Best Web Hosting Compared and Reviewed by Crazy Egg

          
          

          
          

          
          

          Web hosting is at the heart of a lot of what we talk about on this site. As such, weve been reviewing hosting platforms for years. For this review, we compiled 105 pages of research to support what weve learned through first-hand experience. After rigorous testing, we selected
**Hostinger** ** as the best hosting service for most Its dead simple to set up and so affordable you almost feel bad getting so much for so little

## The Best Web Hosting Services for Most
 Hostinger
 Best for Most
Get the cheapest hosting provider and the one that's easiest to use in one package with Hostinger. Their promo and renewal rates are both near the lowest in all of web hosting. Plus, Hostinger's easy guided setup gets your website live in just minutes

Hostinger is the most affordable option on our list and one of the easiest hosts to get started with. Plans start at just $1.99 per month if you sign up for four years in advancemeaning it costs less than $100 to not have to worry about a hosting bill for
*four years*. But dont let its cheap price tagyouHostinger sure doesnt feel like cheap hosting

The entry-level plan includes one-click WordPress installation, step-by-step instructions for setting up your site, and a custom dashboard for managing it. Friendly 24/7 live chat support is there to give you personalized help along the way. You get everything you need to start a new website for less than the price of a cup of coffee each month

## The 8 Best Web Hosting Options to Consider:
- HostingerBest web hosting for most
- DreamHostBest for simple hosting
- SiteGroundBest for keeping uptime above 99.99%
- HostGatorBest for scaling your small business easily
- BluehostBest drag-and-drop page builder for beginners
- InMotion HostingBest price for hosting two websites on one plan
- NexcessBest for experienced WordPress users
- A2 HostingMost dependable web hosting for European and Asian audiences
## When it Makes Sense to Invest In Web Hosting Services
Every website needs web hosting. Without a web host, your site wont be live or accessible to users browsing the web

You need to invest in web hosting as soon as youre ready to launch a site

If youre just practicing web design or messing around with different free website builders, you dont need a web hosting service quite yet. But finding the right web hosting service needs to be one of the first things on your to-do list when you want to create a website


Existing businesses that want to expand their online presence beyond social media need to have web hosting. In this case, youd need to find a host that makes it as easy as possible for you to get started and set up from scratch

Some of you might already have a website thats live on the web. But if youre using a free web hosting service or unreputable provider, it could be time for you to upgrade your service. In this scenario, youll need a hosting provider that can accommodate site migrations

If youre still looking for a web host but havent yet made a final decision, this post offers factual, experience-based data and insight from researchers whove tested the products inside and out to help you make the right choice

## #1HostingerThe Best Web Hosting for Most
 Hostinger
 Best for Most
Get the cheapest hosting provider and the one that's easiest to use in one package with Hostinger. Their promo and renewal rates are both near the lowest in all of web hosting. Plus, Hostinger's easy guided setup gets your website live in just minutes

**Overall Score: 3.9 out of 5**
Do you want to blend hosting thats easy to use and costs barely anything?
If so, Hostinger is the best choice

Theyre ridiculously affordable, keeping your budget on the straight and narrow. And they give you everything you need to launch your website fast

In comparison to the other hosts, they lack a few premier features. But you dont sacrifice the essentials or quality where it counts

Heres how Hostinger ranks in our five scoring categories:
- Ease of Use =
5/5
- Uptime =
1/5
- Speed =
3/5
- Price =
5/5
- Customer Support =
2.67/5 **Ease of Use: 5/5**Signing up for web hosting used to be filled with difficult steps to navigate

You normally get bombarded with all types of extra features and upsells youre not sure you need

But Hostinger is different. They didnt cause any of that anxiety

The signup process is clear. And once youve selected your plan and made your payment, its smooth sailing

Theres no guessing where to go, what button to click, or what you have to do next. Theres zero confusion

Once you get to the setup wizard, simply press Start Now at the bottom and youre on your way. Just follow the step-by-step guide and answer a few simple questions

If you cant finish the setup right now, Hostinger makes it easy to do later. You receive welcome emails that outline all of the steps youll need to go through next

When you click any of the links in the email, youre taken back to the screen above. All links point to the same placeone single source of truth. Easy

Once you start your setup, youre asked about what type of site youre creating, the name of your website, and whether or not you want to use an existing domain or register a new one


Next, confirm if you want to start a new website from scratch or if you want to migrate an existing website. Then, youll pick the content management system (CMS) youll use

We recommend WordPress since Hostinger offers features specific to WordPress websites that improve security and speed, like automatic updates and caching plugins

If you go with WordPress, its at this stage that youll pick your site theme

After that, youll receive name server infoif youre using an existing domain nameand easy-to-read instructions to point your domain towards your new site if youre starting from scratch

Then youre done

The entire process takes a few minutes

By the time youre done answering all of the questions and following the steps, you have a content management system in place, a theme installed, and your domain set up with basic site settings configured

In our experience, this was one of the easiest web host setups

Dont want to use WordPress? No worries. Hostinger acquired website builder Zyro awhile back and has converted Zyro functionality into its own Hostinger Website Builder. So now you have a built-in solution for building your website once you get hosting sorted with Hostinger

The website builder is really straightforward and easy to use, too. Which makes sense, because Hostinger built in this functionality precisely to make it easy for inexperienced people to be able to create websites with minimal hassle or fuss

It gives you straightforward drag-and-drop functionality, so you can get a new site up and running right away. It also makes it easy to start an online store, even if you have no experience with website creation at all

If this is your first time, no worries. Anyone can do it, even if youre not tech-savvy

**Uptime: 1/5** For website availability, Hostinger doesnt shine the brightest

Online, they claim 99.99%

But during our 30-day test, their uptime only reached 99.68%. A little less than what they claim on their website, but enough that the actual amount of downtime is concerning

See the test results below:

The image above shows the key numbers about our Hostinger sites availability for 30 days. It wasnt viewable for a total of two hours and 22 minutes during the month

And there were 58 incidents in total, all connection timeouts that lasted anywhere from a few seconds to a max of 30 minutes

This happens when a website is trying to use more resources than are available from the server, resulting in your browser not loading the site at all

This can cause visitors to scratch their heads wondering where your site is and move on to a competitor


The high number of incidents likely means that theres either a site on the same server thatsup resources or there are way too many sites on the same server pulling from the same pool of resources

This is a common problem with shared web hosting. But when its this bad, it can cost you who knows how much money or missed subscribers

Our testing shows Hostinger has plenty of room for improvement in this category

**Speed: 3/5**When your website is slow, it can ruin the user experience and even drive visitors away

With so many hosting providers claiming to be fast, how do you really know whether they deliver the speed they promise?
So we tested Hostinger for 30 days and put their speed to the test

Heres what we found:

The average response time over 30 days was 670 milliseconds, coming in slightly better than average

The image above also shows traffic spikes that occasionally suppress the load time to 1.5 seconds. Another thing to point out is the maximum time for loading data in a single instance

At one point, loading our site took
*over 27 seconds*. This is a terrible load time maximum. Luckily its not the norm, but it is something to be aware of

But, for the price you pay, Hostingers average load time is good enough

Their server infrastructure is equipped with premium SSD storage, which provides faster page load times for the websites hosted by them. This is just one way to optimize a website for speed

Hostinger also offers even more speed-related tech that makes your site faster:
**Seven global data centers **are located in the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, Netherlands, Singapore, Indonesia, and Lithuania, this allows you to choose the data center closest to your visitors, reducing load times by closing the physical distance between them and the server hosting your site

The
**LiteSpeed Caching plugin for WordPress **delivers customizable server-level caching, image optimization,image loading, and database optimization to further speed up load times. And it comes pre-installed, so your site is optimized from day one

With these features from Hostinger, you can be sure your site visitors will have an optimal browsing experience without any delays or lags whatsoever

**Pricing: 5/5**If youre on a tight budget, Hostinger is the cheapest way to get everything you need

It gives you a starting price of $2.79 per month for its Premium tier (the mid-priced tier). This equates to $33.48 for the first year

You also receive a free domain name for the first year, although you have some limitations on the domain name you can use. (Domains containing .net and .com are included in this deal.) This saves you another $9.99 versus paying for a domain when you pick Hostinger

Your two-year upfront cost for this tier would be $76.95 when you include the $9.99 for the domain name in the second year

This is quite a bit cheaper than the average cost for two years of hosting at other service providers

If you pay for four years upfront, you maintain that $2.79 monthly cost for all four years, and you receive three months for free. This gives you a cost of $125.55 for a four-year contract, or about $31.39 per year

Some additional features Hostinger offers include paying $5 to maintain domain privacy, protecting your identity. An email address is free with your subscription

Beginners who want to go with the lowest-priced tier can pay $1.99 per month when paying for 48 months upfront, totaling $95.52 for the four-year period. However, you do not receive a free domain name for a year with this tier

**Customer Support: 2.67/5**Do you want a service team that pays close attention to your needs and solves your problem every time?
In our experience, Hostinger
*can *be that support team

The problem is, theyre slow. Really slow

They will solve your problem and be friendly while doing it. But youre going to wait around for a while

In our first chat, we asked about what security features Hostinger offered that could make our site more secure

It took 16 minutes to get help. The rep sent us detailed instructions on how to enable Patchstack for security, then sent a screenshot of where to find everything in our dashboard

See our chat below:

The chat itself was quickafter waiting over a quarter-hour for a responseand the support rep was very friendly

We loved that there was a screenshot with immediate action we could take right away without having to pay for anything

And they didnt try to upsell us

In our second chat, we waited 29 minutes for a response

We needed help setting up email for our domain. The friendly rep sent us several support articles on how to create email accounts, plus how to forward emails to Gmail

In addition, they explained different ways we can access domain emails inside our Gmail account

They didnt mind us asking more questions

The only bad part of the interaction was the initial response time

On our third chat, it took an agonizing
*42 minutes* before we received help

Consistent with the others, the rep was very friendly. We asked for help maximizing our site speed, but they only sent us a couple of support articles on how to do it

The rep could have given us a bit more information instead of sending some articles we couldve found on our own


But, overall, it was efficient, they were friendly, and there was no salesy feeling involved with our experience. They answer your questions without trying tomore money out of your pocket

Our only wish is that the response time wouldve been faster

If you want an incredibly affordable hosting provider that also delivers an easy onboarding experience and plenty of tools for site speed, go with Hostinger

## #2DreamHostBest for Simple Hosting
 DreamHost
 Best for Simple Hosting
Trusted by 1.5+ million users with 750,000+ WordPress installations, DreamHost offers one of the most stress-free hosting experiences. Automated backups of your site every day, one-click WordPress installation, automated updates--DreamHost includes these time-savers with every hosting plan. Hosting as low as $2.69 per month

**Overall Score: 3.85 out of 5**
Over the years, DreamHost has done right by millions of users. They are officially recommended by WordPress and have some of the most affordable rates on good web hosting you can find

