Find the top affordable web hosting providers offering scalability, reliable support, and user-friendly features for every website need. Compare Hostinger, Bluehost, HostGator, and more to make the best choice for your budget.
By Brad Nakase, Attorney
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Have a quick question? I answered nearly 1500 FAQs.
When launching a new website all you truly need is an affordable, user-friendly hosting company with excellent customer support and sufficient scalability for the foreseeable future.
For some time, we’ve tried dozens of cheap hosting companies. Almost every shared hosting service available has also undergone extensive testing by us. Our research indicates that three hosts are suitable for the majority of newly launched websites.
Choose Hostinger if you’re looking for cheap hosting that strikes a balance between service, scalability, and ease of use. The cheapest plan includes everything you require to get started, making it the most beginner-friendly supplier.
If choosing from thousands of templates on your own seems daunting, Bluehost has an excellent WordPress drag-and-drop site builder. A built-in AI site builder will do all the labor-intensive work for you.
HostGator offers inexpensive WooCommerce hosting with features specifically designed for online stores, making it a cost-effective choice for building an e-commerce website.
But there are more choices besides these three. Other excellent options include DreamHost, Ultahost, A2 Hosting, GreenGeeks, Web.com, and SiteGround.
There are several varieties of hosting available. Shared plans, cloud services, dedicated servers, Virtual private server (VPS) packages, and reseller plans that enable you to resell hosting to third parties are all available.
Plans for shared hosting are typically the most economical. It’s best to concentrate on this category if you’re looking for cheap hosting.
If you’re just starting out with a new website or don’t anticipate receiving a lot of traffic, it is logical to go with cheap hosting. If you don’t have many visitors to your website, you won’t actually need the finest performance anyway.
A warning: Stay away from free hosting.
In principle, free web hosting packages seem appealing. Spending a few dollars per month is worth it if your goal is to create a professional website that will ultimately bring you money.
There are a lot of disadvantages to free hosting, such as restricted storage, bandwidth, ads, and constant crashes. You frequently have no say in the safety of your website and will probably not have any control over your domain name. The performance of your website is also not a priority for free hosting companies.
Fortunately, starting off with web hosting doesn’t have to cost a lot of money.
Our favorite low-cost web hosting company is Hostinger because it offers the ideal balance of high-quality hosting at a reasonable cost.
By offering modest storage space for entry-level plans, some hosts attempt to keep costs down.
This is not how Hostinger does things. Instead of being limited to ten or twenty GB, the cheap hosting plan comes with an incredible 100 gigabytes of SSD storage. There are no better offers for that much space, at only $2.99 a month.
This is ideal if the files on your website are enormous, taking up an extensive amount of space, such as gifs, movies, and photos.
As you may host as many as 100 websites on the most affordable plan, it’s much more advantageous if you’re hosting several websites.
You must prepay for a four-year term in order to receive that $2.99 price tag.
Although that might seem pricey, all four years are actually under 150 dollars. You’ll spend that on many others only in the first year.
For free, each website under the entry-level plan gets an SSL certificate, unlimited bandwidth, a domain name for free, a complimentary email address, no-cost website migrations in the event that you’re switching hosts, and automated WordPress upgrades for hassle-free administration.
The drag-and-drop website builder offered by Hostinger is an alternative.
You don’t have to create your website from scratch either because Hostinger provides an easy-to-use onboarding process. It doesn’t get any simpler—it guides you through each and every step.
Also, a web firewall, virus scanner, and integrated DDoS protection let you feel secure about the security of your website. One less expense to worry about is that every Hostinger name includes free WHOIS protection.
It feels rich even if it is inexpensive. The features are exactly the same as those of any other host, if not more.
If you require additional space or wish to have a CDN, additional WordPress tools, e-commerce functionality for the dragging and dropping builder, plus on-demand backup, you can purchase up to 200 Gigabytes of NVMe storage—which is considerably quicker than SSD—for less than four dollars per month.
Better DDoS protection, increased performance, and AI capabilities designed especially for WordPress are also included in the Business plan.
You may host dozens of websites on the same account and yet have plenty of functionality and file space for just two extra bucks a month.
