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 standout choice for agency hosting.

Kinsta is a cloud-based hosting solution providing services for WordPress websites. 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 its infrastructure built on a powerful cloud 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 your website's speed, Kinsta also offers a global content delivery network with over 300 locations worldwide. 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), a custom-designed tool specifically for WordPress sites. We used this feature to identify potential issues or bottlenecks slowing our site during our hosting service test.

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

With the new Kinsta Cloudflare integration, we leveraged a wildcard SSL certificate to secure our subdomains with a single certificate. A wildcard SSL certificate secures both a root domain and its subdomains. This contrasts with other certificate types, which require listing each 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 that customer and ensure that other sites on Cloudflare's network will not share the DNS A-record IP address. In some cases, this can cause problems if a service blocks a spam site that shares the same Cloudflare IP address as your site.

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

Kinsta also released a tool called Edge Caching. This is an incredibly powerful tool for WordPress websites that can significantly reduce the 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 are delivered from the location closest to them, helping reduce latency and improve loading times.

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

A curiosity of Kinsta’s hosting, but one that we found made sense, is the apparent lack of a temporary URL for checking that the site runs accurately. However, this feature can be easily turned on and off and lasts 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 available in six Australian cities, namely 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 set up and manage multiple websites from one account. 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 plans ranging from $35/month to $ 1,700/month. All plans include free wildcard SSL, CDN, staging, and unlimited migrations. Kinsta offers two pricing models for its plans: visit-based and bandwidth-based. In visit-based plans, the plan is defined by the monthly sum of unique IP addresses seen each 24-hour period. While bandwidth-based plans are defined by the amount of data in gigabytes (does not include content served by CDN and Edge Cache, and does not count bandwidth used by staging sites)

But what do you get when you purchase one of these plans? The Single plan starts at $35/month and includes 1 WordPress site, 10 GB of storage, 125 GB of free CDN, and 35,000 visits per month or 20 GB server bandwidth. The Single plans scale with each step up, providing more site visits or server bandwidth, storage, and CDN bandwidth. Each Single site plan denotes the support amount of visits or bandwidth . The plans go up to 1,250,000+ visits or 500GB+ server bandwidth, 15 GB+ storage, and 1,000 GB CDN bandwidth.

Multiple-site plans support multiple WordPress installs. Each plan name denotes the number of WordPress installs supported. Each multiple-site plan supports multisite network and site cloning. For WP 2 ($70/mo), you get 2 WordPress installs, 70,000 visits or 40 GB server bandwidth, 250 GB of CDN bandwidth, and 20 GB of storage. As the plans increase in price, so do the resources, site visits, and number of WordPress installs. The WP 40 plan ($450/mo) supports 40 WordPress installs, 60 GB of storage, 1,500 GB of CDN, and 75,000 monthly visits or 500 GB server bandwidth.

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 or 750GB+ server bandwidth, 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 ($284/month with annual billing), 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 or 250GB server bandwidth , 50GB of storage, and 1,000GB CDN storage make 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 white labelling and access to beta tools. Backups, advanced caching, and migrations are also included with these packages, along with that all-important developer support. Several tools are available here, from easy site cloning to Git integration and access to the Kinsta API.

Kinsta speed and experience

Kinsta argues that users will almost certainly 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, we ran tests on Kinsta's Single plan and Agency 20. One test was to create a benchmark of core WordPress performance metrics, and the other was to measure their performance under load.

Latest results

Kinsta performed well on its core benchmarks and maintained these scores across both its Single and Agency plans. We noted especially high scores in file and database performance, which bodes well for WordPress sites, especially those with high transaction rates, such as eCommerce stores, membership-based sites, or large-scale enterprise websites.

Under increasing load, Kinsta was a mixed bag in performance. However, we noted that although some transactions failed, Kinsta's servers seemed to handle load balancing well. That means its servers should be well-optimized to ensure that your website visitors encounter more or less similar experiences, rather than facing wildly varying transaction times. This is highly crucial to high-performance websites and not something you fix on your own.

Kinsta security

Kinsta is one 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, such as credit card numbers and passwords, from unauthorized access by malicious third parties.

More essentially, sites at Kinsta are containerized. That means everything required to run your site is within your container, including the entire tech stack. This isolation means that as long as you can secure your website, nothing else that's happening to other sites on Kinsta can affect you.

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 dedicated Malware team will help restore a site in the event of an attack. The team monitors all sites, and its services are free for all Kinsta customers.

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 you can quickly get help. You can also open tickets here if you ever have any issues with your site. Additionally, Kinsta has beefed up localization in its customer support by making help available in 10 languages.

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

Network Solutions was launched in 1979 as one of the first companies to provide DNS (domain name system) technology. Since then, it has developed to provide many more services, all related to web hosting. Today they provide “all you need, in one place”, that is: domain names and various hosting options with a whole variety of features and accessible applications including a page builder. The company is headquartered in the US, with its main office located in Herndon and its data center situated somewhere in North America.

In 2011, Network Solutions was acquired by Web.com Group, one of the leading web technology companies that provided services to millions of customers all over the world. Then, in 2021 web.com merged with EIG to become Newfold Digital. Later, in 2025 Newfold Digital consolidated brands and absorbed web.com into Network Solutions.

So, it's fair to say Network Solutions has had a long and varied life changing hands and merging more than most hosts. Is this Network Solution's final form? Who knows but one thing is certain. It's not staying power.

• Want to try Network Solutions? Check out the website here

• Also check out our roundup of the best shared web hosting

Is Network Solutions good value for money?

Network Solutions’ Starter Plan is perfect for businesses just getting started. This plan costs only $2.99 per month for the first year and includes 10 GB of disk space, 1 website, and five email boxes. You also get 25 FTP accounts, a drag and drop page builder, and unlimited bandwidth.

For $4.99 per month, the Essential Plan gives you even more features than the Starter Plan. It includes 20 GB of disk space, 3 websites, 1,000 email boxes, and a domain name included in your package (for one year). If your business needs more than the Essential Plan provides, consider Network Solutions Premium Plan. This plan covers all of the features of the Essential plan plus 40 GB disk space and supports 10 websites for $6.99 for the first year.

Is Network Solutions easy to use?

Because Network Solutions doesn’t exactly have a myriad of hosting options, picking out a preferred plan shouldn’t be a time-consuming decision. The first thing you’ll need to know is if you want a simpler cloud-based solution or a WordPress-optimized one. For the most part, together with these hosting packages, you’ll be getting email services as well. If not (and you want them), digging a bit more around the website will take you to a few email hosting solutions as well.

Network Solutions is a decent choice for anyone looking for an easy-to-use web hosting service with sufficient features. Not only does it offer a good range of benefits such as domain registration, design tools, email hosting, marketing tools, and more but its user interface is also incredibly intuitive and simple to navigate whether you’re a novice or an experienced user. 

