All the WordPress webhosting companies I’ve personally tried or heard about from people I trust!
My compared criteria are: SPEED, reliability (up-time), FEATURES (easy to make changes, add SSL?), and PRICING (not crazy expensive). Customer service is not as important for me since I can do 99% of things myself.
I’ve used nearly all of these webhosts myself (via clients) across a broad range of websites…from small blog or portfolio to big shopping sites, database-intensive forums, or large portals with many tracking/ad/conversion scripts running.
YES, this webhosting review guide is recent (as you are reading it). I update it regularly! (Last update: MAY 23, 2020)
Good Webhosts
Shared hosting (cheapest, but functional)
- SiteGround – all-around best of low-tier shared hosting and very popular. Fast, good features and support! The GoGeek plan starts at $11.95 GoGeek but renews at $35/month making managed hosting or unmanaged cloud far more attractive. (Their built-in SG Optimizer is *meh*, use SWIFT LITE for best results.) A2 is now becoming the favorite low-tier company due to SiteGround’s recent resource limits. My Siteground review.
- WebHostFace – started as ridiculously cheap shared webhosting and even faster than SG. Their initial lifetime plans were a great bargain even if you only used them for only a few years. Nowadays, I think their performance has dropped greatly to be more in line with the usual shared hosting.
- A2Hosting – largely toted as a “great service” but many complain it’s actually slow (long TTFB). I’ve used it and it’s definitely not on the same-level as SG. Their turbo caching isn’t much, either. At the moment, it seems more people prefer to SiteGround
- GNUHost (UK) – I heard good things about this one but haven’t tried.
- Incendia Web Works – smaller (but great) company run by knowledgeable system expert Budd Grant. Great if you have one site and only one site to focus on.
- serverfreak (MY) – cheap reliable shared hosting for Malaysians. Step below SiteGround.
- Veerotech – haven’t tried them yet but have heard good things. They’re a smaller large company (does that even make sense?).
- nosupportlinuxhosting – cheap but good webhosting (with no support) for only $1/month per website. Small 1gb space limit, which is more than enough for small sites. Great option for web-techies wanting to get up and running for cheap.
- Krystal (UK) – good speeds and cheap pricing, also use LiteSpeed servers. I recommend this for UK folks. I personally tried it.
- Guru (UK) – another good UK host. Some people like GURU better than Krystal. They use LiteSpeed and allow crawling.
- SmartHosting (UK) – another UK one, like GURU, and some people like SmartHosting better than Krystal as well but they’ve since been bought by Krystal and some people say they’ve gone to crap.
My personal recommendation:
Shared hosting is great for new websites with no traffic. It’s easy to use, allows you to host/manage many sites, and still pretty fast if you pick a good webhost. But the moment you get over 25,000 visits/month (and assuming you make some $$$), you should really consider moving to a VPS. The speeds are much faster and a magical world of difference for those who’ve never tried VPS before.
Those of you who aren’t married to cPanel and don’t need to have email hosting, should really just go with Cloudways or GridPane. It’s far more performance and service at similar cost ($10-25/month). Should you want to ADD emails to Cloudways, you can go with G-Suite or use their Rackspace add-on, etc. Using a professional email service gives you much higher deliver-ability. If you’re a true techie, you can also do RunCloud.
I would also like to do a huge shoutout for the smaller webhosting companies. I’ve come to find they always offer better pricing and great service than the major ones who don’t care if you leave.
Unmanaged VPS hosting (best speeds & cost-efficient, but requires sys-admin):
- Amazon Lightsail – expensive and not as fast, terrible UI. But can be useful if you want tighter integration with other AWS services.
- DigitalOcean – best pricing and sexiest interface, solid speed/uptime. Considered by many as the leader of the price war (race to the bottom for cheapest VPS). They are still quality but with slight issues for downtimes or slow to roll out old hardware. Also some bad PR and customer service here and there (shutting clients down erroneously).
- Prgmr – no-nonsense VPS for techies. Great pricing, solid speed and uptime.
- Linode – my favorite. Solid, reliable, no BS, always faster HDparm reads. They used to have some power outage problems but they are few and far between. Doesn’t offer DDOS-filtering like Vultr or other providers. Linode/Vultr/DO are top 3. My Linode review.
- RamNode – try them if you want to check out a smaller company (cheaper pricing), I like their DDOS-filtered IP protection. It’s a great idea if you’re running a webhosting business.
- Scaleways – not the best VPS provider (slower speeds, disks, CPU, etc), but still serviceable and offers $2.50/month micro-plan. Scaleways is considered really bad.
- Webdock.io – semi-managed solution. I haven’t tried yet but they’re now on my radar for some interesting value points.
- Vultr – similar to Scaleways (slower speeds, disks, CPU) but offers small $2.50 micro-plans and also bare metal servers. Vultr is however better in some parts of the world and considered even faster/more-reliable than DO by some, especially since their recent upgrade. Don’t bother with their DDOS protection; I hear it isn’t very good. I did have dropped network packets in their Sydney (AUS) datacenter.
Lesser-known unmanaged VPS hosts:
- LunaNode (CA) – nice VPS provider out of Eastern Canada (only) with good pricing, many configurations, and good reviews on the web.
- UpCloud (FI) – friendly Finnish company with servers all over the world; great speeds, pricing, and industry-leading SLA. Their upgrades are pricier (their business model) but so far, I hear great reviews about them being faster (record-breaking IOPS) although my personal tests showed otherwise. Many customers switched over to them happily from Linode and DO. They do have a friendly vibe which I liked. I’m sure they’ll improve with time.
My personal recommendation:
When buying a VPS, choose a company that doesn’t deal with shared hosting. For whatever reason, I find pure-VPS/dedicated hosts to be more knowledgeable and specific to the niche of high-performance servers and 100% up-time as opposed to shared-hosts who often over-sell their servers and have rampant downtime or performance-degradation.
It’s an important distinction to make that shared hosts are focused on features, ease-of-use, and customer service. VPS hosts are focused on hardware and speed. Basically, they are 2 entirely different businesses.
