Compare The Best Web Hosting Companies

Our recommendation for most people is Hostinger because it’s an affordable, fast, and reliable web hosting service. Sign up with Hostinger for as low as $1.99 per month.

With the wrong web host, you’ll end up paying for more than bad service. You have to get this right because a reputable web host keeps your site online and helps you avoid unnecessary downtime.

This guide explains the best types of web hosting for different situations. Use these reviews to find the best web host without breaking the bank.

The Top 10 Best Web Hosting Providers

Best of 2023: A2 Hosting, Bluehost, DreamHost, HostGator, Hostinger, InMotion, Nexcess, Scala Hosting, SiteGround, and WP Engine.

Whether you’re setting up your first website or adding to an existing portfolio, all of my top picks give you all the tools you need. However, five providers stood out to our researchers in terms of performance, value, and ease of use.

Our favorite web hosting providers for 2023 are:

• Hostinger – Best overall
• DreamHost – Best value for shared hosting
• SiteGround – Best for extra speed and security
• Bluehost – Best for new WordPress websites
• Scala Hosting – Best upgrade from shared hosting

All of the hosts above are well-rounded providers that make launching your next website a breeze.

Our research team reviewed and tested dozens of web hosting providers to narrow it down to the four on this list. In addition, we reviewed a handful of other hosting providers that are excellent for more specific situations.

Each review covers the highlights and pricing for each web host. After the reviews, we include a buying guide to help you compare the best options.

Hostinger – Best Overall

Hostinger offers dependable web hosting at an incredible price. Shared hosting plans start at $1.99 per month, which includes free weekly backups and enough bandwidth for 10,000 visitors to your site.

Normally you have to back up your site yourself or pay extra, but you get that peace of mind for free with Hostinger.

The most popular option is the Premium Shared Hosting plan which costs $2.99 per month. This lets you create up to 100 websites and host 25,000 visitors. You’ll also get a free domain for one year and a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate to secure your website.

The Premium Shared Hosting plan provides 100 GB SSD storage, which is enough for various website content. Should you need more space, upgrade to one of their VPS or cloud hosting plans.

Hostinger uses its own control panel called hPanel. Thanks to the eye-catching and well-organized navigation icons, it’s user-friendly and easy to navigate. It also comes with an auto installer that lets you set up WordPress or other content management systems using only a few clicks.

Another great feature is their dedicated WordPress dashboard on hPanel. 

You can manage several tasks, such as updating the core WordPress version, activating or deactivating plugins, and enabling maintenance mode from the hPanel. A navigation button lets you access your WordPress dashboard via hPanel with a single click.

LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress (LSCWP) is automatically installed when you set up WordPress. Its server-level cache and other optimization features help you accelerate the website for a better user experience.

Hostinger ensures your maximum online presence with its 99.9% uptime guarantee. Quick-response 24/7 live chat support will also assist you whenever you need help.

For more information on Hostinger, including its plans, pricing, and benefits, check out our in-depth Hostinger web hosting review.

DreamHost – Best Value for Shared Hosting

DreamHost is home to more than 1.5 million websites. People trust DreamHost because they provide fast websites, at great prices, in clear terms.

The company has a 100% uptime guarantee and will compensate you if your site goes down. After signing up, if you are not happy with the performance, you can cancel within the first 97 days to receive a full refund.

There are no surprises, just a streamlined web hosting experience that beginners can master quickly. Advanced users will be happy to find that they can access anything they need without having to upgrade plans.

As far as shared hosting goes, DreamHost provides the most value of any web host out there.

Free daily backups of your site? Unlimited traffic? It sounds too good to be true, but it’s not.

As long as you’re running a legitimate website, you never have to worry about bandwidth or backups, even on DreamHost’s most budget-friendly hosting plans.

Dreamhost keeps your contact information from being registered publicly with your domain. Almost all of web hosts charge a fee for this, but it’s free with DreamHost.

It’s also a great option for WordPress hosting. DreamHost is one of three web hosts that is officially recommended by WordPress. It’s virtually hassle-free with one-click WordPress installation and automatic updates.