Hostinger offers some of the greatest customer support representatives in the business, regardless of the plan you select. All of the agents we spoke with were courteous, informed, and helpful. That being said, particularly during busy periods, contacting help can take a little while.
Hostinger provides cloud & VPS plans in addition to shared hosting, so there’s no need to worry about moving to a new provider anytime soon. This allows for lots of opportunities for growth.
Similar to Hostinger, Bluehost provides round-the-clock assistance through many channels, includes all necessary features, and allows for ample growth without requiring you to move to a different provider.
Nonetheless, it is among the select trio of hosting companies that the WordPress developers formally endorse (the selection we make for the majority of websites).
Additionally, WordPress is simple to use, adaptable, and highly configurable. Although Bluehost makes utilizing it as easy as possible, it’s not the most user-friendly website platform available. You have the platform pre-installed, and there are plenty of free lessons available to help you learn what you must know.
Bluehost’s error-proof onboarding process guides you through every step, even if you’ve never constructed a website before.
All of the other providers on this list are similarly excellent with WordPress; however, Bluehost also offers a range of hosting plans and features specifically tailored to WordPress users using WooCommerce.
For the first twelve months, the cheap hosting plan offered by Bluehost costs $2.95 per month. When it renews after one year, the monthly cost is $11.99. Not all hosts increase costs after the initial contract, even though Bluehost’s renewal pricing could come as something of a shock.
If you want to take advantage of the finest offer from Bluehost, you may pay for 3 years in advance and sign in for a 36-month term. This increases the monthly payment to $4.95, but by postponing the renewal charge for three years, you end up saving over $140.
You may host one website and get 10 gigabytes of data storage with Bluehost’s entry-level sharing plan. To assist in getting you started, it also includes free themes for WordPress and a free SSL certificate.
Your website may be updated and customized more easily than ever with Bluehost WonderSuite, in addition to WordPress themes. Even if you have never created a website before, you will be capable of dragging and dropping what you want and creating a polished, unique website that fits your brand.
If this is your first time hosting a website, the initial plan is a terrific place to start overall.
Forty GB of storage, regular backups for a year, a free CDN, and free virus scanning are all included in Bluehost’s Choice Plus plan. This plan gives better value for your money if you can afford to shell out a few extra dollars a month.
Except in the event that you host more than one website or plan to do so immediately, you don’t really need it.
Bluehost offers a user-friendly platform that walks you through building your first website, regardless of the package you select. You can choose to bypass the guided setup procedure if you are an experienced user. You will receive a comprehensive tutorial on how to set up your website from beginning to end.
Additionally, installation of WordPress and core upgrades will be performed automatically for you, saving you time and ensuring that your website always runs the newest version of its software.
The quantity of upsells that appear during the process of checkout is Bluehost’s biggest drawback. CodeGuard Basic & SiteLock Security are two that are selected beforehand for you if you don’t actually need them; they cost $2.99 a month each.
You may safely deselect these and get comparable functionality elsewhere for no cost.
Apart from that, Bluehost offers a longer free trial period for many of its features. After the first year, additional fees apply for daily backups, free domain privacy, and your SSL certificate (if you choose the least expensive plan).
It can be intimidating and perplexing to build your first e-commerce store. To make the procedure as simple as possible, HostGator’s e-commerce hosting plans provide everything you require pre-installed.
It is technically possible to start an online store with any host on our list. HostGator merely streamlines the process initially and offers a number of complimentary options that are exclusive to it.
It is somewhat more costly, with a starting price of $9.95. But considering what you get, it’s reasonable.
As opposed to needing to pay extra for separate plugins for features like wish lists, search engine optimization, shipping labels, product searches, gift cards, and scheduling appointments, you get almost everything that is included for free with this bundle.
The extra monthly cost is compensated by this alone.
In addition, a complimentary starting theme will be provided for you to tweak to whatever you want. With hundreds of themes to pick from, it can be very overwhelming when getting started, but this makes things much easier. You are not required to spend time sorting through all the available possibilities when you use HostGator to acquire one for free. You just need to start personalizing.
Both e-commerce options come with an infinite number of products, a domain name for free for the first year, integrated payment processing, and WordPress updates that happen automatically so you do not have to worry about out-of-date software.
