12 Best: Web Hosting With Instant Setup & Activation (Feb. 2024)

Web Hosting Instant Setup Activation

Buying web hosting with instant setup and activation is like wearing that ultra-flattering new clothing purchase right out of the store. Instant gratification is a powerful motivator, leading many consumers to bypass a large future benefit for the sake of immediately experiencing a slightly lesser prize.

Why spend a frustrating hour or two assembling furniture when you could have it delivered all ready to go? When it comes to getting started with the best web hosting services, the same forces are at play. Virtualization and automation have undoubtedly sped up server setup, but clicking the buy button doesn’t guarantee you can immediately start building your site.

Read on as we explore the various hosting options that boast the shortest paths to success, whether you’re looking for a simple and affordable shared hosting space or a complex virtual or dedicated server to power your online business presence.

Best “Cheap” Web Hosting With Instant Setup & Activation

The availability of instant web hosting plans is roughly tied to the amount and complexity of computing resources. Shared hosting, for instance, is the simplest and smallest type of hosting — and comes with instant account activation practically by default. Servers’ storage, bandwidth, and memory are already partitioned into hundreds or even thousands of hosting environments on standby for the rush of customers.

As the most affordable and beginner-friendly type of hosting plan, shared hosting comes with a ton of readily accessible features right out of the box. Many plans, including the ones we recommend below, come in a variety of flavors automatically outfitted with free perks like easy-to-use cPanel hosting and one-click installations of popular software programs like WordPress.

Amazingly, just about any cheap web hosting service worth signing up for will be ready to go the second you complete the purchase. Whether you’re comparing free vs. paid hosting plans or seeking out the processing prowess of unlimited storage and bandwidth, these hosts will make sure your site will be ready to publish as fast as you can build it.

1. Hostinger.com

Hostinger Review

Monthly Starting Price $2.49

  • 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
4.9 ★★★★★ Our Review

Hostinger: Our Expert's Review

Laura Bernheim (HostingAdvice.com): 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 SSD - 200 GB SSD FREE (1 year) 3 minutes

2. HostArmada.com

HostArmada Review

Monthly Starting Price $2.49

  • FREE cPanel integration and Softaculous apps
  • Auto daily backups and web application firewall
  • Reliable and redundant cloud servers
  • FREE SSL encryption and website migration
  • 99.99% uptime guarantee
  • Get started on HostArmada now.

CHEAP
RATING
4.8 ★★★★★ Our Review

HostArmada: Our Expert's Review

Lynn Cadet (HostingAdvice.com): HostArmada’s cloud network spans four continents, with datacenters in Europe, the US, Asia, and Australia. Its server redundancy and website optimization features allow users to run stable and performant sites for end users across the globe while running a simplified hosting environment. Go to full review »

Money Back Guarantee Disk Space Domain Name Setup Time
45 days 15 GB SSD - 40 GB SSD FREE (1 year) 3 minutes

3. ScalaHosting.com

ScalaHosting Review

Monthly Starting Price $2.95

  • 1-click install for WordPress, Drupal and 400 others
  • Unlimited email accounts, databases & bandwidth
  • 24/7 tech support for beginners and pros alike
  • 12-month or 36-month plan at $2.95 /month
  • Anytime unconditional money-back guarantee
  • Get started on ScalaHosting now.

CHEAP
RATING
4.8 ★★★★★ Our Review

ScalaHosting: Our Expert's Review

Laura Bernheim (HostingAdvice.com): It's tough to argue with a shared hosting service that comes with all-SSD storage and unlimited bandwidth, databases, and email accounts. ScalaHosting provides all the above and several other premium features for a very affordable price. Go to full review »

Money Back Guarantee Disk Space Domain Name Setup Time
30 days 10 GB SSD - 50 GB SSD FREE (1 year) 6 minutes

See other top affordable hosts »

Best “VPS” Web Hosting With Instant Setup & Activation

Taking the next step up the hosting ladder, VPS hosting represents the midway point between shared hosting and dedicated servers. You’ll still be sharing a physical server with a handful of other site owners, but resources are completely separated and focused on each project.

