The Best Website Hosting: Top 10 Web Hosts for 2024 Compared

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The best website hosting services offer various tools, plugins, and perks, such as free emails and domains, alongside excellent server speeds and top-notch security. Not only will your website enjoy a near-100% uptime, but you’ll also be able to benefit from handy drag-and-drop builders, SEO optimization, and priority support for the best possible performance.

That said, there are a plethora of hosting providers on the market right now, so choosing one of them isn’t easy. To help, we’ve reviewed the most popular and worthy names in the industry in our guide of the 10 best website hosting services. Read on to learn why services like DreamHost, BlueHost, and InMotion are leading the way.

The Top 10 Best Website Hosting Services Ranked 

Every single one of our hand-picked hosting companies has something unique to offer. Before we jump into our reviews of each one, here’s a sneak peek into why they made it on our list:

1. DreamHost — $2.59/month — Offers the best website hosting with class-leading load speeds, a 100% uptime guarantee, and solid customer support. Also, the 97-day money-back guarantee is the most lenient you’ll come across.
2. BlueHost — $2.95/month — Boasts the best web hosting for WordPress, thanks to a free WP migration tool and the WordPress Academy. It also offers a free CDN on Shared hosting plans for excellent speeds.
3. InMotion — $3.99/month — Best for small businesses, with support for two websites on its most basic plan. Lightning-quick NVMe SSD storage and a 99.99% uptime guarantee are a huge plus.
4. Liquid Web — $20/month — Highly recommended for high-stake and e-commerce websites, thanks to dedicated business-friendly plans and a 100% uptime guarantee.
5. A2 Hosting — $2.99/month — One of the fastest hosting providers with Turbo servers and NVMe SSD storage. It offers 100GB SSD storage on its most basic plan, which makes it excellent value for money.
6. InterServer — $2.50/month — Popular hosting company with a Price Lock Guarantee, ensuring zero renewal hikes. Ultra SSD storage and built-in InterShield Security ensure better speeds and security.
7. IONOS — $1/month — The best cheapest web hosting service, and it comes with a free Wildcard SSL certificate on every plan, alongside geo-redundant infrastructure.
8. HostArmada — $2.49/month — Offers up to 21 daily backups to ward off unexpected attacks and failures in saving website updates. There’s also 24/7/365 live server monitoring for extra protection.
9. NameCheap — $1.58/month — A top option for affordable website hosting, as it boasts excellent load times and email marketing features. 24/7 live chat support and transfer assistance on even the most basic plan is a huge plus.
10. Domain.com — $3.75/month — Excellent choice for those who want unlimited storage at an affordable price tag. It also comes with a simple drag-and-drop website builder and trendy templates.

What Types of Website Hosting Packages Are There?

There are four types of website hosting packages. Below we’ll discuss each one in more depth so you can decide which one best suits your needs.

Shared Hosting

This type of hosting is ideal for small websites with limited data and traffic. Multiple providers, like DreamHost and BlueHost, offer managed shared hosting, where they look after your site’s security, maintenance, and updates for you, which makes them tailor-made for non-tech-savvy users.

VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting

VPS hosting is similar to shared hosting in that both involve a physical server that hosts multiple websites. However, the difference is that in VPS hosting, you enjoy a private server environment – a dedicated virtual space, if you may – separate from other websites.

A simpler way to explain it would be that the website hosting provider takes a server, splits it into multiple individual parts, and then offers it to its users. Evidently, this gives your website more resources, and you get a greater degree of control over your website.

This type of hosting is ideal for those who know what they’re doing and would like to operate things their own way.

Cloud Hosting

This is the go-to choice if you want a fast website and the ability to make changes on the fly. Also, it’s beginner-friendly, as the hosting provider will take care of not only your website’s backend but also the cloud servers.

Dedicated Hosting

This is the most powerful and, therefore, the most expensive option on the menu, as it gives you your own physical server, which you don’t have to share with any other website. This is ideal for those who want peak performance and maximum control, which is often the case with high-volume and data-heavy websites.