All plans come with a proprietary control panel, which isn’t as user friendly as some industry-standard alternatives, but we managed to find our way around. From there, most of the famous apps can be yours after a click or two (WordPress, Joomla, Durpal and so on) and all developers out there will be glad to hear that a whole variety of website development features are supported as well (PHP5, Python, Ruby on Rails, Java Servlets, Zend Libraries and much more). A number of e-commerce features (and all-inclusive ecommerce solution) are available for purchase, as well as a competent drag-and-drop website builder.

Speed and experience

When trying to convince us of the superiority of their services, Network Solutions brings up their “reliable” uptime with the guarantee of 99.9%, live tech support and flexible hosting plans, without any promises regarding the speed. Not knowing what to expect, we tested the speed performance of Network Solutions’ main website using GTmetrix as a tool. It placed the website's speed performance above the average with the conclusive result of B (85%), which is quite good.

We decided to test the uptime of Network Solutions’ main website by using UptimeRobot and see if we're going to take advantage of the guarantees they provided us with. After a month of constant monitoring, UptimeRobot reported a few occasions of downtime, with the longest one lasting for 19 minutes straight. However, the total of downtime was around 42 minutes. This means the total recorded uptime was 99.917% and that Network Solutions managed to deliver on their promises by a whisker.

While this isn't a true reflection of the speeds you can expect from your site on shared hosting, it is a good indicator of how reliable and powerful Network Solutions' infrastructure is.

Help and support

The first help options you’ll probably notice with Network Solutions are their telephone number (which is advised to be used for urgent matters only) and “Contact us” button that will present you with a few ways to help yourself. Their knowledgebase (titled as “Help Center”) can be browsed with the help of a search box or you can pick out some of the preselected categories. There seems to be a decent number of articles which are mostly written in an easy-to-follow way (often with pictures) and rated by users with a five-star rating system. 

If you would rather rely on support agents from Network Solutions’ technical team, you can get in touch with them via support ticket, live chat and telephone, all of which ought to be available around-the-clock.

Network Solutions features a community forum, where its registered users (we assume, since trying to proceed without registration made us hit the dead end) can seek answers to their questions, answer questions from other users or leave feedback for others to see. However, when we tried to register, not a single one from dozens of display names (and some were quite original) was deemed acceptable (the only explanation we got was “Name you entered is already in use”, which doesn’t seem to be the case), so we can’t report anything more than this.

The competition

Bluehost is also one of those hosts that will provide their users with everything need but also have servers in Europe and Asia. Even so, Bluehost provides a great value for money and offers (unlike Network Solutions) VPS hosting, managed WordPress and dedicated server in addition to basics, so it is better suited for more ambitious users.

HostGator can provide you with everything Network Solutions can and go beyond that, and we are not thinking about hosting types only. The entry-level (adorably named “Hatchling”) plan with HostGator includes a domain name, website transfer, unmetered bandwidth and SSL certificate, all cost-free. In comparison, Network Solutions’ elementary plan has less bonus features to attract new users with.

Both of those brands are also owned by Newfold Digital. If you wanted to look outside of that group you could also consider Hostinger.

Is Network Solutions right for you? 

Since it was founded at the end of the disco era, Network Solutions certainly knows how to get groovy with its hosting packages, offering a great deal of helpful tools to get your website down with a boogie in no time. 

When deciding on a web hosting service, there are many factors to consider such as price point, customer service availability, and uptime guarantee. Network Solutions offers all these features in one package, making them a great option for anyone who wants reliable web hosting without breaking the bank. 

Network Solutions FAQs

• We've also featured the best web hosting

If you've ever searched for cheap website hosting, then HostPapa is likely one of the brands you'll have come across. Based in Ontario, Canada, the company has been around for close to two decades.

After a series of aggressive acquisitions, HostPapa today has become one of the bigger hosting brands around. It's what I like to call a one-stop shop, offering everything website owners need, from hosting to security and more.

Overall, HostPapa is a brand that is worth a try if you're in the market for cheap hosting. You''ll just need to be careful at checkout not to select add-ons and be patient with the onboarding process.

HostPapa hosting plans and prices

HostPapa offers shared, VPS, dedicated, and reseller hosting. Because of its popularity, several WordPress plans are also available. These are built on different platforms, from shared to VPS. Additionally, you can get email hosting, Microsoft 365, premium SSL certificates, and more.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting plans range between $2.95/mo and $9.95/mo. These are the rates for 3-year terms. Following that, renewals cost from $8.99/mo to $27.99/mo, depending on your subscribed plan.

The lowest shared hosting plan (Essentials) offers decent specifications for a single website: 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, and 25GB of NVMe storage. However, remember that this is shared hosting, so hosting resources aren't yours alone.

There's also what HostPapa calls Optimized WordPress hosting, which simply means they pre-install WordPress on your shared hosting account. The prices are identical, as are the specifications.

VPS and Managed WordPress Hosting

HostPapa offers managed and unmanaged VPS hosting. These plans are a step up from shared hosting. You'll find performance on VPS more consistent, since all the specified resources are yours alone.

The unmanaged VPS plans at HostPapa are, honestly, very cheap. Prices range from $5.95/mo to $59.95/mo, depending on resources provided. The cheapest plan (Start) offers 2 vCPUs, 2GB RAM, and 50GB of storage.

Managed VPS plans are meant for those who don't have the skills (or time) to manage a barebones virtual server. For this, you pay premium rates at HostPapa, ranging from $36.95/mo to $86.95/mo.

The last offering in the VPS segment is HostPapa's Managed WordPress plans. Think of this as Managed VPS plans, which are restricted to WordPress only. As such, prices fall between $19.95/mo to $114.95/mo.

Dedicated Servers and Reseller Hosting

If you're one of those with much higher hosting requirements, then HostPapa's dedicated servers are what you'll need. These plans offer you a custom-configured server, with specifications that would make boyish hearts go "Whopee!"

Prices on these range from $59.95/mo to $219.95/mo for unmanaged servers. If you want a managed dedicated server, be prepared to fork out the big bucks. Prices in this category range between $109.95/mo to $269.95/mo. The most interesting part here is that there is no price hike on renewal for dedicated server plans.

Reseller hosting ranges between $14.95/mo to $57.95/mo. The specifications for these plans are rather modest since the focus is on white-label services and the number of cPanel accounts assigned to you.

Note: HostPapa does not offer a temporary domain name, so you must either have a domain name already registered or buy one from them to get started.

Getting started at HostPapa

Once you've decided which hosting plan you want, click the "Buy Now" button below that plan. You'll then head to a screen where you fill in your billing details and finalize the configuration for your hosting plan.

