The Best WordPress Hosting

Siteground

Sitegroung currently hosts more than 2,000,000 domains, the number growing significantly with each passing day. This particular service is a very well-known name when it comes to popular web hosting services, and with a 98% satisfaction rate among its customers, it’s easy to see why.

Features:

• This service is a great choice for both shared hosting and WordPress hosting, and this is mostly thanks to the high quality caching capability of the service itself.
• The number of different options that Siteground provides for its clients makes it a great all-rounder when it comes to Cpanel hosting.
• You get options that allow any company to be able to host multiple sites at once, without getting charged the same rates as for a single site.
• Siteground probably has the best hosting options for multiple sites, as long as those sites are only expected to keep up with a more modest number of daily visitors.
• This service can also provide hosting for sites that aren’t powered by WordPress, as well as support a large number of different email types.

Issues:

• The servers can get overloaded if the number of daily visitors surpasses 10,000 on the StartUp plan, 25,000 on the GrowBig plan and 100,000 on the GoGeek plan.
• Limits the amount of disk space that any one site can use, making it problematic for larger sites that have more data that needs to be hosted.

Verdict:

Siteground is a great choice for companies that are looking to host multiple different sites at reasonable prices and on reliable servers. The service is not such a good choice for sites with high-traffic since the servers tend to buckle under the load, which can lead to crashes.

WP Engine

WP Engine emphasizes creative agility when it comes to allowing their customers to create their own sites from scratch. The platform they provide you with will allow you to fully utilize all of the many site building, management, and optimization tools in order to help you get your website off the ground.

Features:

• The plethora of different WordPress related options that the service provides, as well as the dedicated WordPress support staff, go a long way when it comes to making it a great choice for any company that’s specifically looking for reliable WordPress hosting for their sites.
• The service automatically manages your WordPress patches and updates, making sure that your site is constantly up-to-date and running as smoothly as possible.
• Most companies will also be happy to learn that all of the hosting options come with security measures that can stand up to hacking attempts or DDoS attacks.
• The platitude of available options really goes a long way when it comes to giving you the option to make your sites as simple or as complex as you might want.
• WP Engine also provides a few more advanced features, such as a staging area and data backups, which are some of the most vital options for any company.

Issues:

• A few of the more useful options that WP Engine has are hidden behind a paywall.
• The cheaper plans are known to have some pretty big performance issues, leaving you with no choice but to spend a bit more money.
• The service doesn’t come with any email options, unlike pretty much every other web host that has that feature included even in some of the cheaper plans.

Verdict:

WP Engine is undeniably one of the best WordPress hosting options that are currently available on the market. However, the cheaper plans are pretty lack-lusted, meaning that the pricier ones, that can be afforded by bigger companies or those with a more flexible budget, can offer a truly reliable service.

WPX Hosting

WPX Hosting tries to make the entire website creation and hosting process as accessible as possible. They strive to accomplish this by providing their users with an easy-to-use admin panel that’s devoid of useless jargon and that ensures that pretty much anyone can learn how to use it in no time at all.

Features:

• One of the most cost-effective hosting services that are currently available on the market.
• The option to host multiple sites is available, and even though the same charges apply for every single additional site and there are no bulk discounts, the prices are low enough that this option is still affordable despite that.
• The support team is known for its efficiency and great customer service, going so far as to state that the customers should expect a “30 second average live chat response time 24/7/365”.
• Provides a lot of options that make it ideal for companies that are expecting to see low to moderate traffic when it comes to their daily visitors.
• All of the plans that the service offers also come with free site migration and even free email hosting.

Issues:

• Server crashes become more frequent as the number of visitors to the site increases and the server has to deal with high load sites.
• The storage options across all of the plans are fairly low, which might cause more and more issues as the traffic on the site continues to grow.
• The bandwidth options can be limiting to you, unless you pay for the most expensive plan that the service has to offer.

WPX Hosting is a very affordable option when it comes to WordPress hosting services. Unfortunately, the low prices are off-set by the limited options that come with each plan, as well as the fact that the only actually useful features are only available if you buy the most expensive plan.

Kinsta

Kinsta has over 24 data centres worldwide, hosts over 30,000 gigabytes of traffic on a daily basis, and has a 97% satisfaction rating on it’s support among the client base. The company is relatively new, only being formed in 2013, but it has made a name for itself in the web hosting world thanks to the many useful features that it has to offer.