That extra computing oomph, however, comes with more setup processes and configuration requirements to ensure your hosting environment perfectly matches the needs you have. This VPS setup tutorial will give you a sense of the work that needs to happen to have a website-ready server space, such as installing an operating system or adding SSL certificates.

Fortunately, many hosts will offer pre-configured VPS plans that use industry-standard specifications meant to appeal to the widest range of customers. You may sacrifice a bit of flexibility, but instantly available VPS hosting is well worth avoiding the lengthy time spent in the command line interface. Take a look at our favorite hosts below:

4. Hostinger.com

Hostinger Review

Monthly Starting Price $5.99

  • Cloud-based SSD storage for speed and reliability
  • Double your RAM with burst periods
  • FREE dedicated IPv4 and IPv6 addresses
  • Custom control panel for reboots and OS installs
  • HostingAdvice readers enjoy more than 50% off
  • Get started on Hostinger now.

VPS
RATING
4.9 ★★★★★ Our Review

Hostinger: Our Expert's Review

Laura Bernheim (HostingAdvice.com): Hostinger's laser focus on providing affordable hosting solutions shines brightest with the company's VPS packages. The company provides six different virtual server plans, including one that costs less than $5. Go to full review »

Setup Time Disk Space CPU RAM
6 minutes 50 GB NVMe - 400 GB NVMe 1 - 8 cores 4 GB - 32 GB

5. Kamatera.com

Kamatera Review

Monthly Starting Price $4.00

  • Cloud VPS that's more flexible and affordable
  • Load balancer, firewall, and managed services
  • Premium Intel CPUs with 300% more power
  • Choose between monthly or hourly billing
  • Sign up today for a 30-day FREE trial
  • Get started on Kamatera now.

VPS
RATING
4.8 ★★★★★ Our Review

Kamatera: Our Expert's Review

Laura Bernheim (HostingAdvice.com): Backed by cutting-edge cloud computing technology, Kamatera adds instant and limitless scalability to the VPS hosting marketplace. Each cloud or virtual server is equipped with blazing-fast SSD storage and Intel Xeon Platinum CPUs. Go to full review »

Setup Time Disk Space CPU RAM
5 minutes 20 GB SSD - 4 TB SSD 1 - 32 cores 1 GB - 128 GB

6. A2Hosting.com

A2 Hosting Review

Monthly Starting Price $2.99

  • Turbo server & cache options for faster page loads
  • Well-built plans starting with 4GB RAM
  • FREE CDN plus auto-installs with Softaculous
  • Multilingual support and up to unlimited databases
  • Enhanced security with and daily kernel updates
  • Get started on A2 Hosting now.

VPS
RATING
4.8 ★★★★★ Our Review

A2 Hosting: Our Expert's Review

Alexandra Anderson (HostingAdvice.com): While A2 Hosting's turbocharged shared hosting platform gives site owners ample room to grow, the company's tech prowess is on full display with its portfolio of VPS options. Ranging from unmanaged, bare-metal environments to stress-free, fully managed space, A2 Hosting is sure to have the perfect option for your expanding online presence. Go to full review »

Setup Time Disk Space CPU RAM
7 minutes 20 GB SSD - 450 GB SSD 1 - 10 cores 1 GB - 32 GB

See other top VPS hosts »

Best “Cloud” Web Hosting With Instant Setup & Activation

Truth be told, instant setup and activation is one of cloud hosting’s most common — and appealing — traits. A network of connected servers all share the workload in hosting and delivering your site to visitors, providing high levels of stability and scalability as your project grows.

Computing resources can be instantly scaled up or down to meet traffic demands, so there shouldn’t be much surprise that your cloud hosting account will be completely ready to go the minute you’ve signed up.

Cloud hosting comes with many benefits, ranging from hardware and cost efficiency to enhanced security and control. While you can fine-tune and tweak your cloud environment in many of the same ways as VPS hosting, you likely won’t want to mess with that. Instead, seek out hosts like the ones coming up that will spin up your cloud instance in an instant.