There are two key things you have to note here:

• Only those opting for shared hosting can choose their data center location. There are three locations available: The United States, Canada, and Europe.
• Pay attention to the optional add-ons. PapaCare Lite is selected by default. If you don't unselect that option, you'll find a significant amount getting billed monthly after the first month.

Onboarding process

Unfortunately, things don't start moving quickly once you've made your payment. With most other hosts, I've gotten onboarding emails almost immediately. HostPapa made me wait 5 minutes before emailing me an identity verification request.

This means you'll have to scan an ID document and scan your face, either on your phone or via webcam. If you wear glasses and can't see without them, things can get problematic since the facial scan requires you to remove them.

When all of this is done, you can finally access your user dashboard. This is where the magic happens. To get started with your website, click "My cPanel." I used it to install WordPress, which completed in a few minutes.

Speed and reliability

When testing web hosts, we typically sign up for the cheapest plan available. For HostPapa, that was the Essential shared hosting plan. We then upload a pre-built WooCommerce website to standardize our tests.

Typically, when an entire test category fails, it indicates that the host may have disabled certain operations. In this case, HostPapa seems to disallow filesystem operation and network speed tests. This has somewhat skewed our HostPapa system benchmark.

However, given the other parameters indicate healthy server operations. HostPapa's shared hosting performed well on CPU and memory operations and showcased impressive database times. All in, that's great news for WordPress fans.

Siege is our benchmark of choice for load testing. It sends multiple requests according to our parameters to test the server's ability to handle simultaneous transactions. Impressively, HostPapa's cheapest shared hosting account performed quite well.

It handled up to 9 concurrent users easily, with 100% successful transactions. However, this came at a small sacrifice in performance as increased loads resulted in some transactions being somewhat delayed beyond the norm.

Once we hit the server with 15 concurrent users, HostPapa began to struggle. There was a slight uptick in failed transactions and longer completion times for some transactions. Still, a 95% success rate for shared hosting is good.

Customer support and knowledge base

HostPapa has one of the most extensive knowledge bases I've come across. Much of the content is helpful, especially the short guides that teach novices simple things like DNS pointing and basic WordPress tutorials. For those more visual, there are also various video tutorials.

It also offers great customer support via live chat, email, phone, or a ticketing system. If you need more assistance, sign up for one of their short one-to-one training sessions (for free!).

Who should consider using HostPapa?

Let me be honest. HostPapa is cheap and offers decent performance. However, once the cheap introductory pricing wears off, you'll be better off elsewhere. Given the cost of their VPS plans, it would be far more cost-effective to sign on with Cloudways.

Or, if you prefer, consider a WordPress-only expert like WP Engine or Kinsta. They might be more expensive, but you'll get the powerful hosting that you'll need to squeeze every bit of performance out of your WordPress website.

I'd recommend HostPapa only if you're:

• Brand new to web hosting.
• Have price as one of your key considerations.
• Require lots of help getting started with hosting.

Final verdict

While writing this review, I had to remind myself that I was on a web hosting plan that costs $2.95/mo. For that price, HostPapa demonstrated performance that, to me, felt good. However, the onboarding process did turn me off because of the email delays, and the emails didn't come in a logical order which may leave some new users slightly confused.

There are many more pros than cons to this web host, and unless you're playing in the big leagues, the plans here are worth a go. Give it a shot for yourself and see what I mean.

HostPapa FAQs

• We've also highlighted the best web hosting

As the name suggests, UK2 is a UK-based host, headquartered in London, and it has been in the web hosting industry since 1998. During more than two decades of operation they’ve registered more than one million of domain names of websites in more than 200 locations around the globe, so there is definitely a reason why they are considered one of the largest web hosting companies in the UK and why they're listed on our best UK web hosting guide.

• Want to try UK2? Check out the website here

The UK2’s main website is not quite as intuitive as it should be and many users might spend considerable time navigating around while forgetting what they were looking for in the first place. The first search window you encounter upon entering the site isn’t related to knowledgebase, FAQ or similar information source, but rather a way to check availability of your desired domain name. If anything, the website is responsive and appears to be updated regularly.

UK2 has a decent-looking blog filled with the various interrelated subjects, some of which are highlighted by the criteria of popularity and publication date. It appears to be active and updated on a monthly basis.

As for the social media, they have presence at Facebook and Twitter, and both profiles seem to be active and available for customer interaction.

Pricing

Upon entering the site, you will be offered a hosting a plan that is currently on sale with details about pricing, discount and additional features. Scroll down and you will be prompted to “design your perfect hosting solution” by picking the options that define you as a user and your professional requirements. Following this, you’ll be offered three hosting plans that ought to suit your needs, varying by the hosting type, price and added features. Basic shared hosting, WordPress, Cloud, Managed, SSD VPS and dedicated server are all at your disposal. 

UK2's basic and most budget-friendly Starter WordPress plan starts at £4.99 ($6.47) a month, but if you choose a year or two, the monthly price drops to mere £2.00 ($2.59) which is £23.95 ($31.06) for a whole year or £47.90 ($62.12) for two. This will get you one domain name, access to FTP, 5GB SSD Disk Space, five 10GB Pro IMAP Emails, Cloudflare CDN (which is always included with WordPress hosting plans) as well as backups and automatic malware removal. 

If you are more ambitious, you could go with Business Hosting, which will allow you to build up to a 100-page website and up to 1000 x 10GB email addresses to share with your contacts and customers, all within reasonable prices. All previously mentioned plans include a 30-day money-back guarantee. 

Although VPS Cloud Hosting is consider to be aimed at the tech-savvy, UK2 will throw in “state-of-the-art” cPanel and first-rate 24/7 customer support to make everything much easier.

When paying methods are concerned, the options include direct debit, debit/credit card and PayPal, which is more than what is usually available.

Ease of use

Upon picking out your plan, you’ll be immediately offered a few add-ons such as Website SEO Guru (a marketing tool) or SiteLock (which should improve security of your website) and all for an extra price. After this, you’ll be prompted to choose your domain or use an existing one, add your personal details and select a paying method. At every step of the way, a “Having problems?” window will pop up, offering you to contact customer service via telephone or live chat, which may be needed because some parts of the process are not as intuitive as they could be.

While selecting the paying method you are offered a checkbox choice to store it, which is quite refreshing to see. The last step is creating an account password monitored by quite rigorous strength meter, after which the sign-up process is finalized.

Since UK2 uses an industry-standard cPanel, if you’ve used web hosts in the past and are familiar with the layout, you’ll have no trouble navigating around. Even if you haven’t, cPanel makes for a largely easy-to-use experience. If you’ve selected VPS or a dedicated server, you’ll be able to decide between a selection of cPanels, depending on whether you use Windows or Linux as an operating system. 

