I have been looking for a good WordPress web hosting company that offers cheap but reliable WordPress web hosting solution for quite a while. The keywords here are cheap and reliable and for some reason these two words do not want to go together very well 🙂
If you are willing to pay big money then you have nothing to worry about… your options are endless. My focus is finding that sweet spot where reliability meets affordability. I update this page with my findings on affordable WordPress web hosting solutions. Hopefully this information will be of some help to someone looking for a good WordPress web hosting company.
If you don’t feel like reading the full story and just want to get to my WordPress hosting recommendation then click here. You get a good discount if you end up taking the recommendation.
Little Background
I am very strict when it comes to the reliability of the web hosting company. Server uptime and the server response time is very important for anyone who has a website doing whatever business that they are doing. If your site is down when a visitor or customer goes to your site then you are losing traffic and business. In addition to losing temporary customers, if your site goes down frequently then there is a good chance that your customers will get annoyed and will try to avoid coming to your site in the future.
Most web hosting companies guarantee 99.9% Server uptime but in reality a lot of them do not deliver 99.9% server uptime that they guarantee. Most of the time you won’t even know that your site was down and you lost customers. None of your visitors complained doesn’t really mean that your site was up 100% that month.
I am particularly interested in a reseller account. A reseller account that allows you to create multiple cPanel based websites. The ability to create multiple cPanel based website is really useful as each website has individual cPanel control panel for administration purpose. Not many of the cheap web hosting companies offer reseller account with the ability to create multiple cPanel based websites.
When I First Started
I was with Surpass Hosting and even though they have a 99.9% uptime guarantee, recently my site has been going down frequently. When you complain to them they reply to you with the result of the UNIX ‘uptime’ command which shows the length of time the system has been up, saying our servers were up all month! The system was up all month doesn’t necessarily mean that your site wasn’t down (The CPU load could have been at 100% so it wasn’t processing any other requests and hence your site was not accessible).
I have decided to change my web hosting provider and after doing some research I found that Web Hosting Buzz offers the cheapest reseller hosting solutions and looks reliable (from their server uptime data). So I decided to give web hosting buzz a try but it didn’t work out very well (read below for details).
Update (3 Months Later) – Migration to WebHostingBuzz
WebHostingBuzz offers Reseller accounts from $5 per month with some great features. They have 99.9% server uptime gurantee. You can check their server uptime history from WebHostingBuz Server Uptime figures. WebHostingBuzz website has Google page rank of 7/10 (Page Rank reflects Google’s view of the importance of the web page). I tend to use the website’s page ranking as a trust factor. A website with high Google page rank is less likely to be a fraud.
Web hosting buzz offers pretty cheap reseller account but is it reliable? It looks reliable from the Server uptime data but I will have to see how I go with them to be sure.
Update (6 Months Later)
The reseller account wasn’t doing it for me so I decided to give WebHostingBuzz.com’s Virtual Private Server (VPS) a try as my traffic has gone up heaps since I first signed up with them. The VPS upgrade was a disaster… they probably put me on an overpopulated sever so my site response time was horrible. After having a chat with their support team they made it seem like it was my fault for using WordPress. Over time my site is going to grow so it is important that the hosting solution is scalable and Web Hosting Buzz’s VPS was just a mess not to mention that they were charging $8 per month extra for using cPanel! I knew it was time for me to look for another hosting solution.
Update (7 Months Later) – Migration to InMotionHosting
I started looking and InMotionHosting seemed to be a good hosting provider so I signed up with them and now I am really happy with my site response time and InMotionHosting charges less than WebHostingBuzz for the same plan. I later upgraded my hosting plan to a dedicated server.
Update (1 Year Later)
I am still with InMotionHosting and everything is going well. I have also signed up with MediaTemple to host some of my other sites and they seem to be really good too.
Update (2 Years Later)
I needed another hosting account for one of my new sites so this time I signed up with West Host after taking Yoast’s advice and West Host seem to be good too.
Update (3 Years Later)
My hosting needs continue to grow. This time I wanted to try the new cloud hosting solution mainly because it can be scaled very easily. Cloud hosting’s scaling and self healing abilities make it a very compelling solution for my needs. One thing to keep in mind is that the cloud hosting may not be suitable for people who are not familiar with UNIX systems (unless you go with a managed option which can become very expensive).
Update (4 Years Later)
I have signed up for an account from WPEngine. It is not working out very well at the moment based on how much I have to pay and what I get. I might cancel this account.
