Do I Need Web Hosting?

The short answer: yes. Whether you want a simple blog, a professional portfolio, online store, or major business profile, you need some sort of hosting service or server to store and deliver your files. Technically, you could learn to host your website from home — more on that later — but from our experience, that route is just not a good idea. Setting up your own server can be a cumbersome venture, from the sheer expenses to time investment and massive maintenance headaches. Fortunately, most of the best web hosting services put everything you need into one complete, affordable package. No muss, no fuss! With a one-stop-shopping web host experience, all the essentials should be covered with a single bill — no matter your website needs. Here are some of the things you can accomplish with any of the hosts we highlighted above: Personal website: Getting your first site online is easy, particularly with an included drag-and-drop site builder or one-click installation of popular platforms like WordPress and Joomla. Professional portfolio: User-friendly design tools come with customizable and mobile-friendly templates to showcase all types of projects. Blog: Writing environments and publishing tools are built in, often alongside tips and programs for search engine optimization, marketing, and analytics. Online store: Choose your favorite shopping cart and payment processing service, along with an interface for tracking and displaying your products. Business: Give potential customers the information they’re looking for, including a convenient spot to make reservations, place an order, or book an appointment.

How Do I Choose the Best Web Hosting Service?

With seemingly unlimited options to choose from, where do you start? Searching for a web hosting provider — whether for your first site or your thousandth — can be an overwhelming experience. Each company and hosting plan comes with assorted pros and cons, to say nothing of the specific needs of each website project. How do they all compare? Which is more important than the other? We’re here to help explain how to best understand your website’s needs and match them to the right hosting plan. First off, take a few minutes to look critically at your current website (or dreams of what it could be) and what it needs to be successful. For instance, a personal blog won’t need a high-priced dedicated server, no matter how much you value performance and have plenty of money to spend. It’s just not worth it. Likewise, an established business or online store just can’t afford to cut corners and go with a cheap shared hosting plan — security, performance, and conversions would all fall dramatically. Hosting plans involve different server configurations and resources, depending on which is the best fit for a site’s traffic.

Can I Host My Own Website?

It’s a fair question: Do you even need a web hosting service in the first place? Can’t you just host your website from home? Whether you’re a single developer or a business looking to move your servers in-house, the short answer is yes, you could — but you probably shouldn’t. Sure, third-party web hosting comes with pros and cons, but the advantages far outweigh the concerns to us. We get it, tech experts and interested daredevils may want to host their website from home, keeping everything at an arm’s reach and perfectly under control. While setting up a server is a fun and challenging experience, however, the total hosting cost savings are minimal and the product will be subpar — especially when considering the amount of time you’ll spend configuring and maintaining your hosting server. Believe it or not, your desktop or laptop is perfectly equipped to act like the very servers in charge of storing and sending your website files across the internet. Hosting your own site isn’t a great long-term solution, but we can understand the theoretical appeal of having total control and access to your infrastructure.

How Much Should it Cost to Host a Website?

First-time website owners, small businesses, and large organizations can all rest easy — web hosting is probably less expensive than you may think. In fact, many hosts feature deals and discounts for the first year. As you’re setting your web hosting budget, keep in mind that all the prices you see are for the lowest possible monthly rates. As the internet continues to grow at remarkable rates, Grand View Research recently measured the global web hosting market at $56.7 billion in 2019 and expects it to grow by more than 15% each year until 2027. Of that, shared hosting — which is readily available for between $2 and $5 per month — is roughly three times more popular than dedicated hosting, which can easily cost upward of $100 each month. But what does that mean for you? Let’s break down the expected monthly and annual costs for each type of web hosting plan: Shared WordPress Cloud VPS Dedicated Monthly $2-$5 $4-$30 $5-$20 $6-$20 $70-$150 Yearly $24-$60 $48-$360 $60-$240 $72-$240 $840-$1,800 We highlighted the entry-level hosting plans at each level to give you a solid baseline to measure against. Naturally, you can easily spend more across the board — just make sure it’s worth the added cost (it probably is).

