Want to know the answer right away? Based on our extensive testing and experience, the best web hosting is Bluehost.
From the title, you may think: What does Best Web Hosting really mean?
Our answer: A bit of everything
There are so many web hosting services out there that choosing is risky. You can find a web host that is very inexpensive, but does a terrible job keeping your site up.
You may also find an expensive web hosting package that looks like it will provide premium service, but doesn’t have the features you need.
No need to worry:
We have tried and tested over 100 web hosting services, (and counting) have helped 2,158+ bloggers and businesses select their suitable choice of hosting service.
Based on that experience, and taking into account crucial factors like performance, price, features, support, and more, we’ve found five great hosts stand at the top.
Without further ado, let’s dive into a detailed review of each Web hosting.
It’s is one of the most popular hosts around, in the big leagues of hosting: around since 2003, Bluehost powers over 2 million websites and has hundreds of support staff ready to go.
I see Bluehost’s main appeal in being an overall great web host that is user-friendly. It performs well, its pricing is overall standard, and it has great ease of use and customer support.
So yeah, Bluehost does limit you technically, but practically speaking the storage allowances are quite generous, especially for an entry level account. Plus, it’s SSD storage, not HD storage.
Besides that, you get unmetered bandwidth, basic SSL, an included domain, some parked domains, and one website. Higher tiers get more of everything, plus marketing offers and some site backup.
These features are honestly generous enough for most users, even if it doesn’t look so impressive on paper. Having said that, I do think Bluehost could be a little more generous to keep up with some of its smaller competitors, like GreenGeeks or FastComet (which is coming up next!).
For example, including backups or more websites for entry level accounts would be nice.
Something Bluehost does especially well is user-friendliness. While all the hosts on this list are fundamentally easy to use, Bluehost is particularly strong here.
The website builder is intuitive and Bluehost is confident enough with it that you can try it for free on their website.
The overall layout and account management is very streamlined and easy to use. The customer support is excellent: representatives are very helpful and the knowledge base is expansive.
For being an overall great host with decent pricing, good performance, solid features, and great ease of use and support, Bluehost has earned our first place on our GoDaddy Alternatives.
On the off chance that if you’re already on the other side with GoDaddy then we have a comprehensive guide that’ll get you over from GoDaddy to BlueHost easily.
Still curious about Bluehost? We’ve got you covered.
Pros
Cons
Data centers can be tremendously wasteful, something few of us consider in the face of everything else that is unfriendly to the environment.
GreenGeeks’ servers are designed to be very energy efficient. Beyond that, for every unit of power they use, they invest triple that amount in the form of renewable energy via an environmental foundation. This means using GreenGeeks not only doesn’t hurt the environment, it helps it!
GreekGeeks does more than ease your conscience. GreenGeeks’ pricing is well within the industry average, and can sometimes be on the lower side—so you’re not going to pay extra for the more ethical choice.
Plus, GreenGeeks’ shared plans are loaded with features.
This is higher quality than space on traditional hard drives, and usually comes in more limited quantities on other hosts.
Besides that, you get unlimited email accounts, bandwidth, and domains. This latter point is unique: most entry-level plans give you one free domain but will also only host one domain.
And if you need any additional help with domains, we have a list of the best domain registrars that offer some of the most best and creative domain names for your purpose.
GreenGeeks gives you a free domain, but lets you host as many as you can afford, which is excellent.
Besides that, you get unlimited MySQL databases (which is great), basic SSL (which you can upgrade), nightly backups, and Cloudflare CDN for free. That these are what you start with is very impressive, even if the renewal price is a bit high.
This means that their entry-level plan can be good enough for SMBs, not just individuals—to say nothing of their higher tiers, which of course are even better.
If that weren’t enough, GreenGeeks has great customer support and ease of use. It’s not exceptional in these areas, but that doesn’t matter much: it does well.
Best of all, though, is their great uptime and response time.
For four months in a row, our GreenGeeks had perfect uptime. To put a cherry on top, the response time is consistently low, making it not only one of the best hosts we’ve used in terms of uptime, but one of the most responsive.
To summarize, GreenGeeks has it all. The pricing plans are a little higher than usual upon renewal, but in total the prices are still within a fairly normal range for shared hosting.
In return, you get a ton of features and incredible performance. And it’s quite environmentally friendly—an easy first place.
You can read a more in-depth review of GreenGeeks here.
Pros
Cons
DreamHost is another major name in the world of web hosting, for good reason.
As you can see from the picture above, DreamHost powers over 1.5 MILLION websites—putting it in the big leagues of shared web hosting, along with Bluehost and GoDaddy.
DreamHost is overall solid for those who want an affordable, high-performing web host with solid features.