Update (5 Years Later)
I have singed up with Hostgator and Bluehost this year.
Update (5 Years 6 Months Later)
I had to get rid of my hosting account with West Host. They were having a lot of outages on my server which brought the site up-time data below 97% and it went on for a few months. So I decided to move away from them.
Update (6 Years 4 Months Later)
GoDaddy recently acquired MediaTemple hosting. I have a thing about Godaddy doing webhosting (I don’t like their hosting) so I switched my site that was on MediaTemple to DreamHost.
Update (7 Years Later)
I have created a test account with A2 Hosting. Their WordPress hosting looks pretty good. I particularly like how their SSD (Solid State Drive) hosting option looks reasonable.
Update (7 Years 6 Months Later)
I purchased hosting from A2 Hosting for one of my small sites. However, I am not very satisfied with their server performance. So, even though I am using it for one of my small sites, I wouldn’t recommend users to buy hosting from them.
It looks like A2 Hosting has picked up their game. I ordered a new “Turbo” WordPress hosting plan from them (for a new site) and it has been working really good so far. The server’s performance is very good. Ordering and installing SSL certificate was a breeze. The SSL certificate pricing is very affordable.
Server response time is really good (given it is a shared hosting). The uptime was 99.98% for the month, this is real uptime as I use external tool to check all my site’s uptime.
Update (8 Years Later)
I have received a few complaints about Bluehost from my users. I have had a bad experience with them also. So I have cancelled my account with Bluehost at the moment.
Update (8 Years 5 Months Later)
I have signed up for a 2nd dedicated server from InMotion Hosting for another WordPress site. The server performance, price and support looks very reasonable to me. They are offering free SSL certificate too.
Update (8 Years 7 Months Later)
I have signed up for a hosting account from Linode. Their hosting is geared for developers so this is not the best option for an average user. I am liking their hosting option so far.
Update (8 Years 10 Months Later)
Looks like A2Hosting has started to offer free SSL certificate with all of their WordPress hosting packages. This is nice as it lowers the total hosting related cost on your end.
My Current Webhost Providers
Currently I have hosting accounts from the following 5 hosting providers and I am happy with them:
Short List of Cheap and Good Web Hosting Companies
Below is a short list of web hosting companies that provide affordable and reliable web hosting solutions. If you are starting a WordPress site, you should consider getting hosting from one of the following providers.
I find that the users using these hosting providers face less issues when using e-commerce or membership solution on their sites.
Avoid Godaddy Hosting
I find that Godaddy gives out a lot of poorly configured server for their shared hosting plans. Issues include: PayPal IPN getting blocked, email related issues, PHP Session not working, etc.
So I recommend avoiding their shared hosting plan (buying domain names from them is fine).
Which Hosting Do I Recommend for a Startup Business?
There are a lot of super cheap hosting packages out there but the hassle that comes with those will cost you way more money and time in the long run (don’t get sucked in by the *unlimited* promise). Changing web hosting is a tiresome task that you should try to avoid as much as you can. The amount of mis-configured servers that I encounter while troubleshooting our Premium WordPress plugins is just mind boggling.
You will get a good discount if you use the following link
So the key is to go with a package/provider that is affordable yet has decent quality. I recommend starting with the “WordPress” hosting package from Inmotion hosting (it comes with free SSL and SSD drives). I personally use hosting from them and you are guaranteed to get a properly configured server.
Click on the following button to purchase hosting service from Inmotion (They also have money back guarantee):
The free SSL certificate for your site is really helpful.
Disclosure: If you click on the links and sign up for a hosting account, we will receive compensation from the companies whose services we have recommended in this page. We only recommend products or services after we have thoroughly tested it ourselves. We are independently owned and the opinions expressed here are our own. We use the fund to improve our free WordPress plugin development and support.
Which web hosting solution are you using? Are you happy with your hosting service provider? Feel free to leave your comment or suggestion in the comment area below.
I used to host with godaddy, but I’ll never do that again. My sites seemed to go down all the time and the interface is really slow. I use dreamhost now and I like them.
Excellent article, very helpful, it can be very hard to find an inexpensive hosting company, especially one that offers good uptime and good support, I have been luck so far, but am looking for another hosting company in the UK that can offer faster server response times for my DNN sites running on windows server.
Many Thanks
I found your article helpful to me. Your article is attractive and increases the curiosity to know about the affordable and reliable web hosting companies using these two keywords together thanks for sharing such post.
