Let us help you find the best web hosting for your website needs through our comprehensive guides and web hosting service comparisons written by us. All the hard work has been done for you utilizing our 20 years experience building and hosting websites for small and large businesses around the globe.
By Brock Hamilton | Last Updated April 2020
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Web Hosting to some people sounds like a long dark tunnel with no light at the end of it. What with things like Dedicated Hosting, Server Cores, SSL Certificates, Managed Hosting, Shared Hosting, different RAM, CDNs, VPS it all sound so scary doesn’t it.
Well you can now relax, because over the years we have built and hosted over 500 websites for a huge variety of businesses, business people, products, corporations and even a few celebrity dogs. We are going to make choosing the best web hosting service for your website so easy by simply cutting out all the nonsense stuff that you just don’t need to know at the moment.
We at eBackers have searched all the reputable web hosting services in the world and below are our the 2020 Top 10 Web Hosting Companies for you right here.
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Here are the Top 10 Web Hosting Provider for 2020
#1 WEB HOST COMPANY
- Best User Experience for:
- Speed
- Pricing
- Scalability
- Eco Friendly
- Free Domain and Site Builder
- 30 Day Money-Back Guarantee
- 24/7 Phone & Chat Support
- 1-Click WordPress Installation
#2 WEB HOST COMPANY
Regular Backups
- Large Range of Plans
- Guaranteed Resources
- 45 Day Money-Back Guarantee
#3 WEB HOST COMPANY
Best Scalability
- Free Domain and Site Builder
- 30 Day Money-Back Guarantee
- 24/7 Phone & Chat Support
Cheapest Web Hosting
- Cheapest Hosting Plan $0.99/mo
- Unlimited SSD Storage
- Automatic Backups
Best Small Business Hosting
- Unlimited SSD Storage
- Fast, Reliable Servers
- 24/7 Chat Support
GreenGeeks
- Shared hosting starting at $2.95/mo.
- WordPress hosting starting at $2.95/mo.
- Reseller hosting starting at $19.95/mo.
- VPS hosting starting at $5/mo.
- Dedicated servers starting at $169/mo.
GreenGeeks are one of if not the most respected and certainly professional hosting companies around today. Usually the word Green or association of Green is synonymous with compromise due to the environment. Nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to GreenGeeks. Consumers are always very pleasantly surprised that their low-end account delivers both SSH and WP-CLI (which is very useful for automated WordPress deployments) access, along with Git pre-installed. This allows customisation of the PHP and PHP.INI, a capability unheard of on a low-end plan up until GreenGeeks.
If like many of us you are also environmentally conscious or aware about the huge amount of power large data centres consume, you would be well to sign up with GreenGeeks. GreenGeeks are totally commitment to the wellbeing of the environment. This company purchases around three times the energy it actually consumes via wind energy credits. This essentially returns raw energy back into the economy. GreenGeeks achieves this by means of renewable energy certificates, which is somewhat complicated, however, in layman’s terms they are actually assisting fuel a greener economy and also make them energy neutral.
Greengeeks offer an all-SSD infrastructure, along with reliable 24/7 phone support. They offer a full 30-day money-back guarantee, a free site migration should it be required and malware detection.
HostGator
- Shared hosting starting at $2.75/mo.
- WordPress hosting starting at $5.95/mo.
- Reseller hosting starting at $19.95/mo.
- VPS hosting starting at $29.95/mo.
- Dedicated servers starting at $119/mo.
- Cloud hosting starting at $4.95/mo.
HostGator offers the full hosting service facilities with several plans for almost everyone’s needs. If you’re starting out today and need a very basic shared site, or actually need to be able to operate your own computer dedicated solely to your company, then HostGator is worthy of your consideration.
We like how HostGator not only because they allow a more sophisticated site builder to customize their virtual or dedicated server, but also because they choose Windows or Linux hosting. HostGator does not support SSDs on all of their hosting plans, however, there are a lot of their servers are equipped with the faster drives for you to enjoy.
Like Bluehost, HostGator attained some extra points from us because of their uptime monitoring and regular backups, along with free Plesk or cPanel. We liked that fact that the SSH is available for the more technically advanced website owners and that a dedicated IP addresses can be obtained. However, we did remove a few points because it’s can be sometimes difficult to tell what the price is once promotional plans run their course. Having said that they do have a 45-day money back guarantee, and this is actually a hosting plan for almost everyone who chooses to use HostGator.
A small warning though, if you want to set up a simple website and have it just as an online brochure type site, HostGator should be fine. However, should you want other users to be able to login or pay for something through your site, don’t use HostGator’s base plan.
