Cheap Web Hosting That Delivers in 2022

In November 2004, a company called Hosting Media was born. Its mission was to offer unlimited free hosting with no advertising.

The name has since changed to Hostinger, the company expanded to paid hosting and gained some 29 million users. Nevertheless, its vision of quality affordable web hosting remains.

Performance

Performance is a primary concern with hosting. Many providers didn’t make the cut because of problems here. Hostinger was one of the good ones.

Hostinger’s uptime would be nearly perfect, but a brief outage brought it down to 99.91%. Even so, it’s above the industry standard.

Hostinger reimburses 5% of your monthly fee if uptime falls below 99.9%. It’s a good incentive for them to keep the servers in tip-top shape, though a higher percentage can give them even more motivation to do so.

Hostinger’s speed is even better. The server’s response time averages at 190ms, and it takes 0.68s to fully load a basic WordPress installation. It’s the fastest shared hosting provider out there.

Admittedly, getting 300+ simultaneous requests affects the load times, but not by much. You could accommodate thousands of users without noticeable issues.

Overall, Hostinger makes your site available quickly and at all times.

Support

Providing quality support is expensive. With low-cost web hosting, you can often judge the quality of the service by the support team.

Hostinger manages to provide strong support for 27 million users, though it’s no menial task.

Each agent is trained to answer all types of queries. This ensures you don’t get bounced around from support agent to support agent all the time.

Overall, the agents are helpful. They do their best to help users resolve issues themselves. If that’s not possible, the support takes over. In other words, they offer a learning environment for beginners.

Despite the support being available 24/7, you can only reach it by chat or email. The lack of phone support is the only complaint I can make.

Pricing

Many providers don’t have a plan that meets our $3/month requirement. Hostinger has two.

Hostinger’s Single Shared Hosting costs $0.99/month, and Premium Shared Hosting costs $2.59/month. Hostinger is all about giving you a good deal.

One caveat is you have to make a four-year commitment. Still, $47.52 for four years is quite a web hosting deal.

Renewal costs $9.59/month for the Basic plan and $14.49/month for the Premium one. This is a standard price, but it’s difficult to plan four years ahead.

The single plan lets you create one website with one free email account and gives you 10GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth. The Premium one removes the limit on all of the above.

“Unlimited” isn’t really unlimited. Hostinger reserves the right to restrict you if you take too much server resources. That said, as long as you don’t purposefully go overboard, you should be fine.

Bottom line—if you’re looking for a bargain, this is it. Hostinger offers the cheapest web hosting without sacrificing quality.

Features

Hostinger offers features like SSD storage across the board, a custom-built caching solution, 100+ one-click installations, and more.

Unfortunately, Hostinger does not offer a free SSL certificate. However, it does often throw it in as a sign-up bonus.

Daily backups are $0.95/month extra. This is a bit of a letdown. Weekly backups are more of an industry minimum than industry standard.

The Single plan gets you one simultaneous cronjob, but the Premium one removes the limit on that too. It’s pretty sweet, especially if you want to schedule additional backups.

Hostinger also has a custom control panel. It’s way more user-friendly than cPanel, but it does sacrifice functionality. Beginners enjoy it more, even though a cPanel would be a tad more useful in the long run.

Hostinger also offers a drag-and-drop website builder. It’s easy to use and creates responsive sites, even though there are better alternatives out there. Which is why Hostinger has a new free website builder in the making.

Finally, Hostinger offers Git with all plans. Git helps programmers collaborate on projects.

You probably won’t use it much with a shared plan. However, if you hire a web development company, they’ll love it.

Hostinger covers the basics splendidly and offers decent extra features. Cheap shared hosting or not—the offer is outstanding.

Around the Web

Once you have millions of users, you’re bound to get a maelstrom of reviews. Having read as many as a regular person can handle, I’ve confirmed most users enjoy Hostinger’s services.

Unsurprisingly, most users come for the cheap plans. They stay for the quality of the hosting, the ease of use, and the helpful support team.

The complaints are few and far between. They either dislike that not all services are refundable or that the unlimited hosting plans are, in fact, limited.

This info is available on the site. That said, Hostinger doesn’t make it as obvious as the next host in these reviews.

Hostinger remains one of the best cheap hosting providers, though it could be a bit more transparent.

Verdict

Hostinger is one of the best hosting providers around—excellent speed and strong backend deliver quick sites with strong uptime. Its price is unmatched, too.

An independent provider, DreamHost is an ardent supporter of open-source projects and green energy programs. Being one of the oldest companies in the business, its positive reputation is even more impressive.

Let’s see how well it fares against the top value offerings of today.

Performance

DreamHost has a 100% uptime guarantee.

Now, the guarantee works a bit differently. For each hour of total downtime, you get one free day of hosting when you renew your plan.

It may not be the most generous offer, but it’s how DreamHost holds itself accountable. The perfect uptime over the past months attests to that.

DreamHost’s load times consistently put it in the top three fastest shared hosting providers. Furthermore, when you load the server with requests, the load time barely budges.

If you don’t feel like you’re reading cheap web hosting reviews, I’m right there with you. Both DreamHost and Hostinger give the more expensive hosts a run for their money.

Support

DreamHost is dedicated to helping beginners.

Which is why it offers one of the most comprehensive knowledge bases out there. Plus, you can search the articles directly from the control panel. It’s fantastic for getting the hang of everything.

The support team is available through phone, chat, and email.

It does an excellent job of answering all questions and resolving any issues that might come up. The agents are proper experts and are in the same league with SiteGround’s support.

DreamHost is also an official WordPress host. Which is why the support team is fantastic at solving WordPress-related issues. Moreover, the knowledge base is packed with WordPress tutorials.

If you’re looking to start a WordPress site, DreamHost is the cheap host for you.