In case you’re wondering about different VPS providers. DO, Linode, and VULTR should be your industry baseline standard. From there, all the other backbone providers will differ in performance, pricing, or security features. They might also be the same for their base plans but differ on add-on pricing (they charge more for IP’s, DDOS-filtering, etc).
You should beware of new VPS providers offering huge discount pricing. Most of the time, the pricing and deals are legit and you will get incredible hardware at a great price. The big issue is knowing how well they’ll scale into the future. Many of them are really small-time providers mixing different hardware which will be harder to maintain over time and harder to get consistent upgrades/maintenance.
There are ALSO “managed VPS” solutions which are different from the options listed above which are the usual “unmanaged VPS”. Managed VPS allows you to have both VPS speeds without having to configure the server but comes at a high price that I think isn’t worth it. In case you’re wondering, I use “unmanaged VPS” and hire a sys-admin to handle it for me.
Learn more about VPS or cloud hosting:
Managed VPS panels aka “Cloud Panels” (high performance, low-cost, but for techies):
- RunCloud.io – most mature UI and has both Apache-NGINX and pure-NGINX stacks. Performance has improved alot since their latest RunCloud Hub caching solution (much more on-par with GridPane and top-tier NGINX performance stacks). I find them cheaper, faster, and more user-friendly than most average cloud-panels. Really full-featured panel; great for dev environment. Hate that phpMyAdmin isn’t installed by default.
- GridPane – probably best performance in this category; clean/minimal but useable UI. Intro pricing is higher than others but worth it. Great for production use.
- SpinupWP – new cloud-panel company by respected WP plugin house. Fast, but overly-simple UI. Feels like it has no features, slightly overpriced IMO. Great if you want a simple server and Digital Ocean. (See my SpinupWP review.)
- Cloudways – popular managed cloud hosting, fair price, average performance but good enough for most folks, full-featured control panel (good for noobs and sys-admins). Most hassle-free option here for non-techies. Their support is the best in this hosting category. Friendly and helpful but will not teach you how to use WordPress! Make sure you purge/disable Varnish during development. They do have some buggy issues from time to time. My Cloudways review.
- Laravel Forge – another high-performance option. Similar to RunCloud.
- ServerPilot – an established panel in this industry. Trusted by many pros. Their UI looks more plain, which some folks like. They now have a cheap 1-server plan (unlike RC/GP).
- Moss.sh – haven’t tried it yet but really cool vibe. I like the branding.
- Ploi.io – reminds me a lot of RunCloud. I haven’t tried yet but heard nice things.
- ClusterCS – same as others but this one also allows easy cluster-deployment for building your own HA environment without having to configure all those proxies and what not. How cool!
My personal recommendation:
These solutions were originally created for techies to manage their “unmanaged” servers from Linode/DO/etc for very cheap but still great performance. They used to be extremely technical and required a lot of server skill to use but have since become more and more approachable for regular power users.
If you’re a developer or at least WordPress and Google-expert, these are a fantastic/cost-efficient way to have your own powerful VPS server without having to do server management or muck around in the command line.
Premium/managed WordPress hosting (fast, but expensive & limitations)
- Amazon EC2 – expensive/weak to me, horrible over-technical UI.
- Flywheel – promises to be better than WP Engine but user comparisons are mixed. Nice UI. Doesn’t allow different PHP settings per site, stupid! I only recommend it if you have one tiny site. ($14/month & up)
- Kinsta – great branding and unanimously faster than WPengine/Flywheel although I’ve heard a few bad reviews about downtimes. As of AUG 2019, I can say they’ve definitely gone downhill and even slower now, with lower resource limits but still better than WPE. ($30/month & up)
- Pantheon – incredible speeds and service. Servers switch to inactive mode when websites get no visitors making 1st visits slower as the server “wakes” again. ($35/month & up)
- StudioPress – great speed AND comes with Genesis framework & themes.
- WordPress.com – very good and they ought to be! ($24/month & up)
- WPengine – best marketed and most popular premium WordPress hosting. They’re like the GoDaddy of managed hosting. Not the fastest, have some plugin limitations, and many issues that people complain about. Non-techie users find them to be amazing (compared to crappy shared hosting), tech users find them to be sub-par (compared to VPS) and limiting. FYI: they use Linode servers and add proprietary caching layer; you can beat them with a $5 VPS. ($35/month & up)
- Closte – good performance but pricey. Some technical issues here and there and also rude-ish French support. Some people like them while others always run into problems. I don’t recommend them for non-techies. (I’m not gonna lie, I tech-snob snarkiness over some fake pseudo overly-courteous offshore scriptreader. It tells me I’m getting access to a real tech who has no time to handhold newb issues….but that’s just me.)
Lesser-known premium/managed hosts:
- RaidBoxes.io (EU)- nice host out in Germany/Switzerland area using NGINX. Fast servers and excellent super fast/friendly support.
My personal recommendation:
Unlike cloud hosts which give you a server with limited resources (hardware lease) and let you do whatever you want, premium hosts give you a traffic limit and guarantee high speeds (speed service).
Maybe it’s the DIY-techie in me, but I don’t like premium WordPress hosting. It’s really expensive if you have: 1) lots of traffic, 2) more than one site, or 3) an uncomplicated site. Go to WPengine and see how much it costs to host ONE site with 500k visits/month (answer: over $300/month). For a third of that price, I could get my own VPS and host a dozen of those. And assuming the sys-admin setting up the server is experienced, I could get those sites to load even faster than on WPengine.
Non-techies go with premium hosting because it’s the easiest way to set up a super-fast host. It comes with fancy panels and really easy to use, no configuration. Kind of like buying a new computer and just turning it on. Getting a VPS is more like buying individual computer parts and putting it together yourself. Some tech-savvy owners choose VPS because they love messing with tech things and appreciate the benefits-to-cost ratio. Other tech-savvy owners respect the complexity involved and prefer to pay someone else to deal with it (thus choosing premium hosting).
