If you’re starting a new website (or your first, all you really need is a cheap hosting provider that’s easy to use with strong customer service and enough scalability for the near future.
The Top Cheap Web Hosting Providers in < 5 Minutes
We’ve used dozens of cheap web hosting providers at one point or another. We’ve also thoroughly tested just about every shared hosting plan out there. Based on our experience, there are three hosts that fit the needs of most new websites.
If you want cheap hosting that balances ease of use, service, and scalability, go with Hostinger. It’s the most beginner-friendly provider and the cheapest plan comes with everything you need to get started.
Bluehost offers a great WordPress drag-and-drop website builder if you don’t want to worry about picking from thousands of themes on your own. It also has an AI site builder that’ll do all the heavy lifting for you.
If you want to build an ecommerce store without a high price tag, HostGator offers affordable WooCommerce hosting with specialized features for online stores.
However, these three aren’t the only options. Web.com, Ultahost, GreenGeeks, A2 Hosting, DreamHost, and SiteGround are also great choices.
When It Makes Sense to Choose Cheap Web Hosting
There are numerous types of hosting out there. There are shared plans, VPS (virtual private server) packages, cloud services, dedicated servers, and even reseller plans that let you sell hosting to others.
Shared hosting plans are (usually) the most affordable. When you want cheap web hosting, that’s the category you want to focus on.
It makes sense to choose cheap web hosting if you’re starting a brand new website from scratch or you’re not planning to get a ton of traffic. You won’t get the best performance, but you really won’t need it if your site isn’t getting a lot of visitors.
One word of caution—avoid free hosting.
Free web hosting plans sound good in theory. But if you’re serious about building a professional site that will eventually make you money, it’s best to spend the few dollars a month.
Free hosting comes with significant drawbacks—including limited storage, limited bandwidth, advertisements, and frequent crashes. You likely won’t have control over your domain name, and you often have no say in your website’s security. Free hosting providers also have no incentive to prioritize your site’s performance.
The good news is that you don’t have to pay a lot for web hosting at the beginning.
#1 – Hostinger — Best Balance of Ease of Use, Customer Support, and Short-Term Scalability
Hostinger is the perfect blend of quality hosting at an affordable price—making it our favorite cheap web hosting provider.
Other hosts try to keep costs low by providing minimal storage space on entry level plans.
Hostinger takes a different approach. Rather than limiting you to 10 or 20 GB, you get a massive 100 GB of SSD storage on the cheapest plan. At just $2.99 per month, you won’t find a better deal for that much space.
This is perfect if your site has large images, videos, gifs, and other types of files take up a lot of space.
It’s even more beneficial if you’re hosting multiple websites–you’re allowed to host up to 100 on the cheapest plan.
To get that $2.99 price tag, you have to sign up for four years in advance.
While that may sound expensive, you actually get all four years for less than $150. With many others, you’ll pay that just for the first year alone.
The entry-level plan comes with a free SSL certificate for each of your websites, unlimited bandwidth, a free domain name, a free email address, free website migrations if you’re moving from another host, and automatic WordPress updates for hands-off management.
Alternatively, you can use Hostinger’s drag-and-drop website builder.
Either way, Hostinger offers a beginner-friendly onboarding process so you don’t have to build your site alone. It walks you through every single step–it doesn’t get much easier.
You can also rest assured that your site is protected thanks to built-in DDoS protection, a web firewall, and malware scanner. Furthermore, all Hostinger domains come with free WHOIS Protection, so that’s one less cost to worry about.
Even though it’s cheap, it doesn’t feel cheap. In fact, it comes with all the same features as every other host… and then some.
If you need even more space or want a CDN, more WordPress tools, ecommerce features for the drag-and-drop builder, and on-demand backups, you can get up to 200 GB of NVMe storage—which is even faster than SSD—for less than $4 per month.
The Business plan also comes with improved performance, enhanced DDoS protection, and AI tools built specifically for WordPress.
For just two dollars more per month, you get a ton of functionality and space for all your files, even if you’re hosting dozens of sites on the same plan.