Pricing

If you commit for three years, DreamHost’s starter plan costs $2.59/month. Monthly, it costs $4.95/month.

The renewal price? It’s the same, provided you renew for another three years. If you want web hosting prices that stay low, DreamHost is your best bet.

You can create one site with unlimited bandwidth and storage. Unlike other providers, DreamHost is transparent about what “unlimited” means.

In fact, DreamHost does everything out in the open. It’s refreshing to find a provider that doesn’t rely on the industry-standard gimmicks.

DreamHost also offers a 97-day full refund—perfect if you aren’t sure website ownership is for you. It’s three times longer than standard—a generous offer.

There’s just one complaint here. Getting a personalized email address is $1.67/month, while most providers offer it for free.

Nevertheless, this is among the cheapest WordPress hosting providers, especially when you take the fixed price plans into account.

Features

DreamHost starter plan comes with free SSL, SSD storage, daily backups, domain privacy, one-click installs, a custom website builder, and a free domain name registration with an annual plan.

DreamHost lets you manage your site from a custom control panel. As with Hostinger, the control panel is fantastic for beginners, but it lacks some of cPanel‘s functionality.

The shared plans feature WordPress optimization and come with a custom caching solution. It leads to some lightning-fast loading speeds. If you’re a WordPress user, DreamHost makes your site work better than ever.

Plus, if your site outgrows what shared hosting can offer, you can affordably scale into managed WordPress hosting. These solutions can take you up to one million monthly visitors. Pretty good, huh?

One issue is website migration. DreamHost only offers WordPress transfers, and for a price. As for non-WordPress sites, you have to migrate them yourself.

DreamHost does have a guide on how to do it. Still, migration is a major pain, especially to a custom control panel. That’s why DreamHost is better for new website owners.

Still, this is one fantastic offer. DreamHost is the best cheap WordPress hosting provider.

Around the Web

DreamHost mostly gets positive reviews, especially from WordPress users.

Customers praise helpful support and cheap plans. DreamHost had apparently gone the extra mile in helping quite a few resolve various issues.

The few negative reviews complain that support is not always available, contrary to what DreamHost claims.

Everything seems in order with the support at the time of writing. Our experience with them, however, is a sample of one—so feel free to take those few negative reviews into account. Keep in mind nobody can know if they’re legitimate.

Verdict

DreamHost is ideally suited for newly-fledges WordPress sites thanks to an impeccable backend, plethora of features, top-notch support, and very affordable fees that don’t change upon renewal.

FastComet is a smaller, independent provider. Its company culture revolves around having a well-trained and seasoned team of experts who value respect, reliability, and responsibility.

This is what the cheap web hosting service looks like in reality:

Performance

There’s little to say about FastComet’s availability. It never recorded over 15 minutes of downtime in a single month, which is brilliant. The provider averages around 99.99% uptime. This is the level of service you would expect with a top-of-the-line cloud infrastructure.

The speed is about average. The servers take about 0.570 seconds to respond and 1.27 seconds to deliver an entire page. This is faster than most providers can achieve, but it still pegs FastComet a bit slower than the top performers.

All in all, you can expect cheap reliable hosting from FastComet.

Support

Without a glimmer of doubt, support is one of FastComet’s best features. The agents resolve queries impressively quickly, and even the frontline agents are adept at handling all kinds of issues. You can expect assistance from real industry professionals with FastComet.

The knowledge base is neatly organized and easy to navigate. The articles are rather comprehensive and helpful. FastComet has excellent tutorials, albeit not as many as some larger providers out there.

On the whole, FastComet’s support can help you get the most out of your web hosting deal.

Pricing

FastComet’s starter plan costs $2.95/month for the first term of your subscription.

You can pay monthly and get the best price for the first month. Alternatively, you can pay for one, two, or three years and extend the discount. It’s helpful that the provider offers this kind of flexibility since not everyone can afford the three-year deal.

After the initial term, the price goes up to $9.95/month. This is a bit pricy, so you’d always want to start monetizing your website during the first term. If you can take advantage of the discount, the renewal will pay itself, so to speak.

The starter plan lets you host one website and gives you 15GB of SSD storage. The cheap website hosting plan lets you access up to 2 CPU cores and 2GB RAM. For an average website, the plan should support up to 25,000 unique monthly visitors. This is way more than you would expect for the price.

Keep in mind FastComet limits you to 40% average CPU utilization. Mind, this means spending 40% of the processing power available to you (i.e., 2 CPU cores), and not the processing power available to the entire server. While you can access 2 cores to handle traffic spikes, you can’t really run at full resource capacity 24/7. This is still pretty generous, though, and the starter plan should last you a long time.

There is a 250,000 inode limit. 250,000 files are a lot, even for larger websites. For reference, InMotion limits you to 50,000 inodes, which is still okay for starting out.

The cheap shared hosting plans scale quite well. Higher-tier plans get you increased resources, lift the inode limit, and even include a few extra features like a premium SSL license.

All in all, the plans are affordable to start with and are generous with the resources. FastComet is a worthy choice if you want to go for a somewhat higher-end start.

Features

FastComet includes the expected features, like cPanel, SSD storage, free SSL, emailing, 1-click app installation, BitNinja Security, etc.

FastComet gets you daily backups across the board, which provides safety in case something goes wrong. The low-cost web hosting plans include one free website migration, as well. If you already have a website somewhere, you don’t have to pay a professional to handle it.

The plans get you a bunch of speed optimization tools, like several levels of caching, compression and script minification systems, Cloudflare CDN, etc. You can take advantage of these even without FastComet. Still, it can save you a bit of time that the affordable web hosting provider has it all ready out-of-the-box.

You can use a variety of security tools, even on the smallest plans. Many providers reserve their full security suite for higher-tier plans. It’s reassuring that FastComet cares about the security of smaller sites too.