I enjoyed reading your easy transformations. I see you offer priceless info. Stumbled into this page by chance but I’m sure glad I clicked on that link.
I just want to thank you for giving out your information and your web page, this is plain, but good article, I love it, I learned something today! Thanks!
Thanks for this posting.It is information that came when most needed.I host with UCVHOST An Indian hosting coy managing by one Raja who hide behind Internet to provide very poor service to those who mistakenly sign up with him. Please dont go near if i you do not have any fund to waste.
Good that I only purchased one .info domain from Go Daddy. That domain though is pointed to another host because I could not get personalized advice from them when I tried to set up my email address. All they diid was to send me to FAQ then I figure out what to do for myself to no avail because I am not a technical person. Their ads for individual products are very tempting but since you have to pay separately for each product, like domain, hosting, website, blog, email, cart, etc. it will sum up more expensive than those offered in package by other hosts.
Nice info. Keep giving your update.
But I think the web hosting support is also be the most important things to consider when choosing a web hosting service.
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I think the main problem for most people when looking for a webhost is budget, It’s always about what they can afford. However, it alwayspays to check on the potential web hosts uptime, support service (tel numbers, is it 24 hour, costs fro call etc) and look at other sites hosted with them. Costs are important but try to look at the bigger picture.
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Inmotion and Hostmonster/Bluehost– I’ve been using these three happily for years. Great value and customer service. I use Hostmonster for my site but now send most all clients to Inmotion.
This is very useful post. Good comparision of webhost.
Great post, some realy uselfull information on here. Keep em coming guys
Staff recommend Hostway – hosting one where price / quality ratio is very good, customer support is ok. We offer customized solutions. After six months of experience, I can say that there was no problem, were promptly whenever I had a request. Good luck everyone!
Great resource for link building methods. Though as an SEO myself, I always recommend content based link building strategies, since they are risk-free and absolutely high quality. link baiting, article submission, guest posting, web 2.0 contents and social bookmarking are the most that I personally suggest, since other link building methods might put your business at risk if marked as spam. But with the other techniques, blog commenting is the most that I find strong in both in bringing traffic to your site as well as in building strong relationships within your niche.
That is the cheapest way to get your website online. These are ideal blog web hosting solution designed for both individual and small business users who need large amounts of disk space and bandwidth. Thank you.
I’ve used many hosting companies over the years and some have been great, whilst others have been dreadful. For my larger sites I’m currently using Amazon (AWS) combined with MediaTemple, which have been great. For my smaller sites I use FusionHost – http://www.fusionhost.com
I’ve been using FusionHost for about a year now and I have to say that they have been excellent. Their customer service is spot on and I have never had a problem with uptime. Their prices are also very competitive. If they did VPS plans I’d definitely use them for my larger sites as well.
InMotionHosting and hostgator are good and this should be highly recommended because their offer is low and their services is guaranteed high.
Thanks for sharing your hosting experience to everyone. Glad you were able to find hosts that you can trust. I’ve been delaying signing up with westhost I guess im going to try them now.
Another good shared host: stablehost.com
I use Hostgator and they have always provided great service for me
i use spider web hosting which is pretty fast n good
spiderhosting.com.au
they dont have contracts or anything either and have really good service
A handy list for those looking for cheap and reliable web hosting, made even better by your detailed account of your experiences. That’s exactly the kind of info I’m considering when I’m comparing webhosts.
The information is very good and very useful. So far I have yet to find a cheap but good webhosting. Usually a cheap web hosting services is less good. I will try hosting your first offer. thank you
It is better to choose a provider based on reliability and quality technical support rather than packages or pricing.
Thank you all for this nice diskussion, its very difficult to find a good webhoster who have good prices and good service.
1. InMotionHostin
2. West Host
3. MediaTemple
I will look at the monthly costs of these hosting compainies.
I have an account with Hostgator. I believe what you are calling a resellers account? In which I can host multiple domains. It was like $5 for my first month and now it is $10. What was bad about Webhosting buzz? I know it was years ago but $5 is quite good. I guess the quality was bad?
Anyway I guess $10 per month is reasonable for what I’m doing.
Always looking for new options when it comes to hosting. The very life of my company relies on my web host being the best at what it is hired to do.
