The Best WordPress Hosting 2021

Why WordPress Hosting Pricing Matters

What makes a website expensive is usually hosting, especially for bloggers & small businesses. WordPress itself is free and usually plugins & themes are sold for a one-time fee. Sadly hosting isn’t, it’s a monthly recurring service you’ll end up paying for, and it cannot be avoided. When looking through our recommended hosting services you’ll notice that there is a substantial price difference between the suggested providers of hosting. 

The two extreme comparisons are Kinsta and Namecheap. Namecheap is incredibly cheap but that makes sense in their case, they have some of the slowest servers on the market and low quality customer support. They outsource all their support to a third-party company in Belarus, which is annoying if you’re going to need a lot of support because they can answer questions but they seldom have any technical knowledge. 

Now considering Kinsta’s pricing is around $30 for their normal plan, that’s almost four times as much as Namecheap. The difference is that they have insanely fast servers and they don’t outsource their customer support to a company that there tends to be a language barrier. To sum it up: Kinsta is very pricey compared to Namecheap, but it’s also the best quality, where Namecheap is one of the low quality hosting providers on the market.

Security Is Important When It Comes to Hosting

You’re probably wondering how we rate security. There are two factors we have been testing when choosing our ratings:

• Website Security: For example, how much do the hosting company do to secure your website. Having a secure website is your own responsibility, but that doesn’t mean that the hosting provider cannot help. For example, Siteground pre-install security plugins on your WordPress installation so you can’t get hacked easily. They install a limit login plugin together with a firewall, that’s awesome! Whereas a company such as Namecheap doesn’t do as much to secure your website.
• Their Own Security: It might seem as common sense to have a two-factor login system & captcha each login attempt, well sadly it isn’t. Even though it’s hard to believe, lots of hosting companies have terrible websites that are easy to hack, that means that you have a chance to get your data and website login stolen, even though you’ve done everything you are supposed to.

It’s important that you look through the hosting company’s website yourself and consider if it seems safe before purchasing anything. If security means a lot to you then we recommend Siteground.

Choose a Web Hosting Service with a High Average Page Speed 

I’m sure you already know how much page speed matters when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), bounce rate and much more. It’s one of the most critical factors. Most people believe that it’s only defined by how well your website is coded and optimized, well it really isn’t. What can speed up/slow down the page speed most of all is the server. Another important factor is server location, so if your audience is in the USA, then you want a server positioned there as well. 

Throughout our hosting reviews we always look at the server speed & compare them to others, it’s important that choose wisely the first time you pick a hosting provider because it’s a nightmare to switch to another one later on. We have tested almost every medium & large hosting provider on the market. There are thousands of small hosting providers with 20-100 customers which we have yet to test.

WordPress Hosting With 99.9% Server Uptime

The industry standard for an average-high quality server is 99.9%+ uptime. It might sound too good to be true but it isn’t, imagine if your server crashes a few times a day, even for a couple of minutes. That really sucks! It can end up harming your ranks in search engines such as Google & costing your sales because people visit you at an unlucky moment where the server is down. You wanna avoid that at all cost (we’re talking from experience).

99.9% sounds like a high number, but it isn’t. You should in fact strive to find one with higher, such as WP Engine, they are known for having the best server uptimes. The extra money you spend on hosting with them will earn itself back over time because you’ll have a stable server & a great hosting company to help you out if you’re having issues.

The Average Customer Support Quality Surprisingly Poor

Everybody advertises with their awesome customer support & emphasizes how much they care about their customers. In reality most companies outsource all their customer support to countries with low wages. The result is horrible, you have absolutely no doubt when talking to their support that it’s not their area of expertise. They do support hundreds of websites and answer only based on an FAQ. We’ve had our website hosted at multiple companies and trust me, you go absolutely mad when you really need help and the ones you can talk to have no clue what to do. It’s a terrible experience. 

GoDaddy and Namecheap are famous for their terrible support, they hire the cheapest workers possible and let them handle all customer relations. If great customer support means something to you, then you better avoid those two companies, the only good thing about them is that they are cheap.