FastComet throws in quite a few advanced tools as well. You can schedule cronjobs (with a mandatory 30-minute interval between cronjobs). Git comes preinstalled, which is excellent for managing more substantial projects. You can get SSH access and command-line tools for WordPress and Drupal. Programming technologies like Perl, Python, Node.js, and Bash. PHP frameworks like Phalcon, Symphony, and Laravel come preinstalled too.

In conclusion, FastComet runs many robust features that can be helpful for beginners and experienced developers alike. Plus, you can still access all the features on the cheapest web hosting plan.

Around the Web

FastComet is proud of its high customer satisfaction, and it even displays its TrustPilot rating on the website. Spoiler alert: it’s higher even than SiteGround’s.

Hundreds of users praise the platform. You can find dozens of testimonials commending the support for resolving issues, sometimes even complicated ones.

FastComet doesn’t have many negative reviews. Even so, FastComet’s team addresses all negative comments (even ones that clearly aren’t the provider’s fault). It’s a reassuring sign they care about putting forth an excellent product. You can expect a high level of service.

Verdict

There’s a lot to like about FastComet’s affordable web hosting packages. The advantages include a ton of powerful tools, reliable servers, and mind-blowingly efficient support. The best part is that all the features are activated on the smallest plan. It doesn’t have the most compact offer out there, but it’s perfect if you want an affordable plan that can last you a long while.

GreenGeeks is the leading green hosting company. Its mission is implementing technologies that reduce its carbon footprint as much as possible.

Of course, GreenGeeks offers more than just green hosting, and it is well-respected in the hosting world. Let’s see if it lives up to its reputation.

Performance

Like with most web hosting deals, you get a 99.9% uptime guarantee. There are no refunds if uptime falls below 99.9%.

Still, GreenGeeks’ uptime averages at 99.95%, so downtime is not an issue.

GreenGeeks’ load times average at 0.29 seconds response time and 0.86 seconds till fully loaded. The load times are consistently good, though they fluctuate a bit month-to-month.

All in all, GreenGeeks is in the top five fastest providers.

Support

Most providers only have guides on how to resolve common issues with their platform. Meanwhile, GreenGeeks offers in-depth tutorials on pretty much everything, starting with “How to Start a Site.” The knowledge base is perfect if you’re a first-time website owner.

The support team is available 24/7 through phone, live chat, and email ticket.

It’s one of the quickest support teams in the industry. Not only that, but it has some of the most professional staff in hosting. They resolve issues quickly and are fantastic communicators. If you’re not an experienced user, you’ll likely pick up a thing or two from the support team.

GreenGeeks provides a positive experience, especially for beginners.

Pricing

The Lite shared hosting plan costs $2.95/month if you commit for three years.

You get unlimited storage and bandwidth for one site, though GreenGeeks can force you to upgrade if you overuse server resources. The terms of service don’t state when you have to upgrade.

The renewal price is $9.95/month. As far as cheap web hosting services go, this is a bit pricey.

You do get a few freebies like a domain name registration. This acts as a sort of counterbalance to the renewal cost.

You can get a refund in the first 30 days, like with most providers. There is one caveat. The domain name registration and a hidden setup fee are not refundable.

So, if you paid $116, you’d actually get $87 back.

In short, the freebies put GreenGeeks into cheap web hosting range, despite many providers having lower prices.

Features

GreenGeeks includes features like cPanel, SSD storage, emails, a free website builder, a CDN, security features, one-click installs, extra speed optimization, and developer tools.

You also get a free website migration and nightly backups.

One extremely useful feature is Wildcard SSL. Unlike with regular Let’s Encrypt, you can apply these SSL certificates to unlimited subdomains. This is perfect for ecommerce websites.

Unlike many providers, GreenGeeks offers all features out of the box—no extra charges.

All in all, GreenGeeks is an amazing hosting solution for beginners. It’s also the cheapest website host optimized for ecommerce.

Around the Web

GreenGeeks gets overwhelmingly positive reviews.

The users praise the features, uptime, and helpful support.

Most users who complain either didn’t know about the hidden costs or about paying for domain name renewal. To be fair, this information isn’t obvious on the website. It’s not really a con, but it is something to keep in mind.

Verdict

Green and powerful, this is a hosting solution with rich features and strong support that is particularly well-suited to handle ecommerce endeavors online.

A2 Hosting is an independent provider and a relatively small company. Still, smaller providers can often outperform the giants of hosting.

And if A2 Hosting’s reputation is to be trusted, it can compete with the best of them.

Performance

A2 Hosting offers 5% of your monthly fee if it goes below 99.9% uptime. It delivers with uptime above 99.99%. This is the best you can get with low-cost website hosting.

With 0.54 seconds to respond and 1.15 seconds to load a page, A2 Hosting’s speed is reasonable. However, it can’t outperform the top providers out of the box.

Still, this is how it fares with all optimization software turned off. A2 Hosting actually offers powerful tools to improve these load times.

All in all, it’s fairly reliable performance.

Support

A2 Hosting has one of the most complete knowledge bases around. You get access to various in-depth articles, tutorials, and blog posts.

If you do need extra help, its support is one of the fastest around. It’s available 24/7 via phone, chat, and ticket.

As A2 is a smaller host, it can focus on providing quality support, instead of servicing as many clients as possible. That’s why the support is helpful, efficient, and highly knowledgeable.

This is one of the best support teams in shared hosting.

Pricing

The Lite plan costs $3.92/month if you make a three-year commitment. Renewal is $7.99/month, which is average.

While $3.92 is fine as far as shared hosting goes, A2 has higher starting rates than other providers here. These are cheap web hosting reviews, after all.

Still, A2 Hosting offers a few things that balance things out.