As it stands today, they are the best host for launching a simple website. We werent blown away by their high-end managed hosting (not yet, anyway), but its perfect for businesses that want a site with minimal fuss,or stress

This is how they did in the top five categories

- Ease of Use =
3.25/5
- Uptime =
5/5
- Speed =
2/5
- Price =
5/5
- Customer Support =
4/5 **Ease of Use: 3.25/5**Getting started with DreamHost is could have been better. Once we got going, everything was great, but it took a minute

There are confusing upsell sections and preselections during the checkout process. Well explain what to watch out for below, so youre not taken by surprise

At one point during the signup, it said we owed twice as much before we even scrolled down to the add-ons sectionconfusing us immediately

However, we did like that theres an option to pre-install WordPress for free

But, once WordPress is installed, theres nothing telling us what to do next

We knew we were supposed to log into our WordPress dashboard, but a beginner may not

Your first step is registering a domain with DreamHost or adding a domain you already own. You can also skip this step and do it later

For us, we already had our domain name, so we selected the last option

After working through the domain section, you go to the next step
Remember when we told you our price was double what we expected? It happened here

We noticed it automatically increased the price we owe at the bottom with no explanation until you scroll down. Revealing the pre-selected upsells being the culprit

If you had never gone through this process before, youd probably
*already be confused* as to why the price changed


We dont think DreamHost means to make you feel this way. But nonetheless, thats how we felt

After you enter your account information, youll run into the add-ons:
- WordPress preinstallationFree
- DreamSheild Protection$3 per month
- DreamHost Email$1.99 per month
- Google Workspace$6 per month
This is the only provider that makes you pay for email if you want it. Very different from every other provider on the list, though not unusual in the rest of the hosting world

You can only pick one email option between DreamHost Email or Google Workspace

Heres a first-person view of this stage of the process:

When you uncheck all of them except the free WordPress installation, It brings the price back down to our expected total of $4.95, the sticker price for one month

Youll need to create a password for your account before youre automatically directed to your control panel

It took around eight minutes for the WordPress install to complete

We got a welcome email after this but it wasnt very helpful. In the email, there were a ton of links with too much info and not enough explanation

In fact, it was a bit confusing since it included FTP (file transfer protocol) login information, with no explanation of what this is or why its separate from the account we just created

This can easily become overwhelming, especially if youve never signed up for hosting before

In a second email, it gave us WordPress login info. But again, it was confusing and had no explanation of why this is different from the two other logins we already created

Also, there was no information on how to actually connect the domain we wanted to use

We found it very easy to get started on the WordPress side of things, once you actually figure out how to get there

Once you do log into WordPress, theres a nice configuration wizard that walks you through choosing a theme, adding the pages you need, and adding social media and contact info

We loved that you can set up the kind of pages you want from the start, choosing from three options:
Base includes Home, About, and Contact pages Five Page includes base pages plus two more preconfigured pages based on the theme you pick. Kitchen Sink includes four more preconfigured pages
We can see this being very helpful for anyone who has never built a site before

You can also toggle blog functionality on or off. So, if you want a blog installed its as easy as flipping a switch

After choosing which pages you want, you can enter in your contact and social media info and youre done


Overall, the process took a lot longer than it should have and wasnt nearly as easy an experience as we like it to be

**Uptime: 5/5**If youre looking for the highest quality uptime at the cheapest possible price, DreamHost takes the #1 spot

Our research shows DreamHost only had a downtime of 49 seconds over the entire month, coming from a single incident

This is outstanding since some other hosts are more expensive and dont give you this type of reliability

The one incident was an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error, a catchall for server-side errors. But it only lasted 49 seconds and that was the only hiccup for the whole month

If you want to sleep easy knowing that your site will be up and running for every opportunity to close a sale, grab a new subscriber, or even persuade a reader to consider your point of view on your blog, the opportunity is there

In fact, when we averaged the downtime for all the providers on this list, it was 23 minutes and 55 secondsway higher than DreamHosts average

**Speed: 2/5**For your website to be taken seriously, you need to have one that loads fast. Theres no getting around it

DreamHost gives your visitors an average response time of 813 milliseconds

Heres what our speed research looks like over our month of testing DreamHost:

Looking at the image above, you can see that response time goes up and down. But it doesnt go any higher than 1.5 seconds

It goes to show that you dont need to pay a huge monthly price to get solid results for your visitors

DreamHost also invests in speed-related features that help with speed without you having to lift a finger:
**Unmetered bandwidth **is included in every plan, meaning you never have to worry about a usage cap. Some providers immediately slow you down the minute you have more traffic than they feel is appropriate for your plan level. But not DreamHost. **Resource Protection** helps prevent your shared hosting resources from being wasted because of malicious intent, like bots or attacks. The DreamHost team monitors resources 24/7 to keep an eye on things to ensure your site performance doesnt suffer from things like that

With that said, DreamHost definitely lacks other speed features for the entry-level monthly plan that other web hosts give you that optimize speed even more

But you get a free content delivery network that can be installed easily

You just need to remember youre responsible for configuration and this can be a bit more challenging since its not built in to your hosting account or pre-configured for your server environment

**Price: 5/5**Hands down, DreamHost offers some of the best price on web hosting you can find. And its not cut-rate at all

Most of what weve described in this review comes with even Dreamhosts cheapest plan. Lets look a little deeper at your costs

If you want to opt for the yearly contract, upfront costs for the first year of hosting run $2.95 per month, equaling $35.40 for the 12 months

With this plan, your domain and domain privacy is free. But email is still $1.99 per month, totaling $20.04 for the year

In total, your plan costs you $55.44 for the first year

Upon renewal, the cost goes up to $6.99 per month. Your domain now costs $15.99 for the year, but its still $0 for domain privacy and $20.04 for email. That brings the total cost to $119.91 for the second year

The renewal rate is 137% higher than promo pricing. High, yesbut you are still paying less in your second year than you do with the contract-free monthly plan

Overall, for two years of hosting its $175.35

The average price across all the hosts on our list is $246.71 for two years of hosting. Thats with email, domain registration, and domain privacy

DreamHost is significantly cheaper than the average, saving you $71.36 with a contract

When you look at the value for the price, its hard to see where they could improve

**Customer Support: 4/5** We left no stone unturned when reviewing customer support for DreamHost. Our research revealed an above-verage experience. They were helpful but lack that extra oomph that gives providers the perfect score

Heres how things went

The first thing we noticed was that their live chat widget is hard to find. You have to go looking around to find it for it to start a conversation with support

There is no chat button unless you click on support in the left menu navigation bar inside your dashboard

Once we found it, we asked our question about improving site security. At first, it automatically sent us to a support document that was relevant but didnt fully answer the question

We had to click around a few more times to get in contact with an actual person

Depending on the topic of your question, you can either start a live chat or submit a ticket

When submitting a ticket, you can let them know how much experience you have and the level of detail you need. Which is unique to DreamHost customer support

When we asked to contact a rep, it took three minutes to get a response

The first thing the rep told us about is a paid upgrade, and they pushed it hard without telling us first what we can do for free. A few minutes later, they sent us an article on how to enable extra web security for our site


Other than that, they didnt really help much or explain anything. It was very generic and not overly friendly, but also not rude. The interaction was very fastfive minutes and straightforward

They lost points here for no phone support, being too salesy, and not offering any help beyond sending us to a support article

In our second interaction around noon, the live chat option wasnt available. We wanted to ask how to set up an email for our website

It told us to submit a support ticket instead. So, we did

We also left the chat window open to see which option was faster. We actually got an email back from the ticket we submitted faster than we did with the live chat

The ticket took 17 minutes for a response and the live chat took 24 minutes. We werent sure how this was going to go, since we didnt have a hosting plan that had email included

Heres the conversation below:

For the third and final chat, we asked how we could improve speed on our site

We were immediately connected with a rep, who did a speed test on our website so they could offer personalized advice on how to make it faster, which was nice

Since theres no content on our site, there wasnt much advice to offer but we still appreciated that they tried

After that, the rep sent us a support article with more steps and information to continue to optimize our site further

Overall, we were pleased with support but we felt they had opportunities to go past average

They solved our problems and, minus the first chat and not having the full chat service available in the middle of the day, our experience was pleasant

Even though you pay such a small price for the hosting plan, you still get an above-average customer support experience. Couple that with their exceptional uptime reliability and DreamHost stands out as a great hosting option

## #3SiteGroundBest Hosting for Keeping Uptime Above 99.99%
 SiteGround
 Best Uptime Reliability
With SiteGround, you never have to worry about your site being inaccessible to visitors. In 30 days, our site experienced a mere 2 seconds of downtime, making it the most reliable shared hosting option on our list. Get fantastic uptime reliability, an easy onboarding experience, and solid customer support

**Overall Score: 3.8 out of 5**
If your website isnt available, it means your website doesnt exist to those trying to find it

And thats a problem

SiteGround flaunts the most reliable servers in web hosting

How do we know?
We tested it for 30 days. Without question, you never have to worry about visitors finding your website online

SiteGround makes sure of that. Your sites always up, so people find you

For your business, this means everything


A closer look will reveal some details about uptime and how SiteGround did in our five scoring categories

- Ease of Use =
5/5
- Uptime =
5/5
- Speed =
4/5
- Price =
2/5
- Customer Support =
4.67/5 **Ease of Use: 5/5**When it comes to simple and easy, SiteGround makes web hosting hassle-free. Their user interface makes your website a breeze to manage with its organized layout and smooth design

From start to finish, we had an incredible onboarding experience

SiteGround had one upsell during checkoutSiteGround SiteScanner for $19.80 per year, which scans your website daily for malicious code or hackers. But it wasnt preselected and was very clear about what it is. It didnt feel like we were being tricked into buying something we didnt need

After checkout, youre immediately taken into a step-by-step wizard to set up your new site

Follow the guide, answer a few questions, and by the time youre finished, you have a complete framework for your website

The first step is choosing your plan, then registering a new domain or entering one you already have

After that, youll enter your contact and payment information

After successful payment, we received a welcome email with instructions on what to do next

A simple click of a link in the email brings you to the customer area

Once you start the wizard, it walks you through starting a new website, migrating an existing site, or skipping the wizard entirely and starting from scratch

We chose to start a new website. From there, you can choose your preferred platform from WordPress, WooCommerce, or Weebly

After we chose WordPress, we were asked to set up login credentials
When you hit Continue a screen pops up asking you once more if you want to add the security add-on for $19.80 per year. You can just hit the skip button and move on

Then click Finish and wait a few minutes until the WordPress installation is complete

From here, you can go to the account dashboard to start managing your site or point your domain name if you didnt buy it through SiteGround

We love how clear they make setting up your domain name

Its right in your face. No way to miss it

Most of the others dont say anything about domain names, but SiteGround offers tons of information

