During my time in web design and development I have often been asked by friends, clients and fellow bloggers what my preferred web hosting provider is and what ones would I consider value for money.

So I decided to once and for all put my personal experience and knowledge to good use and test over 20 of the biggest and most well known web hosts.

My Hosting Review Process

This guide was originally compiled in 2015 & over the past few years I have regularly reviewed, monitored and updated the ratings of 25 different web hosting companies.

For each web hosting company I have tested the following:

• Signed up via their website
• Checked their website speed after deploying a basic website
• Monitored their uptime
• Compared their different features and add-ons
• Compared different levels of pricing
• Contacted their customer support for response time and query resolution

Disclosure: When you purchase web hosting through links on this page, we will earn some commission. This helps us to keep this site running. There are no extra costs to you at all by using our links. 

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Here’s My Top 10 Best Web Hosting Providers That I 100% Recommend To My Readers

1. Bluehost – Best Overall Web Hosting Service
2. Hostgator
3. Cloudways
4. Siteground
5. InMotion
6. A2 Hosting
7. Greengeeks
8. Hostinger
9. Dreamhost
10. iPage

BLUEHOST – Best Overall Web Hosting Service
($2.95 per month)

Bluehost came out on top in our all our review tests. We consider them to be one of the best web hosting providers around. They are certainly one of the most popular web host in the world with over 2.5 million sites hosted with them since 2003. Reliable website hosting, fast load times, easy to set up and you get a free domain name and free ssl certificate. Excellent choice for small business hosting. Read more about Bluehost’s pricing plans.

HOSTGATOR – Best For WordPress –  Reliable and Solid
($2.75 per month)

Hostgator are a well trusted and reliable web host. Ideal for WordPress sites, Hostgator offers exceptional value for money as well as getting fast load times, a free domain name and free ssl certificate. Hostgator are considered to be one of the best web hosting providers on the market today. They also have a pretty good website builder which is free to use with your hosting plan.

Other notable benefits are 24/7 customer support, daily backups, efficient live chat, SSL certificate and $200 worth of Google and Bing Ads credits.

SITEGROUND – Excellent Customer Support –  Reliable and Fast Servers – ($3.95 per month)

Siteground is one of only four web hosts to be officially recommended by WordPress.org. Established in 2004, Siteground hosts over 650,000 websites globally and has one of the best WordPress hosting packages on the market.

INMOTION HOSTING – Top For UpTime Levels 99.99%  ($3.99 per month)

InMotion is one of the major players in the web hosting world. Their servers are fast, robust and great for WordPress sites. Their simple set up process and user-friendly hosting control panel makes it a great choice for beginners.

A2 HOSTING – Very Fast Shared Hosting  ($3.92 per month)

A2 Hosting is one of the old boys on the block. Set up in 2002, they host well over 300,000 websites globally. Their shared hosting speeds are the best amongst all that we have tested.

HOSTINGER – Best Cheap Web Host – Great Value For Money ($1.45 per month)

DREAMHOST – Decent Web Host For Bloggers an Small Business – ($2.59 per month)

iPAGE – Decent Web Host For Small Sites – ($1.99 per month)

Namecheap – Good hosting at a decent price – ($1.29 per month)

Greengeeks – Fast, Secure and Eco Hosting ($2.49 per month)

What Type of Web Hosting is Right for you?

Understanding what kind of hosting plans are available, as well as their respective merits and limitations, is a must. Continue reading below to learn about the most common types of plans offered by web hosts, or see our detailed guide to web hosting for an in-depth look.

Uptime & Load Time – What is it and why does it matter to you?

Uptime and load time are the two most important factors to consider when choosing a hosting provider.

Why? Because both of these affect how your website is viewed and the overall experience of your visitors, which ultimately affects your bottom line. Needless to say, both of these metrics are worth paying attention to.

Uptime is basically the amount of time your website is online and operating properly without any issues or problems.

Downtime, on the other hand, is the amount of time your site is offline and unable to be viewed. Whenever your website is “down,” you’re losing out on potential visitors, customers, and money.

That said, even if your website is up and running online, a slow load time can negatively affect its performance. Load time is how long it takes for your website pages to load. The longer they take to load, the more visitors you’ll lose.

In fact, most people won’t wait longer than a few seconds for a website to load. That’s why you should do everything you can to make sure your uptime is high and your load times are low.

Types of Hosting

The majority of hosting plans can be categorized into five main types:

1. Shared
2. VPS
3. WordPress
4. Cloud
5. Dedicated

What is Shared Hosting?

Shared Hosting is one of the most common and cheapest forms of web hosting. It is more than suitable enough for many small business and personal blogs. Shared hosting involves the use of a single server to host multiple websites belonging to different site owners. This form of hosting is the least expensive and the most popular. You are essentially renting disk space on a shared Linux-based server with many other websites, which means you’re also sharing things like RAM, processing power & bandwidth.

This can often mean that once a website begins to gain a lot of traffic or start to take up a lot of these shared resources it will be time to consider upgrading to one of the other forms of web hosting mentioned on this page.

You can expect to pay between $1.50 and $10 per month for this type of web hosting.

While shared hosting is great for small websites with few visitors, it’s not ideal for larger sites with more traffic. This is because the resources of shared servers aren’t shared equally.

If you’re sharing a server with another website that receives a ton of visitors, the RAM and hard drive space of the server can be taken up by this other site. This can affect both your uptime and load time, making your website slower and possibly causing it to crash.

Therefore, you should only use shared hosting if your site doesn’t receive much traffic or you don’t depend on it for revenue.