BlueHost
- Shared hosting starting at $2.95/mo.
- WordPress hosting starting at $2.95/mo.
- VPS hosting starting at $18.99/mo.
- Dedicated hosting starting at $79.99/mo.
Bluehost is another of the highly recommended web hosting services around. They will give you a free domain name for the first year, and a free SSL certificate. This will allow you to operate a secure website for your business or personal use.
Bluehost is certainly worthy of consideration if you’re a WordPress user. They are a little more expensive than other companies offering the basic shared hosting this facility, however, they do have both specific WooCommerce and WordPress hosting plans available to you. They have the usually high-quality support associated with high quality web hosting companies, but their site migration service comes with an additional charge.
We gave Bluehost a bit more kudos as they do perform daily backups, even on the lowest-priced shared hosting accounts. However, it’s not very clear that the promotional price (on the low-cost shared hosting) does increase after the promotional period has expired. Having said that they do like the others offer a 24/7 phone support, a 30-day money-back guarantee, and SSH access for certain plan options.
Hostinger
- Shared hosting starting at $0.99/mo.
- WordPress hosting starting at $0.99/mo.
- VPS hosting starting at $3.95/mo.
- Cloud hosting starting at $9.99/mo.
Hostinger are based out of Lithuania, and apparently claim that every 5 seconds the sign up a new client.
Note: On 25th August this year Hostinger revealed that up to 14 million users account could have been compromised by a security breach. The company have notified their customers that they have reset passwords for all impacted accounts.
They report to have 29 million user accounts in 178 countries. They claim to have subsidiaries in Brazil, Indonesia and the United States. Hostinger have been in business since 2004.
They do actually have a good selection of plans, and all of these plans can be optimized for WordPress. What impressed us was that even the least expensive plans offered some level of SSH access for those who need it. We gave Hostinger extra points for its offering of dedicated IP, SSD performance, and regular backups for some of their plans.
What is the major difference that has caused such growth? Their first-year hosting price of less than $12 a year, yes that’s a dollar a month. The cheapest plan they offer is now only 80 cents a month. We cannot find any other company who can beat this price. But be warned, the price does go up after that first year. In fact, as with most hosting companies out there, the cost increases after their promotional offer price expires.
Hostinger have a 30-day money back guarantee. We particularly like how this is written: “If for any reason you decide not to continue with Hostinger, we will offer a full refund on your purchase, no questions asked.” They have a customer support with live chat lines available 24/7. No email of telephone support though.
DreamHost
- Shared hosting starting at $2.59/mo.
- WordPress hosting starting at $2.59/mo.
- VPS hosting starting at $10/mo.
- Dedicated servers starting at $149/mo.
- Cloud hosting starting at $4.50/mo.
DreamHost are well known for offering free shared website to 501(c)(3). They are up there amongst the other a top hosting companies for lots of reasons.
They do actually operate their own control panel, which is very easy, user friendly and easy to understand. However, they do not offer 24/7 phone customer support, however they do offer live chat and tickets, as do many others. The company has a free SSL certificate (for more secured web browsing) for all their storage uses super-fast SSDs and provides SSH access for those plans that are intended for more technical users.
There are two more reasons why they nearly attained a perfect score. One is the company’s pricing is very transparent, and two, they provide a 97-day money back guarantee whereas others offer a 40-day.
1&1 IONOS
- Shared hosting starting at $4/mo.
- WordPress hosting starting at $1/mo.
- VPS hosting starting at $2/mo.
- Dedicated server starting at $45/mo.
- Cloud hosting starting at $15/mo.
1&1 IONOS provide a good range of web hosting services available for you, they have Office 365 solutions, online marketing programs, full e-commerce stack, and domain name registration.
They also offer higher-end Linux and Windows servers, available with cPanel and Plesk respectively.
Compared to their competitors what did make us sit up a pay a little more attention was that they offer as well as the more traditional Xeon-based machines was a low-end Atom-based dedicated server.
One great resource for those doing some site development or basic experimentation, is that 1&1 IONOS do have for one of their lightly equipped Atom servers, a free three-month trial.
However, you’re advised to exercise a little caution when placing an order with 1&1 IONOS.
Nearly all their plans increase in price after the first year is up. Some of their plans like the ones with dedicated servers increase after 6 months, and the $1 a month advertised basic web hosting plan rockets to $4 per month after just a one month.
Good phone, email, and chat tech support, along with SSD-based hosting for faster performance, and a free SSL certificate round out the offerings.