Theres also a tutorial on how to do it. SiteGround really spells it out for you

After we finished installing WordPress there were step-by-step instructions back in the dashboard on what to do next

Overall, the entire process is easy to navigate through, even if youve never done it before

**Uptime: 5/5**If you want a website thats available for your visitors 24/7/365, SiteGround has your back


When we ran our tests over 30 days. They destroyed the competition

None of the other shared hosts on this list were even close to the performance SiteGround provided for uptime. Nexcess is the only provider with no downtime, but its 3x the price and not considered shared hosting

Take a look for yourself:

In the upper left, you can see the availability of 100%. And directly to the right, you can see a total downtime all month of 2 seconds

Blink your eyes twicethats how long your website was unavailable

And only one incidentan unknown errorwas recorded

Versus the average of all providers on our list of 23 minutes and 55 seconds of downtime, SiteGround performed significantly better than average

When uptime is low, it can cause countless problems for website revenue, user experience, and your online reputation

**Speed: 4/5**After running our speed tests. We found SiteGround to be one the fastest shared web hosts you can find

For 30 days we looked at how our website performed. And what our visitors would experience as they visited our website

We discovered our average load time was well under one second at 616 milliseconds

You can see all the results below:

We like how this image shows the traffic spikes that affect shared web hosting websites so often

It shows the maximum load time for the whole month was just over two seconds. Thats still a full second under the Google-recommended three-second load time for any website

**Pricing: 2/5**You never feel good when you pay a lot for something that doesnt work. It

With SiteGround, youre receiving high quality in all the areas of hosting that mean the most

But they are not cheap. So if youre looking to save a buck, this host isnt for you

For the first year of hosting in the StartUp tier, you pay $2.99 per month for 12 months, equaling $35.88 for a years worth of hosting

With SiteGround, you receive a free domain for the first year. For the second year and beyond, you will pay $19.99 per year for the domain name

This renewal cost for the domain name is pricier than some competitors. (You do have the option of purchasing your domain through a domain registrar, potentially at a cheaper price.)
With SiteGround, you receive an unlimited number of email addresses for free. However, you do have to pay for domain privacy protection, if you would like this feature. It costs $1 per month or $12 per year

With hosting, a domain name, and domain privacy protection, you pay $47.88 for the first year

The cost for hosting climbs to $14.99 per month in the StartUp tier for the second year. You then would end up paying $211.87 total for the second year with the cost of the domain name and domain privacy protection included

So youll pay $259.75 total for two years, a bit more expensive than the average of $246 across all hosts on this list

Another issue we found is they make it tough to assemble any deal better than our lists average

SiteGround increases the monthly price to $9.99 for two-year plans and $10.49 per month for a three-year plan

Then, the renewal for both two and three-year plans is $11.99 per month. Sure, both long-term plans have the same renewal pricing, but you pay more upfront on the long-term plans. So is it really worth it?
SiteGround is a great web host offering you premier services that dont disappoint

But theyre expensive, plain and simple

**Customer Support: 4.67/5**We loved SiteGrounds customer support

The only thing we didnt like was how hard it was to find the chatbox to get help. It was like a scavenger hunt

But once we did, they showed us stellar support

On the first contact, we got connected with a rep immediately

We asked about how to improve the security on our site

They told us to turn on automatic core WordPress updates and automatic plugin updates. These are the most common ways sites get hacked. Having the latest updates improves security and removes vulnerabilities

The rep told us this right away, they knew exactly what we were asking for. And we left the conversation knowing exactly what to do

We also love that there were no upsells to paid security products

The whole first support interaction only took four minutes

On our next chat, when asking about setting up email accounts, we had similar results

We didnt wait more than a few seconds for support

After we connected, it took only 30 seconds for them to give us instructions on how to get to our dashboard to get started

Then, the rep responded with step-by-step instructions on how to find the area to create an email account

We followed that up by asking about how to forward those emails to our Gmail account, and they were quick again with an easy solution

We appreciated the step-by-step instructions they offered, not making us figure it out alone

The support rep was friendly and patient even though we asked questions that we could easily find in their knowledge base

After connecting immediately to a rep, we got a friendly response and information about SiteGrounds resources on how to speed up WordPress sites. Plus, the rep sent over a few tutorials to help us out


However, they sent us directly to a support article without any extra guidance. We wish they would have explained things a bit more rather than just sending us a guide, ebook, and tutorial

That costs SiteGround the perfect five-out-of-five score; losing a point for not trying to help

SiteGround support was great and none of the reps tried to sell us anythingthey only cared about solving the problem

Overall, their support is the cherry on top of their fantastic hosting speed and uptime. If you want reliability and can afford higher than rock-bottom pricing, SiteGround is an excellent choice for hosting your site

## #4HostGatorThe Best Web Hosting for Scaling Your Small Business Easily
 HostGator
 Best for Scaling on a Budget
With a killer combination of speed, uptime, affordability, and numerous flexibile plans to choose from, HostGator brings a lot to the table. Its flexible hosting packages across all types of hosting make it easy to upgrade and scale once your business website takes off and demands better performance

**Overall Score: 3.6 out of 5**
Starting a business usually takes some complicated steps. But Hostgator makes getting your website hosted super easy because of the variety of affordable hosting plans available

They have the standard WordPress, VPS, and dedicated web hosting you may be familiar with. However, their cloud hosting platform is where its at. It takes center stage as the standout plan

But if youre not ready for that just yet, upgrading can be done with a simple click

For now, lets see how they did in the five categories we tested:
- Ease of Use =
3/5
- Uptime =
4/5
- Speed =
3/5
- Price =
4/5
- Customer Support =
3.67/5 **Ease of Use: 3/5** Our experience signing up with HostGator wasat best

Yes, they score a three out of five, but there are several areas throughout the process we didnt like or feel comfortable with

For instance, once you check out, youre immediately taken into a setup wizardwhich is nicebut there are no prompts that follow about what to do next regarding domain setup

We did realize later on its in your welcome email

But its easy to miss if you dont know what youre looking for or know what it means to transfer a domain

However, the rest of the step-by-step setup wizard was easy to follow and the dashboard is also well-designed and easy to navigate

Heres a brief rundown of our experience

The first step is choosing your domain name. You can register a new one or use one you already own

Then, pick your plan, enter basic info to set up your account, and select what add-ons you might like to add

There are five total add-ons, and two of them are pre-checked:
- Premium SSL certificate$3.33 per month

- SiteLock Essentials$1.99 per month (preselected)
- Google Workspace Account$6 per month
- Automatic backups$2 per month (preselected)
- HostGator SEO tools$2.95 per month
Google Workspace might be the only one you would like to have, but you can always sign up for it later. It allows you to have business email set up through Gmail

But the others are not required or essential. And,not worth the price per month

We liked that the whole process took place on one page. It streamlines the entire process, compared to spacing it out across six different pages

After checking out, you go directly to a few questions about your skill level and the purpose of your site

We found this fantastic. HostGator learns how much you know in order to try and tailor your experience

After that, pick the content management system (CMS) you want to use. WordPress is the preferred choice and it only takes a few moments to set up

And youre done

Next, youll see all of your login credentials and a video to help you get started with WordPress

It walks you through how to navigate the WordPress dashboard, install plugins, change and customize themes, and more

Its well-made and helpful for folks just getting started or who need a refresher

Nobody else had this so easily available, so it was a definite standout onboarding feature among the crowd

Whenever youre done watching the video, youll click Go to WordPress

However, everything is on a temp domain so youll need to connect your own domain name before you can launch your site

Its easy to gloss over and forget about it

We think it should be front and center when you log into the portal and mentioned in the setup wizard

This will cause frustration if youve never set up web hosting before or just havent gone through this process in a long time

Youll go through the setup wizard, and think youve finished. But youre not. Your website wont show up when you look for it and you wont know why

All in all. setting up WordPress and getting it installed was easy

But its not nearly so straightforward with what to do with an existing domain name

**Uptime: 4/5**HostGator meets uptime expectations with the reliability youd expect from a well-known web host

Our research uncovered that 99.99% of the time your website is available to your visitors

How do we know for sure?
We took 30 days to confirm HostGators uptime availability and also tested for the types of incidents that resulted in any downtime

Our test results are below

Notice that during the testing month, downtime was only five minutes and 42 seconds in total


For shared hosting thats great

The longest single duration of downtime was two and a half minutes, caused by one connection refused error (which is usually an issue with the person trying to view the website). There were three HTTP 400 internal server errors and one unknown error in addition

Compared to the average of 23 minutes and 55 seconds of downtime for all the hosting providers we tested, HostGator performed significantly better than average

**Speed: 3/5**Being able to keep up with your competitors shouldnt boil down to if your website is fast enough. But, sometimes thats the great differentiator

Plus, slow loading speeds can make or break your visitor loyalty. No one likes a slow website

When we tested HostGator over 30 days, we were eager to see the results

Heres how fast they are:

The average response time was 661 milliseconds. That comes in slightly better than our average across all web hosts of 708 milliseconds

HostGators top speed-related features are:
**Cloud-based servers **are twice as fast and four times more scalable than their shared hosting plans. With just one click, you can ramp up your resources on-demand without any downtime, reboots, or data migrations. **Unmetered Bandwidth** means you dont have to worry about hitting a bandwidth cap or throttling thatll massively slow your site down. So, you can transfer as much data to a visitor as they need with minimal restrictions. **Price: 4/5**HostGator gives you a variety of
Its $3.95 per month for 12 months, running a total of $47.40 for your first year of hosting

Not only is it cheap to start but you also get your domain name and email free in the first year, unlike most other providers

But, you pay $14.95 for domain privacy

Everything included, youre paying $62.35 for the first year

The renewal rate is $8.95 per month, so your second year starts at $107.40. The renewal rate is 137% higher than HostGators promo pricing

In year two, you pay for your domain name registration at $17.99 for the year. Then $14.95 again for domain privacy

All in, your second year total equals $140.34

HostGators $202.69 total for two years comes in a good bit below our list-wide average of $246.71

For added value and more savings, you can get better pricing by signing up for three years in advance, at $2.75 per month. With domain registration and privacy included, that means you can shore up three years of hosting for $179.83

**Customer Support: 3.67/5**Our customer support experience with HostGator was just above average

What lowered the score for HostGator was the pushy, sales-y nature of the customer support reps and them not doing more than forwarding standard support articles

On our first chat, we connected with a rep immediately

We asked first how they could help us improve security. The rep identified themselves as a security expert, so we were confident it was going to go well

But they immediately recommended a paid security upgrade and copied and pasted aof features into the chat. We asked if there was anything we could do for free and the rep passed us off to someone else

This was not great service at all

We found it annoying and inefficient, especially since they introduced themselves as a security expertshouldnt they know what we can do without paying extra?
The second rep briefly explained how they secure things on their end and sent us a support article on what to do on our end

We liked that they explained their security measures, though they didnt really tell us what we could do to keep our site secure

Overall, it felt kind of rushed, a bit too formal, and salesy

On our second chat, we asked for help with email setup. We were connected with a rep in about 45 seconds

The rep was very patient and friendly, going step by step with us and explaining where to go and what to click on

They didnt proceed until we told them we were ready. We also asked about forwarding emails to a Gmail account and the rep told us exactly where to go and how to set it up.

