower profits
Site speed is a confirmed Google ranking factor. It’s rare for Google to confirm SEO ranking factors but the search engine has made it known that speed is critical to the success of your search rankings.
Why you can’t afford to let your customers become impatient
It’s a fact, today’s online content and shopping consumers are impatient people. Slow pages are a drag and nobody likes them. If a webpage doesn’t load fast enough, they will click out and go to your competitor.
Impatience doesn’t only affect how quickly your customers bounce off a page if it doesn’t load quickly, it also has a devastating effect on conversion rates.
Here are some interesting statistics from feedback from 1 048 shoppers surveyed by Forrester Consulting.
Consumers become impatient when pages take longer than 2 to 3 seconds to load.
- 50 percent of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less
- 40 percent of consumers will wait no more than three seconds for a web page to render before abandoning the site
Retail and travel sites that underperform lead to lost sales:
- 80 percent of online shoppers who experience a dissatisfying visit are less likely to buy from that site again
- 65 percent would simply purchase from another online store
2 Uptime
Uptime needs to be at least 99%. You can’t keep customers if your site is down which is why uptime is so important for website hosting.
Uptime is the amount of time that a server has stayed up and running. It’s a good measure of how well a web hosting service is keeping their systems running efficiently, without unnecessary downtime.
The only problem with rating a hosting service on its uptime is you don’t generally have any way of independently verifying it. You have to take their word for it. If a hosting site says it only has 1% downtime, what does this mean? 3 days a year or 3 weeks a year. And how much will 1% of downtime cost your business?
Lost sales is not the only impact of downtime. You take a knock on SEO rankings and suffer damage to your brand reputation. You only get one chance to impress new customers and you don’t want to blow that on 1% downtime.
What is the host’s uptime guarantees?
When you choose a WordPress hosting service, look at the conditions of their uptime guarantees. Firstly, what uptime do they guarantee; 99.5% is better than 99%. Secondly, will they refund the cost of the hosting for the amount of time you reported and they verified your site was down?
In other words, if your site does go down, you’ll be reimbursed for the cost of the hosting during the downtime. However, read the fine print and find out what is included and excluded in the uptime guarantee they offer.
- Do you know what is excluded from your host’s uptime guarantee?
If your WordPress host notifies you that the server will be down for 4 hours for a scheduled upgrade, this time is usually not be covered by their uptime guarantee.
Likewise, if the server is down due to an unscheduled outages due to hardware problems, does the host exclude this from its 1% guarantee?
- Is it your responsibility to report the outage?
Most hosts will only refund you your money if you report the outage, and then they only refund you for the amount of time from when you reported the outage. If you don’t have a monitoring system in place, it could take hours for you to notice an outage and report it.
- Does the uptime guarantee cover software running time as well as hardware uptime?
Uptime is how long the machine that is running your website stays up and running. However, the machine can be up and working but your website is still down due to software issues. It’s a good idea to choose a WordPress hosting service that includes guarantees for software downtime as well as hardware downtime.
3 Customer Support
It’s easy to forget about customer support from a WordPress hosting provider when you’re focused on creating and launching your website and managing your business. Don’t ignore customer service because it’ll be the one thing that badly frustrates you when your site is up and running.
Here are some stats to chew on:
- One out of 2 (50%) businesses are ready to switch to another web hosting service because of poor customer support
- Four out of 5 (80%) businesses stopped using a web hosting service because of unprofessional customer support
- Two out of 5 (40%) would pay more for hosting if it meant receiving good customer support
Server and software problems mean downtime and downtime costs you lost sales, lost SEO rankings and damage to your reputation. No WordPress hosting service can deliver 100% error-free service but they should provide fast and reliable customer support to resolve problems that do occur.
Top tip to test a host’s customer service promise
Call the hosting service provider and ask a few technical questions to judge their efficiency. If the customer support person is available to help at any time of the day and answers technical questions in a professional and knowledgeable way, then you have peace-of-mind that your WordPress hosting is in good hands.
If the customer support person is hard to get hold of or if he/she doesn’t give clear answers to your questions, it’s best to look for another WordPress hosting service provider.