Can I Host My Own Website? 

Yes, you can host your own website from your computer by installing WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) software that’ll turn your computer into a server. Next, you’ll have to upload your website’s files on the server, and the final step would be to make your website public.

The biggest benefit is that it’ll be dedicated hosting with the highest amount of control and performance. However, all this is easier said than done and comes with a lot of hurdles. For starters, your computer must be switched on 24/7, or else your website will experience dangerous amounts of downtime.

Plus, the maintenance and security of the server and, therefore, your website will be entirely on your shoulders. As you might guess from all of the above, all this sums up to making the biggest downside to locally hosting a website clear as day – the costs involved.

It makes little sense to go down this path when you have hosting providers offering dedicated hosting for less than $100 per month.

The 10 Best Website Hosting Platforms Reviewed 

We’ll now discuss the top website and WP hosting services in detail, including their best features, pricing, pros, and cons. Keep reading for all the nitty-gritty details.

1. DreamHost — Overall, Offers the Best and Fastest Website Hosting 

DreamHost is the fastest website hosting platform we’ve tried, with 0.6 and 0.9 seconds of load times in the US and the EU, respectively, so your viewers will be able to move from one web page to the next without any lags or buffering.

This will ultimately increase the amount of traffic your website receives, as remember, Google favors websites with speedy load times – your site’s visibility depends on the quality of your content, but that won’t reap any rewards if your site’s load time causes users to bounce.

With a whopping 100% uptime guarantee on offer, DreamHost also ensures that your website is up and running all the time, meaning you’ll never lose out on any visitors or revenue.

DreamHost also comes with an exclusive hourly plan priced at a mere $0.0075/hour. It’s available for Cloud hosting plans and allows you to pay for every hour you use the platform. This saves you from paying for any temporary or seasonal websites you launch. It’s also ideal for the trial and error phase of your website.

The Shared hosting plan is also easily one of the best available, as it comes with WordPress pre-installed, unlimited traffic, a free plugin for automatic migration, and essentials, including a free SSL certificate and a free domain for the first year.

What’s more, all DreamHost plans are backed up by a 97-day money-back guarantee – the most generous of the lot. You’re not rushed into making a purchase but instead given ample time to try out the service risk-free before committing.

DreamHost offers endless professional designs and templates, too, so you can make a website within a matter of minutes. You can also chat with a DreamHost web design expert to get assistance in building an efficient website. Speaking of support, DreamHost agents are available and accessible 24/7 via live chat.

Pricing

DreamHost keeps it simple with two very affordable Shared hosting plans. The Shared Unlimited plan, as the name suggests, comes with unlimited storage and sub-domains:

2. BlueHost – Offers the Best Website Hosting for WordPress With a Free WP Migration Tool

BlueHost is among the largest and most popular web hosting companies worldwide, with over 500,000 users worldwide. As of 2024, it’s now over a couple of decades old and has, throughout its long and experienced run, managed to be the talk of the town.

All its Shared hosting plans come with a free Content Delivery Network (CDN), this simply means that content required by a user is cached in a location close to them for quick delivery. For even better speeds,  BlueHost boasts a built-in caching system – Varnish-Cache.

Caching essentially means creating static copies of your web pages so that whenever a website visitor lands on a certain page (or, in technical terms, “requests” to see the contents on a page), they’re delivered duplicates of the actual pages, negating the need to reach out to the main server, thereby reducing load speeds.

BlueHost offers unlimited bandwidth with every VPS hosting plan, too, allowing you to download and upload unlimited amounts of data. You’ll also be able to migrate your existing WordPress website for free, courtesy of BlueHost’s free WP migration tool, which is made available to even the starter Shared hosting plan.

A rather unique advantage of signing up for BlueHost web hosting is that it comes with access to BlueHost WordPress Academy, wherein you’ll learn practical and strategy-focused skills from BlueHost’s in-house experts, allowing you to improve the way your WordPress website looks, moves, and functions.

