Are you planning to start a website for your online business? Creating a site will help you reach more customers online and increase your overall profit. One of the first decisions you’ll need to make is which hosting service you’ll use. So, in this article, we are going to detail and compare the best WordPress hosting services.

How to Choose the Best WordPress Hosting Services

If you search for WordPress hosting services, you will find many results. If you’re a beginner and need to find the best hosting according to your needs, the decision can be overwhelming. But don’t worry. We’ve been through the same process many times so we can confidently recommend some of the best, friendly, and affordable hosting companies.

Choosing which hosting company you’ll use is very important. It’s where your website will be stored so you have to keep in mind performance, security, and pricing plans. In this article, we will show you the best hosting services for WordPress so you can decide with peace of mind.

Best WordPress Hosting Services

The best WordPress hosting companies are:

1. HostPapa
2. Bluehost
3. SiteGround
4. Cloudways
5. DreamHost
6. WP Engine
7. Kinsta
8. GreenGeeks

All of them are excellent solutions, so let’s have a look at what each of them offers in terms of features and pricing to help you find the perfect hosting partner.

1) HostPapa

HostPapa is our favorite WordPress hosting service. It’s an award-winning hosting provider that offers top-rated WordPress hosting plans and excellent support. The support is one of HostPapa’s main strengths as you can get support via phone, live chat, ticket, or email. Additionally, they offer support in four different languages:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish

In terms of security, their custom malware scanners automatically scan your site and search for malicious code and threats. On top of that, HostPapa’s optimized servers make sure that your site has the best performance. This service includes unlimited website hosting that allows you to control all your WordPress sites from one place and the cPanel will give you an easy way to manage your websites.

HostPapa also comes with Jetpack pre-installed so you get features such as image CDN, downtime monitoring, social media automated posting, brute force protection, and more. Additionally, you can set up Cloudflare CDN through the hosting cPanel to protect your site from attacks and save bandwidth.

Available Hosting Plans

HostPapa offers several hosting plans for every type of site or store:

• Shared hosting – $3.95 a month to $12.95 a month
• Managed shared hosting – $39.95 a month
• Managed WordPress hosting – $3.95 a month to $12.95 a month
• VPS hosting – $19.99 a month to $249.99 a month
• Reseller hosting – $29.99 a month to $119.99 a month

Additionally, every WordPress hosting plan comes with free .com domain registration and there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee on every premium plan. They usually have great offers so it’s worth checking out their website.

Notable Features

• Unlimited websites and resources
• Pre-installed WordPress
• Free website transfer
• SSL certificates
• Live WP support
• Free domain transfer
• JetPack pre-installed

Pros

• Easy onboarding process
• Great value for money
• Image CDN
• Powered by SSD
• Spam filtering
• Malware scanning
• Free domain registration

Cons

• Automated backup options aren’t available on entry-level plans
• During peak times you may need to wait a bit for chat agents to answer

Check out HostPapa

2) Bluehost

If you are looking for one of the best budget-friendly WordPress hosting services for your business, Bluehost is a great choice. Even WordPress recommends it! It comes with an inbuilt CDN integration, so you can serve your website files from 200+ data centers.

Additionally, you can create a free staging environment to test changes with a single click. Every plan comes with free SSL integration and higher hosting plans give you access to limited SEO tools. Bluehost also offers 1-year domain privacy if you register your domain through them to keep your personal information safe.

Bluehost has domain managers that help you easily control your registered domain names. You can also purchase new domains, transfer them, or update them according to your needs from the domain manager settings. Bluehost offers support via live chat, online ticketing, or phone. The support is good but not as good as the one from HostPapa in our experience.

All in all, Bluehost is a versatile solution that works well for beginners.

Available Hosting Plans

Bluehost has different hosting packages:

• Shared hosting – $2.65 a month to $13.95 a month
• WordPress hosting – $2.65 a month to $4.95 a month
• Managed WordPress hosting – $9.95 a month to $39.95 a month
• WooCommerce hosting – $9.95 a month $24.95 a month
• Dedicated server hosting – $79.99 a month to $119.99 a month
• VPS hosting – $18.99 a month to $59.99 a month

Notable Features

• Lifetime Free SSL
• Free CDN
• Unlimited resources
• Optimized performance
• Backups
• Domain privacy
• Dedicated IP
• Domain manager

Pros

• Free advertising credits
• Jetpack premium
• 200+ servers
• Bluehost SEO tools
• Video compression tools
• Malware detection and removal

Cons

• In our experience, support isn’t as good as other companies

Visit Bluehost

3) SiteGround

If you are looking for an affordable managed WordPress hosting plan, SiteGround is a great option for you. Siteground is also recommended by the self-hosted WordPress team, Yoast SEO, and WooCommerce. Beginners can start with the shared hosting or managed WordPress hosting plans and then upgrade to a dedicated or cloud hosting plan if they need more power. One very useful plugin is the SiteGround Migrator that helps you easily migrate websites to SiteGround.

