Best WordPress Hosting Compared – October 2021 Edition

best-wordpress-hosting

Page last updated on: February 10, 2021

If you’ve landed on this page, you’re most likely trying to figure out which company offers the best WordPress hosting for your website or blog. There are a lot of factors that go into choosing a good WordPress host, and the goal of this page is to provide you with awesome, high-quality info in order to help you make the best choice possible.

In our 15+ years of building websites professionally, we’ve tried nearly every host out there. We’ve had good luck and back luck—we’ve had hosts we love…and hosts we hate!

The sad truth is that most review sites are really shady—they recommend garbage hosts in order to make a quick commission off of you. They truly don’t care if you have the best WordPress hosting—they’re just trying to make a quick buck! We HATE sites like that, and we promise—you’ll be getting only the best, most honest info you can find here!

A quick note—if you do happen to buy hosting from this page, we might make a commission—but we don’t recommend junk. Ever. We’re up front, honest, and that’s what makes Web Hosting Buddy different—we tell it like it is! (If you need proof, just check out this page where we tell you which hosts to avoid at all costs!)

If you’re just looking for some quick but solid WordPress hosting recommendations, check out the grid below:

Best WordPress Hosting Companies

1. Bluehost

– The Best Value!

When it comes to WordPress hosting, Bluehost truly represents the best value you can find. They have unlimited bandwidth, 50GB of storage, and 24/7/365 US-based telephone support (this is a huge benefit, especially when you’re frustrated and need to talk to someone ASAP).

With our exclusive Bluehost coupon, it’s only $2.95/month for hosting, which is an incredible deal. We don’t just recommend them—we use them ourselves for a lot of sites, and they’re the most frequently-recommended WordPress host to our friends and family, hands down!

They are amazing with WordPress and have tremendously good uptime and reliability, so if you haven’t tried them—we highly recommend checking them out!

Visit Bluehost

2. SiteGround

– The Best All-Around WordPress Hosting Option

When it comes to a WordPress hosting company who can do everything well, there’s no better choice than SiteGround! They’ve got an incredible amount of features for the money (like their SuperCacher plugin that makes your site lighting fast). Their support is some of the best in the business, and they really have almost no cons.

With our killer SiteGround coupon link, you can get hosting for as little as $6.99/month, which is really peanuts when you see how much value they provide. They’re pretty much the best WordPress hosting company around unless you want to spend double digits per month.

We constantly recommend SiteGround to businesses and people who want to run a high-performance blog or website. Take a minute to check them out!

Visit SiteGround

3. WP Engine

– As Good As It Gets For WordPress Hosting

Is WP Engine more expensive than the other hosts on this page? Yes. Are they worth it? Absolutely! They offer staging and development servers, super legit support, amazing backups and security features—basically everything you could ever want while hosting WordPress.

With our exclusive WP Engine coupon you can get a whopping for months free, which equals out to about $20/month for the entire year. This is a killer deal that they gave us to offer our readers, and it’s the best pricing you can find anywhere on the web for WP Engine—we dare you to find a better deal!

If you haven’t taken the time to check out WP Engine, we highly recommend them when you need the best of the best!

Visit WP Engine

Best WordPress Hosting Providers Compared (2021)

Now that you’ve seen our quick summary of the best WordPress hosting options, we wanted to dive in deeper to each host in order to give you some awesome, in-depth information about each one, as well as some other amazing tips!

There’s a lot of info here, so we’ve provided some jump-to links so you can quickly hop around this page!

Jump To:

WordPress Hosting – Our Top 3 Picks Explained

If you’re new to WordPress hosting or website building in general, you might be wondering—why are there only three WordPress hosting companies listed on this page? Surely there are more than three good options, right?

Well, honestly—not really. Yeah, sure—there are other decent WordPress hosting companies, but as time goes on, we’ve truly found that these three options really cover all the bases, are the most reliable, and are the best value for the money. They also have the best support for their price points too—and support is something that’s really important.

The truth is—we get constant offers from other WordPress hosting companies trying to buy their way onto this page, and we always refuse. Why? Because we actually care about providing good, honest information, and these are hosting companies that we use ourselves on a weekly or even daily basis sometimes. We know them, and we trust them. We trust them with everything from a tiny personal blog that maybe gets 50 visitors a year, to a giant multi-national corporate WordPress website. We know we can depend on these companies, and that means you can too!

The bottom line is, it’s just not worth it to us to recommend some crappy, low-end host just for the sake of making a buck, only to have our readers get upset when they find out that our recommendation was garbage, and so is the hosting company.

Our 15+ years of building websites professionally and developing web-based software tells us that Bluehost, SiteGround, and WP Engine are truly the most worth it at their given price points—they are truly the best WordPress hosting, so we really don’t have any reason to recommend anyone else on this page as a top WordPress hosting option.