With a rich and in-depth knowledge hub of tutorial videos and helpful guides, it’s a one-stop solution for those interested in getting educated on creating and running a WP website.

On the marketing front, BlueHost performs decently, as well, with access to email marketing features and Yoast SEO, which is used to improve your website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) by enhancing the quality of content on your website.

Pricing

BlueHost offers a lot more variety than DreamHost, and while the first two plans are adept for basic needs, its real power can be experienced with either the Choice Plus or Pro plan. They come with daily website backups, domain privacy, and lots of other pro tools:

3. InMotion — Best Website Hosting for Small Businesses

InMotion is a great website hosting platform for small businesses, as its cheapest plan lets you operate two websites, as opposed to other providers that limit their support to just a single website in their most basic plans.

We love its next-generation NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) SSD storage that outperforms a normal SATA SSD in performance and speed. What’s even better is that InMotion offers unlimited storage on every plan except its most basic one.

InMotion is superb for WordPress websites, too, as it’ll automatically update your website with the latest version of WP. Plus, its infrastructure and servers are all optimized for WordPress as well.

Having said that, we found that InMotion has an easy-to-use interface. The custom Control Panel allows you to be creative with your website with gazillions of website themes to choose from.

It also boasts an intuitive drag-and-drop builder, meaning you can move around the text boxes, images, and videos on your website’s pages so that everything is as per your liking.

Moreover, with a staggering 90-day money-back guarantee (the industry standard is 30 days) on InMotion’s paid plans, you’ll have a lot of time to decide whether the service is for you. It also comes with an impressive 99.9999% uptime guarantee, which is a lot better than those with a 99.90% uptime guarantee.

In addition to a free SSL certificate and malware protection, you’ll also be safeguarded from hackers and DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks, where a malicious user overcrowds a target server with fake server requests and traffic, thereby rendering the website unable to respond to legitimate user requests.

Pricing

InMotion’s starter plans are some of the best around, and you’ll really only be looking at the Power and Pro plans if you have multiple data-heavy websites or if you just can’t do without live phone support.

4. Liquid Web — Best e-Commerce Website Hosting with a 100% Uptime Guarantee

Liquid Web is the only other web hosting provider on our list, besides DreamHost, that offers a jaw-dropping 100% uptime guarantee. It’s worth noting that while services with a 99.90% uptime guarantee are great, nothing quite matches a full 100%.

Simply put, 99.90% means that your website is likely to experience a downtime of around 8.7 hours per year. Besides shining in this aspect, Liquid Web is also a charm for businesses that run an e-commerce store.

It offers numerous website hosting plans, some specially tailored for e-commerce websites. The Managed WooCommerce Hosting plan, for example, ensures top-notch performance with the ability to auto-scale speed and resources, depending on the traffic that your website receives.

If there’s a spike in traffic, it makes more resources available to you and scales it down when there’s less traffic.

Speaking of traffic, Liquid Web doesn’t limit the number of users you can bring on board, which is a real treat for growing businesses. But another feature-rich e-commerce website plan worth mentioning is the Magento Cloud Hosting.

Its cheapest subscription can handle a maximum of 11 websites – great for stores that handle different types of sales services on different websites. Beyond this, Liquid Web ensures class-leading protection, as it scans for malicious content overnight.

It’s also a Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant hosting provider, meaning you can rest assured that any credit card details your customers enter on your website will be proactively looked after and safeguarded.

While many business-favoring features make Liquid Web a great catch for medium and large-scale enterprises, the basic Shared hosting plan for smaller businesses and individual websites is missing, which is why Liquid Web isn’t as budget-friendly as other options on our list that provide Shared hosting.

That said, VPS hosting strikes a nice balance and eliminates this inconvenience to a great degree.

