A Comparison of Top 5 WordPress Hosting Websites for 2020 By James Tredwell on November 20, 2019 Now that you see many hosting services coming up with competitive results, it is hard for you to decide which the right fit for your specific needs. For WordPress users, it is more challenging as they need a provider that can actually understand their specific requirements. To solve this issue, I have come up with five of the best-known WordPress hosts and took an in-depth look at each of them. There are some unique features these hosts offer which most of them don’t that is WordPress-specific hosting and everything that it is required for the smooth running of your website. Before we take a look into the reviews, we should first understand the need to choose a web host with WordPress Hosting specific experience. Then, I will give a walk-through each host, with the main focus on support and security features, performance, and pricing. Is WordPress Hosting different from Shared Hosting Yes, there are a few ways I would like to mention which makes web hosting different from shared hosting plans. When you pay for a certain amount of space within a server, that is your shared hosting. You can install any CMS of your choice. If you are paying for space which will be your own, then it would be WordPress-specific hosting. What is the advantage? The security measures in WordPress-specific hosting are specifically tailored for the CMS being used and also offer better support. WordPress hosts take care of backups and also provide good loading speeds. How to Choose the Best Web Hosting Company? To run a successful website, it is important to select the best web hosting. Let us discuss few points which will help you to pinpoint the best hosting provider which can meet your needs. How Reliable is your hosting provider? Reliability is the degree to which the result of a specification can be depended on to be accurate. It is measured in terms of uptime. A web hosting company provides its best reliability when its uptime rate is 98-99%. Making such claims is easy but make sure that they keep to their promises. Bandwidth The amount of disc space required for a web host should be your prime concern. If your website is going to have q lot of images, animations and unlimited sites, huge traffic, then going for a decent bandwidth would be a wise idea. There are unlimited plans which can suit our needs. If your site is going to hold only a few pages and the amount of traffic is less, then selecting a plan with less disk space and bandwidth would be sufficient. Compatibility Check for the various operating systems that are supported. This is a very critical thing to be considered. Security checks Security is an essential feature for a good hosting provider. Daily backups, malware cleanups and protection against vulnerabilities are important. Let me give you a brief comparison between the top hosting providers. 1. Bluehost WordPress Hosting Average uptime: >99.98% Average Speed: 375 ms Support Service: 24/7 live chat, fast responses Perks: user-friendly,reliable, https:// (SSL) provided. If you wish to run a small business and become a blogger, then Bluehost hosting would be an appropriate one. The simple reason is that the introductory prices for WordPress users are very cheap($2.75/mo+). Its usage is simple with no performance issues. The ratio of Cost/Value is at its best. The reliability is also great as it uptime showed 99.98% with only 11 outages. The average speed in the last one year is found to be 375ms. 2. MilesWeb: Affordable WordPress Hosting Average uptime: >99.95% Support Service: 24/7 live chat, telephone support at higher levels. Perks: Best infrastructure solution, User-friendly, Reliable, Free https:// (SSL), Most secured platform for your website Performance Overview: MilesWeb provides you the best platform to launch your website in minutes. Additionally, you get automated WordPress installation & best WordPress features to set-up your website. They have made sure that customers are always on 1st priority with 27/7/365 days support service, 30 days of money-back guarantee & best server uptime. With MilesWeb’s Best WordPress hosting platform, you get – Free Domain – Unlimited SSD Disk Space – Unlimited Bandwidth – Unlimited Email Accounts – Free SSL Certificate – cPanel + Softaculous – WordPress Pre-Installed MilesWeb is Perfect Host For Your WordPress Website because you get fully managed WordPress, free WordPress migration, high-performance and faster page loading speed with managed WordPress hosting plans. WordPress Hosting Features with MilesWeb Include: Cloudflare Railgun HTTPS By Default GZIP/Brotli Compression SFTP Access WP-CLI Dedicated WordPress Support Daily Backups CDN Cloning Caching Server-side Optimizations 3. WPOven WordPress Hosting Average uptime: >99.99% Average Speed: 375 ms Support Service: 24/7 live chat, telephone support