No matter the plan you choose, Hostinger’s customer service agents are some of the best in the industry. Every agent we’ve talked to was helpful, knowledgeable, and friendly too. With that said, it can take some time to get in touch with support, especially during peak times.
Aside from shared hosting, Hostinger offers cloud and VPS plans so there’s plenty of room to grow without having to worry about switching to a different provider any time soon.
Sign up now to get four years of hosting for less than $150.
#2 – Bluehost — Best WordPress Website Builder
Like Hostinger, Bluehost offers any time 24/7 support via multiple channels, comes with everything you need, and gives you plenty of room to grow without having to switch to another provider.
However, it’s one of only three hosting providers officially recommended by the developers of WordPress (what we recommend for most websites).
WordPress is flexible, straightforward, and highly customizable, too. It’s not the easiest website platform out there, but Bluehost makes using it as simple as it gets. The platform comes pre-installed for you and there are dozens of free tutorials that teach you everything you need to know.
Even if you’ve never built a website before, Bluehost’s mistake-proof onboarding process walks you through every step.
While every other provider on this list also work well with WordPress, Bluehost delivers a wide array of WordPress-centric features and hosting plans for WooCommerce users, too.
Bluehost’s cheapest plan starts at $2.95 per month for the first 12 months. After one year, it renews at $11.99 per month. While the renewal rate may seem like a bit of a shock, Bluehost isn’t the only host that spikes rates after your initial contract.
So, it’s nothing you won’t experience elsewhere.
To truly get the best deal from Bluehost, you can sign up for a 36-month contract and pay for three years in full. This raises the monthly rate to $4.95, but you end up saving more than $140 over those three years by delaying the renewal rate.
Bluehost’s entry-level shared plan gives you 10 GB of storage space and support for one website. It also comes with a free SSL certificate and free WordPress themes to help you get started.
Aside from WordPress themes, Bluehost WonderSuite makes customizing and updating your website easier than ever. You’ll be able to drag-and-drop your way to a professional, custom website that matches your brand–even if you’ve never built a website before.
Overall, the introductory plan is a great place to start, especially if you’re hosting your first website.
Bluehost’s Choice Plus plan gives you 40 GB of storage, plus a free CDN, daily backups for one year, and free malware scanning. If you’re willing to spend a few more dollars per month, this plan offers more bang for your buck.
However, you don’t truly need it unless you’re hosting multiple websites or will want to in the near future.
No matter the plan you choose, Bluehost delivers a beginner-friendly platform that guides you through creating your first website. You’ll get a step-by-step walkthrough of what to do to get your site set up from start to finish, with the option to skip the guided setup process if you know what you’re doing.
You’ll also get automatic WordPress installation and core updates, so your site is always running the most up-to-date software without you having to do a thing.
The most significant downside of Bluehost is the number of upsells in the checkout process. A couple are pre-selected for you, even though you don’t really need them: CodeGuard Basic and SiteLock Security, each priced at $2.99 per month.
You can safely uncheck these and get similar features for free elsewhere.
Aside from that, you’ll get 1/10th as much storage as you would with Hostinger and many of Bluehost’s features are an extended free trial–your SSL certificate (on the cheapest plan), daily backups, and free domain privacy will all cost extra after year one.
Get started for just $2.95 per month today.
#3 – HostGator — The Best (Cheap) WooCommerce Hosting
If you’ve never built an ecommerce store before, it can feel daunting and confusing. HostGator’s ecommerce hosting plans come with everything you need pre-installed, making the process as easy as possible.
Technically, you can use any host on our list to create an online store. HostGator just makes it easier at the beginning and includes a range of free features you won’t get elsewhere.
Starting at $9.95, it’s a bit more expensive. But it’s justifiable given what you get.
Rather than having to pay for individual plugins for things like wish lists, SEO, shipping labels, product search, gift cards, and appointment booking like you would with other providers, you get all of that at no extra cost.
This alone makes up for the higher monthly price tag.
You’ll also get a free starter theme you can customize as much as you’d like. This greatly simplifies getting started–there are thousands of themes to choose from, which sounds overwhelming because it is. With HostGator, you get one for free and don’t have to waste time sifting through all of the options out there. You can just get started customizing.