Pricing

Liquid Web doesn’t offer Shared hosting plans, and this is what its Managed VPS hosting pricing looks like:

5. A2 Hosting — Lightning-Fast Best Personal Website Hosting with Turbo Servers

A2 Hosting delivers class-leading speeds thanks to its unique Turbo servers that churn out better performance, higher SEO rankings, lower bounce rates, and speeds that are up to 20x faster than what normal servers are able to produce.

These servers are specially designed for speed-hungry websites, and they work by limiting the number of customers per server, thereby preventing overcrowding on servers, which ultimately results in its ability to handle as much as 9x more traffic compared to ordinary servers.

On top of all this, Turbo web hosting ensures 40% faster CPU performance, which is brought to you by NVMe SSD storage – it’s much faster than normal SATA SSDs, as their transfer speeds lurk around the 20Gbps mark, as opposed to SATA SSDs’ 6Gbps.

For e-commerce websites, certain occasions like Christmas holiday sales, summer and winter sales, and the like attract loads of customers, and a sudden spike in traffic often causes a website to crash. However, this won’t be a problem with A2 Hosting as it auto-scales resource usage, just like Liquid Web.

A2 Hosting offers 100GB SSD storage on its beginner-level plan, too, which is a lot more than what its rivals give – where you’re often limited to 10, 15, or 20GB of storage. Plus, there’s an array of hosting plans on offer, including for large enterprises, small businesses, and e-commerce stores.

Pricing

A2 Hosting does well to provide Turbo servers on Shared web hosting plans. The two Turbo plans come with A2 Hosting’s prestigious traffic surge protection and LiteSpeed servers.

6. InterServer – Best Website Hosting for Personal Websites with Price Lock Guarantee

InterServer is a great pick for individuals and small businesses, courtesy of its affordable and beginner-friendly plans. Its Shared hosting plans start at a mere $2.50/month, but the highlight here is that they come with a special “Price Lock Guarantee”.

This ensures that there are no additional charges at the time you renew your plan – you get “locked” in on the price you start with. The security of your website isn’t taken for granted, either, as InterServer has developed its own security solution – InterShield Security.

Its built-in antivirus solution scans thousands of servers and website data to shield you from all kinds of malicious attacks ensuring top-of-the-line safety.

Besides all this, InterServer’s hosting solutions will give you access to over 450 cloud apps, all of which are only a click away from installation. Along with this, it automatically updates cloud-based functions to ensure that your website is up and running anew.

The provider is also neck-and-neck with Liquid Web when it comes to serving e-commerce websites. It provides different e-commerce plans like Magento, WooCommerce, OpenCart, and PrestaShop.

We love the platform’s ready-to-install scripts like WooCommerce and AbanteCart that let you build and run a professional website with little to no coding skills. Plus, it also offers Ultra SSD storage, which is slightly better and faster than normal SSD storage as it automatically adjusts workload for maximum performance.

Pricing

The InterServer Shared and Dedicated hosting plans start at $2.50 and $59 per month, respectively. Plus, as with Domain.com, InterServer, too, offers unlimited storage on every plan.

7. IONOS – Best Cheap Website Hosting

IONOS is the cheapest website hosting provider on our list. If you’re a new business willing to shell out the minimum, this is an ideal choice for you as you’ll be able to get started for a mere $1/month.

It’s worth noting that this discounted pricing is only for the first six months, following which the asking price will be $12/month – also reasonable when compared to the renewal costs of other industry giants.

With a 99.9% uptime guarantee, IONOS makes use of geo-redundant infrastructure. What this means is that your website data is stored in two different data centers – in case one of them is down, your site will still be up and available to visitors from around the world.

Another standout feature is IONOS’s free Wildcard SSL certificate which is much better than a standard SSL certificate used by other top website hosting providers. While the latter will protect a single domain, a Wildcard SSL certificate protects your main domain plus up to a whopping 10,000 sub-domains.