In the next section, we’re going to jump into each of the three hosts and give you some more in-depth to understand the quirks and features of each host!

Top WordPress Hosting Providers – The Best Value Option

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, when it comes to finding the best value in WordPress hosting, you can’t beat Bluehost. With our coupon, they are $2.95/month, and to have 24/7/365 US-based phone support at that level is astonishing—even banks and other businesses don’t have that! Let’s take a closer look at Bluehost.

Bluehost WordPress Hosting

We find ourselves recommending Bluehost to friends and family more than any other hosting company and there’s a good reason for this—they are simply the best value in WordPress hosting that you can find anywhere (as long as you use our Bluehost coupon of course—which is automatically applied when you click our link). At $2.95/month, they really can’t be beaten on price and features.

Yes, there are hosting companies that are cheaper—HostGator, Hostinger, etc., but they’re not as good as Bluehost when it comes to support—not even close, in our opinion. And when it comes to the most valuable features, support is #1 in terms of what to look for in a good WordPress hosting company.

Let’s take a deeper dive into some of the quirks and features of Bluehost…

Support

As we’ve mentioned many times on this site, Bluehost is one of the only mainstream WordPress hosting companies to offer US-based, 24/7/365 telephone support to ALL of their customers. Yes, some other hosts have this, but they charge a LOT more for it by either having more expensive monthly fees, or by offering it as an expensive add on.

The really cool thing about Bluehost is that they have the “holy grail trifecta” of WordPress support options: chat, phone, and ticket support. These are really important because they offer you the opportunity to use the support method that best fits your needs—let us explain…

There are times where you don’t want to open a ticket, because that takes too long, and there are times where you don’t want to (or can’t) be on the phone, but need a quick answer—and chat support is perfect for these situations. There are other times where you have a complex problem, and it’s easier to just talk about it and explain what’s going on—and phone support is great for these times. Lastly, there are other times where you’re having an issue with WordPress that needs to be elevated to a senior technician and requires a more in-depth look by support—and tickets are great for these times. So no matter what you’re doing, Bluehost has a support option for you!

Performance & Reliability

We’ve covered Bluehost’s performance in-depth on our Fastest Web Hosting page, as well as on our comparison pages like Bluehost vs. GoDaddy, and Bluehost vs. HostGator, so we won’t get super in-depth here—but we will say this—Bluehost does a killer job of managing web traffic on their shared servers where other hosting companies often let bad actors eat up bandwidth slowing everyone’s WordPress website down (we’re looking at you HostGator). So if you’re looking for a great-performing shared host, Bluehost is hard to beat!

In all of our tests, they’ve also done amazingly well with uptime, consistently approaching the coveted 99.9% mark, and we’ve never really personally experienced a downtime issue with them when loading a site in a browser—they’re excellent in this category too.

Security

Bluehost does a great job with security and has tons of really great offerings here, including free a free SSL certificate via Let’s Encrypt. We rarely, if ever, have any security issues on our Bluehost servers and we love that they don’t try to upsell you on a bunch of security add-ons all the time (many other hosts do this, and it’s super annoying).

Value

Like we’ve said in many places on the site—the value that Bluehost provides just simply can’t be beaten. At $2.95/month with our Bluehost coupon, they are truly the best value for the money of any WordPress host out there. You’d spend more going to the movies that you would on an entire year of Bluehost with US-based telephone support at your disposal whenever you need it—you just can’t beat that for the money!

Bluehost Pros

  • US-based 24/7/365 telephone support
  • The best value in hosting at $2.95/month with our Bluehost coupon code
  • Very solid performance and reliability
  • Our first choice when recommending hosting to friends and family

Bluehost Cons

  • Lacks some of the advanced features that SiteGround and WP Engine have
  • May not be the best choice for hosting an extremely high traffic WordPress website

Visit Bluehost

Examining WordPress Hosting Companies – The Best Mid-Range Choice

We love SiteGround—we really do. They’re one of our absolute favorite hosting companies when it comes to mid-to-high range options. They’re great for personal blogs that require some more advanced features over Bluehost, and they are only $3 more per month over Bluehost on their cheapest option.

If you need a good mid-range host, that’s also capable of handling big time traffic on their higher-end plans, it doesn’t really get any better than SiteGround, honestly. To this day, we’re still surprised that they don’t charge more, because they give heavy-hitters like WP Engine a serious run for their money when it comes to hosting WordPress.

They have some truly amazing features too, so let’s take a closer, in-depth look at SiteGround!

SiteGround WordPress Hosting

One of the things that we love the most about SiteGround’s WordPress hosting is just how well everything works. Their control panel is super intuitive, it’s easy-to-use, and just plain makes sense. Their chat widgets for support are laid out well, and everything just works in harmony extremely well—and this is one of the reasons why we recommend them so often.

