Basically, the internet is littered with hosting reviews and recommendations claiming that a particular company has the best dedicated WordPress hosting. But how do you know that their recommendations are 100% honest? Why do some bloggers rate one of these companies higher than others?
Colocation is a big deal; it’s a $16 billion industry in the U.S. alone, and growing at a rate of 10% per year. While it is difficult to determine the exact percentage of shared hosting, more than 50% seems like a reasonable guess.
How to find the right WordPress hosting
If you wish to identify the best WordPress hosting brands, you must do at least two things.
- Ask some real users of popular hosting platforms about their website building experience
- Testing on multiple hosts to measure the functionality and features offered by each company
From our point of view, unless a brand is highly rated among real users, they can’t be the best WordPress hosting provider. In order to find out the real data, we have conducted extensive WordPress hosting surveys so far in order to find out more about the nature of WordPress hosting, the specific expectations of our customers, and what would best meet their needs.
For each hosting company, we sign up for the most popular entry-level WordPress hosting plans and launch a basic WordPress site. Each installation uses the default theme, and enables several popular plugins:.Contact Form 7, ,Wordfence Security, ,Yoast SEO.
In terms of performance, each WordPress site is tested by
- UptimeRobot: Regular monitoring of mainframe uptime.
- Pingdom: Test the loading speed of the home page from several different geographical locations and tabulate the results.
1. SiteGround: the best WordPress hosting
The list of the best WordPress hosting would not be complete without SiteGround. This well-known hosting provider has long enjoyed a strong reputation in the WordPress community and has a large and loyal following. The servers optimized specifically for WordPress are not only powerful, but also very affordable – you won’t find WordPress-specific hosting services this cheap anywhere else.
It’s worth pointing out that SiteGround is one of the few hosting brands officially recommended by WordPress.org. For performance testing, we sign up and purchase the Starter Pricing plan, but for more optimized WordPress-specific hosting, we recommend going a step further with the GrowBig or GoGeek plans for some additional benefits such as advanced caching, segment management, advanced wildcard SSL certificates, free PCI Compliance(for e-commerce sites), etc.
With just a few clicks of a button, you can get WordPress up and running using the built-in installer, all easily and seamlessly. During the setup process, you can also choose your server location, and they have five data centers in the US, Asia and Europe.
Customer support is unparalleled, including chat, phone, work orders, social media and more. In addition to being able to access your account and resolve any issues, customer service representatives are familiar with WordPress and hosting technology and can help you with a range of other issues not related to hosting.
2. Kinsta: the best high-end WordPress hosting
As a WordPress boutique hosting provider, Kinsta specializes in optimizing hosting setups, but just because they’re a boutique doesn’t mean they can’t handle huge traffic loads.
In fact, Kinsta uses Google’s infrastructure and has Google Cloud Platform s all the features that make it easier to access and use. Unlike most of its competitors, this company does not use the traditional cPanel control panel, but instead provides users with a clean and modern custom admin backend that puts the focus on what’s important while hiding other unnecessary information.
Fully managed hosting means that Kinsta handles all server-related tasks for you, and when setting up your account, you can tell Kinsta to install WordPress sites and add-ons, all you need to do is check the checkboxes. The customer service staff knows WordPress very well and offers 24/7 chat and work order support to help you with any issues you may encounter.
3. BlueHost: the most affordable WordPress hosting
This is a very cheap WordPress hosting option, a shared WordPress hosting plan to be exact. Note that BlueHost is the only hosting provider on this list that doesn’t offer monthly subscriptions, with a one-time purchase of at least a 1-year paid plan. However, to a certain extent, the strong 30-day money-back guarantee more than offsets this.
In addition to the industry-standard cPanel control panel, they also offer a one-click WordPress installer — handled by an online service called MojoMarketplace — that unfortunately has a lot of shortcomings in the installation interface, can accidentally install multiple instances, and at specific steps What happens in a given step can be inconsistent and confusing. In our comparison between BlueHost and SiteGround, the latter instantly launches WordPress sites with just a few clicks of a button.
The support service provided via live chat is fast and friendly, helping to eliminate initial WordPress installation problems we encountered, and they will also set up a temporary URL to give you access to the upcoming site.
4. Flywheel: excellent entry-level WordPress hosting
Flywheel has a range of attractive pricing plans for those who want to enjoy dedicated WordPress hosting, but don’t intend to spend too much. Feature-wise, there is nothing wrong with Flywheel and you get excellent performance. The cheapest plan allows you to host a WordPress site that handles up to 5,000 unique visitors per month, and you’ll also get 5GB of disk space and free site migration.
All servers run on the Google Cloud platform, and hosting-related features include daily data backups, multisite support, segmentation management, SFTP, free SSL certificates, and more, and they also handle WordPress updates through the Flywheel main panel, rather than letting you modify the site backend. What’s really impressive is the ease of use of the administration platform and user panel, everything is clean and clear and you don’t need to be a web expert to perform basic site setup.
