Best WordPress Hosting Services - List Of WordPress Hosting Sites

2023 has been a crucible for WordPress hosting sites, with many of the more popular smaller and medium-sized options either shutting their doors for good or being acquired by one of the big fish in the industry.

That's different than saying there's a single clear choice when discussing the best WordPress hosting services. There are still plenty of options and many pros and cons to weigh. The trick is to look beyond the noise and pomp and drill down into your core value for money.

We'll use the same metrics that professional Cloud services use when evaluating value for money: Ease of use, feature richness, performance, storage, bandwidth, support, and payment options.

Best WordPress Hosting Services (The Candidates)

Here is a list of WordPress hosting sites that we're considering for the title:

CloudWays - Best WordPress Hosting
Hostinger - Best for Simplicity
WP Engine - The Fastest Hosting
BlueHost - The Most Trusted
DreamHost - Easy to Use
HostGator - Best for Beginners
SiteGround - Best for Migration
Kinsta - Best Customer Support
IONOS - Best Speed Optimization
NameCheap - Accepts Bitcoin

It should be noted that what follows is a compilation of ratings for the individual sites, not the ownership or management companies. For example, BlueHost and HostGator are both subsidiaries of the Newfold Digital Corporation and can be considered sister sites but will be evaluated separately.

Also, note that feature lists and availability are from early July 2023, so if a provider changes something suddenly, let the buyer beware.

By breaking these down into simple terms anyone can understand, we'll determine the best WordPress hosting providers and who you can safely leave out of your evaluations. Let's get started! With this in mind, let's dive into the chaos and see who comes out on top!

CloudWays - Best Overall WordPress Hosting

Cloudways gives you many options, including what cloud provider you want to use when you set up your website! This gives the user more flexibility regarding pricing and the standards of performance and resources they expect for their WordPress site.

Ease of Use

This is a bit more tricky. There will always be a set of core management tools provided by CloudWays, but you will have to manage some resources based on your provider choices. Moderate experience with WordPress hosting is recommended; this isn't for complete novices.

Feature Richness

They have everything you want from a WordPress hosting service (backups, site staging, free SSL, task scheduling, control panels, etc.) minus E-mail hosting. Because they let you pick your Cloud provider, you will want to install your plugin for flexible or individual E-mail solutions (and they also have some suggestions there). It's the price of flexibility.

Performance

CloudWays is one of the best-performing WordPress hosting services out there. Performance under heavy loads with typical plugin suites is well above average, and first-hit load times are some of the best in the field. Additionally, your choice of Cloud hosts can help you pinpoint your data center proximity if you have a geo-targeted client base.

Storage

The base plan has 32GB, which is well above what you would get on most $13 plans in the industry.

Bandwidth

The base plan has 1TB of bandwidth. For most starting sites, that's plenty, assuming you aren't strictly pushing multimedia all day. The next plan ($26 a month) is 2TB, which scales up from there.

Support

Support is impressive, bordering on excellent. They're sitting at 4.5 out of 5 on Trustpilot as of mid-2023. The scripts that level one support works off of are efficient, their live chat is competent, and their real-time monitoring is helpful. In this industry, it's hard to ask for more.

Payment Options

Fair at best. Yes, they have monthly and yearly options. But they double your Cloud provider's costs at every level. That makes lower-level tiers great since you get the extra support and utility for next to nothing. But at higher hosting levels, the doubling puts more in their pocket for less customer value. I would like to see higher hosting levels tweaked in the future.

Overall Rating: 9 out of 10. Easily a contender for our best WordPress hosting services title. But will any of the competition step up to dethrone this early leader?

Hostinger - Best WordPress Hosting Service for Simplicity

Do you know the feeling when you see ads for a product everywhere and want to hate it, but it turns out to be great? That happened when reviewing Hostinger, one of the most prominent WordPress hosting service advertisers.