Let’s take a look at some of the main categories that are important when it comes to choosing a WordPress hosting company, and look at how SiteGround measures up…

Support

Like Bluehost, SiteGround offers the “trifecta” of hosting support options: chat, phone, and ticket support. We already explained in the Bluehost section why this is important, so if you haven’t read that—scroll up and take a look!

There are a couple differences worth noting though when comparing SiteGround’s support to Bluehost’s support. The first difference is that Bluehost offers US-based phone support and SiteGround doesn’t, so in that category it’s a win for Bluehost. But, SiteGround has a much better chat app, and they also have a better ticketing system too—so in our opinion, the support is kind of a wash there. In general, we have found SiteGround’s entry level chat support technicians to be a little more knowledgeable than Bluehost, but it’s a minor difference.

Performance & Reliability

One of the best features that SiteGround has for WordPress hosting performance is their SuperCacher plugin—it’s truly awesome! It does a bunch of things like improve caching times, minifies JavaScript, and a bunch of other things to keep your WordPress site as snappy as possible! It’s also really easy to use/understand, and it works seamlessly—we’ve never had a single problem with it.

In terms of reliability, SiteGround provides uptime statistics in their panel when you log in, and we’ve never personally experienced on of their sites being down when we’ve loaded it in a browser—they’re awesome about uptime and reliability.

Security

SiteGround offers a free SSL via Let’s Encrypt, and it’s seamlessly integrated into their control panel and is super easy to install.

In terms of sites being hacked or issues with WordPress security, we’ve never run into any problems at all with SiteGround, and the feedback that we get from other people is that they’ve generally had the same experience. SiteGround doesn’t allow bad actors to get out of hand on their servers, and in our extensive usage, their security has been top-notch.

Value

At only $3 more per month than Bluehost but with quite a few more features, SiteGround represents one of the best values you can find anywhere in the hosting world. They truly provide a ton for their price, and we honestly think that could charge double and people would pay it (but we’re super happy they don’t!).

SiteGround Pros

  • Amazing support with chat, ticket, and telephone options
  • Super fast and reliable—one of the best you’ll find anywhere in that category
  • Back-end panel is super easy to use and just makes sense
  • An awesome value at $6.99/month with our SiteGround coupon link
  • We recommend them all the time to businesses and people who need a solid mid-range WordPress host

SiteGround Cons

  • Phone support is not US-based
  • They lack some of the advanced features that WP Engine has (although they are significantly cheaper)

Visit SiteGround

WordPress Hosting Options – The High-End Choice

When it comes to the cream of the crop, the big kahuna—WP Engine sits at the top of the mountain as the best WordPress hosting company. They’ve got so many amazing features that are unique only to WP Engine that it’s staggering how much they can do, and how advanced there are when it comes to hosting a WordPress website.

There’s a big reason that we recommend them as the best high-end option for WordPress hosting—it’s because they really are the best! Now, it’s important to understand that not everyone needs this level of performance and features when it comes to hosting a WordPress site. And of course, although you get tons of stuff and WordPress-specific expertise with them, it also comes with a higher price tag.

WP Engine costs a few times what Bluehost and SiteGround cost, but if you need those features, it might be worth it! With our WP Engine coupon, you can get their hosting for $20/month with a staggering 4 months free!

With that said, let’s take deeper dive into WP Engine and look at some of their quirks and features…

WP Engine WordPress Hosting

WP Engine has been one of our long-time favorites. We have a bunch of our own sites hosted with them, so we know their system extremely well. It’s the most advanced control panel available when it comes to WordPress hosting, and it’s got features that no one else has.

To start with, their production/staging/development system rocks, and that alone is worth the extra money that they cost. What is that exactly? Well if you aren’t familiar with how that works, you can basically clone your WordPress website to a test environment, and from there you can test and make changes without affecting your live site. When you’re ready, you can push that version directly to the live site, seamlessly without doing anything else. It’s one of the best ways to test changes and work on things without messing up your main site. They make it super easy to copy from one section to another, and everything on their servers works extremely well.

Their backups are also equally as amazing, and you can label them with one-click, and revert changes in a really specific way so you can roll back different parts of your website if you’ve made an update and created a new problem by accident, which is an invaluable feature to have. If you haven’t used it—you’re really missing out.

We just love WP Engine, and they truly are the best of the best when it comes to WordPress (although not everyone needs this level of performance). Let’s take a look at some of important criteria and see how it applies to WP Engine…

Support

As with the other hosting companies on this page, WP Engine offers the “holy grail trifecta” of hosting support options: chat, phone, and ticket support. This is super important because sometimes you need a quick answer and can’t be on the phone, other times your question has to be looked at by senior techs, which is what tickets are for, and other times you need an answer right away and need to just talk through your problem—and this is why phone support is helpful.

Similar to Bluehost, their phone support is US-based, but so is their chat and ticket support, which really sets WP Engine apart when it comes to support. Their technicians are specifically trained in WordPress since it’s all they do, which makes them super good at responding to questions. When it comes to WordPress support, they really are the best of the best.