To those who say managing servers is too much work: setting up a server takes like 2 hours to build out and a few minutes of maintenance every couple months. How else do you think these “managed hosts” stay in business? None of them are proactively maintaining your server either. You call them when you have an issue and THAT’s when they fix things. Same goes for having your own server and sys-admin. Only difference is you save a ton of money.
Ultra-Premium WordPress Hosting (ultra-fast, REALLY expensive)
- Pagely – incredible speeds but REALLY pricey. ($299/month & up)
- Pantheon – is here in ultra-premium space as well. ($150/month & up)
- ServeBolt – still pricey but reasonable with ultra fast enterprise-grade performance. I like them. ($150/month & up)
- WordPress VIP – overpriced to me. ($1,000 & up)
My personal recommendation:
These guys are the absolute most expensive and most professional tier of WordPress hosting you can get. Super fast TTFB, great performance even for many dynamic requests. They’re more for huge sites….like 10 million hits/month and up, or really big stores. If you have less visits or smaller site than that, you can save a whole lot of money with other providers.
The first questions are…why are they SOOOO expensive and what do they offer that’s different from the other [much more affordable] premium hosts?
To start with, their server hardware and configurations are extremely optimized for performance. They tweak the servers for every possible bit of speed. Compared to other plans, it may not seem like a lot of resources but your configuration is much more customized than other hosts. They write their own php libraries/handlers.; it’s almost like running their own custom server software. Things like DNS are managed in a proprietary way instead of just leaving that to each customer. They have their own in-house panels.
For the most part, they’re complete overkill for 99% of customers out there. But suppose you had a huge worldwide business and don’t have expert sys-admins on hand, these guys are perfect for you. Their servers can handle tons of traffic and also huge traffic spikes. Also too… these server plans are not limited by traffic like WPengine/Flywheel/etc. These servers can handle virtually millions of hits, instead of WPengine and the others charging by traffic. 400k visits/month costs you $290/month at WPengine whereas with Servebolt, your site could easily handle 400k visits/day with their $150/month plan. So in theory, these plans could actually be higher performance and even cheaper than other hosts!
All those top guys will be about the same speed/performance….you should try Servebolt (I like them).
- Pay close attention to what their SLA says…ideal is at least three 9’s for that amount of money you’re paying. Many of them market themselves as “HA” but only offer 99.9% which is the same as most backbone providers.
- Ask them if their IP’s are already DDOS-filtered or if that’s an extra cost.
- All of them will be more than happy to load up demos for you to pit against each other.
- Might also be a good idea to test their support and see how quickly you can get access to a level 3 tech.
If you have tons of traffic, you should not be paying by traffic count (you should be paying for the stack management only). Keep in mind that some of the cheaper-priced ones offer limitations somewhere (visitor count, storage size, # of websites, bandwidth, CPU processing limit, etc).
If you have a budget of $5k, that’s fantastic but you really don’t need to spend that much. You could easily get the same performance if not faster for a small fraction of that. And not pay for all that overhead. Hire someone …. a direct level 3 tech who can provision and manage the server for you. Whatever other add-ons you like, you pay a much smaller fee.
Bad (or Mediocre) Webhosts
These are all the crap hosts. Avoid them, no matter what they promise. I’ve had direct experience with every company here through my own accounts or client/friends accounts. And yes, I’m well aware the companies below might have many happy users.
- 1and1 – yes, it’s bad.
- 20i (UK) – typical low-tier super cheap host…and super slow.
- ASmallOrange – used to be good but turned terrible when they were bought out.
- A2 (VPS) – weak, expensive. Sucks compared to others. Their 8 “vCPU” is weaker than even 4 CPU from typical VPS hardware providers (DO, Linode, etc).
- BellHosting – BAD!
- BeyondHosting – bad hardware, bad service, overpriced. My review.
- BigScoots – slow and lots of downtime.
- BlueHost – customer service improved but servers are still slow. Awful!
- canspace.ca – really slow (even with no traffc) and lots of intermittent downtimes.
- DreamHost – great promises but mediocre hosting speeds, awful control panel and downtimes, but great customer service.
- EIG companies – too many to list, avoid all EIG-owned hosting companies. Terrible service.
- FastComet – complaints about being slow, or that they’re great until they have random downtimes.
- Godaddy – they’ve improved over the years but still poor speeds, UI, and overall service. In case you’re wondering, yes…even their GoDaddy managed hosting sucks.
- Green Geeks – I love their mission of ECO-friendly and clean energy. Their hosting, I’ve heard mixed results about. Some people say really helpful, fast, and great service. Others say the service is annoying and they can’t wait to get off. One thing for sure, just about everyone feels their pricing and refund policies are manipulative. Just from looking at their site, I’d guess they are mediocre-performance shared hosting. Not bad, not great.
- Hetzner – hardware vendor in Germany popular for their low prices. Some feel they’re a great bargain for the price (super cheap dedicated servers) whereas others feel they have horrible support, issues with unfair billing and interface, also annoying technical/hardware issues. Their performance is subpar for me so I don’t consider them but do agree they are cheap.
- Hostgator – oh no. Now owned by EIG, same like BlueHost.
- Hostinger – seems like a friendly new outfit. But I saw them get kicked out of Facebook groups for marketing too aggressively and also making shill reviews. Then I also heard of angry customers…some complaining about speed, others about service. The first time I went to their site, I saw a Cloudflare 502 error. Hmmmm…
- Hostnet.nl – terrible speed and customer service.
- InMotion hosting – slow and bad service, horrible VPS. Also running vastly outdated software (old php). I move about 5-10 clients away from them every month. Link #1 Link #2
- InterServer – mixed reviews.
- KnownHost – known to be bad! There are some good reviews out there.
- LiquidWeb – absolutely horrible performance, but polite customer service. Gone downhill since they acquired WiredTree as well as other companies. I move about 5-10 clients away from them every month. Destroyed many acquired companies (like WiredTree). All their plans seem overpriced except maybe their bare metal servers, which are the only ones I would try from them. They’re like the GoDaddy of server hosting.