In any case, with CPanel you’ll be able to efficiently monitor and manage everything, from variety of tools and add-ons to domain, checking or changing your account details, upgrading your hosting plan or contacting your customer service. Installing WordPress, MediaWIki, Magento, Softaculous or similar apps is only a click or two away.

Although the UK2 doesn’t provide any kind of website builder with its standard account, the website builder feature is offered through the main website and throws in social media integration, search engine optimization, editing tool for digital media and SSL certificate with support, which is always nice to have.

Speed and experience

Following the test run with GTmetrix, we found that UK2 passed the speed trial, at least judging by the performance of their main site. It took 6.9 seconds to fully load from the average of 8.2 and 74 requests from the average of 89, which shows a good performance.

Interestingly, when it comes to uptime, UK2 doesn’t make any definite promises, besides pointing out that “performance and ultimate uptime are their top priority”. Despite that, during the uptime test that run over two weeks on their main website, we recorded no downtime at all and an insignificant amount of oscillations. Although the period we tested is relatively short for a definitive judgment to be made, all things considered, UK2 is clearly off to a good start.

Support

On first impression, the knowledgebase is as confusing as the main site. They offer an alphabetical index in the center of the page, a list of “Recently updated articles” on the right and the tree of categories on the left side. To find a desired piece of information you’ll need to make your way through several subcategories. In its defense, there is search box in the top right corner, but that will get you plenty of articles that only deal with topics in brief, so you will be forced to invest more time in your research.

To avoid that, you could, as suggested on the same page, simply contact the customer support. Luckily, UK2 provides 24/7 support 365 days a year via telephone, live chat or ticket and it is truly one of the highlights of the company’s offer. 

UK2 Help Centre currently doesn’t have a support forum.

The competition

Both UK2 and Tsohost are web hosting companies originating from the UK and with more than decade of experience behind them. They offer more than a decent array of features and extras, a newbie-friendly approach, as well as competent support. However, cPanel that Tsohost offers is their customized version, so if you are looking for the industry-standardized one, UK2 might be a right choice for you.

Bluehost is an equally competent host from the US, with years of experience behind them, a great deal of features on offer, more budget-friendly prices than UK2 and all of their plans including unlimited bandwidth. Therefore, if data centers inside the UK are not a must for you, Bluehost can provide you with everything you are looking for.

UK2 as well as Hostgator are newbie-friendly, but all plans offered by the latter include a free website builder, which is a great tool to have at the start. In addition, although both of them offer 24/7 support, Hostgator’s website is more user-friendly and its knowledgebase is better organized, so if that matters to you, Hostgator might be an ideal choice. 

Hostinger also have some really great value VPS plans but they're unmanaged. They may not be a UK hosting brand but they do have servers in the UK and a range to top hosting features for beginners.

Final verdict

UK2 certainly isn’t the most affordable host to have, but it offers competent customer service and a cPanel packed with helpful tools which will boost the morale for beginners. If you want all of the abovementioned features with the addition of unmetered bandwidth and more budget-friendly prices, then Hostgator or Bluehost could be a more suitable choice for you. 

SiteGround is now over 20 years old and is one of the world's largest independently owned hosting companies. They started off with a handful of staff and have grown to have 500 talented employees and data centers in six continents used by over 3,000,000 domains.

SiteGround are world leaders when it comes to hosting technologies. In 2009 they revolutionised shared hosting making it safer for businesses and have created numerous optimizations for WordPress. SiteGround have been using Google cloud servers for their infrastructure since 2020 which gives the added bonus of easier scalability and even more reliability. Plus, Google match 100% of their energy usage with renewable power. So, SiteGround are green too.

The support offered by SiteGround is also word leading. The top 2% of candidates for the team spend over 6 months in specialist training and on average over 90% of tickets get resolved at first contact.

SiteGround has traditionally been for WordPress sites. Even the cloud hosting plans which appear more like VPS plans are restricted are more focused towards WordPress. SiteGround are stepping out of this area though and also now offer their own website builder.

For speed, reliability, and service, SiteGround are up there as one of the best hosting services. You don't get as much storage as standard compared with competitors but if you don't require bottomless buckets you should find everything you need for a hosting provider in SiteGround.

What types of hosting does SiteGround offer?

SiteGround market their products in two main categories: Web Hosting and Cloud Hosting. They also provide reseller hosting, WordPress hosting, and email marketing plans. The reseller plans and WordPress hosting are very similar to the web hosting plans.

Web Hosting from SiteGround comes in three tiers: StartUp, GrowBig, and GoGeek.
These plans don't state what resources you get but rather what they're capable of delivering. The main differences between the plans are storage, speed, support, and the number of websites you can host.

The lowest plan, StartUp, supports one website, 10GB of web space, 10,000 monthly visits, a free domain, free SSL, daily backups, free CDN, free email, and more. For new signups this costs $2.99/mo for 12 months and then renews at $17.99 a month.

GrowBig is essentially the same but supports unlimited websites, 100,000 monthly visits and 30% faster PHP. You also get an extra 10GB of space, on demand backups and staging. This comes at $4.99/mo for new signups and renews at $29.99/mo. For $44.99/mo after renewal, you can get up to 400,000 monthly visits, and priority support with the GoGeek plan.

SiteGround's Cloud hosting range has four tiers: Jumpstart, Business, Business Plus, and SuperPower with prices from $100/mo to $400/mo. CPU and memory start at 4 CPU cores and 8GB of RAM and both jump incrementally by four for each additional tier with SuperPower providing 16 CPU cores and 20GB RAM. Your resources are guaranteed and managed and you can scale your CPU and RAM with one click or automatically.

A migration tool, SG Migrate, is provided by SiteGround as a free WordPress plugin. The idea is straightforward: if you’re migrating data from an old WordPress site to a new one, you install the plugin on both, then link them up with an encryption token, provided in the app. Unfortunately, we found it didn’t work, so after multiple attempts (there is little to no support for the plugin) switched to a different plugin.

Significantly, SiteGround supports adding users – termed “collaborators” – to the hosting and admin screens. This could prove extremely useful for projects with multiple development personnel, or where a client or stakeholder needs some oversight over progress.

WordPress hosting

This is where SiteGround shines. SiteGround have been recommended by WordPress and are a big part of the community. This is where SiteGround seem to focus the training for support.

SiteGround's AutoUpdate system keeps your WordPress installation and plugins up-to-date with the latest security patches and experts and business users might appreciate WP-CLI, a command-line tool which allows automation of many common WordPress management tasks.

SiteGround is a bit more pricey than other options but the features make it worth it if you can make the most of them. You're also paying for two decades of experience providing hosting for WordPress sites and getting hosting from a provider recommended by WordPress themselves.

Cloud hosting 

SiteGround call this cloud hosting but these plans are really VPS plans on cloud infrastructure. SiteGround's cloud technology is far more suited to high-traffic and feature-packed websites where response time is critical, and even 60 seconds of down time is a very big deal: a busy web store, say, or a regularly-updated news site.