Performance & Reliability

WP Engine truly has the best caching and performance features of any WordPress hosting company, hands down. SiteGround is really, really good—but WP Engine is just next level. Their caching is all proprietary, and works so well with WordPress it’s crazy. Their servers are also calibrated to perfection when it comes to hosting WordPress. If you need the best of the best, there really isn’t a better option.

In terms of uptime/downtime, we’ve only had one situation where a WordPress site we were hosting on WP Engine went down, and they had the problem resolved before anyone notices, so kudos to their response team on that one. What we’re trying to say here is that they’re extremely reliable in addition to being super fast.

Security

When it comes to security, WP Engine is an excellent choice for security-conscious people looking to for the most secure WordPress hosting. They have a list of “disallowed plugins” that they don’t let you install for security purposes, and a lot of other really useful security measures. They’re always automatically scanning the system for intrusions and a lot of other security issues, and are MUCH more proactive about it that other hosting companies—they really take WordPress security seriously. WP Engine is the most secure WordPress hosting company that we know of, and we don’t say that lightly.

Value

Are they the cheapest? Nope. But are they worth it? Absolutely! With our WP Engine coupon code, you can get 4 months free and hosting for $20/month. At that price, WP Engine isn’t just a good value—they’re an absolute steal! With all the awesome WordPress-specific features they have, we’re surprised that they aren’t double or triple the price. There are definitely cheaper hosting companies, but if you want the best WordPress hosting that you’ll find anywhere—WP Engine is it!

WP Engine Pros

  • As good as it gets for WordPress hosting
  • Amazing backups, caching, performance, and security
  • 4 months free and $20/month with our exclusive coupon
  • When people want the best of the best, we always recommend WP Engine—there’s no other way

WP Engine Cons

  • More expensive than other WordPress hosting companies
  • Some people who don’t need all the features with lower traffic sites, or smaller sites, may be better off with Bluehost or SiteGround

Visit WP Engine

WordPress Hosting Quiz – Get Personalized Recommendations!

Still not sure which host to choose? Well, we’ve got something else the might help you out! We created a quiz using some cutting-edge decision technology to help our visitors get an idea of which hosting company might be a good fit for them.

If you like taking quizzes and are interested in learning more about which company might offer the best WordPress hosting for you, take the quiz below!

The Ultimate WordPress Hosting FAQ

In order to answer some of the most popular WordPress hosting questions around, we added this ultimate WordPress hosting FAQ section to this page. If you have a question not addressed in this guide or on this page, please feel free to reach out and let us know!

With that said, let’s take a look at some of the most popular WordPress hosting topics and commonly asked questions in each topic.

Free WordPress Hosting

Can I get free WordPress hosting?

There may be some sites that offer free web hosting, but they are few and far between and come with a lot more negative aspects than positive ones. Most of these sites are poorly-managed, have servers full of spam sites, and a lot of other problems. We also don’t know of any free WordPress hosting options, only a handful of free hosting websites (not specific to WordPress).

Is free WordPress hosting worth it?

No! Absolutely not! The servers on these hosting providers are often insecure and full of spammy sites. They don’t have good support and lack a lot of other critical features. Stay away!

What are the pros/cons of hosting WordPress for free?

As mentioned above, it’s basically all cons—other than saving a few bucks a month (which you really should be able to afford if you’re going to start a website) there are zero advantages of free hosting. If you want to try starting a blog for free, there are a lot of good options that don’t involve paying and hosting your own WordPress website. We’d recommend trying WordPress.com if you want to test out the idea of having a WordPress blog for free.

Shared WordPress Hosting

What’s the cheapest shared WordPress hosting I can get?

There are WordPress hosting providers that are free or nearly free, but we don’t recommend ANY of them—for the reasons mentioned in the previous section and more. It’s just not worth the hassle and headache that comes along with it—it’s much easier to spend a few dollars per month and get quality WordPress hosting.

Who’s the best shared WordPress hosting provider?

If someone is looking for a shared hosting provider who has a lot of experience with WordPress, we highly recommend Bluehost. They’re only $2.95/month with our Bluehost coupon link and we can’t say enough about what a great value they are.

If you’re looking to step up one more notch, we recommend SiteGround as a cross between a shared and managed WordPress hosting provider.

What are the pros/cons to shared environment WordPress Hosting?

The pros are typically cost and value. Shared WordPress hosting gets its name from the fact that you “share” resources and server space with other websites, thereby lowering the overall cost and increasing the value.

The cons are typically performance, lack of customization, and lack of features. Because you are sharing server space with other people, there are sometimes situations where a bad actor on the server can hog bandwidth or CPU and slow the whole thing down, lowering performance. Typically this does not happen with good shared WordPress hosts like Bluehost and SiteGround.

