The 10 Best WordPress Hosting Providers in 2022

SiteGround is an official WP host that combines superb performance with affordable prices and arguably the best support team in the hosting industry.

The company has proprietary technology for the popular CMS that is further boosted by the supreme infrastructure and in-house know-how.

The extremely well-designed server architecture of the company delivers consistently high speeds and uptime. I tested extensively the backend of my WordPress site hosted over at SiteGround and the results are marginally slower than those boasted by the most expensive hosts here.

The introductory price is about one-tenth, though.

SiteGround WordPress Features

Each and every SiteGround shared plan is optimized to work superbly with WordPress. Users benefit greatly from the proprietary caching plugin, which does its job perfectly and speeds up WordPress sites considerably.

SiteGround Super Cacher

WordPress benefits greatly from caching and SiteGround knows that. Instead of relying on generic WP caching plugins, yhe company has developed an in-house plugin that works flawlessly on its servers and caches a lot of data.

On-demand Backups

Backups are essential and SiteGround knows that.

Create up to five backups with the click of a button and access them at any time you need.

No additional charges (unless on the smallest plan), no difficulties, no problems.

SiteGround Speed & Uptime

SiteGround impresses with a steady and speedy WordPress hosting package.

My WP installation with the company takes 0.38 seconds to respond and 0.95 seconds to load fully, which puts SiteGround among the best hosts for WordPress. Indeed, Kinsta is about 30 milliseconds faster but it also costs about seven times more.

As far as uptime is concerned, SiteGround delivers consistently 99.99% availability.

SiteGround Support

SiteGround support is absolutely brilliant!

The agents are quick, polite, and proactive. They answer chats within seconds and you simply feel there is a real person on the other side. A person, who wants to understand the issue you are coming with and help and not an automaton who reads scripts.

What is truly impressive is the fact that SiteGround technical support maintains consistently high levels of customer satisfaction throughout the years. They were some of the best when SiteGround was hosting well below 500,000 customers and continue to excel now when the company serves over 2 million users.

SiteGround Plans

SiteGround offers three plans for WordPress users.

Granted, the company has virtual servers and dedicated machines for really large sites, but the shared WordPress hosting is quite powerful as well.

The introductory plan, StartUp, costs only $3.95 per month but has its limitations. Most notably, it doesn’t have on-demand backups, while the powerful Super Cacher is limited to Nginx caching.

GrowBig costs $6.45 includes these awesome features as well as free, professional migration from another host.

GoGeek is $11.95 per month and unlocks advanced features that devs will like a lot like SG-GIT repository and white-labeling. Additionally, the Geek users have access to premium support.

Our Verdict

Excellent support, great performance, and some unique WordPress features make the SiteGround offer an extremely strong entry in our list of the best WP hosts.

Scala Hosting takes WordPress hosting to the next level: custom build, tight security, stellar performance, and an entire virtual server at your disposal.

Thanks to its heavy R&D investment the host provides a versatile control panel and many unique technologies that comprise a reliable, isolated, and swift WordPress environment.

WordPress Features

Scala Hosting mixes things up in a very interesting way. It offers four WordPress plans and the biggest is powered by a VPS.

As such, it is considerably more versatile and secure than the other three, even though it costs the same as the largest among them.

This being said, Scala Hosting develops a handful of proprietary WordPress-oriented solutions that improve the management and security of the CMS. Most of them are available to all users but those who go for the VPS solution will benefit from the SWordPress manager.

WordPress Optimized

All Scala Hosting WordPress users enjoy the benefits of servers set up to make the popular CMS shine.

Dedicated Server Resources

It is easy to scale up or down with Scala Hosting. All plans grant a certain amount of computational power that helps monitor your site needs and plan accordingly.

7 Daily Backups

7 daily backups kept for 7 days?

Yes, please!

Scala is doing a great job at keeping things secure and running by providing multiple snapshots of your hosting account on a remote server.

Many Developer Tools

All Scala WordPress plans include staging environment, Git, Ruby, CLI, custom PHP.ini, advanced DNS manager, cron jobs, access to raw logs, and more tools that help developers work freely.

When you consider the white labeling across the board, you can see how the company caters after agencies and designers.

Those who opt for the managed VPS WordPress solution will get even greater control and any custom technology they desire.

SWordPress Manager

SWordPress Manager is available only for VPS users as it comes with the proprietary control panel called SPanel (Scala Panel).