At this price range, the majority of other providers do not provide website analytics.
The two options are primarily differentiated by storage capacity and the capacity to oversee the products you sell on third-party markets such as eBay, Etsy, and Amazon.
For those who are just starting off, the less expensive plan is beyond sufficient.
Contact customer service via a live chat, calling, email, or ticketing system around the clock if you have any inquiries or encounter problems. None of the representatives we spoke with left us waiting longer than some minutes, and they were all very helpful and informed.
When we compared it to some of the different companies on our list, we were pleasantly impressed by how quick and simple it was to speak with real people.
That being said, some representatives may come across as a touch pushy when making suggestions.
Generally speaking, there aren’t many issues with HostGator. If we were to choose faults, it would be the obtrusive sign-up procedure.
A number of add-ons are available at checkout for HostGator, just like Bluehost, and they can rapidly add up to your cost.
Fortunately, since you can obtain them elsewhere for free, you actually don’t need any of them. Only Google Workspace is the one you might find interesting. Though you can obtain that elsewhere, just like the others. If you choose the right package, buying directly from Google can even be more cost-effective.
You won’t find any information about complex setups, scalability, advanced hosting types, or extensive customization on the Web.com website. Usually, we would turn away at this.
We spend a lot of time discussing scalability and positioning yourself for success once your website begins to take off. What makes it on our list, then?
The interface is remarkably uncomplicated. It is not a good fit for most individuals, but it is an excellent option for simple, uncomplicated websites that receive fewer than 15,000 visits each month. It works great for websites run by small businesses, independent contractors, physical stores, and even eateries.
That will work great for you if your ultimate goal isn’t to attract tens of thousands of people to your website.
But if you’re launching a blog, creating an online store, depending on advertising money, using affiliate marketing, or running any other kind of business that needs a steady stream of customers to succeed, Hostinger, Bluehost, or HostGator are preferable.
You can either use Web.com’s drag-and-drop site builder or remain with standard hosting and use a platform like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla.
Really, there isn’t a correct or incorrect response to the situation you’re in. Each has advantages and disadvantages, however.
The monthly cost of using the website builder is $4.95. It’s a far quicker method to launch your website. You don’t really need to know anything to get started because it’s drag-and-drop. In addition, Web.com offers over 150 free designs that you can utilize as a foundation.
If your consumers would want to make deposits, purchase goods, or pay for services online, you can even incorporate basic e-commerce features.
The appointment planner on Web.com also facilitates easy scheduling management; integrated email and social media marketing tools help you establish and grow your online presence; an AI writing tool expedites the process.
It has several practical features that you may use to advertise your small business overall.
The website builder does have some restrictions, though. It won’t be possible for you to relocate your website to another location or modify it. It’s unquestionably the simpler option if none of those annoy you.
When you sign up for a longer deal, Web.com’s basic hosting starts at just $2.75 per month, which is two dollars less than the site builder plans. As long as you receive fewer than 15,000 visits per month, the entry-level plan—which supports one website and includes 10 GB of storage—will function effectively.
However, installing the desired platform and configuring everything yourself will be your responsibility, thus there is a setup manual involved in this option. It takes longer to gain an understanding, but once you start rolling, it’s not difficult to do.
It also doesn’t have any fancy features or as many marketing capabilities.
On the plus side, you may use the thousands of complimentary WordPress plugins available, customize your site in any way you like, and transfer your site to a different server at any time.
Any option you select will come with a complimentary domain for the initial year, unmetered bandwidth, business email, an SSL certificate for free, and round-the-clock customer support.
A prevalent feature among all hosting companies is the attractive promotional pricing that is offered exclusively on long-term contracts, as can be observed when you examine their home pages.
DreamHost is aware that not all people are seeking long-term web hosting. While some charge monthly fees for month-to-month service, DreamHost allows you to take advantage of an introductory offer without requiring a year-long commitment.
DreamHost is known for its straightforward, understandable price. Shared Starter & Shared Unlimited are the only two fully functional shared hosting plans available to you.
With Shared Starter, a single website could be launched for as little as $2.59 a month. That includes free domain name transfers for a year, automated daily backups, & automatic WordPress upgrades.
It is understandable why WordPress officially recommends DreamHost as one of the three hosting companies.