It was a refreshing change from the first interaction

The third and final chat wasnt the best experience. We did connect with someone immediately and asked how we can ensure our site stays optimized for speed as we start building it

They told us that was outside of their scope, but also explained that site speed depends heavily on the size of your pages

Then, they sent us a very basic support article about optimization, as well as an Elegant Themes article

We know there is more they could have helped us with or mentioned, but overall the interaction was decent

We wish they would have offered a bit more guidance on basic things we can do, like image optimization, caching, and using a CDN. But the support articles were sufficient. Not an overly friendly rep, but they got the job done

Customer service is the bread and butter of all web hosts. So we were surprised at the lack of quality support from HostGator. We would have liked to see better


HostGator, though, makes up for that with rock-solid uptime reliability and good speed at a reasonable price. Plus, they make it incredibly easy to scale up to faster plans with more resources whenever you might need to. So, HostGator can be a great hosting provider for the long haul

## #5BluehostBest Drag-and-Drop Page Builder for Beginners
 Bluehost
 Best and Easiest Page Builder
Want an easier way to build a WordPress site? With Bluehost, if you can click and move your mouse you can build something beautiful. Its drag-and-drop builder is one of the best we've seen. It's user-friendly, extremely customizable, and dead simple to learn. Build your first site in just 10 minutes with Bluehost today!
**Overall Score: 2.9 out of 5**
Do you want to create a website that gets visitors excited? Would you believe you can do it yourself, while barely breaking a sweat?
Bluehost makes this so simple. Anyone that can point and click a mouse can create a great website fast. No experience needed

Lets talk further about the setup of your hosting and website as we go through our five testing categories:
- Ease of Use:
3/5
- Uptime:
3/5
- Speed:
1/5
- Pricing:
3/5
- Customer Support:
3.67/5 **Ease of Use: 3/5**The overall score for ease of use is for the web hosting setup. This score has nothing to do with how simple it is to create a website with the Bluehost website builder

They are two separate things and well touch on the site builder towards the end of this section

With that out of the way, lets talk about getting your web hosting up and running first

Bluehost isnt the easiest, but its not thepretty average, overall

They lost a point because of the huge push on upsells and preselected boxes. If youre not careful you will easily be paying for things you dont need or understand

After you pay, youre automatically taken into a setup wizard that walks you through everything, including installing a content management system (CMS) and configuring all of your settings

You can even choose how much help you want with the process

But, another point was taken off of Bluehosts score because of the lack of direction on setting up your domain name after the wizard. Well talk more about that later

You set up your account by answering a few questions. Bluehost asks if you need a new domain or if youre bringing your own

On the next page, you enter your account information, select the package you want, choose your add-ons and extras, and enter your payment information

Once you get to the package extras section, a few are pre-checked for you

Its common among web hosts to have preselected upsells, so be careful. Oftentimes they are suggestions and not required

Once youre finished, hit Submit and youre done

Next, youll create a Bluehost account


Follow the simple steps and, once you login, youre asked how much assistance you want with setting up your new site

In the first option, Bluehost will stay clear and let you handle your site setup alone. Or, you can opt for a little help and get step-by-step instructions and tips

For the third option, you can set up a consult and have Bluehost do everything for you, completely leaving it up to them to build your website

We picked the middle option since thats probably what most people will pick as well. Then, it asks what type of site youre building

We liked that you have the option to skip talking about what kind of site you want to create if youre not sure right now or dont want the extra help for that specific step

To create your site, you can choose from a basic WordPress install or Bluehosts drag-and-drop builder. Some people will already know how to use WordPress while beginners may want the extra help of the drag-and-drop builder

The builder is very easy to use and offers you guided help making it impossible to get it wrong. If you scroll down, there are a few FAQs to help you choose the right option for you

**The pros** of Bluehosts site builder are that its easy to learn and you get a flawless design in half the time it takes to learn WordPress. **The con** is the site speed performance is not as fast compared to a site designed on WordPress. But using WordPress will take longer to learn and set up

If you choose the page builder, youll jump right into it, answer a few questions, and start designing your new site

If you go the straight WordPress route, it asks about your industry and who youre creating the website for

After that, the setup wizard is complete. Youll be automatically directed to your control panel

To help you get started and familiar with WordPress, Bluehost offers a checklist of things to do to build out your website. This is super helpful and a great place for beginners to start

However, this dashboard is missing information on what to do with a domain name

This is where you can get lost

If youre bringing over a domain they dont show you how to point it towards their servers so its hosted

They leave it up to you to figure this out, and that is not a good strategy

You have to hunt around for it or call support, which we find is an unnecessary step that takes away from Bluehosts onboarding simplicity

**Uptime: 3/5**Bluehost performed well enough during our uptime testing period. We found that 99.95% uptime was the average over a month, with 20 minutes and 28 seconds of total downtime during that time


The longest single duration of downtime was 10 minutes and 4 seconds. Our site wasnt accessible for that whole time, which is a bit lengthy. That means no visitors, no money, no subscribers

There were seven incidents that caused the site to be unavailable. Our site experienced one refused connectionmeaning a problem with the site visitors connectionand three connection timeouts that usually happen when a website on the server is using up too many resources

There were also two SSL errors, where the browser couldnt verify the SSL certificate and showed a warning that the page wasnt safe to visit

This is a terrible error to see because it tells visitors they shouldnt trust your website

If you sell goods or services that require credit card payments, this error is saying customer transactions are not secure

The last incident was an unknown error

Bluehosts total of 20 minutes and 28 seconds of downtime was slightly better than the average of 23 minutes and 55 seconds of downtime for all the hosts we reviewed

**Speed: 1/5**When we did our speed test, we found Bluehost to be the slowest of the pack

The average response time for visitors was over 1107 milliseconds. An average of over one second is no good at all

A couple of instances of your site taking one whole second to load is nothing to worry about. But
*averaging* that doesnt bode well and implies many periods where the load time is much longer than that

The image shows a roller coaster of server traffic surges affecting the response time for visitors of our website, meaning resources are not managed as well as they could be

Which is surprising, since Bluehost has a speed-related feature called resource protection

Its supposed to ensure other sites on your server cant use up your resources, which improves your sites performance without it being compromised because of someone elses website

As we continued our research into why Bluehost was slower than other shared hosting plans, we found out most of Bluehosts speed and performance features are reserved for managed WordPress hosting users

Thats definitely a downside and is probably one of the reasons Bluehost performed so low in our speed teststheyre virtually doing nothing related to performance for shared hosting

Bluehost was much higher than our average response speed of 708 milliseconds across all the providers we researched

**Pricing: 3/5**Bluehost gives away an easy drag-and-drop website builder for free

No other web host on this list does that while still staying competitively priced

For the first year of hosting, its only $2.95 per month for 12 months, equaling $35.40 for your first year

Bluehost also removes the yearly cost for a domain name. You pay nothing for a full 12 months of domain registration. Thats a huge bonus

And if you want to protect your private information, its $11.88 for a year of domain privacy. Email is included for free

So, to get started with a complete web hosting package, its only $47.28 for the first year. Thats a great deal to start with

Renewal prices are reasonable, as well, Going up to $9.99 per month for the second year

In the second year, your domain will cost you $17.99, which is on the expensive side. Domain privacy comes down just a bit for the second year to $11.80
So, for the second year of Bluehost service, youre looking at $149.75. That gives you a total of $226.82 for two years of worry-free web hosting. Thats just a bit below the average price across all the hosts on our list of $246.71

Even though the renewal rate is 102% higher than promo pricing, its still slightly cheaper than the average

Sign up for three years in advance at $2.95 per month, though, and youll pay only $106.20 for
*three *years of hosting. Thats a killer discount

Just keep in mind youll still have to pay for your domain name for the last two years and domain privacy for all three years, making the total for three years $177.58

**Customer Support: 3.67/5**Bluehost surprised us with their customer support. Youll see what we mean in a moment

It was slightly better than average, and for the price, we couldnt complain about too much

Heres how it went down

It took about 30 seconds to connect with a rep. After asking about security features, the rep immediately said we need to pay more for an upgraded security package

We asked if that costs extra and the rep copied and pasted aof features with no explanation whatsoever into the chat window, carelessly responding to our question with zero effort and leaving us wondering if they even wanted to help us

We asked what we can do for free and the rep told us that the free options they offer for security plugins werent very useful

That made us feel they were being very pushy towards getting us to pay more

We honestly felt a bit of trickery and scare tactics during this interaction

The chat was also riddled with typos throughout, which didnt inspire confidence in the information we were getting

Heres the chat itself:


On our second interaction, where we asked about email setup, we were Immediately connected with a rep. We specifically asked how to create an email account and the rep typed out step-by-step instructions for us

They were straightforward and we also appreciated that they didnt just send us an article to read through on our own


We also asked how to forward emails to Gmail and the rep responded again with step-by-step instructions. We followed all the directions and everything was exactly as they said it was

Overall, it was very fast, as we felt it should be for a simple question. We were extremely pleased in this instance

For our final test, we were immediately connected with a rep

After mentioning that we were not having any specific issues and were just interested in getting help with optimizing our sites speed, the rep asked if they should send us the guide we literally just asked for

So we found this rep not very attentive. We say that because instead of sending it over, they sent us an article on how to set up an email account

After sending us that, they finally sent a good answer for speed and site optimization. It was thorough and overall pretty helpful with specific advice as well as a few articles to check out

But after that, they started talking about security features and the paid security upgrade we were offered the first time we spoke to someone

This was unnecessary and annoying, especially since its something we didnt even ask about this time. They lost points for being overly salesy with the security upgrade (again) and for not being super knowledgeable or friendly

All in all, they offered adequate support, however, it seems they focus a lot on sales and upgrades. You will get help, but you have to bob and weave around the sales pitches and a lack of focus on solving only the problem you asked to solve

So Bluehost loses some points for heavy-handed sales tactics during customer support contact. But one redeeming quality that does bear calling out is their 24/7 live phone support option

Being able to connect with a live person to help you walk through an issue or answer a quick question is a somewhat unique feature among web hosting providers. Bluehost includes it with every plan

So if youre the type of person who prefers talking to chatting, then this might elevate Bluehosts customer service rating beyond the points we gave it. We tried the phone support and found it to be helpful and fast. This can be really important when youre in the throes of creating a new website

If you want the most help with building your site at the same time as you set up your hosting, choose Bluehost and enjoy their multiple ways of creating a great website

## #6InMotion HostingThe Best Price for Hosting Two Websites on One Plan
 InMotion Hosting
 Best Price for Hosting Two Sites