There are three ways to install WordPress.
- Free migration of existing sites from previous web hosting
- Create a brand new WordPress website from the Flywheel dashboard with a few clicks of a button
- Use Local by Flywheel The tool builds the site locally and then exports it to the remote Flywheel setup
Customer support is available 24/7, and you can also submit work orders at any time. Since Flywheel only allows building WordPress websites, the client team understands all aspects related to it. To let you help yourself to problems, there is also an extensive knowledge base with many useful articles on web hosting.
5. WP Engine: the most famous WordPress host
By choosing the entry-level plan, you can install 1 WordPress site that can handle up to 25,000 visits per month (extra charge for exceeding), which is more than enough for most new sites.
The registration process for WP Engine is very simple and the installation of WordPress is part of the registration step, in other words, you don’t need to launch the site separately, the technical team will do it for you. At the end of registration you will receive an email with all access credentials and important data about your new site. They take care of almost all speed issues, and their custom servers have powerful caching features that don’t even allow you to install additional caching plugins.
This hosting provider offers an excellent array of customer support options: a help panel and live chat, as well as a dedicated phone line if you subscribe to a more advanced plan. Overall, customer service is very attentive, and it’s a great choice for experienced users, web developers, or people who don’t want to go to the trouble of dealing with security issues.
6. GreenGeeks: the best green hosting
For the environmentally conscious, GreenGeeks is an interesting option, a hosting platform that takes into account the principle of maximum utilization, meaning that no resources are wasted anywhere. In addition, they claim that colocation gets everyAmperenumber, are passed throughBonneville Environmental FoundationTriple reinvestment in the form of renewable energy.
On the WordPress side, you’ll be able to subscribe to a dedicated WordPress hosting plan at an affordable price. All servers use solid state drives (which can significantly improve site performance), custom caching technology, free SSL certificates, Cloudflare integration, and more. In addition, you can set up a free domain name for a year.
GreenGeeks offers a convenient one-click WordPress installation, so you don’t have to do anything manually, and automatic updates make managing your website easier and more comfortable. When setting up your account, you can choose from data centers such as Phoenix, Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, Amsterdam, and more. Customer support includes email, phone and chat, with the most convenient option being live chat – available 24/7 and phone support available only during business hours.
7. DreamHost
For testing purposes, we chose DreamHost’s standard shared hosting plan, one of the most popular dedicated WordPress hosting plans in the market, with a popular solid-state drive server and an account sign-up process that was both easy and enjoyable.
The one-click installation option in the proprietary backend panel works directly and the user interface is very easy to navigate. Customer support is easily accessible via chat when we need help and they are able to resolve issues quickly.
8. GoDaddy
Despite the poor reputation of the user interface, the entire registration process was smooth sailing. This feeling persists all the way to the backend — a modernized layout for the cPanel, which is by far the easiest one to navigate.
GoDaddy is the only WordPress hosting provider on this list that does not support providing temporary URLs, and we had to set up a standard subdomain to test it. Initial attempts to contact customer support via live chat were not ideal, with wait times exceeding 40 minutes, so we called. In this regard, BlueHost allowed us to access the chat feature much faster.
Technical support was great, friendly and knowledgeable, they assisted us with setting up the subdomains and helped change the account options. The follow-up continued with a series of actions through the work order system to clear some minor DNS exceptions that were occurring with the domain registration service.
9. A2 Hosting
A2 Hosting is a relatively new brand when it comes to finding the best WordPress hosting services, but this company has earned a strong reputation for affordable pricing and above-industry-average performance. Their WordPress web hosting products are designed based on several principles: ease of use, high security, good performance, and an environment optimized specifically for WordPress.
All hosting accounts come with WordPress pre-installed, and you can also launch a brand new WordPress instance with a one-click installer. The hosting company prides itself on 24/7 customer support, and they claim to hand-pick their customer service team and work with only the most knowledgeable technicians. You can contact customer service representatives via live chat, email, hotline, etc., and according to our tests, they are willing to offer some solutions even if the problem is not entirely hosting-related.
10. HostGator
Signing up for a HostGator account was easy and we were soon logged into the backend panel – a very traditional cPanel interface – without any surprises. Launching the WordPress site was also easy using the built-in one-click installer, although the theme had to be updated after installation, with just a few clicks of a button.
We contacted customer support to set up a temporary URL and waited close to 10 minutes for the first hiccup we encountered in the process. They were not quick enough to point us in the right direction compared to other best WordPress hosting providers, and there was some fuss, but the end result was satisfactory.
A note on affiliates: Some of our stories include affiliate links to stores like Amazon, BlueHost, etc. These online stores share a small amount of revenue with us if you buy These online stores share a small amount of revenue with us if you buy something through one of these links, which helps support our work evaluating products.