As SiteGround uses Google Cloud servers the power used to host sites is 100% matched with renewable energy. So, if you want your business to have green credentials and the power too, SiteGround is a good choice.

If you have that kind of demanding website but SiteGround is a little out of budget you may find a good alternative on our best cloud hosting page.

eCommerce

SiteGround recommend their GoGeek plan for WooCommerce. WooCommerce is based on WordPress and is a very capable system which can handle most web store requirements. If you like SiteGround's hosting, you're already familiar with the ecommerce basics (or are happy to take the time to learn), opting for SiteGround's WooCommerce hosting could make sense. But if you're a novice, or just looking for more help getting started, alternatives like Bluehost's WooCommerce plan, or the online store side of GoDaddy's Website Builder have more tools, more features, and extra ecommerce support when you need it.

Performance

Uptime.com accessed our site every five minutes over 14 days recording any failures and how quickly the server responds. SiteGround had no fails at all, giving it a perfect 100% uptime. Average response time was 0.207 seconds, the fastest in our last 15 tests (most hosts are in the range 0.3 to 0.8 seconds).

GTmetrix measures load speed by grabbing a test page on our site, and measuring how long it takes to display the main content (a figure known technically as Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP). A low LCP means a snappy and responsive website, and (hopefully) plenty of happy visitors.

SiteGround's LCP was fractionally below average at 0.735 seconds, ninth fastest in our last 15 tests. But that's not far behind the top providers (most score in the 0.6 to 0.8 second range), and an acceptable time overall.

K6 goes beyond an individual load time by unleashing 20 simultaneous visitors and watching to see what happens. Our site managed an average of 14 requests per second, with a peak of 20. Again, that's fractionally behind the competition (most average in the 14 to 16 second range), but not enough that you're likely to notice.

(Please keep in mind that these tests are based on the performance of a shared hosting plan, and they can't tell us anything about the speeds we might see from VPS, dedicated or other hosting).

How easy is SiteGround to use?

Getting started with a web host can be intimidating, but SiteGround does a fair job of helping out. Log into its Control Panel for the first time and you'll find links to support pages covering several common setup tasks: how to import an existing WordPress site, launch WordPress, create email accounts at a new domain, point an existing domain to WordPress, and more.

This isn't quite as useful as it could be. We hoped the 'Access WordPress' link would launch the WordPress dashboard, for instance, but instead it opened a support page explaining how we could do this ourselves. That's still valuable, and better than we see with many hosts, but life would be even easier if the startup page gave us direct links to WordPress and other functions.

Skip past the walkthroughs, though, and SiteGround performs very well. A simple walkthrough makes it very easy to add a new site, for instance. Choose a domain, install a new application (WordPress, WooCommerce or Weebly Sitebuilder) and the site is ready to go in seconds.

It feels like there's real thought gone into the control panel design. Choose 'Create Subdomain' on most panels, they prompt you for the subdomain name, and that's it. SiteGround's control panel understands that you might want to install something there, and offers you an Install Application button to help.

(The installer is relatively basic compared to the likes of Softaculous, with only 13 applications and fewer installation options. But it's also simple, and we had WordPress ready to go within seconds.)

Even then, SiteGround's helpfulness keeps going. Launch WordPress and a wizard prompts you to choose a theme, then offers to install useful free plugins (contact forms, an image gallery, a calendar, Google Maps, WooCommerce, a contact manager, SEO advisor and more).

What is SiteGround's support like?

SiteGround offers 24/7 support via phone, live chat, ticket and its web knowledgebase.

A comprehensive set of tutorials provides lots of useful information on getting started with the service. There's general guidance on setting up your website, managing domains, creating email accounts and more.

The WordPress section begins with similar startup advice - how to install WordPress, create a post, install a plugin - but then adds a little more depth with articles on improving security and optimizing performance. They're a little on the short side, and sometimes too technical for newcomers, but the site still has more and better guidance than many competitors.

You can also contact the support team via phone, live chat and (apparently) ticket, although the website makes this more difficult than usual. There's a Contact Us button, but this walks you through a support wizard which works hard to direct you to a support site article or website tool. It won't even display a chat button, phone number or anything else unless it thinks you're 'deserving.'

This proved to be an unexpected hassle. We decided to ask a test question about our shared plan's automatic backups (could we set the backup time, or was it fixed?), but the wizard just directed us to the 'create a manual backup' button, without ever giving us a contact option to ask further questions.

So, we decided to cheat the system, and just chose alternative wizard options until eventually it offered us live chat or telephone options (no tickets, though). We chose live chat, an agent appeared within seconds, and gave us a clear answer immediately (automatic backup times are set when you sign up and can't be changed).

We tried the phone support later, with similar success. It's an impressive support service, but we'd like it even more if the website didn't try quite so hard to ration our access.

Can I easily migrate to SiteGround?

SiteGround advertises a migration tool, which is intended to make it easy for you to move a WordPress site from another host. It’s a straightforward plugin intended for installation on both sites, and linked with a unique encryption key generated in the destination site.

Unfortunately, our testing found that migrating an existing WordPress site with a small WooCommerce store attached simply failed on every attempt. SiteGround does not offer support for this tool, either, which might leave you feeling adrift if you end up in the same situation. Fortunately, there is an excellent substitute in a similar plugin called Backup Migration, which ironically works along the same lines.

Final verdict

While many hosts try to win you over with low headline prices, SiteGround is far more interested in power. Its shared and cloud hosting plans may look expensive, but they give you plenty of features and functionality for your money, and could be a high performance choice for demanding users with high traffic or business-critical sites.

FAQs

• Want to know how SiteGround compares to another top European web hosting provider, check out Hostinger vs SiteGround

What types of hosting does InMotion Hosting offer?

InMotion Hosting offers everything from shared hosting for the most basic needs to dedicated servers.

Its managed WordPress hosting supports running anything from simple family blogs to heavy-duty business sites, while hosted WooCommerce and Prestashop plans can help you build a professional web store.

If it's raw server power you're after, VPS (Virtual Private Server), dedicated and cloud hosting plans cover everyone from expert personal users to international corporations.

Starting at the 8GB and higher plans, all VPS servers are using Gen 4 NVMe SSDs which can be 6x faster than SATA SSDs and up to 20x faster than traditional spinning drives.

There's a lot to consider, but next we'll look at some of these hosting types, find out what they offer, what they don't, and whether they could be a good choice for you.

Shared hosting 

Shared hosting is a system where your website and many others are stored on the same web server. Sharing both resources and costs means shared hosting can be slow, but it's also very cheap, and can be a good choice for smaller sites.

