DreamHost is a popular US web hosting provider with 400,000+ customers, managing 1.5 million+ websites, and with an impressive 25 years in the hosting business. 

What types of hosting does DreamHost offer? 

DreamHost has a wider-than-usual range of products for every level of user. (That's not just an advantage when you're shopping. Having plenty of alternative plans gives you more upgrade paths if your website grows.)

A website builder product is a very easy way to create a simple but good-looking website, while cheap shared web hosting plans are ideal for small or low-traffic sites.

Custom WordPress plans are specially optimized for speed and include useful WordPress-related site management tools and extras.

DreamCompute is a developer-friendly cloud hosting service with full root access and the ability to use DreamHost's object storage service, DreamObjects.

VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting gives your site more resources, improving speeds, and is often a better choice for heavy-duty or business-critical sites.

Dedicated server hosting plans provide an entire server for your own use, for maximum speed and control.

That's a lot to explore, but keep reading and we'll break down DreamHost's key products, look at where they score, and where they don't, and identify which plans might work best for you.

Shared hosting

Shared hosting is one of the most popular hosting types. It’s a simple scheme where one web server hosts multiple websites—everyone shares both the costs and the server's resources (CPU, RAM, network connection). This makes shared hosting very cheap, but speeds are lower than other types of hosting (although you can still handle thousands of visitors a month on a shared hosting plan).

Right off the bat, I like how DreamHost keeps things simple with just two shared hosting packages. 

Shared Starter, priced at a low $2.59 a month over three years (renews at $5.99), offers exceptional value thanks to 50GB fast SSD storage, free SSL, automated WordPress migrations, a free WordPress website builder, free domain with free domain privacy (a valuable privacy protection feature), unlimited bandwidth, automatic backups, and so much more. In fact, DreamHost’s feature set is more or less on par with Hostinger, which is the best-shared hosting service in our testing.

The only noticeable downside to the Shared Starter plan is that it doesn’t come with any email accounts. Well, technically it does but that will be an additional purchase. This is a surprising miss by what's otherwise a well-rounded service, especially considering that almost every single rival on the market offers free email addresses even on their most basic plans. 

Additionally, it allows you to host just a single site. Hostinger, for example, allows you to host a whopping 100 websites on its cheapest plan—and even InMotion offers a decent 2 website support.

Next is the Shared Unlimited plan, which as the name suggests, supports unlimited web space, sites and email addresses, and is priced at $3.95 per month for the first three years, $10.99 on renewal.

Overall, though, DreamHost’s shared hosting plans score high marks on affordability and pack enough features to keep most individuals and small businesses happy. Still, it’s tough to recommend it over Hostinger, our #1 shared web hosting service, as it supports 100 email addresses, has 100GB storage, can host 100 websites, and includes a free domain, SSL, backups, a free migration and more.

• Want to try DreamHost? Check out the website here

Cloud hosting

DreamHost really does stand out as a cloud hosting provider. It’s rightfully placed in my list of the best cloud hosting services because it’s one of the very few to offer true cloud benefits. These include geo-redundancy and auto-scaling, where you can automatically change your server resources through OpenStack-compatible API requests. 

Auto-scaling helps you manage infrequent spikes in your website traffic by temporarily increasing More DreamHost featuresyour resources—and allowing you to only pay for resources you actually use.

DreamHost offers its cloud service under a product it calls DreamCompute. It’s among the cheapest cloud hosting services on the market right now (almost twice as cheap as OVHcloud). You can get started at just $0.0075 per hour and enjoy access to 512MB RAM, 1 vCPU, free bandwidth, and 80 GB SSD storage. Even better, it comes with a maximum monthly price, which is $4.50 for the above-mentioned plan.

As is the story with DreamHost, even its cloud hosting plans are more geared towards individuals and small businesses. This is because it caps out at 8 vCPU and 16GB RAM, so if you’re a large business with need for tons of resources, you’ll be better off with, say, ScalaHosting that comes with custom cloud hosting plans and can go as high as 24 CPU cores, 64 GB RAM, and 2,000 GB storage.

WordPress hosting 

WordPress is a hugely popular website creator because not only is it easy to use for hosting newbies but also powerful enough to handle even the largest of business-critical sites.

DreamHost offers two tiers of plans for WordPress. The first one, WordPress Basic, is essentially its shared hosting plans, with the same features and the same price (from $2.59 a month). They're cheap, and if you're just looking to learn the WordPress basics, they should be more than enough. 

These plans come with a handful of custom WordPress features, including a WordPress installer, free automated WordPress migrations, a simple website builder to create an elegant WordPress website, and automated WordPress updates.

However, if you're aiming to build a serious WordPress site, I'd recommend DreamPress, which is DreamHost's professionally managed WordPress hosting range, capable of handling anything up to one million visitors a month. The resources here are not shared, so other users cannot affect your website’s performance—and you get a high-performance cloud server environment, which is a huge plus on the reliability and performance fronts.

The starter DreamPress plan has 30GB SSD storage, unlimited email, free SSL, and on-demand and daily backups. In addition to the custom WordPress features in the shared hosting plans, you get specialist WordPress support and 1-click staging for easier website testing. DreamHost says the plan is built for 100k monthly visitors, and it looks good value at $16.95 billed monthly on a yearly subscription.

The second tier, DreamPress Plus, is an interesting one. It costs 50% more ($24.95 a month) than the above-mentioned plan for which it doubles your storage and increases the number of phone support callbacks to 3. That’s it. It’s worth noting that earlier this plan added the powerful Jetpack Professional toolkit (backups, malware scanning, CDN, and more), which is now offered on all the three plans. While this is undoubtedly a good thing, it does bring down DreamPress Plus’s appeal quite a fair bit. 

Spending $71.95/month on the top-of-the-range DreamPress Pro gets your more resources, priority support (expedited help, advanced troubleshooting, and proactive monitoring), and lifts the suggested visits per month figure to one million. However, that's an advisory figure only, DreamHost won't cut you off if you have more.

A highlight of DreamHost is that it’s recommended by WordPress.org, the makers of WordPress. This is because DreamHost has been actively involved in the WordPress community and has contributed to WordPress’s development over the last 10 years.

Overall, DreamHost is one of the best WordPress hosting providers, offering very capable managed WordPress plans which are well worth considering if you're managing a high-traffic site. However, experienced or more technical users should check out Hostinger and InMotion Hosting's WordPress ranges, too. 

VPS hosting 

VPS (Virtual Private Servers) improves on shared hosting by providing resources that only your site can use. That's great news on the performance front, because the less time a web server has to spend dividing up its RAM and CPU time, the more time it has to just serve your site, and the faster it'll be.

DreamHost has four very simple VPS plans. 

All plans support unlimited websites, traffic, and email addresses. There's also free SSL for as many sites as you need.  

A very important highlight of DreamHost’s VPS plans is that they're all managed, which means DreamHost handles complex low-level tasks like updating the operating system for you. However, the service isn’t a fully managed one as anything to do with managing your site comes under a different DreamHost service, which will cost extra. 

Coming back to DreamHost, it offers a capable range for VPS newbies, with all the core features you need, and for a very fair price. If you have a simple goal—you're building a business-critical WordPress site and need better speeds (which are also more reliable) than shared hosting, DreamHost's VPS range could be a smart choice. 

However, more experienced users may not be as happy. For instance, the plans don’t mention the amount of CPU resources they offer. This is because the CPU scheduler is based on time instead of the percentage of utilization. Next, there just aren't many features or configuration options here, no root access, nor do you get a choice of operating system.

DreamHost doesn’t have unmanaged VPS hosting, either. So, if you’re adept enough at handling server issues, and are willing to compromise support for a lower price, you can consider Hostinger’s unmanaged VPS plans.

Also, strangely enough, while the plans say that they’re VPS, you don’t actually get a VPS server. You get a Linux container with kernel-level isolation, which, in all fairness, is still more reliable than shared hosting plans, but you don't get the sort of security benefits you would with a typical VPS server. This is because OS vulnerabilities in a Linux container can cause isolation breakouts.

If you think you might need more than DreamHost's bare-bones plans, check out my guide to the best VPS hosting providers.

Dedicated hosting 

Buy a dedicated hosting plan and you get a server just for you. This way, you can wave goodbye to sharing resources and unexpected slowdowns because someone else on your server is having a bad day. Dedicated hosting means great performance all the time.

DreamHost has significantly tweaked its dedicated hosting offerings of late, and the change is for the better. Where earlier it offered HDD storage for most of its plans and SSD only if you picked the 12-core CPU, it now offers SSD on all plans, and has completely done away with HDD storage. 

However, this also means that the starting price which was earlier $149/month has been increased to $165/month (on a yearly subscription). This gets you a 6-core/12-thread CPU, 16GB RAM, and 480GB SSD. 

You also have the option to opt for a more powerful 12-core/24-thread CPU where you can go as high as 128GB RAM and 1920GB SSD—meaning DreamHost’s dedicated hosting is large-business-friendly, which isn’t the case with its shared or cloud hosting services.

When compared to the best dedicated hosting services right now, DreamHost has one up on most providers thanks to 100% network uptime guarantee. With emergency generators, data centers around the world, redundant cooling, and constant monitoring, DreamHost is a must-have for you if you just can’t afford to have your site down.

However, services like InMotion and IONOS (this one has a pay-as-you-go pricing model) are certainly more value for money, and a better pick for the majority of users. InMotion, for instance, starts at $69.99 per month and gives you 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, a decent 4-core/8-thread processor, and a full-fledged security suite, as well as a choice of control panel. 

The cost difference is even more substantial for large businesses who need tons of resources (think 128GB and more). DreamHost doesn’t allow you to pair an SSD with a secondary high-storage HDD, which is something you get with Liquid Web. 

More DreamHost features

In addition to the above, I’d like to point out a few DreamHost offerings that caught my eye. The first one is dedicated email hosting, starting at $1.99 a month - or $1.67 a month if you go for a yearly commitment. 

This will be a top-up to your existing hosting plan and get you professional emails @yourdomainname.com, 25GB storage per mailbox (Gmail’s free offering gives you 15GB), real-time syncing across mobile and desktop, and an ad-free experience. 

Next, there’s integration with Google Workspace, which can be a value addition for teams. Here, you’ll get Google Meet voice and video conferencing, team chat, shared calendars, business email through Gmail, access to other Google products, 24/7 assistance from Google Workspace experts, and more. 

It’s worth noting that the extent of features you unlock will depend on your chosen Google Workspace plan. There are two plans: one at $7.20 per user per month and the other more feature-packed one at $14.40 per user per month.

DreamHost Pro services

DreamHost offers a slew of professional services, including custom website designing, SEO marketing, social media marketing, dedicated web software and backend management, and web development. 

Just note that these services cost a pretty penny. For instance, you’ll have to shell out $1,499 if you want DreamHost experts to create a polished, professional website tailored to your needs. Other services range anywhere between $59/month for website management to $399/month for social media marketing. 

With that said, they offer excellent bang for buck for those who’d like to get things done by a professional and skyrocket their business’s growth without wasting time with a hands-on and trial-and-error approach.

Does DreamHost have a website builder? 

If you don't have a website, and creating something with WordPress feels too much like hard work, a website builder could be the perfect solution. Most builders either come with a choice of prebuilt sites, or can create one for you from scratch. You can add elements like text, images, videos, maps or forms by dragging and dropping, then customize the content much as you would in Word or any editor.

DreamHost's website builder, which is included in all of its plans no matter the hosting type, is based on WordPress, but don't let that put you off: it's still an easier way to create a simple site. It comes with 200+ sample websites for various categories (photography, food, music, fitness, fashion and more). Next, you get a handy drag-and-drop mechanism using which you can choose from a selection of over 100 blocks, add some content of your own, and you could have a small site ready to go within a couple of hours. 

The website builder is easy to use, block-based, and might just about be enough to create a small family site, or a low-traffic blog. It even comes with real-time SEO recommendations so that you can create content that’s optimized for search engines. There are enough customization options, too, and you can tinker around with pretty much everything, whether that’s the font size or text color. 

However, the templates are basic and there aren’t any image-editing tools, either. If you want an out-and-out website builder with more than just the basics, I’d recommend choosing from one of the best website builders instead. Hostinger, for example, gives you the option to have a website created entirely by AI. 

Like DreamHost, Bluehost, too, has a WordPress website builder. It includes website templates to help you get started, and has a simple drag-and-drop page editor. But even its most basic $2.99/month plan includes contact forms, social media sharing, and other useful business tools—and the top-of-the-range product even allows you to build a web store.

Can I build a web store with DreamHost? 

DreamHost doesn't have the range of ecommerce plans we see with some providers, but it does have one capable option: a VPS-based WooCommerce range with the power to build some very powerful web stores. WooCommerce is widely considered as one of the best ecommerce platforms for WordPress.

However, it’s worth noting that although DreamHost describes this as 'WooCommerce hosting,’ it's the company's regular WordPress hosting (DreamPress) underneath, with the same prices and specs. If you skipped the WordPress section, I like DreamPress a lot—it has plenty of features and the power to handle 100k to a million visitors a month, enough to cope with some very busy web stores.

Opting for the WooCommerce plans does get you a few tiny extras. WooCommerce is preinstalled with a few themes and plugins, for instance, and DreamHost updates both WooCommerce and WordPress. Good news, but that doesn't really help you build, manage, and troubleshoot your new web store.

If you like DreamHost's WordPress hosting and you're happy to work on the WooCommerce and web store building tasks yourself, then these powerful plans are well worth considering. 

However, if you're looking for something simpler, many website builder plans include the ability to add a web store. HostGator supports a tiny three-product store with even its most basic plan, and Bluehost and GoDaddy both have capable ecommerce plans.

DreamHost Customer Support

DreamHost’s customer support has come a long way since our last review. Now, it offers free 24/7 technical support via email and live chat across all time zones from three continents: North America, South America, and Europe. Supported languages include English and Spanish.

While DreamHost does not have a call-in phone number for technical support, you do get the option to request for callbacks. However, that’s only available with higher-end DreamHost hosting packages.

To test its claims, I throwed some genuine questions at the support agents. I’m happy to report that individual support agents performed well in my tests. Plus, live chat queries had responses within minutes, tickets in under an hour or two (as claimed by the company, so that’s good too), and replies were helpful and detailed.

Furthermore, it also has an in-depth knowledge hub with tons of helpful articles and step-by-step tutorials, which you can use for general know-how and help on the fly.

A standout DreamHost offering is its exceptional 97-day money-back guarantee (for shared hosting products). This also suggests that the company has real confidence in its service, long-term. If you decide to sign up, that's plenty of time to find out how DreamHost works for you.

How fast is DreamHost? 

Uptime, the proportion of time your website is accessible to the outside world, is a key measure of any web host. A provider can have the fastest and most powerful servers around, but none of that will matter at all if your site is regularly down.

We tested DreamHost's uptime over a week, and those results were good, with our site showing 100% uptime, and an average response time of 0.342 seconds (that's the fourth fastest score in our last 15 tests). 

Next, we asked GTmetrix to access a page from our test site and calculate how long it takes to display its main content (a figure known as Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP). Most decent hosts manage somewhere between 0.55 and 0.90 seconds, and DreamHost scored a perfectly acceptable 0.732 seconds. 

Fast load speeds are good news with a single user, but what happens when a site is busy? We use k6 to unleash 20 virtual users on a site at once, and see how the server copes. DreamHost handled an average 16 requests per second, fractionally outperforming most of the competition (the average score is 10-15 requests).

To conclude, DreamHost is an extremely reliable hosting service that delivers on its promises to load both light and heavy web pages without missing a beat. Its 100% uptime guarantee, especially at its price point, is nothing short of outstanding—top dogs such as Hostinger and Bluehost offer 99.96% and 99.95%, respectively, and HostGator doesn’t guarantee uptime at all.

How easy is DreamHost to use? 

Although DreamHost doesn’t offer the industry-standard cPanel—and offers a custom-built control panel instead—it’s fairly easy to use and get started with. 

The control panel looks good, with colorful icons, and everything from your domains and websites to one-click installs and support options, as well as your account and billing info and hosting configurations, is available on the left-hand sidebar. This is when around half of that sidebar is just an ‘Add Product’ section displaying the different DreamHost plans you could subscribe to. Cheeky, yes, but it doesn’t pose any real navigation issues.

Installing WordPress is child’s play. You also get an option to pre-authorize the WordPress installation, meaning DreamHost will send you an email once WordPress is set up. I suggest opting for the pre-install option since DreamHost takes a while to install WordPress—around 20-30 minutes. This is in sharp contrast to other providers who either do it instantly or take no longer than just a few minutes.

What’s more, even creating a new email address is ridiculously simple. Just click the ‘Create New Email Address’ button, fill out your details, and that’s it. All in all, DreamHost is one of the easiest to use web hosts I’ve ever tried my hands on, meaning it’s great for beginners and the non-tech-savvy folks who’d very much like a plug-and-play solution.