GlowHost
- Shared hosting starting at $4.95/mo.
- Reseller hosting starting at $24.95/mo.
- Elastic Sites hosting starting at $13.49/mo.
- Semi-dedicated servers starting at $49.99/mo.
- Managed dedicated servers starting at $129.95/mo.
- Cloud VPS hosting starting at $75.00/mo.
- Enterprise cloud hosting starting at $199.00/mo.
If you have very different hosting needs, then GlowHost may be for you as they offer a wide variety of plans. We were particularly impressed with Their media hosting plan impressed us because it does include offers of SHOUTcast and FFmpeg podcast hosting.
GlowHost does not list a virtual private server offering, however, they do charge their Elastic Sites service as a VPS alternative. This basically offers you the customer a very user-friendly shared hosting plan with the scalability and performance of a VPS. GlowHost also offer a number of different cloud website hosting plans and provide enterprise-grade services.
They earned a few more points because of their 91-day money-back guarantee. Glowhost like a lot of the others, offer an around the clock 24/7, 365 days of the year telephone support option and free cPanel with most plans. They are now operating in 18 data-centres around the world. From a green aspect it’s worth noting that they drive all their hosting services with wind power generation systems.
BigCommerce
- Standard plan starting at $29.95/mo.
- Plus plan starting at $79.95/mo.
- Pro plan starting at $249.95/mo.
BigCommerce is a little different from most of the other hosting plan providers that we’ve reviewed, so far in that it is a SaaS (software-as-a-service) provider instead of the usual IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) web host provider. What this means in layman’s terms is that instead of renting space on a virtual machine where you can setup and configure your own site; these guys provide you with an app so you can login to it and then create your own online store.
So instead of worrying about SSH, cPanel, servers and hosting applications, , you’ll be able to pay attention to the business applications that you can choose to integrate with which are primarily the products and inventory you spotlight, and the selling channels you use.
One of the good things about BigCommerce is that straight away you’re able to host securely, convert visitors, drive traffic, accept payments, and ship and fulfil your orders. There is even an API so if you do need special integrations unique to your business, or if you want to scale, you can do that very easily.
BigCommerce price plans vary quite a lot. There are two factors really: the features offered and how much you pay per transaction. All of their plans charge $0.30 per transaction plus a small percentage.
The cheapest one is 2.9% of the amount you are charge. It then bumps up to the Plus plan which ten gives you a lowered 2.5% of the transaction fee, however, it also adds custom SSL (a security certificate you may have already purchased) the ability for customers to filter their product searches, and Google customer reviews, pretty good value we think.
Their Pro plan is prey costly compared to some of the others, however, you do get quite a lot for it. Firstly, you share considerably less for each of the transaction costs which are down to 2.2%
So, in addition to the Plus plan features, you get even more customized filtering, unlimited API calls, price lists, and you can have sales up to $400,000 per month and get premium hosting account services.
We think BigCommerce is wort a look if you’re requirements lean towards setting up an online store first
Lunarpages
- Shared hosting starting at $3.95/mo.
- Reseller hosting starting at $19.95/mo.
- VPS hosting starting at $44.95/mo.
- Dedicated servers starting at $99/mo.
Lunarpages were established in 1998 and operate three state-of-the-art data centres. They are equipped with multiple GigE fibre connections to the internet backbone. The company has developed and built seismically braced cabinets and racks and have a fully-redundant Liebert HVAC cooling system. They also have their own diesel generator that can run for many weeks, and a pre-action dry pipe fire suppression system in case of the biggest fear that a hosting company could endure.
Obviously Lunarpages are serious at what they do and have a good range of hosting services available to you. They are still a family-owned business and therefore earned points for understanding the importance of transaction security by offering Let’s Encrypt SSL encryption and free AutoSSL for their plans.
If you’re a technically advanced client Lunarpages could be the company for you and they also have a Weebly web builder option to get you up and running as quickly as possible.
There’s no uptime monitoring provided with Kunarpages but some plans do offer SSD performance, and we like the fact the they do offer Linux and Windows plans.
Again, for the technically advanced client a dedicated IP address and SSH access is available for a $2/mo upcharge.
Lunarpages do allow for backup through some of its dashboards and allows their customers to build scripts to automate the backup process if they want which is good. They don’t automatically perform malware scans, however, if you want them to do that for you, they will if you ask them.
Web Hosting Pad
- Shared hosting starting at $1.99/mo.
- WordPress hosting starting at $2.99/mo.
- VPS hosting starting at $29.95/mo.