For one, A2 Hosting has an anytime money-back guarantee. You can cancel the service for any reason and get the money for the remainder of the subscription. You’re not locked in in any way.

The plan comes with unlimited bandwidth and storage, and terms of service state clearly what qualifies as fair use. A2 Hosting is more transparent than most low-cost hosting providers.

Features

A2 Hosting offers SSD storage, a site builder, amazing bundled security features, one-click installations, cPanel, and more.

You also get plenty of freebies that offset the higher starting price. These include an SSL certificate, backups, a free migration, Cloudflare CDN, and some excellent WordPress optimization and security features.

If you purchase $25 of Yahoo/Bing Ad credits, you get an extra $100 worth—fantastic for getting that initial influx of traffic.

Once you need to scale up, you also get powerful features that help with larger websites. A noteworthy one is Turbo Boost that makes everything up to 20 times faster.

All in all, A2 Hosting offers fantastic features. It is a lucrative cheap website hosting opportunity, despite the slightly higher cost.

Around the Web

A2 Hosting is loved by its user base.

Users commend the strong support, reliability, and the feature-rich offer.

Most of the negative reviews are regarding Windows-based hosting, which experienced significant issues last April. As for Linux hosting, a few users complain about site restore not working properly or taking too long.

These are somewhat subjective assessments, but the claims are consistent with one another. You can take it into account when choosing a provider.

Verdict

A2 Hosting is a versatile hosting provider with great uptime, superb support, and feature-rich plans. Even though it is a little costlier at first, there are many freebies that offset the hosting fee.

InterServer is a smaller US provider. The company advertises affordable pricing and robust technologies.

Let’s see what’s included in the low-cost website hosting plans.

Performance

InterServer’s infrastructure has an average availability of 99.95%. This is well above the industry standard.

The provider extends a 99.9% uptime guarantee. This gives some reassurance the availability will remain excellent.

The speeds are even more impressive. The servers take 0.19 seconds to respond and 0.74 seconds to fully load a page. This is beyond impressive, especially for a shared host. InterServer’s frontend hands-down outperforms all other cheap hosts.

Support

InterServer prides itself on providing attentive and efficient customer service to all customers. The host even imposes a daily signup limit for new customers. You can hardly get a better sign that the provider cares more about its clients than earning a few bucks.

To give credit where credit is due, the system just works. An agent is available instantly pretty much at all times. Plus, the tech team does a superb job of troubleshooting various website issues and keeping the low-cost hosting packages running in top-notch condition.

Admittedly, the knowledge base could do with an update. You can still rely on the excellent support team for any info you need.

Pricing

InterServer has a one-size-fits-all shared hosting plan.

The plan supposedly gets you unlimited server resources. This is a tad problematic since you can’t really know what the actual resource capacity is and how much you’re allowed to spend. And there are always limits. InterServer offers enough power for most users, but it’s still tough to gauge how much that actually is.

The web host deal has something of a unique pricing structure.

The plans start at $1/month for the first three months, which is obviously very affordable. After that, you can decide whether you want to pay monthly or prepay for longer at a discount. The plan would cost you $5/month paying month-to-month or $4/month for three years.

Now, this is a bit above our initial price limit. But it’s worth it—the initial $1/month deal lets you test out the platform’s full features.

If you’re a student, you can get a year of free hosting, which is quite the web hosting deal! Non-profit organizations get free hosting forever. They receive the same hosting service everyone else does, which is even more brilliant.

Keep in mind nonprofits have to place a link in the footer saying “Powered by InterServer.” The tradeoff is more than fair, though.

Features

Some of the advantages of InterServer include:

• cPanel
• SSL installation
• SSD storage
• Numerous emailing tools
• Raid-10 redundant storage
• Cloudflare CDN

… and a whole lot more.

Unfortunately, the inexpensive web hosting only has weekly backups available. This makes InterServer a bit less reliable than many competitors that offer daily backups.

One thing to point out is that InterServer runs its plans on the Cloud Linux distribution with the LiteSpeed webserver. This is a rare setup among shared hosts because both the OS and the web server are licensed solutions.

The advantages include better reliability, a performance boost for many web apps, and more accurate resource monitoring.

If you’re a WordPress user, you can enjoy a few additional features. The main one is auto-updates, which can save you a lot of time (and a few potential headaches) when running a WP site.

InterServer’s plan has a respectable feature setup, all in all.

Around the Web

InterServer gets a lot of positive reviews for its cheap web hosting. The host works very well and offers excellent value for the price, so there are no issues.

A few users did complain about problems with the billing. It’s something to keep in mind, but you’re unlikely to experience any issues yourself. InterServer doesn’t really provide an explanation, but the complaints are very rare.

Verdict

InterServer might not be the cheapest website host of the bunch. That said, it does offer handy features and top-notch performance. Plus, you can test out the platform for three months at just $1/month. It’s great if you want to start affordably right now and don’t mind paying a bit more in the long run. You can also get free hosting for students or non-profit organizations, which makes going with InterServer a no-brainer.

With 10 million hosted domains, HostGator is one of the big boys. It has a vast client base and invests serious money into its services.

Coincidentally, cheap domain hosting is one of its main selling points.

Performance

HostGator did suffer a major outage in 2013. However, it has made some serious changes since.

The improvement is obvious. HostGator now has near-impeccable uptime each month.

It offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee. If HostGator breaches the guarantee, you get a refund, equal to one month of hosting.

This is a fair offer, and it instills confidence in HostGator’s service.

HostGator’s servers take 0.7 seconds to respond. It takes 1.28 seconds to fully load a basic WordPress page. The response time is decent, but it does suffer when you get 30+ simultaneous users.

HostGator is fast but needs a bit more to be on the same level as the best cheap hosting companies. That said, it’s more than enough to make a starter website run properly.

All things considered, HostGator offers reliable service.

