Whether you’re taking your first steps online, building a professional portfolio, or looking for an outlet for your creativity, the best personal website hosting plans adapt to a variety of needs.
A website has become a necessity for job seekers, as 56% of employers are more impressed with candidates who house résumés on their own sites. Whether your site is a food blog for the best burgers or just a way to keep in touch, websites are ideal to show the world who you are.
Many may look at site creation as a daunting activity. However, most hosting providers make the experience pain-free with intuitive web builders and professionally designed templates.
Best Overall Website Hosting
Most people seeking to create personal websites want to be able to quickly and easily get their ideas online, and the pros provide some best practices on how to do it.
TheMuse advises avoiding burying your message’s lead and getting right to the heart of your story. This can be done through text, videos, photos, and other media. But you’re going to need a host that allows the flexibility to house large files and provides visitors fast page load times without emptying your wallet.
Our favorite hosts offer free web builders, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, simple management with intuitive control panels, quick load times, and high availability.
Security and backup functionalities are also important items to consider when choosing your hosting provider. To ease the decision-making process, we’ve compiled the three best overall hosts that provide some of these features.
1. Hostinger.com
Monthly Starting Price $1.99
- Unlimited everything, from storage to databases
- FREE site builder & WP performance upgrades
- FREE daily or weekly backups
- Custom control panel and auto-installation scripts
- SSH access & unlimited FREE SSL certificates
- Get started on Hostinger now.
CHEAP
RATING
★★★★★
Our Review
As the shared hosting market becomes increasingly saturated, unlimited storage, bandwidth, and email accounts have become surprisingly average. Hostinger, however, extends the routine, expected metrics to greater lengths — the number of websites, databases, FTP users, subdomains, and parked domains are all unrestricted for most customers. Go to full review »
| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 days | 50 GB to 200 GB SSD | FREE (1 year) | 3 minutes |
2. Bluehost.com
Monthly Starting Price $2.95
- Cheap shared hosting from a highly reputable provider
- Ideal for hosting a WordPress website
- FREE Weebly website builder and Cloudflare CDN
- Unlimited traffic and 24/7 live chat support
- Get 63% off today with our Bluehost coupon
- Get started on Bluehost now.
CHEAP
RATING
★★★★★
Our Review
Bluehost pricing is about as competitive as the industry offers. Sign up for a shared hosting plan for as little as $2.95 per month, and WordPress hosting packages are consistently priced; a VPS plan starts at around $18.99 per month; and the dedicated hosting rates are as little as $79.99 per month. Go to full review »
| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 days | 50 GB SSD – unlimited | FREE (1 year) | 5 minutes |
3. HostGator.com
Monthly Starting Price $2.64
- Get 70% off by buying 36 months up front
- Unmetered disk space & bandwidth
- Unlimited email addresses & free SSL certificate
- One-click WordPress install & free blog tools
- Free 1-year domain registration on select plans
- Get started on HostGator now.
CHEAP
RATING
★★★★★
Our Review
HostGator is a great compromise between performance and price. The company offers unlimited emails, MySQL databases, disk space, and bandwidth, plus one-click installs of popular open-source projects, in addition to a 99. Go to full review »
| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 45 days | Unlimited | FREE (1 year) | 4 minutes |
Best Low-Cost Website Hosting
Some businesses shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars to build highly complex ecommerce sites with functionalities akin to giants like Amazon.
Personal websites are a bit different. You want to have the seamless capability to create optimal experiences for your audiences, but you don’t want to break the bank in the process.
Don’t fret — all you budget-savvy site owners out there are in luck. Budding webmasters can blast professional-looking sites to the masses for just a few dollars per month.
The costs shouldn’t fool you. Even though the rates are low, some cheap hosts offer feature-rich plans that include site builders, domain names, and lots of bandwidth and disk space, among many other options.
Below are our top picks for cheap hosting providers. Feel free to peruse the full reviews to see just how many features you get at such low price points.
4. Hostinger.com
Monthly Starting Price $1.99
- Unlimited everything, from storage to databases
- FREE site builder & WP performance upgrades
- FREE daily or weekly backups
- Custom control panel and auto-installation scripts
- SSH access & unlimited FREE SSL certificates
- Get started on Hostinger now.
CHEAP
RATING
★★★★★
Our Review
As the shared hosting market becomes increasingly saturated, unlimited storage, bandwidth, and email accounts have become surprisingly average. Hostinger, however, extends the routine, expected metrics to greater lengths — the number of websites, databases, FTP users, subdomains, and parked domains are all unrestricted for most customers. Go to full review »
| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 days | 50 GB to 200 GB SSD | FREE (1 year) | 3 minutes |
Best WordPress Hosting for Personal Sites
Even if you’re new to the website-building game, odds are pretty good you’ve heard of blogging software legend WordPress. The platform currently powers roughly 27% of the sites on the web and an estimated 76.5 million WordPress.com blogs.
WordPress software is open-source and free to use, but you’re going to need a host to get your site online once it’s built.
The top WordPress hosts offer tools, such as BoldGrid, to make using the CMS even more intuitive than it already is.
It’s important to also look at other factors, including the ability to run multiple WordPress sites, whether the platform comes pre-installed, and if the host offers SSDs for optimal performance.
Our top choice to run a personal WordPress site is below. We’ve included a comprehensive overview of all the benefits offered, so be sure to click on the review.
5. Bluehost.com
Monthly Starting Price $2.95
- Recommended by WordPress.org since 2005
- Automatic WordPress updates and initial install
- FREE WordPress themes in the Bluehost Marketplace
- 24/7 support via live chat, phone, and email
- Get exclusive discounts on WordPress plans
- Get started on Bluehost now.
WORDPRESS
RATING
★★★★★
Our Review
Bluehost’s WordPress hosting packages are aimed at first-time site owners and personal bloggers. These services come at a premium compared to the standard Bluehost web hosting (basic shared hosting) plans, but the WordPress optimization and platform-specific resources are arguably worth the cost. Go to full review »
| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 days | 50 GB SSD – unlimited | FREE (1 year) | 7 minutes |
Best for Cloud-Hosted Personal Projects
Sure, your site may be fairly small now — but what if you strike it big?
Web professionals are notorious for their side projects and design-showcasing portfolios. If one of your pet projects gains some traction, the flood of traffic will likely overwhelm your shared hosting servers and crash your site.
Cloud hosting, on the other hand, offers a great deal of flexibility and peace of mind. Your hosting environment can easily grow with traffic demands, and economically scale back down when things are slow.
Read more about our favorite cloud hosting providers in our hosting review below to learn if cloud hosting would be a good fit.