7. Kamatera.com

Kamatera review

Monthly Starting Price $4.00

  • Ultimate scalability with limitless customizations
  • Create and deploy servers in 60 seconds
  • Easily add load balancers and firewalls
  • Stellar 99.95% uptime guarantee
  • Sign up today for a 30-day FREE trial
  • Get started on Kamatera now.

CLOUD
RATING
4.9 ★★★★★ Our Review

Kamatera: Our Expert's Review

Laura Bernheim (HostingAdvice.com): Starting with more than 60 operating system images to choose from, Kamatera is a strong option for developers who know exactly what environment works best for their project. Customize your cloud server as needed and deploy in less than a minute. Go to full review »

Setup Time Disk Space CPU RAM
5 minutes 20 GB SSD - 4 TB SSD 1 - 32 cores 1 GB - 128 GB

8. IONOS.com

1&1 IONOS review

Monthly Starting Price $4.00

  • Start with $100 in credit for your first month
  • Auto scaling with premium Intel processors
  • Customized operating systems (Linux or Windows)
  • Deploy Linux instances in less than 1 minute
  • Transparent costs and by-the-minute billing
  • Get started on 1&1 IONOS now.

CLOUD
RATING
4.8 ★★★★★ Our Review

1&1 IONOS: Our Expert's Review

Alexandra Anderson (HostingAdvice.com): Boasting 99. 998% platform availability, the popular cloud hosting services from 1&1 IONOS deploy more than 2,500 virtual machines each week. Go to full review »

Setup Time Disk Space CPU RAM
6 minutes 10 GB NVMe - 640 GB NVMe 1 - 24 cores 512 MB.- 48 GB

9. Cloudways.com

Cloudways review

Monthly Starting Price $8.25

  • Managed cloud hosting with 24/7/365 monitoring
  • Choose from 5 popular cloud providers
  • Auto-healing cloud servers with FREE backups
  • 3-day free trial with no credit card required
  • Host unlimited apps with no contract lock-in
  • Get started on Cloudways now.

CLOUD
RATING
4.6 ★★★★★ Our Review

Cloudways: Our Expert's Review

Alexandra Anderson (HostingAdvice.com): If you can’t beat the cloud provider behemoths, offer their infrastructure as a service. Cloudways gives customers their choice of cloud platform: AWS, Google, Linode, Digital Ocean, or Vultr. Go to full review »

Setup Time Disk Space CPU RAM
8 minutes 20 GB SSD - 4 TB SSD 1 - 96 cores 1 GB - 384 GB

See other top cloud hosts »

Best “Dedicated Server” Web Hosting With Instant Setup & Activation

With great power comes great responsibility — and usually a wait of at least a few hours. Since each customer has complete control over an entire server, there are many variables and configurations that must be exactly right. Often, the hosting company’s sales team must communicate your desired specs to the engineers and system administrators responsible for building your machine. The odds of having your exact server configuration in a rack and all ready to go are extremely long.

Instant dedicated servers are pretty rare and sometimes require you to stretch the exact definition of an instant. A handful of top hosts for dedicated servers, like InterServer and Hostwinds, will deploy standard, pre-built servers within 15 minutes or less. That’s obviously much less time than the standard 24- to 48-hour span most companies allot to set up and spin up your server. But customers lose a great deal of flexibility when it comes to the various programs and ways to tailor their server.

Of the few providers that do promise instant access to dedicated servers, most concentrate on looking for user-friendly ways to save customers time and stress. By choosing the nitty-gritty details like operating system, firewalls, and other technical aspects of server setup, hosts can assure you’ll have a stable, well-supported environment on which to expand your online business presence.