Web Hosting Pad probably has the largest international presence of all the companies we tested. The company has servers in Hong Kong, Korea, Mainland China, and int the United States and you can specify which location and server you want then to sign up on.
They have a term they use to explain their unlimited offer, it is called “incremental.” If you’re not sure which one you should choose, they do offer advice and assistance.
Web Hosting Pad have a very low-priced entry-point and you can take advantage of this generous offer which will last for three years. However, buyer beware, once the promotional price period runs out, they will bump you up to the higher cost.
That said, they do have 24/7 SSD support on many plans, and phone customer support. Web Hosting Pad also off you a 30-day money-back guarantee.
SiteGround
- Shared hosting starting at $3.95/mo.
- WordPress hosting starting at $3.95/mo.
- Reseller server starting at $42/year.
- Cloud hosting starting at $80/mo.
SiteGround is a web hosting company that we fell belongs in the middle ground between those who cater to enterprise business solutions, and a consumer web hosting provider. If you are a small business owner with more complex website needs than say any other small business, SiteGround can provide you with a great solution.
Their plans start at $3.95 per month, and we can recommend their GoGeek plan, which has lots of really useful features, including access to a one-click Git repo creation and a staging server and.
SiteGround are a very good company however, they did lose some points due to the fact that they double their hosting fees after the first year. So that nice $3.95/mo price end up being a massive $11.95 per month. They call it their “first-year discount” but come on, that’s a bit thin.
On a positive point if you choose SiteGround, they offer a free automatic daily backup of your data, high-performance SSDs for all plans, access to the Cloudflare CDN, integration of the free LetsEncrypt SSL certificate into sites, and unlimited email accounts. They don’t limit your bandwidth or storage, and we can tell you that there are those who claim to offer unlimited bandwidth and storage but in the fine print they can get you.
This company is quite proactive about protecting their customers security. They actually have a security team dedicated to writing the essential patches and firewall rules to assist in mitigating zero-day vulnerabilities. They also use an AI-based system to monitor and apply fixes to all their servers dynamically.
Finally, SiteGround offers an entire tier of custom enterprise business services.
So, in conclusion should you begin with a small business model and do GrowBig which is the ame they have given to their mid-tier you’ll be able to stay with them and it won’t matter how big you grow.
Web Hosting Hub
- Shared hosting starting at $4.99/mo.
- WordPress hosting starting at $4.99/mo.
Web Hosting Hub are pretty reasonable and do have an entry-level starting price and some surprisingly valuable benefits for such a low-price start offer.
Web Hosting Hub actually use BoldGrid as a site builder. BoldGrid is an add-on to WordPress, which is good for you the consumer because that means that there is no lock-in.
This helps overcome the big problem of most site builders: you are contracted into that host service provider and that tool, which often requires you to totally rebuild your site from scratch if you want to grow. If you use a WordPress-based solution, all the power of WordPress is available there for any future expansion.
Web Hosting Hub have a different approach to their customer process. They tell new customers, “We walk you through setting up your account in a personal on-boarding call.” We think that’s so good of them and worth of mentioning.
Web Hosting Hub also have some other great points we’d like to mention. They offer a custom firewall, an all-SSD infrastructure, free site migration, automatic vulnerability patches, SSH access for certain plans, and a very generous 90-day money-back guarantee.
MochaHost
- Shared starting at $1.95/mo.
- WordPress starting at $2.48/mo.
- Reseller starting at $9.87/mo.
- VPS starting at $7.98/mo.
- Cloud starting at $19/mo.
MochaHost has quite a wide range of plans and offers, one of which is a very nice 180-day money-back guarantee. Of all the hosting companies we have researched, this is the best by far. If you think about it that’s 5 months, that really offers you a total risk hosting service. Well done MochaHost, you really do stand by and believe in your business model.
What are also impressive are the how customer-centric they.
MochaHost’s published prices do not balloon once you’ve settled in with their service. They have a lifetime price-lock guarantee which id why we like them. Other hosting service lost point because they do this.
They get other customer-centric bonuses for 24/7 customer support, including 24/7 toll-free callback phone support, free domain name and SSL certificates for as long as you remain a MochaHost customer, a website builder with 500 free templates (and a service that will custom-design your site if you need), a site migration service. In addition, all plans are e-commerce ready and come with free shopping cart software.
For more business-oriented customers, they offer a full range of VPS and cloud hosting, along with serious Java Tomcat hosting, including shared and private JVMs, as well as Java VPS offerings. With a company named MochaHost, you’d expect some quality Java support and they have it. So brew yourself a cuppa, open a browser window, and give MochaHost a spin. You have half a year to make up your mind, so if it turns out MochaHost really isn’t your cup of tea, they’ll understand.
