Top 10 Hosting In US
Not having to worry about the technical aspects of owning a website is a blessing. Your website should just work(!), without much maintenance having to be done on your part. Signing up with one of the best web hosting services in the market will give you such peace of mind.Today, we compare some of the top options out there and name the best hosting services available!This guide will show you how to pick a host for your next website project, which details to pay attention to, how much to spend, and which of the hosting providers is going to be the best fit for your specific needs.
Bluehost is one of the most popular web hosting companies on the web, catering their services to different users with different websites and goals. For instance, if you’re a beginner with not much money to spend, you can get a Bluehost plan for as low as
- From: $2.75 / month
- Traffic allowed: unmetered
- Disk Space: 50 GB
- Free Domain
Namecheap with its commitment to affordable prices, excellent customer support, and user-friendly interface, Namecheap stands out as an ideal choice for individuals or businesses looking to establish their online presence.
- Free domain & SSLs
- Unlimited websites
- Unmetered SSD & AutoBackup
- From $2.38/month
DreamHost is one of the most affordable of the best web hosting services on the market, especially for new website owners who don’t have experience with web servers and the like.
- From $2.59 / month
- Traffic allowed: unmetered
- Disk Space: 50 GB
- Free Domain
What we like about A2 Hosting in particular is that they have a big portfolio of different types of web hosting types, plans, and offers. For instance, apart from classic shared hosting, there are also plans for unmanaged and managed WordPress hosting, VPS hosting & more
- From $2.99 / month
- Traffic allowed: unmetered
- Disk Space: 100 GB
HostGator is one of the best-known web hosting companies out there. I guess those Super Bowl ads helped with that a bit. They’ve revamped their offering lately and now offer several interesting hosting plans and tiers (based on your needs).
- From $2.75 / month
- Traffic allowed: unmetered
- Disk Space: unmetered
- Free Domain
GreenGeeks is one of the first web hosting companies on the market that position themselves as eco-friendly web hosting. GreenGeeks claims to be “putting back three times the power they consume into the grid in the form of renewable energy.”
- From $2.95 / month
- Traffic allowed: unmetered
- Disk Space: unmetered
- Free Domain
InMotion Hosting is one more very affordable web hosting service that’s not missing out on any of the important features.Even on the entry-level plan, you still get a free SSL, free email address, hack and malware protection
- From $2.29 / month
- Traffic allowed: unmetered
- Disk Space: 10 GB
- Uptime: 100%
IONOS is a web host most known for its focus on the European market. They’ve been offering web hosting since 1988, which gives them a unique 30+ year experience that’s not too common in the web hosting industry.
- From $0.5 / month
- Traffic allowed: unmetered
- Disk Space: unmetered
- Free Domain
With more than a thousand website hosting services out there, it’s pretty difficult to find a host that’s perfect for your needs. At first glance, GoDaddy is great, having low prices and some great features. Well, we want to help make the decision easier for you
- Great Page Speed (280 ms)
- Hosting Price $2.65/month
- Good Uptime (99.98%)
- Over 125+ One-Click Install Applications
- 24/7 network security
Bluehost
Bluehost is one of the most popular web hosting companies on the web, catering their services to different users with different websites and goals. For instance, if you’re a beginner with not much money to spend, you can get a Bluehost plan for as low as $2.75 / month. Then if you ever need more, you can upgrade to a higher-tier plan easily. On the other end of the spectrum, if you’re an advanced user or have a site that receives more traffic, you can get a VPS hosting or a dedicated server (of course, those cost more).
Specification:
- From: $2.75 / month
- Traffic allowed: unmetered
- Disk Space: 50 GB
- Free Domain:
- Uptime: 100% (last 3 months)
Good Uptime (99.98%)
Uptime is one of the most critical aspects when choosing a web host – after all, if your site is down, your users can’t access it. So, consistent uptime should be one of your top priorities when looking at hosting services. After reviewing many web hosts, our benchmark for “good” uptime is between 99.91% and 99.93%. So ideally, we don’t want to see anything less than that.
Loading Speed (420 ms)
Research conducted by Google found: “As page load time goes from 1s to 3s the probability of bounce increases 32%.” This translates to your visitors being 32% more likely to leave your site. And it only gets worse with longer page load times. Furthermore, Google is more geared towards mobile-first indexing. This means that your site also needs to be optimized for mobile users, or otherwise, you’re losing traffic.