- LunarPages – average.
- Media Temple – used to be good…then they got acquired by EIG.
- NameCheap – better than Bluehost/EIG but still slow.
- Network Solutions – bad!
- OVH (VPS) – bad! Bad service, stuck IO, frozen boxes, reboot issues, slow disks, server crashes, many complaints out there.
- Pressable – supposedly a “premium service” but I found it to be slow.
- Pressjitsu – I really wanted to like these guys (they know their stuff) but their stack was underwhelming for me. Better than shared hosting but a step behind the usual “managed” tier like WPengine/Kinsta.
- Rackspace – used to be good but went downhill.
- Site5 – it’s gone downhill ever since getting bought out (by GoDaddy?), super slow. Many users switching away.
- SSD Nodes – on my radar. Love the website and vibe, heard mixed reviews. Some people are happy with performance and uptimes, others complain about slow speeds (oversold servers), confusing pricing, and poor support.
- WiredTree – has been really bad since the acquisition.
- VPS.net – horrible, tons of downtimes. These guys are the “shared hosting” of VPS providers.
- Wedos (CZ) – very cheap and very slow. Don’t use it.
- WPMU hosting – the same guys behind WPMU DEV. Somebody from our Slack group tried it and said his site was 4 seconds slower. Hahaha, not surprised.
- WPX Hosting – the owner is well-intended, creating WPX as a superior alternative to overpriced/poorly-support shared hosting out there. Most people are happy but the ones who aren’t…are really unhappy. I’d say they’re comparable to SiteGround (ok speed, great support). They aren’t good for big sites, even their big VPS plans. I often have backup issues with them, sometimes large sites, sometimes even small sites throw errors when trying to backup even a 40mb database. Their support is always helpful but I hate that I can’t do many basic things.
My personal recommendation:
Understanding why these webhosts are “bad” can be the most confusing thing for new website owners. On one hand, you have “expert” sites saying such and such company is “HORRIBLE, AWFUL, NEVER USE THEM!” and on the other hand, you see hundreds of “trusted” review sites showing thousands of happy customers and many 9.5/10 scores. How do you know who to trust?
Haha, you can trust your own experience or mine. Most people don’t listen and will go for the super cheap hosting with the 75% OFF promo code. The server may be fine for 2 months, or even 2 years, and then slowly degrades. Your site keeps getting slower and customer support will tell you it’s because of your theme, or your plugins (which could be true). You’ll even hit downtimes on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. Your host will assure you it’s only a minor server upgrade and will be up and running better than ever!
At some point you get fed up and start asking around. Your friend who just signed up with some other host gives you an affiliate code, and you take the leap all over again.. but the cycle only continues. You get bad service again and can’t figure out how to find a decent host. How is this happening?! It’s because these big name hosts pay huge affiliate commissions. That’s why you see them promoted by so many bloggers out there. An amazon link might only net them a couple bucks but a webhosting referral link can earn up to $150 per sign-up.
On my radar
These are webhosts that I heard of but don’t have any concrete opinion of their service yet.
- BunnyShell – reminds me of RunCloud. I like their polished website. Their vibe feels really professional.
How to Research Webhosts
Looking up establish webhosting companies
Check out the sites below to see what systems techs are saying about them.
- www.webhostingtalk.com – lots of webhosting reviews, Q&A
- www.lowendtalk.com – many sys-admins and webhosting experts, many new company deals
Looking up new webhosting companies
How do you research a new hosting company? With new companies that just popped up, you can’t. You have to trust in their branding and the people behind the brand. And not only that, but you have to trust that they’ll have the same enthusiasm for low pricing and great service in 5 years. Many new webhosts start out great but then start over-crowding servers to increase profits or don’t make enough to pay for quality support techs as their service grows. As expected, performance and service goes down so profits can go up!
Is there a way to technically measure them? Yes, you can ask them questions like how many resources per server, per account, etc. You can look up the TTFB’s, use their trial period to check disk speeds, how long to process queries, how many requests per second, etc. It’s a great idea but not something I can bother with. For me, when dealing with companies I don’t know, the biggest thing I’m looking for is how reliable they will be over the years. And only when I know they’re reliable will I start to compare CPU, disk speeds, max requests, etc.
Hey Johnny, why do you write “FastComet – also marked as DO NOT USE!”
I am hosting some customers in FastComet with very good results.
Do you have some bad experience here?
Regards.
The going rumors are slow and bad service. I believe I tried on a client’s account as well and not impressed. You have an account that you feel is fast? Let me know if you want me to test it.
Hi Johnny, you can try malagaware.com and controlatuwp.com.
Controlatuwp.com is my lab website and malagaware.com is the site of a friend. Both are hosted in FastComet.com
You can test if you like.
Regards.
I’m using UpCloud and is really fast, I don’t trust enoght to migrate my main server with them because I don’t found to many reviews 🙁
From what I hear in my circles, UpCloud is really fast and the ones who like it, really like it. The only issue is that some people had some bad experiences before with certain network issue. They seem to be like good people, honest, knowledgeable, and well-intended. If I had to guess, I feel maybe they’re doing new things in the market and so their offering may be higher performance but less tested. They are still a solid provider for me and I want to wait for them to grow a little more before putting any mission-critical sites on them. If you have less than 100k hits/month, they should be more than adequate for you.
Great Review!! My first visit to your website…full of information, insightful and honest review. Thank you so much.
Could you please suggest me one great hosting (managed VPS may be ;-)) for a budget of $30/month for my WordPress blog (Unique visitor 35000/m)
Is that email of yours current?
Yes, that’s my current email.
Awesome! I sent you an email. Sorry for delayed reply. It’s been a crazy week.
Johnny, I was recommended by an Oxygen user and I’m already hooked. This article is the first that I read and when I get to the Best Hosting Providers, you recommend SiteGround. I have just signed up with them yesterday so I think I’m headed in the right direction. I’m a one person operation and have taught myself as I moved forward and muddled through all the videos, support, posts, and just looking for simple, get to the point, no nonsense, care for the customer and not just price…and here you are. Thank you!