If you have a WordPress site, DreamHost will migrate it free of charge.

They also include a no-code WordPress website builder with every hosting plan. Roll out a new site quickly and make changes going forward, even if you’ve never built a site before.

DreamHost shared hosting starts at $2.59 per month for one website with a Shared Starter plan. This is a great price for everything many small organizations will ever need.

Our complete DreamHost review covers the plans and pricing in greater detail.

Ticketed customer service is available 24/7, and you will always communicate with one of DreamHost’s in-house team. Phone support is an add-on for shared hosting plans, but you will be able to get help through email and live chat.

Sign up with DreamHost today for low-stress, high-value web hosting.

SiteGround – Best for Extra Speed and Security

SiteGround is built to deliver top-class speed and rock-solid security for WordPress hosting. Currently, it’s running a huge promotion. You can get 80% off all annual hosting plans and a free website transfer. It makes a good deal even better.

Hosting on SiteGround means you won’t have to worry about speed or security at all. It starts with the technology the hosting is built upon. SiteGround utilizes Google Cloud to maintain swift and stable connections and SSD persistent data storage to ensure low latency.

Of course, you’re not on the hook for any of this–you just have to sign up for SiteGround and launch your WordPress site–they’ll take care of the heavy lifting on the backend.

SiteGround security is on constant alert. It runs server health checks every 0.5 seconds, and its AI-driven anti-bot system blocks between 500,000 and 2 million brute force attack attempts every hour.

This combination of speed and security can work for most sites. But as one of WordPress’ recommended web hosts, SiteGround is particularly skilled at delivering this performance for WordPress sites and includes an extra layer of security just for those sites.

Plus, all SiteGround plans—not just the WordPress hosting options—include one-click WordPress installation, the WP Starter site builder, easy-to-use interfaces, and auto-updates for both the WordPress platform and its plugins.

For a limited time, you can receive up to 80% off all annual Site Ground hosting plans:

• StartUp: $2.99/month for one year, paid annually
• GrowBig: $4.99/month for one year, paid annually
• GoGeek: $7.99/month for one year, paid annually

Keep in mind that each plan will renew at a higher rate after one year. SiteGround also gives you options at checkout to pay for a 24-month or 36-month term instead– and gives nice discounts on renewals longer than one year. Two-year renewals get a 20% discount on the base renewal rate, and three-year renewals get 30% off.

So, in terms of long-term value, you’re still getting the best deal by capitalizing on their great intro rate for one year upfront.

Altogether, SiteGround offers the best technology and services to host your site and keep it fast and safe for all visitors. Refer to our full SiteGround review for more information.

Bluehost – Best for New WordPress Websites

Bluehost is one of the most popular web hosting companies in the world, especially among people launching their WordPress websites. Bluehost is one of three hosts that is officially recommended by WordPress, and we agree.

They offer great rates and a beginner-friendly platform that makes every aspect of running a WordPress website easy. You can certainly build other types of websites on Bluehost, but it is definitely set up to work best with WordPress.

Most of the time Bluehost will walk you through a task the first time, like setting up a blog or email account on your site.

If you get stuck or have a problem, Bluehost has 24/7 support by phone or live chat. The support number and live chat options are listed right on the site, so you can reach out for help within two clicks.

Installing WordPress takes one click, as do hundreds of other apps available in Bluehost’s deep app marketplace.

Bluehost also offers fantastic marketing tools, analytics, and SEO tools to track how well your website is ranking for specific keywords. This gives you a good idea of how you should optimize your site for the best search rankings.

The Basic shared hosting plan is usually $9.99 per month, but there are major discounts if you are a new customer. If you sign up for three years and lock in the price, you can get it at $4.75 per month.

Like other hosts, renewal pricing is higher than promotional pricing, so I recommend signing up for a longer contract to lock in the low price.

Quick Sprout readers an even bigger discount on Bluehost. New customers can click here to get a rate of $2.75 per month when they sign up for a new three-year contract.

