Writer: Laura Bernheim
Editor: Lillian Castro
Reviewer: Christina Lewis
After a year or so of testing and writing about some of the fastest web hosting services in the industry, I started feeling a little self-conscious about the host I had chosen for my personal sites and projects many years prior. I knew better options existed for speed, stability, and added services.
When I finally decided to join our readers searching for a hosting plan, I quickly zeroed in on one standout feature—SSDs, or solid-state drives. This modern storage technology reads and writes data much faster than traditional hard-disk drives, making websites up to 20 times quicker.
I went ahead and compiled a list of the fastest options at all levels of hosting. These hosts are known to be the absolute fastest web hosts in the industry — with price points that make their services well worth the investment. Read on to learn about our experiences with each web hosting provider, along with our picks for the best plans and services.
1. Fastest Web Hosting Overall
We constantly write about the importance of fast web hosting. You’ve heard the mantras: Speed sells, performance is pivotal, and milliseconds matter. The stats illustrating the penalties of sluggish hosting are rather sobering, as one in four visitors will abandon a website if it takes more than four seconds to load.
Google and other search engines sometimes rank slow sites lower, which can drastically impact your traffic. Fewer visitors mean fewer potential customers and less revenue. For instance, an eCommerce site earning $100,000 daily could lose $2.5 million annually with just a one-second delay.
When considering hosts with SSDs, InMotion Hosting immediately rises to the forefront. The well-known provider has been a standard-bearer in the industry, particularly when it comes to speed, customer support, and reliability. InMotion invests millions in name-brand hardware and includes SSDs for free with every plan. Add in US-based support and a 90-day money-back guarantee, and InMotion plans are sure to impress at any level.
InMotionHosting.com
Monthly Starting Price $2.79
- FREE SSD drives included with all hosting plans
- Zero-downtime website transfers and migrations
- FREE backups, SSL, and DDoS protection
- Choice of East Coast or West Coast datacenter
- Multi-language support for PHP, Ruby, and Perl
- Get started on InMotion now.
Dave McQuilling
| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 90 days | 100 GB SSD - Unlimited | FREE (1 year) | 4 minutes |
2. Fastest Shared Web Hosting
When looking for a truly superior shared hosting experience, a provider’s infrastructure and hardware make all the difference. With hundreds or thousands of customers and websites crammed onto each server, any upgraded equipment bodes well for everyone.
Offering SSDs is a sign that a web host actually cares about customer experience and website performance instead of simply maximizing profits on inexpensive hardware. In addition to the speed boost, SSDs are more reliable and less prone to mechanical failure, meaning your data will remain safe. As SSDs become an increasingly practical and popular option for both hosting companies and customers, you can expect to see more and more high-performance, supercharged plans.
Hosting.com
Monthly Starting Price $3.99
- FREE SSD speed and optional Turbo Server
- 1-click installs for all popular apps and scripts
- FREE CloudFlare CDN and optimized caching
- Get up to unlimited domains and databases
- Help from the Guru Crew available 24/7
- Get started on hosting.com now.
Christina Lewis
| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 days | 15 GB NVMe SSD | FREE (1 year) | 4 minutes |
See more shared hosts with SSDs »
3. Fastest Cloud Hosting
One of the fastest-growing categories of web hosting, moving to the cloud is an exceedingly easy and rewarding step for your website. The redundant resources give you extra scalability and reliability, ensuring your website has more than enough computing firepower to deliver information to your audience.
As we highlighted in our in-depth comparison for the fastest cloud hosting services, the difference between providers isn’t massive — but each millisecond matters when it comes to speed and performance.
InterServer.net
Monthly Starting Price $3.00
- Price-lock guarantee — your rate never increases at renewal
- Linux or Windows, with cPanel, DirectAdmin, or custom panel
- Self-healing cloud infrastructure with SSD storage
- Free SSL, DDoS protection, and 24/7 support included
- Pay $.01 the first month with HOSTINGADV coupon
- Get started on InterServer now.
Sead Fadilpasic
| Setup Time | Disk Space | CPU | RAM |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 minutes | 30 GB SSD - 480 GB SSD | 1 - 16 CPUs | 2 - 32 GB |
4. Fastest VPS Hosting
A virtualized private server, or VPS, naturally offers a performance upgrade over shared hosting servers. Fewer VPS customers share the same hardware, and virtualization allows the physical server resources to act like a dedicated server. With more control over the VPS operating system and configuration, users can further optimize their hosting environment for speed.
As with shared hosting providers, SSDs are usually just one of the perks offered with top-notch VPS plans. Several hosting companies will help customers manage their environments by including free managed services that cover security patches and software updates. We’re highlighting the cream of the crop below, but check out our article about fastest VPS hosting services for a more detailed analysis.