InMotion Hosting's shared hosting starts with its Core plan (from $3.19/mo for first-time buyers on a 3-year term). This includes a free domain, supports one website, provides 100GB of SSD storage, and offers unlimited bandwidth. The plan only comes with 10 email addresses (most accounts have no limit). There's also free SSL, malware protection, and 1-click WordPress installation, while the excellent cPanel has everything you'll need to manage your site.

The Launch Plan only supports 2 websites, but the Power and Pro plans scale this up with 10 and 40 respectively. They handle as many email addresses as you need, and have some unusual speedup features, including ultra-fast NVMe storage, for instance, something we rarely see with shared hosting.

Unsure about signing up for long-term contracts? Us too, but InMotion Hosting offers more protection than most with a 90-day money-back guarantee (three times the industry standard 30 days), for all of its shared and WordPress hosting plans, plenty of time to be sure if this is the right package for you.

WordPress hosting

WordPress is the world's favorite website creator, a one-stop tool which can build anything from simple personal sites to busy web stores and the most heavy-duty business-critical projects.

InMotion Hosting's shared plans have an automatic WordPress installer, good news if you're just looking to learn the basics. But its specialist WordPress hosting range goes further, with server-level speed optimisations, extra security to keep hackers at bay, automatic WordPress updates and more.

Prices start at only $3.69 a month over three years ($11.49 on renewal) for the WP Core plan. It's limited to one website and ten email addresses, but InMotion Hosting suggests a WP Core site could handle 20k visitors a month, more than enough for many users.

The $ 5.49-a-month WP Launch plan lets you host one more website (for a total of two) and provides enough resources to support 50k visitors a month, making it our budget pick.

These are capable plans, reasonably priced, with the power to handle (at the top of the VPS range) perhaps a million visitors a month. But the WordPress-specific features are much the same as you'll find with other providers. If you're after real WordPress power, WP Engine offers genuinely Premium themes, intelligent updating, smart performance optimizations, page speed testing, and more.

InMotion Hosting also offers what it calls UltraStack ONE for WordPress. These are special plans built on their VPS platform, albeit fine-tuned for mission-critical WordPress sites. These start at $33.33/mo (same price on renewal) if you sign up for a one-year term. UltraStack ONE plans come with a minimum of 8 vCPU and 8GB RAM, alongside NVMe storage, W3 Total Cache, Redis cache, and a 99.99% uptime SLA.

VPS hosting 

Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting is a mid-range option which gives your website more server power, for a little extra cost. You're likely to see better and more consistent speeds, with fewer of the slowdowns that often happen with shared hosting.

InMotion Hosting has four VPS plans. These start at $9.99 a month over three years ($16.99 on renewal) for a plan with 8 GB RAM, 160 GB NVMe storage, and a 4 vCPU core server, and range up to $44.99 a month ($111.99 on renewal) for 32GB RAM, 460 GB NVMe SSD storage, and a 16-vCPU system.

Although these prices are higher than some, that's because they're stuffed with valuable features. Every plan gets a free migration, at least two dedicated IPs, and a choice of control panel. They're fully managed (InMotion Hosting support can help update your VPS and troubleshoot any server issues for you), and all plans come with Launch Assist, which includes two hours with their expert System Administrators to help you set up and optimize the server, migrate a previous site, or whatever else you need.

These are powerful products that could work for many levels of users. The 4 vCPU plan is ideal for mid-range sites that have outgrown shared hosting, or demanding projects that need more resources (a busy photography site where users can explore many image galleries, for instance). Upgrading to a more powerful VPS may help with sites where consistent performance is critical - a web store where just a brief slowdown might drive customers away - or if you need to host multiple sites on the same server.

Minecraft server hosting

Like Hostinger, InMotion Hosting doesn’t promote its Minecraft Server Hosting offerings as much as it does its other services, but it’s worth checking out. Eight different plans are available from the minimal Grass server which is $6 per month and offers 2GB RAM, right up to its hefty Netherite server for $185 and providing 32GB RAM.

All server plans take less than five minutes to set up, include a dedicated IP address, full access to files, and 99.9% server uptime. There’s also DDoS protection and 24/7 server support. A 7-day money-back guarantee is a good way to try things out.

Its game control panel is reasonably intuitive to use and clearly laid out, so you can easily pick out different mods or types of server.

It’s these kind of things that ensure InMotion Hosting feature in our look at the best Minecraft server hosting.

Dedicated hosting 

Opt for dedicated server hosting and your site gets the full power of a server all to itself. No more unexpected slowdowns because a neighboring site is suddenly really busy, because there are no neighboring sites: the server is entirely yours. If you're running a large business-critical site, where speed matters, even when you're really busy, dedicated hosting is a must-see.

InMotion Hosting has five dedicated hosting plans. These have been beefed up significantly over the past few months, not just in capability, but also price. They now begin at $124.99 a month for a managed 4-core/8-thread, 16GB RAM, and 1TB SSD system, and range up to a hugely powerful plan that provides Xeon E-2388G chips with 8 cores/ 16 threads, 128 GB DDR4 RAM, and 2x4TB NVMe RAID-1 storage. That'll cover most sites and requirements, but if you're unhappy, a 'Build your own' plan allows you to choose whatever CPU, RAM, storage, and other features work for you.

These aren't the lowest prices around, but as with other InMotion Hosting products, that's because the company isn't skimping on the server specs. There's a 1Gbps network connection, unmetered bandwidth, at least 50GB of free backup space, free cPanel and WHM licenses, free SSL, free website migrations, and more.

It's good to see that InMotion Hosting now offers a data center in the Netherlands, as well as the US, a welcome performance boost if your main audience is outside of North America.

Overall, InMotion Hosting's dedicated products offer a capable full-featured service which can handle some of the most demanding business and speed-critical tasks.

Does InMotion Hosting have a website builder?

InMotion Hosting includes the BoldGrid WordPress Website Builder for free with all its plans. Choose a prebuilt starter site from 200+ industry-specific designs, drag-and-drop blocks (text, pictures, videos, forms, more) onto the page, and you can customize them with your own text and photos just like any other editor.

BoldGrid is easy to use, and a handy site-creating alternative if regular WordPress feels a little too intimidating. But it doesn't have a lot of features, and is really only suitable for creating small-scale sites.

HostGator's Gator website builder is also simple and seriously cheap (from $3.84 a month), but even the most basic plan supports a tiny web store and email campaigns. At the top of the market, Wix has great templates, stacks of features, an intuitive editor, and the power to handle almost any web task.

How easy is InMotion Hosting to use? 

InMotion Hosting's customer account panel looks more appealing than most, with the usual text links replaced by 30+ colorful cPanel-like icons. Unfortunately, many of these are for functions you'd use rarely, if ever. Add another credit card; buy or transfer in a new domain; buy a Sucuri website security package; read InMotion Hosting's GDPR statement. These should be tucked away in a menu, not permanently taking up valuable screen real estate as though you might need them every day.