At the other end of the spectrum, however, are the experts at Liquid Web. Instead of taking the easy way out, the Michigan-based company created an entirely different product. Cloud dedicated servers introduce the scalability and immediacy of cloud hosting without the constraints of shared resources. The host’s on-demand servers are always available and provisioned instantly, providing a promising option for advanced users and businesses. Take a look at our reviews below to compare Liquid Web’s cloud dedicated servers with the more standard options of A2 Hosting and Bluehost:

10. LiquidWeb.com

Liquid Web Review

Monthly Starting Price $75.00

  • Linux or Windows with choice of 3 control panels
  • 100% network and power uptime guarantees
  • Custom configurations and instant provisioning
  • Auto-migrations, backups, and real-time monitoring
  • Block/object storage and load balancer add-ons
  • Get started on Liquid Web now.

DEDICATED
RATING
4.8 ★★★★★ Our Review

Liquid Web: Our Expert's Review

Alexandra Anderson (HostingAdvice.com): Liquid Web's strong suit is managed dedicated server hosting. The company owns and operates five state-of-the-art datacenters in the US and Europe works tirelessly to build and maintain custom solutions for added performance and security. Go to full review »

Setup Time Disk Space CPU RAM
8 minutes 480 GB SSD - 960 GB SSD (+ 2 TB SATA) 4 - 16 cores 16 GB - 64 GB

11. A2Hosting.com

A2 Hosting Review

Monthly Starting Price $105.99

  • Root access and 3 levels of server management
  • Expertly managed servers deployed instantly
  • Choose from 4 datacenters across 3 continents
  • FREE redundant SSD storage in RAID-1 arrays
  • Choice of 13 Linux operating systems
  • Get started on A2 Hosting now.

DEDICATED
RATING
4.4 ★★★★ Our Review

A2 Hosting: Our Expert's Review

Alexandra Anderson (HostingAdvice.com): Whether you're looking for managed or self-managed hosting, A2 Hosting offers three extremely reliable dedicated server plans to meet your needs, depending on your levels of comfort and experience. With A2 Hosting's Unmanaged Flex Dedicated Server plan, users get administrator-level control with root access and their choice of Linux operating system. Go to full review »

Setup Time Disk Space CPU RAM
7 minutes 1 TB SSD (RAID-1) 4 - 16 cores 16 GB - 256 GB

12. Bluehost.com

Bluehost Review

Monthly Starting Price $91.98

  • Instant provisioning for all Bluehost server plans
  • Minimum 3 dedicated IP addresses
  • Modern hardware, built and maintained in house
  • 24/7 expedited support from a dedicated team
  • Sign up to save 49% on your first term
  • Get started on Bluehost now.

DEDICATED
RATING
4.5 ★★★★★ Our Review

Bluehost: Our Expert's Review

Ryan Frankel (HostingAdvice.com): Built on modern technology, with a minimum of four CPU cores per dedicated server, Bluehost offers reliable and flexible dedicated hosting options at an extremely reasonable price. We continually praise the company's shared hosting options for having fantastic hardware and a great management console, and the brand's dedicated server offerings are no different. Go to full review »

Setup Time Disk Space CPU RAM
8 minutes 500 GB - 1 TB (RAID-1) 4 cores, 4 - 8 threads 4 GB - 16 GB

See other top dedicated server hosts »

How Do I Choose a Host?

Unlike shopping for clothes or shoes, you can’t really try on most web hosting before you buy. Month-to-month hosting plans and services with lengthy money-back guarantees get the closest to limiting your upfront expenses, but you’ll want to take your time researching and evaluating hosting providers before you choose a host and commit to a long-term plan.

Before you get to that phase, though, take stock of what exactly you need in a hosting partner. Small blogs and portfolio sites won’t need a full dedicated server, just like a rapidly growing business won’t want to squeeze itself into a cheap shared hosting plan. Set a budget and prioritize the importance of factors like the amount of storage, accessibility of customer support, and specific hardware or software options.

Once your parameters are set, start comparing the available options. Read reviews (we’ve got plenty) to learn about the personal experiences of customers and expert site owners while keeping an eye out for distinguishing features that particularly resonate with your exact needs. Every plan will cover the basics, but seemingly little differentiators like SSDs or cPanel can have a massive effect on your hosting happiness and give your website an edge.