Support

A part of HostGator’s mission is helping beginners.

Besides offering inexpensive web hosting services, it caters to users with its simple interface and an extensive knowledge base. You can find tutorials on both basic and more complex tasks.

The actual technical support is available 24/7 through phone, email, and live chat.

The support agents are polite and do their best to be helpful, but the support could be a tad faster. Tougher queries often get forwarded to email support, which adds waiting time.

The support is average. It resolves your issues, but you do have to wait longer than you might like.

Pricing

HostGator’s Hatchling plan starts at $2.75/month with a three-year commitment. The renewal is $6.95/month.

It’s among the better discount web hosting deals, but the price increase isn’t evident on the landing page. Unfortunately, this isn’t the only lack of transparency.

The plan covers one domain with unmetered storage, bandwidth, and subdomains. The resources aren’t actually unlimited, but breaching the terms of service with one site is difficult.

HostGator offers a 45-day refund policy—15 days longer than standard. It’s a nice gesture. Plus, you have more time to see if HostGator works for you.

Features

HostGator offers features like SSD storage, weekly automated backups, a free SSL certificate, one-click installs, and more.

Purchasing $25 of Google AdWords credits or Bing Ad credits gets you an extra $100. It’s invaluable for getting the attention of those first few visitors.

Other than that, HostGator offers few features that set it apart from other providers.

Unfortunately, HostGator also makes misleading claims like “SiteLock Security is available.” This means it’s available for purchase.

When you open the checkout page, a set of recommended paid features is already selected. Be careful and avoid purchasing something you don’t want.

Around the Web

All things considered, HostGator offers cheap reliable hosting and impressive features. Which is why the overwhelmingly negative reviews are surprising.

The auto-renew checkbox seems to be responsible. This option is activated by default in their case. Unless you untick the checkbox in your profile, HostGator will keep renewing your subscription.

What’s even worse, some customers seem to have been charged even after canceling auto-renewal. HostGator apparently refunded them, but it took several complaints to get its attention.

The positive reviews tend to focus on quality servers and the beginner-friendly interface.

HostGator does provide a quality service if your target market is in the U.S. Still, the negative experiences of some customers indicate a few problems.

Verdict

HostGator is a massive hosting provider with a strong technical pedigree and impressive uptime. It can help beginners learn the basics but beware of the upsells.

NameCheap is a domain registrar turn hosting provider. Unlike GoDaddy, however, its hosting plans get little attention.

Still, it has an array of inexpensive web hosting options. I checked out how it measures up against the competition.

Performance

NameCheap offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

According to our monitoring tools, though, its uptime averages at 99.83%. NameCheap disputed the results but offered no logs as proof—not the best start.

The average response time is 0.37 seconds, and the average load time is exactly 1 second. NameCheap is relatively fast, but not as fast as Hostinger or DreamHost. The servers handle receiving a lot of requests pretty averagely too.

On a side note, NameCheap’s central server is in the U.S. Therefore, your target audience should be in North America for the best results.

You can host data on U.K. servers for $1/month extra, but this defeats the purpose of getting cheap web hosting.

In a few words, the performance is unimpressive. Other cheap providers showcase better results.

Support

NameCheap’s knowledge base is decent. You can use it to solve most issues.

The support is available via live chat and email ticket. There is no phone support, which can annoy at times.

As for support quality, it’s okay, but not exceptional. The agents often try linking to the knowledge base before reading the query carefully. Repeating your question every time can get frustrating.

It’s far from the worst support team I’ve seen, but NameCheap has some work to do nevertheless.

Pricing

NameCheap’s Stellar plan starts at $15.44/year. This is $1.44/month.

It costs $2.88/month to renew the plan. The renewal price makes this the cheapest web hosting per year. The only better long-term deal is DreamHost’s three-year contract.

The plan comes with unlimited bandwidth and 20Gb of storage. Mind that NameCheap calls this “SSD storage,” but it is actually HDD drives, enhanced with SSD caching. Speed-wise, it’s somewhere between pure HDD and pure SSD.

While most starter plans offer one domain, NameCheap gives you three. This makes NameCheap the most affordable option if you want to host two or three websites.

Even if you have just one site to host, NameCheap is among the cheapest hosting sites out there.

Features

NameCheap offers cPanel, a bunch of email features, free privacy protection, and much more.

Its SSL encryption costs $3.88/year. It’s affordable but still leaves a bad taste, considering most providers have it for free.

NameCheap also offers a free .website domain name. If you want a .com domain name instead, you can get it at a low price.

You get biweekly backups. It’s enough for most website owners, although daily backups would provide more peace of mind.

One useful service is a free migration. If you need one, you just need to submit a ticket.

The features are robust, but they are not the best in the game.

NameCheap is among the best cheap web hosting companies for U.S. and U.K. users who want to avoid expensive migrations. In other cases, you can find a better deal.

Around the Web

NameCheap’s reviews are somewhat mixed.

Users like that everything works well. Most satisfied customers seem to use both hosting and domain services.

As for the negatives, many users are disappointed NameCheap breaches the uptime guarantee. Plus, a few claim NameCheap covers up issues instead of resolving them.

The last complaint is pretty non-specific, making it hard to confirm. A reasonable explanation is these customers have picked up on NameCheap’s occasional transparency problems.

It’s a quality hosting provider, but its offer can’t match, for instance, that of DreamHost.

Verdict

Namecheap is one of the cheapest hosting providers that deliver a decent performance and a reasonable amount of features.

iPage has been around since 1998 and has been a hosting provider since 2009. It offers an array of hosting options, with shared hosting being the most popular.

Let’s see what all the fuss is about.

Performance

iPage has a 99.9% uptime guarantee like most providers.