Ease of Use

Automatic WordPress install. Automatic domain connection. A custom control panel called hPanel is perfect for their particular service. Great UI. Fantastic task, wizards. Even a novice will find this easy to use, though they may have to consult the help files to sync up the free E-mail service with their domain control panel.

Feature Richness

Hostinger goes deep here. The one-click app and plugin process is precise. They use a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG site builder that works. Free SSL implementation. Built-in WordPress optimization that, and we can't stress this enough, actually works—hotlink protection. For more complex hosting solutions (VPS, dedicated E-commerce, etc.), we'd like to see a few more of the typical bells and whistles. And we'd like to see at least 5 E-mail accounts with the basic plan instead of the one on offer. But otherwise, it's a very satisfying suite.

Performance

For a WordPress site? It's incredible. They have around ten available sites worldwide (depending on your plan type), which gives you all kinds of options for regional performance. They use LightSpeed caching to improve load times dramatically. Time to load after the first hit is almost twice as fast as the average of what you'll find on this list of WordPress hosting sites. In short: Impressive.

Storage

100 GB for their monthly plans, around three bucks. You shouldn't need more than that on the kinds of sites you'll want to run here.

Bandwidth

Unmetered but throttled. However, it seems more generous than many others, so bursting is likely enabled as needed for short periods.

Support

Pretty good. Depending on their workload and time of day, most E-mail requests are answered within an hour. Live chat is quicker, though you'll sometimes have to wait for a definitive answer if it needs to be somewhere in the FAQs and guides. No phone support, though, so if that's a dealbreaker (it shouldn't be in this day and age for most people), c'est la vie.

Payment Option

From their site, 'Credit/Debit/Prepaid cards: Visa, MasterCard, Amex, Carnet, PayPal, Google Pay, SPEI, OXXO, Cryptocurrency.' Plans are incredibly cheap for what you get; if you lock in for four years, they get even better.

Overall Rating: 9 out of 10. Few features are missing from the lower price ranges, and support only needs a few key options. We've got a tight race for the number one spot, folks! If you're running a real money online casino or a gambling-related website - this will definitely be your hosting.

WP Engine - The Fastest WordPress Hosting Service

Are you looking for a premium WordPress hosting service that you can trust? WP Engine is certainly a contender!

Ease of Use

Excellent. Setting up a new WordPress site is incredibly easy. You click 'Add Site,' answer a few questions, and you're done. They don't sell domains, so if you want to link an external domain, they'll also walk you through that. The dashboard is simple, and day-to-day management is hassle-free.

Feature Richness

The website's production, development, and live versions by default. The acclaimed Local site development tool is available at all levels—automatic WordPress updates. Free site migrations. MaxCDN integration. Automatic SSL certificates. And their Evercache acceleration engine. That's many features available, even on the $ 25-a-month account!

Performance

Easily on par with Kinsta! The built-in CDN and over a dozen Google Cloud hosting location options mean your visitors will experience lightning-fast response times. It's one of the best on this WordPress hosting site list - top 2 quickly and in the first place.

Storage

10GB of disk space. Is this a strange trend from the more expensive WordPress hosting services designed to annoy me?! Should be more. Storage is dirt cheap.

Bandwidth

50GB a month on the base plan. Not terrible, not great.

Support

Chat, E-mail, and telephone support are all available. They've recently invested in phone support infrastructure to improve the experience, and customers approve these enhancements.

Payment Options

Credit or debit only. No PayPal, no bank transfer (at least by default). And, of course, you're paying $25 a month or $300 for the base plan, so something other than budget oriented.

Overall Rating: 8 out of 10. When paying so much for the most basic plan, the need for more bandwidth and storage is inexcusable. The performance is stunning, and it's a dream to set up and use.

BlueHost - The Most Trusted WordPress Hosting

BlueHost is the fast food option of WordPress hosting services. They get you in the door cheaply, try to upsell you with packages, and provide reliable results as long as you are looking for something other than something unique.