InterServer.net
Monthly Starting Price $3.00
- $0.01 for the first month using code HOSTINGADV
- Then $6/mo. with no contracts or price changes
- Latest PHP, MySQL, Perl, Python, Ruby & more
- 14 operating systems for Windows & Linux
- Self-healing hardware boosts your site's uptime
- Get started on InterServer now.
Sead Fadilpasic
| Setup Time | Disk Space | CPU | RAM |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 minutes | 30 GB SSD - 480 GB SSD | 1 - 16 CPUs | 2 - 32 GB |
5. Fastest Dedicated Server Hosting
The cream of the web hosting crop, dedicated servers represent the utmost in computing, memory, storage, and performance. With an entire server’s resources committed to your website and applications, dedicated hosting is naturally the most performant tier of service.
As such, SSDs have proportionally less of an impact at the dedicated level. Certainly no less worthwhile, however, SSDs are best when supplementing optimized server configurations. The best dedicated hosting providers typically include some form of managed services or technical expertise to help customers fine-tune the right software, security, and performance settings to put the page load pedal to the metal.
LiquidWeb.com
Monthly Starting Price $55.50
- Best for mission-critical sites needing fully managed dedicated hardware
- Save up to 50% for 2 months with this HostingAdvice offer
- Fully managed or self-managed — Linux or Windows
- PCI-ready environments with 99.99% uptime SLA
- cPanel, Plesk, or InterWorx — 24/7 Heroic Support® included
- Get started on Liquid Web now.
Christina Lewis
| Setup Time | Disk Space | CPU | RAM |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 minutes | 383 GB SSD – 3.2 TB SSD | 4 - 32 cores | 12 GB - 192 GB |
See more fast dedicated servers »
6. Fastest WordPress Hosting
WordPress might be among the most popular technologies used online ̶ in fact, the free content management system is behind 43.4% of the web ̶ but it can be surprisingly difficult to host WordPress sites well. The platform can run awfully slow if the hosting environment is not configured well.
While your theme and files can certainly impact your site’s performance, investing in one of the fastest WordPress hosting plans will make the most notable and immediate difference. In addition to SSD-driven hardware, customers and their website traffic will be well served by adding a content delivery network and caching plugins.
InMotionHosting.com
Monthly Starting Price $3.29
- UltraStack NVMe hosting makes WordPress up to 40x faster
- Automatic WordPress updates, free SSL, and malware scans
- Free domain, free cPanel, and free expert migration on all plans
- BoldGrid drag-and-drop WordPress builder with free themes
- 90-day money-back guarantee and 24/7 award-winning human support
- Get started on InMotion now.
Dave McQuilling
| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 90 days | 100 – 300 GB NVMe SSD | FREE (1 year) | 5 minutes |
See more fast WordPress hosting providers »
What Is SSD Hosting?
SSD hosting, or solid-state drive hosting, uses SSDs instead of HDDs for storage. Solid-state drives are more desirable than hard disk drives because they use flash memory chips and are more reliable. With SSD hosting, customers can expect faster speeds on hardware that is smaller, more energy efficient, and more resilient.
Your hosting provider may offer one or two types of SDD hosting: NVMe or SATA III. SATA III offers greater compatibility with more devices because it’s been around longer, but NVMe drives are faster.
Which Is the Best Web Hosting Provider?
The best web hosting company for you depends on what type of hosting you’re looking for. The answer will be different depending on whether you’re looking for the best dedicated server hosting or the fastest WordPress hosting provider.
A top web hosting service will most likely include some key features to maximize your experience. Those features typically include a free SSL certificate, ample, if not unlimited, bandwidth, and 24/7 live chat customer support. For WordPress folks, the best WordPress host may also include a free content delivery network and free premium themes.
Browse through our list of the best hosts to find a web hosting company that will suit your needs.
The Fastest Web Hosting Services Yield Up to 20x Better Performance
Web hosting companies don’t always agree on much, but the language among SSD providers is the same: Not only are solid-state drives fast, they can make a site up to 20 times faster than those powered by traditional hard drives.
The growing popularity of SSDs among both hosting customers and providers means you can expect to see prices fall, storage capacities rise, and more choices as you shop for an SSD plan. The increased adoption of speedy storage devices will boost business for hosting customers around the world and improve user experiences.
In fact, some industry experts expect SSDs to rapidly replace hard-disk drives over the next few years, as the performance gains, increased customer satisfaction, and improved stability make them a sound investment and upgrade for hosting providers.
My quest for SSD hosting paid off, and hopefully the experiences and research we shared here help you rev your website’s engines, as well. If you’re still on the fence about a few hosts or if SSDs are truly for you, check out our host-by-host comparisons to see how your options stack up.
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