Siteground
Siteground‘s speedy hosting is a great value, though the cloud plans are quite expensive.
Siteground is a hosting company that specializes in value-for-money shared hosting. This isn’t just a marketing gimmick: the company’s hosting plans start from $3.99 (£2.69) a month, and are among the cheapest in the world (by a country mile).
The baseline plan gives you a highly configurable website builder, free domain names, unlimited storage and bandwidth, a SSL certificate, and the option to pay by monthly blocks rather than large upfront sums.
If that sounds good, you might also be interested in the more expensive Business and Enterprise plans. These give you access to unlimited accounts, advanced system monitoring, enhanced security, and a free domain name. Prices start at $10 (£7.49) a month.
Reading some of the Siteground reviews, one thing is clear: there’s no need to decide right away, though: Siteground also offers a trial. If you decide you don’t like it, simply go to the checkout and your membership expires. You’ll be billed only for the amount you’ve used up over the year.
Hostwinds Hosting
Loads of excellent features at unbeatable prices
Hostwinds looks relatively basic on the surface, with its 1 domain plan shared hosting, but the package includes many powerful features that you won’t usually see in this price bracket.
As well as the usual cPanel features, for instance, you get Cloudflare CDN, database backups, SSL certificates, an FTP client and more. If you sign up, the company will email you with a 30-day trial of its more advanced Pro plan, which includes even more features: Nginx web server, a free domain, SiteLock malware scanning and more. There’s even a free service to monitor your site 24/7.
It’s hard to imagine a more affordable hosting package that’s as user-friendly as this one.
Hostwinds is refreshingly transparent with its prices, offering daily deals that offer a good saving on the package pricing, and offering cashback to new customers on the website.
Live chat and phone support are on hand via 24-hour 7-day options.
Cloudways
Core WordPress hosting at a bargain price
Cloudways has one of the most attractive deals around when it comes to WordPress hosting. For only £3.75 ($5.20) a month, the company offers powerful core WordPress hosting with a choice of cloud-based VPS and reseller hosting.
The Core plan gives you unlimited domains, databases, FTP accounts, storage, web applications, user accounts, mailboxes, PHP applications and more. The only real limit is your choice of Linux OS (Ubuntu, Debian 8, Debian 9, CentOS 7, CentOS 6 or RHEL 6).
Prices start with a year’s sub in Cloudways hosting package, which gives you 5GB RAM and 100GB storage, as well as a free domain, unlimited emails and a 100% SSL certificate. The top-spec Cloudways VPS plan provides 50GB RAM, 200GB storage, a free domain, up to 2TB traffic, unlimited mailboxes and FTP accounts, and two years of WHMCS for just £7.25 ($10) a month.
Cloudways offers excellent customer support with a live chat and phone support, and you get one free domain with your first package. Monthly billing is billed in advance, so you’ll only have to pay for what you use.
WPEngine
Powerful customisable features for the price
With a range of configurable premium features, WPEngine has become a popular choice
- Best for managing multi-site sites
- Powerful WP-CLI for managing WordPress-based websites
- Offers both shared and VPS plans
WP Engine may not be the cheapest company in this list, but it has the tools and technology that you’ll need to build some large-scale sites, and there’s no need to do any maintenance or set up your own website server as it will take care of all this for you.
WP Engine’s Cloudflare service gives you DNS and SSL setup and management.
If you need custom control over your websites, there’s a range of paid-for features like Softaculous installer and control panel, WP-CLI for automating your tasks, and 24/7/365 customer support. Monthly pricing starts at $45 (£33) per month for the Small plan, which includes 2GB of storage and 50GB bandwidth, and you can find more information about the plans on the WP Engine website.