Final verdict

DreamHost's lengthy down time got our review off to a bad start, but there's still a lot to like here: lots of products, WordPress solutions for personal to major business sites, fair prices, and a reassuring 97-day money-back guarantee for shared hosting customers. Worth considering. 

A2 Hosting was founded in 2001 by Bryan Muthig and got its name from Ann Arbour, Michigan, where they were founded. They started off providing shared hosting services and, between 2007 and 2012, came out with a range of VPS hosting solutions from unmanaged to managed. Then, in 2014, they launched Turbo Hosting, SwiftServer platform, and Optimised WordPress hosting, providing up to 20x faster page loading speeds. In 2015, A2 Hosting went global and added servers in the Netherlands and Singapore.

A2 Hosting prides itself on being fast and green. By having a distributed team that works remotely, they save on resources like water, electricity, and paper and they have a range of green hosting initiatives like hot/cold airflow management in their data centers and variable speeds on all cooling fans. If you decide to go with A2 Hosting, in most cases, you can migrate your site for free, and you get a money-back guarantee plus an SLA of 99.9% uptime. If you’re looking for speed and great support from a responsible host, then A2 Hosting is a great choice.

What hosting plans does A2 Hosting offer? 

A2 Hosting offers a full range of hosting products, from shared and WordPress ranges, to an easy-to-use website builder, and faster and more powerful VPS and dedicated servers. (There's no Windows hosting any more, unfortunately: A2 Hosting is Linux-only).

There are a handful of additional services, including domain registration and SSL certificates, but the company doesn't have the range of extras we see with the larger providers. Most plans include backup and email support, for instance, but there are no extended backup or hosted email packages available. 

A2 Hosting may not have a profile that matches the big names, but A2 hosting provide well resourced plans with a 20+-year track record in offering some of the best web hosting services around the world.

The company has strong environmental credentials. Its data centers are designed to use less energy, its servers use energy-efficient components, they're recycled after retirement, staff work from home to avoid commuting, and the list goes on.

A2 Hosting has won plenty of fans over the years, and the company now claims 110,000+ users. To put that in perspective, Datanyze places the company 47th in its Web Host Market Share chart, with 0.34% of the market. That's comparable with providers such as TsoHost (0.38%), HostPapa (0.36%) and Heart Internet (0.34%).

Shared hosting 

A2 hosting offers six managed and six unmanaged VPS hosting plans. First, under the managed hosting, the Takeoff 4 plan is the entry-level plan, which costs $35.99/mo and renews for $76.99/mo after 36 months. It includes 4 GB RAM, 150 GB SSD storage, and 2 TB data transfer, along with 2 cores, an SSL certificate, a cPanel control panel, and an Imunify360 Security Suite. Above this, the Takeoff 8 plan is priced at $104.99/mo, but you can get it for $49.99/ mo for the first 36 months. This plan upgrades your hosting to 8 GB of RAM, 250 GB SSD storage, and a 3 TB transfer limit, supported by 6 cores. If you want more, the Takeoff 16 comes with 16 GB RAM, 450 GB SSD storage, and 4 TB transfer capacity, all for $59.99/ mo for 36 months, after which it renews at $131.99/mo. It features 8 cores, along with an increased amount of files, folders and emails to store on your account.

A2 also offers three different managed hosting plans that are hosted on turbo servers capable of delivering up to 20X faster page loads. The entry-level Soar 8 turbo plan comes for $54.99/mo as an introductory offer for three years, after which it costs $139.99/mo. This plan offers 8 GB RAM and a 2 TB transfer limit but also enhances performance with 150 GB NVMe SSD storage. Further up the scale, the Soar 16 turbo plan currently comes at $79.99/mo and renews for $189.99/mo. This plan includes 16 GB RAM, 250 GB NVMe SSD storage, and 3 TB transfer. It is built on 6 cores and offers significant speed improvements. Finally, the most powerful managed VPS plan by A2, the Soar 32, costs $99.99/ mo and renews for $239.99/ mo after three years. It features 32 GB RAM, 500 GB NVMe SSD storage, and 4 TB transfer on 8 cores.

Similarly, there are six different unmanaged VPS hosting plans with A2. The most basic Launch 1 plan starts at $2.99/mo and renews for $8.99/ mo. This plan includes 1 GB RAM, 25 GB SSD storage, one core, and a 0.5 TB transfer limit. It’s designed for developers who require minimal resources but demand full root access for complete server control. If you want more, the Launch 2 plan, renewing at $14.99/mo and currently priced at $7.99/mo for the first year, offers a slight upgrade with 2 GB RAM, 75 GB SSD storage, 2 cores, and a 2 TB transfer limit. Like all unmanaged plans, it provides root access and a money-back guarantee. For more substantial needs, the Launch 4 plan is priced at $9.99/mo for the first year, down 58% from $23.99. It includes 4 GB RAM, 150 GB SSD storage, 4 cores, and a 3 TB transfer capacity.

Just like the managed plans, A2 also offers three separate unmanaged plans that provide turbo servers with 20x faster speed. First, the Ascent 8 plan hosted on these turbo servers features 8 GB RAM, 250 GB NVMe SSD storage, 6 cores, and a 4 TB transfer limit. It costs $29.99/mo for the first year and renews for $59.99/mo. For even more demanding needs, the Ascent 16 plan costs $99.99, but as an introductory offer, you can get it for $59.99/mo for the first year. This option includes 16 GB RAM, 350 GB NVMe SSD storage, 8 cores, and a 6 TB transfer limit hosted on the same turbo servers for optimal performance. However, if you want the best of the plans, the Ascent 32 costs $89.99/mo and renews for $139.99. You get 32 GB RAM, 450 GB NVMe SSD storage, 10 cores, and an 8 TB transfer limit. This plan is designed to handle the highest traffic and the most resource-intensive applications with ease, supported by turbo server technology.

WordPress hosting 

A2 Hosting has a section for managed and unmanaged WordPress hosting but the unmanaged WordPress hosting just links to their shared hosting plans.  Managed WordPress hosting starts from $11.99/mo (renews at $25.99/mo) and supports one website, 50GB NVMe storage, 4GB memory, and a bunch of features. If that’s not enough, you get the Jump plan, priced at $18.99/month (renews at $35.99), which supports five websites, 250GB of NVMe storage, 4GB memory, daily onsite and offsite backup, multisite management, and Jetpack Daily Backup, which provides an additional layer of protection for your WordPress sites.

Superior to this, A2 has a Fly plan at $28.99/month (renews at $51.99). This plan supports unlimited websites, unlimited NVMe storage, and 8GB of memory (RAM). Along with the features included in the Jump plan, this plan also comes with Jetpack Security Daily and Jetpack Daily Malware Scans, giving your WordPress sites the highest level of security.

At last, the top-tier Sell plan, priced at $41.99/month (renews at $61.99), is a great option for WooCommerce and eCommerce sites as it offers unlimited websites, unlimited NVMe storage, and 16GB memory. It further includes Premium Rapid SSL, Traffic Surge Protection, and WooCommerce optimized and preinstalled, which makes it an ideal choice for online stores and eCommerce businesses.

VPS hosting 

A2 Hosting's VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting is faster, more reliable and configurable than its shared range, making the plans a better choice for business-critical sites.

Unmanaged plans (which means you largely run the server yourself) start at $4.99 a month over three years (then $8.99) for a tiny, 1GB RAM, 1 CPU  system. Top of the range is $74.99 a month ($139.99 on renewal) for an 8 core, 32GB system, combined with A2 Hosting's Turbo system, (LiteSpeed web server, NVMe storage, more), which the company says can get you up to 20x faster page loads.

Managed VPS plans are more expensive, with prices ranging from $39.99 to $99 a month over three years ($76.99 to $239.99 on renewal.) But they get you a lot of extra features, including full support, cPanel server management, and a free transfer. 

Highlights of A2 Hosting's VPS plans include the low starting price, the very powerful top-of-the-range systems, and the company's comprehensive Turbo speedup technologies.

But there are problems, too. No Windows hosting. The starter managed plans are expensive. Data transfer limits are lower than some at 2-4TB a month, and there's no way to add any more.

A2 Hosting could still work for experienced users who just need a cheap unmanaged SSL, or anyone looking for maximum VPS speed. But if this doesn't sound right for you, Hostwinds has 40 different VPS plans, making it very likely there's one that'll work for you. Prices start from $4.99 a month unmanaged, $8.24 unmanaged, and there's cheap Windows VPS hosting available, too.

Buy a shared or VPS hosting plan and your site shares its web server and network connection with other accounts. Choose dedicated server hosting, though, and you get a server all to yourself for maximum speed and reliability.

A2 Hosting offers eight server configurations, each available in managed (A2 Hosting runs and supports the server for you) and unmanaged (you largely support the server yourself) types.

Prices start at $105.99 a month over two years ($199 on renewal) for an unmanaged server with 16GB RAM, 2 x 1TB SSD drives and 6TB traffic.

A decent dedicated hosting provider should offer servers for all levels of user, and A2 Hosting really delivers. The top-of-the-range model has two speedy AMD CPUs, 128GB RAM, 2 x 960GB NVMe SSD drives and 15TB bandwidth, enough power for just about any task. It's far more expensive at $455.99 a month over two years, $699.99 on renewal for the unmanaged plan, but still fairly priced for what you're getting.

If you don't have the experience to run a server yourself, A2 Hosting's managed option adds full support, free site migration, a free SSL certificate and cPanel control panel for around $50 extra a month, a much better deal than some providers.

A2 Hosting's dedicated plans stand out for their hardware configurability. Not only are there eight servers to choose from, but you can tweak them individually, perhaps to add more RAM or an extra backup drive.

One issue is you're unable to choose the operating system. There's no Windows hosting, and you can't even pick your preferred Linux version (other than paying extra for a Cloud Linux license.)

Overall, this is still a capable set of dedicated hosting plans. If you're running a business site, or anything where you need the maximum performance at all times, they're likely to give you excellent results.

Also consider Hostwinds. Servers are fully managed, prices start at a low $122 billed monthly, Windows hosting is available from only $25 extra and you can add extra bandwidth for high-traffic sites. 

If value is vital, check out IONOS. Basic dedicated servers start at under $50, and we've seen systems as cheap as $33 a month with occasional special deals.

Dedicated hosting

A2 hosting offers seven managed and seven unmanaged dedicated hosting plans. Under the managed dedicated hosting, Warp 1 is the most basic plan, starting at an introductory price of $79.99/mo (renews at $249.99). This plan has an Intel Xeon E-2224 4.6GHz Turbo CPU, 16GB of DDR4 ECC RAM, dual 1TB SSD storage, and a 6TB transfer limit. The next tier includes the Warp 2 AMD and Warp 2 Intel plans, both priced at $149.99/mo. You can renew these plans for $329.99/mo once you’ve utilized the introductory plan. The Warp 2 AMD features an AMD Rome 2nd Gen EPYC 7232 3.2GHz Turbo CPU, while the Warp 2 Intel includes an Intel Xeon Silver 4210R 10-Core 2.4GHz Turbo CPU. Both configurations offer 32GB DDR4 ECC RAM and dual 1TB SSD storage, supporting up to a 10TB transfer capacity. 

To enhance performance further, A2 offers the Warp 2 Turbo AMD and Warp 2 Turbo Intel plans for $179.99/mo which can be later renewed at $379.99/mo. Both options come with 64GB DDR4 ECC RAM and dual 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD storage hosted on A2's Turbo Servers. These servers use advanced features such as NVMe storage and Turbo Cache page-level caching, which deliver faster data processing and improved connection efficiency.

For the highest level of performance, the Warp 3 Turbo AMD plan is priced at $439.99/mo and renews at $749.99. This premium option includes dual AMD Rome 2nd Gen EPYC 7232 3.2GHz Turbo CPUs, 128GB DDR4 ECC RAM, and dual 960GB NVMe U.2 SSD storage, with a generous 15TB transfer limit. 

All these managed dedicated server plans from A2 Hosting come with root-level access, a free 1TB backup drive, a free SSL certificate, and a free Imunify360 Security Suite. They are managed through the cPanel control panel, simplifying server settings and application management. 

For the unmanaged dedicated hosting plans, the entry-level Hyper 1 plan starts at just $79.99/mo (renews at $199.99/mo)and provides an Intel Xeon E-2224 4.6GHz Turbo CPU, 16GB DDR4 ECC RAM, 2X1TB SSD storage, and 6TB of bandwidth. For those seeking more processing power, the Hyper 2 plans take performance up a notch with your choice of an AMD Rome 2ndGEN EPYC 7232 3.2GHz Turbo CPU or an Intel Xeon Silver 4210R 10-Core 2.4GHz Turbo CPU. Both configurations come with 32GB DDR4 ECC RAM, 2X1TB SSD storage, and 10TB of transfer, priced at only $89.99/mo, which can be renewed after two years at a revised price of $279.99 rate.

If you need even more muscle, the Hyper 3 AMD plan doubles up on CPU power with 2X AMD Rome 2ndGEN EPYC 7232 CPUs, 64GB RAM, and 2X960GB U.2 storage for $379.99/mo, and $649.99/mo, once your introductory offer ends.

The Turbo server lineup utilizes NVMe storage for ultimate performance. The Hyper 2 Turbo plans feature a 64GB RAM, 2X1TB NVMe M.2 SSD setup for $139.99/mo initially and $329.99/mo for renewal. The range-topping Hyper 3 Turbo AMD gives you 2X EPYC CPUs, 128GB RAM, and 2X960GB NVMe storage for $399.99/mo which escalates to $699.99/mo after two years. All plans include root access, a free 1TB backup drive, and a money-back guarantee. 

Can I build a web store with A2 Hosting? 

A2 Hosting provides multiple options for building an online e-commerce store. If you want to quickly get a simple store online, A2’s integrated SiteBuilder solution includes a dedicated eCommerce plugin with the Enterprise plan. At $18.99/mo, the Enterprise plan offers unlimited pages, templates, and storage, along with a blog plugin, SSL protection, and the eCommerce plugin.

For more advanced self-hosted eCommerce solutions, A2's hosting plans support 1-click installers for popular open-source platforms like WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Magento, and OpenCart. Their Shared hosting is suitable for smaller stores, with higher tiers like the Drive ($15.99/mo) and Turbo Boost ($24.99/mo) plans to provide more server resources like higher CPU cores, faster NVMe storage, and up to 20x better performance for busier stores. The top Turbo Max plan ($29.99/mo) includes 4 CPU cores and 4GB RAM.

A2 also offers Managed WordPress and Managed WooCommerce hosting plans that are pre-configured and optimized specifically for WooCommerce stores right out of the box. These managed solutions handle performance tuning, security hardening, and other eCommerce optimizations.

For high-traffic enterprise stores requiring maximum control, horsepower, and scalability, A2's VPS and Dedicated server hosting are powerful options. These plans install any eCommerce software, full server access for customizations, and have the ability to scale up resources like CPU, RAM, and storage as needed.

Nevertheless, no matter which hosting solution you pick, A2 includes free SSL certificates, a 99.9% uptime commitment, and a 24/7 support team to keep eCommerce stores secure and running smoothly. 

Does A2 Hosting have a website builder? 

A2 offers a site-building tool that lets you quickly design and publish custom sites without needing any technical knowledge. First, its 1-Page plan costs just $2.99/mo for a simple one-page site with 10 templates and 100MB storage. However, if you need more than a simple one-pager, A2 offers three SiteBuilder packages bundled with its Startup Shared Hosting Plan.

The Basic plan, starting at just $8.99/mo, gives you 10 pages, 25 templates to choose from, 250MB storage, a blog plugin, and SSL protection. This plan is perfect for quickly designing and publishing custom sites. For more resources, you can opt for the Business plan priced at $14.99/mo, where you get 40 templates, 10 pages, 5GB storage, the blog plugin, and an SSL certificate. Also, if you want to open an ecommerce store, the Enterprise plan is tailor-made for that purpose. It includes unlimited pages, templates, and storage, plus an eCommerce plugin on top of the blog and SSL features at $18.99/mo.

How fast is A2 Hosting?

A2 Hosting has a 99.9% uptime commitment, which means you should expect your site to be available to visitors at least 99.9% of the time. That's similar to many providers, but even 0.1% downtime translates to a possible 43.83 minutes of inaccessibility a month.

To find out what a hosting provider really delivers, we use Uptime.com to check a WordPress-based test site every five minutes for 14 days.

A2 Hosting did well, with a perfect 100% uptime. (That's what we expect with a short measurement period, but it doesn't always happen. In our last 15 hosting reviews, four providers had some downtime during our two week monitoring period).

Server response times were less impressive at an average 1.53 seconds, and a very wide range of 1.1 to 3.36 seconds. Most providers have response times of half that, and a range of 0.06 or less, making them much faster and more consistent.