What is the Fastest Web Hosting Service?

To quote a Queen song, visitors to your website want it all and want it now. Readers and potential customers are notoriously impatient, so businesses especially will want to find a web hosting service that can help them capture visitors’ attention quickly and move them through a conversion funnel. Here’s a recap of the fastest hosting providers in each category, according to our recent tests: Fastest overall: InMotion Hosting Shared hosting: A2 Hosting WordPress hosting: SiteGround Cloud hosting: InterServer VPS hosting: Hostwinds Dedicated hosting: Liquid Web Any of those hosts offer blistering speeds across the board and would make a great choice for a performance-optimized website. We’ll dive into the specifics of why page load speed matters and how you can find it, but you’ll probably be able to get a good sense of a hosting company’s priorities just by looking through its website. Many hosts develop custom tools and deploy upgraded hardware to optimize customers’ sites. The upgrades aren’t cheap, so don’t be surprised if you’re paying slightly more than bargain-basement prices.

What is the Cheapest and Best Website Hosting Service?

When it comes to choosing your next web host, beauty is often in the eye of the beholder. Prices are obviously easy to sort numerically, but what does that mean for the level of service you can expect to receive? Managed WordPress hosts, for instance, offer some of the best web hosting performance but at a price much higher than that of others. Our hosting comparison is all about promoting low-cost, high-value web hosting providers that offer robust plans with tons of features and constant support. With that in mind, here are our recommendations for the companies that will meet most site owners’ needs when it comes to affordability and performance: Cheapest First Month: InterServer ($2.50) Cheapest First Year: Hostinger ($35.88) Best Value: Bluehost ($1.99/month) Best for Small Business: InMotion Hosting Best Support: SiteGround Best for WordPress: Bluehost Easiest: Wix Fastest: InMotion Hosting Now that we’ve broadly compared hosting in terms of budgets and quality, what about for specific types of uses? What works best for a beginner, for instance, won’t adequately serve a thriving and rapidly growing online store that would benefit from a specialized e-commerce hosting service.

19 Best Web Hosting Services (Feb. 2024)

Written by: Laura Bernheim

Edited by: Lillian Castro

Updated: 1/24/2024

The best web hosting services do it all — providing seemingly unlimited features and resources for the least amount of money. But finding the perfect hosting plan can seem like an enormous challenge, and what works for one website may not be the best for your particular needs.

Our team has spent decades developing and hosting various sites and applications, testing dozens of web hosting providers along the way. We’ve consolidated our first-hand experiences into in-depth reviews and cost comparisons, which we’re happy to share here.

Whether you’re looking for affordable shared hosting plans or an entire dedicated server for your business, read on for our current reviews and recommendations, plus tips for picking your best web hosting partner.

Best Overall Web Hosting

With the largest web hosting companies rapidly innovating to stay competitive, you can easily find tons of great plans that feature speed, security, simplicity, stability, and support.

We believe the best web host serves the full range of website customers. From helping first-time site owners start a blog to empowering businesses to grow their online presence, hosts should provide cost-effective support and computing power to foster successful websites.

These hosts score high marks across the board. Let’s start with the best of the best, Bluehost:

1. Bluehost.com

Monthly Starting Price $1.99

Up to unlimited website domain and email hosting
1-click WordPress installs and software updates
Support for popular shopping carts with FREE SSL
Up to $200 in Microsoft and Google Ad credit
Industry-leading hardware and uptime rates
Get started on Bluehost now.