Both ecommerce plans include unlimited products, a free domain for the first year, built-in payment processing, and automatic WordPress updates so you don’t have to worry about outdated software.
Website analytics is something most other providers don’t offer at this price point, too.
The main differences between the two plans are storage space and the ability to manage your inventory across third-party marketplaces, like Amazon, Etsy, and eBay.
As such, the cheaper plan is more than enough if you’re just getting started.
If you ever run into issues or have questions, you can reach out to customer support 24/7 via live chat, phone, email, or ticket. We never had to wait more than a few minutes and most of the agents we talked to were knowledgeable and more than willing to help.
We were pleasantly surprised with how fast and easy it was to get in touch with actual humans, especially compared to the drawn-out processes with some of the other services on our list.
With that said, some reps can come across a little salesy with their recommendations.
Overall, there’s really not much to complain about with HostGator. But if we had to nitpick something, its the pushy signup process.
Much like Bluehost, HostGator has several add-ons at checkout that can quickly rack up your bill.
The good news is you don’t really need any of them since you can get them for free elsewhere. The only one you might be interested in is Google Workspace. But like the others, you can also get that elsewhere. Purchasing straight from Google may even be more affordable, depending on the plan you choose.
Start building your online store today!
#4 – Web.com — The Best for Simple Business Websites
On the Web.com’s website, you won’t find anything about advanced types of hosting, scalability, complicated setups, or major customization. Normally, this would make us turn away.
We talk a lot about scalability and setting yourself up for success as your website starts to gain traction. So, why’s it on our list?
The platform is refreshingly simple. While it’s not a great fit for most people, it’s a fantastic choice for straightforward, basic websites that won’t see more than 15,000 visitors a month. It’s excellent for small business websites, freelance service providers, brick-and-mortar locations, and even restaurants.
If your end goal isn’t to drive tens or hundreds of thousands of visitors to your website, it’ll work well for you.
On the other hand, Hostinger, Bluehost or HostGator are better if you’re starting a blog, building an ecommerce store, relying on ad revenue, doing affiliate marketing, or any other type of business that requires an increasing flow of visitors to be successful.
With Web.com, you have two options—you can use its drag-and-drop website builder or stick with traditional hosting and use something like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal.
For your situation, there’s not really a right or wrong answer. However, there are pros and cons to each.
The website builder starts at $4.95 per month. It’s a much faster way to get your site live. It’s drag-and-drop, so you don’t have to really learn anything to get going. Plus, Web.com provides more than 150 free templates you can use as a starting point.
You can even add basic ecommerce functionality if you want to give your customers a way to pay for goods, services, or deposits online.
Web.com’s appointment scheduler also makes it easy to manage your schedule, the built-in social and email marketing tools are great for building up your online presence, and there’s even an AI copywriting tool you can use to speed up the process.
Overall, it comes with a ton of useful features you can use to market your small business.
However, the website builder has it’s limitations. You won’t be able to customize everything, nor will you be able to move your website somewhere else. If neither of those bother you, it’s definitely the easier way to go.
Traditional hosting from Web.com starts at two dollars cheaper than its website builder plans—it costs just $2.75 per month if you sign up for a long-term agreement. The entry-level plan supports one website, comes with 10 GB of storage, and will perform well as long as you have fewer than 15,000 monthly visitors.
The downside is that this route requires a bit of manual setup as you’ll need to install the platform you want to use and set up everything on your own. It’s not hard to do once you get going, but it will take longer to learn.
It also doesn’t come with as many marketing tools or all the bells and whistles.
The upside is that you’ll have complete flexibility to design your site however you’d like, take advantage of the thousands of free WordPress plugins out there, and move your site to another host in the future if you’d like to.
No matter the route you choose, you’ll get a free domain name for the first year, 24/7 customer service, a free SSL certificate, business email, and unmetered bandwidth.
Drag and drop your new website today!
#5 – DreamHost — The Cheapest Month-to-Month Web Hosting
When you survey the landscape of hosting providers, you’ll find one theme common to everyone—that sweet promotional pricing you see on their homepages only comes on long-term contracts.