Ease of Use

BlueHost rates highly on the ease of use scale. Setting up a new site is a six-step process, after which you tailor the results to your liking. It's managed using the industry standard cPanel, and their custom toolset.

Feature Richness

It has the typical features of a modern website: Free SSL certificate, revision management tools, core WordPress file integrity checks, and the like. E-mail accounts are limited to five, however, without an additional purchase. You'll also need to use plugins if you want firewall features. There are no automatic backups on the two lower hosting tiers.

Performance

Sadly, they are laughably bad in this category. They're among the few companies on our WordPress hosting sites with no uptime guarantee. They have a 50,000 inode limit per cPanel account for 'performance reasons.' If they detect over 200,000 inodes, it can 'result in possible suspension.' No full page caching, either. In short: Don't use them for large or complex websites.

Storage

10 GB storage limit without addons, which is relatively typical in the industry these days.

Bandwidth

Unmetered bandwidth, but throttled reasonably low unless you get dedicated hosting at $100 monthly. Below that, you can opt for VPS hosting, which will give you 1TB at $25 monthly if that meets your needs.

Support

Support is hosted overseas, with a limited understanding of either technology or English. This is common for the industry, but it's nasty in BlueHost's case. Some of the most common TrustPilot complaints are about getting endlessly shuffled around as websites go offline for days or weeks.

Payment Options

Poor. There's no monthly option because they want to lock you in cheap for the first year and then triple your yearly price after the introductory offer has expired. If you will use them for a year, use a prepaid card and then zero the balance so they can't 'accidentally' renew you.

Overall Rating: 5 out of 10. The poor performance and support mean you must use BlueHost for simple hosting that will stay intact and self-sufficient. If there's a back-end issue that you have no control over, you may be screwed.

DreamHost - Easy-to-Use WordPress Hosting

We have some good news for you if you want cheap WordPress hosting services! Dreamhost is about as basic as it gets… but that's not always bad. Banish any high expectations, and prepare yourself for the reality of hosting on a severely tight budget.

Ease of Use

Incredibly easy to use. This is where DreamHost shines the brightest. You can have a working WordPress site in minutes.

Feature Richness

Below average, but at least everything works. You get your free domain name, you get E-mail hosting, and you get a basic dashboard. WordPress is preinstalled.

Performance

This is one of the worst-performing WordPress hosting services ever seen. Loading times for anything remotely complex are visibly bad, and response time from the first hit is nearly triple what you get at the average sites on this list. If you need speed or performance, look elsewhere.

Storage

Unlimited, but with restrictions on the type of websites you can host (no sites that sell storage, file sharing, mirroring, etc.). They reserve the right to delete data that has nothing to do with the website.

Bandwidth

Unmetered but throttled. They charge $1 per additional 10GB of data used if you're deemed to have abused your plan. How do these policies work together? Who knows!

Support

If you can interact with a human being, it's okay. But getting there is difficult. There needs to be a direct phone number for support. The chatbot has a complex and inaccurate script you have to go through before the option to speak to a human appears. In other words, this is precisely what you would expect out of a budget service.

Payment Options

Super cheap, but major credit cards only. You can talk to their sales team if you're a big account and get a bank transfer option, but that's unrealistic for most people. At least they have monthly plans.

Overall Rating: 4 out of 10. This is your service if you need WordPress, which is super cheap. But if you want any appreciable level of quality, look elsewhere.

HostGator - Best WordPress Hosting Service for Beginners

Will the WordPress hosting service with the most excellent mascot win? We're about to discover because it's time for HostGator to shine.

Ease of Use

Good! One-click WordPress installs are heavily advertised and work exactly like they say. Their cPanel hybrid is simple and functional, and their added utilities make sense—nothing to complain about here.