If your site keeps growing and you want to upgrade, Bluehost gives you lots of options: managed WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated hosting. When you are ready for more server power and control, you can grow and stick with the same provider.

Bluehost is a very safe play for people who want to build their site with WordPress. If you want to use another content management system besides WordPress, there will probably be a little extra legwork and backend maintenance.

Try Bluehost today and test-drive their web hosting with a risk-free, 30-day, money-back guarantee.

You can also check out our full Bluehost review for a closer look at this web hosting provider.

Scala Hosting – Best Upgrade from Shared Hosting

Maybe you’ve been running your website on shared hosting for a while and you’ve outgrown it. Or maybe you have an ambitious new website idea and you know the lower speed and security of shared hosting isn’t going to cut it.

No matter your reason, Scala Hosting offers the best way to take the first step up from shared hosting into something more powerful and secure.

While they offer an array of competitively priced shared hosting packages (starting at $2.95 per month), Scala’s Entry Cloud plan is a potent combination of server resources and premium features for boosting and fortifying the sites you host on it.

First, you’re getting the dedicated resources that come with cloud hosting. No more worrying about how other sites that share server resources with yours are dragging down your site’s performance. You’re guaranteed two CPU cores for processing power and 2 GB of RAM that no one else is going to tap into on Scala’s cloud hosting.

Entry Cloud also comes with the helpful features you’d expect from a step up from shared hosting. Scala provides 50 GB of NVMe storage space, which you can upgrade as needed. Simply pay a one-time fee to add anywhere from an extra 10 GB to a whopping 2 TB to your disk space.

You also get one year of a custom domain for free, free SSL certificates, daily secure backups of your site data, and additional premium features such as:

• 24/7 SShield malware monitoring
• OpenLiteSpeed caching for faster site loading times
• Dedicated IP address
• Priority support from Scala Hosting
• Dedicated firewall
• Custom access role for site and hosting management

It’s a really potent package that will set your site up for success. Scala’s Entry Cloud plan is faster, more reliable, and more secure than any form of shared hosting. 

Best of all? It’s one of the most affordable cloud hosting plans you’ll find.

Scala Hosting offers Entry Cloud for as little as $14.95 per month when you commit to a three-year term. That means you’ll lock in 36 months of upgraded hosting for just over $538 at checkout. 

While that might be a lot to spend up front, consider that some of the other providers on our list charge between $30 per month to $100 per month for comparable plans.

Don’t want to commit to three years? Entry Cloud’s rate rises for shorter terms, but not by too much. A one-year contract will lock in a rate of $19.95 per month while month-to-month billing will cost you $29.95.

Another benefit of going for a longer term with Scala Hosting is that you save on the renewal rate as well. One-year and three-year terms renew at $24.95 per month, five dollars less than the base monthly rate.

Stop playing in the shallows and get the upgrade your website needs to achieve success. Take the next step in web hosting by signing up for Scala Hosting’s Entry Cloud plan.

More Good Web Hosting Services

HostGator – Best for Simple Websites

HostGator offers all the hosting essentials you need at a great price, plus comes with a 45-day money-back guarantee. If you just need a standard business info website with products, services, “our story”, and so on, HostGator makes it as easy as possible.

HostGator offers an extensive list of how-to guides for technical support. If you don’t find the answers you need, you can turn to phone, live chat, and email support. You can also purchase optional services like their SEO package, which is especially helpful for those who aren’t sure where to start to optimize their website.

Unlike some hosts, HostGator does include support in all its plans. If you want a hosting plan that’s cheap and includes support, this is the host for you.

If you want to get your hands dirty, there is a bit of a learning curve to taking advantage of their advanced options.

HostGator does offer Windows hosting in addition to Linux, as well as a variety of options to upgrade, including cloud hosting, VPS hosting, managed WordPress, and a dedicated server. Shared hosting plans normally start at $2.75/month with a three-year contract.

But QuickSprout readers can get up to 66% off new HostGator plans using the link.