It makes WP management a breeze by putting all frequently used controls in one place: passwords, WP installations, updates, and more.

One of the coolest features is the possibility to lock your site files. That makes it practically unhackable.

SWordPress Manager is under constant development and new features appear all the time.

Many Freebies

Free SSL, free CDN, and the free domain name will get you going in minutes.

Scala Hosting Speed & Uptime

Scala Hosting recorded some of the fastest results in the frontend and backend tests we carried out.

We ran our simple WordPress installation (without any optimizations enabled) through several benchmark testers and it took only:

– 0.29 seconds to respond to the first byte (TTFB)

– 0.76 seconds to load the site fully

On average, that makes a loading time of 0.55 seconds, which is blazing fast!

The backend handled more than 300 simultaneous queries in about 30 seconds on average.

Scala Hosting Hardened Security

On top of the generous backups, Scala Hosting deploys the powerful SShield Cyber-security suite to monitor and terminate in real-time any threats.

Custom mod_security rules, automatic updates, and a web-application firewall contribute to the overall safety of the Scala hosting environment.

Even without the file lock option SWordPress provides, users can rest assured that their sites are safe.

Scala Hosting Support

Scala Hosting is a relatively small, independent hosting provider that caters to its customers.

Case in point, the support is available 24/7, mostly via email, and responds quickly.

They are knowledgeable and even when confronted with unknown issues are eager to investigate and help. You can smell their technical curiosity.

Scala Hosting WordPress Plans

Scala Hosting offers four generous. The first three are as follows:

– WP Mini – $3.95/mo – Suitable for one site that will benefit from no storage and bandwidth limitations.

– WP Start – $5.95/mo – Unlimited sites and more computational power builds up on the Mini plan. The price remains excellent.

– WP Advanced – $9.95/mo – Even more resources allocated to advanced users, who will enjoy priority support and free SEO analysis of their site!

And here’s the kicker:

– Managed VPS – $9.95 – Get your own powerful VPS and get advanced OneSpeed/LiteSpeed support, special control panel, and SWordPress Manager.

Our Verdict

Scala Hosting mixes things nicely with the traditional cPanel and proprietary technologies that elevate its WordPress hosting package to the next level.

Kinsta is a superb managed WordPress host that specializes exclusively in WP. Everything is optimized for the CMS to work to perfection, while the support is proactive and knowledgeable.

It offers a wide variety of plans and even the smallest includes perks like a staging environment and free inbound migrations.

Kinsta Features

Kinsta is a very fast WordPress hosting platform with a remarkably diverse offer.

Excellent Control Panel

Kinsta doesn’t run cPanel because everything is designed in-house in an extremely user-friendly way. The control panel is powerful, yet lean and intuitive. Within minutes you will know where everything is.

The control panel responds quickly and allows you to manage your WordPress site with great ease.

Automatic Performance Tuning

Kinsta deploys several technologies that monitor the health of your website and optimize its performance regularly.

The self-healing technology monitors the performance of PHP and fixes issues right away, while the constant DB monitoring checks all your site’s queries and tweaks the MySQL settings for optimal performance.

Neat.

Daily & Manual Backups

Even the smallest Kinsta plans come with regular daily backups that last for 14 days. In itself, this is an awesome feature to have, but creating manual backup points is almost as easy.

Whenever you roll out major updates on your site you can back it up with the click of a button and restore it should things go south.

Of course, you'll have the staging area to test all updates and all scenarios.

Staging Area

Something that most of the best WordPress hosting platforms have by default is the staging environment and Kinsta delivers.

It synergizes nicely with the manual backup points because live roll-outs of massive updates rarely go exactly as planned. Having a safety net is always welcome and, doubtlessly, so is the staging environment.

Kinsta offers site cloning too (only the smallest plan doesn’t have it as an option as it can host a single domain), which is particularly useful for developers and agencies.

Kinsta Caching Plugin

The company has its very own caching plugin.

As you can imagine, it works miraculously well on its servers and trumps any other WP caching solution.

As an additional perk, it automatically purges the cache whenever the site is updated from the backend.

Truly Global Presence

Kinsta utilizes Google Cloud and as such offers hosting from the stunning 21 locations around the world. Of course, it uses a CDN too, but the possibility to choose a data center in the most convenient location is awesome, indeed.

Kinsta Speed & Uptime

Certain plan limitations aside – many users won't even notice them – Kinsta is a strong contender for the first spot on our list of the best WordPress hosting solutions.