The only provider where you can host two websites on the same entry-level shared hosting plan, InMotion delivers solid uptime and great loading speeds no matter if you choose to host one site or two on it. And good customer service is available for any hiccups that may arise along the way

**Overall Score: 2.8 out of 5**
InMotion Hosting is the only shared web host on this list that offers an entry-level plan that lets you host two websites on the same plan. To sweeten the deal even more, its cheaper than other plans that only give you one website. For just $6.99 per month and a one-year agreement, you can host two sites for the price of one

Plus, you wont have to manage two plans on different platforms or deal with the headaches doing so can cause with billing and renewals every year

InMotion Hostings Launch planthe one we fully tested ourselvesmakes your life a heck of a lot easier

While InMotion technically offers an even cheaper plan (the Lite Plan), it only lets you host one website. We recommend going with another provider if you only need to host one website

Heres how InMotion scored overall in our five rating categories:
- Ease of Use =
0/5
- Uptime =
4/5
- Speed =
5/5
- Price =
3/5
- Customer Support =
4/5 **Ease of Use: 0/5**InMotion tied with A2 Hosting for the last place for ease of use

The customer dashboard is hard to navigate

Its not easy to understand what comes next or even see beyond the bunched-together user interface

When you finish the signup process theres no instruction on how to proceed. Making it very stressful for anyone not familiar with setting up web hosting

We found the overall experience lacking in structure

But one thing InMotion offers is a
**free 30-minute onboarding call, **something no other web host on this list offers. That can help you along the way if youre confused

Full disclosure: We opted to skip this free service and did not test this. So we cannot attest to its quality or helpfulness. We can only say that its a feature you can take advantage of

We feel If you get a knowledgeable rep, the feature could be really helpful

But we still wish that there was more guidance for those that dont want to use this feature or dont have time to jump on a call with someone

Heres a brief walkthrough of the setup process

The first screen starts with your account information and the plan selection. It also shows an outline of all the add-ons they offer

Upsells include:
- Backup Manager for $24 per year (was automatically checked to yes)
- Dedicated IP address for $72 per year (automatically checked no)
- QuickStarter for a one-time fee of $249you get a professionally designed one-page website built on WordPress (automatically checked no)

For backing up your site, you can add a free plugin that will do this for you


Next, youll set up your domain. You can add your own or buy one from InMotion

Next, youll set up a new account and then add simple account and billing details

In our opinion, the checkout process was clunky. It felt unnecessarily long compared to other checkout processes

There were a TON of fields to fill out and a few pre-checked upsells

After payment, we got a welcome message and the option to get help setting up a personalized one-on-one call with a New Account Specialist

We then received three separate emails. The first two were basic emails about receipts but the third was the welcome email, which had a ton of information in it

First, it told us how to access the account management area with a button to set our password

Next was a link to InMotions WordPress guide and how to get help if we need it, including through customer service or the support center with thousands of articles

There were also two attachments: a guide on how to set up a new site and a guide on how to transfer a website

Once we set up our password we were brought to our dashboard. Theres no instruction on what to do following that

We definitely wish there was more of a guided process or setup guide like most of the other hosts have

At this point, we didnt even have WordPress installed and were not sure how to do that

We opened up the getting started guide under the Recommended For You section at the bottom

Then, we clicked on WordPress since that was the content management system (CMS) we wanted to install

However, there was nothing about how to actually install itonly how to use it after its installed

It definitely takes some digging to find out how to do this, but it shouldnt

You have to open up Softaculous and install WordPress from there. If we didnt already know that, it would definitely take a long time to figure it out

After that, we clicked Install In about 15 seconds, it told us the install was successful and what URL to use to log in to WordPress

During our setup for InMotion Hosting, none of the boxes for ease of use we find useful for setting up web hosting were checked off

So, InMotion scored a zero out of five for ease of use

Even if you have experience, there are a lot of holes in this onboarding process we hope to see improved

**Uptime: 4/5**The availability your website has to its visitors is crucial to success. For InMotion Hosting our research shows a 
Two of the incidents were SSL errors that displayed a security warning to visitors. One incident was a bad gateway error, meaning the end users browser got an invalid response from your sites server. The last incident was an HTTP 503 internal server error

The HTTP 503 error means that the server was temporarily unable to complete the request. Overloaded servers or maintenance are the most common causes of this error

Across all the hosts we tested, the average down was 23 minutes and 55 seconds. InMotion performed significantly better than average

**Speed: 5/5**Keeping your website fast, gives you a clear advantage when doing business online. It also keeps your users happy when they are just searching your website for information

No matter what its a critical piece of providing a good user experience

When we tested InMotion speed performance we found the average response time was 339 milliseconds, making it the fastest host we tested

The average server response time across all the hosts we tested was 708 ms, and our InMotion server did significantly better. In fact, it was almost twice as fast as the average

If youre looking for sheer speed at an affordable price, you cant go wrong with InMotion

You also get various speed-related features that further enhance the entry-level plans speed. So, theres
*even *more room to improve this as you get started and build out your site. **Unlimited Bandwidth **allows your website to transfer as much data to a user visiting your site as they need. Some providers cap bandwidth and slow your site down when you hit that data cap. But InMotion hosting doesnt limit you and provides enough so your site is fast for your visitors. **UltraStack Optimized Performance** **is on InMotions entry-level plan. Its a proprietary operating system stack thats pre-optimized for your server environment so you dont have to touch anything. So, your site is as fast as possible right from the start. ** **Max Speed Zones** is a fancy name for the option of choosing between two Category A data center locations, one on the east coast in Washington D.C. and one on the west coast in Los Angeles. **Price 3/5**Pricing for InMotion Hosting is slightly above the average for two years of hosting, when compared to other hosts on this list

For the first year of hosting on the Launch plan (formerly the Lite plan), you pay $6.99 per month for a total of $83.88 for the first year. The domain name and email are free, but if you want to protect your identity youll need to add on domain privacy for $12.99

So, your first-year total is $96.87 for all the essentials you need to get started

For renewal, the hosting price increases to $11.99 per month for your next 12 months, equaling $143.88


This year you add in the domain price at $15.99. The domain privacy remains $12.99 per year. But, email is still free though

So, the total cost for year two is $172.86

The renewal rate is 72% higher than promo, which is the lowest percentage increase out of all other providers on the list

Added up, youre looking at $269.73 in total for two years of web hosting

The average price across all the hosts on our list is $246.71. InMotion is slightly more expensive than average and the third most expensive option

But, you can get better pricing by signing up for two years in advance at $5.99 per month and paying $143.76 for
*two *years of hosting

Youll still have to pay for your domain name for the second year and domain privacy for both years, making the total a more palatable $185.73. After the first two years, your monthly rate goes up to $10.99 per month

**Customer Support: 4/5**Our experience with InMotions customer support was pleasant and they have above-average service that made us feel they wanted to solve our problems

In the first chat, it took 16 minutes to connect with someone

The rep gave us lots of great information on on-site security, including SSLs and server-side protections they have in place

They also said that we are mostly in charge of security, but that they have a tool that helps manage passwords and things of that nature

After that, the rep mentioned a paid security tool called Sucuri, but they were very transparent that it costs extra and the rep even said we probably didnt need it right now

We appreciate that the rep took the time to explain things to us rather than immediately sending us to a support article

We also really liked that they didnt mention a paid upgrade until the very end. Overall, the interaction was excellent, although it did take a while to connect with someone, initially costing them one point since it took more than 10 minutes to connect

In our second interaction, when we asked about setting up email for our domain, we were connected with a rep in 30 seconds

The rep was really friendly and patient, plus they also walked us through the process step by step to make sure we were following along

They told us what to click on and where to look for it, as well as what certain icons looked like to help us find everything. They did the same after we asked how to forward emails to our Gmail account

We feel like the rep really went above and beyond by walking us through everything

Despite them taking the time to do all of that, the interaction still went pretty fast and our new email account was set up in about 15 minutes


We loved this interaction and can see how this level of support would be helpful to anyone who needs it

In our last chat about website speed and how to improve it, it took just 30 seconds before we connected to a rep

The rep first mentioned a few caching plugins to look into

Then, they said they have several optimization guides to help and asked if we would like to see them. We said yes, and then the rep sent a string of eight hyperlinks with no explanations as to what they are or anything

They quickly asked if we needed anything else and ended the chat

We didnt like when they sent us a string of eight different support articles with no explanations

We also didnt like that they immediately asked if we needed anything else before we even responded to the barrage of links

It felt really rushed like they didnt have time to explain anything more so they could get on to the next person

The first two interactions were really good, but the last one was subpar

We really enjoyed our experience with InMotion Customer support overall. They really show up to help and make themselves easily available for their customers with a public forum, knowledge base, live chat, and phone support

All in all, InMotion Hosting provides a well-rounded experience with above-average support, as long as the difficult onboarding doesnt present too much of a barrier

## #7NexcessBest Web Hosting for Experienced WordPress Users
 Nexcess
 Best for WordPress Pros
If you're an experienced WordPress user and want a step up from the wide array of basic shared hosting options, go with Nexcess. Its hosting provides a fantastic combo of speed, security, and uptime with a great deal of user control for maximizing your resources without all the bloated features you don't need

**Overall Score: 2.6 out of 5**
Nexcess is a step up for the other web hosts on this list. Its a top-tier web host for WordPress users

They dont offer shared hosting plans and they specialize in ecommerce platforms

Its for users who know what theyre doing and want a bit more control over their servers and web hosting experience. So, its not as beginner-friendly as the others

And the scoring reflects this

Nexcess offers managed hosting, something we havent talked about. It makes managing a site much easier because it removes most if not all of the DIY management of your website. Extending an added freedom from stress with Nexcess

However, its the setup and onboarding that requires more technical knowledge and understanding of setting up web hosting

Heres how they did in our five major categories:
- Ease of Use =
2/5
- Uptime =
5/5
- Speed =
4/5
- Price =
1/5

- Customer Support =
4/5 **Ease of Use: 2/5**Nexcess isnt for beginners, so ease of use takes a hit. Its made for those who know a bit more about web hosting

There is very little direction whatsoever after youre done signing up

All the hosts that scored higher immediately took you to a setup wizard, but youre left to figure things out on your own with Nexcess

Its clear this host is meant for more experienced users who want something with better performance, but dont want to fork over $25 or $30 per month

When you get started, you select your payment terms. We went with the monthly plan

After that, you can change the name of your plan to keep track of them and also choose your server location

There are five server locations:
- Asia Pacific
- Amsterdam
- London
- Michigan
- California
No other web host so far has allowed you to do this

Then, youll see an order summary. There are no upsells, so you dont have to worry about any unnecessary extras

You also get a welcome email before finalizing your purchase with info on how to finish setting up your account

This is great, its like two-step authentication. They want to make sure youre getting what you asked for