If you’re interested in trying HostGator, I recommend taking full advantage of the 45-day money-back guarantee and testing out their support thoroughly before committing.

We have a complete review on HostGator that dives deeper into its web hosting capabilities and plan options.

Overall, this is a great web host for simple deployment and uses like a company website that doesn’t necessarily see a ton of traffic each month. However, with VPS options, it’ll allow you to scale if you need.

A2 Hosting – Fast and Reliable Shared Hosting

A2 Hosting stands out for its great speed and low prices. It’s what the company is known for.

At every hosting tier (shared, VPS, dedicated), A2 Hosting beats other hosts on speed. If you’re coming from another shared web host, you’re likely going to see an improvement in loading speed once you migrate to A2.

With their Turbo Boost and Turbo Max plans, you’ll get access to their Turbo Servers. They boast that it’s 20x faster than their other servers and includes:

• 40% faster AMD EPYC CPU performance
• 2x faster to first byte
• Manage 9x more traffic
• 3x faster read/write speeds with NVMe drives

A2 Hosting also has a 99.9% uptime commitment on all plans so you know you’ll have a reliable host that won’t be down often.

They offer free site migration with each plan too. If you’ve set your site up on a bad host and want to migrate, this is a fantastic deal. It’ll save you dozens of hours trying to get your site rebuilt. The A2 Hosting team takes care of it for you.

Like many of the other web hosts, there are 1-click installs for all the popular CMS tools like WordPress, Magento, and Drupal.

Plans start at $2.99 per month for a single website.

If you plan on hosting multiple websites, you’ll need to get the Drive plan which is an extra $2/month after the promotional period ends.

Our A2 Hosting review covers these plan options in greater detail.

One trick to save money with A2 Hosting: the promotional prices end on renewal. To lock in the 63% discount for as long as possible, go for the tri-annual billing which will bill for three years at once. You’ll get 2 years of hosting for free.

InMotion Hosting – Best VPS Hosting

InMotion is the host for you if you’re looking for a virtual private server (VPS). They have the best pricing around, along with top-notch customer support as an added value. Something you usually have to sacrifice for a better price. But not with Inmotion. 

With VPS hosting, you get more control over the server than you do with shared hosting. This is great, but you definitely need to know what you’re doing configuring a server.

If you’re not super confident in the command line, you can opt for a managed VPS plan from InMotion. They’ll handle the technical side of things and keep an eye on security for you.

For the developers out there, InMotion VPS includes optional root access with every plan. You won’t have to upgrade to make the changes you want to the server.

Whenever questions come up, you can reach out to the company’s excellent customer support team. Don’t believe it? Try for yourself. InMotion’s 90-day free trial period gives you plenty of time to test out the quality of support.

Managed hosting, great support, and the latest technology–these are the reasons people choose to go with InMotion. This is covered extensively in our InMotion web hosting review.

I highly recommend this option for ecommerce. Online shoppers like a fast experience with no hiccups. With InMotion VPS you can ensure that your site has the resources it needs to handle any traffic spike.

There are also a number of fail-safes built into the hosting platform. If anything happens to your server, InMotion will automatically spin your site back up almost instantly on a server in the same cluster.

You also won’t have to worry about SSL certificates, which keep your shoppers’ credit card info private. All InMotion VPS plans include AutoSSL, which lets you enable this crucial protection for every website visitor with a single click.

VPS hosting with InMotion gives you the speed you need along with the peace of mind that your site will always be safe and secure.

Managed VPS hosting starts as low as $19.99 per month. Visit InMotion to find out if you can get an even better deal today.

WP Engine – Best Managed WordPress Hosting

WP Engine is one of the best (if not the best) WordPress hosts out there. Full stop.

They provide a truly excellent product, that’s highly optimized for WordPress websites. If you want all the storage and speed you can get for your WP blog or online store, this is the host for you.

It does come at a price though. A fully managed WordPress host is noticeably more expensive than shared hosting providers.