DreamHost knows that not everyone is looking for web hosting for the long haul. While others charge full boat for month-to-month billing, DreamHost still lets you get an introductory deal without committing to years at the outset.
Simple, easy-to-grasp pricing is one of DreamHost’s hallmarks. You have just two fully featured shared hosting plans to choose from: Shared Starter and Shared Unlimited.
Shared Starter can get a single website up and running for as little as $2.59 per month. That, unlike many other providers’ entry-level plans, comes with a free year of a domain name, free WordPress site migrations, automated daily backups, and automatic WordPress updates.
No wonder DreamHost is one of three hosting providers officially recommended by WordPress itself.
Upfront costs stay low no matter how you slice it. That $2.59 per month rate is available on a three-year commitment (meaning $93.24 due at checkout), but the one-year commitment doesn’t raise the rate too much—it’s just $2.95 per month for a total of $35.40 for year one of hosting costs.
That’s some low pricing, but we led this review off by highlighting how affordable DreamHost is when you go month-to-month. Well, it’s still quite cheap, even without a contract.
Monthly billing for Shared Starter begins at a rate of $4.95 per month for your first three months. After that, you’re on the hook for the renewal rate.
That sounds like it’s going to jump up a lot, right?
It’s only $7.99 per month after your third month of promotion pricing. Compare that with the $9.99 per month (or more) that other providers will charge you after the introductory rate goes away, even after one-year or multi-year initial terms.
Not only does this make DreamHost exceptional for trying their hosting services out without commitment; it also positions this provider as the best (and cheapest) choice for specific site cases.
We’re thinking of event websites, landing pages attached to marketing or sales campaigns, registration pages for classes or webinars, and just about anything else where a website isn’t meant to stick around until the end of time.
Whenever you have a website that’s intended to have a short shelf life and you need cheap and reliable hosting, think about DreamHost before all others.
It’s not just the affordable rates for no-contract hosting plans—it’s also the reliability you get.
During our testing period, DreamHost’s servers delivered uptime for all but 49 seconds of the entire month.
So, not only can you rest easy that your short-term website isn’t costing you an arm and a leg to host—you can also be confident that it’s always available to visitors, doing what it’s supposed to be doing, whether that’s converting visitors into subscribers, registering attendees, or anything else.
Now, this is all on the Shared Starter plan, which only allows for hosting a single website and doesn’t include email accounts. If you need those, plus unlimited site storage and subdomains, you can go for the Shared Unlimited plan. That starts at $3.95 per month for a three-year contract or $8.95 for monthly billing.
Another thing to be mindful of is that neither plan gives you a free year of a domain when you opt for monthly billing. That extra benefit is only available on year-long commitments or longer terms.
Get short-term hosting without being punished at checkout for it. Use DreamHost’s inexpensive shared hosting without ever having to commit to service for longer than you need to.
#6 – Ultahost — The Best for Keeping Renewal Rates Low
Ultahost is a bit of a lesser-known name on this list, but it’s a reputable and reliable platform for anyone who wants long-lasting predictability from their hosting bills.
Plans start at around $3.08 per month for a one-year contract. If you opt for monthly billing, it’s a very palatable $3.29 per month.
That gives you some assurance that Ultahost isn’t pushing low promotional rates just to gouge you if you don’t pony up for multiple years. While the above rates are for their entry-level Shared Starter plan—which supports one domain and delivers 30 GB of NVMe storage—most site owners will prefer Ultahost’s Shared Basic plan.
That runs $5 per month for no commitment, or $4.67 per month when you lock in for a full year. With it, you get support for up to four domains, twice the storage as Shared Starter, and monthly bandwidth for up to 15,000 visitors.
All plans come with a free SSL certificate, free site backups, and free domain transfers. Plus, your hosting purchase is covered by a 30-day money-back guarantee.
One unique standout of Ultahost compared to other providers is its billing flexibility. While it’s not uncommon to see web hosts offer several different billing options, we typically see three main flavors here—month-to-month, annual, and three-year contracts.
Ultahost gives you six options for billing, including quarterly, six-month, and two-year terms. Each longer commitment reduces the rate you pay by a bit.