We test website performance by using GTmetrix to load a shared hosting test site and calculate how long it takes to load the main content of a page, a technical measure called Largest Contentful Paint (LCP.) The lower your LCP value is, the faster your page pops up onto the screen, a key factor in keeping your visitors happy.

A2 Hosting's LCP was higher than average at 1.1s, making for a slower load time. GoDaddy (667ms), Hostinger (607ms), Bluehost (603ms) and HostGator (551ms) were around half a second faster. A2 Hosting did outperform some big names, though, including IONOS (1400ms) and iPage (1600ms). 

Finally, we use k6 to see how a site performs when it has many visitors loading pages at the same time. Our A2 server averaged 11 requests per second, well behind the typical 14-16 we see from most providers, although it did beat one or two (IONOS averaged fractionally under 10 requests per seconds).

How much this matters depends on your website and audience. If it's a high traffic web store, milliseconds count; if it's a personal blog or you may not get 100 visitors a day, an extra half second on load time may not make any difference at all.

Keep in mind that we carried out these tests on a standard shared hosting product. You may see very different results from the Turbo shared hosting plans, VPS or dedicated hosting.

How easy is A2 Hosting to use? 

A2 Hosting uses top quality, industry-standard management tools across the service. 

You're able to manage your hosting account on a powerful platform called WHMCS. Our favorite auto-installer, Softaculous, is on hand to set up WordPress and 150+ other apps in barely more than a click. Meanwhile, the powerful cPanel can help create email accounts, upload and work with files, and generally manage your website and keep it running smoothly.

These are some of the best and most popular hosting tools around, and if you've used another web host, the chances are you'll already know how to manage your A2 Hosting account and website.

If you're a hosting newbie then it'll take a little longer, mostly because there are so many features to explore. Overall, though, it's not difficult, and most users are likely to master the hosting essentials in their first session.

A2 Hosting has other worthwhile usability pluses scattered around the service. Running WordPress, for instance? Most providers just give you a standard installation, but A2's 'Optimized' WordPress has its settings specially optimized for speed and security.

Put it all together and A2 Hosting is a quality provider which makes it as easy as possible to get your site online and keep it running smoothly.

What is A2 Hosting's support like? 

A2 Hosting support is available via ticket and a web knowledgebase only. There's no live chat or telephone support. Although that's disappointing, it doesn't have to be a big problem if the ticket response time is rapid.

We opened a ticket asking about the issues involved with installing WordPress on a subdomain. The results were excellent, with a helpful and detailed reply arriving only 30 minutes later.

We could probably have got even faster results with telephone or live chat, but there can still be problems with complex queries. If an agent gives you troubleshooting advice over live chat and it doesn't help, you have to go back and explain the issue again; if it's a ticket or email, typing a couple of sentences could be enough.

A comprehensive support website is important, too. If you can quickly find what you need there, you might not have to contact support at all.

A2 Hosting's web knowledgebase has a lot of articles, but they're poorly organized, and the search engine doesn't do a good job of finding the most relevant articles.

Fortunately, the site has some decent startup and other guides. These have some useful advice for beginners, and if you already know the hosting basics, the knowledgebase has some interesting and more technical articles to explore.

Final verdict

A2 Hosting doesn't quite hit the spot in every area (support website needs work, renewal prices are higher than some), but its wide range of products, custom speedup technologies and quality hosting tools earn the company a thumbs up from us. 

Whether you're looking for feature-packed shared hosting which goes beyond the usual basics, or powerful VPS or dedicated plans for a high traffic, business-critical site, A2 Hosting is a must-see. 

A2 Hosting FAQs

HostGator is renowned as one of the best web hosting providers and has been helping customers get online since 2002.

These days the company is owned by Newfold Digital (previously Endurance International Group), the hosting giant who also runs Bluehost, iPage, Domain.com, and Network Solutions.

HostGator's cartoon mascot, cheerful website and low headline prices might leave you thinking it's mostly for consumers and hosting newbies, but in reality the service offers a full range of products for all levels of user.

• Want to try HostGator? Check out the website here

What hosting plans does HostGator offer? 

HostGator's range starts with low-cost shared hosting, simple to manage, but with all the features many sites will ever need.

If you don't have a website already, HostGator's website builder helps you create a starting design in minutes. Editing can be as easy as typing in some text, and dragging and dropping images, contact forms and anything else you need onto the page.

More powerful VPS and dedicated products deliver extra speed and reliability, and are better suited for large or business-critical sites.

There's also a capable managed WordPress range, reseller hosting, domain registration and more.

Shared hosting

When you sign up for a shared plan, HostGator places your website on a single server, which also hosts many other accounts. As everyone is using the same CPU, hard drive, and network connection, speeds aren't the best and can be more unreliable than VPS plans.

HostGator's shared hosting starts at just $2.75 a month over three years ($10.99 on renewal). It supports 10 sites, and provides everything we'd hope to see: free domain for the first year, 10 GB SSD storage, unmetered bandwidth, WordPress preinstalled, free SSL, the powerful cPanel control panel, and 24/7 support, all protected by a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Upgrading to the top-of-the-range plan gets you support for 50 websites, along with a Cloudflare CDN, two extra CPUs, daily website backups for one year, and domain privacy for one year. This plan renews at $21.99 a month, so in my opinion, it's not worth it when you get most of those features included in your plan with SiteGround for $17.99 a month.

Hostinger's shared hosting is an interesting HostGator alternative too. Its plans are priced similarly to HostGator's but you get a lot of paid for add-ons that are part of your plan at no extra cost.

Overall, HostGator's shared hosting is a capable product which has loads of features, but still remains very easy to use. It's just the higher level plans lack some value.

WordPress hosting

WordPress is a popular platform which can help you build anything from a simple single-page website, to a personal blog, a professional business site or (with help from add-ons like WooCommerce) a full-featured web store.

Other benefits are less visible, though also important. Managed WordPress servers are optimized for WordPress. They supposedly deliver more speed and higher security. The support team has more WordPress expertise and can help solve tricky WordPress-specific issues.

Despite these advantages, the managed WordPress plans are only a little more expensive, with prices starting at $3.50 a month over three years ($16.49 on renewal) for the basic plan.

This looks like a good deal to us, but after the first year, some features like email, domain, and CDN become paid-for addons, which increases the price. For managed hosting, SiteGround and Hostinger offer better value overall.

VPS hosting 

VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting, like shared hosting, has multiple accounts on the same server. But there aren't as many, and every VPS gets its own resources. If you buy a VPS with two CPU cores and 4GB RAM, for instance, no other account can use them, ensuring your site delivers higher and more consistent speeds. While shared hosting might run into trouble if you have tens of thousands of visitors a month, a good VPS can handle hundreds of thousands.

HostGator has only three VPS plans. The starter product gives you 4 GB DDR5 RAM, 2 CPU cores, 100GB NVMe storage, and 1 dedicated IP from $34.99 a month for 12 months, $53.99 on renewal.

The top-of-the-range plan offers 8 cores, 16 GB DDR5 RAM and 450 NVMe GB storage for $82.99 a month over 12 months, rising to $128.99 on renewal.

These are capable products, all fully managed (which means HostGator offers full support to keep the VPS updated and running smoothly), and should deliver solid and speedy hosting for larger, resource-hungry websites. But other providers typically have a far wider range of plans, and if you're looking for something cheaper, more powerful or configurable, it's well worth checking a few alternatives on the best VPS hosting guide.

It's worth noting that the 30-day money back guarantee does not cover plans purchased on the monthly basis. If you need a VPS for a quick spin then I suggest InMotion Hosting.

Dedicated hosting 

Choose dedicated hosting and the server, the CPU, the RAM, the network connection is all yours, ensuring you'll never be affected by other site's behavior.

Another big plus for experienced users is the ability to set up the server just as you'd like. You can choose the hardware specs, the operating system, web server and more, and tweak them to suit your precise needs.

HostGator's dedicated server hosting products (like its VPS range) is limited, with only three server configurations.

These start with a 8-core, 32 GB DDR5 RAM and 1000 GB NVMe storage, priced at $141.19 a month over three years, $188.79 on renewal.

The top-of-the-range is an 32-core, 128 GB DDR5 RAM and 3000 GB NVMe storage for $312.19 a month over three years, $391.19 on renewal.

Both systems support Windows as well as Linux, a welcome option you won't see with most web hosts.

These are decent mid-range systems, fully managed with 24/7 support, and good value for what you're getting. But with three plans only, your choice is very limited. If you're looking for something outside of this middle ground, a cheaper or more powerful server, there are many more options available.

HostGator offers some valuable add-ons

Add-ons are something that most web hosts offer. It's an upsell attempt to try to get new users to pay more. It's also something I tend to ignore because of those reasons. However, HostGator is special and you may want to seriously consider some of their add-on services.

For example, you can get:

• SiteLock for $2.99/mo. If you sign up for this security tool separately it'll cost you around $16.58/mo
• Yoast Premium for $2.99/mo. This handy SEO plugin normally costs around $9.80/mo.

You don't have to sign up for these, but Yoast can be very useful for those who aren't familiar with SEO concepts. Although there's a free version of it available, Yoast Premium has much more guidance for new users.

Site migration: Be prepared for some DIY

One of the biggest pains I feel the most at HostGator is that they don't offer free website migrations. At many hosts, this is often part and parcel of their enticement to new customers.

Instead, HostGator wants you to pay them $149.99 to migrate your website from your previous host. Email migration is charged separately, at $99 per account.

Rather than pay these fees, I recommend you consider using a plugin for WordPress sites. UpdraftPlus (it's free!), for example, lets you export your WordPress site. You can then install the plugin on your HostGator account and import those files.

Does HostGator have a website builder?

Website builders are just about the easiest way to start a site. Choose from a selection of designs, drag and drop elements like text blocks, photos, maps and video onto the page, then customize the content to make it your own. Even newcomers could have a good-looking site online within hours.

All HostGator's shared hosting products include a free version of the Weebly site builder. This limits sites to six pages and displays a HostGator link in the footer, but it might work for kids or just learning what a website builder can do.

HostGator has a far better option in its stand-alone Gator Website Builder plan. Instead of asking you to choose a template, then drag and drop page blocks, Gator Builder asks you some questions and then automatically builds a site to suit your needs.

Prices start low at $3.84 a month over two years, $7.68 on renewal, which gets you hosting, a free domain, free SSL, the Gator Builder, and even support for a tiny three-product web store.

The top-of-the-range Gator Builder plan lifts the product limit, helps encourage customers with up to ten email campaigns a month, includes an appointment booking system and allows taking payments with no transaction fees. Those are some valuable e-commerce extras, yet it's still cheap at $9.22 a month over two years, $18.45 on renewal.

Put it all together and Gator Builder is well worth a look, especially for newcomers looking to take their first steps into the web design waters.

If you're looking for more features, try Wix. It's just as easy to get started, but gives you many more design and website tools, and you can try it out and build your first site for free.

GoDaddy's Website Builder also has a surprisingly capable free option (there's email marketing, an appointments system, even the ability to sell online with GoDaddy Payments), along with some business-friendly paid plans. And Bluehost's WordPress-based website builder has 300+ appealing templates, a custom image library and support for unlimited websites, but starts at only $2.95 a month.

Can I build a web store with HostGator?

HostGator doesn't have the same ecommerce-focused products as the likes of Bluehost and GoDaddy, but as we've discussed above, the Website Builder's Express Store plan is a simple solution for smaller web stores.

If you're looking for more power or features, then opting for a specialist WooCommerce hosting plan could make more sense (WooCommerce is one of the best ecommerce platforms around).

Bluehost's baseline WooCommerce plan includes tools to simplify building your site, take payments and collect customer reviews from only $7.45 a month on the annual plan ($18.99 on renewal). InMotion Hosting gives you even more choice, with optimized OpenCart and Magento software, bonus features and a pile of performance-boosting tweaks.

How fast is HostGator?

We assess web host performance by signing up for a shared hosting package, using a standard WordPress template to create a basic site, then watching how it performs in different situations.

Uptime - the proportion of time a website is available to visitors - is a vital factor in hosting success. We test this by using Uptime.com to try to access our test site every five minutes over 14 days, and logging any failures. HostGator managed 99.63% uptime, and although that sounds like a high figure, it's a little disappointing for a short test (most providers manage 100%.)

We measure website load speeds by using GTmetrix to access our test site, then calculate how long it takes to display the main content (a value known as Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP.) The lower a site's LCP, the faster and more responsive it feels.

This time HostGator trampled all over the competition, with an LCP of 0.551 seconds earning it first place out of our last 15 tests. The lead isn't huge - most providers score between 0.600 and 0.800 seconds - but this is an important stat, and a good result for HostGator.

We're also interested to see how a site performs when it's busy. The service k6 helps us figure this out by unleashing 20 simultaneous visitors on the site and monitoring what happens. This time the results were typical of most providers, with our HostGator site handling a very acceptable average of 15 requests per second.

For each host we also perform a WordPress benchmark test. This enable us to get a bird's eye view of how the plan is able to handle core WordPress operations, such as file movement or database operations.

It's here that we find that HostGator offers some impressive scores, outperforming some distinguished brands like Bluehost. However, do note that these are snapshots, and not always indicative of real-world performance.

The siege test is where things get more similar to real-world operations. During this test, we throw increasing numbers of virtual users at HostGator to see how it handles multiple simultaneous transactions.

What we observed was interesting. HostGator tries to process an impressive number of transactions, which was great. Unfortunately, it wasn't able to handle them flawlessly, resulting in some failing.

Overall, however, the failure rate was small (and unsurprising for shared hosting). It's still great performance, in any case.

How easy is HostGator to use?

HostGator's customer portal has a helpful Create Website guide which walks hosting newcomers through their first site-building steps: installing WordPress, choosing another CMS or app, maybe uploading files via FTP. This doesn't do very much, but it's still a welcome touch which could be very handy if you're still finding your way around.

The rest of the portal is little more than lists of links. Click here to open the WordPress dashboard, there to create email accounts, and over there to manage your domains. There's even a Search box to find relevant support documents without opening a separate tab at the HostGator knowledgebase.

This is useful, but HostGator spoils the effect by regularly trying to sell you more stuff. At least eight of the control panel links were mostly about pushing other products. You'll quickly learn which links to avoid, but we don't think that should be necessary. If you've spent maybe hundreds of dollars on a hosting package, we expect its dashboard to focus on helping you use that, not selling you even more.

Fortunately, once you identify the useful links, they point you to some top-quality hosting tools. HostGator's shared hosting plans all come with cPanel, for instance, a very popular platform which has all the features you need to manage domains, emails, web space, databases and more.

Put aside the over-enthusiastic marketing, then, and HostGator is relatively straightforward to operate, even for newcomers to the hosting world.

How good is HostGator's support?

Run into any issues at HostGator and its web knowledgebase could be the quickest route to an answer.

Searching for common hosting terms brings a huge number of hits, but that's partly because there are duplicates or not-so-relevant articles in the list.

When we searched for 'subdomain', the top result was an article called '[Featured] HostGator Datacenter Migration', for instance: not something we'd expect to come first. And the next three articles were titled 'What is a subdomain name and how to create one', 'Please read before creating a subdomain' and 'How to create a subdomain' (a blog post.) What we really want is a single comprehensive page, but here we'd probably open and read all three.

The various articles mostly have a lot of helpful content, and they can also be filtered according to their category. If you're only interested in cPanel guides, say, or video tutorials, you can view those results only with a click.

When you finally reach your chosen article, there's usually a lot of helpful content, but we found this wasn't always well maintained. The How To Create a Subdomain piece has broken image link icons where its screenshots used to be, for instance, making it less than useful as a tutorial.

If you can't find what you need, there's real live help available 24/7 via telephone, live chat and email.

Our experience with HostGator support has been excellent over the years, and it was broadly positive in this review. Email queries received speedy and accurate replies, and although we waited a lengthy 19 minutes to get a response on one live chat session, once the agent arrived he did a good job of identifying our fictional test problem and pointing us to the best and easiest solution.

Final verdict

HostGator has some of the best shared hosting plans around, speedy, great value, with a pile of features and responsive support on tap when you need it. Its high-end VPS and dedicated plans can't match the power of the best of the competition, but there's still a huge amount to like here for both home and big business users.

HostGator FAQs

Check out the latest Hostgator coupon codes to get discounts this month.

We've used and tested 140 hosting providers and Hostinger ends up being top for a lot of our recommendations because they cater to home users that have little to no web hosting experience all the way to seasoned web-devs.

For this review, we used the most basic web hosting plan and a VPS to see if Hostinger offer the tools and reliability beginners and web-devs need alike . We built a test site, explored their custom control panel, tested support, monitored speeds, uptime, and compared our results with the best of the competition.

What we found was a service easy for complete beginners to use but with the tools and flexibility to keep more experienced customers happy.