WP Engine’s lowest-priced plan is $20/month, and that’s only for one 10GB site with max 25,000 visitors/month. You get two months free when you sign up for a year, however, and can get an even better deal signing up through Quicksprout.

Yes, the price tag is higher than other hosts, but when you factor in what WP Engine does, it’s an incredibly appealing option for WordPress site owners.

As a managed WordPress host, WP Engine only provides service to WordPress users, which means its entire infrastructure can be optimized for WordPress. Your site will be wicked fast, there’s virtually no downtime, and lots of maintenance tasks get taken care of automatically.

It also offers special plans for people who are running an online store with WordPress. These are much more expensive than managed WordPress hosting, but you’ll get access to premium WordPress ecommerce themes and other tools that would cost hundreds of dollars sold separately.

Customer support is also laser-focused on WordPress, which makes for highly competent knowledgeable support staff available through tracked tickets and on live chat 24/7.

To see how WP Engine stacks up against the crowd, I recommend reading our complete WP Engine review.

Bottom line: If you want a blazing-fast WordPress site where everything is taken care of automatically, you’ll want WP Engine. You’ll be paying more in order to get a lot more.

Nexcess – Best for Ecommerce Hosting

Nexcess is a web hosting solution from Liquid Web — a provider I’ve featured on my lists for best dedicated web hosting, best VPS hosting, and best WordPress hosting.

So it’s no real shock that Nexcess makes my list of best web hosts. Where it really shines is managed ecommerce hosting. This is ideal for people who need a speedy site, but don’t want to be the one configuring the backend.

Nexcess really specializes in these managed hosting arrangements, and offers a great selection of ecommerce platforms to build on:

• Magento
• Woocommerce
• WordPress
• Drupal
• BigCommerce
• Sylius
• ExpressionEngine
• Craft CMS
• Orocrm

Again, all of these are managed ecommerce hosting plans–you won’t be on the hook for configuring the server or troubleshooting issues that pop up.

Need more speed? Not a problem. The Nexcess Cloud Accelerator—a feature that adds a layer to the cloud stack–increases the speed of your website’s loading time. That’s a huge boon because speed is everything when it comes to keeping your customers on your website and browsing.

Pricing starts at $15.83 per month with an annual contract for WordPress. There are many more plans and rates available for each type of hosting, it just depends on the resources you need.

This makes Nexcess perfect for any growing business looking to scale. No matter where you are with your business, there’s likely a plan for you with Nexcess.

On top of that, it has a dedicated support team available 24/7 to help you address any technical issues as they occur.

If you’re running an ecommerce website or if you have a startup that you know will grow quickly, Nexcess should definitely be in consideration.

Prices vary depending on which CMS platform you want to use. But WordPress plans start at $13.30 per month.

Additional Web Hosting Reviews

In a broad top list post like Best Web Hosting, I considered how different options stack up against one another and how they fit within the general category.

But there are more things to think about, like taking a deeper dive into individual hosting providers to learn more about their strengths and weaknesses. Likewise, you also want to think about the different types of web hosting available, and check out reviews of the providers that excel in those different categories.

The following information will be helpful to you as you make your decision about the best hosting provider for your unique needs.

Hosting Company Reviews

Narrowed your list to a few top options? Before you make that final decision, check out our detailed company reviews on some of the most popular web hosting services out there today.

• Hostinger Review
• Bluehost Review
• Dreamhost Review
• HostGator Review
• A2 Web Hosting Review
• InMotion Review
• SiteGround Review
• iPage Review
• GoDaddy Review
• Whogohost Review
• NameCheap Review
• Bluehost vs Dreamhost Comparison
• Bluehost vs HostGator Comparison

Types of Web Hosting

Not clear on the different kinds of web hosting available? Wondering who is the best in a given category? No matter which criteria is most important to you, be sure to read up to learn more about it all in the following posts.

• Understanding Different Types of Hosting
• Best Free Web Hosting Plans
• Best Cheap Web Hosting Plans
• Best Cloud Web Hosting Plans
• Best Cpanel Hosting Plans
• Best Dedicated Hosting Plans
• Best Reseller Hosting Plans
• Best Shared Hosting Plans
• Best VPS Hosting Plans
• Best WordPress Hosting

How To Find the Best Host for You

You do not have to know anything about web development to get hosting.