Low Introductory Pricing ($2.95/mo)
Bluehost’s default pricing starts at $3.95/month, which is an introductory price from the regular $9.99/month rate.However, the good news is that we’ve been able to work out a deal with Bluehost for our readers that takes the starting price down even further to $2.95/month.For this price, you get pretty much everything you need for a single website. That includes 10 GB SSD storage, unmetered bandwidth, a free SSL certificate, and more. So you’d be getting a pretty good value for the price, plus their consistent uptime and page loading speeds.
Packed with Security Options and Features
Since Bluehost is one of the “cheapest” options on the market, we are pleased to see that they don’t cut too many corners on critical security options and features. Already with the cheapest plan, Bluehost provides your site with a free SSL certificate. You also get access to great features like a free CDN (Cloudflare), a one-click WordPress install, multiple CMS integrations, and additional eCommerce plugins.
24/7 Customer Support
Bluehost provides 24/7 customer support over live chat, phone, and an email ticketing system. On top of that, they have a vast knowledge base packed with answers to frequent questions and useful information. We went ahead and tested their live chat option, and the experience was overall pleasant.
Site Ground
SiteGround has made a name for itself as a quality WordPress hosting platform, but it’s grown to offer other types of web hosting as well. These days, SiteGround allows you to host a site built on Weebly (popular builder), Joomla, Drupal, and other popular CMS platforms. SiteGround is also perfectly capable of hosting your eCommerce store.
Specification:
- From: $2.99 $1.99 Black Friday / month
- Traffic allowed: 10,000 visits/month
- Disk Space: 10 GB
- Free Domain:
- Uptime: 99.95% (last 3 months)
Good Performance
SiteGround’s uptime performance has been nearly perfect over the last six months. Their
<br99.99% average puts them among the most reliable hosts we’ve reviewed. Strong uptime like this keeps website visitors happy. But more importantly, it means your site is almost guaranteed to be working around the clock so you won’t miss out when your customers want to make a purchase, either.
Average Load Time (356 ms)</br
Site speed is easily the second most critical factor when choosing a host. For starters, research by Google shows that 53% of people will leave your site if your page doesn’t load within three seconds. Furthermore, you can’t do much to fix a slow host. You might be able to compress images to lighten their weight. You might be able to load them through a CDN to take some pressure off your server.
Good Customer Support Experience
SiteGround provides a knowledge base for customers to find their own quick answers. Otherwise, you can call in over the phone or use the 24/7 live chat. For this latest test, we opted for the live chat option and we connected with their customer rep in less than a minute.
Unlike some other hosts, there was no noticeable delay in answers. So it seemed like he knew what he was talking about and didn’t have to look up answers each time we sent over a new question.
Dream Host
DreamHost is one of the most affordable of the best web hosting services on the market, especially for new website owners who don’t have experience with web servers and the like. Their entry-level hosting plan, for instance, offers a free domain name included, a free SSL certificate, and WordPress pre-installed if that’s the platform that you want to use.
Specification:
- From $2.59 / month
- Traffic allowed: unmetered>Disk Space: 50 GB
- Free Domain
- Uptime: 99.91%
Average Speed (1730 ms)
Loading time is one of the most important factors when choosing a host. Not only does page speed affect visitor bounce rate but slow loading time can also affect your overall SEO (not to mention Google rank). This, however, calculates lost profit. So needless to say, the faster your website loads the better. Unfortunately, DreamHost’s 1730 ms average loading time over the past 6 months hasn’t been good. It puts them in the lower half of the hosts we’ve tested.
Average Uptime (99.77%)
DreamHost’s 6-month average uptime is also nothing to brag about – 99.77% with more than 10 hours of downtime. That’s bad and could potentially mean lost website visitor traffic and profit for you. However, the good news is that DreamHost has an uptime guarantee. Like other hosts, if your monthly average falls beneath that threshold, you’ll get a credit for the cost of the service. DreamHost, though, guarantees 100% uptime in their Terms of Service. Keep in mind that scheduled maintenance or user errors aren’t covered in this guarantee.