There's a separate set of icons for each hosting package you have, but they share a similar problem. There are some useful shortcuts, for example to launch cPanel, or Softaculous to install WordPress or hundreds of other apps. But many of the others are less helpful. How often do you think you'd use functions like 'Request Email Limit Exemption' or 'Simple CSR Request for 3rd party SSL', for instance?

Fortunately, you don't have to spend long in the account panel. One click launches Softaculous, you can have WordPress ready to go within a minute or two, and the excellent cPanel has all the email, file, database and other management tools you need to get your site running smoothly.

How fast is InMotion Hosting? 

We began our performance tests by signing up for an InMotion Hosting shared plan, then setting up a simple WordPress website based on a standard template.

Next, we measured our server's core WordPress performance. These are several segments of server performance vital to how well it can handle WordPress websites. Finally, we use the SIege testing tool to see how the website performs under increase loads of concurrent users.

In our core benchmark tests, InMotion Hosting's shared plans held up better than most others we've seen. Not only did it handle processing jobs quickly, but it also had robust database and filesystem performance.

What was a little unusual, though, was its benchmark results in the VPS space. This was primarily held down by mediocre performance in the CPU and memory space. However, the overall VPS benchmark score of 6.1 is still fairly decent and held its own against even cloud VPS providers like Cloudways.

Still, for four CPU cores running at 2.7 GHz, I expected a bit better performance.

InMotion Hosting's performance under increasing user load was a bit surprising. Given the excellent core benchmark results, we expected it to handle user loads relatively well. However, we observed failing transactions even on a minimal 5-user load. Even stranger was the fact that the longest transaction times, even under heavy loads, weren't that high.

It's entirely possible that some of these failed transactions are due to the shared hosting servers' internal safeguards, rather than to specific performance issues.

What is InMotion Hosting's support like?

InMotion Hosting offers 24/7 US-based support via phone, email and live chat, a web Support Center, a customer exclusive Knowledge Base and community forums.

Their website has a 5,000+ articles, guides and tutorials on the full range of hosting topics, way more than you'll see with most providers. The search engine doesn't do a good job of sorting its results by relevance, so it might take some scrolling to find what you need, but there is a lot of detailed and helpful content to explore.

They also have a Customer Exclusive Knowledgebase which is constantly being updated with new guides. Customers must be logged into their AMP to access the knowledgebase.

Ticket support wasn't the fastest we've seen, with replies to even relatively basic product queries taking around four hours. These typically pointed us in the right direction, though sometimes didn't have all the details we'd expect.

Fortunately, live chat gave the best results. We found responses were speedy and helpful, and the agents were able to give us useful answers to any extra questions we asked.

Final verdict

Whether you're a total website newbie or a big business running a huge and high-traffic web store, InMotion Hosting has a fast and feature-packed product which can help. A must for your web hosting shortlist.

InMotion Hosting FAQs

Founded in 2010, Hostwinds is a Seattle-based web hosting provider with feature-packed products for slightly more experienced users.

Hostwinds offers cheap and easy-to-use shared hosting plans, with plenty of features . A huge range of VPS (Virtual Private Server) plans give your site well balanced resources making them a cost-effective choice for demanding small to medium business sites.

Developers and other experts can build a custom setup with multiple cloud servers, load balancers, block and object storage for whatever suits their precise needs.

Hostwinds shared hosting

Hostwinds' shared hosting starts at an affordable $5.24 a month for three years, $6.99 afterwards.  All Hostwinds shared hosting plans come with solid-state drives (SSDs), free SSL certificates, and access to the latest cPanel for easy site management. They also include unlimited FTP accounts, databases, and email accounts to help you manage your website effectively. You also get Softaculous Auto Install for easy application installation, Weebly Site Builder for drag-and-drop website building, and 24/7 customer support to assist you.

Upgrading to the next shared hosting plan gets you support for hosting more websites, or you can opt for Hostwinds' Business Web Hosting range for extra performance. This has less accounts on a server, and uses LiteSpeed's fast web server, but with prices starting at $8.24 a month over three years ($10.99 afterwards), it's still relatively cheap.

You don't get a free domain, but the nightly backups are worth more, and overall, these are quality shared plans for a bargain price.

Hostwinds WordPress hosting

Hostwinds has a managed WordPress hosting range, but it's essentially the regular shared hosting products, with the same prices, and just more website focus on any WordPress-specific features.

Softaculous is on hand to automatically install WordPress in seconds, for instance, and help you manage it afterwards.

The company offer WordPress support including helping you customize your WordPress installation using themes and plugins, create and restore backups, automate updates for WordPress, add security to WordPress, and troubleshoot issues.

That's good news, and with prices starting at $5.24 a month, the plans are certainly cheaper than the specialist Managed WordPress competition. If you're not committed to Hostwinds, though, or looking for more features, Bluehost, IONOS and A2 Hosting add extras such as free themes, easier WordPress website testing, automatic WordPress updating, extra security, performance optimizations and more.

Hostwinds VPS hosting

A step up from shared hosting, VPS hosting ramps up your website speed by giving it more server resources. A capable VPS can host sites with hundreds of thousands of visitors a month, making the technology a good choice for business-critical sites, busy web stores, or any heavy-duty projects where performance is top priority.

Hostwinds has a lengthy list of ten VPS plans, ranging from a basic but pocket-friendly 1 CPU core, 1GB RAM setup for $4.99, to a giant 16 CPU core, 96GB RAM, $328.88 a month server with the power to handle almost anything.

The plans are hugely configurable, too. Need a cheap unmanaged plan where you run the server? No problem. Or do you want Hostwinds to handle all that? There are managed plans, too. You can opt for Windows and Linux hosting, add cPanel licenses, buy more IP addresses, choose a US or Amsterdam data center, and more. We love the control you get over the finished package, and if other providers aren't quite giving you the VPS plans you need, it's always worth checking out what Hostwinds has to offer.

Hostwinds dedicated hosting

Opting for a dedicated hosting plan gets you an entire server, just for your website. No more sharing of resources, no more slowdowns because some other site is busy. Dedicated servers offer the best and most consistent performance, ideal for the most serious heavyweight sites.

You can choose from different processors, the amount of RAM, number and type of storage disks, and even Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) configurations.

The entry-level dedicated server option, the E3-1270 v3, comes with a 3.5 GHz quad-core processor that can turbo up to 4 GHz, 8 GB of RAM (expandable), and options for configuring hard drive storage, starting with a 1TB Enterprise HDD. This server setup starts at $122/mo and includes 10 TB of outbound bandwidth along with 8 IP addresses. You can additionally customize your plan based on various specs like adjusting the RAM storage, adding RAID configurations, and selecting from various operating systems like CentOS.