InMotion
- Shared business hosting starting at $3.99/mo.
- WordPress hosting starting at $4.99/mo.
- Reseller hosting starting at $13.99/mo.
- VPS hosting starting at $27.99/mo.
- Dedicated servers starting at $105.69/mo.
What we like about InMotion is that the company will offer you a free backup service and SSH access with their cheapest lower-end plans. Also available is WordPress support with integrated WP-CLI.
See also: InMotion in-depth review and hands-on testing
So, let’s have a bit of an in depth look as to why InMotion score so well with us.
They do offer an all-SSD infrastructure. Their support and help line is 24/7 and they do have live chat and email support if you prefer.
InMotion do offer you a site migration although it is a little basic in that they will only unpack your site that has been saved from another cPanel. They also will offer you free malware detection and SSL.
So, in conclusion and finishing off with the positives, they do offer you a full 90-day money-back guarantee. On top of that, here’s a special money-saving hint.
InMotion does have a “loyal customer discount” that you can enquire about when your special low price offer is about to go up at the end of the discount period.
Ipage
- Shared hosting starting at $1.99/mo.
- WordPress hosting starting at $3.75/mo.
- VPS hosting starting at $19.99/mo.
- Dedicated servers starting at $119.99/mo.
Ipage have set the bar a little higher for everyone to attain. An incredible low price service or less than $2 a month for the 36-month plan, which equates t o a full three full years of hosting for $72. This is incredible value. After that promotional 36month period is up, it does go to $7.99 a month there after.
They do not however, offer unlimited bandwidth, but let’s face it, if you’re a low end low-end user, you won’t generally unlimited. What we did like is if you do sustain a big surge, ipage will not just hit you with extra charged, they will work with you to come to an agreement.
They do have some nice incentives which include some free stuff even in their lowest-priced plans. They offer free Sidelock web security and $100 in Google and Bing ad credits.
One final thing we liked about ipage is that they are one of the few companies that a 30-day guarantee with 24/7 telephone customer support with live chat on even the cheap plans.
A2 Hosting
- Shared hosting starting at $2.96/mo.
- WordPress hosting starting at $2.96/mo.
- Reseller hosting starting at $9.80/mo.
- VPS hosting starting at $5/mo.
- Dedicated servers starting at $99.59/mo.
A2 Hosting offer a great service and does many things right. First off, they offer Windows and Linux-based servers, SSD, caching, CDN, and SSL on all of their plans. While some of their popular plans provide regular backups and uptime monitoring, all of their plans offer automatic patching, malware scanning and updates.
This Webhost provider offers a managed hosting service called HostGuard. This is where subscribers of can have access to a 24/7/365 help line. They advertise it as a ‘Guru Crew’ but so do a lot of other providers, the only difference is they have a name for their service. It’s a pretty good marketing idea, but at the end of the day they are there like many other to have a support team that manages your hardware, network, , security and software. Managed hosting for WordPress customers begins at $9.78/mo, and for VPS customers at $25/mo.
A2 Hosting offers some solid plans with a healthy selection of features. We not happy with how these providers present their offers though. They are not alone though because a lot of providers out the kind of mislead you into purchasing their service only to find down the track with renewals. For example, unless you pay $71 up front for two years of service you will not get your hosting for $2.96/mo as you might think. Renewals are nearly always at a much higher rate. However, not wanting to mislead you ourselves, I’d like to clarify that they do have a “loyalty discount” but you have to ask for it, and if you don’t know that then you can’t.
Like so many other webhosting providers It won’t surprise that A2 Hosting’s unlimited plans aren’t actually unlimited, and we think this is kind of not right to call them that. A2 believe that you’re going to use their service like everybody else. To put it metaphorically, if you’re traveling down the freeway and going 10 mile an hour because everyone else is, then that’s fine by them. Now, if you decide to do 40 miles an hour and overtake everyone in the outside lane, then you’ll get penalise, or asked to slow down, and if you don’t, they’ll do it for you.
A2 Hosting offers a 30-day money back guarantee, and their marketing call it “Anytime” money back guarantee. Hummm, I don’t know, you can always ask for your money back with any company and at any time, but once your first 30 days is up, how much you get back is anyone’s guess.
I will say though that their 24/7/365 customer support is available by live chat, email, and by the phone. Like others they do have a free site migrations facility. If you purchase a higher-end plan, A2 Hosting will pay you that extra bit of attention into performance and caching.