Whichever way you cut it, upfront costs remain minimal. Although the rate is $2.59 a month when paying for three years (that is, $93.24 payable at checkout), the one-year agreement only results in a slight increase in price, since the first year’s hosting charges come to $2.95 a month, or $35.40.
Even though that is a very cheap hosting price, we started our review by emphasizing how inexpensive DreamHost is on a month-to-month basis. In any case, even without a binding agreement, it’s still fairly cheap hosting.
For your first 3 months, the monthly billing rate for Shared Starter is $4.95. You are responsible for paying the renewal rate after that.
After the third month of the promotion, it only costs $7.99 a month. In contrast, other service companies will charge you $9.99 a month (or more) once the introductory offer expires, even if you have multi-year or one-year original agreements.
In addition to making DreamHost stand out for offering free trial hosting, this also establishes the company as the best—and least expensive—option for particular site settings.
We may think of registration pages for webinars or seminars, landing pages for sales and marketing campaigns, event websites, and pretty much any other situation where a website isn’t intended to be around forever.
Consider DreamHost above all others if you need affordable, dependable hosting for a website that is meant to have a brief lifespan.
Not only are no-contract hosting options reasonably priced, but you also get dependability.
DreamHost’s servers maintained uptime for every minute of the testing period, with the exception of 49 seconds.
You can therefore relax knowing that your temporary website isn’t breaking the bank to host and that it will always be accessible to visitors and functioning as intended, whether that be registering guests, turning visitors into subscribers, or something else entirely.
All of the functionality is available on the Shared Starter plan, which excludes email accounts and can only host a single website. You can choose the Shared Unlimited plan if you require such things in addition to limitless site storage & subdomains. For a three-year agreement, that begins at $3.95 a month, or $8.95 with monthly payment.
You should also be aware that if you choose monthly billing, neither plan offers a complimentary year of domain registration. Only commitments for a year or more are eligible for that additional reward.
Obtain temporary hosting without facing charges while checking out. Take advantage of DreamHost’s cheap hosting options without ever being locked into a longer service agreement than necessary.
Though it’s not as popular as other names on this list, Ultahost is a trustworthy and dependable platform for anyone looking for consistent dependability from their hosting expenses.
For an annual contract, plans begin at about $3.08 per month. It’s a fairly reasonable $3.29 a month if you choose monthly billing.
This provides you some peace of mind that Ultahost isn’t promoting low prices solely to extort money from you in the event that you don’t pay for several years. Although Ultahost’s basic Shared Starter plan, which offers thirty gigabytes of NVMe storage and supports one domain, is priced above, most website owners will find that Ultahost’s Shared Basic plan works better.
If you choose not to commit, that costs $5 per month; if you do, it costs $4.67 per month. It comes with double the storage of Shared Starter, the ability to handle up to four domains, and monthly bandwidth for up to fifteen thousand visits.
Free site backups, free domain transfers, and complimentary SSL certificates are included with every subscription. Additionally, there is a 30-day refund guarantee for your hosting order.
Ultahost stands apart from other providers due to its flexible billing. Web hosts frequently provide a variety of payment options, but the three most prevalent types are monthly, annual, and three-year contracts.
Payment options—quarterly, six-month, and two-year terms—are available to you with Ultahost. You pay a little lower fee for each extended commitment.
Regarding renewal rates, however, Ultahost truly excels.
The price increase for renewals is negligible, even though it does occur after your first term. More so in light of the rankings of all the other people.
Monthly paying, for instance, causes the Shared Basic plan to increase from $5 to a mere $6.67 and the Shared Starter plan to go from $3.29 to $4.39.
In comparison to other hosting companies, this is significantly less after the promotional time expires and the charges virtually triple. Long-term, Ultahost remains affordable.
You may also use a drag-and-drop Weebly-powered website builder for free with Ultahost plans. But this is not something that comes with your plan by default. You won’t receive the free website builder if you just use the default settings. Due to the abundance of upsells through the checkout process, it is necessary for you to manually pick it.
However, it’s actually just a small flaw in an otherwise innovative hosting company. Ultahost allows you to launch a website without even needing to design it on Weebly. For those looking to quickly create a website from scratch, it’s just a great and simple solution.