Feature Richness

But there's a little to complain about here. There need to be more security tools as part of their base suite. Similarly, domain privacy and auto-backups are extra charges. In this day and age, it seems silly, given how much support time those features eliminate. Otherwise, it's what you'd expect.

Performance

Good when things work. Consider it average or slightly above average on this list of WordPress hosting sites. Of course, you never get real performance out of WordPress, don't run a latency-critical dashboard from here. Here's the thing… HostGator's uptime is some of the worst in the industry. Frequent outages are what they're known for. If that's okay with you for the price, go for it. If not, look elsewhere.

Storage

Unlimited, with the same caveats as usual (no creating a file storage business, etc.).

Bandwidth

Unmetered, throttled at their discretion. Reseller and VPS clients have their own bandwidth rules and can request more from support to get additional information.

Support

Not terrible. Live chat is the best way to go. That's because support is outsourced, and you can get some frustrating experiences using phone support when there are built-in communication issues. If it can be dealt with in text format, use live chat. Otherwise, please look at their FAQ and tutorial section, which is quite extensive.

Payment Options

Good at first, bad later. Once the introductory offers expire, they're not the best deal. And if you need to pay for addons like auto-backup and site lock ($24 a year each), it adds up quickly. At least they accept 'credit cards, PayPal, checks, money orders, and bank wires' as payment methods.

Overall Rating: 6 out of 10. They would be a contender if they only provided some of the essentials for security and disaster recovery/continuity as part of their base package and had better uptime stats.

SiteGround - Best WordPress Hosting for Migration

We cannot say anything about SiteGround, good or bad, for one simple reason: They have threatened legal action and repercussions against reviewers in the past.

If we felt safe posting an honest, unbiased review of SiteGround, they may or may not have been a contender. But for fear of legal repercussions, we will not be saying anything about SiteGround other than the fact that they exist.

If they state in writing that they will allow us to review their service honestly without our site or team facing legal action, we will reconsider our stance.

Kinsta - WordPress Company With The Best Customer Support

In a world where everything is a race to the bottom, how do you compare a WordPress hosting service that charges $24 a month with all the bells and whistles to its $3 cousins? Let's find out.

Ease of Use

Above average. Their custom control panel is responsive and intuitive. But it needs to have the flexibility of CloudWays (Kinsta uses Google Cloud, which is an excellent choice, to be fair) or the automation of Hostinger. It should be at least on par for the price.

Feature Richness

It has everything you'd expect, plus automatic daily backups. Automatic site outage checks. Automatic scaling. Disaster recovery includes fixing damage from intrusions and hacks. Auto-minify. This is the level of automation we expect from a high-end plan! Magnificent.

Performance

Incredible. They edge out CloudWays and Hostinger. It scored number one in first-hit response time, number one in total page load time (with simple WordPress sites approaching the one-second mark, nearly unheard of), and number one in availability. If you primarily want WordPress performance and are willing to pay for it, Kinsta must be your first choice.

Storage

10GB of disk space. This is terrible for such an expensive plan.

Bandwidth

This is vague. They claim 'enough for 25,000 visits' on the base plan. But they also list 100GB CDN. Why bother with the visits metric at all? It must be someone in marketing.

Support

24/7 live chat, E-mail, and phone support. And yes, they're worth the price. Information is accurate, and they're always willing to point you toward the right DIY resources if you want a general guide to follow in your own time. If not, they'll walk you through everything on the phone as needed.

Payment Options

Credit, debit, wire transfers, and ACH. Of course, you're paying quite a bit. With the annual discount, it's $24 for the same base plan, going up to $47 and $77 for the following two tiers. If you want monthly, that's $35, $70, and $115 respectively. Yeowch!

Overall Rating: 7 out of 10. For most people, those price points are going to be a no-go. And they need to up their storage limits, 10GB is just dumb. But for those willing to pay the piper, Kinsta will make your WordPress site sing!

IONOS - Best Speed Optimization

This is one of the EU's best-known names in WordPress hosting services. But does it compete on a global scale? Let's have a look.