Shared WordPress hosting providers also typically do not allow for customizing certain aspects of the server since they are trying to keep things secure and reliable. If you want to make in-depth customizations on the back-end, you should consider a WordPress VPS or dedicated server.

WordPress VPS Hosting

What is WordPress VPS hosting?

VPS stands for “Virtual Private Server.” This is a type of WordPress hosting where you share a server with other people, but it’s split into much larger chunks, and these chunks are partitioned in a way that gives you the appearance and customization options of your own dedicated server. This type of hosting is typically reserved for people who have in-depth technical needs or requirements.

Do I need to host my WordPress site on a VPS?

Most likely, no. Some businesses and developers have the need for WordPress VPS hosting, but in general it’s not something that the majority of websites running WordPress need to use. In fact, most of those sites that don’t need a VPS may be better off with a shared or managed WordPress hosting environment.

How much does WordPress VPS hosting cost?

It’s difficult to get a quality WordPress VPS for under $30/month, but in many cases that number begins at $50-$60/month. Because a WordPress VPS is considerably more powerful and complex, it requires more management and support by the hosting company, and therefore costs more per month. But again, this is something that most people looking to host WordPress don’t need.

WordPress Dedicated Server Hosting

What is WordPress dedicated server hosting?

WordPress dedicated server hosting is a type of WordPress hosting where you have an entire physical server at your disposal and dedicated to your website (hence the term “dedicated server hosting”). This is really an option for the most advanced users and people with very high technical needs.

How do I know if I need to host my WordPress site on a dedicated server?

Generally speaking, if you have to ask that question you probably don’t. Most people who need to have dedicated server WordPress hosting will know this right away, and they are typically large businesses and developers. Even sites that get a ton of traffic can be hosting on managed WordPress platforms like WP Engine, etc. Dedicated servers are really expensive, and generally not worth it for most people.

How much does dedicated server WordPress hosting cost?

It’s difficult for find quality dedicated server WordPress hosting for under $100/month, and many options start even higher. Again, this is something that the majority of people looking to host WordPress do not need, so don’t be scared away by the pricing. Quality WordPress hosting can be had as cheap as $2.95/month by companies like Bluehost, so for most people the price of WordPress hosting never gets anywhere near $100/month.

Managed WordPress Hosting

What exactly is managed WordPress hosting?

Managed WordPress hosting is a type of hosting for WordPress where the provider does a variety of things in order to make WordPress more secure and run more smoothly.

Managed WordPress providers often manage the technical details of the server for you, stay on top of security issues, perform automatic backups, and essentially “manage” a lot of the technical or more difficult aspects of hosting WordPress. For many people, the slight increased cost is well worth it in terms of the frustration and headache that can be avoided.

Do I really need managed hosting for my WordPress site?

The answer to this question really depends on your level of technical expertise and how comfortable you are with managing certain aspects of hosting WordPress yourself. If you’re quite technical and have the time to manage the security of your server and other aspects, then managed WordPress hosting may not be worth it for you.

However, if you’re less technical or don’t want to spend time managing these aspects of your WordPress hosting, then managed hosting may be a great option.

Is managed WordPress hosting worth it?

For many people who lack the technical expertise to manage some of the more complex aspects of their WordPress hosting installations, managed WordPress hosting can be a great way to ensure that their WordPress website is secure and running smoothly without taking up a lot of their time and causing frustrations.

How much does managed WordPress hosting cost?

SiteGround is generally regarded as managed WordPress hosting, and they can be had for $6.99/month with our discount.

For a true managed WordPress hosting experience, you’ll need to step up to a company like WP Engine, and they start at $20/month with our exclusive WP Engine coupon that gives you 4 months free.

Other WordPress Hosting Questions

Do I need special hosting to run WordPress?

Not really, but you do need hosting that supports server side scripting and has a SQL database. For example, you can host a static website on Amazon’s S3 platform, but you can’t host a WordPress site on S3 because it doesn’t handle PHP and doesn’t have the capability of handling SQL databases. With that said, it’s best to choose a host that has experience with WordPress websites. You can also go one step further and go with a managed WordPress host like WP Engine where WordPress is all they do—which will probably give you the best WordPress experience.

How do I setup WordPress on my server?

Most hosting companies have documentation or tutorials on how to setup WordPress. It can be different at each hosting company, so you should check with your host and their tech support should be able to help you. Often times you can install WordPress via Fantastico or Softaculous (automatic installer programs that are often included with web hosting). Otherwise, WordPress has a guide on how to install their software here.

What if my host doesn’t include email?

Some managed hosts such as WP Engine don’t offer email as part of their hosting. This is because they want to focus on the hosting aspect instead of being distracted by dealing with email too. If you go with a host that doesn’t offer email, you have a couple options. If you only need to receive email but not send it, you can set up email forwarders at your domain registrar. If you need to send email, you can get a different host that does email hosting only. This is usually very cheap and then you just set your MX DNS records to point to that host.