Start with a Discount Code

Hosting is expensive over the years, luckily most companies use coupon codes to give discounts to first-time customers. Most of the time you’ll get a discount on your first year, usually around 50%. Hosting companies are fully aware that almost nobody switches, the most common way they lose customers is if somebody decides to quit having a website. It’s important that you take advantage of that, if they don’t have a discount when you’re about to make your first purchase then send them an email and ask for one.

It might seem like a long shot but it isn’t, most hosting providers have a huge amount of coupon codes they can give out to new customers in order to increase their conversion rate.

Consider Your Server Requirement

There is no single best hosting provider, it will always depend on what you need. For small & medium sized blogs & businesses we almost always end up suggesting Siteground. We recommend them because they have a cheap hosting plan with great support, decent uptime and fast servers. They also have the option to upgrade to an awesome server later on if you feel like you need a faster website. It’s important to look at what you need now and make a decision depending on that. Especially because you can always upgrade your server quality.

However, you cannot switch hosts easily, so choose a provider you think will be a great fit for the next many years, because chances are that you’ll never be migrating away from it. If you need something cheap and have a small blog with few visitors then Namecheap might be for you. However, we never really recommend them to anybody because it is literally the lowest budget hosting on the market, which results in it being the lowest quality hosting provider as well.

Green Hosting Is Worth the Price

You’ve probably read it a hundred times already on our website, we really do recommend people to consider a green hosting company such as GreenGeeks or HostingForest. Servers are one of the most damaging factors when it comes to climate, so please take that into consideration even though it costs a little more. The good part of using a green hosting company is that you can often get a link from their website & insert a badge on your own to show that you have chosen a green host. Considering ethics from the start is rarely a bad move, often it’ll end up with bringing in more customers and readers. 

If you’re an advanced user then you might consider using Google’s Environmentally friendly servers as well, but it requires that you know how to install and use a server yourself. It’s very advanced. HostingForest & GreenGeeks have made it easy to have a climate friendly website without too much hassle, it just costs 1-2 dollars more a month, and that really isn’t a lot considering how much it changes.

How to Choose the Best WordPress Hosting

The best way to pick the top WordPress host is to look at the three most vital factors. The speed must be considered so that your web page can reach people quickly. If a user is sitting there staring at the screen for more than a couple of seconds, it is almost guaranteed they have already left the session and they are moving on to look at another website. A server load time should be under 300 milliseconds if you want customers to have the loading speed that they have come to expect from a professional site.

If you go with a company that offers cheaper servers that you are sharing with a lot of other customers, it will degrade the experience that people get from your site. Videos will be crawling as they buffer and images will load up in different pieces before the user can tell what they are looking at. It is better to go with a fast host like BlueHost. They have servers all around the globe which means you can be confident that users across the planet are seeing the same fast and responsive website. 

Another thing to consider is the uptime. It is standard for most hosts to have at least 99% uptime now with how stiff the competition is. A web page that is not live is useless because nobody can see it! This brings us to the last vital factor which is customer service. When you see your site is down and not working, how fast is your host getting back to your frantic emails or confused phone calls? Kinsta is a great company to use if you want to make sure that your questions and concerns are addressed. They get a full five out of five stars from us which means that they are great about getting back to you when time is extremely important. A company of this caliber can handle businesses worth millions in revenue since they will make sure you don’t have extended downtime. 

Hosting Companies That Include WordPress Themes

Looking for a speedy WordPress host? Why not try out HostNoc? They can give you a precision WordPress site that is going to impress you with blazing speed and solutions for any problems that might pop up for non-technical owners. Managed WordPress is awesome because you have experts that are going to make sure the site is stable and there are no security holes. Don’t worry about constant updates when you have a managed website because the pros will take care of the details. HostGator also includes free templates that can help make a professional site fast.

Cheap Hosting for Blogs

There are few individuals and companies that want to spend more than what is needed for a service. As SEO continues to evolve and becomes more important, we are seeing companies use their blog to attract customers with information so they can sell them products and services. With the rise of so many blogs, what are some of the cheap hosts that you can use to save money while still collecting lead generation from your blog?