On top of that, they also have a plugin to optimize your site’s performance called SG Optimizer. Additionally, this plugin also helps you get rid of other caching plugins such as WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, or WP Fastest Cache.

SiteGround also comes with a server firewall that blocks almost every suspicious website visitor and protects you from attackers. Finally, in terms of hosting quality, SiteGround is pretty good considering its price range.

Available Hosting Plans

• Shared hosting – $6.99 a month to $14.99 a month
• Managed WordPress hosting – $6.99 a month to $14.99 a month
• WooCommerce hosting – $6.99 a month to $14.99 a month
• Reseller hosting – $9.99 a month to $80 a month
• Cloud hosting – $80 a month to $240 a month

If you need more robust servers, you can go for their enterprise hosting. You have to share your requirements and they will develop a custom environment for hosting your WordPress site.

Notable Features

• Scalable resources
• Staging environment
• Git friendly
• 24/7 support
• Free CDN
• Free SSL
• Custom caching plugin
• Sub-accounts
• Unlimited databases

Pros

• Unlimited websites
• Easy WordPress migration
• Daily backups
• Developer friendly
• Auto-Updates

Cons

• No free domain available

Visit SiteGround

4) Cloudways

Cloudways is a cloud hosting platform for businesses. With over 60+ data centers, you can choose any location you need around the world to help you when you are targeting a specific country audience. For example, if you are running an online store and targeting people in the US, you can choose a location in the US so when American customers visit your store, your site will load faster than usual.

Many people use a CDN for this purpose but with Cloudways you can target countries or regions with a CDN. If you already have your site hosted somewhere else, the Cloudways team will help you migrate it to their own server in less than 24 business hours. In terms of server security, Cloudways has Firewalls, SSL, and 2 Factor Authentication for protecting the user account. Additionally, they have partnered with Malcare to offer bot protection to keep every site safe from DDoS or similar attacks.

Another interesting feature that Cloudways has is auto-healing. Normally, when your server OS crashes, your website will go offline affecting your business. However, with the auto-healing, the server will take care of minor crashes and restart automatically keeping your site online always.

Hosting Plans

• DigitalOcean – $10 a month to $80 a month
• Linode – $12 a month to $90 a month
• Vultr – $11 a month to $84 a month
• AWS – $36.51 a month to $274.33 a month
• Google Cloud – $33.63 a month to $232.80 a month

You can also see the available data centers from the Cloudways pricing page and they offer a free trial. It’s worth mentioning that you don’t need to enter your credit card details for the trial.

Notable Features

• Pay as you go
• Unlimited website hosting
• Quick support responses
• SSD based infrastructure
• Custom CDN
• Latest PHP supported
• Custom caching system
• Security patching
• App cloning
• Inbuilt backup and restore systems

Pros

• No contacts
• Unlimited applications
• Great support team
• Firewall and SSL security
• Bot protection
• MySQL or MariaDB supported

Cons

• Free migration available for only one website
• Not the cheapest compared to other hosting companies on the list

Visit Cloudways

5) DreamHost

If you want an easy-to-use control panel to manage your WordPress site, DreamHost is one of your best bets. With more than 400K customers around the world, their shared hosting plans are affordable and perfect for beginners. DreamHost provides free WHOIS guard protection for every domain purchase, so you don’t need to purchase this as an extra add-on or service.

When you sign up for shared hosting or a managed WordPress hosting plan, you will get a free domain name from DreamHost. On top of web hosting, they also offer several extra plans such as website management service, design service, marketing services, and web development services. The best part is that they won’t count for your resource usage. DreamHost comes with an automated backup feature that generates a complete backup of your site to keep it safe.

Additionally, DreamHost uses SSD for their servers to help you get faster loading times. Additionally, they’ve recently introduced a plugin for migration that allows you to migrate your site to DreamHost in minutes. Finally, in terms of support, you can contact support agents via live chat, phone, or social media 24/7.

Available Hosting Plans

• Shared hosting – $2.59 a month to $4.95 a month
• WordPress hosting – $2.59 a month to $4.95 a month
• DreamPress – $16.95 a month to $71.95 a month
• WooCommerce hosting – $16.95 a month to $71.95 a month
• VPS hosting – $10 a month to $80 a month
• Dedicated server – $149 a month to $279 a month

In all the plans, DreamHost offers a 97-day money-back guarantee which is much more than most hosting companies. This is a great advantage because you can thoroughly test their services and make sure you’re happy with them.