Do you have a newsletter that I can sign up for
Here it is, Paul. I finally put one together. https://wpjohnny.com/newsletter/
Hey Johnny,
I love your website. I’ve been looking for honest info on hosting/wordpress optimization for ages. Affiliate marketing is just too strong in this field.
However, I still find this article to be quite lacking for “normal” people like us, that is, “non-techies”.
I understand what you say about buying managed VPS and hiring a sys-admin, but how would one go about that?
In other terms, how could I (non-techie) have a fast hosting at a reasonable price?
I receive 400k pageviews/month so WPengine, Kinsta and the rest are very expensive (food blog, so it doesn’t make as much money).
Thank you very much for your help,
Guillaume.
Hi Guillaume,
I recommend different tactics for all skill levels. Do you have a budget in mind?
Hey Johnny,
I actually re-read the article and went with Cloudways. It’s not too technical for me and it does seem to be much faster than Siteground Gogeek (which now wants to charge 30/mo LOL).
Thank you!
Hi Johnny,
You recommended webhostingtalk as a good info resource. I followed their recommendations and I’m using bigscoots for managed VPS. There were lots of good reviews for bigsccots.
Yet you wrote that they are slow with downtime. Now I’m confused 🙂
Can you recommend an alternative for managed VPS? Regular business website (not WP). I’m not a techie, but I want good speed, uptime and good service.
Thanks
I can’t speak on what others have felt. As with anything, reviews are relative. So yes…it’s possible BigScoots might seem fast compared to another webhost that’s even slower. But in my personal experience and through my own webhosting clients, BigScoots is considered really slow. If you like…you can check out our managed VPS services or any of the other hosts on here.
Thanks, Johnny for your recommendation of RAIDBOXES in Europe!
Cheers,
Torben & Team
My blog thuthuat.vip using Upcloud and it really fast, I also using DO, VULTR, LINODE and feel satisfied about the service
Such a refreshing site after all those affiliate-driven “recommendations” floating around. Questions:
If I choose to go with Linode, how complex is it to set up everything myself in a SECURE way (at least as secure as WPEngine)? Could you create a guide on how to manually set up a Linode server optimized for WordPress sites, or at least recommend a sysadmin who knows what he/she’s doing to do all that for me?
Thanks a lot mate,
Your site is gold.
(p.s subscribe to comments plz!!!)
I think you want a set of instructions to install a stack on bare VPS instance? I don’t want to create that as every person has different needs and I don’t recommend for non-admins to try doing those things yourself. If you’re only doing it for fun and for learning purposes, there are plenty other guides out there already.
Or if you have a budget, you can hire us to do that for you. Thanks for the kind words, Regev!
I am tried Kinsta & Wp-engine & Pagely, and when I try Closte, I really like the way they work, simple, speed… but they don’t support Cloudflare proxy.
I think I will recommend Kinsta for people, they are really good.
Hello, thank you for the reviews! I really appreciate your honesty in speaking truth about shared hosting providers.
Do you have anything on mddhosting? I saw some reviews that recommended them on webhostingtalk and personal blogs. I’m a full stack developer, but I have no experience as a sysadmin, so I’m mostly looking for a managed service that can hold millions of pageviews/month. Right now my site is at 300kish/month, hosted on cloudways.
Thanks again! I’ve been reading your blog nonstop!
I haven’t used them but they seem like a possible OK option. What’s your site URL? And how do you like Cloudways performance so far?
Johnny, good write up but want to point something out. WPX is indeed a managed WordPress host that does far more for customers than 97% of companies on the list. Picking only one review and one of the very few not 10/10 reviews of the service feels a bit one-sided and not substantiated.
Seeing that you have never tried our service, we would be willing to open a free account for you to test and judge.
That sounds awesome.
I would not recommend Webhostface anymore!
I bought a shared account “Face Extra” with 1GB memory late 2017 and everything was running fast and smooth for some time, until starting getting performance issues after a couple of months.
They suggested to upgrade to “Face Ultima” with 2GB memory, which I did and again everything run fine for some time.
Lately, I started having LOTS of resource issues with the DB and internal server errors. Of course it was my fault… I removed some small sites and kept only 2 of them. Both with very low traffic and small amount of pages. Nothing improved. It was my fault again. I deactivated some plugins (that I already run at other sites with similar configuration without problems) and things went a bit better.
Finally, I discovered that those sites were loading very slow. Of course my fault again! This and that is slowing down your site, I’ve been told.
OK, so I took the final step: I temporarily cloned both sites with exact same configurations, cache and CDN at 2 different shared hosts with even less memory: they both have 1GB instead of the current 2GB I have with slow speeds.
Result was I was getting 3-4x faster loading times!
Of course this was never their fault and some things were different they said.
Bye, bye Webhostface…
Ahahahaha! I am very sorry to hear that but alas, they have reach their “too good to be true” limit. Especially with the crazy lifetime plans! Thank you for this review.
Hey John!
Thank you for another great article. I choose a hosting with help your article. I hope to register by your referral link.
Please, let me question. Why did you write very badly about OVH?
I look at their tariff plans. They can give VPS with 4 GB of RAM for only 6 euros. Isn’t it very powerful and lowcost?
Just for the price they are very attracted.
I hope for an answer. Your reader from Russia, Alexey!
Many people don’t like OVH. You can read up why. Really bad reputation, service, and support.
Also I wonder why you did not consider Hetzner?
They are one of the major hosting providers. They have very cheap VPS and dedicated servers.
Can you tell something about Hetzner?
Netzner is ok to me, not great. Very popular and cheap since they resell used hardware to give lower prices. I recommend you set up plans at different companies and compare for yourself.
Hey Johnny,
Thank you for mentioning WPX Hosting in your article. We are Managed WordPress Hosting.
If you want to know more, please do not hesitate to contact our 24/7 tech support via live chat.