Have you tried iPage as your host for a WordPress blog? Right now the introductory price is just $1.99 a month. Once that special pricing is over, the price only rises a small amount to $7.99 a month. That is an amazing deal! What if you already have hosting through another company and you are worried about the price of moving everything over? After all, you need a technical expert that knows what they are doing and can work quickly. iPage is amazing because they offer a free transfer program because they want your business! A very good deal!

Speaking of cheap hosting, we could not go without mentioning Namecheap. If you thought iPage was great with a plan that you could start for just under two dollars, Namecheap is even better. Right now you can try out their service for just a dollar. That is less expensive than even a bad cup of coffee! Many business owners may want to take advantage of the extreme savings with Namecheap but they are nervous about downtime. After all, when you shift the hosting for a site, won’t the site be down until you get everything going with the new host?

In the case of Namecheap, you can rest assured that when you move over your site to their servers, the website you put so much time into will not go down! Their streamlined process makes the act of migrating over seamless and their tech experts are able to keep everything online 24/7 so you won’t be losing views or customers. Give Namecheap a try if you are looking for a very cheap yet reliable company that cares about their customers.

WordPress Hosting With Free Trials

How can you be sure a host is right for you unless you try them out first? That is how Cloudways approaches business. Start a free trial with them today and don’t worry about them charging you after the fact. You won’t need a credit card when you use Cloudways so there is no worry that they are going to keep charging you if you want to cancel the service. Signing up is very easy and quick. You can have a new account set up in just a matter of minutes when you log in with a GitHub account or a LinkedIn account. Cloudways made everything very simple and sleek for their customers so that you will be up and running in no time. Once you are in, building the website is a snap with all the tools presented to you.

Cloudways has a built in CDN that will make sure your content is going to be served to customers and users very fast no matter where they are located. Around the clock support means if you have trouble during your free trial, there will be somebody on hand that is going to help you out and be ready to explain to you how things work.

Hostgator is another company where you can get a free trial. With creative names such as the hatchling plan, baby plan, and business plan, you can see that this company has many tiers that you can choose from.These will give you many options to choose from depending on how much you want to expand your website. Hostgator is great about scaling up with you so that you can’t outgrow their technology. Keep in mind with even their most basic plan, you are still going to get an SSL certificate which is exactly what you want if you need customers to trust you. Would you buy from a site if there was any question about you possibly getting hacked? Not only do you instill more confidence in buyers when you have your SSL cert, but Google is going to start heavily penalizing sites that do not have this in place. If you want your site to get the proper traffic it deserves from all the time you invested, it is vital to go with a company like Hostgator that knows how to keep your customers safe and stays in line with what Google is looking for in a safe website.

The Best WordPress Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is becoming more powerful and popular as more companies move to the cloud. Take Kinsta for example. They are the first managed WordPress provider that only uses the Google Cloud Platform. That is huge! It means you can future-proof the infrastructure that is so crucial for your success. Don’t worry about growing too fast when you work with a company like Kinsta because they can scale up just as fast as you can!

Cloud hosting is secure, works on a global basis, and gets you high-performance. Cloud hosting is never static and continues to improve on a constant schedule. Kinsta are experts when it comes to working with Google and their Cloud Platform so that means they know exactly how to get the most horsepower out of the system. Your website will be loading extremely fast when you sign on with Kinsta so that you can add as many high quality images as you want along with crystal clear video in the highest definition.

Kinsta also is kind enough to support their customers no matter what time it is. Maybe your website just went down at two in the morning due to an update that was supposed to improve compatibility? Kinsta has your back! You can contact them at all times and they are going to have experts ready to guide your team until you are satisfied with how your website is running again. All of their support personnel are WordPress veterans that understand how frustrating it can be when you don’t get the support you need right away. If you want to try out Kinsta, why not use the free migration that they offer? They have a thirty day money-back guarantee so there is no risk if you decide the service is not for you. They are rated as one of the best hosts on many lists and that is for a reason!