Ultahost offers excellent live chat assistance around the clock in addition to competitive renewal prices. Based on our experience, they are informed and helpful.
The support staff also offers complimentary migration services if you’re switching from another web server to Ultahost.
However, the advantages don’t end there. Even at the most affordable shared hosting tier, Ultahost offers enterprise-grade protection for your website.
Ultahost offers proactive server monitoring around the clock, handling all the background technical requirements on your behalf. This helps shield your website in real-time against dangers including DDoS attacks, malware, viruses, spyware, and redirection.
Ultahost even does automatic updates for your security settings and plugins. As soon as new threats and frequent exploits are discovered, you will always be using the most recent versions of the software.
Start using Ultahost right now to lock in competitive prices for the long term.
Many web hosts will make you moonshot promises. However, they won’t stand by you if something goes wrong.
Not SiteGround. For every one of their clients, they provide genuinely beneficial one-on-one support. Support is available in more than ten languages when you contact SiteGround agents via phone or live chat around the clock.
This gives them a significant advantage over other hosting companies that use the library of articles or bots to respond to customer inquiries instead of having to put in the labor-intensive employment of human employees to provide their clients with helpful support.
Our connections to SiteGround representatives were always made almost instantly each time we tried their support via online chat or telephone call. Representatives provided us with pertinent information, detailed directions, and a clear understanding of what we might and might not do. They also got straight to the point.
From the point of connection with a representative to the resolution phase, our longest engagement was a mere eight minutes. We waited three times as long as necessary to speak with a live person with some of the other companies on this list.
In addition to all of the SiteGround people we interacted with being incredibly kind and helpful, none of them attempted to upsell us anything.
Regarding website speed, we were especially pleased with our help chat (a portion of which is seen in the image above). They didn’t treat any of our inquiries as pointless or as an unnecessary use of their time, and they provided us with a variety of tools to maintain the speed of our website.
Speaking of quick websites, SiteGround performed admirably throughout our testing.
During the course of a month of testing our test site, we only had two seconds of downtime, and site load speeds were (mostly) constant below one second.
You’ll pay a small bit extra for this caliber of service and performance. StartUp, the most affordable shared hosting plan offered by SiteGround, starts at $2.99 a month and requires a 12-month commitment. Upfront expenses are quite standard.
GrowBig is available for $4.99 a month for a period of one year if you want a plan that can accommodate several websites or provide you with additional storage & monthly capacity for visitors.
The way the rates increase upon renewal is the only significant problem here. With that special pricing, StartUp only costs $35.88 during the first year. Following that, it is priced at $17.99 a month. Once your first-year rate expires, GrowBig goes all the way to $29.99 a month.
If you plan to stay with SiteGround in the long run, simply ensure you plan for this significant fee increase.
However, if you appreciate dependable performance backed by excellent customer service, we believe the cost may be justified.
Launch your SiteGround account right now if you’re ready to spend a little bit extra for that level of assurance.
Choose GreenGeeks if you’re looking for affordable, raw speed. Our 30-day test revealed how GreenGeeks outperformed the competitors in this area, and we were astounded.
In actuality, they don’t make the same claims about site performance as other providers. We’ll take care of their boasting, then.
To be fair, we used a very basic website to conduct our tests. But we carried out that action for every provider we looked at. In this testing category, GreenGeeks dominated with a typical load time of less than 0.5 seconds.
GreenGeeks opened our site in a flash for almost the whole month, with the exception of a few surges that were still hardly longer than a second.
With top-notch speed for the shared hosting package, this is two times as fast as a few of the other providers we tested. This speed can be unlocked without even adding plugins or tinkering with settings.
GreenGeeks outperforms certain other shared hosting companies even during their worst days.
Additionally, they provide you with a setup procedure that aids in getting off to a good start. Instead of having to manually remove the plugins you don’t need, you can select which ones you want pre-installed at onboarding.
The installation wizard provided by GreenGeeks expedited the whole setup process. The absence of instructions on what to do once we installed WordPress was the one thing we did not like.
To access shared hosting at this speed, you’ll need to spend a little bit more than with some other companies. That’s to be anticipated.