But knowing how to assess a few key factors helps a lot.

I’ll hit on each one in this section. You’ll be able to assess your options, get something that works for you, and not have to worry about hosting again for a while.

So how do you evaluate web hosts? What actually matters?

Let’s go through all the key items.

Site Uptime

Uptime is the most crucial component of a good web host. If your site isn’t up, you won’t make money or gain an audience.

First and foremost, you want a web host with great uptime. This means your site is always available and never goes down.

To try to avoid the “just trust us” promise of near-perfect uptime, most hosts provide some sort of guarantee of at least 99.9 percent uptime. However, that guarantee isn’t much of a guarantee. It just means your bill can be discounted in the event of any unplanned downtime.

HostGator, for example, will credit you one free month of hosting if your uptime ever dips below 99.9%.

There’s a lot of fine print on these guarantees, too, including not accepting self-reported or third-party uptime data, and not providing refunds for downtime that was out of the host’s control (for example, a hurricane).

Site Speed

Site speed impacts everything related to your site. Want search rankings? Get a fast site. Want conversions on your site? Make it fast. Want happy users? Speed it up.

Every part of your business is impacted by the speed of your site.

When looking at different web hosts, make sure you’re choosing a host that can serve every page lickety-split.

There is some nuance with site speed.

In the early days, you need a host that’s fast “enough.” It doesn’t have to be blisteringly fast, but it needs to be fast.

Think of Amazon. Back in the day when Amazon just sold books, its site needed to be fast but it didn’t need to be instantaneous.

But now that many people use it for all their shopping, Amazon’s site can’t be fast enough.

In other words, the bigger you get, the faster you’ll want to be. If you’re planning on building a high-traffic site, you’ll want a host that can maintain crazy-fast speeds on large sites.

Customer Support

When running your own site, web host customer support is the single most important thing a web host can offer.

Digging through use reviews doesn’t always give you a conclusive answer on the quality of support at a particular web host.

Watch out for glowing reviews on top publications, they don’t always reflect reality.

There is one true test for assessing the customer support quality at any host.

The free trial customer support test.

Pretty much every web host has some sort of money-back guarantee on their shared hosting plans, which means you can set up your website and see what you think of the service with relatively low stakes — just your time and any add-on fees you opt into, like paying for domain registration.

I recommend going to town with customer support during that trial period. Get on live chat, open tickets, and hop on the phone as much as possible to see if you like what you’re being served up.

Most web hosts offer some sort of free trial period. I recommend using this time to really dig into your host’s customer support — its knowledge center and especially support staff across all channels. That’ll tell you the real story.

Traffic Volume

The amount of traffic that you get has a huge impact on the hosting that you need.

For a site that gets 300 visitors every month, pretty much any standard hosting package will be good enough. As long as your web host has strong customer support, you’re good to go.

As you get bigger, all sorts of small details start to matter a lot more.

Is the PHP on your server being updated regularly? Do you have a CDN for your content?

Is your site being backed up daily and can you restore it within 15 minutes if something goes wrong?

Do you have an SSL certificate? Can your server handle a giant traffic spike during a marketing promotion?

Whenever I have a larger site, I look for premium hosting that takes care of all this for me. And if I’m planning on building a large site, I look for a host that can easily scale to millions of visitors per month. I’m happy to pay a premium price in order to guarantee easy upgrades in the future.

Don’t skimp if you’re going big. And if you’re wondering how to get to big, here are 25 tips for growing your website traffic.

Of course, not everyone has aspirations to go big. If that’s you and you plan to stay under 50,000 visitors/month, get a standard shared hosting package. It will simplify your life, trust me. There’s no reason to worry about the advanced stuff.

Price

While you don’t want to overpay on hosting, you definitely don’t want to underpay either.

That being said, avoid choosing a host exclusively on price.