How much does WordPress hosting typically cost?

The first thing to know about this is that the longer you pay in advance, the cheaper it will be. For example, if you pay up front for 12 months, most hosts will offer you decent discount over paying month to month. Generally speaking, shared hosting will be $3-$8 per month or more. A VPS will cost anywhere from $30-$90 per month or more and a dedicated server typically costs over $100 per month. Managed WordPress hosting like WP Engine starts at $20/month with our coupon. Prices can vary wildly depending up different packages, promotions, and all kinds of other factors.

What is the difference between WordPress hosting and regular hosting?

WordPress hosting is a term that’s thrown around and it tends to mean a few different things. Generally speaking, “WordPress hosting” means and hosting that is able to handle WordPress. However, there are people who sometimes say “WordPress hosting” and what they really mean is “managed WordPress hosting” instead. What’s the difference? Managed WordPress hosting is hosting that is specifically designed for WordPress where the hosting company typically only hosts WordPress sites and they’re an expert in WordPress; they also typically take care of any problems related to your installation and will go above and beyond what normal hosts will do when it comes to WordPress problems. Bluehost is a WordPress host, but WP Engine is a managed WordPress host. To make things a bit more confusing, some companies offer both WordPress hosting and managed WordPress hosting.

A bigger question when it comes to managed WordPress hosting is, do you actually need it? Are you ok with a smaller plan that a company like Bluehost offers? Or, do you need a beast like WP Engine for your WordPress site? This already answered on this page—but again, it really depends on your needs. If you’ve got a business or high-traffic website, you may want to consider managed hosting because it comes with a lot of benefits. However, if you’ve just got a small hobby blog, it’s likely that you don’t need managed WordPress hosting (but this doesn’t mean you can’t still get it as some people are just happier when they have the best products and the most help).

Are there any good alternatives to WordPress?

In our opinion, WordPress is really the best content management system out there for building websites. With that said, some individuals may be looking for an alternative. In that case, Joomla and Drupal are other popular content management systems. There’s also the option of building a static HTML site and rocking that instead of a WordPress site (but we don’t generally recommend this.

One of the best things about WordPress is that it’s optimized for many web browsers and devices out of the box, making it a great option to cover a lot of different use cases. We definitely feel like we’re spoiled by WordPress though because every time we build a site using another method, it’s never as easy as working with WordPress.

What about website builders (Weebly, Wix, SquareSpace, etc.) vs. WordPress?

In the past few years (the past year specifically), website builders have become a popular solution for people looking to get a good-looking website up-and-running fast. They’re pretty neat tools, because they allow you to create a website that looks professional without have a lot of technical know-how. This is helpful for people who want to get online, but don’t really know how or where to start.

The downside to some of these popular website builders is that while gorgeous, they just aren’t as versatile as a full WordPress installation hosted on an independent server. Yes, the website builders are good at creating a good-looking site, but that’s where most of their functionality ends. It’s really hard to create any custom coding, run scripts on the server-side, and do all sorts of other things that you’d do with your own WordPress site.

The closest you can get to a website builder with WordPress is WordPress.com, which allows you to create a blog on a WordPress.com subdomain, such as yourblogname.WordPress.com. For a little extra money, WordPress will allow you to connect a custom domain to WordPress.com subdomain so it looks like a regular website. This is nice for people who want WordPress, but don’t want the management hassle of running it on their own server. From our perspective, there really isn’t any hassle, it’s just like anything else that’s more complex, as in once you get used to how it works and using it there’s nothing to it and you’ll be glad that you have the extra functionality. So, as always, our recommendation is to go with WordPress, but hosted on your own server so you have the best combination of functionality and control!

What if I’m a medical professional and need HIPAA compliant WordPress hosting?

If you’re a medical professional who deals with patient records, there are a lot of considerations when building a WordPress website in the US because of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). While you’ll need to do your own research to be sure of all the various medical-specific hosting requirements, it’s likely that you’ll need to choose a WordPress host who offers HIPAA compliant hosting as well as a variety of other security protocols to meet local and national privacy and patient confidentiality requirements.

How important are backups when it comes to WordPress hosting?

Very important—like, super important!

Back in the day, it used to be OK to just sort of keep manual backups and go from there, but nowadays, the size of many WordPress themes and the frequency of theme/plugin updates make it nearly impossible to track.

This is really important when there’s a problem with your website—if you’ve got a good backup, can just restore to the previous version. And if you’re on a managed WordPress hosting platform, they usually make this quite simple—generally just a few clicks and you’re back to an old version of your site. WP Engine is the best at this in our opinion—they allow you to keep 40 backups and it functions like Apple’s Time Machine—super intuitive and easy to use.

So, yes—backups are really important, now more than ever—so we recommend choosing a WordPress host that has excellent backup capability.