But, Ultahost really shines in terms of renewal rates.
While they do go up after your initial term, the renewal pricing barely moves the needle. Especially when you compare it to everyone else on this list.
For example, on month-to-month billing, the Shared Starter plan goes from $3.29 per month to $4.39 per month and Shared Basic jumps from $5 to just $6.67.
This is considerably less than other hosting providers that nearly triple the rates when the promo period ends. Ultahost stays cheap for the long run.
Ultahost plans also entitle you to a free drag-and-drop website builder powered by Weebly. However, this doesn’t automatically come with your plan. If you simply proceed with the default options, then you’re not going to get the free site builder. You need to manually select it, which can easily be overlooked in the sea of upsells during the checkout process.
But it’s really a minor blemish on an otherwise refreshing hosting provider. You don’t even have to build on Weebly to get a website going on Ultahost. It’s just a nice option that’s easy for people who want to swiftly whip up a site from scratch.
On top of the stellar renewal pricing, Ultahost delivers quality 24/7 support through live chat. They’re helpful and knowledgeable from our experience.
If you’re moving to Ultahost from another web host, the support team also provides free migration services.
But the benefits don’t stop there. With Ultahost, you’re getting enterprise-grade security for your site—even at the cheapest shared hosting level.
Ultahost provides 24/7 proactive server monitoring —taking care of all the technical requirements behind the scenes on your behalf. This helps protect your site from malware, viruses, spyware, redirects, DDoS attacks, and other threats in real time.
Ultahost even updates your security instances and plugins automatically. You’ll always be running on the latest versions that have been patched against new threats and common exploits.
Get started with Ultahost today and lock in great pricing for the long haul.
#7 – SiteGround — The Best for Getting Truly Helpful Support
Lots of hosting companies promise you the moon. But, when things go wrong, they don’t have your back.
Not SiteGround. They offer genuinely helpful one-on-one support for all their customers. You can get a hold of SiteGround representatives 24/7 via live chat or phone call and get help in over 10 languages.
This is a huge edge on other hosting providers who rely on bots or knowledge base articles to answer customer questions and avoid the hard work of hiring people to actually deliver useful assistance to their customers.
Every time we tested their support out via live chat or phone call, we were always connected to a SiteGround rep almost immediately. And, reps got right to the point, giving us relevant articles, step-by-step instructions, and a clear expectation of what we could and couldn’t accomplish.
Our longest interaction took just eight minutes, from connecting with a rep through resolution. With some other providers on this list, we had to wait three times that long just to connect to a real human being.
And SiteGround agents didn’t try to upsell us anything, in addition to the very friendly and helpful nature of every agent we spoke with.
We were particularly impressed with our support chat regarding site speed (which you can see a snippet of in the screenshot above). They offered several different resources we could use to keep our site speedy, and they didn’t make us feel like any questions we had were silly or a waste of their time.
Speaking of speedy sites, we were impressed by SiteGround’s overall performance during our testing.
We only experienced two total seconds of downtime over a month of monitoring our test site and site load times stayed (mostly) consistently under one second.
For this level of performance and service, you’re going to pay a little bit more. Upfront costs are pretty typical, with SiteGround’s entry-level shared hosting plan (StartUp) starting at $2.99 per month for a 12-month commitment.
If you need a plan that supports more than one website or gives you more storage and monthly bandwidth for visitors, GrowBig runs $4.99 per month for a one-year term.
The only real issue here is how the rates spike upon renewal. StartUp only costs you $35.88 for the first year on that promotional pricing, but it will cost you $17.99 per month after that. GrowBig jumps all the way up to $29.99 per month after your first-year rate ends.
That’s a massive hike in rates, so just make sure you budget for this if you stick with SiteGround for the long haul.
But, in our eyes, that price can be worth it if you value consistent performance supported by superlative customer service.
If you’re willing to pay a bit more for that kind of peace of mind, get started with SiteGround today.
#8 – GreenGeeks — The Fastest Cheap Web Hosting
If you want raw speed at a low price, go with GreenGeeks. When we conducted our 30-day test, we were floored by how GreenGeeks blew away the competition in this regard.