Features:

• The service comes with an emphasis on daily backups, ensuring that no data will be lost in the event of any unforeseen server problems.
• Kinsta also has a long list of different server locations that you can choose from, making it much easier to find a local server that’s near you and ensuring better performance for your site.
• The security that’s put in place makes sure that all of the data that’s hosted on the servers is properly protected against hackers and any other common vulnerabilities.
• Kinsta was built on top of the Google Cloud platform, which makes the sites that it hosts much more optimized for certain features.
• The service can be scaled up to enterprise-grade. While this is a bit pricey, if you can afford it, the perks are definitely worth the cost.

Issues:

• Kinsta is the most expensive web hosting service on this list, putting it out of range for a lot of companies that can’t match the prices that all of the plans charge.
• Kinsta also has certain strange bandwidth charging issues that are based on the number of site visits, but they can be reduced with the help of Cloudflare.
• CDN can sometimes be slow, but again, this issue can also be reduced significantly through the use of Cloudflare.

Verdict:

Kinsta provides you with a variety of features that ensure your site is optimized and properly protected. However, the prices of most of the plans are high enough to scare even some of the larger companies that have big pockets.

Cloudways

Cloudways makes the promise that they are focused on building great websites rather than on web hosting complexities. Their simple yet useful site creation tools seem to back this statement up. This service allows companies to have as much control as possible when it comes to how their sites are designed and how they are hosted.

Features:

• Cloudways can provide much faster WordPress specific hosting options than any other service on this list, which says a lot.
• The service also provides advanced caching capabilities, which is a great help when it comes to all kinds of hosting, not just WordPress.
• Cloudways can also provide all of its customers with access to dedicated servers in managed-style environments.
• The service also provides you with the option to host multiple sites, and they don’t even charge on a per-site basis.
• All of these features also come at incredibly cheap prices across all of the plans that Cloudways offers.

Issues:

• The quality of their WordPress hosting support can bear to see some improvement.
• No email hosting feature, even though it’s considered to be a vital part of any web hosting service.
• This web host is a little more complex than a lot of other similar services, which means that it might take a while before you can get accustomed to all of the functions that are available.

Verdict:

Cloudways is both cheap and fast, which makes it a great choice for a company of any size. The issues that it has, like the lacking customer support and intuitive interface, can be easily overlooked, especially when you consider the absurdly low price tag.

A Few Things to Keep in Mind

The Different Types of Hosting

Shared hosting – You’ll be hosted on a server with multiple other sites.

Managed hosting – Better security, backup, and customer support.

WordPress hosting – Better performance for sites that run on WordPress.

While these are generally the main differences between the different types of hosting services, the more important differences are stated in the plans.

Rather than choosing a specific type of hosting service, you should pick out a plan that can provide the features that you specifically need.

Are the More Expensive Options Worth It?

Depends on what you’re looking to gain from them.

The more expensive plans that web hosting services provide usually come with perks such as unlimited monthly site visitors, unlimited bandwidth and storage, access to priority customer support options, and so on.

Smaller companies might not have much use for these features, but as you expand you might want to look into the usefulness of any of these sorts of features and strongly consider investing in a more expensive plan.

Important Features That Should Be Included

Backups. Mistakes happen. Some are minor, and some can cost you hours of work. Finding a web hosting provider that has daily backups can really help save you from a lot of frustrations and potential issues.

WP Support. Basic customer support is something that’s present in pretty much every company. What you should focus more on is making sure that the provider you choose has a team of experts that can specifically provide WordPress support, because that really makes a difference.

PHP. This is the programming language that WordPress runs on. What’s important here is to make sure that the version that the web host runs is the latest one, since that can really affect the performance of the sites.

Staging area. This has recently become a must-have inclusion in any WP service, and that’s mostly due to the fact that it can be used to test out the changes that you’ve made to your site before they go live.

SSL certificate. SSL certificates add an additional level of security between your website and the information visitors are sharing on your site by creating a secure and encrypted link between your website and server. Most web hosting services provide this certificate, and some even include it as a free feature in all of their plans.

What Is the Best Choice for You?

Siteground has very fast and reliable servers when it comes to low-traffic sites, making it a strong candidate for any small to medium-sized company.

WP Engine has the best WordPress hosting options and support, making it the go-to for any larger company that can afford to pay for the more expensive plans that the service has to offer.

Cloudways is a good all-rounder when it comes to both price and speed, meaning that it’s a great choice for any company, as long as they can get over the fact that it’s not Cpanel compatible.

Keep in mind that these are only our recommendations. Every company is different and not all of them will have the same requirements, meaning that you might want to look into the services that we mentioned and draw your own conclusions as to which would be the best choice for you.