5 Best Web Hosting Services 2023
Best Web Hosting and Top provider hosting ,We compared popular web hosting services across essential criteria like security, uptime and more to help you find web hosting that fits your needs.
If you want to create your own blog, kick off a side hustle or build an online portfolio, you'll want the best web hosting service for your website. Web hosting services have data centers that house your website on one or more servers.
Comparing website hosting services can be confusing, and that can make choosing the right hosting service for you more difficult. We looked over the data for web hosting services to make things a little easier on you.
You can read more about our criteria for the best web hosting services, including how we assess security and customer support, and you can check out important web hosting terms to know.
Note: Pricing for web hosting is a bit tricky to follow. Listed prices are generally introductory rates attached to contracts that usually last a year or more and renew at the regular (higher) rate at contract's end. Make sure to take regular rates into account when trying to figure out a long-term hosting provider. You can also see our recommendations for how web hosting providers should advertise their prices.
Best web hosting services
1. Ionos
Pros:
Extensive security features, including backups
Unlimited traffic, so no need to scale up plans to handle additional traffic
99.99% uptime guarantee
Cons:
Website builder costs extra
Plan prices increase, sometimes by huge margins, over time
Our take
Ionos has the lowest starting price point of any other service on this list, but once the plan renews, the price increases drastically. Ionos also has customer support numbers for 14 countries, making it a good choice for international customers.
Hosting plans
Ionos offers shared, VPS, dedicated and managed and unmanaged WordPress hosting. The company also differentiates between hosting plans meant for smaller and larger organizations to help customers better understand what plan is best for them.
Security features
Ionos offers security features that go beyond what other web hosting services offer. All plans include SSL certificates, malware scans and DDoS protections. Some plans also help repair damage malware might cause on your website. Backups at least once every 24-hours are also standard with each plan, and each backup is held for 20 days. A full set of a customer's data is also stored in two separate data centers as a security measure, that way customers will always have access to their data, even if one data center is brought down by a cyberattack.
Uptime
Ionos has a 99.99% uptime guarantee, which is a higher guarantee than most other web hosting services. Battery-operated power supplies and backup generators help maintain power to Ionos data centers so your site and services stay online even if its data center loses power.
Customer support
Support is available any time, either by phone or chat. A directory also provides customer support numbers for customers in 14 different countries. Ionos also offers a personal consultant who will be your main point of contact if you need help with your site. A personal consultant and phone numbers for different support centers around the world gives Ionos customers more ways to get help compared to some other hosting providers.
2. HostGator
Pros:
Unmetered bandwidth and disk space
Free site and domain transfers
45-day money back guarantee
Cons:
Restoring data from backups costs extra
Add-ons add up
Our take
HostGator makes it easy to start and maintain a website with a database of tutorials and walkthroughs. If you already have a site, you can transfer it to HostGator for no extra charge. Make sure you read the fine print when it comes to backups, though -- it left us with questions.
Hosting plans
HostGator offers shared, VPS, dedicated, WordPress and reseller hosting plans with tiered options. Each plan comes with unmetered bandwidth and disk space so you can load as much data on your site as you want. That makes it a great option for anyone with lots of video, images or animated page elements.
Security features
HostGator offers free SSL certificates, DDoS protections and automated backups. After the backups are taken, HostGator scans the files and makes sure they are free of malicious code, and if any is located the files are quarantined. However, HostGator writes that anyone with "critical business information or important data are STRONGLY encouraged to seek a third-party backup service…" (emphasis theirs). Undermining your own backup system is an odd choice.
Uptime
HostGator has an industry-standard 99.9% uptime guarantee. Shared and reseller hosting customers can request a one-month refund if their uptime doesn't meet that guarantee. However, VPS and dedicated hosting customers won't get a refund if their uptime isn't met. Instead those customers receive a prorated credit for how long the server was down.
Customer support
Customers can reach HostGator customer support representatives by chat, email or phone 24/7. A database also offers customers video tutorials, articles and guides. Not all services offer video tutorials, which could help solve an issue when it feels like talking to customer support over the phone or online isn't helping.
Other features
HostGator offers a 45-day money back guarantee, which is above average when compared to most other web hosting services. The tutorials and walkthroughs available also make it easy for first-time site managers to get started.
3. NameCheap
NameCheap offers some of the cheapest pricing plans. Month-to-month plans in particular are less expensive compared to monthly plans from other services. Some other services might offer monthly shared hosting plans for $20, but a NameCheap monthly shared hosting plan can cost less than $5. NameCheap also offers VPS, dedicated, WordPress and reseller hosting plans. NameCheap has a 99.9% uptime guarantee for VPS and reseller plans, as well as a 100% uptime guarantee for most shared, VPS and dedicated plans. Each Namecheap plan comes with a free virus scanner, two-factor authentication and DDoS protection to help secure your data and your visitors' data. SSL certificates are free for one year. After that year, you can buy SSL certificates through NameCheap. Prices start at $6 a year with a five-year contract. NameCheap offers 24/7 email and chat support, but no phone support. The pricing for some plans can be confusing. For example, the cheapest dedicated hosting plan comes with a one month contract for $41.88, and then the price reverts to the standard rate of $53.88. Over a one year period, this plan will cost $634.56. This appears to be a good deal, but the same plan with a one year contract costs $566.88, a difference of about $68.
4, GoDaddy
GoDaddy Web Hosting offers unmetered storage and bandwidth with its plans so you can upload as many images and videos onto your site as you want. GoDaddy offers shared, VPS, dedicated and WordPress hosting plans, has a 99.9% uptime guarantee and 24/7 customer support. However, its security offerings are inconsistent. For example, SSL certificates are included with some higher-tiered shared plans, but not lower-tiered plans. If this is your first site, you might want to start with one of the lower-tiered options, but the lack of security features might push you to get a more expensive plan.
5. Bluehost
Bluehost specializes in WordPress hosting and offers additional resources, like its Blue Flash customer support team, for anyone who chooses WordPress hosting. It offers shared, VPS and dedicated hosting as well as managed and unmanaged WordPress hosting. All plans include free SSL certificates, two-factor authentication and anti-spam protections. Bluehost customers can call or chat with a customer support representative 24/7. Bluehost doesn't offer an uptime guarantee, but instead says it resolves issues within 15 minutes of them being reported. However, it doesn't say how many issues you should expect on average. If your site is down for about 15 minutes a week, your site could be down for about 13 hours a year, which is higher than standard.
Criteria for web hosting services
While we didn't test the services, we did carefully examine each service's offerings and ranked them according to essential web hosting features. Here's what we looked for to determine the best web hosting services. You can also check out CNET's 11 things to know about web hosting for more information about these and other features.
- Hosting plans: We checked to see if the service offered shared, VPS and dedicated hosting plans. Inclusion of all three plan types allows customers to scale their plan up as their site grows.
- Security features: Services need to include some basic security features such as SSL certificates, DDoS protections and backups to protect your data as well as your visitors'. The best web hosts do this at no extra charge.
- Uptime of 99.9% or higher: An uptime of 99.9% or higher ensures your site won't go down for more than 20 minutes a month, so you keep losses of readers and sales to a minimum.
- Customer support: All services offer some kind of customer support. Most services offer email support, which is a good start. Others offer live chat -- which is better -- and others offer phone support -- which is best. The best services offer all three at no additional charge. Even if phone support is only available in a certain timeframe, it's better than nothing.
The best web hosting services meet all four of those criteria. If a service falls short on one or more of those measures, you'll find it in our list of other web hosting services to consider or our list of additional web hosts we looked at.