And the truth is, they don’t boast about site speed like other providers. So, we’ll do the boasting for them.
Granted, we ran our tests on a pretty bare-bones website. But we did that for all of the providers we tested out. And GreenGeeks ran away with this category of testing, delivering an average load time of under half a second.
Outside of a few spikes that still barely exceeded one second, GreenGeeks loaded our site in the blink of an eye for just about the entire month.
This is twice as fast as some of the other hosts that we tested and top-tier performance for a shared hosting plan. You don’t even need to add any plugins or fiddle with any settings to unlock this speed.
Even on their worst day, GreenGeeks is faster than some other shared hosting providers’ best days.
They also give you a setup process that helps you get started on the right foot. You can choose which plugins you want pre-installed during onboarding, rather than having to manually delete the ones you don’t want.
GreenGeeks’ setup wizard streamlined the entire process of getting set up. The only thing we didn’t like was the lack of information on what to do after we installed WordPress.
You’ll have to pay a bit more than some other providers to unlock this level of speed on shared hosting. That’s to be expected.
Promotional pricing is right in the same ballpark as the other big names. GreenGeeks’ single-site shared hosting plan runs you $2.95 per month for a one-year term, meaning you’ll pay $35.40 at checkout. For unlimited websites, storage space, and email, their mid-tier plan starts at $4.95 per month on a 12-month contract, for a checkout total of $59.40.
All plans, including the entry-level one, include a free year of a custom domain name, a free SSL certificate, nightly site data backups, and a unique 300% green energy match that puts back 3x the resources they use via renewable energy sources. On top of that, GreenGeeks plants a tree for every hosting account and partners with the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
It’s a great thing to promote if your company or organization is also eco-conscious.
Renewal pricing is a bit steep. That single-site plan’s rate rises to $11.95 per month after your first year while the mid-tier option runs $16.95 per month after your one-year promotional term ends.
All in all, GreenGeeks is the fastest host on this list. If you’re willing to pay a bit more after year one to keep your site loading in the blink of an eye (without leaving shared hosting), GreenGeeks will keep you satisfied.
#9 – A2 Hosting — The Best for Sites Focused on Europe and Asia
A2 Hosting is the right choice for affordable shared hosting that can still perform well when your site gets visitors from all around the globe.
That’s because of their well-placed data centers, which give you access to servers in Amsterdam and Singapore. By using one of those servers for your website, you can ensure great visitor experiences for your fans, customers, or prospects in Europe or Asia.
They also have two separate data centers for the United States, one in Arizona and one in Michigan, which helps you also reduce the time to first byte if you have a larger visitor base on one coast of the U.S. over the other.
But it’s the global data centers that really appeal to us, because A2 Hosting is a bit pricey and disappointing for hosting a website with a primarily domestic audience.
Introductory rates for A2’s shared hosting start as low as $2.99 per month for a single-site plan with an ample 100 GB of storage (which is more than you’ll see from most other providers’ entry-level plans). A shared plan for unlimited sites and storage starts at $5.99 per month.
Both of those low rates come on a one-year commitment, but you can also secure the unlimited shared plan for the same rate for three years.
On renewal, the single-site plan rises to $10.99 per month while the unlimited one goes up to $13.99 per month. Both of those rates aren’t too bad—you’ll notice that many others on this list have steeper renewal rate spikes.
If you’re willing to spend a bit more, you can secure one of A2 Hosting’s more unique offerings: their Turbo servers. Those can deliver up to 20 times faster performance than traditional shared servers and they come with enhanced NVMe storage. Those plans start at $6.99 per month for a one-year or three-year term on promotional pricing.
For those of you currently using another web hosting provider and considering the switch to A2 because it’s cheaper, you’ll love the fact that A2 Hosting offers free migrations.
Not only will this save you money, but it also ensures you get a smooth site transfer without having to worry about downtime or data loss.
In terms of your total cost, it’s worth noting that A2 doesn’t offer a free domain with its hosting plans, while most other providers on our list do. This shouldn’t be a deal breaker in most situations, since it’s a free domain only saves you about $15 or $20 on your first year. But if you’re on an ultra-tight budget, it could be the reason you look elsewhere.