Importantly, all dedicated servers from Hostwinds are fully managed and come with 24/7 technical support, server monitoring, nightly backups, and high-quality networking for steady performance and uptime. These dedicated resources mean that each server provides 100% of its capabilities to a single user and avoids the drawbacks of shared environments. This setup is great for applications requiring high computational power and storage, such as web and application hosting, game hosting, data analysis, and more. You can also choose from multiple data center locations globally to improve the latency and user experience of your site.

Hostwinds could be a reasonable choice for experienced users who need a mid-range dedicated server and know exactly which options and extras work for them. But if you need something on the budget side, IONOS has unmanaged servers from under $50 a month, while A2 Hosting starts at a similar price to Hostwinds, but has more high-powered servers and is even more configurable.

 Cloud Hosting 

The most basic cloud plan starts at just $0.006931 per hour, which costs approximately $4.99/mo. This entry-level option comes with 1GB RAM, a single CPU core, and 1TB monthly data transfers. On the higher end, the most advanced plan costs $0.456931 per hour or about $328.99/mo. This plan offers a substantial 96GB of RAM, 16 CPU cores, 750GB of storage, and 9TB of monthly data transfers.

With all plans, you get 1 Gbps ports coupled with solid-state drives, a 99.9999% uptime guarantee, enterprise-level firewalls, and nightly backups. Additionally, Hostwinds supports custom ISO uploads, giving you the flexibility to deploy customized configurations.

Does Hostwinds offer a website builder? 

Hostwinds' shared hosting packages include the Weebly website builder, It's a simple tool which allows you to create a small website by choosing a pre built site design, customizing colors and styles, then using the drag and drop editor to add blocks of text, pictures, videos, maps or whatever else your site needs.

This may work for you if you only need a very simple family or personal site, just a few pages, but it doesn't have the power for anything serious. Take a look at Wix if you need a website builder that can take on the most serious projects, including quality web stores and business-critical sites, or read our best website builder guide for more advice.

Launching cPanel gives you access to Softaculous, a popular platform which makes it easy to install WordPress and 400+ other big-name web applications.

Hostwinds' shared hosting plans include the Weebly website builder, an excellent template-based web designer with a stack of drag-and-drop widgets and UI elements.

There's a problem, though. What you're getting here is Weebly's very limited free plan, which includes Weebly branding on the footer and restricts your website to just 500MB.

You can upgrade to more capable plans from within Hostwinds, but from what we can see, you'll pay much the same price as if you went to Weebly direct. (And remember, this is an extra cost – you'll still be paying your regular Hostwinds fees.)

The service could still be useful in a few situations. If your plan supports multiple domains, for instance, the Site Builder might help less technical family members create their own small personal sites. But there's not a lot of value here for most users, and typically you'll get better results by installing WordPress.

If WordPress and Weebly don't interest you, there are all the usual tools to build and manage a website from scratch: FTP, SSH, a file manager, MySQL, phpMyAdmin and more.

Can I build a web store with Hostwinds? 

Hostwinds doesn't have specialist ecommerce hosting or online store builder plans. 

You could sign up for one of Hostwinds' shared, VPS or dedicated plans, then use Softaculous to install an ecommerce platform that can help you (WooCommerce, Magento or PrestaShop are popular choices). But as Hostwinds doesn't have specific support for any of these, it's not going to give you much help.

If you'd like a simpler way to get started, HostGator's Gator website builder supports a tiny web store with even its cheapest plans, and Bluehost's WooCommerce plans include tools to help build and market your site from only $12.95 a month.

How fast is Hostwinds? 

We measured Hostwinds' performance by signing up for a shared hosting account, setting up a simple WordPress site using a standard template, then running various tests.

Uptime.com checked the availability of our site every five minutes for 14 days. Hostwinds managed 99.95% uptime, a little disappointing, but within the range we expect for a shared hosting plan (most providers offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee).

GTmetrix loaded a page on our site and calculated its LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), a measure of how long it takes to load the most important content. Hostwinds had an LCP of 0.774 seconds, a little below average (it ranked 10th in our last 15 tests), but acceptable for all but the most speed-sensitive sites. 

We set up k6 to unleash 20 users on our test site simultaneously, and monitor what happened. It managed a peak 17.67 requests per second, with an average of 13. That's a little below par (most providers peak at 20 requests per second and average 14-16), but that's not a difference you're likely to notice with most sites.

How easy is Hostwinds to use? 

Hostwinds uses industry-standard hosting tools and platforms across its service. 

Its web account dashboard, where you'll manage, add and cancel products, is powered by WHMCS. It's a very popular system, and if you've signed up with hosting providers in the past, there's a good chance you'll immediately know your way around.

Softaculous is available to automatically install WordPress and hundreds of other apps. It's one of the best auto-installers around, and will set up whatever service you need with the minimum of hassle.

Hostwinds' shared accounts include cPanel, an excellent control panel with all the tools you need to manage your domains, email accounts, files, databases, and every other aspect of your web space.

These can get complicated, particularly if you've complex hosting needs. But we'd much rather see quality and standard hosting tools than the basic home-made control panels offered by some providers. And overall, Hostwinds has more than enough power for most people to get their sites online at speed (and keep them there).

How good is Hostwinds' support? 

Hostwinds has three different ways to support its users– product documentation, in-depth tutorials, blogs, and a support team. We find their product documentation quite insightful for understanding their services in-depth and utilizing them efficiently. You can find the description and the use case of all their products under this segment. There are also many tutorials that can guide you in troubleshooting some common and complex issues that may arise during daily activity.

These tutorials span from their hosting plans descriptions to tons of how-to guides on how you can make the most of hostwinds offerings. You get detailed step-by-step guide along with multiple snapshots that helps you understand it better.

But, if you don’t want any of this hassle, Hostwinds’ offers customer support via email, call, and a live chat. To test it, we asked a couple of queries and their support agent answered back within minutes and that too with some helpful suggestions. Overall, Hostwinds support is pretty impressive and you even get sufficient information on their blog to get comfortable with the platform.

Is Hostwinds right for you?

Hostwinds offers a variety of hosting options, from shared hosting to dedicated servers, with both managed and unmanaged VPS hosting available. This diversity is indeed a plus point for targeting a wide audience, but its worth mentioning that many hosting providers deliver this many plans these days. 

Price-wise, Hostwinds is competitive, especially considering features like unlimited bandwidth and disk space in their shared hosting plans. However, there are areas where Hostwinds could improve. First, many users have pointed out that while Hostwinds markets itself on performance and reliability, there are occasional reports of downtime and slow server responses. Additionally, the cost of add-ons can accumulate, as essential services like automatic backups and advanced security features come with extra charges. These additional costs may not be clear upfront and could be a point of contention for users who are budget-conscious or require a more comprehensive out-of-the-box solution.

Hostwinds FAQs