After clicking on the email link youre taken back to the signup page. After you click Purchase you are immediately redirected to your portal with a popup message that says itll take a few minutes to set up your new plan

Theres a short tutorial walking you through important features of the portal and how to use it

We clicked Learn More

We found this to be a plus for Nexcess during the setup, and worth calling out. But it doesnt improve the overall score

Heres why

The first screen walks through how to use the main navigation panel of the portal. It tells you about the plans, support, and billing tabs

Clicking Next shows you how to use the user menu on the top right corner

The last screen is for support shortcuts. It tells you all the different ways you can get in touch with the support team if you need to. This makes it simple for you to find help, not forcing you to waste time looking for it

Its great for general information, but it does not actually help you set up your website. And thats the whole point of this right?
By the time youre done with the wizard, your hosting plan is ready to go

At this point, we got another welcome email with an invoice for the payment, a link to our portal where we can access our site, and additional information on how to get support if we need it

After that, we got one more email telling us the account is ready and that WordPress is installed on our site

Other than that, theres not really much info on what to do next

We werent even sure how to log in to WordPress at this point or start editing our site. Theres also nothing telling us what to do with our domain name. Again, not very easy to follow

Heres what the home screen of the dashboard looks like:

After spending a few minutes figuring out how to get to our WordPress dashboard. We were in

We found a detailed analytics section that allows you to look at total bandwidth and disk space used. Data like this is something you can wield to see how you can make site improvements

It definitely
*feels *like a portal thats better suited for advanced users who have specific preferences

Nexcess expects you to know the basics and be comfortable with creating a new website. And theres no need for slow, step-by-step instructions since you
*should *already know what to do

Despite the lack of further instructions, we loved that there were no additional payment upsells

And the WordPress install was also very clean, with only three plugins and standard themes installed. Much different than shared web hosting that usually comes with tons of plugins, upsells galore, and pre-installed themes, which actually slow down your site

Nexcess is great for users who know how to set up a web host. If you dont know what youre doing, this is not the host for you

**Uptime: 5/5**
Nexcess keeps your websites doors open like a 24-hour market, always ready to serve customers and visitors

Take a look:

There were zero incidents causing the site to be unavailable. Happier visitors, increased traffic, and more sales are the results you can expect when you host your site with Nexcess

Obviously, that perfect performance ranked at the top of all the web hosts on our list

**Speed: 4/5**When you pay top dollar for web hosting you expect it to be fast. And we wanted to make sure thats exactly what you got**
So we tested Nexcess servers for a month to see how they did

They turned in an average response time of 565 milliseconds. This means your site loads in about half a second a literal flip of a light switch

When you look at the image above, you can see the spikes in load time dont move any higher than 1.2 seconds

Nexcess does everything it can to make your site a speeding bullet out of the gate, bolstered by their many speed enhancement features:
You can choose from

**eight data centers spread across Michigan (where they have two), California, Florida, the UK, Amsterdam, and Sydney. This gives you control over minimizing the physical distance between your server and your visitors, which reduces load time

You also get
**2 TB of bandwidth which most sites wont reach for a very long time, if ever. Having lots of bandwidth means theres plenty of room for traffic spikes and surges without them affecting your sites performance. You also have a lot of room tobefore needing to upgrade to a higher tier. **Auto-scaling technology** from Nexcess lets your site go beyond your PHP limits for a short amount of time in the case of intense traffic surges or spikes to ensure your site doesnt crash. Even on your busiest days, every user will experience fast load times and great performance no matter what. **Nexcess content delivery network (CDN) **features 22 edge locations in North America, Europe, and the Asian Pacific region. The CDN is automatically configured with all new Nexcess accounts so you dont have to do anything, its all taken care of for you. It requires no configuration or tweaking on your part and is preconfigured for your server environment, with the best settings selected for you. **Image Compression andLoad **reduces the file size of JPG and PNG images automatically without sacrificing image quality. The days of spending hours configuring images to the perfect compression size are a thing of the past. Nexcess has partnered with TinyPNG so you get the premium compression plugin for free

With all this attention on speed, its no surprise/ or a surprise that Nexcess is significantly better than the average 708 milliseconds for response times across all the hosts we tested

**Price: 1/5**Predictably, Nexcess scores horribly in this category. They are not your average cheap shared web hosting provider. And they are the most expensive hosting provider on this list. Shared hosting isnt even an option with them

For the first year of hosting you pay $15.83 per month for 12 months, totaling $189.96 a year for hosting

With this plan, you pay nothing for an email address. But you do pay $15 a year for your domain. Then, if you want to protect your identity with domain privacy, its another $5 per year

Thats a total of $209.96 for year one

But there is something unique about Nexcess. On renewal, theres no increase in price. Theyre the only provider on the list to have this price lock guarantee

So, you pay the same $209.96 for your second year as well

That runs your two-year total to $419.92, which is still very pricey

Nexcess is expensive and not for everyone. They are way above the average price for all the other hosts


If you want to save a little, buy a domain name from another domain provider. Instead of paying $15 a year with Nexcess

Other than that, this is the best deal you can get

**Customer Support: 4/5With a web host that gives you all the bells and whistles, wed expect outstanding support. Though they scored above average, we feel our experience should have been much, much better

Heres what we mean

On our first chat, we asked about website security. We were immediately connected to a rep

About five minutes into the conversation, the rep forwarded us three articles they felt would be helpful:one about iThemes Security Pro, a second on how to get started with managed WordPress hosting, and a third about securing WordPress sites

The first two were not helpful at all. But the last one was extremely valuable to answering our question

But, the rep just sent us aof support articles to read on our own. Were paying for premium hosting and customer support, yet it didnt feel like the support was any better than the shared hosting options on our list

The rep didnt really know much about the product, even for a simple question about if something comes with our plan or not

And response times were very long in between answers

We liked being connected immediately, but the rest of the interaction was slow, bland, and impersonal. The rep was friendly but not knowledgeable

On the second interaction, we were connected with a rep in 30 seconds

We asked the rep to help us set up an email account for our domain name

The rep asked us a series of confusing questions, which we list below

The first they asked us was, Can I point mail service to Nexcess? Could you please confirm
We told them we didnt understand the question, and they repeated the above question again. To avoid any further confusion, we basically just said, Okay, do whatever you have to do
The rep responded and said, In order to access email service, we require MX records. Could you please confirm whether I can create it for you
We responded in the affirmative and they said it could take up to four to eight hours for the changes to go through and to check back later

They also dropped a link with instructions for us on how to get to our email later on

We thanked them and we ended the chat

Though confusing, we appreciated that they actually went into our account and did everything for us

We found Nexcesss process to be much different from everyone elses. Which doesnt make it bad. Its just normally email setup is a really simple thing to do


We would have liked to have the rep recognize our confusion and explain a bit more to us. But they did solve the problem and took matters into their own hands

Definitely more on par with the level of support youd expect with a premium host

On the third chat, we were connected with a rep immediately

We asked about optimizing the site for speed and they mentioned three tools to look into: WP Rocket, a content delivery network, and Redis, with a support article explaining each tool

WP Rocket and Redis are both paid tools

We definitely wished they would have mentioned some more things we could do for free, or at least explain things a bit rather than just shooting over an article for us to read on our own

It
*was *really fast, though, which was nice

But we also felt like the rep could have offered advice beyond sending us to paid tools and support articles

It almost felt a little bit rushed, as if they just didnt have time to explain any of it to us, especially after we said we were a beginner and just getting started

Beyond naming the tools and sending us to a support article, the rep didnt really do much else

But the chat took only five minutes, so they were friendly and fast

Although Nexcess scored a 4/5 on support, it didnt feel that way. We definitely expected it to be better since their services are so much more expensive

We expected the reps to be a lot more involved and hands-on, but many of them seemed to not really know much about Nexcess services

With that said, we were connected with reps quickly which is nice

And they offer five ways to get help: email, phone, live chat, social media, and knowledge base articles

But they were really disappointing for premium hosting customer support when compared to other high-end hosts not included in our list

All that being said, you do get the performance youre paying for from Nexcess. Its not for beginners, but if you know what youre doing and you want unflagging uptime and speed, look no further than Nexcess

## #8A2 HostingMost Dependable Host for Europe and Asia
 A2 Hosting
 Best for Europe & Asia
If you are catering your website to mostly European and Asian audiences or just want reliability for visitors from all over the globe, use A2 Hosting's server selection to make sure everyone gets a pleasant site experience. Enjoy multiple data centers, excellent customer support, and decent performance

**Overall Score: 2.3 out of 5**
A2 Hosting is well known for its blazing-fast site speeds. Our research put that to the test. Youll find detailed data about it below

But what we didnt knowand found surprisingis how well their data centers perform in Europe and Asia

They are exceptional at catering to visitors in these parts of the world

If you do business internationally in these areas, you need a web host you can trust thats built to perform well for overseas customers

A2 Hosting will exceed your expectations in this department, providing your visitors with speedy access to your website without a problem

Now, with that said, we found A2 Hosting doesnt perform as expected in other areas we find crucial in web hosting. Falling far behind other shared web hosting comparisons

Lets look at how well they performed

- Ease of Use =
0/5
- Uptime =
3/5
- Speed =
1/5
- Price =
3/5
- Customer Support =
4.33/5 **Ease of Use: 2/5** A2 Hosting proved to be one of the hardest web hosts to use when getting started. Its surprisingly challenging with its difficult dashboard design and riddled with upsells during the checkout process

We found it cluttered and difficult to navigate. To make matters worse, there were no instructions on how to get started after checkoutleaving us frustrated as we clicked and scrolled trying to figure things out

Its definitely a terrible user experience for us, one that can leave you feeling uneasy and lost if you dont know what youre doing

Heres how getting started looks

When you first sign up, you register a new domain or transfer an existing one, by updating nameservers or using a temporary subdomain from A2

After you finish the domain step, things get very cluttered and confusing

Youre taken to a new screen thats very overwhelming with so much crammed onto the screen

If youve never done this before, you wont know what any of this means. Since we opted for one month of hosting at $10.99, we found the price of $60.98 due today a bit shocking

The advanced SSL certificate is pre-checked, which is causing a massive price spike of $49.99. But A2 doesnt tell you its an advanced option

To us, we feel you may see Rapid SSL and assume you need it, even though the free SSL that comes with the plan is more than enough. It feels very misleading

It should be clear as day that its advanced and not required. But its not

As you scroll down, youll choose your plan, and decide where you want your server. Then choose which SSL certificate you want

After that, there are four more add-ons you can choose from. None are pre-checked except the expensive SSL certificate we already mentioned

The upsells are:
- A premium SSL certificate
- A dedicated IP address
- Offsite backups
- A spam firewall
- A2 website builder
These upsells all come at a cost. However, the pricing is not listed unless you select the upsell


The premium SSL certificate is the only one that was preselected. Once we unchecked it the price returned to $10.99