Notable Features

• Unlimited resources
• 1-year free domain name
• Lifetime SSL
• Free custom email address
• Automated backups
• Unlimited databases
• Developer friendly
• Sub-accounts
• One-click installer

Pros

• Free domain registration
• Easy to use
• Hassle-free migrations
• New WP website builder
• Multiple billing cycles
• 97 days money-back guarantee

Cons

• Live chat is limited

Visit DreamHost

6) WP Engine

WP Engine is one of the best WordPress hosting services out there. This premium WordPress managed hosting company comes with premium features so it’s not the cheapest option from our list. What we liked the most about this service is the staging environment feature that helps you make sure that every change you make on your site won’t break anything. Additionally, it comes with auto-updates to automatically update your themes, plugins, and core to the latest version.

WP Engine has recently acquired StudioPress, so when you purchase any WP Engine plan, you also get StudioPress’s Genesis Framework and their 35+ custom Genesis child themes for free. You will be able to save thousands of dollars on themes! The support team is highly qualified and it’s available via live chat, ticketing, or phone.

On top of that, WP Engine generates regular backups of your WordPress site and stores them offshore. This way, you will keep your site safe and be able to restore any version you want.

Available Hosting Plans

Since this is a managed WordPress hosting company, WP Engine doesn’t have dedicated hosting or VPS. Currently, the plans they have are:

• STARTUP – $25 a month
• GROWTH – $95.83 a month
• SCALE – $241.67 a month
• CUSTOM – custom pricing

There are monthly and yearly billing options. If you’re planning to use the service long-term, go for the yearly option as you will save 2 months of the plan you choose.

Notable Features

• WordPress multi-site compatibility
• Genesis Framework with 35+ child themes
• 24/7 support
• Global CDN
• SSH option
• Geo-targeting
• Latest PHP compatible
• Automated SSL certificate generation

Pros

• Staging environment
• Auto Updates
• Secured servers
• WordPress experts at your service
• Offsite backups
• Automated migrations

Cons

• More expensive than other services

Visit WP Engine

7) Kinsta

Shared hosting usually isn’t the best to manage sites with a lot of traffic. For those cases, Kinsta is one of the best WordPress hosting companies that will help you manage and run your website smoothly. With the Google Cloud Platform integration, the server will be scaled to provide you with the best experience.

Kinsta is a managed WordPress hosting company like WP Engine. They have the best security features and uptime monitoring system. If your website went offline, their monitoring system will let you know and the scanner will run through your site every 2 minutes to make sure everything works correctly. If you need to migrate your site from any third-party hosting, Kinsta’s support team can help you move your complete content from the old host to the new one.

Additionally, this solution offers a hack-fix guarantee for all its clients. This means that if your website gets hacked or compromised, they help you recover your site and remove the malicious code. This way, you get top-notch security for free! Kinsta also monitors its internal systems for updates and patches, so you won’t get compromised because the software is outdated.

Kinsta provides access to their 24 data centers around the globe so you can choose your preferred location and it’s 100% developer-friendly. You can access features like WP-CLI, SSH, and Git. All in all, Kinsta is a great option when you run a website or online store with thousands of real-time visitors.

Available Hosting Plans

• STARTER – $30 a month
• PRO – $60 a month
• BUSINESS
  • 1 – $100 a month
  • 2 – $200 a month
  • 3 – $300 a month
  • 4 – $400 a month
• ENTERPRISE
  • 1 – $600 a month
  • 2 – $900 a month
  • 3 – $1200 a month
  • 4 – $1500 a month

Higher-level plans will give you more resources and features. If you need even more resources, they will help you build a custom package for your needs. Finally, every plan comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Notable Features

• Powerful admin panel
• High-secured network
• Best architecture
• Free migrations
• Free uptime monitoring
• 24/7 support
• Staging environment
• Powered by GCP (Google Cloud Platform)

Pros

• 24 data centers
• Integrated with GCP
• Regular daily backups
• WordPress experts available
• Hack fix guarantee

Cons

• Not the easiest to use for beginners

Visit Kinsta

8) GreenGeeks

In the market since 2007, GreenGeeks is one of the best eco-friendly WordPress hosting services in the market. They host more than 500,000 websites running wind energy for low environmental impact. GreenGeeks is a versatile service that can be used by both newbie and online business owners.

All their hosting plans are affordable and come with great features such as unlimited resources, Cloudflare integration, speed-optimized servers, security cleanups, an inbuilt caching system, one-click WordPress installs, and unlimited website hosting.

One of our favorite features is the automated security checkups that scan your website for malware and faulty codes regularly to make sure that your site is safe. When the scan finds that something is wrong, it automatically freezes your website and sends you a warning to your registered email address. You can try to fix it yourself or get help from the support team (they offer one free website cleanup service) to get your website back online.