at higher levels. Perks: user-friendly,reliable, https:// (SSL) provided. Performance Overview Load Storm The purpose of the Load Storm test is to simulate real users entering the site and browsing the site thereby bursting some of the caching mechanisms typically found on managed WordPress hosts. Plans for WordPress VPS hosting service starts with $ 16.6 Per Month with – FREE Offsite Backups FREE SSL Certificate and Business Emails FREE SSD storage and Host Unlimited Websites FREE Daily Malware Scanning FREE 24 / 7 WordPress Dev & Server Support WPOven had a whopping single error on Load Storm and maintained a sub 400ms response time. This was the fewest of any company in the price tier. Load Impact The Load Impact test makes sure static caching is effective so that if a page gets a lot of traffic the site will keep responding without issue.WPOven had zero errors and kept a sub 400ms response time which is perfect. To know exactly how the support team dealt with customers in case of an issue, we connected with their live chat and asked several queries. To be frank, they were very friendly and quick in creating tickets and resolving the issue. The common issues like dns probe finished nxdomain can easily be tackled by their support team. 4. SiteGround Average uptime: >99.99% Average Speed: 671 ms Support Service: 24/7 live chat. Perks: Multiple datacenters, enhanced speed and security optimizations, good WP support. WordPress.org community has recommended SiteGround as a popular and legitimate hosting service.SightGround has over 800,000 domain names around the world ith staffs located in Bulgaria, having servers worldwide. They give you the option of changing the data center locations, from Europe to the USA. If you initial select the server location as USA but find more traffic coming from Europe, SiteGround gives you the flexibility of migrating from one server location to another. WordPress site transfers are offered for free which includes a free CDN and also optimization of images is done which makes the WordPress website running absolutely faster than ever before. If I talk about uptime, on an average uptime of 99.99%(with 31 outages) with a load time of 671ms is maintained. According to our test, it’s not as fast as Bluehost or WPOven, but it might be faster in Europe regions. 5. A2 Hosting Average uptime: >99.93% Average Speed: 282 ms Support Service: 24/7 live chat. Perks: faster loading time. SSL and CDN are included. When you log in to A2 Hosting on their homepage, you can see a claim saying “20x faster than your current hosting”. Let’s find out if it is true. We performed uptime speed tests, A2 Hosting was blazing fast with 282ms. But tagging it to 20x faster was incorrect. The SSD storage and Litespeed Cache greatly help in WordPress optimization. Their plans come with SSL (Let’s Encrypt), free Cloudflare CDN, unlimited storage and bandwidth. You have the provision of changing server locations on A2 Hosting. They currently offer USA1, USA2, Amsterdam, and Singapore. Their support system wasn’t ideal, they kept us waiting for around 8 minutes to keep in touch. However, they are available 24/7. Contacting the support team via phone is also possible. The plan starts at $2.96/mo which is the cheapest and will last for a minimum duration of 12 months and then you can renew it at $8.99/mo. A2 hosting also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. Even though A2 hosting has come up with lot of good features and aspects but the last one-year uptime result wasn’t ideal. 6. GreenGeeks Average uptime: >99.99% Average Speed: 420 ms Support Service: 24/7 live chat. Perks: Unlimited email accounts, free site transfers The word green itself says they make use of the environmentally friendly approach for hosting websites. It is secure, fast and scalable for WordPress users. Their plans come with unlimited email accounts, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited SSD storage and also all their plans come with free SSL. There is a flexibility of selecting the server location as they are spread over the USA, Canada, and the Netherlands. You can change server locations for free of cost. They provide 24/7 chat, email and phone support. They also provide tutorials and guides related to WordPress. The support system is found to be quick and accurate. Talking about GreenGeek’s performance, speed (420 ms) is found to be good, and uptime looks very reliable (99.99%). There were only 26 outages in a total of 1 hour that was found in the last one year. Finally Always select a hosting provider who can meet your current as well as future needs. The comparisons are done with respect to the site’s speed, uptime, and cost. Pingdom, a third-party source was used to monitor analyze performance. To be precise, go for a web hosting provider that can provide a decent uptime of 99.95% thereby keeping their load time less than 700ms.
