The Ultimate WordPress Hosting Comparison (2022)

Say you’re a cinephile and you always believed that the internet lacks quality reviews on Quentin Tarantino or any other director you adore. What do you do? Create your own blog and put your ideas down! Well, it’s easier said than done. The first thing you’ll do is go to Google to find an answer to the question of “how to create a website” and you’ll certainly come across WordPress and the multiple hosting options it has. And here’s when we come to your rescue with our ultimate WordPress hosting comparison that will tell you everything you need to know about website hosts! That way you’ll know which one works best for your Tarantino blog. But you might wonder,

What is WordPress and WordPress hosting?

WordPress is a website builder that allows you to create blogs, portfolios, eCommerce stores, and business websites — pretty much everything that comes to your mind. It’s powering more than 37.5 % of all the websites which means it makes up one third of the market. And, because it’s so popular, many hosting providers offer WordPress-specific services. The issue is that there are too many types of WordPress hostings now, which makes it extremely difficult for beginners to make the right choice. So,

How should you choose a WordPress host?

Well, if you want your blog (or anything else) to get famous, then you need your website to function well and load fast. That is, it has to have a good uptime and a high load speed to ensure that your customers have a good page experience. But your website hosting is not only taking care of your customers, it’s mainly taking care of you, because you are their main customer. So, you need to make sure that they provide high-quality customer support, offer you an affordable price, and guarantee the security of your website. Now let’s dive into our WordPress hosting comparison. What types of WordPress hostings are there and what do they provide? You can also check out our ultimate WordPress hosting comparison, where you’ll get an honest review of all hosting types.

Types of WordPress Hosting

There are 4 main types of WordPress hosting:

• Managed WordPress hosting
• Shared WordPress hosting
• VPS WordPress hosting
• Dedicated WordPress hosting

Below we will discuss each of these one by one, listing their main advantages and drawbacks, while also mentioning the best hosts for each type. So, let’s start our WordPress hosting comparison with our favorite type of hosting:

Managed WordPress Hosting

Now, if it’s still unclear, website hosting is the service that saves your website’s data and makes it accessible to your customer. It’s, as the name suggests, a virtual “host” for your website. So,

What is Managed WordPress hosting?

It’s like a super rich host that not only gives you a place to live, but covers your meals, gives you luxury rooms, and has an entire team that is ready to handle your complaints. Sounds fun right? This is what managed hosting does for your website. It offers a package of useful features and plugins that come absolutely free of charge, assures a 24/7 custom care service, and guarantees your website’s security. It also gives you a high PageSpeed score and a good uptime. But let’s go through these features one by one.. Pros

• Speed

Let’s be honest, you wouldn’t be reading this article if our page took more than a couple of seconds to load. In fact, you’d be right to bounce, because if another page works faster, it means they’ve invested more attention and effort into their website and, hence, they win. So, it doesn’t matter how good your content is, if the website is slow, you’re gone. The same is true for your website. You can put hours of work into your content, but if you don’t put as much energy into your website’s functionality and speed, no one will be there to appreciate it. But guaranteeing a website speed is easier than it seems. You just need the right host! With managed WordPress hosting, you can be sure that your website will be fast enough. 10Web, for instance, even optimizes your website automatically to assure a 90+ PageSpeed score and help you beat all your competitors. You’ll see later on in our WordPress hosting comparison, that many other types of hosting actually fail to do this. So, it’s one of the main advantages of managed hosting.

• Uptime

Uptime stands for the amount of time your website is available to its visitors. Today, it also refers to the basic functionality of a website, which means it shows how well your visitor can perform the required task. To be even more precise, let’s take a look at some examples. First of all, if you request a website and it simply doesn’t open, then it’s doing very poorly on uptime. The same goes for when you open a website, but can’t reach a desired page, because the specific button doesn’t work properly. With managed WP hosting, you don’t get these issues. Your website is always guaranteed to have the highest quality and you also get 99.999% uptime. Managed hosting providers make sure that, if your customer wants to make a purchase from your website, there won’t be a problem with adding the product to the shopping cart or accessing PayPal. Basically, managed WP hosts take care of all the technical issues, so you don’t have to worry about them anymore.