Having the right hosting company can really make a big difference in your site and business. I was recently with a hosting company that constantly was down quite bit of the time. Of course you get what you paid for since this was a low cost hosting. I quickly switched to a well known hosting company now and all is well. Bottom line is don’t go cheap with your hosting.
the post is very useful, as the information regarding the web host is very informative, which makes my work simpler and easier.
Thanks for the information on hosting its a great save if you shop around ive just started my own website and had to shop about. I found one UK company that have done a GREAT JOB. I used this post to make up my mind and would like to thank you for spending the time looking out for other website owners.
Thanks
I have been using hostgator for the last two years.So far i have never come across any problems with them.Hopefully it will remain so.
You really know if your hoster is worth the money you pay him, when you are in serious troubles with your website. Maybe because of a hacker-attack or because you erased your MySQL-Database per accident and cannot find any backup. If he can help you in that kind of situation, you chose a realy good one. As long as everything works fine, most hosters are more or less good.
dude… I buy my hosting following that stuff everytime 😀
I’m looking to expand my hosting so I will check these out to see how they will work out for me. Always looking for new options when it comes to hosting.
I think you need to pay just a little bit extra to get the extra customer service. As with everything, you get what you pay for!
I still don’t trust many hosting providers out there but hostgator still seems to be at top
‘Cheapest and reliable’? Not to put my had in the lion’s mouth, but should people really be getting helped down that road to ruin. I may be in the minority here (but I doubt it), but I think of my web host as something akin to my company car or my personal doctor. The very life of my company relies on my web host being the best at what it is hired to do. When I restrict my choices to only those who are at the bottom of the barell price wise I’m just asking for trouble.
Great post, I think i might try WebHostingBuz and see how it goes. Thanks for the awesome information.
The article above regarding hosting has come at a very opportune time for me. I’d never heard of WebHosting Buz. I was just about to open a reseller account with Hostgator but now looking at the terms for WebHosting Buz it looks as though I may be going with them. Pricewise is appears to be ok as its cheaper but I’ll have to sit down and compare the 2 sets of figures. I don’t have any problems with Hostgator and have been with them for quite a long time now.
I have used Fatcow and GoDaddy but let me tell you first about Fatcow. I have very bad experience with Fatcow, many times their email (pop3) doesn’t work and their server down several times. Even their own site fatcow.com were down for many hours. Since I have many sites, were hosted on Fatcow was a big loss.
Then I shifted to Godaddy. They says 500 email IDs can be created in their plan but you can create only 1 email if for Per Domain and for additional Email IDs you will have to pay extra $. So this is the once secret that they never reveled to any one. 2nd, Godday has issue with WP, almost 15-20 times i have noticed that all my sites that is using WP shows 503 error while I have not even installed a single plugin. When asked with their customer care support, they says issue with the wp-config file, but if that was the issue then the site itself never works.
So now I am thinking to shift my all sites to Justhost.com
One more secret, i guess very few people know about this, FatCow and IPage using the same hosting server and might be possible that any one of them is using Reseller account.
Nice article but i have very less budget so another option for me to use this…..
Thanks to this post, I may just need to switch… I’m with bluehost now, but my account expires in about 3 weeks. Thanks for the Info btw.
I have never heard of web hosting buzz, been using hostgator and bluehost. Will check out webhosting buzz. Thanks for the heads up
I don’t know – hosting is backbone of your online business and cheapest is not the best way to go about it. After all you get what you paid for. Even the regularly priced host can screw you, I can only imagine the problem other guys will create
I’m glad to see Hostgator on your list as I mostly use them now and am very happy with them. I have also used Dreamhost in the past – again a very good hosting solution with the only drawback being that they do not have c-panel which is why I started using HostGator!
I have always used godaddy and for now I’m very happy with them. If some day I have problems with them I will try out WebHostingBuz.
I have tried a few hosts and according to me, Host Gator is the best.
It’s really an impressive posting. I liked it & think that it will be helpful for others. Keep up the good work. Good luck
Thanks dude for sharing good hosting companies name. I have used Fat cow that is totally useless, most of the time their server down, mysql dont work properly. Last year I shifted to GoDaddy and that also not working good, some times MySQL dont run and say 500 internal server error. I informed them many times but they says problem is with WP-Congig File, if that is the case then it shouldn’t run at all. Now I am planning to shift my all 45 sites to inmotionhosting.com
i have alot of issues with my host, you gave me alot to thinks about… thanks.
I still think that Hostgator is the best on the market and Godaddy has quickly become my enemy!