There are some other flaws we didn’t care for. The onboarding and checkout experience was a bit painful. The checkout pages are overwhelming, with tons of information packed into a small space. There are lots of upsells to navigate, as well.
Plus, A2 charges extra if you want to use their page builder, which is something almost everyone else offers for free. You could alternatively use a standalone site builder for free, as well.
After you create your account, there’s little guidance. We received an email with a ton of different login credentials and that’s about it. You’re largely left to figure it out on your own.
Outside of these issues, we still rate A2 Hosting quite highly. They make it easier to cater to international site visitors and unlock enhanced site speed without having to leave the more affordable world of shared hosting.
If you have a global audience or want to launch a site specifically for your visitors in Europe or Asia, get started today on A2 Hosting.
Methodology for Choosing the Best Cheap Web Hosting
We determined which hosting providers made the cut for this list through a time-consuming research process. We took an entire month to collect all the data for our recommendations.
For every host that we evaluated, we went through this testing process:
- We opened a brand-new account with the web host
- Starting from scratch, we went through their entire onboarding process
- We set up a new website by installing WordPress, using the same theme and settings
- We monitored site speed and uptime for the month
- We went through three separate support interactions to see how helpful they were
After running all our tests, we determined which hosting providers offered the best value for certain use cases. Every provider above offers a cheap shared hosting plan or two—but what gives you the most bang for your buck for each one?
That’s why you’ll see every review above explain what you’ll end up paying for at least one shared hosting plan, then elaborate on what kind of site owner would get the most out of using that plan. For some folks, just getting the lowest rate is all that matters. For others, it’s about getting a good deal on a host that delivers specific benefits, like speed or ecommerce support.
Let’s go through the main factors we used to determine which web hosts to include on our list and where to rank them.
The Upfront Cost of Promotional Pricing
Getting a cheap web host is all about keeping your costs down.
Every provider that we reviewed has a plan with monthly promotional pricing under $7. At first glance, everyone’s pricing can look very similar.
In practice, though, the total you’ll spend for your first year of hosting can vary from $35 to $85 due at checkout. That’s a huge range.
The first thing to watch for is the cost of add-ons, like a domain name, domain registrar privacy, and other features you may need that aren’t included in your hosting plan.
Our research discovered that many “cheap” plans don’t include some of these things, which means you’ll pay more than you’re expecting. Domain names are a big one here—just about every provider offers a free year of a domain, but usually only on select plans. The really valuable cheap hosts extend this offer on all shared hosting plans.
So, while something may seem to be the cheapest option out there, don’t forget to factor in these extra expenses when comparing prices for different providers.
The other thing to be on the lookout for is term length. That rock-bottom rate you see on every hosting provider’s pricing page isn’t for a true monthly bill. You’re going to need to commit to a year or longer at the outset to secure that rate.
And rates can change significantly based on the length of that commitment. Sometimes, a provider’s plan on a one-year term is priced at a lower monthly rate than a three-year term. In other cases, the inverse is true and you get the best deal overall by locking in three years at checkout.
The bottom line here is that you’re not going to get that $2.99 per month rate by only paying $2.99 at checkout today. You’ll need to factor in how much cash you need to put down after signing up and what it’s going to cost you for the long haul.
That’s why renewal pricing is an entirely separate consideration.
Renewal Pricing and Long-Term Value
Let’s say you get a great promotional price. You’ve paid as little as possible for your first year. Time goes by, you forget about your hosting entirely, and one day you look at your credit card bill to see months of charges that are almost as much as you paid for the first year of hosting itself.
That happens all the time. And it is one of the most frustrating parts of running a website. Hosting providers will hike up your rates after your promotional period ends, there’s no way around that. All you can do is educate yourself on these renewal rates before you commit to a host in the first place.
Among the providers on our list, we saw second-year increases of anywhere between 50% and 137%.
The key here is to consider this alongside the way that your introductory term affects pricing. Longer initial commitments tend to give you slightly reduced renewal rates once they expire. So, you may end up paying $2 more per month to choose a three-year term over a one-year term at checkout, but you get to reap the benefits of a monthly rate that’s $1 lower after the term ends.