So far, my small WordPress installation at Kinsta enjoys 100% uptime, needs only 0.442 seconds to load fully, and the backend doesn’t flinch under some significant stress. I happily sent 50 virtual users to bombard my WP site and the Kinsta server responded throughout with the impressive 0.314 seconds on average.

Pleasingly, I saw absolutely no spikes whatsoever, even when the simultaneous requests reached close to 300. Quick, steady, and powerful and that makes sense as Kinsta dedicates at least two PHP workers per site, allowing the servers to handle more concurrent queries.

So far, after seven months of monitoring, the uptime has been as good as it gets, with 99.999% availability.

Naturally, such a sublime performance is exactly what Kinsta promises.

It definitely delivers.

Security – Constant Monitoring, Hack-fix Guarantee

By default, Google Cloud is a very secure environment, but Kinsta takes no chances whatsoever. Constant uptime monitoring, robust hardware firewalls, and extended DDoS protection take care of most online threats.

The automatic WordPress updates contribute to the overall protection, while the LXD containers provide strong account isolation.

The regular backups are a fallback option, but the Kinsta team of experts guarantee a hack fix for any site compromised on their watch.

If a web page gets hacked or otherwise infected with malware the company security team will resolve the issue free of charge.

Kinsta Support

The further down my Kinsta review steps I was going, the better things were looking – the support of the company really blew my mind.

I have my Kinsta domain registered with Namecheap. Although the Kinsta user area has very clear and straightforward instructions on how to set it up properly, I managed to botch the DNS configuration.

I hadn’t quite realized my mistake until a Kinsta support agent emailed me that my site doesn’t resolve properly. He had tried to reach me through my user area at first and since I didn’t respond he shot me a mail to notify me something’s wrong. He had checked the DNS records and sent clear instructions about what and where had gone wrong and how to fix it.

Top stuff!

Kinsta Plans

Kinsta has no less than 10 (!) plans to offer, plus the option to talk to the sales team and get a fully customized solution. Prices start from $30/mo (can get lower if prepaid) for a single site and reach $1,500 for a high-quality enterprise-grade solution that can handle over 3 million monthly visitors.

Our Verdict

Kinsta’s WordPress offering is nothing short of spectacular. For the premium price, you get a truly premium service with superb server architecture, impregnable defenses, and proactive support.

If money is not an issue, WP Engine can easily be titled the best hosting for WordPress!

The company caters exclusively to WordPress sites. Its service operates with precision to make the CMS work to perfection.

All this spells two things: sublime performance and impeccable uptime.

Seriously, this is a perfectly tuned premium WordPress platform.

WP Engine Features

WP Engine is a narrowly specialized hosting for WordPress that holds many riches for webmasters, enterprises, and non-techies alike.

EverCache

A proprietary plugin that is part of the WP Engine scalable architecture, this caching solution reduces manifold the loads on the AWS servers used by the company.

Coupled with the fully managed global CDN, EverCache ensures blazing fast speeds regardless of traffic.

Genesis Framework

Genesis is a powerful open-source framework that can help you deploy professionally-looking websites very quickly.

It provides a technical foundation that allows unparalleled customization. It is widget-ready, has countless layout options, auto-sized featured images, and more.

Additionally, quite unlike most site builders, be that for WordPress or standalone platforms, Genesis has very lean and clean coding, which makes the sites built with it load quickly.

Fast loading times are beneficial on many levels, including search engine optimization.

Of course, for many users, the opulence of choice can be bewildering and overwhelming. This is why Genesis comes with many ready-made themes.

StudioPress & Genesis Themes

Built with HMTL5, the Genesis themes are light, flexible, and suitable for devices of any size.

They sport great looks and airtight security.

And you have 36 of those to choose from.

Many Enterprise Perks

WP Engine is the ideal business solution.

Its experts are ready to assess and improve the code of any website before its launch. By knowing the ins and outs of the hosting platform, the WP Engine devs can tweak and optimize new enterprise sites and improve their performance.

If you are wondering how the WP Engine team knows whether a site needs code-proofing you should know that new enterprise clients are provided with account managers. They make sure to onboard newcomers and maintain smooth communication between them and the support team.

WP Engine knows how to do business and does it well.

WP Engine Speed & Uptime

The first site load test confirmed my suspicions: WP Engine has built something spectacular. In the months that followed this impression was only strengthened.

