Best hosting for a WordPress site. Top 3 WordPress hosting providers for 2019.

What is the best place to host a website with WordPress?

Now, this can be a hard question for someone who never dealt with any website hosting companies before. There’s a lot of information on how to choose the best WordPress hosting provider. It is really easy to become confused with huge variety of choices. My goal was to just set up a single WordPress blog website, and forget about all the technical problems forever. Focusing on the actual content creation, is what I really needed.

Should you be looking for the cheapest option?

One of my requirements was to save some money, so I’ve ended up using the cheapest hosting provider. Everything seemed to be OK at first. But, after awhile, I realized that using a cheapest provider wasn’t the right decision. Once I’ve started getting a decent amount of visitors on my blog, it was obvious that the speed of my hosting provider wasn’t any good. Uptime wasn’t even close to what I needed to keep my blog up and running 24/7. Setting up the optimization plug-ins wouldn’t help much. There were certain limitations I couldn’t fix, as they were caused by poor hosting provider quality. I’ve started loosing my traffic! Using a cheapest web hosting was really a bad idea from the very beginning. In retrospective, I would lose more time (and time is money) by constantly solving the issues caused by cheapest provider.

How I found the most reliable and affordable hosting providers?

Trying out different hosting providers was really the only choice for me. I wanted to test the different aspects of various hosting companies, so I could choose one that works best for me. My goal was to find a hosting provider that would offer a best price to quality ratio. I couldn’t afford paying for the WPEngine , even though it is clear they are the leading hosting provider in WordPress domain. Their pricing is something I am just not ready to pay for a simple blog or small business website. I had to do it the hard way and tested out around 10 different hosting services that I considered to be the good ones, based on reviews. Pricing plans they offered, were good for me as well.

Are there many providers that I can recommend?

Being aware of how hard it can become, when it comes to finding a best hosting provider for your WordPress website, I’ve listed the top 3 best hosting providers that I tested myself. Currently, I am using all 3 of them to run different blogs and e-commerce sites. Why haven’t I stopped my choice on a single hosting provider, and why do I keep using all 3 of them? The answer is – I am still not sure which one of them is the number 1! Yes, really, these hosting providers, I am listing in this article, are all the best in the price range of under 5$ per month! Each and every one of them provides the best hosting services for WordPress, and offer a professional support team to help you out in various situations, to make sure you are satisfied with your hosting plan.

In case you are curious which hosting provider is my favorite, before getting to the actual review and comparison – I keep catching myself on my personal preference to a Siteground web hosting. The most notable advantage of this provider is
blazing fast speed of support as well as the page loading speed out-of-the box.

Top 3 best WordPress hosting providers

I am not a fan of long introductions, so let me just get straight to the point. Here is the list of 3 best WordPress hosting companies I’ve come up with, while doing the real-life testing:

1. SiteGround web-hosting

• StartUp – $3.95/mo (regular $11.95/mo)
• GrowBig – $5.95/mo (regular $19.95/mo)
• GoGeek – $11.95/mo (regular $34.95/mo)

Relatively new web hosting company. Established in 2004. Yet, highly trusted company with 15 years of WordPress experience. The biggest advantage of SiteGround is its independence. The company is operated by a small management team of university friends from Bulgaria. Since this is an independent company, they are free to express their technical skills and creativity, making it possible for them to develop custom made optimization plug-ins, firewall software, and server infrastructure you wouldn’t expect with a bigger hosting conglomerates.

What is that good about the SiteGround?

First of all, this provider is one of the recommended by the official WordPress.org website. Siteground has deserved its reputation for offering the best hosting services for WordPress, but not limited with that. They also provide a web-site builder for fast site creation, as well as the cloud hosting and the dedicated server plans if you plan to grow your web-site bigger. I was more than pleased with the fast page loading speed, Siteground provides out-of-the box, even without any optimization plug-ins installed. The SG Optimizer plugin is available for customers starting from a GrowBig WordPress hosting plan. This plugin is an in-house solution, designed for Siteground customers to get the most of the page loading speed possible when using WordPress.