• Customer Care

Say something unexpected happens and you don’t know what to do with it. What then? Well, here’s where the support team comes in. With managed hosting, you get a team of WordPress experts that are ready to help you whenever you need and are there to solve all your issues. So, you don’t waste your time trying to figure out what to do when you have a website malfunction. Instead, you can trust other people to take care of it for you. Most of the managed WP hosts assure customer support 24/7 via email, phone, and online chat. This is very important, especially if you’re a beginner and come to have a lot of minor questions when trying to create your dream webpage. You would probably rather focus on your content instead of spending too much time on technical issues. Finally, you can be sure that if something bad happens, you can always contact the support team knowing that they will help you resolve the issue.

• Security and Backups

But what if the worst happens? What if your website becomes a target for hackers? Here is where you’ll need the security and backup features of managed hosting, “the bodyguards” of your site. These guys make sure that all your plugins are updated, provide you with an SSL certificate, detect vulnerabilities, and protect you from suspicious actions, so that you can sleep safely at night. Plus, even if your website gets hacked, managed WP hosting provides you with constant automatic backups, so you will still have access to the backed up version of your page and recover it. This being said, they do have a few disadvantages:

• Price

You’ve probably heard the saying, the best things in life are free and the second best are very expensive. The same is true for managed WP hosting: It is known for its pricey packages. Pagely, for instance, bills $499 a month, which, let’s admit, is a little bit too much, especially for beginners. But, as our WordPress hosting price comparison shows, managed hosting can be as cheap as shared hosting! You don’t need to worry about the price anymore, because you can get all of these treats in a very affordable package. So, let us introduce you to,

The Best Managed WordPress Provider: 10Web

Yup, there’s a host that gives you all the privileges of managed hosting and even more. 10Web is an AI website builder that makes website building and hosting simpler and faster than before thanks to the power of automation. 10Web’s repertoire includes automated WordPress hosting, automated 90+ PageSpeed optimization, automated 1-click migration, automated and AI-assisted website building, and so much more. And all of this comes at a very low cost. $10 per month, to be exact. Although 10Web is a newcomer in the hosting industry, it has already proven to be one of the most trustworthy hosts of 2020. Here’s why:

• 90+ PageSpeed score: With 10Web, you can be sure about your website’s speed as the hosting provider guarantees a 95+ PageSpeed score.
• Plugins and themes: Not only does 10Web host your website, but it provides you with a bunch of useful plugins (Photo Gallery, Form Maker, Slider, Event Calendar, etc.) and cool themes to make your page look and feel good.
• SEO analytics: 10Web also provides you with special tools to track your SEO performance and help you keep your Google rankings high.
• Backup solution: At 10Web, you can schedule your backups, get access to and download all the backup details, perform a full backup or store the database and files separately. You can also restore your backup with just one click.

And finally, Remember we said managed WP hostings have the drawback of being super expensive? Well, with 10Web, you can forget about that.

• Low prices: 10Web gives you all the advantages of managed hosting and takes this up one notch by providing an automated WP platform for only $10 a month! You usually pay this much for shared hosting. This is why 10Web gets top scores, for enabling you to build a nice and secure website for only a couple of dollars a month.

Plus, 10Web gives you the opportunity to try out their services by offering a free trial (no credit card required!). If you decide to switch to the platform, you can migrate your existing website with just one click.

s With that said, let’s jump to the second competitor of our WordPress hosting comparison.

Shared WP Hosting

What is Shared Hosting?