After over two years of testing, the average time-to-first-byte stands at the imperceptible 16 milliseconds, while the average load time is just 0.97. That’s without any optimizations whatsoever, just base speed.

Yeah. Mind-blowingly fast.

Keep in mind that the backend is even faster.

Of course, speed by itself is meaningless if your site goes offline too often. In this sense, WP Engine puts a lot of meaning behind its stunning speed: for about 30 months of non-stop monitoring my site has been online 99.999% of the time.

This downtime includes all the maintenance scheduled for the period.

Security

WP Engine doesn’t host on shared servers. Instead, all user accounts enjoy strong account isolation and automatic, real-time threat monitoring.

The service has powerful DDoS mitigators in place, as well as a web application firewall.

SSL certificates encrypt all the traffic, while the cloud configuration provides great redundancy and additional security.

It goes without saying that the host updates all sites automatically to the latest stable version of the CMS.

One peculiar thing is that WP Engine has a list of disallowed plugins.

WP Engine doesn't allow quite a few WP extensions on its servers. Most are banned for security reasons, while some hinder the performance. There are alternatives, of course, but if you are used to a certain setup you might need to learn new tricks over at WP Engine.

Lastly, in case your site gets compromised, WP Engine has a team of security experts who will investigate the root cause and restore the site to its functional self, free of charge.

WP Engine Support

Given that the company specializes exclusively in WP, it is hardly a surprise that the support team are very well-versed in all things WordPress.

I won’t dwell too much on their excellence and knowledge because I’d like to have some platitudes left for other worthy providers.

The WP Engine tech support is superb.

WP Engine Hosting Plans

Such a highly calibrated service has a couple of drawbacks. One stems from the fact that money often matters a lot. For $25 per month (prepaid for a full year), you can get a single site hosted over the WP Engine and that makes the service rather inadequate for people who are just starting.

Webmasters whose sites are growing also could find a reason to complain about the pricing policy of the company as WP Engine limits the number of monthly visitors per plan. To cut a long story short, this is an awesome service that costs some top dollar.

All the same, WP Engine has probably the best WordPress hosting package money can buy. Only that it requires a lot of money, indeed.

Our Verdict

WP Engine is the shining example of what all WordPress hosting services should be like: fast, reliable, and versatile.

Hostinger managed WordPress hosting ticks all boxes: fast, reliable, affordable, scalable.

Ideal for entry-level site owners, the packages are tailored to meet the needs of a growing website by putting more server and marketing resources into your hands.

WordPress Features

Hostinger adds quite a few WordPress-specific features on top of its versatile shared plans to craft a well-rounded product.

Optimized Performance

Hostinger WP platform runs on LiteSpeed servers. They are known for their fast speed and advanced caching.

Accordingly, all WordPress users benefit by default from the powerful LS Cache Plugin. This server-level cacher is built specifically for WP running on LiteSpeed and its output is noticeable.

That’s not all because all Hostinger servers rely on SSD to deliver maximum performance.

JetPack Across All Packs

JetPack is one of the most popular WordPress suites because it is such a great all-rounder.

The smallest Hostinger plan provides only the free version of the plugin, but should you decide to upgrade it grows into Personal or Premium subscription.

Free WordPress Themes

Hostinger provides a rather nice collection of WP themes to choose from. Thanks to the company’s growing connections you can get yourself a premium theme for free.

Developer Tools

Hostinger is working actively on improving its WordPress hosting solution. It already includes things like SSH access, Git, WP-CLI, SFTP, phpMyAdmin, and multiple PHP versions, while a staging environment is in the works.

Regular Backups

The entry plan has only weekly backups but the other two copy your data every single day. This should be a standard practice among the best WordPress – and not only – hosts but some companies either forego it or don’t provide the service for free.

Hostinger Speed & Uptime

Hostinger clocks in some irresistible times. It is the second-fastest host on the list, lagging only behind Kinsta.

The time-to-first-byte is only 0.24 seconds on average and the site loads fully in 0.86 seconds.

On the backend, things look impressive as well, with an average response time of only 0.91 seconds. Even when bombarded with over 300 simultaneous queries the LiteSpeed servers responded well within the norm.

Add to the mix the impressive 99.97% of uptime over the span of 22 months of monitoring and you get yourself a highly reliable and quick WordPress hosting that remains extremely affordable.