Just so we’re clear, these are the basic features and prices we’re looking at:
People looking into WordPress will feel right at home. DreamHost is 2nd place in our Best WordPress Hosting Services. Like Bluehost, DreamHost is one of the three major hosts that WordPress.Org itself recommends.
As you can see, DreamHost has quite a few features designed to make things easier for WordPress users—such as a free migration plugin for people using WordPress on a previous host, a free site builder for WordPress, and pre-installation of WordPress.
On top of that, DreamHost has decent pricing, in the general range of what most web hosts offer but a bit on the lower side.
And as an added bonus, DreamHost has monthly payment plans for those who don’t want to commit to a year up-front.
As far as performance goes, DreamHost is pretty good. They guarantee 100% uptime and will credit you for certain amounts of downtime.
But DreamHost’s ACTUAL uptime? A little more complicated. Check it out:
Usually DreamHost does indeed offer 100% uptime. But there was one day in February that threw off our average, with an abysmal 81% uptime.
But with that aside, DreamHost still has pretty solid uptime. As you’d guess, days like that are extremely rare.
You can see our full DreamHost uptime stats here. And you can read my full evaluation of DreamHost here for more overall information.
Pros
Cons
InterServer isn’t the most famous web host, but it’s still pretty well known. And it should be:
InterServer has been around since 1999 and has managed to uphold a solid reputation the whole time.
On price, InterServer is very simple. Most web hosts, as you’ve probably noticed by now, offer quite a few tiered options. The features and performance increase the more you pay.
Additionally, each pricing tier typically renews at a higher rate after the first term, and the low price advertised is dependent on you signing up for a certain period of time.
With InterServer, there is precisely ONE web hosting package. Ordinarily it’s $4 a month if you commit to 3 years, or $5 per month regularly. As you can see, there is a discount at the time of writing.
This is a one-size-fits-all hosting package, which makes sense given its features (more on that in a sec).
It’s still a good deal for the price, though. $4-$5 a month is a tad higher than the cheapest entry-level hosting, but it’s cheaper than high-tiered hosting with other companies.
Proportionately speaking, it’s a great price. So let’s get into what it offers:
One of the best things about InterServer is that it offers a lot of features. I mean, just take a look at these basics:
Some of these you probably expect, like free migration, SSL, and SSD storage.
But you also get a free website builder, and email isn’t even limited for the first tier. Heck, storage isn’t even limited.
Plus, InterServer’s default security features—known as Intershield Protection—go above the norm for shared hosting:
They also have something called “Inter-Insurance,” which means they’ll clean up hacked or infected accounts—especially WordPress sites—for free.
That’s part of InterServer’s generally great customer support. It’s a feature in itself.
Finally, one of the more unique and nice points about InterServer is its resource allocation. I already told you that you’re getting unlimited SSD storage. But this is why:
Spacing out customers on shared plans like this is less common, because of course it’s less profitable. It makes more sense to cram low-consuming customers together.
But by making sure each server is running at half-capacity, InterServer lets its customers make the most of shared hosting—with other companies, they’d be forced to upgrade to a higher plan if they consumed too many resources.
Now, at this point InterServer probably sounds like the undisputed first option. Not so fast:
One of the things that keeps InterServer from moving up higher on this list is performance, a crucial component.
We’ve been testing InterServer for a while. The newer results are better, but some of the older results still affect the evaluation.
These are the older results, from about a year ago:
As you can see, about a year ago uptime COULD be great, but it was often frequently pretty low. Anything below 99.95% is on the poorer side of average, with May and March of 2019 standing out.
Also, response times were quite slow in late summer 2019.
These are newer results:
As you can see, the response times have been very fast.
And the uptime has been closer to 99.99% or 100% (it says 99.966% because the most recent day is always counted as 0%, throwing off the average).
The uptime and response times have been good lately, but over the course of the last year things have been spottier.
You can view our full uptime records here, spanning more than a year and up until the present.
Anyway, that’s the deal with InterServer’s performance.
It’s not the end of the world, and ultimately InterServer is still a great bargain for many looking for affordable hosting that provides good features.
But if your absolute bottom line is performance, something else on this list would be better.
You can read more about InterServer here if you’re still unsure.
Pros
Cons
Compared to some of the companies here, Hostwinds is a lot younger, being founded in 2010.
However, in the last decade, Hostwinds has made a name for itself. Despite still being on the smaller side, its reputation is pretty solid, and it has even won some awards.
So, let’s not dilly-dally. Here’s the overview for Hostwinds:
Hostwinds actually has two sets of web hosting options. The first one is the regular web hosting:
As you can see, these are pretty normal prices. Not much higher than the norm, or much lower.