Regards,
WPX Team
Hi guys, I’m open to try out your service if you have a free review account for me. I’m not really interested in chatting with your support staff about your service.
Have Cloudways and Flywheel for about 75 sites. Flywheel is now part of WPEngine and they are acting very shading about future pricing questions. I like that flywheel and cloudways has server-side caching out of the box. I would like to move all sites to a single solution.
Does anyone know of another provider/manger that offers server side caching out of the box, with simple wp cloning, for people that dont want to manage the “details” and want fast and lower cost.?
Hi Scott, how big of a server do you need?
Hey Johnny, Thanks for the response. Great place you got here.
All of our sites are low-small traffic. 3gb storage or less per site. Right now on Cloudways, I am doing 10 sites at 4gb/2core DO and VULTR.
I dont mind using more smaller servers or less bigger servers to fit everthing in.
I love the all in one – click to clone WP websites for fast developing and love have caching all setup with minimal tinkering.
Let me know pal. Thanks 🙂
Hi Scott, I think you might be a good candidate for our hosting services. What’s your monthly budget range?
Hey man.
$10 or less per site month.
What solution would be do for clone/deploy?
Hey pal, any thoughts on this? Thank you.
Yeah, I think you can try our service. How much space do all your sites take, in total?
Great article, but totally unfair to put WPX in with the crap hosts. To sum them up based on one poor review seems harsh. I moved from Siteground Cloud hosting to WPX earlier this year and now have 50+ sites hosted with them. I can categorically say everything about WPX is far superior to SG.
1. Speed – overall page load speed is faster, ttfb is 3-4 times quicker and working in the WP backend is considerably snappier than SG.
2. Support – very quick, almost immediate response via live chat and tickets are also dealt with quickly and efficiently. To be fair SG support is also very good, but this is better.
3. Reliability – with SG I had regular 503 errors with my heavier e-com sites. No matter how much optimising we did, increasing ram and cpu resources etc the problem would not go away. Since moving to WPX I have not had one 503 error.
4. Added value – free cdn (custom built) and free malware removal are a real bonus that most other WP managed hosts don’t include.
So as you can see, myself, like many others having nothing but good things to say about WPX and for good reason. I know crap hosting when I see it and it’s NOT WPX. I would suggest trying them out with free trial. Reach out to Terry Kyle that runs the company, he’s a good guy and I’m sure would love to prove you wrong.
Hey Darren! Thanks for your feedback. I actually do have a good feeling about WPX personally but felt like I ran into more negative reviews from other people. I happy to scope them out again at some point and correct the record!
Any updates on the WPX front? They’ve fallen onto my short-list of new host options and would value your opinion on their service. Been shopping around for some managed WP options; I feel it’s time to get out of the Vultr/Runcloud sysadmin game, mostly because I’m not one lmao
I think they’re ok. Well-intended. Give it a try and see for yourself.
Hello Johnny,
Since 2006 we at Tierra Hosting have been providing web hosting and domain registrations and would like to be considered for listing on this page as well.
We offer cloud (shared) hosting and cPanel (shared) hosting. Additionally, we provide OpenVZ and KVM VPS’s, semi-dedicated and dedicated servers (managed and unmanaged). Currently we offer 20 free domain extensions when bundled with a cloud hosting plan.
We aren’t a major hosting provider and really aren’t looking to get so huge that EIG buys us out. Rather, we are dedicated to providing a quality service for an affordable price to the few that will appreciate it.
Thus, please consider us in any future review/update you perform. The URL is https://tierrahost.com . . . WordPress hosting information at https://tierrahost.com/wordpress-hosting/
Hi, Johnny. This article is a great starting point. I am currently running my website on Lightningbase. It feels rather fast, but amount of resources offered for the money is rather modest. What do you think about them?
Many thanks for sharing this info about cloud panels and hosting in general. It has helped me out a lot. I have hence used your runcloud referral link.
I really like the simplicity of your Blog and your writing. So uncluttered compared to most sites.
I will take this as inspiration.
Have a great day.
Awesome post, thanks you so much for sharing, you should also visit http://cloudserver.science/category/shared-hosting-review perhaps cause this site is great for shared hosting stuffs said kevin just above.
Oh wow…big site! How do you guys decide which videos get posted?
Wow, that’s one nice and looong list of hosting options, thanks a lot!
One not-so-minor detail I’d really like to see in this kind of overview one day would be: where those servers actually are located. Since ~99% of my clients traffic originates in German-speaking countries (Germany, Switzerland, Austria), having even a brilliantly fast server is of little actual use if it’s located somewhere on the US West Coast (not to mention the dreaded GDPR).
Somewhat related: I always though little of Hetzer, as you seem to do, but their VPS are actually pretty nice, and the value is excellent. You probably won’t get out-of-this-world fast TTFB from these, even if you’re in central Europe, but for testing and staging, I feel they’re really great. I’m using one with SpinupWP, one with ploi.io (a control panel alternative you might also want to look into, it’s pretty smooth), and am now playing with a CyberPanel/LiteSpeed setup too.
Hi Phil,
Many of these companies have datacenters all over the world so location is not a problem. I do agree that Hetzer is indeed a great deal, and even possible to run production sites off of them. From what I heard, they lease used hardware and that’s why the prices are lower. You might be more prone to maintenance downtimes due to hardware failures but it’s still a great deal. I agree with them being nice for testing environments or non-critical sites. Ploi looks nice enough, reminds me A LOT of RunCloud. I’m sure I’ll test them out at some point. There are so darn many now.
the Post may based on a old feeling long years ago. In these two years ,Vultr ‘s I/O and CPU was even better than Linode by my experience … DigitalOcean was bad performance whatever disk, cpu and network.
I do agree that VULTR can sometimes put up better numbers than Linode but it’s not as reliable. Not sure if you heard but a ton of people having network issues and dropped packets lately. I was forced to migrate all servers away from their Sydney (AUS) datacenter just a week ago. DO, I’m not a big fan of but they do keep up with the trends and adequate for most cases.