Let’s see the features, pricing, and test results for Siteground web hosting:

• uptime is – 99% (your website availability is a subject of downtime for a maximum of 1 hour during the year)
• initial page load time – 0.58 seconds – result from Google Speed Test Insights
• SSD storage space – 10 GBs with the cheapest starter plan
• bandwidth – unlimited
• free daily backups
• 10K monthly visitors
• money-back guarantee (1 month – no questions asks really!)
• DNS bound email address is free
• free SSL
• CDN (Cloudflare) is available for free
• 1-click WordPress installation + free site migration (from other provider)
• 1 or unlimited amount of web-sites (on advanced plans)

Siteground offers a managed WordPress hosting out-of-the box. That means, your website is getting regularly updated with new WordPress versions as soon as they released. You can chill, and focus on content creation. Siteground technical support team would get you covered with security updates, and anti-spam protection of your blog or e-commerce store.

To get more details about Siteground hosting, and pricing, feel free to visit their web-site here.

---

2. Bluehost

• Basic- $2.75/mo (regular $7.99/mo)
• Plus – $5.95/mo (regular $10.99/mo)
• Choice Plus – $7.95/mo (regular $14.99/mo)

This provider is different from Siteground in such a way so, it is owned by a huge company called “EIG group”. There are some negative reviews about EIG hosting services in the Internet. Most specifically iPage and Hostgator are getting a lot of critics. As for the Bluehost – I am including this provider in a list of top 3 best hosting providers for WordPress, because I have tested it myself, and haven’t found any noticeable issues with it. In fact, this article you are currently reading is proudly hosted with Bluehost and WordPress. What could be the best evidence of high quality?

Is Bluehost having a good feedback?

Bluehost is officially recommended by WordPress.org. Oftentimes there are significant flaws, when it comes to a highly advertised hosting services, but not in case of Bluehost. I’ve been surprised on how many people I know personally, are using it to run their online businesses and blogs. This has only increased my confidence in Bluehost as best place to host my WordPress site.

What are the additional benefits of Bluehost?

As a web developer, I am more than satisfied to know that Bluehost has set-up a custom php-fpm configs and they are using the NGINX servers. In a nutshell – this setup greatly improves the web-site stability under high load when you start getting a decent amount of daily visitors. Speed of page load is also increased significantly. Another advantage of having your site powered by Bluehost, is their cheapest plan storage type and storage capacity. Just look at that – they offer 50GB of SSD space for only $2.75/mo! Incredibly good deal for a shared hosting.

As an add-up bonus, Bluehost offers 50$ – 200$ of marketing credit that you can use for Google Ads, in case you are using the pay per click ads to drive traffic to your site.

Let’s have a look of the features, pricing, and some test results for the Bluehost:

• uptime is – 99.9% – confirmed by my tests, and feedback from my friends
• initial page load time – 0.65 seconds
• SSD storage space – 50 GBs with the basic plan (or unlimited with advanced plans)
• free SSL
• CDN (Cloudflare) integration with no extra charge
• DNS name is included for 1 year for free
• 1 or unlimited websites (on advanced plans)
• 30 Days money back

Bluehost offers a decent price/value ratio. Offers a huge capacity SSD storage. All the industry standard free features like SSL and CDN. Affordable price (though not the cheapest in the market). Page load speed for Bluehost hosted web-sites is amazingly fast. Something, hard to find for this price. Customer support is professional and highly responsive. This provider offers one of the best strategy for your website scaling with their dedicated plans.

Keep in Mind: While page load speed testing result is the lowest for the Bluehost, the page size is the highest from all of the 3 web-sites here. That greatly affects site performance. Reducing the page load speed would align Bluehost performance with the competitors!

Find out more about the Bluehost on their web-site here!

---

3. A2 Hosting

• Lite – $3.92/mo (regular $7.99/mo)
• Swift – $4.90/mo (regular $9.99/mo)
• Turbo – $9.31/mo (regular $18.99/mo)

I never heard of this provider before. These guys don’t do much advertising, unfortunately. Why, unfortunately? A2 Hosting is getting overlooked by website owners, when looking for a best hosting service. I found out about the A2 Hosting when reading 10th WordPress hosting review, just by accident.