So, picture this: If managed hosting was like a luxury hotel, then shared hosting would be the room you get in a shared hostel. It’s cheap, but if someone has a spicy and smelly dinner in the room, everyone has to endure it. And you can’t bring a lot of guests to your room, can you? The same goes for shared hosting. As Domain.com explains, shared hosting “is a way to host your website on a single physical server that also hosts additional sites.” This means that your page automatically gets lower speed and can suffer malfunctions because of the issues of other users. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Pros

 

• Affordability

 

When you go to Rome and decide to stay in a hostel, it’s not because you didn’t want to get a 5-star experience on the rooftop of a hotel. It’s because you don’t want to spend money on it. The same goes for shared WP hosts. Many users understand the risks they have to take with shared service providers, but they choose to turn a blind eye, because they don’t want to pay that much. Now with the shared hosting your monthly billing price can be as low as $3.That’s the most alluring thing about them. But, As we said, there are managed hosting providers that offer better services for the same price as shared hosting. So, we are happy to announce that the era of shared hosting has come to an end. As our WordPress hosting comparison shows, shared hosting lost its most important advantage.

 

• Accessibility

 

With shared hosting pretty much anyone can get access to the tools needed for creating a website. It’s cheap and easy and if you are just a beginner in the field, you might not need much more. Shared hosting is especially good, if you need to create a quick website for a university project that you won’t really need after you hand it in. So, for small projects and very amateur options shared hostings may work well.

 

• User-Friendly Platform

 

Finally, shared hosting provides you with an easy drag-and-drop platform to create your website. Efficient tools of website making are always handy, because you don’t want to waste your time getting through the intricate technicalities that you won’t really need in the future (unless you’re a WP developer). But again, you can find the same feature in other hostings as well.

Cons

Well, because there are too many the disadvantages, we’ll just gloss over them:

• Forget about speed:If you share your hosting with thousands of other users, then obviously you can’t expect to have a good load time for your website. This is an obvious drawback for shared hosting.
• Forget about performance: You can do relatively well with your uptime if you don’t have a lot of traffic, but if you start to get popular, then your website won’t be able to handle it.
• “Bad neighborhood” effects: If you’ve never heard of bad neighborhood effects, here’s a quick explanation: With shared hosting, if your neighboring users have too much traffic on their page, this might also impact your page and make it function slowly. The same goes for security: if there is a leak for one of the users, you too might have safety issues.

Moving on to the next category, let’s see who’s the best shared hosting provider in our WordPress hosting comparison (drum rolls!).

The best shared hosting provider: Bluehost

In our research we found Bluehost to be the leader of the shared hosting market and here’s why: Pricing: The basic package is $7.99 a month, which is usually discounted to $2.95/month. So, you don’t need to worry about your finances. + They are honest with their pricing packages and have no hidden charges. Good server uptime: Compared to other shared hosting services, Bluehost does a good job keeping your website’s uptime high – 99%, on average – which, trust us, is very rare in shared hosting packages. Free SSL certificate: On top of this, Bluehost gives you a free SSL certificate which is a good bonus for your website’s credibility and security. So, if you want to start with shared hosting to figure stuff out and then switch to a better plan, then Bluehost is the perfect choice. Now let’s jump to the next section of our WordPress hosting comparison:

VPS WordPress Hosting

VPS Hosting is short for virtual private servers. Here’s an analogy that describes the essence of VPS hosting perfectly: Imagine having an apartment in a building. Your apartment is only yours, but you still share the building with other residents. In the same way, the VPS divides one physical server into many virtual servers. But what do you get from it? Pros

• Good Performance: Because you are virtually isolated from other users you don’t have the bad neighborhood effects as you do with shared hostings, which radically improves your website’s performance and rids you from a lot of technical issues.
• More Freedom: VPS hosting allows you to get root access to your hardware, software, customization, etc. Basically, you have control over almost everything in your website. So, if you enjoy dealing with technicalities then this is certainly for you. But don’t forget: this leaves you with more responsibility.
• Security: With VPS, your website is certainly more secure than with shared hosting. And, as you’ve seen in our WordPress hosting comparison, security is always an important feature for us. Cause, duh, you don’t want to get hacked! And VPS protects you from DDoS attacks, so you can feel more safe.

Cons

• Price: Because VPS is frequently compared to shared hosting, we need to mention that in terms of prices VPS hosting certainly loses, because the average package is $30/mo, which is even more expensive than some of the managed hosting services.
• More Responsibility: And again, as we mentioned, if you want flexibility then be ready to take on more responsibility. If you’re not tech-savvy, then this will be a huge disadvantage for you.

