If you are using WordPress to build your website, you will find out why millions of people love it and would never use anything else. The platform has an easy learning curve and a vast creative library filled with plugins and themes that fulfill creative needs as well as have practical potential. When you need more services than WordPress.org offers, shared webhosting is the next logical step to host your website.
Using a shared webhosting provider allows you to share server resources with other customers, which provides a lower cost hosting solution over dedicated servers. While most service providers offer similar options, there are hosting providers that stand out from the rest as far as their reliability and options offered. When researching and choosing the best shared WordPress hosting provider for your website, you must dig down past the basics in order to understand the true pros and cons of each provider’s hosting solutions.
Most providers will offer a basic set of hosting features that you will need in order to run a website. Standard hosting features include unlimited domain names, unlimited disk space and bandwidth/throughput, unlimited email accounts, as well as technical support available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The following five companies offer the best overall value for shared WordPress hosting packages.
SiteGround
SiteGround is a full-service hosting company that offers customers a full menu of hosting options that can fit most anyone’s budget and technical needs. Read our SiteGround review.
They offer numerous support methods that include live chat and telephone support, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If you are just starting out hosting a site using WordPress, technical support is highly desirable. New clients transferring websites are provided with three months of premium support to help them through this sometimes difficult process. SiteGround has a proprietary set up tool that saves valuable time for clients and they also back up their servers daily, something that a lot of providers do not offer.
One thing at SiteGround does not offer its customers is a virus filter specifically for email. If you don’t use the email through the website, it isn’t a problem, but if you want to use email through your website, SiteGround may not be for you. SiteGround also does not offer a Google AdWords credit that most other hosting companies include in their standard setup. For business sites, you may want to consider a different provider. If you are hosting a personal website, Google AdWords isn’t needed.
A2 Hosting
Touting over 10 years of serious hosting expertise, A2 Hosting specializes in offering their SwiftServers, an exclusive hosting platform that boasts site loading times up to 300% faster than a normal hard drive. You can also request Solid State Drives (SSD), which will speed up your data even more. A2 Hosting’s customers are slightly more technical than most, as they are known as being the site “for developers, by developers.”
Green hosting has been slowly growing in popularity with consumers, and A2 Hosting has been at the forefront of this movement with their FutureServe Green Hosting offered with every hosting package. They have partnered with Carbonfund.org since 2007 to offset their carbon footprint. They also have a 100% green data center in Iceland.
Rates for Basic service start at $4.97 per month with a 36 month contract. Basic plus SSD service starts at $7.46 per month. – for non WP Hosting Hub users. See link above for 20% off all packages.
Bluehost
Bluehost has been in business since 2003 and has steadily grown to become one of the most popular shared WordPress hosting companies, with good reason. They are now one of the largest cloud-based online solution providers and one of the best shared WordPress hosting providers in the world.
In addition to the standard hosting offerings, Bluehost offers a money-back guarantee that is always available, which is unusual for service providers.
Their weekly blog is easy to read and offers members, as well as the public, tips on how to use WordPress, as well as other relevant hosting topics.
Lately there has been a lot of online grumbling about Bluehost’s server downtime, probably the most important asset a web company has. Good or bad, customers use perceived downtime as a benchmark for choosing a provider. Downtime reflects how a company is perceived in the marketplace.
Bluehost offers two types of hosting accounts. $4.95 per month gets you their basic service and for $19.99 per month, the PRO account offers 5x server performance.
Site5
Site5 is a popular shared hosting provider with web designers and developers because they like the custom control panel that sits on top of the standard cPanel control panel. Site5 may be a little confusing for an absolute beginner, but it is still easy to understand and use with a little research and practice.
Site5’s hosting service allows you to choose a location where your files will be physically located. Why is this important? If SEO is important to your business, having your pages load faster can give you an edge. By Site5 allowing you to choose the area of the country or world that is closest to where your users generally reside, theoretically, this will help your page rankings. If your page visits come from all over the world, then this will not matter. However, if your visitors are mostly from Chicago, it makes sense to choose the Chicago server location as data won’t have to travel far to the end user, making it faster to load. Site5 offers 20 different locations around the world and is highly regarded among website designers and developers. With a 45 day money back guarantee, Site5 is a great choice for international websites.
Pricing for Site5 hosting plans start at $4.95, $8.95 and $11.95 per month with contracts.
Web Hosting Hub
Web Hosting Hub is a low-cost basic solution provider and the value is good if you are hosting a single website. They offer unlimited disk space and bandwidth, but it’s not unlimited for multiple websites. Their WordPress website builder is extremely easy to understand and use.
Web Hosting Hub’s unique “No-Downtime” transfer allows new customers access to a temporary URL address to hold files, create email addresses and to test out your site before you transfer your domain name. If you aren’t transferring a domain name and are just getting one for the first time, you can get a free domain with your first year of hosting and they provide McAfee Email Spam and Virus Protection, something not offered by most providers.
Complaints seem to center around support, but this could be because of the general lack of knowledge that beginners have. Web Hosting Hub has two data centers, one on the West Coast and one on the East Coast. Their basic service starts at $3.99 per month using this link. An additional unique feature is their “on-boarding phone call,” which every new customer receives from a live person to discuss account setup. Check out our Web Hosting Hub review for more information.