Month-to-Month Hosting
The vast majority of all 40+ web hosts we’ve reviewed will give you a 30-day refund period. That gives you a full month to test out their services before risking your prepaid amount. A few hosts, like HostGator, will give you 45 days.And then there’s DreamHost. Their money-back guarantee is good for up to 97 days. That’s over a full three months to really make sure you’re happy.
A2 hosting
What we like about A2 Hosting in particular is that they have a big portfolio of different types of web hosting types, plans, and offers. For instance, apart from classic shared hosting, there are also plans for unmanaged and managed WordPress hosting, VPS hosting (unmanaged and managed), offers for resellers, and dedicated servers.
Specification:
- From $2.99 / month
- Traffic allowed: unmetered/li>
- Disk Space: 100 GB
- Uptime: 99.11% (last 3 months)
- Load time US: 0.7s
Performance
A2 Hosting servers that we’ve monitored since 2015 are optimized for WordPress websites and they use LiteSpeed cache. Thanks to that they are the fastest host we’ve seen with an average speed of 286 ms. Moreover, A2 Hosting is also reliable. Their average uptime over the past six months has been hovering around 99.99% with only 13 minutes of downtime.
Customer Support
A2 Hosting has a reliable customer support team called “Guru Crew Support.” Customers can connect with them 24/7/365 via live chat, phone, email, and tickets. Our personal experience with A2 Hosting live chat was positive, their customer rep connected within a few minutes and was very knowledgeable.
Super-Fast Page Loading Speed (286 ms)
You see a recurring theme when you go to A2Hosting.com – speed. And A2 Hosting is, in fact, fast. In the past 6 months, they have delivered an amazing average speed of 286 ms.
Reliable Uptime of 99.99%
On top of being lightning-fast, A2 Hosting is also reliable. They had some trouble a few years ago when their uptime struggled to reach the industry standard of 99.93%. However, they’ve turned the problems around and achieved an average of >99.99% uptime. The total downtime of their servers was only 13 minutes.
Hostgrator
HostGator is one of the best-known web hosting companies out there. I guess those Super Bowl ads helped with that a bit.They’ve revamped their offering lately and now offer several interesting hosting plans and tiers (based on your needs). You’ll find classic shared web hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated servers.
Specification:
- From $2.75 / month
- Traffic allowed: unmetered
- Disk Space: unmetered
- Free Domain
- Uptime: 99.94% (last 3 months)
Ease of Use
HostGator is tailor-made for beginner bloggers or webmasters. Their site is full of tutorials, walkthroughs, and more to help you navigate the murky world of DNS and data centers. They also have extra features for beginners who are looking to set up a site without the hassle of hiring other people to design, build, and manage everything.
Customer Support
Similar to other known providers like SiteGround and Dreamhost, HostGator provides a knowledge base, phone, email, and live chat support. We tested out their live chat option. We asked a simple question about their shared hosting plans and got connected to a customer rep within two minutes. The replies were fast and knowledgeable.
Page Load Speed
HostGator’s servers had no issues keeping our site up and live over the past half a year. However, what about their server speed? HostGator delivered an average page loading time of 688 ms. Moreover, HostGator has consistently improved its page loading times. Not a very long time ago, it took more than a second to load our site.
Uptime
HostGator has posted an average of 99.85% uptime with over six hours of downtime over the last 6 months which is below industry-standard result. Another good thing is that they have an uptime guarantee which says that if they drop below 99.90%, you can receive one month of credit on your account.
Green Geeks
GreenGeeks is one of the first web hosting companies on the market that position themselves as eco-friendly web hosting. What this means in practice is that GreenGeeks claims to be “putting back three times the power they consume into the grid in the form of renewable energy.” Offer-wise, GreenGeeks doesn’t lag behind the other players out there. There’s standard shared hosting, WordPress hosting, specially optimized WooCommerce hosting, VPS hosting, and also plans for resellers.
Specification:
- From $2.95 / month
- Traffic allowed: unmetered
- Disk Space: unmetered
- Free Domain
- Uptime: 100% (last 3 months)
Reliable Uptime Performance
GreenGeeks didn’t disappoint in this area. They delivered an average uptime of 99.93% during the 6-month testing period. Throughout the whole half a year their uptime was between 99.96% and 100%, except in August when the uptime was only 99.66%.