In my latest round of testing I put Hostinger up against some cheaper hosting options to see if the extra price was worth it. After I got the test test results back I can say with confidence that the small amount extra for Hostinger is worth it to make your site function faster for website visitors.

Editor's note

Update: April 2025

Hostinger's cloud hosting plans now feature auto-scaling and geo-redundancy earning it the right to be included on the best cloud hosting page. This has also changed my recommendation for Hostinger as best for beginners to best overall which will be reflected on my best web hosting guide shortly.

Hostinger: The pros

Ease of use

When I started building websites, if you had zero experience and wanted a website you'd go to a place like Squarespace or Wix because they offered an easy to use website builder and hosting all in one. They were a bit more expensive but if you didn't want to pay for a web developer they were still much cheaper. Hostinger has changed the game as you can use Hostinger's website builder, AI tools, and guides to easily create and host a website at a much lower cost.

Cost

If you went with a website builder such as Wix you'll be paying $17 a month and if you want to add features to your site like taking bookings or payment you'll need to fork out even more. At Hostinger you can start from as little as $2.49 a month with very little restrictions. It's unlikely you'll need to upgrade your plan unless your site get more use. You won't need to pay more for features that you want. Plus, you get a website builder with Hostinger too. After renewal the most basic Hostinger plan is $11.99 a month still making it cheaper than Wix and Squarespace at $16 a month.

Feature packed plans

Hostinger’s plans are well priced and stuffed with features, many of which are chargeable extras elsewhere. Page speed monitoring, malware scanning, and analytics are all nice extras for beginners. There are also drag and drop website builders alongside AI builders and AI tools to manage website optimization and troubleshooting.

The more advanced plans like cloud the cloud hosting plans include auto-scaling and geo-redundancy for maximum flexibility and reliability.

Excellent uptime

Reliability is one of the most important elements in any quality web host. A provider can offer as many other features as it likes, but if your site is down all the time, most of your visitors will disappear.

We measured Hostinger’s performance by setting up a test WordPress website, then using Uptime.com to monitor its speed and any downtime from multiple locations around the world.

Although our site was hosted on Hostinger's most basic shared hosting plan, it still managed an excellent 100% uptime record over 10 weeks of monitoring.

Fast load times

We measure website load speeds with help from GTmetrix, which accesses a test page and reports how long its main content takes to load (a value called Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP). A low LCP means your website begins to appear on the screen more quickly, keeping visitors happy.

Hostinger scored here with a speedy LCP of 0.607 seconds, the second fastest result in our last 15 tests, just behind HostGator.

One-off load speed checks are important, but we also like to see how a site performs when it's busy. To do this, we use the stress-testing service k6 to unleash 20 virtual users on our site and measure what happens.

Hostinger's results showed it could handle 15 requests per second throughout the test. That’s similar to other providers, but very acceptable for shared hosting, and if you’re opting for a more high-powered cloud or VPS plan, you should be able to handle even more visitors.

Low starter prices

Hostinger’s prices start at just $2.49 a month for the four year Premium hosting plan (renewing at a still very reasonable $7.99 on the first renewal).

Not keen on signing up for such a long time? Switch to the annual plan and it’s still well priced at $2.99 a month and $11.99 on renewal.

The pricing can be a bit confusing and renewal prices can change based things like whether you have auto-renew enabled. You can ignore the countdown timer on the page as it's always refreshing and the prices stay the same. However, we do recommend that you take more time to look at the long term cost of your plans.

Data centers in nine countries

Sign up with many web hosts and they’ll give you storage space in a data center but they won’t tell you where it is, or give you any choice of locations.

That could be bad performance news if, say, your target audience is in California but your website is hosted in a data center halfway around the world.

Hostinger has data centers in nine countries: the USA, UK, France, Netherlands, Indonesia, Lithuania, Singapore, India and Brazil.

That's far more than most hosts, and it’s especially good to see a service which doesn’t purely focus on North America and Europe.

There is one catch though, some plans don't support all the data centers. The Shared, Cloud and WordPress plans are available everywhere, but Hostinger's VPS plans can't be hosted in Netherlands, the UK, Indonesia, and Singapore.

Check the small print of individual plans to find out more, or take a look at Hostinger's 'Where are your servers located?' support document.

Quality custom control panel

Hostinger doesn't offer cPanel (an intuitive server and site management platform) to its shared hosting users, opting to provide its custom hPanel platform, instead. Custom control panels make us wary, probably because most of them are underpowered in the extreme, but hPanel is a rare exception.

It looks similar to cPanel with server details (location, IP address) in a sidebar, and colorful icons representing features in categories such as Domains, Emails, Files, WordPress and more.

Most functions are accessible to even novice users. Creating an email address, for instance, is as easy as entering the address and a password. Advanced features like importing existing emails, to setting up SPF and DKIM records (to authenticate emails and protect against phishing) are just a click or two away too.

Hostinger: The cons

Confusing prices

With three different subscription lengths and each one having a different renewal cost, it can be hard to work out which plan is best for you. Keep in mind when calculating long term costs. After the reduced renewal price the monthly fee will revert to the monthly cost of $11.99.

There are significant discounts to be had for longer plans but are you really going to need that plan for 48 months? Check your business plan and pick a subscription length not just based on price but one that might come up for renewal when you're about to out grow your hosting plan.

Performance restrictions

Any site that does any kind of image processing or has big databases will find low performance because disk read/write speeds are throttled and memory is not that generous. Any static site will be fine but performance of sites that have user accounts and to some extent eCommerce sites will be affected.

No telephone support

Hostinger say that telephone support just slows down getting things done and that they've been able to fix issues faster by removing this option. If you really care about speaking to a human via a voice call there are other hosts that offer phone support but they are more costly.

Hostinger: Tested

We've put Hostinger through its paces to see how well it copes and how easy it is to use. Our testers are industry experts that have extensive experience in a range of web hosting scenarios so we can give a reliable and comprehensive review on everything Hostinger claims to be.

On the whole, we found a web hosting service that's easy to use and performs well for the majority of users.

Using Hostinger

Hostinger has put a lot of effort into making their shared hosting experience as seamless and beginner friendly as possible. From the moment you sign up, Hostinger walks you through every step with very clear and easy to follow instructions that can help beginners get their website up and running.

There's more for experienced users too. With the inclusion of additional features such as page speed monitoring, malware scanning, and analytics, they’re really making sure that you can manage every aspect of your website directly from Hostinger’s hPanel. This really goes above and beyond the industry standard control panel cPanel and it does a good job of hiding away any of the techy stuff that can be confusing, presenting everything in a logical manner.

Hostinger guide you through every combination of scenarios - building a fresh website vs migrating an existing one, doing it yourself vs getting a developer to do it - they really caters for everyone. They’ve even customised the Wordpress admin panel to ease the transition from their own control panel to help newbies get to grips with Wordpress.

Wordpress is by no-means difficult to use, but if you’re not familiar with it then it can be overwhelming and their customisations are a really nice touch. Overall impressions are very high.

Hostinger have developed a new AI troubleshooter that can automatically detect errors (403, 404, 500, 503, etc) and suggest fixes making hosting even easier than before. Currently the tool works 42% of the time but it's improving every month. It also only takes one minute to use so it's not an added inconvenience if it doesn't work, you can just go through the usual support channels.Hostinger is a genuine alternative to Wix and Squarespace. The getting started process is really well thought out. It covers every eventuality including, transferring your website from another host and installing WordPress.

Extras such as malware scanning, page speed monitoring and analytics are great for beginners who wouldn’t know how to set up third party tools such as google analytics

There's an AI website builder if you don't want to use WordPress but if you do it's very easy to personalise WordPress, add content, and configure performance improving settings like automatic caching.

When it comes to their VPS offerings, you’ve very much on your own. VPS tend to be aimed at people with experience setting up and managing servers and, in exchange for far more performance for your money, you will need to know how to run and manage the server yourself.

One click installers

Hostinger really shines here. There are a bunch of different things you can one-click install, most are a bit useless but there’s not much harm in having the choice. Some plans include staging versions which let you test changes to your website on a cloned version of your website. Perfect for beginners that are afraid of breaking their live site. There's also automatic updates which is a fantastic feature.

Hostinger's performance

We used Uptime.com to monitor our test website from multiple locations around the world, logging response times and any downtime.

Our test site was hosted on Hostinger's most basic shared hosting plan, but still managed a solid 99.96% uptime record over 10 weeks of monitoring.

Uptime.com recorded a response time range of 171ms to 1.73s, with an average of 382ms, over the last seven days of testing. Starter shared hosting plans typically manage 200-400ms with an average peak of 700-800ms, so Hostinger is a bit on the slow side when it comes to response times.

Page load times matter too, though, so we used Dotcom Tools' Website Speed Test to measure our site performance from 16 locations around the US and Europe. This time the results were much better at 878ms, putting it in the top 25% of providers.

One-off load speed checks are important, but we also like to see how a site performs when it's busy. To do this, we use the stress-testing service k6 to unleash 20 virtual users on our site and measure what happens.

Hostinger's results showed some drops in performance at peak load, but that's what we would expect for a shared hosting package. Overall, it was able to handle 15 requests per second throughout the test, a typical result for most providers.

These are broadly positive results, and show Hostinger performs better than most budget hosts. But keep in mind that our figures are based on testing a shared plan, and if you're opting for VPS, cloud hosting or any other product, your experience may be very different.

A mixed story, then, but keep in mind these are comparisons based on the cheapest shared hosting plan from each test provider. Some of those plans cost 5x to 10x the cost you could pay with Hostinger, so on balance we think the company did reasonably well.

How good is Hostinger's support?

Unusually for a top hosting provider, Hostinger doesn't have telephone support. There's 24/7 live chat, though, and email or ticket support if you prefer.

We opened a ticket asking how we could install WordPress on a subdomain. That's not a complicated technical issue, but it's more involved than a simple product question, and gave us a better chance of getting an interesting response.

The reply arrived only 17 minutes later, just about as speedy as we could expect for ticket support. (Who needs live chat, anyway?)

The text used more jargon than we’d like, but was accurate and included all the detail we needed to figure out a solution.

Live chat is also available whenever you need it. We never waited more than a couple of minutes for a response, and agents were just as quick at identifying our issues and coming up with relevant and useful advice.

A web knowledgebase is on hand if you prefer the DIY approach. We'd recommend ignoring the Search box (it does a poor job of finding the best articles), and just browse the categories further down the page. There are hundreds of articles arranged into topics such as hPanel, cPanel, DNS, SSL Certificates and more.

These articles are often short, and not always organized or presented as you'd expect. The site does have plenty of useful advice on carrying out specific tasks, though, even when they're not about Hostinger's own services.

If your domain is managed by another registrar, for instance, most hosting providers don't give you any real advice on how to modify DNS records. But Hostinger has separate articles for managing DNS at Bluehost, GoDaddy, IONOS, Namecheap, HostGator, SiteGround, WordPress.com, DreamHost’s, and many more: 30+ providers in total.

There's clearly work to do here, but Hostinger scores well in most areas, and overall delivers a far better quality of support than most budget providers.

What sort of hosting plans does Hostinger offer?

Hostinger offers affordable shared hosting for small to medium low-traffic sites. VPS hosting and cloud hosting give your website more resources for extra speed, making them suitable for more demanding, business-critical sites. (How demanding? A good VPS can run a WordPress site with hundreds of thousands of visitors a month.)

Hostinger is also one of the few big hosting names to offer pre-configured Minecraft server hosting from under $10 a month.

• Hostinger is also top of our best Minecraft server hosting list

Shared hosting

Shared hosting works just as the name suggests: your site is stored on a web server along with many others, and everyone shares the server costs and resources. It's cheap and relatively easy to use, and although this is the slowest hosting type, shared plans may still be able to handle sites with tens of thousands of visitors a month.

Hostinger's shared hosting starts with the Premium plan. It's well priced at $2.49 a month over four years ($7.99 on renewal, then the standard $11.99 monthly price), and has some welcome features including free SSL, easy WordPress installation and management.

The Business plan comes at an affordable $3.99 a month ($8.99 on renewal, then the standard $13.99 monthly price). There's support for 100 websites and 100 email addresses, a free domain, and unlimited bandwidth are also available with the Premium plan. This plan comes with more (200 GB) and faster (NVMe instead of standard SSD) storage, free CDN for faster loading speeds, daily and on-demand backups, WordPress AI tools that help you create bespoke content and troubleshoot issues, Amazon Affiliate plugin for WordPress, and enhanced DDoS protection, to name a few.

On top of what the Business plan offers, the Cloud Startup plan adds a dedicated IP for increased security and enhanced control, as well as more power (100 PHP workers instead of 60 with the Business plan, 3GB RAM instead of 1.5GB, 1024 IOPS limit instead of 256), up to 2 million files and directories (inodes), and support for up to 300 websites. It starts at $7.99 a month for 48 months and renews at $19.99 a month before switching to the standard $24.99 a month. We recommend Hostinger's cloud hosting plans for WooCommerce users so they can enjoy the performance they expect.

VPS hosting 

Signing up for VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting gets you a private area in a web server with your own system resources. This automatically gives any VPS a speed advantage over shared hosting, and the more resources your plan includes (CPU time, RAM, storage space) the faster it's likely to be.

Hostinger offers four VPS plans. The first is $13.99 a month for 1 vCPU core, 4GB RAM, and 50GB NVMe storage. The higher end plan is $59.99 a month for 8 vCPU cores, 32 GB RAM, and 400GB NMVe storage. All these plans are on offer at a discount when you purchase plans of long durations. For example, the basic plan is $4.99 a month instead of $13.99 if you get a 24-month subscription.

The range is fair value, but it won't work for everyone. One reason Hostinger's prices are low is that their VPS plans are unmanaged. That means Hostinger doesn't monitor the operating system, set up the firewall, install security patches or do anything similar: you're left to manage the server's system software yourself. That's manageable for experts, but if you're not one, Hostinger has over 60 one-click templates, so clients can install top control panels and applications with ease. Also, VPS AI Assistant provides answers and guidance for VPS clients.

All VPS plans have 1000 Mb/s network speed which facilitates high-performing websites, smooth streaming, and fast data transfers.

A new feature from Hostinger for VPS servers is Vibe sysadmin. You can create an MCP server that acts as the link between an AI coding assistant and the VPS server. This can help you perform system administration like maintenance and automation more easily.

Cloud hosting

If Hostinger’s shared hosting isn’t powerful enough for your needs, its cloud hosting packages might help. They come with up to 20x more resources and come with a dedicated IP address, ensuring fast performance, great stability, and maximum security. But they’re also just as easy to use as the shared range.

There are three cloud hosting plans available: Cloud Startup, Cloud Professional, and Cloud Enterprise. They all offer unlimited bandwidth, free SSL, a free domain, daily backups and a dedicated IP address, and can host up to 300 websites on the same account.

The Cloud Startup plan includes 200GB of NVMe storage, 3GB of RAM, and 2 CPU cores for $27.99 billed monthly or $7.99 for a 48-month subscription. Other subscription durations are available too at varying discounts.

The Cloud Professional plan increases these to 250GB storage, 6GB RAM and 4 CPU cores, and remains reasonably priced at $47.99 a month (discounts are available for different subscription lengths).

Opting for the Cloud Enterprise plan gets you 300GB storage, 12GB RAM ,and 6 CPU cores for $69.99 a month or $29.99 for four years. The major difference between the Cloud Enterprise plan and the Cloud Professional plan is that Enterprise is more suitable for larger eCommerce businesses.

Does Hostinger have a website builder?

If you don't have a website yet, and WordPress seems a little intimidating, a website builder may be the easiest way to get started. Typically, they'll have a gallery of pre-built website designs you can use to get started. Adding pictures, videos, maps and other page elements is as easy as dragging and dropping, and customizing the content with your own text and photos works much like any editor.

Hostinger has its own website builder, which comes with unmetered traffic, unlimited free SSL certificates, web hosting, up to 100 websites, free domain, free email, ecommerce features, plus more.

We found it to be a simple and straightforward tool that we could use right away. No need to spend an age scrolling through feature lists, comparing plans or wondering what you can afford: just hand over your email address to create an account and you can start building right away. In fact, now you can generate your own, unique website with Hostinger's AI in less than a minute.

The editor is relatively basic, but the online shop’s what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor will give you tools to create detailed descriptions with HTML titles.

Hostinger website builder has two plans: Premium Website Builder and Business Website Builder. The entry-level plan costs $2.99 per month for a 12-month period and is a decent website builder for personal use and small sites. But, if you want more, the Business plan costs $3.99 per month for a 12-month period and offers eCommerce features and AI tools to write articles, generate images, and even whole sections for a website.

Does Hostinger provide Minecraft server hosting?

Hostinger offers Minecraft server hosting, even though it's not as obvious as its other hosting options.