Uptime itself is fairly consistent month-to-month and averages out at 99.99%.

iPage does well with speed too. With 0.17 seconds to respond and 0.93 seconds to load, it has one of the fastest load times among shared hosting providers.

Yet, where it really outperforms the rest, is speed under load. 250+ simulated connections barely slow down loading.

With such performance, it’s safe to say iPage offers cheap reliable hosting.

Support

One notorious practice of EIG-owned providers is taking their support overseas. Such moves save EIG money, but invariably reflect on quality.

iPage is no exception. The agents rarely have strong communication skills, and resolving even simple problems can drag out.

It’s nicer support staff is available through phone and live chat, but even then the agents need more training.

On the bright side, the knowledge base is rather comprehensive. You can find solutions to most issues there.

Pricing

iPage offers just one plan. Having a one-size-fits-all solution in hosting is unusual, even if a provider specializes in low-cost hosting. Strangely enough, it works.

There’s only one plan, so you get the full features, including unlimited bandwidth and storage.

If you make a one, two, or three-year commitment, the plan costs $2.99/month. Renewal is $8.35/month. This is about average, as far as affordable hosts go.

One potential problem is outgrowing shared hosting. Since there are no other shared plans, you would have to upgrade directly to VPS hosting. Of course, the issue here is – it is three times as expensive.

Features

iPage offers SSD storage, a free SSL certificate, a bunch of one-click installations, email features, a beginner-friendly website builder, and more.

You get a free domain name as well. It saves you up to $15 in the first year.

You also get fantastic ecommerce features and a bunch of shopping cart integrations. It’s affordable to start an online store with iPage.

iPage uses a custom control panel called vDeck. It’s a similar situation as with DreamHost and Hostinger—the control panel is more user-friendly, but it lacks cPanel’s functionality.

Unfortunately, iPage charges extra for features like website security, domain privacy, and WordPress optimization. Some of the cheapest hosting services offer these for free, so iPage could do better.

Site backups cost $1/month too. This is not ideal, as backups are essential. What’s even worse, is that restoring your site has a surprise fee of $100.

This is nothing short of outrageous. iPage is charging you to use the backup you’ve already paid for.

It’s similar with site migrations. They cost $150. Since migrating a site from cPanel to vDeck is beyond difficult, it doesn’t pay off to migrate to iPage.

It’s a shame about the restoration fee. With its features and free SSL, iPage would have one of the best cheap website hosting offers for ecommerce. The extra costs on security and backups are a bit too much, though.

Around the Web

iPage gets mixed reviews, to say the least.

Positive ones focus on fair pricing, quality service, and cool freebies.

One concerning issue that negative reviews point out is iPage can shut off your service without prior notice.

Indeed, the terms of service state iPage can make you upgrade to VPS this way. There’s no mention of fair use. In essence, iPage can shut off your hosting whenever it thinks you’re spending too much resources.

The lack of transparency doesn’t help the already questionable offer.

Verdict

iPage is the quintessential cheap hosting service—amazing performance and decent features but the support is questionable and the hidden fees not so few.

InMotion Hosting is a privately owned US-based hosting provider. It manages over 350,000 domains, which is an impressive feat.

Its plans start relatively small and are quite affordable. Let’s jump right in and see what the low-cost hosting packages are all about.

Performance

InMotion’s uptime is well over the 99.9% industry standard. The last notable outage was a year ago, and that didn’t put too much of a dent in the average uptime. The servers are reliable, and you shouldn’t have any downtime issues.

The provider does have a 99.9% uptime guarantee. This is the standard guarantee offered by most providers.

The overall speed is fast enough in North America. The servers respond relatively quickly and perform well under heavy traffic.

Although some parts of InMotion’s website might suggest it works equally well worldwide, this isn’t really the case. InMotion’s Max Speed Zones boost performance in Europe and Asia but only that much. It doesn’t get you the same speeds like that of a provider with geo-redundant data centers on multiple continents.

If you need cheap website hosting in the US, on the other hand, InMotion has top-notch performance.

Support

The support is available through all the standard channels. You can contact it 24/7.

The agents do a decent job. Ever since first testing InMotion Hosting, the agents have had no issues providing concise and informative answers.

That said, the live chat can be a bit slow and clunky. The website will inform you if the chat support is experiencing a high influx of traffic, so you’ll know how long you’ll have to wait. If you have just a quick question, you can return when the wait times aren’t so long.

If you like solving problems yourself, InMotion runs one of the most extensive knowledge bases not only among cheap web hosting services but in the hosting industry as a whole. It contains tutorials on performing simple operations, installing and configuring various software, and getting around common hurdles of hosting.

Pricing

InMotion’s Launch plan starts at $2.95/month, which is just under our price limit. You have to prepay for three years to get the most affordable deal.

On renewal, the plan goes up to $6.99/month, which is about average. InMotion is affordable enough, but definitely not the cheapest of all providers.

Keep in mind InMotion often does testing with various prices and discounts. If you’re not seeing the price you want, don’t worry. I contacted the support with this issue, and the agent was helpful enough to add the appropriately priced plan to my shopping cart.

The main advantage here is that the starter plan lets you host two websites. Most cheap shared hosting providers only allow one. This gets you extraordinarily good value if you want to set up two sites at once.

Another nice feature is that InMotion extends a 90-day money-back guarantee. This is three times the industry average. It gives you ample time to ensure the platform is the right match for you.

InMotion Hosting maintains its plans have unlimited storage space and bandwidth.

This is not an unusual practice, but it could be misleading. When you go for “unlimited” hosting, you are just getting regular hosting without knowing the resource limits. It’s fine to go for such providers, but you should be aware the cheap host might suddenly ask you to upgrade.

Features

InMotion Hosting offers a pretty standard cPanel shared hosting platform. You can get SSD storage, free SSL, emailing with spam protection, bundled security, etc.