What’s even better is that the free Wildcard SSL certificate is available on every IONOS web hosting plan, which is great considering that an SSL certificate is a crucial component of a website’s security, as it creates a secure, encrypted connection between the website and a visitor.

As such, these certificates secure all transaction data of the user to prevent leaks and exploitation.

Pricing

Despite being super cheap, IONOS offers daily backup and recovery, 24/7 support, and its much-acclaimed free Wildcard SSL certificate on every plan:

8. HostArmada – Popular Website Hosting with Excellent Number of Daily Backups

HostArmada prioritizes your website’s data by offering an astounding number of daily backups coupled with a handsome 99.90% uptime guarantee as the cherry on top.

You’ll get a daily website backup, and depending on the plan, you’ll have either 7, 14, or 21 daily backups made accessible to you. Backups are super important to retrieve your database if it’s lost to hardware or power failure, malicious attacks, or human error.

HostArmada shines through nicely in terms of load speeds, too, regardless of where your visitors are from (in Asia or in the US). It’s able to do so thanks to its nine data centers spread across the world, from Europe to North America to Australia.

Beyond this, security is excellent on even the most basic Shared hosting plan – you’ll get malware scanning and removal abilities, in addition to brute-force protection and 24/7/365 live server monitoring, meaning you’ll be safeguarded from bad actors trying to infiltrate your website or server.

Pricing

HostArmada Shared hosting plans hold back on the amount of storage they offer, but they make up for it by providing excellent security.

9. NameCheap – Affordable Website Hosting with Superb Speeds

NameCheap lives up to its name as it’s a highly affordable website hosting platform with plans starting for as little as $1.58/month. While IONOS is priced at $1/month for only the first 6 months, NameCheap’s $1.58/month plan will serve you for two full years.

As such, NameCheap is more cost-effective than IONOS, especially for the long haul. Moving on, NameCheap’s EasyWP cache plugin is an advanced caching system that enhances user experience by ensuring load speeds of less than 2 seconds in the US and the UK.

An added benefit is its LiteSpeed servers on Shared hosting plans, which despite being able to deliver excellent speeds, make minimum use of CPU.

In addition to being able to store an unlimited number of parked domains (these are domains that you’ve purchased but are yet to connect to a page) on every plan, NameCheap comes with SpamAssassin, which will protect you from bot emails.

What’s more, NameCheap is also one of the few hosting services to offer 24/7 live chat and transfer assistance on its most basic Shared hosting plan. And to top it off, NameCheap also comes with “Site Maker,” which will create your website for you.

It requires minimal input from your end – all you have to do is answer a few basic questions. That said, it’s worth noting that NameCheap’s Site Maker is a separate service, available for $3.88/month. However, it comes with a 14-day free trial so that you can get started without paying a single penny.

Pricing

Even NameCheap’s high-end Shared hosting plan is cheaper than other providers’ starter plans, and for long-term use, you’ll hardly find a cheaper pick:

10. Domain.com – Offers Unlimited Storage on Every Plan

Domain.com can be an asset for your WordPress website, as it boasts a selection of hand-picked WP themes accompanied by pre-installed plugins. Although it isn’t as cheap as some of our other options, it’s certainly great value for money.

It offers unlimited storage with scalable bandwidth on every plan, which is unheard of in the industry, where almost every other provider reserves these offerings for their intermediate or high-end plans. Along with this, you also get a free domain for the first year.

What we found missing is a monthly subscription, which is disappointing if you’re a business in search of a hosting provider for short-term use. It also lacks 24/7 customer support on its most basic plan, although that shouldn’t be much of a concern given that its offerings are simple to understand and implement.

A highlight of the service, though, is its easy-to-use drag-and-drop website builder and the 150+ customizable templates, serving as a great choice for those who want to make a website first-hand and from scratch.

Pricing

Although Domain.com’s Shared hosting plans are well over the $3 mark from the outset, they all come with unlimited storage and scalable bandwidth, making them worth the splurge.