Setting up a server isn’t quite as straightforward as Hostinger’s 1-click WordPress installers, but it’s not difficult either. The support site has tutorials on how to get your server running, find and install mods, tweak key settings and change your server type (options include Official, Spigot, CraftBukkit, Paper, Forge and more.)

Plans start with a small-scale 4GB RAM, 1 CPU package for $4.99 a month for a 24-month period, ranging up to $19.99 for a 24-month term, which offers 32 GB RAM, 8 vCPU cores, and 400 GB NVMe storage.

All plans include a malware scanner and a dedicated IP to protect your server from DDoS attacks, while automated backups keep you safe from just about everything else. Its AI assistant -- Kodee -- is a stand out feature as it'll help answer many common questions along the way. It's easily one of the best Minecraft server hosting options for most people.

Can you build a web store with Hostinger?

Hostinger has two options for eCommerce clients: WordPress clients can pick a managed WooCommerce plan, and eCommerce Website Builder is perfect for simple online shops.

As we’ve discussed above, Hostinger Website Builder can create web stores with up to 1000 products, and supports 20+ popular payment types. It’s not very configurable, but it’s easy to use and could be enough to run a simple home business.

The alternative is to sign up with one of Hostinger's other hosting plans, then install a specialist ecommerce platform. WooCommerce is probably the best-known option. It's a hugely capable WordPress plugin, which can be easily installed on any Hostinger plan, and includes all the product cataloging, inventory managing, payment taking and worldwide shipping integrations you need.

This really does give you the power to build a world-class web store, and handle most of it on your own. Hostinger will not only help with the hosting but also provide expert WooCommerce support for managed WooCommerce hosting clients.

Up and coming

Performance boost
This feature will enable you to boost the performance of your site to be able to cope with the traffic generated by promotions and seasonal peaks for longer periods of time.

Finer grained control

In the future you will be able to grant access to specific sites so you can better manage permissions and security.

Broken link checker

This tools helps you discover broken links on all pages and posts and will give you a detailed report on all URLs, link text.

Automatic optimization

Hostinger's range of AI tools is set to get even better after they release a site optimization tool that will suggest things you can do to help speed up your site.

There isn't a fixed date on when these features will be released. When they are we will jump in and give them a whirl.

Final verdict: Is Hostinger right for you?

Hostinger is really good for complete beginners and very basic websites and the VPS plans are good value. If you’re either a complete beginner or experienced enough to handle your own server through their VPS offering then Hostinger are good for you. Anyone that has enough experience to not need the help with the shared plans won't be getting their value for money and if you are not an expert at VPS then using Hostinger VPS packages might be slightly out of your league.

How we test

Hostinger was tested and reviewed by Lewis Wright who has years of experience in web hosting and infrastructure. He tested the features and usability of the basic shared plan and a VPS plan, assessed the performance, and compared the plans with hosts that offer similar packages.

Meet the authors

Hostinger FAQs

Check out the latest Hostinger promo codes.

Bluehost, one of the world's largest and best web hosting providers, has almost two decades of experience in helping users build and host quality WordPress websites.

Bluehost is owned by Newfold Digital the company behind other major hosting names like HostGator, Network Solutions, and SEO tool Yoast too.

Bluehost has a real depth of knowledge in WordPress which goes way beyond most competitors. It has developers working on the platform full-time, and has been directly recommended by WordPress.org since 2005.

For a quick run through what Bluehost is like to use check out my One Hour With Bluehost article.

What types of hosting does Bluehost offer? 

Bluehost provides some of the best WordPress hosting in the shape of shared, VPS hosting, cloud, and dedicated hosting plans. These plans are good for everything from blogs to ecommerce sites of all sizes.

The shared plans come in four flavours: Starter, Business, eCommerce Essentials, and eCommerce Essentials Premium. You'll find yourself directed to these plans if you click through from WordPress Hosting, WooCommerce, and Web Hosting. The only difference is that if you click through from WooCommerce you'll only be offered eCommerce Essentials, and eCommerce Essentials Premium.

The shared plans are ideal for up to 400K visits but those figures are based on the average site and don't specify a performance level for the sites. You should consider the number an estimate and safety net. If your site gets a lot of visitors, you'll likely need to use one of the VPS, cloud, or dedicated plans.

The VPS plans come in three flavours: Standard NVMe 4, Enhanced NVMe 8, and Ultimate NVMe 16. Plus, a bonus custom flavour. The number in the name corresponds to the amount of RAM you get with each plan. You get a 1:2 ratio of CPU cores to gigabytes of RAM. As for site visits, you're on your own here when it comes to estimated levels but support will help you make the choice on which one is best for you.

The cloud plans also come in three flavours: Cloud 10, Cloud 25, and Cloud 50. Plus, the additional custom plan. The number in this name corresponds to how many sites each plan supports. The cloud plans are ideal for 300K - 23 million site visits a month.

It's the same pattern with dedicated hosting plans: Standard NVMe 32, Enhanced NVMe 64, and Premium NVMe 128...and the custom plan. These plans have a CPU core to RAM ratio of 1:4.

Bluehost shared & WordPress hosting

Bluehost's WordPress and shared hosting plans are the same. Opt for one of these plans and your website is stored on a server which also hosts many other accounts. This type of hosting saves money, because the cost of the server is shared between many users. But it runs the risk of unstable performance, because the server's resources - the processor, the RAM, the network connection - are also shared by all the accounts.

The cheapest plan starts at $3.95/mo for 36 months and then renews at $9.99. It supports 10 websites and up to 40K visits a month. It provides 10 GB NVMe storage, a CDN, managed WordPress updates, SSL, and some security features. Email and back ups are only free for one year.

Spending more on the next plan will set you back $6.45/mo for 36 months and then $14.99/mo after. The only difference is that the plan supports more visitors (200K) but also malware removal and free domain privacy for one year.

Step up again and you'll be paying 6.99/mo for more resources and more security, development tools, and ecommerce tools. This plan renews at $17.99/mo.

These are capable products, easy to manage, faster than most (more on that later) and powerful enough to handle many personal and small business sites.

Bluehost VPS hosting

VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting is where a physical server is divided up into individual server environments. There are far fewer accounts on a server than you'll see with shared hosting, and your VPS doesn't have to share its resources with other sites. That's a real performance plus, and while some shared hosting plans might struggle with large amounts of visitors, a good VPS can usually handle hundreds of thousands.

Bluehost has three VPS plans. The simplest gives you 2 CPU cores, 4 GB DDR5 RAM, 100 GB NVMe storage, unmetered bandwidth and a cPanel/WHM license for $46.99/ month over three years, $65.99 on renewal. At the top of the range, an 8 core, 16 GB DDR5 RAM, 450 GB NVMe storage and unmetered bandwidth setup is priced at $94.99 a month over three years, $140.99 on renewal.

Bluehost dedicated hosting

Selecting a dedicated hosting package gets you the maximum resources and control: an entire web server, for your use only.

The server users the latest hardware including AMD EYPC processers. Speedy NVMe storage which is becoming the new standard SSD. You also get unlimited bandwidth, Cloudflare Enterprise CDN, and a 99.9% SLA.

The servers are fully managed and come with white-glove onboarding.

Does Bluehost have a page builder?

Bluehost offers a WordPress page builder. It's based on WordPress and has some of the same pain points of the WordPress built-in block editor but has some handy tools to make it easier. You can use this for all types of sites from blogs to eCommerce stores.

First of all, you get a helping hand if you're stating out with your first WordPress site in the form of an AI built website. There are also suggestions and tutorials to help you make it better. There is also the WordPress Academy to help you better understand WordPress.

Then, there is the WonderBlocks tool that has loads of templates for all sorts of things you want to add to your site. You can read more about the experience of building your first site with Bluehost in my one hour with Bluehost review and the full Bluehost website builder review.

How fast is Bluehost? 

Performance matters in web hosting, even for the cheapest of plans. A slow site, regularly down, could be worse than having no website at all.

To test Bluehost we migrated a WordPress site to the most basic plans and then ran some WordPress benchmark tests to see how well the server performed in general. After that we did some gentle stress testing to see how well the site coped with some traffic.

For benchmarking, the WordPress Benchmark plugin measures CPU and memory use, object cache, filesystem access, and network speed. It then provides a final benchmark score. Meanwhile, the command line tool Siege can simulate multiple concurrent visits, providing us with an idea of the server’s reliability when demand is high.

Our modest WordPress-based WooCommerce store, with around 20 items and a welcoming landing page scored 7.9 in WordPress Benchmark. This was a particularly good set of scores across the board, only let down by the “Persistent object cache enabled” benchmark unable to measure a score.

Meanwhile, the Siege testing found the hosting able to handle 9 and 15 concurrent visitors comfortably, responding well and with over 95% availability. Considered together, these test results offer some confidence that even with Bluehost’s most affordable hosting plans, you can expect reliable performance.

Note that these tests determine performance on a shared hosting plan. As such, they don’t offer any insights into speeds on dedicated hosting, cloud hosting, or VPS hosting plans.

What is Bluehost's support like? 

There is only chat support for the most basic shared hosting plans. All other plans come with chat and phone support. There is also only a local US or international number for phone support and all support is in the English language. This might not be an issue if you're in North America but it could be costly and less than ideal compared with having support in your local language.

To be fair, this shouldn't be a big cross in the cons column because most hosting companies don't offer phone support at all - let alone in multiple languages. Still, only offering English support across all support is going to be a dealbreaker for some and other hosts do offer multi-lingual support, such as Hostinger.

Final verdict

If you want to make your first WordPress site and you want to invest some time in getting to Know WordPress then Bluehost is the right host for you. Making an actual WordPress site can be difficult and I did find it slightly easier on Bluehost than other hosts thanks to WonderBlocks.

I also found it easier to do some technical things like improve website performance metrics with Bluehost too.

Bluehost doesn't quite grab a best for beginner accolade because I think nothing can beat DreamHost's offer of building a site for you and you do feel a bit of the less than ideal WordPress page building interface come through into the UI when editing web pages.

Bluehost FAQs

Check out the latest Bluehost promo codes.

Founded in 1999 by Octave Claba, OVHcloud is a French web hosting company with an international presence thanks to over 400,000 servers spread across more than 43 data centers in four continents. It offers a wide variety of cloud-based solutions to over 1.6 million seemingly satisfied customers. The company is headquartered in Roubaix (France), and its data centers can be found in the USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Germany, Poland, France, Singapore, and Australia. 

In December of 2010, OVHcloud was revealed to the public as a web hosting provider for WikiLeaks, making them a small part of the story that shook the world. In October of 2021, the company enhanced its public cloud portfolio with a Database as a Service (DBaaS) catalog of services with which its customers would be free of tedious tasks such as database configuration, the set-up, software, and hardware maintenance, and so forth.

• Interested in OVHcloud? Check out the website here

What types of hosting does OVHcloud offer?

As the largest provider in Europe today, OVHcloud offers a wide range of hosting products, from shared and VPS hosting to dedicated and even gaming-optimized servers for hosting. What’s more, it also offers both private and public cloud instances, bringing the benefits of cloud to small, medium, and enterprise customers.

Shared hosting

OVHcloud is one of the cheapest, if not the cheapest, provider when it comes to shared web hosting. Plans start at just $1.04 per month for the Starter Hosting tier which gets you 1 GB of disk space, free domain name for the first year, support for one website, free SSL certificate, anti-DDoS protection, and one-click WordPress installation. What's more, you also get access to OVHcloud’s Web Statistics tool for free, using which you can track page visits and engagement.

For support for more websites and CMS (Joomla!, Drupal, and Prestashop) as well as more storage and number of email accounts, consider upgrading to one of the three higher-end plans which range from $4.39/month to $13.19/month.

Interestingly, though, the shared hosting plans mentioned above do not come with CDN included; perhaps that's why they're among the cheapest plans in the industry. CDN, which reduces the loading time for your pages, will cost an extra $2.79 per month.

Dedicated server hosting

Unlike shared hosting where thousands of websites are hosted and stored on a single server, dedicated hosting allocates all the server disk space and resources to your website—no sharing resources with other websites. This results in better speeds and optimal performance.

With OVHcloud, you can spend anywhere between $50 and $4,000 on a dedicated server. The cheapest of the lot comes with the Intel Xeon E Processor, 32 GB RAM, and 1 TB SSD NVMe storage. This is an excellent package and right up there with the very best dedicated server hosting providers. 

A highlight of the service is its filtering system. You can select from a number of options under location, hardware (AMD vs Intel, core/threads, frequency, etc), price, and use cases to filter out the dedicated servers that fit your needs and budget. To put it simply, this is similar to what you get on shopping apps such as Amazon. Even better, the provider has dedicated servers for a wide variety of use cases, including Artificial Intelligence, gaming, grid computing, and so on.

However, I feel that it’s not as secure as it could be. InMotion, for example, comes packed with security features, including free SSL certificates, a custom firewall, DDoS protection, auto-updates, and heavily guarded data centers. To be fair, though, OVHcloud does come with SSL certificates and protection against DDoS attacks and DNS cache poisoning, so there’s a good amount of protection on offer.

VPS hosting

A virtual private server (VPS) divides a single physical server into multiple private server environments. Each of these “private” servers has dedicated resources (meaning better performance than what you’d get with shared hosting), but at the same time, the websites within the one large physical server are still essentially sharing resources, which keeps the cost down.

OVHcloud offers a ton of VPS server options, meaning choosing one is admittedly not as simple as, say, DreamHost or Liquid Web. At the same time, though, some users may like the availability of so many options. Where OVHcloud really sets itself apart is that all of its VPS servers are parts of its cloud environment, so you’ll benefit from auto-scaling, which will allow you to only pay for what you use. 

There are a total of eight plans to choose from, ranging from 1-16 CPU cores, 2-16 GB RAM, 20-160 GB SSD NVMe, and up to 2 Gbps unmetered bandwidth. This degree of customization allows you to choose the best plan for your unique requirements—plus, whether it’s a small business with a handful of websites or a large-scale application, there’s a plan for every use case. 

Cloud hosting

OVHcloud is hands down one of the best cloud hosting providers on the market right now. First things first, it offers two cloud products—public cloud instances and hosted private cloud. The latter is designed for large enterprises that want high-performance dedicated resources along with the benefits of the cloud. So, OVHcloud’s Public Cloud instances, which combine flexibility, guaranteed resources, and affordable prices, is where the party's at for most businesses and websites. 

OVHcloud is particularly great for niche businesses who want to be able to configure a cloud hosting plan to their liking. Where typical cloud hosts offer only a handful of plans, OVHcloud knocks it out of the park with 10+ broad filters, including storage, network, databases, data analytics, etc., all of which then have several subdivisions inside each of them, allowing you to zero in on the perfect plan for your business’s needs. 

For instance, if you want to run applications that require high-frequency computing, you can choose a plan from the ‘Compute Optimized’ section. Alternatively, if you dabble in data analysis and data science, a ‘Memory Optimized’ cloud hosting plan will be a perfect choice.

Also, if you want to steer clear of the extreme customization, OVHcloud allows you to do that too—just stick to the ‘General Purpose’ plans that provide balanced CPU/RAM resources. A highlight of OVHcloud is that no matter what plan you pick, you will get a generous $200 credit so that you can test OVHcloud’s services risk-free.

Coming to the costs, the most basic cloud hosting plan is $0.0508 per hour and gets you 8 GB of RAM, 2 vCores, and 50 GB fast NVMe storage. It’s worth noting that you can also opt for monthly billing, although that option is only available from the 7 GB RAM plan onwards. 

Is OVHcloud the cheapest cloud hosting? Nope. DreamHost at $0.0075 per hour and IONOS at $0.0056 per hour are much cheaper, meaning they are better suited for users who need the benefits of cloud i.e. auto-scaling and geo-redundancy, but don’t require the amount of power OVHcloud’s most basic plan offers.

However, OVHcloud comes with on-demand resources, meaning that your contact is non-binding—you can delete a resource at any time following which you won't be charged for it. Also, unlike other providers that may charge you for instance network traffic or API calls from Object Storage, OVHcloud offers these for free. 

Dedicated solutions for different industries

In addition to the above, where OVHcloud really stands tall is being a highly versatile and customizable hosting provider. Servers with DDoS protection and quick scaling for hosting large-scale video games? Check. Servers that facilitate remote learning and collaboration for the education industry? Check. Minecraft VPS servers—the kind you get with industry leaders such as Hostinger? Check.

Similarly, OVHcloud has a compliant and secure solution for just about every industry, whether that’s healthcare, IT, nonprofit, or the government sector. It also carries the proper attestations and certifications (HIPAA, HITECH, PCI DSS, etc) to be able to be this diverse. 

Plans and pricing

OVHcloud’s scope of cloud hosting solutions includes a public cloud, a private cloud, and a bare-metal cloud, under which you’ll find VPS, dedicated servers, managed bare metal hosting, as well as additional storage, backup, network, security, email, and big data solutions, domain name registration, and management services.  