I agree, Linode more reliable, and a good support
they like technical geeks ,so the interface UI I really didn’t like ,even new …
I heard of Vultr ‘s network issue in past, but I am not a heavy user , haven’t a deeply impress, big users may need to care about it .
Yeah, I definitely don’t like Linode’s new interface. Looks nice but eats up so much space and kind of annoying if you have many servers to manage.
Hi Johnny – I was wondering if you have a review for Green Geeks? It’s selling point is that it is eco-friendly and I’ve heard it mentioned a couple times from both clients and other developers
Hey Aurelia, I’ve added them to the review with my thoughts. Let me know if you experience differently and/or want to see other hosts on there. 🙂
Perfect review, thanks so much @Johnny
Thanks. I’m glad you like it. I wish I could read your site too but unfortunately, I can’t. 🙁
Yes, I m come from Viet Nam. I really learned a lot from your blog. Hope you continue to share many other interesting things. Thanks.
Follow your review for low-cost hosting for low budget customer with Webhostface.
it’s good for the price, no problems, too good for lifetime plan, but seems slower than Hostinger (SG DC) a bit, I used for many sites (in one plan account) before.
So, Hostinger is the best low-cost hosting for now.
Thank you for that insight. They were much better when they first opened but now it’s just a good deal if you get the lifetime plan.
Johnny boy did you try Kamatera?
https://www.kamatera.com
Reading good things about them.
Hmmm…I’ve never heard of them ever. Maybe you can try it and report back! 😀
Ok I did 🙂 Quite reluctantly though – I’ve read a couple horrific reviews of people being charged for the trial or something, decided to try it anyway because they’re located in Israel and I needed an Israeli server for my traffic (countrys so small no need for a CDN.. and we’re the only ones speaking and googling in Hebrew!). Anyway site sped up from an average of 10secs on a Linode in Atlanta (for a 4.8mb page that has plenty of images – a long-form sales page for one of our products) to 2.5secs on a Kamatera in Tel Aviv. Massive difference. For now I’m sticking with them for the Hebrew sites. Not sure I would choose them over the Big 3 for international projects, but would be interesting to test them as well, their hardware seems solid. Maybe I’ll do it and report back soon!
Haha, thanks for that insight. I’m sure you’ve helped other curious people already. I should probably do a “tentative” review page for new webhosts.
Maybe teach us how to test the speed (objective/perceived) of different servers against each other properly, the WPJohnny way 🙂
Easiest way is to test with your own eyes. See how it feels on frontend and backend.
ciao from Italy
Thanks for the great insights. 🙂 I saw you have a soft-spot for smaller hosting companies, so I thought to ask you about proisp.com – a Norwegian company. They have Litespeed servers and a pretty nice setup I think, but it would be really interesting to hear what you think about them. Cheers – and thanks for the WP optimisation post as well, very insightful.
A good summing up, and whilst I agree with most of it, i’m disappointed to see WPX still in with the bad hosts. To have Siteground listed as a good host (just read the daily complaints in the FB groups and the number of people leaving them) and WPX relegated to bottom of the pile seems harsh and unjustified.
I’ve used both and WPX is streets ahead of SG both in performance and support. WPX have since moved to Litespeed servers and load speeds are consistently good with low ttfb.
They offer great value – free CDN, free malware/hack fixes, free DDOS protection. Even some of the high end hosts don’t offer this.
The bad review you link to tested WPX ttfb at 33ms and SG at 1ms! I know other things come into consideration, but that review is poorly researched and unfounded.
*correction ttfb WPX 33ms SG 1 sec
Hi Darren, I work with WPX nearly every month now with several clients migrating away from them over to my service now. The more I use them, the more I don’t like them. They are like SiteGround for me. Nice outfit, good prices, great support and friendly chat. But the performance is sub-par and a total nightmare if you have a large site. I’ll list some issues below:
– random service interruptions…the site will just cut out and ERROR 5XX at odd hours of the day. for no reason whatsoever
– random DB corruption…sure, you can blame the site plugins if you want but I suspect their server failed and they restored a large DB incorrectly
– nightmare doing large site backups….if your site is over 10GB, good luck getting a solid backup…you’ll have issues generating the backup or downloading the backup
– nightmare retrieving large databases….issues generating the backup
– DDOS protection – this is one of those gimmicky features, because DDOS attacks can happen on several layers and most of them are easy to protect against…the tough one is costly and usually not protected by any webhost (has to be bought from datacenter or edge)
I love that you like WPX; they seem like nice people. But I’ve now had plenty of firsthand experiences to suggest that I wouldn’t recommend them for serious clients. Do you think I should make a separate review post outlining all my issues?
Hi Johnny, thanks for taking the time to reply and outline your findings in more detail. To be honest I have not experienced any of those issues, but to be fair most of my 60-70 websites are small/low traffic brochure sites so they wouldn’t have large DBs or be that demanding.
Now you have explained your personal experience I can understand why you came to your conclusion. Although I still don’t believe SG to be worthy of good hosts badge. I had far more issues with their terrible cloud hosting than I have with WPX. Basic Woocommerce sites would have regular 503 errors regardless of how much cpu or ram I added to the server. Since I moved them to WPX these issues vanished.
I wouldn’t say WPX are the perfect host and for some peoples needs they may not fit, but as an alternative to SG and at that price point I think they do a good job.
Yeah, I think both can be a mix bag depending on your needs and it’s true that SG can be very resource-limited at times. Both SG and WPX will fail once you go for their higher CLOUD/VPS plans as one client of mine had with WPX recently.
Just what I was looking for. I appreciate addicts for speed, yet will never be one. The hardest thing for someone interested in speed yet doesn’t have a budget is finding real information. How can one know when you’re on page 8 of Google searching for a decent shared host?
It is pretty clear and your article documents reality: low cost don’t expect much, medium cost can be interesting, high cost and you need expertise. I had a super low cost shared unlimited one price fits the only plan they have O2Switch. Thing is over time backend times WP were slowing to a crawl, and emails were blacklisted and problematic too. When asked to fix the problems they didn’t/wouldn’t.