The Market’s Top-Rated Web Hosts Compared

Our table here highlights the main differences between the top 10 best web hosting services across core aspects like storage, traffic, load times, and of course, value for money so that a quick glance is more than enough for you to zero in on the most adept provider for your needs:

What’s the Best Free Website Hosting Service in 2024?

It’s commendable that it offers SSD and not HDD, which is much slower and, simply put, outdated for today’s fast-paced world. However, it misses out on a lot, as is the case with every free offering. A major downside, though, is that it doesn’t offer free SSL, daily backups, or DNS management.

These are crucial for data and website security and shouldn’t be compromised to save just a few bucks, especially when you can get these for dirtcheap ($1/month) with services like DreamHost, BlueHost, InMotion, and IONOS.

Not only do these offer free SSL certificates, free email accounts, and even free domains, but some of them also come with WordPress website builders and free automated site migration on their most basic plans.

All in all, those pinching for pennies or those experimenting with whether running a website is for them will find great value in free hosting plans. However, if you’ve committed to launching and growing a website or you’re a multiple-pronged business with lots of websites under your belt, free solutions won’t do the job.

The best part is that there are so many cheap hosting services that there’s hardly any need to worry about the cost side of things.

How Do I Choose the Right Hosting for My Website?

Here are the key factors you should consider when looking for a hosting service:

Server Speed

Ideally, your website’s load speed shouldn’t be more than 2.5 seconds, and it’s worth noting that web pages that take longer than 3 seconds to load on mobile experience a bounce rate of a mammoth 53%.

All our providers boast excellent load times, with DreamHost and BlueHost comfortably seated at the top of the mountain with 0.6 and 0.7 seconds of average load time in the US, respectively.

Uptime 

Providers like Liquid Web offer a 100% uptime guarantee, whereas others like InMotion and InterServer offer an excellent 99.99% uptime guarantee. Remember that 99.99% uptime means that your website will be down for around 8 hours in a year – this shows the importance of mere decimals in uptime percentages.

Security

Needless to say, data security is paramount when looking for an ideal hosting provider. You should receive:

• A free SSL certificate
• Firewalls and routine malware and adware scans
• Protection against DDoS attacks, ISP throttling, and other digital threats

A widespread cyber attack can easily leave your website in shambles, destroying your users’ trust in it, so there’s a lot at stake here, especially if you plan on embedding payment portals on your website where users would enter their credit card details.

Cost-Quality Mix

The features you get should justify the money you shell out – as simple as that. With providers like DreamHost, BlueHost, InMotion, and others that we’ve reviewed costing less than $3 to $5 per month, there’s little to no reason why you should spend hundreds of dollars on your hosting service.

Look for plans that give you your desired amount of bandwidth, storage, support, and of course, features. Most reserve their best offerings for their high-end plans. However, as long as you’re not a full-fledged enterprise with multiple websites, you won’t need these – starter and intermediate-level plans should do the job nicely.

Customer Reviews

Real-time customer feedback and web hosting reviews are important to find out whether a particular service performs as it says on the tin. Besides testing ourselves, to ensure a solid overview of each one, we also incorporated user reviews from several sites, including Reddit and TrustPilot.

We included our observations in our reviews, pros, and cons to give you a detailed and unbiased view of the tools, allowing you to gauge what could be a deal breaker for you so that you’re able to quickly yet effectively zero in on the best tool for your needs.

Conclusion | What is the Best Website Hosting Service to Use in 2024? 

Our in-depth guide with thorough reviews of the best website hosting providers on the market right now has a lot of variety, so irrespective of your needs, you should be able to find one adept for you – whether that’s a super cheap hosting provider, one that offers reasonably priced fast hosting, or an all-out premium experience.

DreamHost is a one-stop solution with lightning-fast load times, an affordable hourly plan, and a simple drag-and-drop builder for those who want to make a website. The best part is that it comes with a 97-day money-back guarantee, so you’ll be able to test it first-hand without putting any money on the line.

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