Hostinger Security

Hostinger relies on Imunify360 to secure its WordPress environment. This is a robust tool for proactive server monitoring that delivers six layers of protection. It includes WAF, reputation management, patching, IDS / IPS, and real-time malware detection.

The entire defense constantly evolves thanks to its advanced machine learning.

Impregnable.

Hostinger Support

Support at Hostinger is weird.

Overall, it is quite good – the agents are quick to reply, they are friendly and knowledgeable.

The company even has a dedicated WordPress support team.

No complaints there.

However, the only way to reach them is via email. There is no phone line. There is no chat either.

The chat button you may find while browsing Hostinger.com leads to a contact form.

It is true, your query would be addressed within minutes but over email.

Not the greatest, but for what it is worth it, the agents are quite good.

The knowledge base is not bad either. It contains plenty of easily accessible tutorials and help for beginners.

Hostinger WordPress Plans

Hostinger has three plans: WordPress Starter ($2.15/mo), WordPress Premium ($7.45/mo), and WordPress Business ($14.95/mo).

The beauty of it is that each plan can host as many domains as you can fit there. The Starter comes with 20GB of SSD space, the Premium with 100GB, while the Business plan has the lofty 140GB.

The larger plans include a JetPack subscription as well.

Our Verdict

Hostinger is the best entry-level WordPress hosting provider, but that doesn’t make it lightweight or incapable of handling large sites.

The plans are affordable and with ample resources, and the support is knowledgeable. The company’s WordPress platform sports some more advanced features as well that make it a well-rounded option for technically-apt users.

Through technical excellence, top-notch security, and a strong support team, HostPapa is all about helping small businesses thrive online.

Its WordPress hosting service delivers on all fronts.

WordPress Features

HostPapa builds upon its impressive shared hosting package by adding Jetpack and several other WordPress perks – like automat to create a remarkable hosting solution.

Jetpack Across the Board

Jetpack is among the most popular WordPress add-ons because it is a great site-management tool. Even the free version, which comes preinstalled with the smallest HostPapa WP plan, has plenty to offer.

Jetpack Premium brings along a host of useful tools that help SEO, boost security, and help with site analytics.

Superb Servers – SSD Hosting & Advanced Caching

All HostPapa clients enjoy SSD hosting and it shows – the company clocked in some of the fastest times we’ve seen in our tests.

The potent Varnish server-side caching works in tandem with WP Super Cache to deliver very quick loading times regardless of traffic.

Personal WordPress Training

Even though WordPress is fairly simple to use, it has its kinks and quirks.

New WordPress users can benefit from a free call from the HostPapa support team to help them get going.

Learning the basics and some of the secrets of the versatile CMS and getting to know the support team at the same time is a powerful combo that will make your life online much easier.

HostPapa Speed & Uptime

The average HostPapa speed after 20 months of testing, is absolutely mesmerizing. It easily puts it among the best WordPress hosting providers.

Without any optimization or caching, both frontend and backend impress mightily:

– The time-to-first-byte is barely 0.20 seconds!

– The site loading completes in 0.80 seconds.

– The backend responds to all user requests within 0.20 seconds, even when the traffic is significant.

Stunning!

HostPapa Security

Jetpack Premium boasts a comprehensive security suite. However, it is available only on the biggest plan.

Nonetheless, all users benefit from strong account isolation, redundant networking, RAID-10 SSD servers, automatic patches, and mod_security is enabled by default.

HostPapa Support

HostPapa prides itself in its award-winning support and for a good reason.

Available through chat, phone, and email, the agents are quick to react and quite knowledgeable in most things WordPress.

Granted, they are broad hosting specialists, but the popularity of the CMS means that they get plenty of hands-on experience with WP and it shows.

HostPapa WordPress Plans

HostPapa offers three WordPress hosting plans:

– WP Starter- $3.95/mo – it is suitable for no more than two websites but comes with more than enough resources: 150,000 inodes, 100GB of SSD storage, and no bandwidth limitations. This makes it ideal for small blogs

– WP Business – $5.95/mo – increased server resources and no limitations on the number of hosted sites and used space. It is great for medium-sized sites with significant but not overwhelming traffic.

– WP Business Pro – $12.95/mo – here users get Jetpack Premium and even more server resources that will allow them to run heavy and heavily visited web pages.

Our Verdict

HostPapa is an excellent choice for new users and people who value quality support.

The company is among the best WordPress hosting solutions thanks to its award-winning technical support and excellent infrastructure which makes the content management system purr.