Common WordPress Hosting Mistakes

When it comes to WordPress hosting, there are a lot of them. Let’s look at some of the most common ones, and how you can avoid them!

Not Properly Evaluating Your WordPress Hosting Needs

The truth is that there’s no such thing as “the best WordPress hosting” for everyone…some people have different needs, and that’s ok.

If you have a small personal blog with low traffic levels, shared hosting is probably the best and most economical choice for you—in this case, Bluehost might be a good place to start. However, if you have a website with higher traffic or a business website, then you may want to go with a higher-end WordPress hosting from a company like WP Engine.

Here are some questions to ask yourself to help figure out your hosting needs:

How much traffic does my website get each day, on average?

If you’re only getting a few hundred visitors per day, and it’s just a personal blog, you’re probably ok staying with shared WordPress hosting. It’s economical, pretty easy to use, and generally reliable.

In our personal experience, the cutoff we like to use for shared hosting vs higher-end options is about 300-500 visits per day. If you’re up in that range, it might be worthwhile to invest in a better hosting option than standard shared WordPress hosting. The reason for this is because shared hosting can sometimes get overloaded if the other people who you’re sharing the server with experience a traffic surge. This means that your site could slow down and other people could experience problems trying to access your site. When you’re on managed hosting like SiteGround or WP Engine, this is less likely to happen. Generally speaking, the fastest hosting will usually cost a bit more than budget hosting too, but it’s important for your site to be speedy if it receives a lot of traffic.

How elaborate is my site? How resource-intensive is it?

If you have a site with all sorts of images, whiz-bang graphics, and other animations, you might not be able to host it on shared hosting—you might need a server that has a bit more power. However, if you have a relatively simple blog that isn’t very elaborate, then shared hosting may be a good fit.

A great example of this is Find My Electric—a website that’s created for people to buy and sell Tesla vehicles.

Sites like this can be very image heavy—because people who are looking to sell a Tesla generally have quite a few images of their vehicles to upload, and buyers want to see as many images as possible.

Because of this, the dev team at Find My Electric had to choose top-tier hosting in order to ensure that images load fast and quickly—and that other aspects of the site function properly. In this case, shared hosting would never have worked.

So, if you’ve got a site like this—it’s important to make sure that you get hosting that can handle the demands of your database and image queries, etc. And yes, although images should be served via a CDN—the hosting still matters!

How important is support? How tech-savvy am I?

This is an important question to ask because often times the more you pay for hosting, the better support you get. If you’re someone who isn’t all that tech savvy, you may want to choose a host that has great support. If you’re comfortable with jumping into PHPMyAdmin, dealing with SQL databases, and other technical aspects of WordPress backends, you might be ok something that requires more management.

Most of the best shared hosts have pretty good support, however, shared hosting support will never match the level of managed hosting like WP Engine etc.

What kind of additional features do I need?

Do you need email functionality? Do you need a lot of disk space or bandwidth? These are important points to consider about when choosing a WordPress hosting package. The more disk space you have the more expensive the package will be. The more bandwidth, the more features, the more expensive the package will be. Keep in mind that you’re also paying for reliability and infrastructure often times as you spend more on hosting.

There are many little bells and whistles that hosts often try to upsell you on that you don’t really need, so when you sign up for hosting, make sure you read all of the options/fine print on the checkout page carefully.

Choosing the Cheapest WordPress Hosting Possible

Now that we’ve spent some time talking about the importance of evaluating your WordPress hosting needs, it’s important to take some time to talk a bit about why it’s not a good idea to choose the cheapest WordPress hosting possible.

Sure, everyone wants to find the best deal possible, at all times, but the truth is that the best deal isn’t always best for you, and you truly get what you pay for when it comes to web hosting.

While it might seem like a great deal to pay $0.99/month for a cheap host compared to $6.99/month for SiteGround, the truth is that it’s just simply not worth it. When you look at what you’re saving, it’s only a few dollars per month, and in reality, those few dollars buy you amazing support, reliability, and a lot of other features.

With super cheap WordPress hosting, you’ll just end up having more headaches being on servers with bad security and poor support—it’s just simply not worth it—trust us on this one. If you’re going to host a WordPress website, spend a few extra dollars per month, and get a good quality host—this is not the time or place to be an extreme cheapskate!

Choosing a WordPress Hosting with Bad Support

Most hosting companies will tell you that support is one of the main expenses for their business, and when you choose a cheap web host, they just don’t have the budget to put enough money into support to make it worth their while.

What does this mean? It means that cheap WordPress hosting companies typically don’t have chat support, definitely don’t have phone support, and while they typically do have ticket support, they respond slowly and take forever to fix problems.

