Over the years, countless people have asked me what I think is the best hosting service for WordPress. My answer? It depends.
There’s no one-size-fits-all web hosting company.
Your decision should depend on where you are in your blogger journey.
If you’re just starting a blog with zero visitors, you have different hosting needs than a blogger who gets more than 500,000 unique visitors per month.
You might be thinking, why should I listen to this no-name Larry guy? He has no experience with web hosting. He’s another blogger writing a “best of” hosting article for the affiliate commissions.
If so, you’d be wrong.
I successfully built a web hosting company from scratch and ran it for over twenty years. In my years of helping clients, I have worked with more than fifty hosting providers. I know the industry and all of the major players intimately.
Choose Your WordPress Hosting… Wisely
One thing is for sure: Not all WordPress hosts are created equal.
Your WordPress hosting is a critical part of your business. So choose carefully.
The right host can make blogging such a joy. The wrong one can make your life a living hell.
Web hosting is one of those services you don’t think about when everything is working but quickly notice when something goes wrong.
This list of recommended WordPress providers isn’t meant to be a comprehensive comparison of every single web hosting or WordPress hosting provider available. There are way too many hosting providers to review and compare. I created this list to help you decide where to host your WordPress blog.
One more thing I should mention — pretty much every hosting provider has an affiliate program. In fact, web hosting is the most popular category for affiliate marketing. However, I chose the services on this list because I truly believe they represent the best WordPress hosts.
The Best WordPress Hosting Comparison
For impatient people, here’s a top-level summary of the web hosting providers I recommend for WordPress.
Other Best Of Ratings
3 Factors When Choosing a WordPress Host
From my experience, there are three critical factors to check out when picking the best WordPress host:
- Speed — How quickly does your website load? A slow host can not only affect SEO but cause lost revenue as well.
- Customer Support — How quickly does customer service respond to you, and — more importantly — how quickly does the team resolve your problem?
- Reliability — If your website isn’t available for visitors, it can cost you hundreds, if not thousands, in lost revenue. Does the hosting provider have an uptime guarantee?
Notice something missing? I didn’t mention the price. Especially in today’s hyper-competitive market, WordPress hosting is a commodity. The hosting price is very cheap compared with the level of service you get. Sometimes, monthly service costs less than one cup of Starbucks coffee.
Cut out a few Starbucks coffees if you can’t afford a costlier web hosting service. The Latte Factor applies when starting a blog.
A Dirty Little Web Hosting Secret
Psst… I’ll let you in on a little-known web hosting secret.
Web hosting is a super-competitive business. It’s an arms race, with hosting providers trying to outdo each other.
The margins are razor-thin, and web hosting is a commodity. So marketing is sometimes based on gimmicks. Keep this in mind when deciding which hosting provider to sign up with.
For example, you’ll see offers for “unlimited” this or “unlimited” that.
There’s no such thing as unlimited disk space. All shared hosting services (which is what most of the companies on this list are) oversubscribe the hardware they manage. While they may offer unlimited or large resources, this space is not exclusive to you.
This is neither new nor uncommon. Nor is it limited to web hosting. For example, cellphone service companies do it all the time. After all, if everyone jumped on and made a phone call simultaneously, the systems would never support it.
So make sure you understand the provider’s definition of “unlimited” before you sign up.
What should you look for instead? Simply put, you want a fast-loading blog.
Faster loading means more sales. So much so that Google counts page load time as a key metric. Therefore, ensure you’re getting the fastest possible host for your price.
A simple rule of thumb: The more you pay, the more dedicated server resources you get.
Beginner bloggers don’t need many resources, but a popular website certainly does, and you should pay more.
Bluehost — Best Beginner Host
Larry's Take
| Price | $2.95 - $13.95 per month |
|---|---|
| Annual Discount | Yes |
| Promotion | Starting At $2.95/mo |
Key Features
- 30-day money-back guarantee
- A free domain name for the first year
- SSL certificate to secure your website
- 1-click install of WordPress
- 50GB of disk space for the lowest plan
So you’ve decided to become a blogger. Congrats! It’s a rewarding business that can easily be done as a part-time side hustle.
I detail the steps required to begin in my article on how to start a blog and make money.
If you’re starting out, I recommend creating your blog on WordPress. It’s the most popular blogging platform and gives you many options for creating a great-looking and robust website.
From my experience, the best WordPress hosting company for beginners is Bluehost.
Bluehost’s pricing starts at $2.95 per month. The company hosts over 2 million accounts, making it one of the largest web hosting companies. Bluehost is owned by a conglomerate called Newfold Digital, the same company that owns more than 83 other companies, such as HostGator, Domain.com, and Web.com.
If you are using one of Newfold’s other companies, don’t expect your service to be much different at Bluehost. That said, Newfold is a large company with many resources to dedicate to Bluehost.