Then there’s the business web hosting:
These are naturally more expensive, but the prices are pretty decent proportionate to the features.
In GENERAL, the features are the same for regular web hosting and business web hosting.
However, business web hosting has less clients per server (meaning more room to grow) and better servers (for generally better performance, especially faster speeds).
Now, let’s get into those general features. These are the basics available for ALL web hosting plans (regardless of tier, or regular or business).
Pretty normal stuff here, with unlimited email accounts and a free dedicated IP being more unique/nicer points.
Aside from the dedicated IP, I’m particularly impressed by the included website builder:
Many web hosts include a website builder (many do not as well). But when they do so, it’s typically their own website builder.But for times they don’t, here are some of the best website builders.
That’s not bad in and of itself, as some hosts may provide great building software—but there’s always the risk that it’s sub-par, as the focus of the company is ultimately on hosting.
Weebly is a very popular company that is used pretty much solely for easy, drag-and-drop website building. So having it included in your hosting package is a great feature.
Beyond these features, storage and bandwidth are unlimited (or unmetered, to be more accurate).
The main difference between pricing plans, if you haven’t already caught it, is the number of domains you can equip.
Additionally, Hostwinds has pretty decent support that can be reached in quite a few ways:
And is generally pretty easy to use (again, Weebly’s site builder is a nice point here). However, it’s not as beginner-friendly as some other options here.
Hostwinds also has pretty solid data centers that appear to be well-secured:
But of course, here comes the real test. Do those data centers turn out great uptime?
The answer is simple—yes. And they guarantee as much:
It may not be a 100% guarantee…but that’s still a pretty good guarantee.
As far as response times go, Hostwinds is quite solid, but it’s still not the fastest around—more like, consistently the lower side of average.
So in general, Hostwinds is a very solid option. With great performance and some solid features, its pricing moves from being standard to good.
As you’d expect, we’ve got a more detailed look at Hostwinds here. Until then:
Pros
Cons
| Price | Response Time | Uptime | Customer Support | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bluehost | $2.95/mo | Good | ||
| GreenGeeks | $2.95/mo | Good | ||
| DreamHost | $2.59/mo | Great | ||
| InterServer | $1/first 3 mo | Good | ||
| Hostwinds | $3.29/mo | Ok |
If you’ve been reading this article ‘till now, and had the sneaking suspicion that none of these are the best option for you or your business…
You MAY be right. Web hosting is great for a lot of people, which is why it’s so popular, but there are other types of hosting.
Let’s start with web hosting for businesses. Now basically, this is still shared web hosting. And regular shared hosting can and IS used by businesses often.
But, many hosts offer web hosting that’s better for businesses. And many hosts offer special web hosting plans for businesses—take Hostwinds for example.
The main benefit is that you get a better compromise: more resources, better performance, but still the cost-effectiveness and ease of web hosting. To see more, check out my list of the best web hosting for businesses.
Some of those options:
Another type of hosting that overlaps with shared hosting is WordPress hosting.
Some WordPress hosting is basically shared web hosting with extra features. Some WordPress hosting is VPS or cloud hosting—more money, but also better security and performance.
The short version is that WordPress hosting can refer to different types of hosting, with the underlying component being, of course, that the packages are optimized for WordPress.
So if you really want a good host for WordPress in general, some of the options on this list are good—but there are still others out there, and they’re worth looking into.
Here are some of the best WordPress hosting providers, at a glance:
WordPress is the most popular content management system, or CMS, around, which is why you’ve heard of it already.
But there ARE other content management systems that are very powerful. Drupal is one such CMS: it’s also open-source and can be used on most hosts.
However, Drupal is oriented towards more advanced site management. As such, some hosts are better suited for Drupal.
Here are some of those best hosts:
Another popular CMS is Magento. Magento is for managing ecommerce sites, and is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms in the world.
A key point here, of course, is that you can have an ecommerce site with any of the web hosts listed here, or WordPress or even Drupal.
But Magento is for those who want to take the management of their ecommerce site to the next level, in which the whole CMS is about online business. Naturally, some hosts are better for Magento.
And if you’re trying to build an educational site, you can use more than a simple but expensive course-builder—there’s even a CMS just for flexibly building educational sites.
For that, you’ll need to use Moodle, and hosts that are especially great for Moodle.
Here are some of the best hosts for Moodle:
Now aside from hosts that are good for certain popular CMS software, you can search for a provider based on the technical nature of the hosting itself.
Of course, there’s also cloud hosting. Cloud hosting essentially gives you a DEDICATED slice of server resources, through virtual servers linked together.
Because your resources are private, you can use them more freely without worrying about affecting the overall server. And they’re more secure.