Good Page Loading Time (478 ms)
Another important factor to look for when choosing a host is their server speed. Why? There’s a 32% probability of a site’s bounce rate increasing if it takes one to three seconds to load a website. In short, the longer your page takes to load, the more likely visitors will leave. And that’s just one of the ways how speed can affect your website. Once again, GreenGeeks didn’t let us down. Their speed is better than the industry average, clocking in at around 478 ms.
Good Support with Quick Answers
Customer support is another “big element” of the review. We tested out GreenGeeks’ live chat and were connected to a customer support agent within a minute, who then answered questions quickly and concisely.
inmotion hosting
InMotion Hosting is one more very affordable web hosting service that’s not missing out on any of the important features.Even on the entry-level plan, you still get a free SSL, free email address, hack and malware protection, DDoS protection, automatic backups, custom server optimizations to improve speed, and even a website builder tool to make it easier for beginners to craft their own websites.
Specification:
- From $2.29 / month
- Traffic allowed: unmetered
- Disk Space: 10 GB
- Uptime: 100% (last 3 months)
- Load time US: 0.46s
Good Speed 311 ms
Fast loading times aren’t just great for user experience. Speed is also factored into Google’s algorithm for dictating where in the rankings you’ll show up (you know – the whole SEO thing). How fast your page loads has one of the biggest impacts on your bottom line, forcing half your traffic to bounce if it doesn’t load within two seconds.
Great Average Uptime of 99.97%
InMotion Hosting’s average uptime clocked in at 99.97% with an hour and 20 minutes of downtime based on our careful tracking and monitoring over the last 6 months. This is a nearly perfect result and if it wasn’t for May’s poor uptime, InMotion’s performance would have fluctuated between 99.97% and 100%.
Customer Support
InMotion Hosting has a variety of support options to choose from: live chat, phone, email, and even Skype. We tested out their live chat option. We asked a few simple questions about their shared hosting plans and the customer rep connected within a few minutes. The replies were a bit delayed and concise, but still good enough to keep our attention and not go looking elsewhere for answers.
IONOS
IONOS is a web host most known for its focus on the European market. They’ve been offering web hosting since 1988, which gives them a unique 30+ year experience that’s not too common in the web hosting industry.They offer a wide range of different hosting options, including shared hosting, WordPress hosting, ASP.NET hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated servers, web hosting plans for agencies, and more.
Specification:
- From $0.5 / month
- Traffic allowed: unmetered
- Disk Space: unmetered
- Free Domain
- Uptime: 99.98% (last 3 months)
Strong Uptime – 99.97%
One of the most important metrics that we measure when it comes to hosting providers is uptime. You’re paying to have your website online. If uptime is lacking and your site is routinely going down, then your hosting service has failed you in its most crucial area.
Loading Speed 713 ms
A slow site isn’t just annoying: when a page takes too long to load, many of your potential visitors will already look elsewhere. Why is that? Site performance is a big deal when Google examines your site. Your all-important SEO score, which determines your placement on the world’s most popular search engine, relies heavily on it.
Improved User Interface
IONOS doesn’t use the classical cPanel, instead, they have developed their own custom backend. For those who are used to the cPanel, it may be confusing and take some time to get used to in the beginning, but overall, it’s rather easy to use.
Godaddy
With more than a thousand website hosting services out there, it’s pretty difficult to find a host that’s perfect for your needs. At first glance, GoDaddy is great, having low prices and some great features. Well, we want to help make the decision easier for you. So, we have signed up with GoDaddy to test their performance. We took a deep look at all their features and terms and wrote this definitive review to make it easier for you to know if GoDaddy meets your needs.
Specification:
- – Great Page Speed (280 ms)
- -Hosting Price $2.65/month
- • Good Uptime (99.98%)
- • Over 125+ One-Click Install Applications
- – 24/7 network security
Great Page Load Time at 280 ms
This might come as a bit of a surprise: Our GoDaddy test site has shown a great average page loading time as low as 280 ms over the past 6 months. This is somewhat surprising because years ago you wouldn’t associate cheaper web hosts like GoDaddy with performance as great as this.
Basic Cheap Plan is Good Value
When we originally reviewed GoDaddy (in 2017), their cheapest shared hosting plan was too expensive, and the features were really limited. At least compared to the competition. Now, though, it seems they’ve done a 180-degree turn. Currently, the Economy plan pricing is only $2.99/month with a 12-month contract.