WP Engine — Best Intermediate Host
Larry's Take
| Platform | Cloud |
|---|---|
| Price | $24 - $600+ per month |
| Annual Discount | Yes |
| Promotion | 4 Months Free - Promo WPE4FREE |
Key Features
- Designed specifically for WordPress hosting.
- A fast-loading website with built-in caching and CDN for images, CSS, and JavaScript.
- Never lose a file with nightly backups.
- More than 35 free SEO-friendly WordPress themes (StudioPress Genesis).
- A development, staging, and production environment you can use to avoid going down for an update.
- Free SSL certificate included.
- 60-day money-back guarantee.
If you’re a blogger who has been around the block, you’re ready to upgrade from the basics. You are making money at blogging and take downtime seriously. You want a web hosting company that specializes in WordPress.
WP Engine is easily my recommended choice. In my opinion, it’s the best-managed WordPress hosting company.
While WP Engine’s pricing might be higher than some other web hosting options, several key features are built into the service. WP Engine includes nightly backups, CDN, WordPress themes, and environments to test out new plugins. If you’re using a cheaper provider, adding on these features can really add up.
Linode — Best Advanced Host
Larry's Take
| Platform | Cloud, Linux |
|---|---|
| Price | $5 - $4,000 per month |
| Annual Discount | No |
| Promotion | $100 Free Credit |
Key Features
- NodeBalancer lets you handle more visitors to your WordPress site
- Block storage that can move from one VPS to another with ease
- Free DNS is included, so there’s no need for a third-party service
If you’re like me and you dream in PHP code and eat shell scripting for breakfast, then your most obvious choice would be a good VPS hosting provider.
That choice is Linode, which runs this very website.
Believe it or not, while I have some services at Amazon’s AWS, I cannot recommend it for a WordPress blogger. AWS can be pricey, and to be honest, the service can be quite confusing to use, even for the advanced techy.
I like a cloud hosting option that has direct and straightforward options. Linode fits that bill and is the best VPS hosting provider. The service isn’t a newcomer, either – it’s been around since 2003.
The advantage of using a cloud hosting service is that you can roll your setup. So you have the advantage of building your infrastructure for speed. For example, I recommend and use the webserver LiteSpeed. Not only is it the fastest web server, but it understands Apache configuration files and has a built-in caching server.
Unfortunately, most WordPress hosts don’t use it.
Linode has all of the services a blogger needs to scale its website. The service has pre-built images of all your favorite Linux distributions and can be up in running within minutes.
Linode offers load balancers, block storage, monitoring, and backup options. In addition, Linode has data centers around the world, including centers in Texas, New Jersey, Georgia, California, Germany, Singapore, England, and Japan.
Other WordPress Hosting
These 3, of course, aren’t the only web-hosting game in town. There are many others. Here’s a list of popular other web hosting providers that specialize in WordPress hosting as an option or have managed WordPress hosting.
| Review | My Rating | Backups | CDN | Free SSL | Website |
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| BigScoots | 8.0/10 |  |
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| Bluehost | 9.5/10 |  |
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| Cloudways | 8.5/10 | |
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| DreamHost | 9.0/10 | |
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| FastComet | 8.0/10 | |
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| Flywheel | 9.0/10 | |
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| GoDaddy | 7.5/10 | |
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| GreenGeeks | 8.0/10 | |
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| HostGator | 9.0/10 | |
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| Hostinger | 8.0/10 | |
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| HostPapa | 8.0/10 | |
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| InMotion Hosting | 9.0/10 | |
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| IONOS by 1&1 | 7.0/10 | |
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| iPage | 7.5/10 | |
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| Kinsta | 8.0/10 | |
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| Liquid Web | 9.0/10 | |
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| Namecheap | 9.0/10 | |
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| SiteGround | 8.5/10 | |
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| Web.com | 7.5/10 | |
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| WordPress.com | 8.5/10 | |
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| WP Engine | 8.5/10 | |
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| WPMU Dev | 7.5/10 | |
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| WPX | 9.0/10 | |
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WordPress Hosting FAQs
I’m just starting out. What do you recommend?
What is the purpose of an SSL certificate?
When should you switch from Bluehost to WP Engine?
However, there’s a rule of thumb: Switch when your site gets more than 20,000 unique visitors and/or makes over a few thousand dollars a month in revenue. In other words, switch to WP Engine when you can justify the higher fees.
Summary
If you’re just starting out, Bluehost is the perfect WordPress blogging platform. However, as you progress and make more money, you should eventually move on to WP Engine. For the more advanced, high-volume blogger who hosts multiple websites, Linode is the best option.
Readers: Please comment below if you have any web hosting questions.
Thanks for sharing Larry! How would you rate the ongoing maintenance cost for hosting in those three offerings – is it the same, or in some places you have to keep things up to date and spend lots of time maintaining them?