InMotion Hosting states backups are available. But you’d have to pay for the backup manager. It costs $2/month for the first 10GB of backup storage and $1/month more for each 10GB extra.

This solution is more robust than the backups you get with most inexpensive web hosting providers. You can do things like set up a custom schedule, do full-site or partial backups and restores, queue multiple restoration requests, and a lot more.

Still, many providers have a free backup option, which puts InMotion at a bit of a disadvantage. The backup system is worth it if you can afford it, but there are cheaper options.

If you have some technical skills, the cheap shared hosting lets you take advantage of SSH access. The platform supports quite a few programming technologies and database programs, including PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. If you want to set up a WordPress site, WP CLI is supported.

If you’re more of a WordPress beginner, InMotion will throw in BoldGrid website builder with your WordPress installation. BoldGrid is a decent builder, and it makes it easy for beginners to create a custom WordPress site design.

All in all, InMotion offers solid, affordable web hosting for both fresh website owners and experienced professionals.

Around the Web

InMotion Hosting user reviews are a mixed bag. They lean to the positive, but not enough to give peace of mind.

Some users praise the support, while others complain about declining service quality. Some dislike the unnecessarily complicated account activation.

Both types of customers have a point. InMotion is generally a well-performing provider, but it doesn’t really perform consistently.

Verdict

InMotion is a good host, but it does have a few issues to work out. It’s an excellent choice if you want to set up two websites affordably or if you just need web hosting in the US. You do get a 90-day refund period. This gives you more than enough time to see if the low-cost web hosting platform works for you at zero risk.

Bluehost is a part of the EIG group. It has 17 years as an established host and manages over two million websites worldwide, making it an impressive company. Plus, it’s one of the few WordPress-recommended providers.

It has something of a reputation for low-end web hosting deals. Let’s check out what kind of features you can expect:

Performance

Bluehost runs a pretty reliable infrastructure. The average uptime is 99.97%. Monthly, this fluctuates between 99.95% and 100%, which is solid. It amounts to a maximum of 20 minutes of downtime per month, so you shouldn’t even notice any outages.

The servers are reasonably fast. Bluehost’s load speed helped it score third among the top hosting providers we tested. Putting servers under heavy load barely affects response times, which is precisely what you want from a hosting platform.

Bluehost is one of the best cheap hosting providers in terms of performance.

Pricing

Bluehost’s starter plan costs $2.95/month when paying triennially and goes up to $7.99/month when you renew the plan. You can pay biennially or annually, but this raises the total initial cost of ownership.

There is no option to pay month-to-month, which is odd. Most hosts let you spread out payments to make them more manageable. Not Bluehost.

It’s not that much of an issue since most users go for a longer deal to take advantage of the discount. Still, twisting the customer’s arm into subscribing for an extended period is hardly sportsmanlike.

You might be getting low-cost website hosting, but the resources are anything but modest. The starter plan includes 50GB of SSD storage, which is more than enough to host multiple websites, let alone just one. Bluehost doesn’t explicitly state the limits on CPU, RAM, or bandwidth. Be that as it may, the starter plan should be enough to get your website off the ground.

Features

Bluehost’s plans come with SSD storage, 1-click script installation, backups, free SSL, and $225 worth of ad credits.

If you’re a WordPress user, you can use various WP-specific advantages. This includes automatic WordPress installation, automated updates, and initial login reconfiguration. Bluehost is actually one of the top WordPress providers, and it has one of the best offers here.

One more thing is that Bluehost gets you a free domain name for the first year. This isn’t much, but it can save you about $12.

Other than that, the starter web hosting deal is kind of bare-bones. Once you scale up, you can take advantage of tools like Cloudflare CDN, spam protection, SiteLock security, and CodeGuard backups.

Some providers, like SiteGround, however, include similar tools out-of-the-box. It puts Bluehost at a disadvantage.

Overall, Bluehost is a respectable host, especially if you’re looking for cheap WordPress hosting.

Support

Bluehost’s support is a bit erratic.

The provider made strides in this area in the past few years. The support agents are courteous and helpful. The knowledge base is chock-full of handy guides.

That said, the support has been a bit sluggish lately. The agents are obviously overwhelmed with queries, and the PR team confirms as much. This means not all customers get the attention they might need, at least not immediately.

The support is generally decent, but this cheap blog hosting provider is going through a rough patch.

Around the Web

Bluehost gets mixed user reviews, to say the least.

Don’t misunderstand, many users like the platform and praise it for working well. Bluehost is definitely not all bad.

The provider suffered a torrent of negative reviews in recent months. Most complain about subpar support and long wait times.

The issue is that EIG-owned brands often outsource a big part of their support. Plus, Bluehost’s support team struggles to keep up with the vast user base at the best of times.

As of recently, they are being overwhelmed with requests each day. Consequently, not all customers get the level of service they should.

Verdict

Bluehost is one of the best cheap hosting companies, especially if you want to set up a WordPress website.

What’s more, it is among the top hosts performance-wise. You have to prepay for three years to get the best deal. So the service is a bit of an investment.

eUKhost is one of Britain’s most successful web hosting providers. It hosts over 150,000 domains, which is impressive. It’s also one of the few UK-based hosts not owned by GoDaddy.

Let’s see what inside its cheap web hosting plans.

Performance

eUKhost extends a 99.95% uptime SLA, which is a pleasant surprise. Most hosts set this at 99.9%, but eUKhost does one better. The actual uptime is above the guaranteed availability.

eUKhost gets satisfactory speed results in the UK—you can expect as much from a local hosting provider. Just keep in mind the host focuses mainly on that location, so the servers might take longer to respond to visitors outside the UK. If you want to target an international audience, a host with more geo-redundancy will likely perform better.

Support

The affordable host promises it runs a “team you can count on.” And, to be fair, the claim is not too far off.

