The Best Web Hosting Services of 2024
Bluehost is the best web host based on our testing. See our picks for web hosting services below.
Featured Partners
Best Web Hosting Services: Our Shortlist
Every website needs high-quality hosting. Whether you’re just starting or you know a thing or two about web design, choosing the right provider for your business or project is vital. We’ve tested industry-leading web hosting companies based on cost, speed, security, reliability, and a number of other factors to help you find the best hosting provider to suit your needs.
Our Top Picks
Bluehost
Best Overall WEbhosting
Hostinger
Best Low-Cost Web-hosting
SiteGround
Best Webhosting For Beginners
DreamHost
Best Webhosting For Shared WordPress
Cloudways
Best For Multi-Cloud Hosting
The Top Web Hosting Companies
Bluehost
Best Overall Web Hosting
#1 Top Pick
Bluehost is our top pick for its overally quality, support, versitle hosting options, and attractive rates.
Features
- Free domain name for the first year
- Official partner of WordPress
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Price
$2.95 per month
Server Types
Shared, Dedicated, VPS, WordPress
Uptime Guarantee
99.99%
Support
24/7 phone, chat, and email
Hostinger
Best Low-Cost Web Hosting
Features
- Blazing fast TTFB
- Weekly backups included
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Price
$1.99 per month
Server Types
Shared, Cloud, VPS, WordPress, Email, CMS, Ecommerce
Uptime Guarantee
99.9%
Support
24/7 chat, videos, and tutorials
SiteGround
Best Web Hosting For Beginners
Features
- Unmetered traffic
- Free CDN
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Price
$2.99 per month
Server Types
Shared, WordPress, WooCommerce, Cloud
Uptime Guarantee
99.9%
Support
24/7 chat, phone, ticket, and knowledge base
DreamHost
Best For Shared WordPress Hosting
Features
- Free domain name for the first year
- Official partner of WordPress
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Price
$4.95 per month
Server Types
Shared, VPS, WordPress, Dedicated, Cloud
Uptime Guarantee
100%
Support
24/7 live chat, ticket, callbacks, knowledge base, and community forum
Cloudways
Best For Multi-Cloud Hosting
Features
- Free SSL included
- Automatic backups included
- Free 3-day trial with no credit card
Price
$10 per month
Server Types
Shared, WordPress
Uptime Guarantee
99.99%
Support
24/7 free live chat and phone, Slack, priority, and monitoring with select plans
Web Hosting Glossary
- Content delivery network (CDN): This technology takes copies of all of the static parts of your website and puts them on servers closer to your readers or customers. When someone accesses your site through the CDN, they will have a faster experience than without it.
- Content management system (CMS): WordPress is an example — a CMS is responsible for how your website looks and what content you put on it. Typically the CMS will include a page editor or some reasonable way to add content.
- Time to first byte (TTFB): This metric is used to gauge a hosting provider’s performance. TTFB is important because this hinges entirely on the network and servers helping your content rather than the size or complexity of your content, which is responsible for your site’s performance after the first byte is sent.
- Search engine optimization (SEO): This is a set of principles and concepts used to help enhance how readily a given site is easily found within a search engine.
- Service level agreement (SLA): This is a provider’s service terms typically described in terms of uptime percentage, per unit of time (typically a month). Services provided will be up 99.9% of the time according to the terms of the agreement. Often SLAs pad their numbers by adding exclusions in the form of downtime that doesn’t count against the SLA. This usually includes scheduled maintenance but could also include things out of the provider’s control, such as a DDoS attack.
- Solid-state disk (SSD): This is a type of storage used in servers, known for its performance because there are no moving parts.
- Non-volatile memory express (NVMe): This is a type of high performance SSD. NVMe technology is relatively new and currently represents the state-of-the-art regarding SSDs.
- Virtual private server (VPS): This type of hosting entails multiple users (tenants) running their websites on a single large server, like shared hosting. VPS hosting goes one layer further and uses server virtualization technology to split tenants into their own (private) servers with their own resources. Compare Web Hosting Services
What You Need to Know
How We Review Web Hosting Services
I rated web hosting services on specific plans and prices, what features are offered, the performance of a hosting company, what type of security is included, and whether the hosting provider is engaging in ongoing improvements.
I signed up for a plan with each provider to test:
- Plan value: What plans are available, and do they offer a good value?
- Ease of use: Is the dashboard easy to navigate?
- Support: How fast can you get help when needed, and is support genuinely helpful?
- Features: What features does the host offer, and how do they compare to similar competitors?
- Security: Does the host offer SSL certificates, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack protection, backup services, and scans for viruses and malware?
- Speed and uptime: Does the provider offer a fast, stable environment for your website? How does it perform in tests, and what kind of servers does the hosting company use?
- Recent improvements: What has the host done lately to update its technology and services?
When testing hosting providers, I set up a default installation of WordPress, utilizing the default theme. I tested the speed, then verified the site’s performance, both from my personal experience as well as several industry standard tools. Each hosting provider is rated in six categories and an overall score is calculated from the average of the category scores.
Every web hosting provider here is tested both objectively and subjectively. For the subjective tests, we have a standardized set of qualities any web hosting provider must have to achieve a specific rating. A plan was purchased from each of these providers and I utilized each provider’s tooling and tested their support according to the same standard.
This information was combined with objective testing around website speed and responsiveness, as well as some aspects such as support response time. Historical uptime and performance data were also utilized to form a more complete picture of how each hosting provider performed.
When we tested our trial plans’ speed, they were tested on the provider’s least expensive hosting plan with a default installation of WordPress. The TTFB was then calculated from each provider’s performance test and used to determine each web host’s performance rating.