The cloud solutions start relatively cheap with the “Personal” coming at $3.99 per month with an annual subscription. This plan can supply you with five websites, a free domain name for the first year, 100GB disk space (SSD), unlimited bandwidth, 10 email accounts (up to 1GB per account), one SQL database (up to 200 MB), support for Python (CGI), MySQL 5.6,  PHP (8.0 / 7.4 / 7.3), optimization for WordPress, anti-DDoS protection, and a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate. If you want more features and fewer restrictions on resources, you’ll have to purchase a bigger plan.

Unlike other hosts, OVHcloud doesn’t provide any free trials or money-back guarantees with its services, which means that if you decide to cancel their services, you can say goodbye to any money you’ve invested so far, including additional setup fees.

As for payment methods, with OVHcloud you can pay via credit/debit cards (Visa, MasterCard, and Maestro), PayPal, cheques, postal orders (in value of up to £250), and bank transfers.

Ease of use

OVHcloud’s official site uses a monochrome palette that plays with different shades of blue making itself quite easy on the eyes. It also utilizes a familiar page layout, provides plenty of information and features an up-to-date blog, all of which creates a user-friendly experience. The site is available in French, English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, and Dutch.

Fans of social networking sites can find OVHcloud on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube, where all accounts look very much alive.

After selecting a plan you want to use, you’ll be asked to pick out a pre-installed CMS from WordPress, PrestaShop, Drupal, Joomla, or to go without one. As for add-ons, you can include a CDN and extra SSL certificates (Let’s Encrypt SSL comes free of charge). After this, you can choose your domain name, where one is included for free for the first year with all OVHcloud’s plans.

If you have an account with OVHcloud, now is when you need to log in. If not, it’s time to create one, and doing so will need your full name, email address, and password. It’s also advisable to go through the “Terms of Service” before cracking on with any further steps. After this, you’ll have to pass a verification via email and surrender all the additional data (your telephone number, country, city, postcode, and language) to finish creating your account.

When all of this is done, you’ll gain access to OVHcloud’s dashboard, from which you can complete your purchase if you haven’t done so already. From here, you should be able to monitor and manage all aspects of your account, such as changing passwords, creating/restoring backups, creating/deleting databases, and so forth.

It’s worth noting that we didn’t use the word “should” because of a lack of belief in your abilities but due to the somewhat slow, painfully plain, and not too novice-friendly OVHcloud dashboard.

Unfortunately, even if you are willing to invest some cash into an intuitive industry-standard control panel, you can choose between cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin, and ISPconfig3 with only some of the many OVHcloud plans. For instance, industry-leading cPanel is only available with dedicated server hosting plans that start at $56.75 per month, and this isn’t something most users who look for simple solutions will be willing to pay.

How fast is OVHcloud?

An abundance of data centers scattered across the globe typically predicts lightning-fast speeds, and this is true with OVHcloud. A GTmetrix test performed on OVHcloud’s main site shows that it took 2.9 seconds for it to fully load, whereas the recommended time is less than 3.5 seconds (and the average is 8.1). On top of this, all other web vitals (speed measuring metrics) showed a presentable performance building-up to a near-perfect A (95%) as a final GTmetrix grade.  

As for uptime, OVHcloud offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee backed by SLA across most of its VPS ranges. Now, uptime is perhaps the only major area where the service falls slightly short of the competition. Sure, 99.9% backed by SLA is nothing to sniff at, but rivals such as InMotion Hosting offer a 99.999% uptime guarantee, whereas Liquid Web and DreamHost lead the space with a whopping 100% uptime guarantee.

OVHcloud also claims that all of its data centers are designed to Tier 3+ standards, meaning that the maximum amount of downtime a site should suffer throughout a year should be less than 1.6 hours in total (or 99.982% uptime). During a two-week-long uptime test on OVHcloud’s main site (via UptimeRobot), we only recorded a single case of downtime, but that lasted for 15 minutes straight. This amounted to 99.93% of uptime, which is a bit lower than we expected but still in line with the service’s uptime guarantee.

OVHcloud customer support

Although OVHcloud claims to be completely committed to its customers, this doesn’t seem to be the case with its customer support. There are four levels of support: Standard, Premium, Business, and Enterprise support. The lowest level called “Standard Support'' consists of several self-help options including a brief FAQ section, a knowledge base, and a community forum.

The knowledgebase contains plenty of step-by-step guides (some of which contain videos and others screenshots), which is fortunate since there’s barely anything to help and encourage beginners. On the other hand, the community forum seems quite active—although we did find several months-old questions that are still left unanswered.  

It’s worth noting that “Standard Support” is the only level of support that comes with every single hosting solution without any additional charges. “Premium Support” costs $56 per month, “Business Support” starts at $300 per month, and to find what fortune you’ll have to pay to get “Enterprise Support” you’ll have to request a callback from the sales team.

Anyway, you are free to contact OVHcloud’s sales team via telephone (on weekdays from 9 AM to 5 PM) and email/ticket. However, don’t expect to get anything but basic information here. OVHcloud also claims they’re planning to launch live chat support “soon” but they’ve been claiming that forever. The lack of live chat support (even one powered by a chatbot) is disappointing. So, if you have any questions regarding the service and you’d like to reach out to them, you’ll have to send them a message and then wait for a reply.

The competition

All those looking for a cloud-based solution can find an amazing alternative to OVHcloud in a US-based host called DigitalOcean. Both hosts are geared toward developers and tech-savvy users in general, to whom they offer a nice variety of web hosting products, and the similarities stop there. OVHcloud may be much cheaper than its competitor, but with DigitalOcean you’ll get better value for money and a bit better customer support.

Another popular alternative could be Linode, a US-based host with a data center network that parallels the one of OVHcloud. However, while Linode offers a 7-day trial to new users (and a 60-day credit), you won’t get anything similar with OVHcloud.

When it comes to user-friendliness, availability of customer support, and beginner-friendly features (such as free domain registration, industry-standard control panel, and money-back guarantee), HostGator wins the day. That being said, since HostGator has data centers in the USA only, it is less convenient to users elsewhere.

While OVHcloud stays outside the beginner’s comfort zone, Bluehost strives to boost the confidence of less experienced users by offering a full list of beginner-friendly features, round-the-clock support, a one-click installer with lots of apps, a drag-and-drop website builder, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. This means that you’ll have enough time to try everything out for yourself without a need to worry about your budget.    

Final verdict

With over two decades of experience, OVHcloud does a commendable job at supplying its customers with a variety of competitively priced cloud-based necessities, including VPS, dedicated servers, bare-metal servers, hosted private cloud, public cloud, as well as hybrid solutions. 

On the downside, though, OVHcloud isn’t as geared towards beginners as we would have liked, its customer support needs a serious revamp, and the lack of a refund period means that you can’t try out the service risk-free. If you think this could be a deal killer for you, check out more beginner-friendly hosts such as Hostinger and Bluehost before parting with your money.

• Here's a list of the best web hosting services on the market

Krystal Hosting began as the brainchild of a 17 year-old Simon Blackler. While spending his summer vacation developing a fan site for an upcoming video game and learning how to build it in that process, he faced the problem of finding a suitable web hosting service. After being annoyed with a number of overpriced hosting solutions with dreadful performance on the UK market, he came up with the idea of offering an “honest, reliable, and personal” alternative. 

Krystal Hosting was then founded in 2002 and has since become one of the largest independent web hosts in the UK which is currently hosting about 200,000 websites. Today, they offer a variety of hosting solutions, from standard shared hosting to managed WordPress, cloud VPS, and reseller hosting.

• Want to try Krystal Hosting? Check out the website here

As an ethical alternative to mainstream hosting providers at the time (a lot have become much better in terms for the environment). Krystal set out with a creed consisting of nine statements, which essentially cover the mission statement, "Currently the web hosting industry is dominated by two faceless corporations, who have gobbled up the competition to create a situation that is unfair to customers and harmful to the planet. But, we're here to show that there is a different way."

Krystal is headquartered in London (the UK) from where it maintains and manages its tier 1 data centers and over 220,000 websites for more than 30,000 customers. All of their data centers are 100% powered by green renewable energy, which means that their carbon footprint is reduced to a minimum and that our planet should be better with them around.

Krystal’s official site is refreshingly modern, well-organized, user-friendly, and pretty. The same is true about its official blog, which is chock full of articles written in an interesting, informative, and somewhat witty way.

As for social networking sites, Krystal can be found on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Plans and pricing

Krystal offers a nice variety of web hosting solutions starting with simple shared hosting and application hosting (WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Opencart, PrestaShop, and Drupal), in addition to managed WordPress and advanced solutions such as reseller, VPS, and dedicated server hosting.

If a tight budget is one of your concerns, worry not. Although Krystal is not the most budget-friendly option on the market, it offers a few reasonably priced packages that come overloaded with features and with no limitations on bandwidth, databases, e-mails, subdomains, parked domains, and email aliases. All three shared hosting packages (Amethyst, Ruby, and Sapphire) also include free SSL certificates (via LetsEncrypt), one-click installers (Softaculous and Installatron), a user-friendly website builder (with no limitation on page/site numbers), an industry-leading cPanel, 24/7 support and 99.99% uptime guarantee.

All of Krystal’s hosting solutions come with a confident 60-day money-back guarantee, except for dedicated server plans (and understandably so), while with managed WordPress plans you can get a 30-day free trial.

Available payment methods with Krystal include credit/debit cards (Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, and American Express) and PayPal.

Ease of use

New users are prompted to create an account with Krystal, which requires a form to be filled out that includes  personal information, payment details, and a password.  

Accounts are set up in an instant, as they promised. We picked Onyx. Onyx is a fully managed plan, which means there is always someone from the technical team on the watch in case you get stuck or have any questions.

Krystal’s cloud-based shared hosting plans come with the industry-standard cPanel (which is always good news), a one-click installer with a myriad of available apps (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and many more), and a drag-and-drop builder. With all these tools you’ll be able to create a compelling site without writing a single line of code.

Speed and experience

We didn't test a website that we hosted on Krystal but we did the next best thing. We tested the Krystal website itself. Undoubtedly, this will be hosted on Krystal and quite important for them. If there's any issue on this site, not much can be said for what you host on them. As for uptime, Krystal guarantees 99.99% at all times. After getting UptimeRobot to monitor their main site for two weeks without a break, we got a glimpse of what you can expect to get while hosting with Krystal, and that is exactly what they promised. During our test, not a single second of downtime was recorded whatsoever and no major oscillations in response time to boot, which paints a picture of pretty presentable performance.

Support

Seeking support on Krystal’s main site will give you a few options including opening a support ticket, starting a live chat, giving them a ring (if you are their client), or searching through the knowledgebase. The ticketing system is available round-the-clock but you can expect to get a reply every day from 6 AM till midnight. The same hours apply for the live chat, while telephone support can be reached Monday to Friday from 9 AM to 8 PM. However, if you’ve opted for one of their premium packages, emergency phone support will be available for you 24/7.

We tried the live support and the responses were lazy. We asked if they have 24/7 support to see how much effort they would put into their reply. Their answer, after a short wait, was, "You can obtain support via live chat (9am to 6:00pm), support ticket (24/7 submission - manned 6am - midnight) or phone (Monday - Friday 9am - 8pm and 24/7 emergency phone support)."

We found this a little misleading as we thought 24/7 emergency support is only covered in the more expensive plans.

So, we asked if this support is available for all plans. A Krystal employee responded, "That would be on the business packages only, as mentioned at  https://help.krystal.uk/getting-started/what-support-is-included-with-my-hosting."

This still didn't really answer our question as there was no indication as to what "business packages" are (there are no plans labelled as business plans). The page also didn't explain whether 24/7 emergency support is available for VPS plans and on the VPS pages it wasn't immediately clear either.

After some digging we worked out that 24/7 emergency support is also available for all VPS plans but only with a management add-on that costs an extra £80/mo.

We also found that chat history is not handed over between shifts for chat support. This meant that we had to explain our query again only ten minutes after we first opened the chat. 

Overall, we were underwhelmed by the support received and the help pages for what should have been a rather simple query. 

Krystal provides a knowledgebase on the official site to help you find the best self-help option. It compiles over 300 easy-to-follow how-tos divided into 18 interconnected categories. At the end of each article, users are welcomed to leave a grade with a fitting emoji (charmed, confused, or a disappointed). As for our impression, we were pretty much charmed with everything we saw there.

The competition

If you are looking for an eco-friendly host with a similar scope of cloud-based products as Krystal’s, but with data centers across four continents, SiteGround might be a good pick. The hosts are remarkably similar in terms of pricing and features, however, SiteGround has the edge with its worldwide infrastructure.

Like Krystal, GreenGeeks is a likable beginner-friendly host that cares about the environment. However, since it offers data center locations in the USA and Canada (in addition to Europe), it may be more attractive to the wider audience.

Bluehost is another budget-friendly albeit US-based alternative to all the above, yet its US-based data centers don’t offer much flexibility in terms of location (unlike with SiteGround and GreenGeeks). Additionally, after a few years of hosting with Bluehost, the price of your package will dramatically increase, which may catch you unaware. There will be no such surprises with Krystal.

Much like Bluehost, HostGator is a US-based host offering a myriad of hosting options, features, and free apps for an attractive price. Unfortunately, just like Bluehost, it provides data centers in the USA only. Nevertheless, since all of these web hosting providers offer a money-back guarantee (Krystal’s is valid for 60 days), you can check them all out without the need to worry about wasting your money.

Final verdict

Krystal’s superiority in the UK market comes from its commitment to speed, stability, and sustainability. They also have a good reputation across multiple review sites and really nice business practices. For example, they offer free hosting to UK charities and start-ups in their first year.

• We've also highlighted the best web hosting

The company with the curious name of 20i was launched in 2016 by a dynamic duo consisting of two brothers, Tim and Jonathan Brealey. Although 20i is still basically a new-born in the trade, its creators are industry veterans, having gathered extensive web hosting experience while working on their previous creations.

Their first project was Webfusion, which was the first company to offer a customized version of a control panel called Virtual Control Panel. Three years later they founded 123-Reg, which remains a market leader in domain name registration in the UK. After two decades of experience the brother's launched a hosting company that would (in their words) “break the mold” (let’s hope for the better).

20i’s head office is located in Ransom Wood, the UK, and they have two of their own datacenters, one in London and one in Dallas, Texas. Plus they have the option of using AWS and Google Cloud servers. 20i also provide a global CDN (content delivery network) with twenty-one locations across Europe, North and South America, Asia and Africa, but their infographics could lead you to believe there are more locations included in their network than there are. So, double check the CDN locations when making a purchasing decision.

Actual amount and location of CDN nodes

Plans and pricing

20i are best known for their reseller hosting but they also provide managed cloud hosting for AWS, and managed WordPress hosting and WooCommerce hosting from their own datacenters and AWS and Google Cloud servers. For reseller plans you can't choose the datacenter location but for other plans you can. 

If you create a reseller account with US login details you'll automatically be given servers in the US datacenter. If you create a reseller account with UK login details, you'll get the UK datacenter. For other plans you can choose the location but only customers from outside the UK have the option to use the USD listing price which is cheaper than the GBP listing price after currency conversion. If you use a VPN you might be able to take advantage of the USD prices (but check the T&Cs).

We asked 20i about why the pricing is different and we were told that it's because of the lower costs to run a datacenter in the US. This didn't add up though because for this plan you can choose a server location anywhere in the world. 

Even though 20i focuses on reseller hosting, its shared, WordPress and VPS packages offer a wide array of fantastic features such as free website migration, CDN, website acceleration suite and much more. All hosting plans are presented in a very detailed manner where you can  get all needed information about web hosting packages, their cloud platform, security measures, e-mail features, supported web hosting software and their promises (some of which are backed by a guarantee) within a few clicks.

We've noticed at least one inaccuracy in the specifications listed for 20i plans. For example, for managed WordPress hosting unlimited MySQL databases with a 5GB capacity are provided but in the small print it says that database size is limited to 1024 megabytes. We asked 20i about the database capacity and were told that the limit is actually based on the SSD size of the hosting plan.

After you select a plan, you’ll be provided with a few options regarding the domain name. Here, in addition to the typical options (register a new or use an old one), you can choose to feed the little master of procrastination that lives in all of us and decide to, well, decide later what to do about your domain.

In any case, the rest of the process is everything one might expect from it. You are required to provide a first round of personal data, opt for a payment frequency (monthly or annual, with the annual one getting you one month of free hosting) and go through 20i’s terms and conditions. Now it’s time for the second round of personal data and the content of a form slightly differs depending on whether you are acting as an individual or on behalf of a company.