What is so special about the A2 Hosting? This provider has decided to limit the amount of hosted web-sites per node. That means, A2 Hosting has optimized the population of each server node, making it less crowded, therefore offering higher performance for every separate customer.

Another interesting point of A2 Hosting – they are 100% carbon neutral. Yes, this provider takes a problem of climate change very seriously. They’ve partnered with Carbonfund to install emission-free geothermal cooling system for their server farms. Good reason to choose this provider only because of this information.

What about the quality of A2 Hosting services? Read on…

Development team of A2 Hosting has crafted the A2 Optimized plugin for WordPress (only available with Turbo plan). This plugin makes an impression as if WordPress was meant to be powered by the A2. A2 Hosting has set up their goal, to create such a hosting provider, so the staff of the company would enjoy of using themselves. This goal has been successfully achieved as of year 2019.

A2 Hosting customized servers set-up brought a speed boost for up to 20 times faster page loading time! See the screenshots to get the idea of A2 Hosting loading speeds. Every customer is covered with a SSD storage device on board. The minimum capacity offered is UNLIMITED! Server infrastructure is powered by CloudLinux OS (premium Linux distribution specifically designed for shared hosting).

What are the other advantages of the A2 Hosting?

Feel free to choose the desired PHP version, from the obsolete 5.4 to a most up-to date (as of March 2019) PHP 7.2. Databases available are MySQL and PostgreSQL. 25 doman-bound Email addresses included in the starter plan which costs as low as 3.92$ per month (normally 7.99$). Data centers are spread in 3 most popular locations (US, Europe, and Asia (Singapore)).

Customer support of the A2 Hosting has demonstrated high level of satisfaction during my tests. They usually respond in average within ~3 minutes, and are quite professional and friendly during the process. You can reach them out by calling, emailing, or submitting a ticket.

Uptime is pretty good (99.91%) for the A2 Hosting , but could be better – check the uptime of Siteground and a Bluehost for instance. Though 99.91% is within the required values for a shared hosting, so, nothing to worry about.

Let’s find out the features, pricing, and the test results for the A2 Hosting:

• uptime is – 99.1% – a bit lower compared to the competitors
• initial page load time – 0.6 seconds
• SSD storage space – UNLIMITED for all the plans
• SSL certificate from Letsencrypt (for free)
• free CDN (Cloudflare)
• DNS name is included for free
• site migration with no extra charge
• 1 or unlimited websites (on advanced plans)
• 30 Days money back
• Reinforced DDoS attacks protection
• free HackScan
• CloudLinux OS powered server farm
• Redundant Power (UPS/Diesel Generator)

A2 Hosting is one of not so many hosting providers, that keeps an eye on the health of our planet. 100% carbon neutrality makes this provider stand out from the competitors. Unlimited SSD and wise resource strategy make this provider a perfectly balanced choice, with an affordable pricing tag. Check more details on A2 Hosting official web-site!

---

Top 3 WordPress hosting providers comparison table

	Bluehost	A2 Hosting	SiteGround
Initial Page Load Speed	0.65 seconds	0.6 seconds	0.58 seconds
GT Metrix score	B(85),C(79)	A(92),B(81)	A(97),B(85)
Storage Capacity (SSD)	50 GBs up	unlimited	10 GBs up
Uptime	99.9%	99.1%	99%
Money-back guarantee days	30	30	30
Number of sites	1+	1+	1+
Free SSL	+	+	+
CDN free included	+	+	+
Domain name for free	+	+	+
Pricing per month $	$2.75	$3.92	$3.95

---

Bottom line

---

I wish I knew all about SiteGround, A2 Hosting, and the Bluehost before. Now, you are more lucky than I was back in that days. You are only faced with 3 options to choose from. While this might sound like not an easy decision to make, when you have more than 1 option for your future website hosting, it’s still way more easier compared to choosing from 10 or more different providers.

The price range is around the same for all the 3 options. Each of the hosting provider listed here offer a cPanel interface. A2 Hosting is a little bit cheaper if you choose their Turbo plan, compared to other competitors. Siteground is recommended if you want to have the easiest set-up process. The Bluehost strongly keeps it’s best overall price and quality. The final decision is up to you!