I looked to cloud hosting and some good ones came up yet are out of budget. Mid priced there were a lot, and Flywheel seemed best, yet limited. Once you add email Suite or other and more add ons it goes towards the price of say Kinsta.
I hesitated between several, yet kept coming back to an unknown called Chemicloud. Support ( for a beginner) is way above expected. They migrated my site email etc in an hour. Speeds are okay, and although in Paris put my site on the London site. Turned Cloudflare free on with their RailGun server ready and things are looking good. They have Litespeed, yet I’m not ready to switch from plugin based caching to Litespeed (yet).
I have no idea if SiteGround or WPX would have been better!
One thing is sure, you will help me when renewal time comes up to switch to a better cloud host maybe even yours!
Hey Neil, thanks for the comment! Really glad to hear you had a great time with ChemiCloud. And yes, come back during renewal time and I’ll give you the scoop what I like then. Hahaha. I promise [try] not to biased for my own service. 😉
Surprised to hear that KnownHost is on the bad list. I’ve been with them for years and have excellent uptime and the customer service always responds within a few minutes.
Have you had any experience with Tier.net and if so what are your thoughts on them?
Thanks for your comment regarding Knownhost. What other ones have you tried? I’ve never tried Tier.net or even heard of through clients or other developers.
I’ve always gone with reseller plans b/c I host a few different sites and tried HostDime back when they used to offer those plans, Big Scoots (awful with tons of downtime), Veerotech and then ended up with KnownHost. They used to be a VPS only provider and got into the shared/reseller space a few years ago.
Hi Johnny,
I’m from Vietnam and as you could know the internet speed often have issues with undersea cable (https://vietnaminsider.vn/slow-internet-in-vietnam-to-continue-for-longer-as-undersea-cable-repair-delayed-again/).
I have a website with about 50k visits/ month. All visitors are from Vietnam too. Should I use a hosting from other countries such as Serverbolt?
Please give me advice.
Thank you
Who is your current webhost?
Sorry, for late reply. I’m using PAVietnam with a plan for WordPress Hosting VIP4 https://www.pavietnam.vn/en/wordpress-vip.html
Hi Nhat, I think you should try my webhosting service. I think it’ll be better than what you have now.
Hi Johny, could you please give me more info about your service? I look around but cannot find its info.
P/S: is your service suitable for users from Vietnam? I’ve just worried about far location server when the undersea cable in trouble.
My webhosting service is JohnnyVPS.com. We have servers in Asia. You can read more details on the site or email me directly.
In Vietnam these days:
ServeBolt https://prnt.sc/smocq5
Siteground https://prnt.sc/smog25
Hello, I discovered this article today and I was impressed with all your knowledge and reviews, I have been researching hosts for a long time and tested many options.
I recently migrated most of the smaller sites to wpx hosting, but I saw that this host is listed on crappy hosts, lol. I also use Kinsta for larger customers and I have nothing to complain about so far, but I would like to talk to you about options, especially about something I was going to do and test again, recently I signed the wp mu-dev plugin plan, I thought very interesting but I had problems using sitegroung, I was going to hire their plan again to get the plugins and maybe even test their hosting but I saw that you listed it as a crappy host too, please give me your opinion about the wp mu plugins dev, are they good or would they be just as bad as hosting?
Thank you very much for the excellent content, here in my country I don’t know really serious companies with quality.
Hi Lincoln,
You can see my WPMU DEV review.
Hell, I read your whole post about them and I’m really impressed, I thought all the problems I had were my fault, but from what I said in the post they are really bad. Thank you very much for the information, I really appreciate it, I was about to try their service again. If it is not too much to ask, would you have an equivalent indication? It can be something of yours or that you are an affiliate, I would be happy to support something of quality that you indicate.
You can try my webhosting service here: JohnnyVPS.com (it would be an honor to host you)
Thanks for the great article it’s really helpful, my hosting renewal is coming soon and I want to ask you about my thoughts after reading your article I’m considering to migrate to A2Hosting my current hosting is SiteGround and I don’t have any problems or issues with them actually I’m happy with their service and support but I’m considering to change it because I want to leverage LiteSpeed servers & caching and A2Hosting provide this in the equivalent plan which is Turbo Boost and I’m on GrowBig on SiteGround which is the same price for me.
But I’m confused about couple of things you mentioned in the article you said that “A2 is now becoming the favorite low-tier company” which great but in the A2 section you said “Their turbo caching isn’t much, either. At the moment” which confuses me even when they are using LiteSpeed server & caching they are still doesn’t match SG this is my main concern because that’s the main reason for me to switch is leverage LiteSpeed on my sites.
I would like to know you thoughts on this or further clarification would be really appreciated.
Both are OK. You can’t go wrong with either. If you like SiteGround, stay there. A2 may use LiteSpeed but that doesn’t mean the underlying hardware and resources allotted per account are “generous”.
Hey Johnny,
What about DigitalOcean $40 Droplet with Cyber-panel.
My traffic is 1M approx.
And I like your theme speed could i port it to Django for personal use.
All depends on how you configure it, how efficiently-coded your site is, and how your traffic goes. How are you planning to port my theme? 🙂
I am a python/Django developer. I will copy/paste the HTML and stuff from source code and then customize it as needed. Of course, your credit details will be there as it is.
Very cool! Would be great if you can send me the zip after to give to my community. I’d love to see how it looks launched. Hahaha.
Sure, Definitely i will . But There will be no front landing page. Because i did not need that.
For me most difficult part is comments reply functionality. That will take time.
Hahaha, good luck with Comment Reply. The one we have is custom-forked. I’m looking to release it soon to the public.
Smart hosting uk has now been totally swallowed by krystal and no longer exists. I used to be one of there customers then one day i logged in and it was krystal.
Hetzner – Contabo have great ttfb from EU. and you hav to check your security headers (https://securityheaders.com)