Ease of Use

Average. They use a custom dashboard, which can be significant. But the implementation could be better thought out in places. For example, you must dig several layers deep to install a WordPress site. Given its popularity, this should be a one-click feature on the home screen. There's a logic to it all, but that logic negatively impacts the UI. But their WordPress setup wizard is great once you find it!

Feature Richness

Easy automatic backups and one-click restore on every plan. Only one E-mail account with the basic plan. Free SSL certificate. Some features could be more evident due to occasional strange control panel bugs. Do you see a pattern here? There are a lot of ups and downs here. It's a mixed bag.

Performance

Not terrible, but not great. Response time after the first hit was in the lower 50% of all sites tested for this list of WordPress hosting sites. But total page load times were in the upper 30%, indicating some decent caching and optimization options. This might have been a regional quirk. And if you want to pay more, you can upscale your plan to one of five accelerated performance levels.

Storage

10 GB on Essential, 100GB on Starter. You get what you pay for.

Bandwidth

Unmetered. Decent bandwidth after throttling. It didn't strain under moderate load, reinforcing what we saw during performance testing when it simultaneously spits out the entire page.

Support

Good, but overworked. You get your support advisor but don't expect quick responses from them. Sometimes phone support wait times are long. Live chat is also overworked during peak hours. E-mail is the best option.

Payment Options

From their site, 'Direct Debit, Credit Cards, Debit Cards, and PayPal.' Prices are reasonable based on what you get.

Overall Rating: 6 out of 10. They're not a top contender, mainly because of slow support and a weird dashboard that might need to be more intuitive to new users. But they're on the positive side of average, and the pricing is good for what you get.

NameCheap - WordPress Hosting Service That Accepts Crypto

Cheap in name and affordable in nature, the point of NameCheap is to get a WordPress site without breaking the bank.

Ease of Use

Average. cPanel greets you when you start using NameCheap, so this may look familiar if you've been on other services before. You must follow the WordPress installation instructions; it isn't a one-press process. But Softaculous makes it easy. There's limited customization here, so you may need to hunt around or follow a step-by-step guide to get what you need.

Feature Richness

The default plan has 30 E-mail accounts over three websites. You get free SSL in the first year; it's a paid service. NameCheap's domain registration is integrated with site management, so using them for hosting and domain registration is a plus.

Performance

First-hit response times and full-page load times were in the bottom 25% of our list of WordPress hosting sites. It's not a rosy picture. Add to that the frequent outages that customers report, and you have one of the worst-performing sites in this review.

Storage

On the standard plan, 20GB is the storage limit of 300,000 files or less. This should be enough for simple WordPress websites that don't serve much media.

Bandwidth

Unmetered but throttled.

Support

Not the worst, but could do better. Live chat is a far quicker option than their ticketing system. It's more scripted than some support interactions, which is good and bad. If the agent knows the issue, they can skip right to the correct solution. But if they get it wrong, it can take a while to circle back. There's no E-mail or phone support.

Payment Option

Introductory offers are 45% cheaper than renewal costs, so you'll pay nearly double in year 2. They accept credit cards, PayPal, and cryptocurrency as payment. Even in year 2, it's a decent deal.

Overall Rating: 4 out of 10. The lack of support options, lackluster ease of use, and lousy performance combine to sink this ship. Even at this price, you can do better.

And The Best Of The WordPress Hosting Services Is…

CloudWays, by a tiny margin. It is the complete package, minus a few minor issues we pointed out.

If you want to avoid picking a Cloud provider, Hostinger should be your first pick, as it's the clear #2 on this list!

Finally, if you're looking for high performance and buttery ease of use at a decent price point and can keep your content fairly streamlined, WP Engine should be your WordPress hosting site.

Disclaimer:

The above is a sponsored post, the views expressed are those of the sponsor/author and do not represent the stand and views of Outlook Editorial.