BEST OVERALL
RATING 4.9 ★★★★★ Our Review

Bluehost: Our Expert's Review

Ryan Frankel (HostingAdvice.com): Bluehost has long been a favorite of mine in the shared and WordPress hosting spaces. The company adheres to modern standards for hardware, and its customer service resources are now backed by hosting industry titan Newfold Digital. Go to full review »

Money Back Guarantee	Disk Space	Domain Name	Setup Time
30 days	10 GB SSD - 100 GB SSD	FREE (1 year)	5 minutes

Types of hosting: Shared, VPS, reseller, and dedicated hosting, plus plans optimized for WordPress and WooCommerce. Managed WordPress hosting, Microsoft Office 365, and marketing services are also available.
Price: Shared hosting starts at $1.99, while dedicated servers cost $91.98 and up.
Support: 24/7 via chat and phone
Uptime: Regularly delivers 99.9% (and more) but does not guarantee reliability
Money-back guarantee: 30 days for all services (minus domain registration and setup fees)

As a go-to option for website hosting beginners and WordPress power users, Bluehost excels in combining top-tier services with customer trust. The web host drives more than 2 million websites worldwide and even boasts the coveted seal of approval of the WordPress.org team.

Bluehost plans range from shared hosting to managed WordPress and even dedicated servers — each with modern hardware, easy-to-use features, and the complete toolbox of services.

At every level, the hosting provider is known for reliable service and support. Bluehost is certainly among the most trusted and respected brands in the industry.

The hosting provider continues to roll out upgraded features like high-performance solid-state drives and hands-on managed services.

Even better, Bluehost gives users tons of freebies, like a domain name registration, SSL certificate, unlimited email accounts, and marketing credits.

2. Hostinger.com

Monthly Starting Price $2.49

24/7/365 ticket and live chat support
99.9% network uptime guarantee
FREE domain, site builder, backups, and SSL certificate
Unlimited bandwidth, databases, and email accounts
Speedy SSDs optimize performance
Get started on Hostinger now.

BEST OVERALL
RATING 4.8 ★★★★★ Our Review

Hostinger: Our Expert's Review

Laura Bernheim (HostingAdvice.com): Behind a mission to make life easier for website developers and their customers, Hostinger provides fast, stable, and streamlined services at a price that is very hard to beat. Founded in 2004, the bootstrapped company hit the 10 million users mark a decade later, achieving ICANN accreditation and localizing services in 39 countries. Go to full review »

Money Back Guarantee	Disk Space	Domain Name	Setup Time
30 days	50 GB SSD - 200 GB SSD	FREE (1 year)	3 minutes

Types of hosting: Shared, dedicated, cloud, and virtual private servers with domain hosting, email hosting, and WordPress-specific hosting packages available
Price: Shared hosting starts at $2.49, while dedicated servers cost and up
Support: 24/7 support available via live chat 365 days per year
Uptime: 99.9% guarantee across all services
Money-back guarantee: Full refund (excluding new domain registration fees) within 30 days of signup

Trusted by 29 million people scattered throughout 178 countries and counting, Hostinger bundles affordability and flexibility with a range of hosting packages. We proudly recommend the host for beginners, as the company offers welcomes first-time site owners with a comprehensive feature set and always-available, always-friendly customer support.

Hosting plans include a free domain name registration and standard security features, such as a complimentary SSL certificate, to set your website up for success. Performance boosts powered by LiteSpeed caching and other WordPress-specific features make Hostinger a popular choice for both beginners and veteran hosting customers.

3. A2Hosting.com

Monthly Starting Price $2.99

SSDs and TurboServer for 20x faster pageloads
Host unlimited websites and FREE site transfer
Optimized plugins and 1-click installs for WP
Pre-installed OPcache and Memcached caching
FREE HackScan with restore options
Get started on A2 Hosting now.

BEST OVERALL
RATING 4.9 ★★★★★ Our Review

A2 Hosting: Our Expert's Review

Alexandra Anderson (HostingAdvice.com): If speed and performance, partnered with support and security, are at all priorities in your web host shopping, A2 Hosting should be a leading contender. When A2 Hosting first launched in 2003, the company was focused on serving developers; A2 Hosting was among the first providers to offer PHP 5 and to support Ruby on Rails on shared servers. Go to full review »

Money Back Guarantee	Disk Space	Domain Name	Setup Time
30 days	100 GB SSD - Unlimited SSD	New or Transfer	5 minutes