The promotional prices are competitive with those of the other well-known brands. For a period of one year, GreenGeeks’ single-site shared server plan costs $2.95 a month, which adds up to $35.40 at the time of checkout. Their mid-tier plan begins at $4.95 a month for a 12-month agreement, for a checkout sum of $59.40, and includes unlimited sites, online storage, and email.
All plans, even the entry-level one, come with a special 300% alternative energy match that uses sources of clean energy to return three times the resources used, a free year of an individualized domain name, an SSL certificate for free, and nightly website data backups. Additionally, in addition to working with the US Environmental Protection Agency, GreenGeeks plants a tree for each hosting account.
If your business or organization is environmentally sensitive, it’s a terrific idea to promote.
Pricing for renewals is a little high. When your one-year introductory period expires, the mid-tier option costs $16.95 a month, while the single-site plan’s fee increases to $11.95 after the initial year.
GreenGeeks is the most rapid host overall on this ranking. GreenGeeks will satisfy you if, after the first year, you’re prepared to spend a little bit extra to maintain your site loading quickly (without switching from shared hosting).
When looking for reasonably priced shared hosting that continues to work well when your website receives traffic from all over the world, A2 Hosting is the best option.
This is a result of their strategically located data centers, which provide you with access to Singapore and Amsterdam servers. You may guarantee fantastic user experiences for your followers, clients, or potential clients in Europe or Asia by hosting the site on one of these servers.
Additionally, if you have a greater visitor population on one side of the United States than the other, having two distinct data centers across the United States—one in Arizona and another in Michigan—helps you cut down on the time it takes to first byte.
However, what really appeals to us are the international data centers, as A2 Hosting is a little too costly and unsatisfactory for running a website that caters mostly to domestic users.
Starting at just $2.99 a month, A2’s shared hosting offers a single-site package with 100 gigabytes of storage, which is greater than most other companies’ entry-level plans. $5.99 a month is the starting price for a shared plan with unlimited websites and storage.
The one-year agreement for both of those affordable rates includes the option to acquire the unrestricted shared plan for a period of three years at the precise same rate.
The monthly renewal of the single-site plan increases to $10.99, while the monthly renewal of the unlimited plan increases to $13.99. These two rates aren’t bad at all; several of the other companies on the list have sharper increases in their renewal rates.
Among A2 Hosting’s more distinctive products, their Turbo servers can be yours for a little bit of money. Compared to conventional shared servers, those can operate twenty times faster and have improved NVMe storage. These programs have introductory prices of $6.99 a month for terms of one or three years.
You will appreciate that A2 Hosting gives free migrations if you are now with another web host and are thinking about making a move to A2 because it is less expensive.
This can help you avoid downtime and data loss during the site migration process, in addition to saving you money.
Regarding your overall expenses, it’s important to note that, in contrast to the majority of other providers in our list, A2 does not include a domain for free with its hosting packages. Given that registering a free domain usually saves you $15 to $20 for the first year, this shouldn’t usually be a deal breaker. On the other hand, you might search elsewhere if you have an extremely tight budget.
The checkout screens are extremely dense, cramming an enormous amount of information into a tiny area. In addition, there are numerous upsells to avoid.
Furthermore, A2 charges an additional fee for using their page builder, although practically everyone else provides one for free. Alternatively, you might make use of a free standalone website builder.
There isn’t much help available after you register your account. All of the login details were sent to us in an email, and that’s all. Most of it is left up to you to figure out for yourself.
With these exceptions, we continue to think highly of A2 Hosting. Without leaving the more cost-effective realm of shared hosting, they make it simpler to accommodate visitors from around the world and enable faster websites.
Start using A2 Hosting right now if you have a worldwide audience or wish to create a website just for visitors from Asia or Europe.
Through a laborious research process, we ascertained which hosting companies qualified for this ranking. To gather all the information needed for our suggestions, it took us a full month.
This testing procedure was used for each host that we assessed:
We evaluated all of our test results to identify the hosting companies that provided the most value for particular use cases. Though each of the aforementioned providers offers a few cheap hosting plans, which one delivers the best value for the money?