Ease of use

20i have their own control panel (named simply My20i) that, without much subtlety, proclaims its superiority over the fan-favorite “old-school” Linux-based cPanel. Funnily enough, My20i and cPanel look like chips off the same old block, which is something even the casual eye would take a notice of.

However, we have to admit, My20i is one of the most user-friendly tailor-made control panels we have seen and the one that will make everything you need readily available at your fingertips. It is a genuine one-stop solution for managing all of your web hosting, e-mails, databases and software. In addition to this, it has to be noted that My20i is included with all hosting packages, so you won’t be driven to pay extra just to enjoy its elegant simplicity and intuitive ease of use.

As an alternative (not that you will need one), you can use 20i’s drag-and-drop website builder,  but if you haven’t opted for their “Startup”, “Premium”, “Business” or any of the reseller plans, it will come at a price.

Speed and experience

Considering that 20i utilizes worldwide CDN and their own website acceleration suite in order to improve your site speed and “make it fly”, we came with a certain set of expectations regarding the speed performance. After we performed a speed test on 20i’s main website (provided by GTmetrix), our expectations were pretty much justified.

The page fully loaded in just 1.8 seconds (the average result is 8.1) and it required 55 requests to do so (the average being 98 requests). In addition, all other vital web metrics were ahead of the curve i.e. all but one, and that is total blocking time that regrettably took 352 milliseconds, although ideally it should be less than 150. Nevertheless, GTmetrix rated the speed performance of 20i’s site with a B (86%), which is one of the better performances we have seen so far.

20i emphasizes security of their “state-of-the-art” data centers that are manned day-and-night and reinforced with high-level physical security measures that cover everything from backup power generators to advanced fire protection. However, oddly enough, they failed to say a lot about the uptime we can expect while doing business with them.

As per usual, we put the uptime of 20i’s main website to the test, so you don’t have to. After a month of steadfast monitoring (via tireless UptimeRobot), our efforts were rewarded by pretty promising results. There was no recorded downtime at all resulting in an impeccable 100% of uptime. 

Support

Although all visitors to 20i’s website have an option to reach its support staff via telephone, if you are looking for some good old customer support, you will notice that their help is primarily text-based. The first pick for most of us will be live chat, which seems available during the working hours at a minimum. Fortunately (for both parties), after testing the willingness of their helping hands, we were well pleased with all the hand-holding we got. 

If you’re not in a rush, you can get in touch with 20i’s technical team via support ticket or email. However, if you want to remain as self-sufficient as humanly possible, there are some excellent options for you as well. The principal one is their knowledgebase (titled “Support Database”) as it manages to cover all key issues and concerns in an easy-to-understand way. On the other hand, if you are more into how-to video guides, 20i’s YouTube channel features a stack of them (actually, around sixty) and those we have checked out seem really handy. 

The competition

Most newcomers looking for a well-balanced reseller hosting solution are likely to consider web hosting providers like InMotion Hosting, HostGator and A2 Hosting at some point, and not without reason.

Since you are here, you are presumably taking 20i into consideration. And if you pick them out, you are right to expect a full list of features (many of which are unlimited), lightning speed and powerful performance in general, together with a standard 30-day money-back guarantee. However, if this should be your first close encounter with reseller web hosting, InMotion Hosting is most likely your safest bet. Their packages present a great value for money at a pocket-friendly price of $26.59 (with 20i it is about $49.50) per month, with cPanel, WHM and WHMCS  included together with an overgenerous 90-day money-back guarantee that will give you quite a bit of time to try them out before making any definitive decision.

Although HostGator is not as reseller-focused as 20i, its reseller plans can grab anyone’s attention, particularly in terms of features. For a really reasonable price HostGator will put no limitations on the number of domains, subdomains, email accounts, MySQL databases and FTP accounts. However, if you want an unlimited hosting in its true form, you’ll have to go with 20i for they will throw in an unlimited number of websites, unlimited storage space (100% SSD), unlimited bandwidth and unlimited Wildcard SSL certificates.

Bluehost is another popular alternative for those on the lookout for a novice-friendly hosting provider that has something to meet most needs. However, while Bluehost offers no reseller packages (which are 20i’s specialty), 20i doesn’t provide an option for demanding users in need of dedicated servers (and Bluehost does). This is one of those differences that can serve as a decisive point for certain types of users.

In terms of features, GreenGeeks is comparable with InMotion Hosting, but one feature that sets them apart from all the hosts above is (not hard to guess considering the name of the company is highly suggestive) their dedication to eco-friendly hosting. If we add that they guarantee 99.98% of uptime, provide 24/7 live support chat and all at a price starting at $10.95 (you can get about 80% off on sale), going green might sound even better.   

Final verdict

One of the hallmarks of hosting with 20i is their very own custom-made My20i control panel and it is the closest thing to an industry-standard control panel (such as cPanel and Plesk) we have seen since the Jurassic period of web hosting. Its beauty lies in its simplicity, intuitive design and sheer user-friendliness, which is something we seldom see with non-standard counterparts.

At the same time, 20i has been quietly gaining worldwide momentum thanks to its well-structured, feature-rich and easy-to-set up hosting solutions, a performance one can rely on and professional and polite in-house support staff.

We just found too many inaccuracies on their site which could fall into being misleading for us to strongly recommend this hosting provider for everyone. If you're looking for the best UK web hosting, there are other options.

Claimed score vs real score

The company with the curious name of 20i was launched in 2016 by a dynamic duo consisting of two brothers, Tim and Jonathan Brealey. Although 20i is still basically a new-born in the trade, its creators are industry veterans, having gathered extensive web hosting experience while working on their previous creations.

Their first project was Webfusion, which was the first company to offer a customized version of a control panel called Virtual Control Panel. Three years later they founded 123-Reg, which remains a market leader in domain name registration in the UK. After two decades of experience the brother's launched a hosting company that would (in their words) “break the mold” (let’s hope for the better).

20i’s head office is located in Ransom Wood, the UK, and they have two of their own datacenters, one in London and one in Dallas, Texas. Plus they have the option of using AWS and Google Cloud servers. 20i also provide a global CDN (content delivery network) with twenty-one locations across Europe, North and South America, Asia and Africa, but their infographics could lead you to believe there are more locations included in their network than there are. So, double check the CDN locations when making a purchasing decision.

Actual amount and location of CDN nodes

Plans and pricing

20i are best known for their reseller hosting but they also provide managed cloud hosting for AWS, and managed WordPress hosting and WooCommerce hosting from their own datacenters and AWS and Google Cloud servers. For reseller plans you can't choose the datacenter location but for other plans you can. 

If you create a reseller account with US login details you'll automatically be given servers in the US datacenter. If you create a reseller account with UK login details, you'll get the UK datacenter. For other plans you can choose the location but only customers from outside the UK have the option to use the USD listing price which is cheaper than the GBP listing price after currency conversion. If you use a VPN you might be able to take advantage of the USD prices (but check the T&Cs).

We asked 20i about why the pricing is different and we were told that it's because of the lower costs to run a datacenter in the US. This didn't add up though because for this plan you can choose a server location anywhere in the world. 

Even though 20i focuses on reseller hosting, its shared, WordPress and VPS packages offer a wide array of fantastic features such as free website migration, CDN, website acceleration suite and much more. All hosting plans are presented in a very detailed manner where you can  get all needed information about web hosting packages, their cloud platform, security measures, e-mail features, supported web hosting software and their promises (some of which are backed by a guarantee) within a few clicks.

We've noticed at least one inaccuracy in the specifications listed for 20i plans. For example, for managed WordPress hosting unlimited MySQL databases with a 5GB capacity are provided but in the small print it says that database size is limited to 1024 megabytes. We asked 20i about the database capacity and were told that the limit is actually based on the SSD size of the hosting plan.

After you select a plan, you’ll be provided with a few options regarding the domain name. Here, in addition to the typical options (register a new or use an old one), you can choose to feed the little master of procrastination that lives in all of us and decide to, well, decide later what to do about your domain.

In any case, the rest of the process is everything one might expect from it. You are required to provide a first round of personal data, opt for a payment frequency (monthly or annual, with the annual one getting you one month of free hosting) and go through 20i’s terms and conditions. Now it’s time for the second round of personal data and the content of a form slightly differs depending on whether you are acting as an individual or on behalf of a company.

Ease of use

20i have their own control panel (named simply My20i) that, without much subtlety, proclaims its superiority over the fan-favorite “old-school” Linux-based cPanel. Funnily enough, My20i and cPanel look like chips off the same old block, which is something even the casual eye would take a notice of.

However, we have to admit, My20i is one of the most user-friendly tailor-made control panels we have seen and the one that will make everything you need readily available at your fingertips. It is a genuine one-stop solution for managing all of your web hosting, e-mails, databases and software. In addition to this, it has to be noted that My20i is included with all hosting packages, so you won’t be driven to pay extra just to enjoy its elegant simplicity and intuitive ease of use.

As an alternative (not that you will need one), you can use 20i’s drag-and-drop website builder,  but if you haven’t opted for their “Startup”, “Premium”, “Business” or any of the reseller plans, it will come at a price.

Speed and experience

Considering that 20i utilizes worldwide CDN and their own website acceleration suite in order to improve your site speed and “make it fly”, we came with a certain set of expectations regarding the speed performance. After we performed a speed test on 20i’s main website (provided by GTmetrix), our expectations were pretty much justified.

The page fully loaded in just 1.8 seconds (the average result is 8.1) and it required 55 requests to do so (the average being 98 requests). In addition, all other vital web metrics were ahead of the curve i.e. all but one, and that is total blocking time that regrettably took 352 milliseconds, although ideally it should be less than 150. Nevertheless, GTmetrix rated the speed performance of 20i’s site with a B (86%), which is one of the better performances we have seen so far.

20i emphasizes security of their “state-of-the-art” data centers that are manned day-and-night and reinforced with high-level physical security measures that cover everything from backup power generators to advanced fire protection. However, oddly enough, they failed to say a lot about the uptime we can expect while doing business with them.

As per usual, we put the uptime of 20i’s main website to the test, so you don’t have to. After a month of steadfast monitoring (via tireless UptimeRobot), our efforts were rewarded by pretty promising results. There was no recorded downtime at all resulting in an impeccable 100% of uptime. 

Support

Although all visitors to 20i’s website have an option to reach its support staff via telephone, if you are looking for some good old customer support, you will notice that their help is primarily text-based. The first pick for most of us will be live chat, which seems available during the working hours at a minimum. Fortunately (for both parties), after testing the willingness of their helping hands, we were well pleased with all the hand-holding we got. 

If you’re not in a rush, you can get in touch with 20i’s technical team via support ticket or email. However, if you want to remain as self-sufficient as humanly possible, there are some excellent options for you as well. The principal one is their knowledgebase (titled “Support Database”) as it manages to cover all key issues and concerns in an easy-to-understand way. On the other hand, if you are more into how-to video guides, 20i’s YouTube channel features a stack of them (actually, around sixty) and those we have checked out seem really handy. 

The competition

Most newcomers looking for a well-balanced reseller hosting solution are likely to consider web hosting providers like InMotion Hosting, HostGator and A2 Hosting at some point, and not without reason.

Since you are here, you are presumably taking 20i into consideration. And if you pick them out, you are right to expect a full list of features (many of which are unlimited), lightning speed and powerful performance in general, together with a standard 30-day money-back guarantee. However, if this should be your first close encounter with reseller web hosting, InMotion Hosting is most likely your safest bet. Their packages present a great value for money at a pocket-friendly price of $26.59 (with 20i it is about $49.50) per month, with cPanel, WHM and WHMCS  included together with an overgenerous 90-day money-back guarantee that will give you quite a bit of time to try them out before making any definitive decision.

Although HostGator is not as reseller-focused as 20i, its reseller plans can grab anyone’s attention, particularly in terms of features. For a really reasonable price HostGator will put no limitations on the number of domains, subdomains, email accounts, MySQL databases and FTP accounts. However, if you want an unlimited hosting in its true form, you’ll have to go with 20i for they will throw in an unlimited number of websites, unlimited storage space (100% SSD), unlimited bandwidth and unlimited Wildcard SSL certificates.

Bluehost is another popular alternative for those on the lookout for a novice-friendly hosting provider that has something to meet most needs. However, while Bluehost offers no reseller packages (which are 20i’s specialty), 20i doesn’t provide an option for demanding users in need of dedicated servers (and Bluehost does). This is one of those differences that can serve as a decisive point for certain types of users.

In terms of features, GreenGeeks is comparable with InMotion Hosting, but one feature that sets them apart from all the hosts above is (not hard to guess considering the name of the company is highly suggestive) their dedication to eco-friendly hosting. If we add that they guarantee 99.98% of uptime, provide 24/7 live support chat and all at a price starting at $10.95 (you can get about 80% off on sale), going green might sound even better.   

Final verdict

One of the hallmarks of hosting with 20i is their very own custom-made My20i control panel and it is the closest thing to an industry-standard control panel (such as cPanel and Plesk) we have seen since the Jurassic period of web hosting. Its beauty lies in its simplicity, intuitive design and sheer user-friendliness, which is something we seldom see with non-standard counterparts.

At the same time, 20i has been quietly gaining worldwide momentum thanks to its well-structured, feature-rich and easy-to-set up hosting solutions, a performance one can rely on and professional and polite in-house support staff.

We just found too many inaccuracies on their site which could fall into being misleading for us to strongly recommend this hosting provider for everyone. If you're looking for the best UK web hosting, there are other options.

Claimed score vs real score

The company with the curious name of 20i was launched in 2016 by a dynamic duo consisting of two brothers, Tim and Jonathan Brealey. Although 20i is still basically a new-born in the trade, its creators are industry veterans, having gathered extensive web hosting experience while working on their previous creations.

Their first project was Webfusion, which was the first company to offer a customized version of a control panel called Virtual Control Panel. Three years later they founded 123-Reg, which remains a market leader in domain name registration in the UK. After two decades of experience the brother's launched a hosting company that would (in their words) “break the mold” (let’s hope for the better).

20i’s head office is located in Ransom Wood, the UK, and they have two of their own datacenters, one in London and one in Dallas, Texas. Plus they have the option of using AWS and Google Cloud servers. 20i also provide a global CDN (content delivery network) with twenty-one locations across Europe, North and South America, Asia and Africa, but their infographics could lead you to believe there are more locations included in their network than there are. So, double check the CDN locations when making a purchasing decision.

Actual amount and location of CDN nodes

Plans and pricing

20i are best known for their reseller hosting but they also provide managed cloud hosting for AWS, and managed WordPress hosting and WooCommerce hosting from their own datacenters and AWS and Google Cloud servers. For reseller plans you can't choose the datacenter location but for other plans you can. 

If you create a reseller account with US login details you'll automatically be given servers in the US datacenter. If you create a reseller account with UK login details, you'll get the UK datacenter. For other plans you can choose the location but only customers from outside the UK have the option to use the USD listing price which is cheaper than the GBP listing price after currency conversion. If you use a VPN you might be able to take advantage of the USD prices (but check the T&Cs).

We asked 20i about why the pricing is different and we were told that it's because of the lower costs to run a datacenter in the US. This didn't add up though because for this plan you can choose a server location anywhere in the world. 

Even though 20i focuses on reseller hosting, its shared, WordPress and VPS packages offer a wide array of fantastic features such as free website migration, CDN, website acceleration suite and much more. All hosting plans are presented in a very detailed manner where you can  get all needed information about web hosting packages, their cloud platform, security measures, e-mail features, supported web hosting software and their promises (some of which are backed by a guarantee) within a few clicks.

We've noticed at least one inaccuracy in the specifications listed for 20i plans. For example, for managed WordPress hosting unlimited MySQL databases with a 5GB capacity are provided but in the small print it says that database size is limited to 1024 megabytes. We asked 20i about the database capacity and were told that the limit is actually based on the SSD size of the hosting plan.

After you select a plan, you’ll be provided with a few options regarding the domain name. Here, in addition to the typical options (register a new or use an old one), you can choose to feed the little master of procrastination that lives in all of us and decide to, well, decide later what to do about your domain.

In any case, the rest of the process is everything one might expect from it. You are required to provide a first round of personal data, opt for a payment frequency (monthly or annual, with the annual one getting you one month of free hosting) and go through 20i’s terms and conditions. Now it’s time for the second round of personal data and the content of a form slightly differs depending on whether you are acting as an individual or on behalf of a company.

Ease of use

20i have their own control panel (named simply My20i) that, without much subtlety, proclaims its superiority over the fan-favorite “old-school” Linux-based cPanel. Funnily enough, My20i and cPanel look like chips off the same old block, which is something even the casual eye would take a notice of.

However, we have to admit, My20i is one of the most user-friendly tailor-made control panels we have seen and the one that will make everything you need readily available at your fingertips. It is a genuine one-stop solution for managing all of your web hosting, e-mails, databases and software. In addition to this, it has to be noted that My20i is included with all hosting packages, so you won’t be driven to pay extra just to enjoy its elegant simplicity and intuitive ease of use.