Which is the Fastest Web Hosting Provider?

Whether it’s account activation and server setup or page load speed and support response times, speed is one of the most important factors to consider when evaluating web hosting companies. Shortening your time to market can have a tremendous impact on your business success, well before your website or application goes live.

Image of servers in a datacenter

Server setup and activation is a critical component to the speed and security of your website.

Once you’ve published, the speed at which your host can deliver your website to visitors and potential customers is absolutely critical. Google has publicly stated that performance, of both desktop and mobile sites, is part of the search engine’s ranking algorithm. If your site takes three seconds or more to load, you stand a good chance of losing more than half of your audience.

When shopping for high-speed hosting, instant setup and activation are certainly a good sign the provider places a special emphasis on protecting your time. From there, take a look at the type of storage available. Modern solid-state drives, or SSDs, operate up to 20 times faster than traditional hard disk drives. The plans may be slightly more expensive and come with a little less capacity, but the investment is rather minimal for the performance boost you can expect to receive.

Another common feature to improve your site performance is including a content delivery network, or CDN. CDN hosting, through services like Cloudflare, distributes your data across a global network of servers and puts it as close to visitors as possible. Take a look at our research into the fastest web hosts that specialize in certain forms of services:

What Does It Cost to Host a Website?

As you can see from our reviews earlier in the article, web hosting prices can vary wildly depending on the type of server space you’re looking for. Here’s a rough guide to the types of hosting and the prices you can expect to pay. Keep in mind that these are monthly prices; hosts commonly ask you to sign up for at least a year to get the best deals.

Type of Hosting Estimated Price Best for:
Shared $2-$5 per month Beginners, bloggers, new businesses
Cloud $5-20 per month Small businesses and developers
VPS $10-$50 per month Medium businesses, app developers
Dedicated $80-$120 per month Large companies

From free-for-life to hundreds of dollars a month, hosting plans only account for a fraction of the expenses associated with running a professional-grade website or application. Here are some other costs to keep in mind:

  • Domain name: With many plans, a one-year domain registration is included for free. While the most expensive domain names can cost billions of dollars, you’ll most likely spend between $10 and $20 per year.
  • Design and development: Sure, there are countless website builders and open-source programs to help beginners create their first site, but do you want to deal with all the time and stress? You can create a basic site for zero to little investment, or you may want to consider hiring a professional. Those services can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.
  • Content: Similar to the look and feel of your site, what about all the words and images you’re looking to display? Are you planning on creating it all yourself, or will you need to outsource the work? Hiring a writer or designer may also mean you’ll have to purchase stock photos.
  • Add-on services: As your site grows, what other tools can help you maximize your reach? You may want to add email hosting, a CDN, domain privacy, more computing resources, marketing programs, or productivity software like G Suite or Microsoft Office 365.

Depending on the hosting provider, some of those last services may be included with your plan for free or available for a slight upcharge. Once you figure out which upgrades are important to your online success and how much you can feasibly spend, the path will narrow into a select few choices and a more manageable decision.

Instant Web Hosting With No Setup Fees Saves Time and Money

The world of online business can turn in an instant. Being able to instantly launch a new brand, product, or marketing campaign online is a valuable boost to that project’s success. While the steps to launching a new website can still take quite a bit of time, the right web hosting plan can give you a boost of immediacy and urgency.

Perhaps surprisingly, you typically won’t even have to pay extra for the head start — especially with the hosts we’ve recommended in this article. As some of the most innovative companies in the industry, these hosting providers look for ways to automate time-consuming configuration processes and skip the setup or activation fees.

Your business or project will already be pulling you in hundreds of different directions. Consider simplifying your operations by signing up for managed hosting plans that further ease the stress of technical jargon and high-stakes security. The upgraded service may come with a slightly steeper price tag, but our bet is the added revenues and growing traffic will quickly offset those costs.

After all, with all the attention paid to website performance and page loading times, why not apply the same standards to your hosting plan?

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