Bluehost is an officially WordPress recommended host that provides both shared and managed WordPress hosting.

The latter is fast, powerful, and quite affordable considering all things it includes, while the shared packages are an excellent starting point.

WordPress Features

I had the chance to review Bluehost on several occasions and every time the services offered and provided are climbing up a notch.

Currently, the fully managed WordPress hosting Bluehost has tailored is quite impressive.

Marketing Center

Using a top WordPress hosting solution has plenty of perks. One of them is the impressive marketing center that allows you to monitor and analyze traffic from all sources but from one interface.

SEO Tools

One of the best features of the marketing center is the SEO analysis and tips you get in real-time.

Optimize and tweak your website to help it reach the coveted #1 in Google SERPs.

Review Tools

User reviews are a powerful instrument that builds authority and helps with ranking. Bluehost enables this functionality from the get-go for WordPress users who opt for one of the two bigger plans.

Yelp, Yahoo, Google Reviews, and more can become an intrinsic part of your marketing strategy with the click of the button.

Harness the power of peer-to-peer reviews and grow your business!

Elastic Search & PayPal Integration

Power users who choose the largest WP plan can benefit from the best search tool available.

PayPal is integrated by default too.

Jetpack

Jetpack is one of the most powerful and versatile WordPress plugins. It helps with security, marketing, optimizations, and management.

All Bluehost WordPress plans feature this awesome tool.

Daily Backups

Backups are a must in the digital world and Bluehost delivers.

Bluehost Speed & Uptime

Bluehost is one of the best WordPress hosting providers not only because of the multitude of tools it has.

Its performance is impressive as well.

After 31 months of monitoring, the uptime is the irresistible 99.99%!

In terms of speed, the blue giant is not the fastest but it isn’t that slow either. My speed tests clocked 1.18 seconds for a fully-loaded page, while the time-to-first-byte was 0.59 seconds.

Not great, not terrible.

Security

If you are looking for the most secure WordPress hosting, Bluehost will have difficulties winning you over.

Most providers put a lot of effort into displaying their security installations.

Bluehost doesn’t. The support told me the standard stuff you’d expect to hear: firewall and account segmentation but nothing that stands out.

Support

While the Bluehost support has a dubious reputation, the managed WordPress support team is quite good.

The two bigger plans of the company give access to premium support as well that is well-versed in WordPress.

Bluehost Managed WordPress Plans

All three plans come with unlimited sites, unlimited domains, no bandwidth restrictions, and more. (Granted, nothing is truly unlimited on a web server, but unlimited is certainly more than one, which is what many managed WP basic plans offer.)

It feels a bit like shared hosting on steroids and performs accordingly. It clocks in very quick loading times and stays online with impressive consistency.

Throw in the mix the vast array of features and you have an impressive WordPress hosting package.

Our Verdict

Bluehost is an officially recommended WordPress host that works constantly on improving its WP packages. Its offer is growing into one of the best hosting solutions for the popular CMS.

Friendly and geeky, A2 offers a well-crafted managed package that deserves a rightful place among the leading WordPress web hosting providers.

Its WordPress solutions perform very well and are amongst the most affordable managed plans.

You will find a wide array of features, including perks like lazy loading images, built-in caching, and a money-back guarantee that never ends. The latter, in particular, is a rarity, regardless of the size of the host.

WordPress Features

A2 Hosting actively improves its WordPress offering by constantly adding new, WP-oriented features.

Turbo Boost Throughout

All managed WordPress plans reside on the impressive A2 Turbo servers. In a nutshell, this custom configuration guarantees greater server resources, fewer users per server, and faster response time.

Speaking plainly, these servers grant better stability and speed to boost customer satisfaction and SEO.

Superb for Online Trading

A2 Hosting partners with Evo Payments to make credit card payment and processing a smoother, faster process while boosting the security of transactions and sensitive data.

Jetpack

Jetpack helps with security and analytics. It is a powerful suite that makes WordPress site management much more of a scientifically structured strategic effort and is well worth its salt.

A2 Hosting includes it for free in all its WP plans.

CloudFlare ServerShield

CloudFlare ServerShield improves the performance of your site, increases its accessibility, and boosts its security.

It’s quite awesome.

And it’s free.

Daily Backups

Backups are life-savers. Regardless of what kind of data you are dealing with, backing it up is a no-brainer.