We know how tempting it is to try and save a buck—especially on something like hosting that seems like a random recurring expense. But, you have to trust us when we say a good support is absolutely worth its weight in gold—it really is, especially when you have a problem with your website that needs to get fixed immediately. And yes—it’s true that good WordPress hosting support will cost you more, but honestly not that much more than a bargain basement company with terrible support—and we believe that spending the extra money on that is worth the savings in time alone vs. dealing with low quality support.

At the end of the day, it’s really an economics problem—when you’re a small WordPress hosting company charging almost nothing for hosting, and not doing a lot of volume, you just can’t afford to pay a good support staff. So—the lesson here is, make sure your WordPress host has good support—you will definitely need to take advantage of it!

Believing Fake WordPress Review Sites

There are SO many low quality hosting review sites out there online that just push garbage hosting companies on people in order to make a quick buck. They don’t care about their visitors, whether they find good hosting, or anything at all—they only care about making money.

If you read around and look at different pages on Web Hosting Buddy, you’ll see that we have a dedicated page about web hosting companies to avoid—and some of those companies pay a lot in commissions—but we don’t care! Our goal is to provide the best, and most honest information—not funnel people to bad companies just to make a buck—and we feel like that’s evident on our site.

And it’s one big reason why we only recommend three WordPress hosting providers on this page—because we use them every week, trust them, and know that they provide high quality, reliable hosting.

The truth is—we have WordPress hosting companies contact us ALL the time (sometimes on a daily basis) asking us to review their services, and we almost always say no. Why? Because we genuinely care about the quality of this site, the honesty of our hosting reviews, and our visitors. We’re not going to recommend junk just because someone wants to flash some cash in our face—it’s not how it works here at Web Hosting Buddy. Just as our motto says—this site is about honest hosting reviews, and we stand firmly by that.

Whatever you do, make sure you do your research/homework when it comes to the credibility of a hosting review site. Make sure that they have the best interest of their readers in mind and aren’t just trying to make a quick buck pushing low quality hosting companies. We HATE sites like that and have made it our #1 goal to be honest and transparent. Stay away from fake WordPress hosting review sites (and low quality hosting providers)!

Final Thoughts on Choosing the WordPress Hosting

Whew! This is a long guide, but when it comes to WordPress hosting, there’s a lot to cover, and we wanted to make sure that we didn’t leave anything out (or at least tried out best not to).

With that said, we wanted to summarize some of the main points from this guide and recap what we believe to be the absolute best options for hosting WordPress.

Best WordPress Hosting (A Final Recap)

When choosing the best WordPress hosting for your needs, we really believe that there are three amazing options that represent a good, better, best approach to buying WordPress hosting—they are Bluehost, SiteGround, and WP Engine. Let’s recap those options quickly:

Bluehost – A Good, Solid Option for Most People Representing the Best Value in WordPress Hosting

As we’ve said many times on this page, it’s really, really hard to beat Bluehost when it comes to value in WordPress hosting.

With our coupon for Bluehost, they’re $2.95/month which is an incredible deal. For that price, you get 24/7/365 US-based telephone support, unlimited bandwidth and email accounts, and TONS of other stuff including some really cool features.

They’re the hosting company that we recommend most to friends and family, and use ourselves on a weekly basis. Hands down, they’re a great option.

Visit Bluehost

SiteGround – A Great Mid-Level Option With Tons of Features and Great Support/Performance

We’ve been using SiteGround for ages, and we absolutely love them. They are without a doubt one of the best hosting companies around, and really don’t have a weak spot in our opinion.

Using our SiteGround link, you can get hosting for as low as $6.99/month, which is an incredible deal (we seriously aren’t sure why they don’t charge more). They have an amazing SuperCacher plugin that really speeds up your WordPress site, free SSL certificates, amazing support, and a bunch of other awesome features.

We recommend them most to small-to-medium sized businesses, and people who are looking for a step up from Bluehost. They are awesome and incredibly reliable. If you haven’t checked them out, you definitely should!

Visit SiteGround

WP Engine – The Best of the Best for WordPress Hosting

We love WP Engine, and have been using them for years now on a weekly (and sometimes daily) basis! If you truly want the Best WordPress hosting, they are it!

Using our WP Engine coupon, you can get hosting for $20/month with 4 months free—it’s the best deal available on the web! And we think they’re worth every penny. They have amazing backups, support, and tons of WordPress-specific features. There’s really no better option if you need to have the best WordPress hosting available.

We typically recommend WP Engine to businesses and people who want the highest quality WordPress hosting you can find. Check them out if you haven’t already!

Visit WP Engine

We hope you enjoyed our guide to the best WordPress hosting! This page represents the best of everything we know about web hosting (specifically, WordPress hosting). From things to avoid to hosting tips and tricks, we really feel like this is the best WordPress hosting guide in existence! But that said, we’re always open to ways we could make it even better, so if you’ve got any questions, suggestions on how we might be able to improve it, or a topic you’d like to see covered, please feel free to reach out via our contact page.