That’s the reason every review you read mentions the total cost of a minimum one shared hosting package before going into detail about the kind of website owner who would benefit most from adopting that plan. A few people are only concerned with getting the best deal possible. Others are more concerned with finding a decent cost on a host that offers particular features, like e-commerce support or speed.
Let us review the primary criteria we employed to decide which web servers to feature and how to order them on our list.
One of the main goals of finding an affordable web host is to minimize expenses.
There is a plan with a discounted monthly price under $7 from each of the providers we examined. All of the prices can appear to be pretty similar at first glance.
However, the actual amount you’ll pay for the initial year of hosting may range from 35 dollars to 85 dollars at the time of checkout. It is a very wide spectrum.
A domain name, privacy from the domain registrar, and other capabilities you might require but aren’t covered by your hosting package are examples of add-ons you should first look into.
According to our study, a lot of “affordable” plans omit some of these benefits, so you can end up paying more than you anticipated. Domain names are important in this case; nearly all providers allow a free domain name renewal for a year, albeit typically just for specific plans. This offer is extended to all shared hosting services offered by the most valuable low-cost hosts.
Therefore, keep these additional costs in mind while comparing the costs of various providers, even if something appears to be the best deal available.
Another thing to watch out for is the duration of the phrase. Every hosting provider’s pricing page shows a very low price, but it isn’t what you will actually pay each month. In order to guarantee that rate, you will have to make a commitment of at least one year upfront.
Furthermore, depending on how long that commitment is, rates may vary dramatically. A provider’s plan may occasionally cost less per month for a one-year term than for a three-year period. In other instances, however, the opposite is true, and locking in for three years during checkout gets you the best cumulative deal.
The simple truth is that spending just $2.99 during checkout today will not get you the $2.99 monthly pricing. Consider your long-term expenses as well as the amount of money you have to put down upon signing up.
Because of this, the cost of renewals is a completely different factor.
Suppose you find a fantastic deal during a promotion. For the initial year, you have made the lowest feasible payment. As months pass and you completely forget about your hosting, you’ll eventually glance at your credit card statement and see months’ worth of expenses that nearly equal the amount you spent on the very first year of hosting.
It is a common occurrence. It’s also among the most annoying aspects of managing a website. There is no getting around the fact that hosting companies will raise your costs when your promotional period finishes. Before agreeing to a host in the initially scheduled place, all you can do is familiarize yourself with these renewal rates.
There were increases in the second year of anywhere from 50% to 137% among the vendors on our list.
It is important to take into account how your introductory term influences price in addition to this. When your initial obligations expire, you usually get a slightly lower renewal rate for longer commitments. Therefore, selecting a three-year term during checkout may result in a $2 monthly increase, but you will benefit from a $1 monthly rate reduction when the term expires.
Here, it’s important to consider how long you intend to maintain this website (or hosting package) live. You most likely won’t benefit from choosing a longer-term plan if it’s a short-term initiative for promotion or an event.
However, if your website is meant to last more than a few years, you should consider long-term value first and figure out how much a hosting company will charge you in the fourth year afterward.
Many of those searching for cheap hosting options don’t have high standards for features and resources. In all honesty, all they really want is reasonably priced website hosting from a company that makes it simple for them to maintain it and obtain support when needed.
The simplicity of configuring your hosting & website, as well as the usefulness and accessibility of a host’s customer care channels, are the two main aspects that affect this.
The setup and onboarding procedure should be simple and painless.
We had a great experience setting up our websites on a couple of the companies we looked at above. We experienced confidence as we were guided through the procedure step-by-step. Above all, we believed that anyone could accomplish the same with ease.
In particular, we preferred sites that clearly indicated your options for creating a new website or moving a current one to a new host. These hosts offered a guided approach in an easy-to-understand interface.
Other products we tested lacked this level of organization and cleanliness. Some overly fill your screen with data. It could be somewhat intimidating for a person who hadn’t previously set up web hosting, even if the information on the website isn’t extremely technical.
If you’re not familiar with the procedure, it might be extremely confusing.
We try to cover each side of this issue in the ratings above, praising the hosts who are most accommodating to newcomers and pointing out those that make the procedure more difficult than novice users may find desirable.