True SSD Hosting

SSD hosting is a term that is often thrown around but rarely matches reality.

A2 Hosting deploys solid-state drives throughout. Files, operating systems, and databases all benefit from the speed boost that this better, faster, and more reliable memory-storage technology grants.

A2 Hosting Speed & Uptime

A2 Hosting is among the fastest and most reliable WordPress providers. Both frontend and backend handle requests well under a second, despite traffic spikes.

The uptime is nigh perfect as well, sitting at 99.98% after more than 30 months of non-stop monitoring.

A2 has a well-designed package that is set up for optimal performance with minimum fuss.

A2 Security

Powerful infrastructure and attention to detail make A2 Hosting an extremely secure place to host your site. Quadruple network redundancy, dual web firewall, proactive monitoring, server hardening, and more measures efficiently thwart that hacking attempts.

A2 Support

A2 Hosting has awesome support throughout!

While not the narrow specialists other premium WordPress hosts deploy, the A2 crew is friendly, quick, and very honest. When they aren’t sure about something they say as much but that doesn’t discourage them to try and figure it out for you.

A2 Hosting WordPress Plans

How many sites will you host?

1, 3, or more?

The managed WordPress plans of the company are named aptly. 1 site would cost you $12?/mo, 3 would be 18 for as many years, while the Unlimited plan starts at 35?/mo.

Storage is capped as well. The 3-sites plan allows 25GB of storage, while the Unlimited package has 40GB.

Other than that, the plans are largely identical.

Our Verdict

A2 Hosting has a surprisingly robust offer! It is easily the cheapest WordPress hosting you can find without compromising the quality of the service in the slightest. The featured-rich managed service of A2 packs a Turbo-charged punch!

InMotion Hosting is the most versatile independent web hosting provider that puts a strong emphasis on technical excellence, great support, and good performance.

It delivers the best WordPress page builder, the powerful proprietary BoldGrid, and has WordPress plans that meet the needs of users of all sizes: bloggers, online merchants, businesses, and enterprise-grade.

The mix of regular backups, staging environment, and developer tools creates a complete WordPress-building suite.

WordPress Features

Practically all InMotion products are rich in features, but its WordPress packages have a few outstanding perks.

BoldGrid WordPress Page Builder
BoldGrid is a WordPress site builder developed by InMotion Hosting. It is a very intuitive drag and drop builder that packs tons of design tools, plugins, themes, and SEO boosters.

WordPress is easy to work with, but BoldGrid makes site building a breeze.

BoldGrid is not a perfect solution, but it can help you learn the basics or, if you are beyond that point, craft a website very quickly. InMotion Hosting constantly improves its WordPress site-building tool.

Free WordPress Themes

InMotion Hosting provides over 200 WordPress themes to choose from. They are part of the efforts the company puts into developing its impressive site builder but can be used independently if you don’t fancy BoldGrid.

WordPress-optimized Servers

All WordPress sites hosted with InMotion reside on the company’s WP-optimized stack. It is designed to deliver sublime performance, ample room to grow, and better security.

All servers run on SSDs.

Staging Environment

InMotion Hosting provides a staging environment in all its WordPress plans. You can add and remove features at will, tweaking your website to perfection long after it’s gone live.

Do you want to check out a new plugin or a brand new theme?

The staging environment is right there, allowing you to test anything that comes to mind for as long as you want before pushing it to the live site.

Free Domain Name

InMotion Hosting allows you to register a domain name free of charge. The company is not the most diverse domain hosting registrar, but the choice of top-level domains is solid nonetheless.

InMotion Hosting Speed & Uptime

I’ve been monitoring the biggest InMotion shared hosting plan for nearly two years now and its performance has been nothing short of spectacular.

It clocks incredible speeds, both frontend and backend, and is up 99.94% of the time.

What stands out with InMotion Hosting is how well the sites hosted there respond to optimizations. Simple caching plugins, GZIP compression, and adjusting the image size – standard techniques that must be applied to any website, WordPress or otherwise – made my small WP page fly. Without the aforementioned fixes, it was quick but not the quickest.

Superb Security

The massive popularity of WordPress makes it one of the most common targets for malicious attacks. Insecure plugins and weak passwords are the weakest points of the CMS, but InMotion Hosting takes serious measures to keep your sites secure.

Each plan comes with SSH access, real-time malware and hack protection that scans, patches, and, whenever necessary, quarantines files.