What is VPS Hosting?

VPS Hosting is stands for Virtual Private Server. If your website has grown in terms of traffic and popularity then you might require more capacity than shared hosting can offer you. VPS hosting is the next step up from shared hosting.

Virtual private server hosting will provide you with increased performance without the expensive bills of a dedicated server. An interesting option if you’re looking for improved security, and more control over the server, in an environment with fewer users to place demands on server resources.

What is Cloud Hosting?

Cloud Hosting describes a method of configuring servers in a flexible way to allow for the most affordable, scalable, and reliable web infrastructure.

Cloud servers scale with incredible speed. You can expand or reduce servers in seconds to ensure that the server keeps up with demand without wasting money on unnecessary resources.

Shared hosting may rely on a single server, but cloud hosting utilizes a “cloud” of servers that seamlessly work together to securely store your site’s data and files.

Cloud hosting is more secure and efficient than other more traditional hosting methods. Since it pools together the resources of several servers from various locations into a single virtual network, cloud hosting is better able to protect your website from cyber attacks.

Plus, with virtual cloud-based hosting, you only pay for what you use. This is a big plus for budget-conscious entrepreneurs who are just starting out online, or anyone else for that matter. After all, why pay more than you need to?

What is WordPress Hosting?

As its name suggests, WordPress hosting is only designed for WordPress websites. Since WordPress hosting servers are specifically set up to host WordPress sites, it is really fast.

Launched in 2003 as a blogging platform, WordPress has become a powerful content management system that powers around 36% of websites today. Consider a managed WordPress hosting package optimized for WordPress.  If you want to spend less of your time managing the security and performance your WordPress website, and more time building your WordPress-powered website, then this might be the type of web hosting for you.

In fact, compared to other shared hosting providers, your page load speeds will be a lot quicker with WordPress hosting. Your uptime will be a lot better too, and it’s more secure as well. This is because you have an expert support team ready to thwart attacks or quickly restore your website should something happen.

Check your web hosts average uptime percentage and then put that figure into my uptime calculator to see exactly how much time your website will be offline over the course of a month.

On the downside, WordPress hosting is less customizable. For example, only certain plugins can be used or altered. It’s also worth pointing out that if you go with WordPress for your hosting, then you must use WordPress as your CMS. For some, this is a bit limiting.

What is Reseller Hosting?

Reseller hosting involves renting bandwidth and hard drive space from a hosting provider and then renting it back out to third parties. In other words, reseller hosting is the ability to offer hosting to your own customers or clients, so you’re more or less acting as a middle man.

You can offer it for free as a bonus incentive or charge a higher fee and make a profit. Most people choose the second option, and the ones who do are often trying to expand their brand by offering additional services or want to become a hosting provider themselves.

Simply put, reseller hosting is designed to make you money. It’s also designed to be the easiest and least expensive way to launch a hosting business.

When using reseller hosting, you have one control panel for everything. You use it to set up, operate, and manage you or your clients’ domains, websites, and emails.

That being said, you shouldn’t have to go into your cPanel very often. Since your hosting provider handles everything server-related, you’re able to focus on growing your customer base and making profits.

The key to being a successful reseller hosting provider is choosing a quality hosting provider yourself. In addition to helping you meet your business objectives, your hosting provider should consistently deliver fast and reliable service, and since your name and success is on the line, it should provide great support too.

What is Dedicated Hosting?

Dedicated hosting involves leasing an entire computer server. Unlike most traditional office environments with a server stashed in a closet, dedicated servers are housed in highly secure, climate-controlled data centers with a team of expert engineers on-site.

Best of all, dedicated servers are much more reliable and secure than other hosting methods, especially shared hosting which shares resources amongst its customers. With a dedicated server, 100 percent of the server’s resources go to a single client, so there’s no sharing of hardware, disc space, internet connectivity, and so on. This results in much better up time

Rather than purchasing a server and hiring IT staff to maintain and manage it, leasing a dedicated server is a smarter option for many businesses. With a dedicated server, there’s no need to worry about daily server issues. Instead, a business can focus on proactive activities that stimulate growth.

Other Types of Hosting

PHP Hosting:  Most hosting providers support PHP hosting, with many now offering PHP7, easy to implement, and boasting a huge development community, PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a core feature of many hosting plans. As the programming language that powers popular applications like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla, if it’s PHP hosting you’re looking for then you will have no shortage of web hosting options.

Joomla Hosting: Joomla is a content management system (CMS) and web application framework that really shines when asked to organize a large and complex content database, Joomla is a popular framework for building websites and applications. If you want to build website powered by Joomla we’ve aggregated some hosting options that offer Joomla optimization.

Should I choose Linux Hosting or Windows Hosting?

Other than choosing between shared hosting or more robust hosting packages, your other big choice to make when it comes to picking hosting for your website is the OS (operating system) of the web server.

Linux Web Hosting: The most common web hosting platform in the world, Linux web servers are a good choice for many websites. If you’re looking for a hosting platform that can handle today’s most common programming languages and applications consider Linux as your hosting platform.

Windows Hosting: Is hosting powered by the Microsoft OS. If you want a server that can handle Windows applications, databases and programming languages like ASP.NET, SilverLight, and MS SQL while still giving you the flexibility to make the most of common web programming languages like PHP, consider the Windows server hosting platform. Expect to pay about 20% more for a Windows-based hosting plan compared to one which is Linux-based.

Hosting Deals and Coupons: occasionally hosting companies offer special deals and offers especially around holidays such as Easter or Christmas and popular shopping weekends such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.