Most basic web hosting plans are in the $10-$20/month range. Yes, there are cheaper options. Some of them are promotional offers that go away at renewals. Others are hosting plans with terrible support and uptime.

My rule is if the price sounds too good to be true, it probably is. For example, you may find a very attractive introductory rate for just a few dollars per month and lock that price in for one or more years. However, when the time comes to renew your hosting, you will likely find the price will jump, sometimes by a lot.

If you don’t like the renewal price you either have to live with it or change hosts. Changing hosting services can be a huge hassle, especially if you’re not tech savvy. You definitely do not want to be moving your sites every year or two, and that is what can happen if you start choosing a host based exclusively on price.

I don’t worry about chasing promotional offers to save a few dollars. For every site I’ve ever managed, I used the same host without ever switching. Once you have a host you’re happy with, changing to save a few bucks isn’t going to be worth it. Promotional offers come and go pretty quickly.

Migration Features

The ability to easily and quickly migrate an existing site will save you weeks of time.

Even a basic WordPress site can be a real hassle to migrate.

First you have to set up a new WordPress install on your new host. Then you need to export the database of content from your old site and import it into your new one. Finally, you have to re-configure everything in WordPress like the theme, plugins, and settings.

And if something doesn’t go quite as planned? You might be stuck with a website that doesn’t function. Fixing errors can sometimes take days, meaning your site is out of commission. Not something any website owner wants to see happen.

All this potential risk can be a real pain–and it’s why I put together an entire guide on WordPress migration.

Fortunately, it is possible to skip all these steps and mitigate your risks, too. Some hosts will offer a one-click migration for popular site builders like WordPress.

If you’re switching hosts and handling the migration yourself, look for an easy migration feature. This is a great way to make the final decision on which hosting service is best for you, once you’ve narrowed it down to a few final options.

If you are really concerned, A2 Hosting has a team of specialists that will migrate your site for you free of charge.

Managed Hosting

Here’s how a normal host works:

• After you sign up, you get a login.
• The login takes you to cPanel. The cPanel is an app on your server that lets you manage it through a UI without needing to know how to code anything.
• You configure your server however you want.
• There’s an FTP option to upload files manually to your server.
• There are also quick options for installing WordPress and other site software if you want.
• You get full access and can do anything you want. It’s a “choose your own adventure.” Install WordPress, Drupal, Magento, or code your entire site by hand.

Alternatively, there are managed web hosts. These hosts customize the hosting environment and manage a lot more of it for you.

WP Engine is the best example, they’re a managed host for WordPress. Instead of getting a cPanel login that lets me do anything I want, WP Engine gives me a login to their custom interface that’s built to manage WordPress sites specifically.

When a web host is optimized exclusively for WordPress, three key things happen:

1. Faster-performing sites than shared hosting. Everything can be tailored to make WordPress work its best, whether that’s optimizing website caching or tinkering with the command line tools. The host only needs to know how to support WordPress, as opposed to, say, Joomla and a Node server and some sort of custom-made site and on and on.
2. More security and stability. A managed WordPress host can build a system that predicts, accommodates, and patches all of WordPress’s vulnerabilities. That means fewer malicious attacks and less downtime.
3. Admin and site maintenance get a lot easier. And that service is vital because managed WordPress hosting is significantly more expensive than shared web hosting services.

While I give up some flexibility from not having a basic web server like other hosts, a managed host takes care of a lot of ongoing tasks that I’d normally have to handle myself.

If you have a small business site, a normal host is fine. If you’re building a larger site, a managed host will save you a ton of time in the long run and is worth the extra cost.

Best Web Hosting: Your Top Questions Answered

The Top Web Hosting Providers in Summary

The best hosting providers offer different types of web hosting, including shared hosting, cloud hosting, VPS hosting, WordPress hosting, and managed hosting. You also need to evaluate factors like uptime, site speed, and support.

As your traffic grows, you need a hosting provider that can scale with your site. Whether you’re starting a new website or looking to switch providers, this guide has you covered.