On top of that, their support team is awesome and offers support via live chat, phone, and tickets. If you contact them with a pre-sale question, the ticket or phone support is better. For other queries, we recommend you log in to your GreenGeeks account and open a ticket.

Hosting Plans Available

• Shared hosting – $2.95/ month to $11.95 a month
• WordPress hosting – $2.95 a month – $11.95 a month
• WooComerce hosting – $2.95 a month – $11.95 a month
• Drupal hosting – $2.95 a month – $11.95 a month
• Joomla hosting – $2.95 a month – $11.95 a month
• cPanel hosting – $2.95 a month – $11.95 a month
• Magento hosting – $2.95 a month – $11.95 a month
• PrestaShop hosting – $2.95 a month – $11.95 a month
• OpenCart hosting – $2.95 a month – $11.95 a month
• VPS hosting – $39.95 a month to $109.95
• Reseller hosting – $19.95 a month to $34.95

All the plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Notable Features

• Unlimited Resources
• SSD
• Free domain name registration
• Unlimited website hosting
• Free backups
• Secured environment
• Speed optimized performance
• Unlimited database creation
• The environment is friendly
• Free SSL
• CDN integration
• Custom caching system (LSCache)

Pros

• Eco-friendly hosting
• Awesome support
• Free website migration
• CDN integration
• Multiple data centers
• Advanced security checks

Cons

• The renewal prices are high
• Monthly billing is not preferred

Visit GreenGeeks

Recommendations when choosing a WordPress hosting service

Before you choose a WordPress hosting service, let’s have a look at some recommendations and tips.

Avoid Local WordPress Hosting Providers

Some companies offer WordPress hosting services for a cheaper price compared to the ones we mentioned above. However, we highly recommend avoiding them. Those companies purchase a reseller hosting plan, start their own web hosting company, and then sell it. So if you sign up for one of them, you won’t get proper uptime, security, and data protection.

These services are usually around $10/ year, so it’s better to pay a bit more and have a much better service. It’ll be cheaper in the long run. Please avoid all local hosting providers for a better hosting experience.

Do regular Backups

WordPress hosting companies like Kinsta, WP Engine, and Cloudways offer one-click backup and restore options. We recommend you use a backup plugin to generate your WordPress site backups. If you’re not sure how to do it, check out our guide to create a complete site backup.

Consider Using a CDN

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. A CDN helps you make your website faster and more secure. They have many data centers around the world, so regardless of where your visitors come from, your content will be delivered to them from the closest CDN. The good part is that setting up a CDN isn’t as hard as most people think.

All you need to do is sign up for Cloudflare, add your website, and change the domain’s name servers. Within a couple of hours, your website will be added to the Cloudflare network. If you still need help with the CDN integration, you can get help from the support team via live chat or ticketing system.

Use a Security Plugin

These WordPress hosting services will protect your web server from attacks and block bad IP addresses by using their firewall. However, if you want an extra layer of security, we highly recommend using a security plugin. There are many options out there but Sucuri is our favorite.

SSL Is Essential

An SSL certificate will help you encrypt the connection and also build trust with your audience. On top of that, SSL is also a ranking factor that Google considers when it comes to search engine rankings. So if you have good content, stable speed, and an SSL certificate, you’re well placed to outrank your competitors.

Additionally, we recommend you redirect the HTTP and WWW to HTTPS. If you’re not sure how to do it, have a look at this guide. Most web hosting companies on our list offer a free SSL certificate that renews automatically. Similarly, most CDN networks will also give you free SSL that you can turn on and off from your CDN dashboard.

What’s the best WordPress hosting service for you?

All in all, choosing the right hosting for your site is key. There are many options out there and it can be hard to choose so we’ve selected the best WordPress hosting services in terms of features, support, quality, and price.

All the services on our list are excellent but they serve different purposes. HostPapa is our favorite WordPress hosting for beginners. With affordable pricing options and great support, you can run your site without any issues. Their pre-sales and technical support team are excellent and will help you find the best plan for you and assist you if you’re stuck somewhere.

Other companies like Bluehost, SiteGround, GreenGeekas, DreamHost are also excellent but in terms of value for money and performance, HostPapa was better in our experience. On the other hand, if you are looking for a more powerful solution or need managed WordPress hosting for scaling your business, WP Engine and Kinsta are your best choices. If you’re looking for an easy-to-use control panel, Cloudways is the way to go. You won’t have to sign up for any fixed contracts and you can pay depending on your resource consumption.

We hope this post was useful and you found the best WordPress hosting services for your site. If you did, please share it with your friends and help them find the right hosting company for their business.