All servers are behind a web application firewall, while the email service enjoys a strong spam filter. All plans include a CDN as well, while only the smallest one doesn’t have automatic remote backups by default. (A plugin can resolve this lapse easily enough.)

Another strong security feature is provided by the InMotion onboarding team who often calls new customers to verify their identity. Most hosting providers have automated scam protection, but InMotion Hosting makes a (necessary) extra step.

InMotion Support

InMotion is a hosting provider with excellent technical support and with, hands down, the best knowledge base around.

I chatted with different departments of the company’s customer service team and inevitably got prompt, polite, and well-informed answers.

InMotion Hosting WordPress Plans

Something that sets InMotion apart from the competition is the wide variety of managed WordPress solutions, which makes it suitable for any pocket. The company has six different packages, which scale up nicely.

The smallest plan can host a single site, while the largest two are a virtual private server and physical machine dedicated to the needs of massive WordPress sites.

The plans start at $6.99 (when prepaid) and all of them besides the smallest one come with Jetpack Premium. On top of that, four out of the six offerings include an advanced caching pool, which speeds things up considerably.

Our Verdict

InMotion Hosting is the company with the most versatile WordPress platform. Suitable for sites of all sizes, it boasts excellent performance, reasonable pricing, and sublime support that make it one of the best hosting choices for WordPress.

DreamHost and its DreamPress managed solution is ideal for a small number of sites, promises great performance, and comes with premium, WP-specialized support.

The price is very competitive and speed is not half-bad either, so you get excellent value. DreamPress is fast, powerful, and reliable.

The uptime is impeccable and the support is quite good.

DreamPress Features

DreamPress is a managed WordPress platform that marries performance with feature-rich plans.

On-demand & Daily Backups

Copy your entire site with the click of a button. And if you forget to click it, DreamPress got you covered with its recurring daily backups.

Great Account Isolation & Dedicated Resources

DreamPress is more akin to VPS hosting and as such guarantees great account isolation which translates into dedicated resources and superb account separation.

In other words, the performance of your DreamPress plan is stable and reliable, and the security is enhanced.

Server Caching

Server-level caching boosts performance tremendously and Dreamhost implements it well.

An additional perk is the fact that the cached content served to returning visitors is not counted toward the soft monthly plan cap.

Jetpack

Included in all plans, the Jetpack suite helps you run a WordPress site quite a lot.

Free Domain Name

All DreamPress plans come with a free registration so don’t rush into a domain hosting before opening an account with DreamHost.

When you calculate the domain price into the annual WordPress hosting bill you end up getting three months of free hosting.

WordPress Website Builder

If you want to launch a site within hours, DreamHost puts into your hands its own WordPress website builder – one of the best and most intuitive site-building tools you will ever see.

It comes with over 200 pre-built sites that you can customize and play with to get the web presence you want.

Tools for Developers

Advanced users will benefit from SFTP, shell access, and WP-CLI. These tools are enabled by default.

DreamHost Speed & Uptime

My DreamPress site has been down for 0.01% of the time over the stretch of 39 months. That’s the online equivalent of a “blink of an eye”.

The DreamHost frontend clocks in impressive times, while the backend doesn’t flinch even when bombarded with over 300 simultaneous requests. The performance is steady and quick.

It takes merely 0.61 seconds for the site to load, while the queries are handled within a third of a second.

DreamHost Security

The DreamHost data centers have the latest tech that makes them reliable, redundant, and secure.

The strong account isolation and the daily backups add another layer of security to each site hosted over at DreamPress.

DreamHost Support

The company support team is fast and knowledgeable. The agents know the custom hosting environment of DreamPress very well and troubleshoot quickly and efficiently.

Premium users can take advantage of high-priority support.

DreamHost WordPress Plans

Each DreamPress plan permits only a single domain and that’s the biggest limitation you will see there.

Otherwise, all three plans provide ample space, plenty of visitors, staging, CDN, and much more.

DreamPress is the name of the smallest plan that comes at $16.95 and includes a free Jetpack account.

DreamPress Plus costs $24.95 while DreamPress Pro is $71.95. The only substantial difference between the two – other than the higher SSD space and the increased visitor cap Pro brings – is the high-priority support.

DreamHost likes to do things in its own ways, as evident by the custom control panel. It is quite functional and well-structured, but it is not cPanel so be prepared for a small learning curve.

Our Verdict

DreamPress is a great value for money for those who have an established WordPress site and want to take it to the next level.