So which VPS hosting do we advise?

The best VPS hosting provider: InMotion

Though it has a lot of hosting packages, in our WordPress hosting comparison we concluded that InMotion does best in VPS hosting. Here’s what you’ll get:

• Unlimited number of sites,
• Free SSL,
• Multi-layer defence,
• Full root access with SSH keys (for self-managed cloud VPS),
• Server management support, updates, and patching (for managed VPS hosting).

You think VPS hosting is for you? Then you can trust InMotion to provide a great experience. Now, without further ado, we come to the last contender in our WordPress hosting comparison:

Dedicated WordPress Hosting

If with shared and VPS hostings you had to share your resources to some extent, with dedicated hosting you get an entire physical server just for your website. This type of solution usually works best for eCommerce stores and larger businesses, as it assures more security and flexibility, and better performance. So, let’s take a look at the advantages: Pros

• Security: Now in the case of dedicated hosting you certainly don’t need to worry about security at all, because you don’t share your server with other customers, which reduces the risks of malicious attacks.
• Functionality: Your website has all the resources needed to deal with the overloads, so you can be sure you’ll have a good performance.
• Full-Control: Again, dedicated hosting also gives you full control over your website which you couldn’t get with VPS, managed or shared hosting. So, here, too, if you love control, then dedicated hosting is the best choice for you. It’s even more powerful than VPS hosting!

Cons

• Full Control: Yup, this is both a pro and a con, because full control also means a lot of headache and you’re the one to figure out whether you can handle it.
• Priciness: The average price is $100/mo, which means that in our WordPress hosting comparison this hosting type is the most expensive choice. Of course, you can also get higher prices with VPS or managed hosting, but we’re talking about the average prices.

The best dedicated hosting provider: HostGator

As explained on their website, with HostGator’s dedicated hosting you get:

• Maximum Performance,
• World-class Support,
• Advanced Management.

So, as our WordPress hosting comparison has shown, all the hosting types have their advantages and disadvantages. You simply need to understand which plan best covers your needs and can be the perfect solution for your website.

FAQs

• How much traffic can WordPress hosting companies handle?

It depends on which server type you choose. As we showed in our WordPress hosting services comparison, each hosting plan is different. Managed WP hosting can handle way more traffic. 10Web as an Automated WP Platform (the better alternative for managed hosting), for instance, is famous for its great scalability, while shared hosting will run slow when your visitors grow.

• Can I switch to a different WordPress hosting provider?

Sure, only the migration process differs depending on the hosting. 10Web provides you with an automated one-click migration service that allows you to switch to 10Web’s platform by just pressing one button.

• Do I need WordPress-specific hosting?

Of course, there are other options available, but people usually go for WordPress hosting, as these plans provide higher performance and a diligent support system.

• Which hosting is best for WordPress?

Again, as we mentioned in our WordPress hosting comparison, you first need to know what you need to understand which type works best for you. If you want more control, go with the dedicated option, but if you don’t want to deal with technicalities, while still having an excellent performance, then managed WordPress hosting is a good choice for you. An even better one is an Automated WordPress Platform that lets machines handle super annoying manual tasks.

• What is the cheapest way to host my WordPress website?

The most common answer is shared hosting. But nowadays you can get high-quality automated hosting for the same price as shared hosting, making automated hosting the better option. Plus, don’t forget that you end up paying more with cheap packages because of hidden costs and necessary features not included in the plan.

• Can I host WordPress on my own server?

Yes, but you need to be tech-savvy or else you won’t be able to handle the administrative and maintenance tasks. Alternatively, you can hire a special team, which will end up costing you more.

There are a lot of WordPress hosting types out there and each of them has its advantages and disadvantages. To understand which one will serve you best, you need to decide what you’re looking for in a hosting provider: Do you want more flexibility or more technical assistance? Do you need your page to handle a lot of traffic or is it going to serve only a couple of your friends? Understanding your website’s purpose will help you understand which hosting type you need. Whichever way you decide, we’ve introduced you to one of the best providers out there! Have you tried any of the hostings mentioned? Or maybe you know better providers? Share your experience with us!