For starters, the support team is there 24/7 and tends to respond almost instantly. A high influx of queries can slow down email support, but it’s nothing to be too concerned about.

The agents do an excellent job of resolving issues. You’re in good hands with eUKhost’s support.

The host’s knowledge base is well thought out, too. It’s packed with numerous helpful guides, although the design is a bit clunky.

Overall, eUKhost does a superb job in the support department.

Pricing

eUKhost’s smallest plan starts at £2.15/month + VAT, which is a relatively affordable web host deal for a UK-based provider. You only need to prepay for six months to get this price, which makes the host an affordable starting option.

You can prepay for longer if you prefer and get a free domain name. This essentially gets you the same monthly cost, but it is worth it to extend the initial discount.

After the initial subscription period, the price goes up to £3.44/month. Admittedly, this is a relatively big jump.

One thing to point out is that the starter plan gets you just 2GB of SSD storage. This is relatively limiting so it may be a good idea to assess how much storage you need before signing up for the eUKhost’s discount web hosting.

The provider lets you set up unlimited websites but caps the databases at 10. This essentially means you can set up 10 dynamic sites at most (provided that you can fit them on 2GB of storage).

eUKhost doesn’t state anything else about the resource capacity. The technical team essentially decides how much resource usage is too much, which is less than ideal.

Features

eUKhost offers your typical cPanel hosting. You get emailing, SSD storage, SSL setup, 1-click installers via Softaculous, and a lot more. They are all pretty standard and useful tools.

The plans come with daily backups. eUKhost saves the backed-up data for a week. This means you won’t have to worry about issues compromising your website.

Paying for a year or longer gets you a free domain registration. It’s a handy way to get a cheap domain and hosting in one place.

You get all the features you would expect from a dependable cPanel host, but little distinguishes eUKhost from other providers.

Around the Web

eUKhost gets no end of positive cheap web hosting reviews. Many clients have been with the hosts for years (sometimes more than a decade!) and still report a stellar service.

A few users did leave negative reviews about billing issues. The billing system typically works smoothly, but there are enough comments to indicate a few kinks to fix.

Another possible cause is that the billing department isn’t available 24/7. This means you might need to wait a few hours if something isn’t working with billing.

Still, these are all minor problems, and most of the reviews heap praise on eUKhost.

Verdict

eUKhost is a fairly average hosting provider. It has reliable servers and offers all the standard features, but the resources are relatively limited. It’s a well-performing local provider, but there are better cheap web hosting services for larger-scale projects.

TMDHosting is an award-winning provider with over 300,000 domains under its belt. It boasts excellent R&D and stellar customer support.

Let’s dive right in and see what the plans are all about.

Performance

TMDHosting guarantees 99.999% uptime. The uptime is perfect most months, but it’s tough to say how tenable the availability is on a shared platform.

The actual terms of service contain a few provisions for the guarantee. The first is that you must be a customer for at least a year to invoke the ToS, which is a bit odd. The second is that downtime must be above 0.1% for you to get a portion of your money back. This pegs the guarantee at 99.9% and not 99.999% as the provider states on the product page.

You can still expect availability above 99.9%. However, the uptime guarantee is misleading.

The speed is a bit below average among inexpensive web hosting services, but it’s nothing to be concerned about. With the right speed optimization, you should achieve fast load times without a hitch.

Support

TMDHosting loves tooting its own horn about the support team. The support is there 24/7, but the actual quality of the service is barely okay.

Frontline agents can resolve basic issues, but any more complex problems require a bit of back-and-forth with the tech team. The agents are kind of vague about the specifics of the platform, as well, which doesn’t instill much confidence.

The support is still helpful but not the best among the cheap hosts we review here.

Pricing

If you commit for three years, the TMDHosting plan costs $2.95/month for the first term. The regular price is $4.95/month. This is standard pricing and gets you good value for the money.

The host maintains the resources are unlimited across the board, which is not ideal. You can’t know how much you actually get until you actually exhaust the resources. This makes it challenging to plan for a plan upgrade in advance.

One thing TMDHosting has going for it is a 60-day money-back guarantee. This is twice what even the best cheap hosting providers offer. It gives you ample time to make sure the host works for you at zero risk.

Features

TMDHosting’s starter plan comes with SSD storage, SSL security, free daily backups, cPanel with Softaculous, emailing with spam protection, and a bunch of other tools.

Registering a plan for a more extended period gets you a free domain registration. It saves you a few bucks in the first year, which is helpful when looking for cheap website hosting.

TMDHosting offers discounts on GlobalSign SSL certificates. This is premium SSL, which comes with a liability warranty and several possible levels of validation. It’s excellent if you want an affordable paid SSL for your business.

The cheap shared hosting servers support several dev technologies. These include multiple versions of PHP, Perl, Python, Curl, and a bunch of others. You can schedule cronjobs as well. The plans don’t allow root access, so you can’t install your own technologies. Technical users can access the SSH command line.

All in all, it’s a decent feature offer with a few nice freebies and discounts.

Around the Web

Among the cheap web hosting providers. TMDHosting sports excellent reviews. Hundreds of users praise the platform for working well. Also, some confirm TMD’s claims that the support can help resolve advanced issues.

Some complaints have to do with billing. Namely, the provider has a 60-day money-back guarantee, but this doesn’t apply if you pay month-to-month. The host doesn’t really communicate this, so keep it in mind.

TMDHosting enables plan auto-renewal by default, too. You should cancel this if you plan to let your service expire.

One nice change is that the host started addressing all negative reviews. It’s helpful to be able to see an explanation of each issue. Plus, it indicates the provider cares about keeping customers satisfied.

Verdict

TMDHosting has a respectable offer and reasonable web hosting prices. There is little to make the host really stand out, but what is there works like a charm.