Next is support. Regardless of whether the setup procedure is the most straightforward in the world, you will probably eventually encounter a problem that calls for you to contact your hosting company directly for support. That might be unplanned downtime, errors, or just queries you have about running as efficiently as possible or getting things done.
Good 24/7/365 assistance is essential, regardless of how many websites you have set up in the past.
Nowadays, the majority of suppliers give live chat assistance at least. Both the wait time to speak with a representative and the level of assistance they provide can differ in quality in this instance.
We highlighted instances in the provider’s rating above where they truly excelled in terms of service quality. Regretfully, good customer service these days is hard to come by. So you can imagine how shocked we were to find representatives who not only understood our issues but also provided insightful, timely answers.
The same holds true for any supplier that provides assistance over the phone. These days, this is also extremely uncommon. For a user, however, having a phone number rather than the widget for live chat can make every difference in the world.
Based on the representatives’ responses to these three inquiries, we evaluated customer service:
These are typical problems for a new user to experience. We commend a supplier for good support when they go above and beyond our expectations in responding to these inquiries. Should you decide to use that web host, you can be sure you’ll likewise receive excellent responses to these or any other queries.
Purchasing a cheap hosting package shouldn’t limit your potential for expansion. Though entry-level shared hosting packages will always be the least expensive on the market, you should still check out what your web hosting company has to provide at different price points.
Once you inevitably outgrow your inexpensive shared plan, there will be two common routes to follow.
You can either switch to a more resource-dense shared package or to a different kind of hosting, which is usually cloud or VPS hosting.
You should avoid moving your website to a new web server until it is absolutely required, as it can be quite inconvenient. Thus, invest the extra time now to make sure the web host at the highest level of your choice has a wide range of alternative hosting choices so you can decide on them when your site expands in the upcoming years.
In the long term, this will save you additional funds and lessen the likelihood of data loss and downtime during a move.
1. Which web hosting provider offers the best deal?
The most respectable and trustworthy low-cost web hosting provider is Hostinger. There aren’t many less expensive web hosts that provide all you need, with packages starting from $2.99 a month.
Although there are less expensive plans as well as free web hosting options available on our list, none of them can match Bluehost’s blend of customer service, scalability, and ease of use.
2. Is it possible for me to eventually upgrade my budget web hosting plan?
In the future, you can always upgrade your budget web hosting package. You may always move on to a more advanced web hosting plan or a virtual private server (VPS) hosting service if your traffic increases and you require additional resources. A well-liked alternative for websites looking to move up from a budget hosting package is cloud web hosting.
Choosing a reliable low-cost web hosting company that provides an extensive array of additional hosting options is the ideal way to simplify things later on. Next, you won’t have to change service providers when the time comes to update your cheap hosting package.
3. Which web host is the cheapest and fastest?
The least expensive and fastest web host available is GreenGeeks. GreenGeeks had the quickest speeds and cheapest hosting price out of all the low-cost web hosts we evaluated.
You may get the finest deal on speed and price when you sign up with GreekGeeks. Quick page loads will provide the best possible experience for visitors to your website, and they can also help you rank higher in search results than your rivals.
4. What drawbacks come with low-cost hosting?
Sharing server space with other websites hosted on the same server is a drawback of cheap hosting. This implies that a surge in traffic on one website may cause your site to load more slowly, which would negatively impact the user experience.
Your processing, memory, and storage capacity are also restricted by many cheap hosting packages. Thus, when your site grows and your traffic increases, you will eventually require an upgrade.
5. Who provides shared hosting at the lowest price?
Overall, Hostinger is an excellent low-cost shared hosting company. It is reasonably priced, dependable, feature-rich, and has lots of space for expansion. It’s also as simple as it gets.
To complete our top three, we also suggest reasonably priced cloud hosting options from Bluehost and HostGator.
It can be difficult to find a low-cost web host that meets your demands while yet performing well enough. Our post aims to reduce the confusion and distress associated with making the optimal decision.
As always, we advise you to take a seat and carefully outline your needs. Next, decide intelligently based on your requirements, priorities, and money, among other factors.
For cheap hosting, we highly recommend Hostinger. It has everything that you desire at an incredibly low cost and is expandable, dependable, and easy to use. If it doesn’t, however, meet all of your needs, you may utilize the article as a reference while you make your final choice.
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