Once you finish selecting your content management system (CMS) and checkout, youll finish up with general account information and process your payment

If you arent aware, a CMS is where you store all of your website content: your blog posts and media. Its also the place you manage comments, update plugins, and manage your website security. WordPress is the most well-known CMS

Then, you are greeted with this screen:

Theres no guided setup or checklist. Theres absolutely nothing telling you what to do next

We also received a welcome email filled with web hosting jargon, with no explanation on how our control panel, FTP, SSH, and email actually work, or why each of them has separate accounts

This leaves you to manage multiple passwords, which can easily be forgotten or lost in the shuffle of all the information they blast you with

Onboarding could definitely be a more user-friendly experience with help, guidance, and step-by-step instructions on how to move forward

A2 doesnt check off a single box in our ease of use criteria, so it scored a zero out of five

**Uptime: 3/5**Staying available to your visitors is something A2 Hosting does very well. They make sure that when your site is up and running, it stays that way

Our uptime research uncovered a 99.96% availability for visitors, with 15 minutes and 41 seconds of total downtime over 30 days

Heres the screenshot for 30 days of uptime testing:

There were two incidents that caused the site to be unavailable, displayed by the two little red boxes on the bottom of the image

One very short connection timeout occurred. That happens when your website is trying to pull more resources from the server than are available. It results in your browser not being able to load the site at all, a common problem with shared web hosting. This lasted 41 seconds

The second, a 15-minute HTTP 500 internal server error, is a catchall for server-side errors. Thats an unfortunately long period of sustained downtime

The average downtime across all the hosts we tested was 23 minutes and 55 seconds, which places A2 Hosting slightly better than average

**Speed: 1/5**Speed is A2 Hostings claim to fame. Its proudly displayed, front and center, on their website

So, we were excited to do our testing over 30 days and reveal the facts about their entry-level plans performance

Our results show the average response time was 895 milliseconds. Just under one second, but keep in mind we have no data, media, or plugins on our site


Not the norm for most users. And thats a rather high average anyway, implying some serious spikes in load time

The screenshot of the speed test results is below

A2 Hosting definitely prides itself on being fast and offers numerous speed enhancement features to combat slower load times, all included without any extra effort on your part:
**100 GB of SSD storage space** **A2 Hostings unlimited bandwidth **is another plus. Most web hosts limit how much data you can transfer to your users over a given period of time. When you exceed that limit, they normally slow your site speed down. But you dont have to worry about excessive bandwidth usage with A2 Hosting. However, they do have a fair usage policy which states youre only allowed to use a standard amount of bandwidth and cant abuse the system. But most users just getting started dont have to worry about this. **A2s optimized software **offers pre-configured installs for tons of different CMS systems, WordPress included. All of your optimization settings are set up for you out of the box, including image, file, and code compression to keep your website lean and running fast. You also get basic cache control, so your site doesnt need to be fetched every time a user needs to access it

There are
**four server locations** to choose from: Michigan, Arizona, Amsterdam, and Singapore. This keeps your overseas visitors happy and offers smooth and quick access to your web content

All said, because A2 Hosting speaks so highly of their speed we expected mind-blowing speed test results that absolutely demolished the competition

But there is no real difference on the entry-level plan with no upgrades

**Price: 3/5**When you compare the pricing of other shared web hosts on this list, the cost for A2 is average

For the first year of hosting, you pay $6.99 per month for a total of $83.88. A domain name costs $14.95 per year if you arent transferring one over

If you need domain privacy, tack on another $9.95. Email is free, though, so your first-year total is $108.78 with everything you need to get started

For renewal, the hosting goes up to $8.99 per month for your second 12 months, equaling $107.88

The domain price remains at $14.95 per year, as does the $9.95 fee for privacy. Email is still free, so the total second-year cost is $132.78

The renewal rate is 29% higher than promo pricing, which is the lowest increase weve seen

Youre looking at $241.56 in total for two years of hosting


The average price across all the hosts on our list is $246 for two years of hosting, email, domain registration, and domain privacy, making A2 Hosting slightly higher than average

If you want more value for your money, signing up for three years in advance at $1.99 per month runs you $71.64 for three years of hosting

Youll still have to pay for your domain name and domain privacy, which makes the total for three years $146.34

Thats a savings of $100

But after the first three years, your monthly rate goes up to $10.99 per month, which is quite a big jump

**Customer Support: 4/5**A2 Hosting scored above average in customer support

In our first interaction, it took six minutes to get a response

The first thing they sent us in response to our question about site security was a paid product, and they were pretty salesy about it

We also didnt like that they sent over a support article with info on how to secure WordPress sites. But didnt go into further detail on how to use the article. They didnt try walking us through how to secure our website

They offered no advice or additional help. We asked how much the security upgrade costs and all they could tell us was that it depends

They then offered to switch us over to the sales team. We declined and ended the chat

This chat lost points for pushing a paid product first and for not offering any help beyond sending us support articles

In our second chat, we were connected with a rep immediately

This rep was really helpful and typed out step-by-step instructions on how to create an email account for our domain

They also offered screenshots of where to click, which was nice. We asked how to forward emails to Gmail and they provided instructions on how to do that. They also offered a detailed support article that covers more of the process if we needed it

This was a thorough interaction. Even for a simple question, the rep was friendly and helpful the entire time

This chat ticked every box we test for in excellent customer support

For our third and final interaction, we again were connected with a rep immediately

We asked how to optimize our site to load as fast as possible

The rep did a speed test for our site and said it was loading fast already. We told them we hadnt started building it yet and were just looking for help on how to keep it optimized going forward

They said we can enable Cloudflare and offered an article on how to do so

They also sent over a detailed article with lots of info on how to optimize WordPress sites. We definitely appreciated that they took the time to test the site to offer personalized advice

Again, this interaction met all of our customer support testing criteria

A2 really did a great job here. They were more reliable than some of the other hosts on our list. We were connected with a rep almost immediately every time we reached out to them

Aside from the first interaction, they were very knowledgeable and friendly. They gave us advice and clear instructions beyond leaving us to figure things out on our own

If thats something you prefer or come across a complex issue thats easier to resolve over the phone, A2 also offers phone support

Cater to your international visitors with A2 Hosting and enjoy the added bonus of really good customer support so you can maximize their hosting services. We also wrote a detailed A2 Hosting review if you would like more information

## How To Choose The Best Web Hosting Service
Our team compiled 105 pages of research, gathered over one month, giving us crystal clear proof to back up our best hosting recommendations

Because we dont want you wasting your time or money on what
*could *be best

Only on what
*is *best

So, for every host that we evaluated, we went through our definitive testing procedure:
- We created brand new accounts for each web hosting plan
- Purchased domain names for each host and then onboarded through the signup process
- Built brand new sites with zero images, plugins, or pages. Only a blank WordPress install
- For each website, we selected the same WordPress settings and theme
- Monitored uptime and site speed closely for a full month
- We Submitted three customer support tickets. Testing how helpful every web host will be
After running our tests, we rated each provider on a scale of one to five in five categories, weighted by their importance in your buying decision:
- Ease Of Use (25%)
- Speed (10%)
- Uptime (10%)
- Pricing (35%)
- Customer Support (20%)
We then combined all those ratings into a single overall score for each web hosting provider

These five categories are the main areas to focus on. We found that understanding these influences the quality of a web host, pulling you toward a better buying decision

Pricing is the most important factor, so it has the biggest impact on a hosts overall score

Ease of use and customer support make up almost half of the overall score, since getting started and getting help when you need it are keys to having a quality hosting experience (especially if youre building your first website)

It makes sense, getting started without pulling your hair out and having a support team behind you are the most important things to look for

Our full review and guide will help you figure out what provider is best for you. By showing you how well they did in ease of use, availability, speed, price, and customer support


We have all these categories listed below because they are what top web hosts excel at. And what people really want to know about

Our research found they are whats most important to you in having a successful website

 So Easy You Can Deploy Your Site In One Day (25%)
No one likes feeling like they cant do something

Wouldnt you like a quick and easy-to-follow setup? One with no fuss and no headaches?
Of course, you would

Thats why it counts for a quarter of each providers overall score

When we started our definitive research on web hosts, we wanted to make sure using a provider was easier than popping the top on a ketchup bottle

So we looked at every aspect of our experiencetesting and documenting how easy or hard things were during the signup process. We also examined the difficulty of setting websites up on each host

We include tips on navigating pesky upsells what they mean and if you need them

We graded ease of use on a one through five-point system. Based on five specific outcomes

Lets look at the rules we followed for calculating the ease of use score

- Minimal upsells or trickery during the signup process
- A clean, clutter-free, and easy to use dashboard
- Straightforward, step-by-step instructions on how to get started (youre never left guessing what to do next)

- A CMS installation wizard that walks through configuring your site
- Clear instructions on how to connect a domain name
When a host does well in one of these five categories, they score one point. The best score is five out of five

Some providers send you a ton of emails that have links and instructions that are hard to understand lowering the score for ease of use

Some dont send you instructions via email at all. We go over a detailed experience for each provider set up. So you know who does this well and who doesnt

We dug deep into it all, so you dont get lost later on

We loved that many of them make the onboarding process automatic, and dont challenge you in any way

You dont have to be an expert, and its easier than ever to end up with a complete and functional website in minutes. They make it virtually impossible to do anything wrong, never leaving us asking what next

On the other hand, we feel some are trying to win an award for most frustrating

They send you multiple emails with zero instruction regarding server security, email security, and more. Theyve designed web hosting dashboards that are clunky and monotone and left us with incomplete websites, confusion, and a mountain of questions


Our onboarding experience with a few providers was filled with twists and treacherous turns of confusion. If we had to sum it up, it was simply dreadful

But it serves as a clear roadmap so you avoid the same experience

 Never Lose a Visitor Because of Slow Site Speed Again (10%)
Got a slow website? Kiss your visitors and rankings goodbye

We know this for a fact because weve done the research time and time again

Our team spent 30 days methodically watching the performance for every provider on this list. We added all the sites into FreshPing and monitored the speed response

That way, we could give you the truth about which providers have real, reliable speed and which ones are all talk

And our discovery shows raw data on how they all performed. No fluff, just results

The only difference between our test sites was the host. We made our testing environment sterile in the sense there were zero variables

No images, comments, or any other content was included. All plugins were stripped as well. The website is completely bare

Why would we do it this way?
Because we wanted a clear baseline for performance with unquestionable accuracy

Your website will be different, and have media and other assets. So your averages will vary

But our goal isnt simply finding out whos faster. We also want to prove which provider is all talk and who actually keeps your website running when others cant

So, we wanted an environment with no variables or limitations to see who has the best results possible for speed

When the 30 days were up, we looked at the data. Then, we assigned a score to each of the web hosts with the grading scale below:
- 5 points for less than 550 ms
- 4 points for 551 ms to 650 ms
- 3 points for 651 ms to 750 ms
- 2 points for 751 ms to 850 ms
- 1 points for more than 851 ms
We couldnt believe our eyes, and were blown away by the results we found