But one of the best things about cloud hosting is that it’s scalable: because you’re not as limited by physical hardware, you can start with a smaller amount of higher-quality resources and then scale up to larger and larger amounts as your site grows.
It’s naturally more expensive than regular web hosting, but much less expensive than dedicated hosting.
Here are some great cloud hosting providers:
On that note: dedicated hosts are great if you have a larger business and need the most premium hosting you can get your hands on.
Dedicated servers are what they sound like: they’re entire servers dedicated solely to the paying customer, and shared with no one else.
But be careful: even if you’re willing to pay up for premium service, you want to make sure you’re investing in the best dedicated server for you.
At a glance, here are some of the best providers of dedicated servers:
Now, aside from looking at different types of hosting, or at hosts that are better for certain content management systems, you can look at hosts that are better at certain types of languages.
PHP is a very powerful scripting language used to build some of the most visited sites in the world, and certain hosts provide great features and support for developing sites in PHP.
Some of the best providers of PHP hosting are right here:
Alternatively, you can look at hosts that are great for Java. Java is one of the most popular web development languages aside from PHP, and is often used as an alternative to it. It’s especially good for interactive content and mobile apps.
You guessed it. Here are some of the best hosts for Java:
Lastly, there’s ASP.NET. It’s not exactly a language, but a web application framework (that uses the .NET language) and especially great for dynamic projects.
ASP.NET hosting is a little more niche, but there definitely are hosts better suited for it than others, and even hosts that are great for ASP.NET hosting specifically.
Some of those hosts:
Clearly, there are a ton of different kinds of hosting out there—but if all of these sounded too overwhelming for you, then you probably should return your attention to shared web hosting.
It can still provide the best combination of affordability and functionality, and that’s why it’s the most sought-after type of hosting plan.
And on that note…
Despite the info-dump on the other types of web hosting up there, even just normal web hosting has a wide range.
You can see some of it from the items covered: some prioritize WordPress more. Others prioritize simplicity. And others are better at features.
What we prioritize while reviewing a hosting service are the following paradigms:
Budget while selecting a hosting service is essential to your motive. The features usually go hand-in-hand to what you pay.
There’s also the theory that if you pay more, you get more but there’s also a difference between what you want and what you require.
Newcomers are always welcome in the hosting community but innovation happens so fast that the learning curve keeps getting steeper. Which is why we test to find out how the average guy figures things out.
An underrated aspect of a hosting service. Most companies get it done with an SSL. Others offer an entirely custom solution. After all, you need to know what works best for you.
When you get tired of figuring stuff out yourself or get into some kind of trouble, customer support is your best chance. Whether it is guides, chat or email support, it can be measured.
If you’re brand-new or a hobbyist, it may be worth prioritizing “ease of use features” like website builders, site metrics, etc.
And if your bottom line is cost, go for whatever host is cheapest but has decent uptime. You can install WordPress on it for free, or another CMS, and manage a site with little extra payment.
If you need more advice, I recommend you read our guide to how we review web hosting companies—there’s a lot of good overlap that will help you choose.
Although finding the best web hosting might have been daunting at first, hopefully this list helped simplify things.
It should go without saying that you need to do your own research on which host is best for you.
And while I stand by this ranking as a good OVERALL ranking, it’s not going to be the best fit for everyone.
Some of you may prioritize the low cost of feature sets on InterServer or DreamHost. Others may like the simplicity and effectiveness of Bluehost, and so on, and so on.
As this list stands now, I think it’s a pretty good start. All these hosts are great web hosting options, but each has their own strengths.
GreenGeeks is affordable for the first year and a bit pricier after that, but offers a ton of features, has great performance, and is environmentally friendly.
Bluehost is probably the best simple-but-reliable host: pricing and features are okay, performance is very good, and it excels with user-friendliness and customer support.
DreamHost is a pretty good all-rounder web host. It’s got decent prices, and some solid features—and it’s one of the best hosts for WordPress or those who want to pay monthly.
InterServer is a unique host that has just ONE plan with a ton of features. It’s also a great all-rounder, but especially good for the bargain or value customer.
Hostwinds has more normal prices and features, but good performance, support, and the Weebly website builder, plus plenty of plan options.
You can try all of these for at least thirty days, and in some cases longer—so don’t wait. Happy hosting!
Hello, Gen Z! Ready to fly high with your dreams? Let no one stop you…
Let's talk about HideMyAss Alternatives! But first, let us talk about HideMyAss. If you’re interested…
These days the theme market is flooded and users are spoiled by choices. But if…
Thinking of starting a video log or want to host your video on a video…
So, you‘re looking for the best ecommerce hosting company for your needs? No matter whether…
Why Trust Us "We have been a paying customer for Turnkey Internet since March 2019.…