As an alternative (not that you will need one), you can use 20i’s drag-and-drop website builder,  but if you haven’t opted for their “Startup”, “Premium”, “Business” or any of the reseller plans, it will come at a price.

Speed and experience

Considering that 20i utilizes worldwide CDN and their own website acceleration suite in order to improve your site speed and “make it fly”, we came with a certain set of expectations regarding the speed performance. After we performed a speed test on 20i’s main website (provided by GTmetrix), our expectations were pretty much justified.

The page fully loaded in just 1.8 seconds (the average result is 8.1) and it required 55 requests to do so (the average being 98 requests). In addition, all other vital web metrics were ahead of the curve i.e. all but one, and that is total blocking time that regrettably took 352 milliseconds, although ideally it should be less than 150. Nevertheless, GTmetrix rated the speed performance of 20i’s site with a B (86%), which is one of the better performances we have seen so far.

20i emphasizes security of their “state-of-the-art” data centers that are manned day-and-night and reinforced with high-level physical security measures that cover everything from backup power generators to advanced fire protection. However, oddly enough, they failed to say a lot about the uptime we can expect while doing business with them.

As per usual, we put the uptime of 20i’s main website to the test, so you don’t have to. After a month of steadfast monitoring (via tireless UptimeRobot), our efforts were rewarded by pretty promising results. There was no recorded downtime at all resulting in an impeccable 100% of uptime. 

Support

Although all visitors to 20i’s website have an option to reach its support staff via telephone, if you are looking for some good old customer support, you will notice that their help is primarily text-based. The first pick for most of us will be live chat, which seems available during the working hours at a minimum. Fortunately (for both parties), after testing the willingness of their helping hands, we were well pleased with all the hand-holding we got. 

If you’re not in a rush, you can get in touch with 20i’s technical team via support ticket or email. However, if you want to remain as self-sufficient as humanly possible, there are some excellent options for you as well. The principal one is their knowledgebase (titled “Support Database”) as it manages to cover all key issues and concerns in an easy-to-understand way. On the other hand, if you are more into how-to video guides, 20i’s YouTube channel features a stack of them (actually, around sixty) and those we have checked out seem really handy. 

The competition

Most newcomers looking for a well-balanced reseller hosting solution are likely to consider web hosting providers like InMotion Hosting, HostGator and A2 Hosting at some point, and not without reason.

Since you are here, you are presumably taking 20i into consideration. And if you pick them out, you are right to expect a full list of features (many of which are unlimited), lightning speed and powerful performance in general, together with a standard 30-day money-back guarantee. However, if this should be your first close encounter with reseller web hosting, InMotion Hosting is most likely your safest bet. Their packages present a great value for money with cPanel, WHM and WHMCS  included together with an overgenerous 90-day money-back guarantee that will give you quite a bit of time to try them out before making any definitive decision.

Although HostGator is not as reseller-focused as 20i, its reseller plans can grab anyone’s attention, particularly in terms of features. For a really reasonable price HostGator will put no limitations on the number of domains, subdomains, email accounts, MySQL databases and FTP accounts. However, if you want an unlimited hosting in its true form, you’ll have to go with 20i for they will throw in an unlimited number of websites, unlimited storage space (100% SSD), unlimited bandwidth and unlimited Wildcard SSL certificates.

Bluehost is another popular alternative for those on the lookout for a novice-friendly hosting provider that has something to meet most needs. However, while Bluehost offers no reseller packages (which are 20i’s specialty), 20i doesn’t provide an option for demanding users in need of dedicated servers (and Bluehost does). This is one of those differences that can serve as a decisive point for certain types of users.

In terms of features, GreenGeeks is comparable with InMotion Hosting, but one feature that sets them apart from all the hosts above is (not hard to guess considering the name of the company is highly suggestive) their dedication to eco-friendly hosting. If we add that they guarantee 99.98% of uptime, provide 24/7 live chat support going green might sound even better.   

Final verdict

One of the hallmarks of hosting with 20i is their very own custom-made My20i control panel and it is the closest thing to an industry-standard control panel (such as cPanel and Plesk) we have seen since the Jurassic period of web hosting. Its beauty lies in its simplicity, intuitive design and sheer user-friendliness, which is something we seldom see with non-standard counterparts.

At the same time, 20i has been quietly gaining worldwide momentum thanks to its well-structured, feature-rich and easy-to-set up hosting solutions, a performance one can rely on and professional and polite in-house support staff.

We just found too many inaccuracies on their site which could fall into being misleading for us to strongly recommend this hosting provider for everyone. If you're looking for the best UK web hosting, there are other options.

Claimed score vs real score

When it comes to best web hosting and website management, there is no shortage of options. The vast majority of companies out there offer affordable services that are good enough to get the job done. For us, Kinsta is the stand-out choice for hosting for agencies.

Kinsta is a cloud-based hosting solution providing services for WordPress websites, web applications, databases, and static sites. They provide access to high-performance servers and features such as staging environments, automatic backups, enterprise-level Cloudflare integration, and more.

Kinsta also includes quality security features such as DDoS protection, SSL certificate with wildcard support, and malware scanning and removal.

• Want to try Kinsta? Check out the website here

From the main website, you can access Kinsta’s official blog. It’s easy on the eye and filled with a myriad of articles, most of which are related to WordPress and software development. In addition to this, Kinsta offers a fresh and video-packed YouTube channel and relatively active presence on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

Kinsta features

Kinsta offers high-end CPUs, as well as global availability thanks to Google’s C2 and C3D machines on its premium tier network. By using these top-of-the-line CPUs, you are guaranteed that your website will be up and running faster than ever before.

To further improve the speed of your website, Kinsta also offers a global content delivery network with over 260 locations around the world. This allows Kinsta to deliver fast pages and serve cached assets from your visitors’ closest location.

Kinsta also comes with built-in application performance monitoring (APM), which is its custom-designed performance monitoring tool specifically for WordPress sites. We used this feature to identify any potential issues or bottlenecks slowing down our site during our test of the hosting service.

Kinsta's DevKinsata feature provides a comprehensive development environment that makes it easy to develop applications locally on your computer. DevKinsata includes many helpful features such as version control which allows developers to roll back to previous versions of their code if needed, easy debugging capabilities with Xdebug integration, and deployments to production servers with just one click.

With the new Kinsta Cloudflare integration, we took advantage of a wildcard SSL certificate which let us secure our subdomains with just one certificate. A wildcard SSL is an SSL certificate that secures both a root domain and its individual subdomains. This is in contrast to other types of certificates that require you to list each individual subdomain on the certificate.

As part of its Cloudflare integration, Kinsta offers customers a unique benefit - reserved IP addresses. Reserved IPs are unique IP addresses assigned to each Kinsta customer site. These IP addresses are reserved exclusively for use by that specific customer and ensure that the DNS A-record IP address will not be shared by other sites on Cloudflare's network. In some cases, this can cause problems if a service blocks a spam site that happens to share the same Cloudflare IP address as your site.

We were also impressed with the Kinsta Brotli Compression Tool (a lossless compression format that is supported by all major browsers and achieves better compression ratios than gzip).

Kinsta also released a tool called Edge Caching. This is an incredibly powerful tool for websites running WordPress that can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to serve cached HTML to site visitors. Edge Caching is included free with all Kinsta plans, and no additional plugins are required.

Kinsta’s Edge Caching works by saving your website/page cache to Cloudflare’s global network of over 260 data centers. When site visitors load your website, cached responses will be delivered from the location closest to them, helping to reduce latency and ensure faster loading times.

With the help of the Early Hints, you can further improve site speed. Early hints is a modern web standard that defines a new 103 HTTP status code. Enabling this web standard on your site, it gives your site visitors’ browsers the chance to download certain resources in advance or in parallel with others. This results in a faster page rendering speed.

A curiosity of Kinsta’s hosting, but one that we found made sense, is the apparent lack of a temporary URL for checking the site runs accurately. However, this is a feature that can be easily turned on and off, and lasts for around 60 minutes when enabled. Given that a site doesn’t need to be seen by the public or crawlers before launch, this is useful.

For web hosting services in Australia, Kinsta CDN is in six Australian cities, including Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney.

Is Kinsta easy to use? 

We find Kinsta easy to use - from signing up to navigating through the dashboard. The web host provides you with an intuitive dashboard that makes hosting your website easy. The dashboard let us quickly access all the features and settings in one place, which makes it simple to manage our website’s performance and security.

With Kinsta, you can also set up and manage multiple websites from one account, as well as deploy applications, databases or static sites, meaning you don’t have to switch between different accounts every time you want to make changes or update your site or create a new web app.

Kinsta also has a number of helpful features that make managing your website easier. All these features are designed so that even those who aren’t tech-savvy can easily manage their website without too much hassle.

Kinsta plans and pricing

Kinsta offers different plans, ranging from $35/month to $1700/month. All plans include free wildcard SSL, CDN, staging, and unlimited migrations. But what do you get when you purchase one of these plans? The Single plans starts at $35/month and allows you to install 1 WordPress, 10 GB of storage space, 125 GB free CDN, and 35,000 visits per month. The Single-site plans scale with each step up getting more site visits, storage, and CDN bandwidth. Each Single site plan denotes the support amount of visits. The plans go as high as 1,250,000+ visits, 15 GB+ storage and 1000GB CDN bandwidth.

Multiple-site plans support multiple WordPress installs. Each plan name denotes the amount of WordPress installs supported. Each multiple-site plan supports multisite network and site cloning. For WP 2 ($70/mo) you get two WordPress installs, with 70,000 visits, 250 GB of CDN bandwidth, and 20 GB storage. As the plans increase in price the resources, site visits, and amount of WordPress installs increase too. The WP 40 plan ($450/mo) supports 40 WordPress installs, 60 GB storage, 1500 GB of CDN, and 75,000 monthly visits.

Kinsta also offers an Enterprise Plan for multiple sites, which starts at $675/month and includes 60+ WordPress installs, 100+ GB of space, 1,250,000+ visits, and a 30-day backup retention.

All the above plans come with unlimited free migrations and a 30-day money-back guarantee, so if you are not satisfied with the service, you can request a refund. Select plans on Single and Multiple-site tiers also include a one month free trial.

Agency Hosting

Kinsta’s Agency program is targeted, price-wise, at established digital agencies. The Agency 20 plan, which we tested, offers support for 20 WordPress installs, so potentially 20 clients. It also includes an extra site, for your agency. 500,000 visits, 50GB of storage, and 1,000GB CDN storage makes this an attractive starting point, but Agency 40 ($375/month with annual billing) and Agency 60 ($563/month under the same terms) are also available, with corresponding increases in installs.

These plans also include a white label provision, removing the Kinsta branding for reselling the hosting to the client, and access to beta tools. Backups, advanced caching, and migrations are also included with these packages, along with that all-important developer support. A number of tools are available here, from easy site cloning to Git integration and access to the Kinsta API.

Kinsta speed and experience

Kinsta argues that it is almost a certainty that users will see “faster page load times, along with back-end (WordPress dashboard) speed” when hosting with them. Faster than what, we asked ourselves. Faster than the average speed, faster than lightning or faster than Superman?

In any case, GTmetrix (a tool we used to test the speed performance of Kinsta’s main website) appears to agree with them given that it rated the performance of their website with an A (91%), which is not a result we often see. All major core metrics related to the speed were above the average, which looks pretty promising.

When it comes to uptime, Kinsta’s technical team monitors all of its users’ websites at all times, which means that they will be notified if any downtime occurs and lasts longer than five minutes, and, thus, prompt them to rush to resolve the issue. After monitoring Kinsta’s main website for a month using UptimeRobot, we couldn’t find a single trace of downtime, which does inspire confidence.

Latest results

We recently ran more tests on Kinsta for our best hosting for agencies guide. We did the same test we do for every host. We migrate a simple website and perform some baseline WordPress benchmark test and do some Siege testing for concurrent visitors. We used the Agency 20 plan. While these don't show what the server is like under load. It does show a good baseline score for site performance.

Kinsta security

Kinsta is one such provider that offers quality security measures (in our opinion) including SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates. An SSL certificate is a type of digital certificate that provides encryption and authentication for data sent over the internet. It helps protect user information, like credit card numbers and passwords, from being accessed by malicious third parties.

An SSL certificate also helps verify the identity of a website so that users know they are connecting to the correct server and not a malicious one.

Kinsta uses Cloudflare's infrastructure to provide wildcard SSL certificates with 128-bit or higher encryption as well as 2048-bit RSA keys. Kinsta says its servers are also constantly monitored 24/7 for any signs of suspicious activity or hacking, which is good to know. Kinsta also offers a 99.9% SLA-backed uptime guarantee.

There's also a Malware Security Pledge in which Kinsta's team will help restore a site in the event of an attack. Kinsta have earned SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance so security standards are high and hopefully you'll never have to use that.

Customer support

Kinsta offers knowledgeable sales representatives who can help you find the hosting plan that best fits your website or project.

If you want a deeper dive into all of Kinsta’s features, consider scheduling a personalized demo with one of its experts. This is an excellent way to get familiar with Kinsta's powerful dashboard and hosting features, as well as ask any questions that come up during the process.

We had a few questions about our website and contacted Kinsta through its question form on the website. They got back to us the next day with answers tailored specifically to our hosting dilemma.

Kinsta’s support team is available 24/7/365 via live chat in the MyKinsta dashboard so that you can quickly receive help. You can also open up tickets here if there are ever any issues with your site.

As noted, we also tried Kinsta’s Agency 20 plan, arranging for a site to be migrated via a backup. The support operative who took ownership of this task completed it within a couple of hours, a timescale that included not just scanning the ZIP file for potential issues, but also fully migrating it and testing the site.

We later ran into an issue trying to point a domain at the hosting. This requires a bit more clicking and settings configuration than with other hosts (switching nameservers is just one aspect of this), but while I found this baffling at first, the support team member who walked me through it helped me solve it within 15 minutes.

There are more than a few self-help options including regularly updated documentation, free e-books, free webinars, a newsletter and a blog we mentioned before, and everything is dedicated to bringing knowledge about WordPress to its users. In addition to this, Kinsta’s YouTube channel is filled with step-by-step guides and the new ones are coming out on a week-to-week basis at the very least.

As an alternative, you can reach Kinsta’s “timely and knowledgeable” support via email and chat.

Kinsta alternatives

Much like Kinsta, Flywheel is a fellow US-based host specialized in “top-of-the-line” managed WordPress hosting solutions. Both of them strive to be beginner-friendly, offer well-rounded, feature-packed packages and are on the high-priced side of the spectrum. However, Kinsta’s least expensive solution starts at a whopping $30, half as much as what is offered by Flywheel. Therefore, if the price is the key criterion (since both hosts are competent) for you, you could save some bucks by going with Flywheel.

Bluehost is one of the most popular hosting options on the market today, even when it comes to managed WordPress hosting. In comparison with Kinsta, Bluehost has a myriad of hosting types and options besides WordPress and its WordPress plans are well-structured and suitable for newcomers. If you are, however, looking for premium managed WordPress options, you might find yourself at home with Kinsta.

DreamHost is a US-based provider supplying WordPress-optimized hosting solutions and related services, including a domain registration, which is something you won’t get with Kinsta. Another thing they don’t provide is a website builder and you’ll have that as an option with DreamHost. What is more, in addition to offering more hosting options, DreamHost has more pocket-friendly plans, so you’ll save some money as well.

Although HostGator does not specialize in WordPress hosting, it has a few rather attractive solutions on the offer. Nonetheless, if you are looking for a premium fully managed WordPress hosting (and you are ready to shell out the money) Kinsta might be a better pick. If you would rather have something simpler and more on the affordable side, HostGator is an excellent choice.

WP Engine is also a great alternative as it offers a wide range of services, from shared hosting to managed WordPress hosting and dedicated servers. WP Engine is known for its fast speeds and reliable uptime, as well as its excellent customer service and support team.

SiteGround is another great option if you’re looking for an alternative to Kinsta. This provider offers a variety of hosting plans that range from shared hosting to VPS and cloud solutions. SiteGround also has excellent customer service and support, which makes it a great choice if you need help getting started or have questions about how to use their services.

Is Kinsta right for you? 

Kinsta offers a range of features to help businesses get up and running quickly and easily, including easy scalability, managed updates, automated daily backups, and 24/7 support.

Kinsta offers a range of features to help businesses get up and running quickly and easily, including automatic scaling, managed updates, automated daily backups,SSH access, WP CLI, a powerful API, Application Performance Monitoring, and 24/7/365 support in 10 languages, with a response time within a minute and 98% client satisfaction.

Kinsta also prides itself on its performance and reliability - It’s caching technology ensures websites load faster than ever before; this helps keep visitors on your site longer which can lead to increased conversions.

Kinsta FAQs