Good Uptime at 99.98%
GoDaddy delivers quite average uptime on their shared hosting plans. Their 6-month average uptime is 99.98%. An uptime rate of 99.98% means about an hour and a half of downtime per year, which is not too bad compared to some other hosts we’ve reviewed.
Customer Support
One feature that we’re always happy to see is 24/7/365 customer support. GoDaddy offers exactly that. They have a live chat, a great network of international phone support in a number of languages, and a decent knowledge base. So, to test out their live chat support, we asked them a few basic questions about the site backups.
Godaddy
Hostinger has made a name for itself by being the budget-friendly option among the best web hosting services, and it’s hard to argue against that. The entry-level plan at Hostinger is the cheapest on this list, and the server parameters aren’t too shabby either.Apart from that, Hostinger offers many different hosting types, starting from shared options, to cloud hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS (running on both Linux and Windows), and even other unique types of hosting such as Minecraft server hosting.
Specification:
- From $1.99 / month
- Traffic allowed: 10,000 visits/month
- Disk Space: 30 GB
- Uptime: 99.52% (last 3 months)
- Load time US: 1.06s
Fast Load Time – 307 ms
Fast page loading times are vital for any website user’s experience with a site.Have you ever tried to open a web page only to get stuck waiting for the site to load for what seems like ages?We all have.Moreover, you probably didn’t stick around for long. Hostinger boasts servers in the USA, Asia, and Europe (UK). Each is reportedly connected to a 1000 Mbps connection, which ensures that loading times are stable.
Good Uptime 99.97%
Uptime is the most important thing to check out when considering a web host.Hostinger delivered an average of 99.97% uptime with an hour and a half of downtime over the six months. In total they had 26 outages, the biggest of them was in July when the average uptime was only 99.90%. Other than that, Hostinger’s uptime fluctuated between 99.96% and 100%.
Multilingual Customer Support
Customer support can either make or break a web host. If your site is down for some reason and you’re unable to get in touch with a customer support person ASAP, you might lose out on a ton of sales. Hostinger doesn’t disappoint. The company offers a multilingual customer support team, live chat, and they integrated Intercom as their main support system. Live chat is only accessible if you’re logged into a Hostinger account, though. We’re glad that Hostinger offers live chat, but it would make more sense if they offered it to everyone.
FAQ
1. What Uptime Guarantee Do You Offer
When it comes to web hosting, there’s nothing more important than uptime and reliability. If a hosting company isn’t able to keep your website online and available to visitors, they aren’t doing their job. Most good web hosting providers offer an uptime guarantee of 99.9%, though some go as far as 99.99%. If a hosting company you’re considering doesn’t offer a guarantee, make sure to find out what their historical uptime rate has been to see if they may still be worth considering.
2. What Types of Hosting Are Available?
There are several different types of web hosting available. Knowing which one you need today, and what you may need to upgrade to in the future, is important. The following are the most common types of hosting that companies should offer:
Shared hosting
Virtual private servers (VPS)
Cloud hosting
Dedicated servers
3. Is it Free to Upgrade to a New Hosting Package?
Most small businesses are going to start out needing a simple shared hosting package. If the site becomes more advanced or you start generating a lot of traffic, you may need to upgrade to a VPS or even a dedicated server. If your site reaches that point, you want to be sure that the hosting company can upgrade you to a new type of hosting easily and without any downtime.
4. What Type of Security Do You Have in Place to Protect Websites?
Cyber security is extremely important, and for many companies, that starts with protecting the website. Your hosting provider should offer a variety of different things to help keep your site protected. Some of the most common security features offered by good hosting companies include:
distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation
Virus and malware scanning
Email scanning
5. Do You Offer a Free SSL Certificate?
Secure sockets layer (SSL) is an important type of security that helps to ensure not only that your site is protected, but also that users who visit your site are kept safe. In addition to being important for security, having an SSL certificate in place is also important for SEO, which is essential if you want to get traffic to your site.
6. Do You Allow Add-on Domains?
If you ever plan on having more than one website, you’ll want to make sure that your hosting company allows multiple add-on domains. There are many reasons why having multiple domains is important for small businesses, and whether you’re doing that from the start or only want to consider it in the future, you want your hosting company to support it.