In this case, you want to think about how long you’re planning to keep this site (or hosting plan) up and running. If it’s a short-term project for marketing or an event, you probably won’t gain any value by going for the longer term.
But, for any site that plans on sticking around for a while, you’ll want to prioritize long-term value by calculating what a hosting provider will cost you in year four and beyond.
Help for Web Hosting Beginners
A lot of people looking for cheap shared hosting don’t have a lot of demands in terms of resources and extra features. Really, they just want affordable hosting for their website from a provider that makes it easy for them to manage it and get help when it’s needed.
That’s where two big factors come into play: the ease of setting up your hosting and website and the convenience and helpfulness of a host’s channels for customer support.
Ideally, the onboarding and setup process should feel effortless.
When we set up our sites on a few of the providers we reviewed above, our experience was excellent. We were walked step-by-step through the process and felt confident along the way. And, most importantly, we felt any beginner could easily do the same.
We favored hosts that provide a guided process in a clean interface that’s easy to grasp, especially if they clearly marked your options for building a new site or migrating an existing one to your new host.
Others that we tested weren’t as neat and clean as this. Some densely pack information into your screen. Even if what’s shown on the page isn’t super technical, it could easily be overwhelming for someone who has never set up their own hosting before.
The whole process can be very confusing if you have no idea what’s going on.
In the reviews above, we make sure to call out both sides of this coin, highlighting the hosts kindest on beginners and flagging those that make this process more complicated than inexperienced users might like.
Then, there’s support. Even if the setup process is the easiest thing in the world, you’re likely to eventually run into something that requires you to seek direct assistance from your hosting provider. That might be unexpected downtime or errors or just questions you have about how to maximize performance or accomplish something.
Whether you’ve never set up a website before or have set up hundreds, quality 24/7/365 support is crucial.
At this point, most providers offer at least live chat support. Quality can vary here, both in terms of how long you’ll have to wait to connect to a rep and how helpful that rep will actually be.
When providers really shone in their level of service, we spotlighted that in their review above. Unfortunately, truly helpful customer support can be rare these days. So, when we encountered representatives that understood our questions and answered them in a timely, thoughtful manner, we were floored.
The same goes for any provider that offers phone-based support. This, too, is exceedingly rare these days. But it can make a world of difference for a user when they have a phone number to call instead of a live chat widget.
We based our assessment of customer support based on reps’ answers to these three questions:
- What security features do you offer so I can make my site more secure?
- Can you walk me through setting up my email address at my domain?
- How can I make my site load as fast as possible?
These are common issues for a novice user to have. When we call out a provider for good support, it means they answered these questions in a way that surpassed our expectations. You can be confident you’ll also get quality answers to these and any other questions should you opt for that web host.
Ability to Scale
Getting a cheap web hosting plan shouldn’t restrict your room for growth. While the cheapest plans on the market are always going to be entry-level shared hosting, you should still take a look at what your web hosting provider can offer at different tiers.
There are two common paths to take as you eventually outgrow your cheap shared plan.
You can either upgrade to another shared plan that has more resources or upgrade to another type of hosting—most commonly cloud hosting or VPS hosting.
Migrating your site to another web host is a pain, and it’s something you definitely want to avoid unless it’s absolutely necessary. So take the extra few minutes now to ensure the host at the top of your list offers a variety of other hosting options to choose from as your site grows in the coming years.
This will ultimately save you more money in the long run and reduce the chances of downtime and data loss during a migration.
Expanding Your Knowledge: Best Cheap Web Hosting
Summary
Finding a cheap web host that performs well enough for your needs can be hard. We hope our post takes some of the mystery and misery out of finding the best choice.
Our advice is always to sit down and take the time to list out your requirements. Then, make an educated decision based on your priorities and specific needs, particularly your budget.
Hostinger is our top recommendation for cheap web hosting. It’s reliable, scalable, easy to use, and comes with everything you need at a rock bottom price. But if it doesn’t check all your boxes, you can use this post as a guide while you go through the process of making your final decision.