We discovered that most hosts hover right around average, with a few standing out from the pack for good (and bad) reasons

The image below shows a provider that performed significantly worse than we expected

The image above shows an average response time of 1107 ms in 30 days. Thats theperformance we saw, and with initial responses taking more than a second, theres not much hope for speedy load times

In shared hosting speed and traffic spikes are closely related. Shared hosting can be slower than other types of hosting plans

The speed of your site depends on other websites behavior that are on the same server

Thats because shared hosting plans stuff as many websites as they can fit on one server. Slowing down your site when they have traffic spikes, also called surges


A good shared web host will combat slow response times by using cloud servers, speed related features and improved management of their servers

An example of a speed related feature is a content delivery network (CDN)

It allows your data to be easily accessed by people around the world from the data centers closest to them. One more is a caching plugin that stores different parts of your website to serve up pre-loaded, instead of reloading it every time someone requests it

When we ran our speed tests, they were done on the base plan for each provider. To keep things equally fair

The truth is, a creepy crawling site will have hideous consequences. Thats why its 10% of the web host score

Our recommendation, keep your site speed fast. Under two second response time. This will improve your rankings and keep your visitors happy at the same time

 Ignore Uptime GuaranteesLook at Real-World Data Instead (10%)
The hosting industry is full of terrible support, broken promises, and spotty uptime rates

Often turning good websites into ghost towns because of poor availability

Do all of them really deliver 99.99% uptime, all the time?
chance

Some hosts like to say that because they dont want to tell you the truth about not meeting this guarantee

They rather offer you misdirection from transparency about real performance

They do this by offering you compensation if the guarantee isnt met. Paying you is much better than telling you they cant reach this coveted number of 99.99%

So we cut out the fluff and test them ourselves, so we can tell you the truth

But youll start with the entry-level plan. Most do. And many hosts fall short here

So thats where we started

You dont have to wonder if the host is telling the truth or not. because weve done the research for you. Weve cleared away all the hype, making it simple to see whats really going on

We make it incredibly easy for you to see in a matter of minutes which host you can trust and who to avoid

Heres how we do it

We started fresh, just like with speed testing

The same websites we created and used for all of our other testing, we also used for uptime research

For a full 30 days we poked and prodded each host

Looking for every flaw and crack in their story about uptime

Our websites were connected to FreshPingrecording every piece of data they could find about uptime and the reasons behind the slightest decrease

Then we carefully took the data we collected, and graded it against our simple and easy to follow grading system

- 5 points for less than one minute of downtime
- 4 points for one to 15 minutes of downtime
- 3 points for 15 to 30 minutes of downtime
- 2 points for 30 to 45 minutes of downtime
- 1 point for more than 45 minutes of downtime
Once we had our final scores, there was no hiding from the truth

The percentage of availability for each host was crystal clear. Making your job much easier when its your turn to decide what provider offers better uptime availability

You might be thinking Thats great, but are there any other details about uptime I should know about
Emphatically, we say yes

Here are six of the most common reasons for downtime

- Network Outages
- Human Error
- Server Failures
- Usage Spikes/Surges
- Unknown Issues
- Power outages
These reasons cause the highest percentage of websites being unavailable. And every web host uses their own data and engineers to improve uptime as best they can

A lower percentage of uptime means there are moments where visitors dont have access to your website. That can cause you to lose money or credibility and ruin your reputation with Google, affecting your search rankings something no website owner can afford

Heres an example of terrible uptime percentage:

In this image you can see the availability percentage (99.68%) in the far upper left corner. Doesnt sound bad right?
But its deceiving. Look directly to the right at the total downtime that accompanies it

The total downtime of two hours and 22 minutes is massive over a 30-day period. Thats over two hours your website isnt working; over two hours during which your visitors cant come to your website. They wanted your content, they wanted to visit, but you werent home

Even worse, the next statistic overthe longest single, sustained period of downtimewas a full 30 minutes

So, at one time during this month, our website was inaccessible for a full half-hour

And there was nothing we could do about it. When visitors land on your domain, its likely they wont come back if you have this same problem

We expected to find that the majority of web hosting providers would have reliable servers

The average downtime was 23 minutes and 55 seconds. So its not all bad

But, the main thing you want to remember is to pay attention to how often incidents happen

The same common reasons we went over just above the uptime image in this section

The incident statistic is in the upper right corner of the image above

The more these occur the more flimsy the uptime performance will be

Whats an incident? It is when something, anything, causes your website to become unavailable

Sometimes its scheduled maintenance by the provider, other times its pure server errors and platform


But now you wont be surprised when downtime happens. Youll also have a good idea on how your websites affected. And even some idea of whats causing it

 The True Cost of Hosting Your Site for the Long Term (35%)
Do you like spending hard earned money on something you dont know is going to work?
Us either

So when we did our research on pricing we made it the most important score in our grading system

Because we know you dont want to get burned if things dont work out

Thats why we carefully reviewed every detail of the price for each provider in this review. We mapped out every cent you need to pay so there wont be any surprises for you

And we spent all of our time on the entry-level plans so pricing would be equally compared across the board for every provider. Most of our readers will begin here anyway

Heres the breakdown:
First we started with the monthly promotional pricing, using that to calculate what the upfront cost would be for a full year of hosting

Then we searched which providers charge for domain names. If there was a price we added that to the yearly total

We did the same for domain privacy and email services. Then added those to the yearly total as well

After the first year. You have renewal costs to deal with. Which commonly puts a larger dent in your wallet

Web hosts are notorious for jacking up the price on renewals

Once we calculated the renewal costs and all the fees for a second year of hosting, we combined that with the first year pricing to give you a clear idea of the totalfor every single provider we reviewed

After this meticulous review process on pricing, we created a grading scale on total cost for
- 5 points for less than $150
- 4 points for $151$210
- 3 points for $211$270
- 2 points for $271$330
- 1 point for more than $331
The average price across all the hosts on our list is $246.71 for two years of hosting, email, domain registration, and domain privacy

One provider on the list is the runaway winner with a two-year cost of only $136.74, while the most expensive options ranged between just under $300 to a bit over $400

The reviews above offer specific details about renewal pricing and other fees to be aware of specific to each provider

We noticed even if a provider comes in cheaper than average price for two years they can offer better service or uptime then a more expensive provider

Giving you more than you would expect for less

In comparison to a more expensive provider. Our experiences with some higher price web hosts didnt provide a better overall experience. Proving higher rates did not mean better quality

 Connect with a Real Human in Ten Minutes or Less (20%)

Do you remember the last time you got outstanding customer service?
For us, it was from a few providers on this list that really blew our socks off

The best part, we documented it all. Every detail, screenshots and everything

Because customer support is one of the most important features any web host can have. It is weighted as 20% of the overall score

We spent hours researching all eight providers on this list, asking the tough questions most users need answers to

Why?
Because we believe finding the gold standard for customer service shouldnt be trial and error

Based on our research, there are three questions that help every website perform better from the start:
- What security features and measures do you offer to keep my site secure?
- Can you walk me through how to set up an email account for my domain?
- How do I make my site load as fast as possible?
We contacted support via live chat three separate times of the day, with each interaction focusing on one of those three questions:
- In the morning, around 89 a.m. PST
- In the afternoon, around noon1 p.m. PST
- In the evening, around 78 p.m. PST
We felt it was important to find out for you if each providers support was consistent. Or if it was hit or miss

Also, we wanted to gauge support response times at different times of the day. Because not everyone can chat at 10 a.m

Doing it this way kept things consistent. And since there are a few providers on our list without phone support, live chat was the best way to compare each host

We documented every interaction and graded each provider on specific critical areas, proven to be valuable to real users:
- Offered support that doesnt feel salesy or pushed unnecessary paid products
- Phone support if you prefer getting on the phone with someone
- Offered advice beyond sending us directly to a support article
- Took 10 minutes or less to connect with a human via live chat
- We felt like the rep was knowledgeable and friendly
You see, we go beyond getting help on just answering a simple question

Lets look at one example, where we asked a hosting provider about security features:
The chat started at 8:07 am:
We
She was very thorough and confirmed our call back number in case we got disconnected. Then she asked may I have your domain name and email address
We responded sure and gave it to her. She then asked for the last four characters of our password so she could provide account-specific answers about security

We felt this was so far so good. After that, we mentioned that we wanted to hear about security features that are available to secure our website


Her first response was about paid packages we can buy. We know they offer free security features so we are not sure why she didnt mention those at all and went straight for the upsell

This response told us how much these extra packages cost per year and what features each one includes. Then, we asked if theres anything we can do that doesnt cost extra

Kiara responded and said that theres a free security feature but it isnt very good and then recommended free plugins we can use that also wont be very good

We told her wed think about it and then she said I hope Ive provided a five-star experience and ended the chat

The whole interaction took 22 minutes

Heres a screenshot of our conversation:

Above you can see how we broke down our conversation line by line and what steps the rep did to meet our criteria for grading

For our support grading scale, we assigned one point for each of the following:
- Received advice/support that wasnt overly pushy on upgrading/paying more money
- Offered advice/support beyond being immediately sent to a support article
- Ended the entire interaction in less than 15 minutes
- Initial response in less than 5 minutes
- The rep was knowledgeable, friendly, and eager to help
Simply put, if a provider does well in any area we listed above they score a point

One trend we want you to be aware of are the providers that upsell you before trying to help you with your original concern

We find this to be poor customer support and suggest you dont tolerate it. This is a red flag and a clear sign you arent getting the help you need

For us, a few providers glossed over our problem and instantly began pitching services that they believed were more helpful, instead of trying to solve the problem we reached out to them about

This left a nasty taste in ourand, for that reason, any providers that had this happen lost a point

But, in the end, you must test your customer support thoroughly within the first 30 days. No matter if you experience a problem or not

Use them as a resource. Its the only way to know if theyll be effective for you and really help when your back is against the wall

Fortunately, you normally get a 30-day money back guarantee with hosting providers. So you can put them to the test for yourself and, if they dont perform well, move on without risk

So sign up, go through the process of setting up your site, test them out, and see if our research stands up to your own experience

Many users praised this approach and found it to save them countless headaches later on. Even if you think youll never need them

Customer support that provides detailed and in-depth help, while walking you step by step with patience through any problem, is what we all want, isnt it?
 Hostinger
 Best for Most
Get the cheapest hosting provider and the one that's easiest to use in one package with Hostinger. Their promo and renewal rates are both near the lowest in all of web hosting. Plus, Hostinger's easy guided setup gets your website live in just minutes

## Summary
Quality web hosting is the backbone of your sites performance. Thats why its so important for you to understand your options and evaluate the best web hosting solution for your specific needs

Hostinger is our top recommendation for most people. Its affordable, easy for beginners, and offers quality hosting services that can scale with you as your site grows.