You don’t have to get WordPress hosting for your WP site, but it sure takes things to another level. Choosing the best WordPress hosting for your needs will simplify the CMS installation and boost your overall experience. You’ll benefit from a preconfigured environment, improved plugin management, one-click installs, automatic WP updates, and more!

At HostAdvice, we have made significant efforts to bring you the best choices for WordPress hosting. Our experts are professionals with years of experience who have bought each plan and reported first-hand as regular customers. The HA team performs side-by-side comparisons, speed, uptime and reliability tests, and other vital actions during the testing phase.

Check Our Best WordPress Hosting Providers:

1. HostArmada – Best Managed WordPress Hosting Provider
2. ChemiCloud – Best WordPress Hosting Providers For Beginners
3. Ultahost – Top WordPress Hosting for Features
4. Cloudways – Best SSD WordPress Hosting Provider
5. Verpex Hosting – Cheapest WordPress Hosting

Full Overview of our Best WordPress Providers:

Ranking comparison between the Top Providers

What Is WordPress Hosting, and Do You Actually Need It?

WordPress hosting is a web hosting service preconfigured for WordPress, the most popular CMS worldwide. It’s not a type of hosting product like shared, VPS, or dedicated hosting, but more of an add-on to traditional web hosting plans, such as reseller hosting.

This hosting is a specialized solution for WordPress that integrates perfectly with WP sites. It improves the website security, performance, and overall functionality by specific features and options, such as one-click installs, better plugin management, automated updates, tailored WordPress customer support, and so on.

In general, WordPress hosting providers intend to offer a package that simplifies, secures, and speeds up the WordPress installation and management. Still, the offer can vary significantly from one web host to another, primarily depending on the type of WordPress hosting you choose, your needs, and your budget. For more information about WordPress costs check out our WordPress pricing page.

The thing is, WordPress hosting is not a prerequisite for hosting a WordPress site, meaning you don’t have to buy WP hosting. Still, if I were you, I would select this alternative. Sure, you can host your WP website on a generic server, but it’s far more time-consuming and lacks the needed features for your website’s optimal performance. This service is highly convenient if you are a beginner, mainly due to the preconfigured environment for WordPress, range of WP-specific features, ease of use, and 24/7 availability of WP experts.

What Are The Advantages Of WP Hosting?

Each type of web hosting (shared, VPS, or dedicated) can be optimized for the CMS, making it WordPress hosting. The question is, how does WordPress hosting exceed generic hosting?

Here’s why you need a WordPress optimized service over a traditional web hosting plan:

• You get a preconfigured environment for a fast and easy setup
• Better uptime, reliability, and performance with less work on your part
• It’s a speed-optimized solution that improves loading speeds, SEO, and customer satisfaction
• WordPress hosting is also optimized for performance tweaks, especially with managed WP
• Security features adjusted for WP-specific attacks (reduced danger of malicious third parties)
• Improved plugin function, automated updates, and up-to-date software
• Significant ease of use with a user-friendly interface – it’s easy to add plugins, SSL certificates, perform backups, and more (only a few clicks)
• You get access to many customization options (website design, ads), themes, and features
• Customer support consists of WordPress experts qualified to solve all your issues with the hosting and boost your performance

The Different Types Of WP Hosting

As mentioned, you cannot find WordPress hosting on the specter of web hosting plans alongside shared, VPS hosting, or dedicated servers. Instead, each web hosting plan can be optimized for the CMS. If you start browsing, you’ll indeed find more than one WordPress hosting solution. Further on, you will encounter several classifications based on different factors.

In general, you can make a distinction between shared WordPress hosting, VPS, cloud, and dedicated (VDS) WP hosting, but more on those later.

HostAdvice combines different review methodologies to separate and rank the best WordPress hosting services. Our experts are always a step ahead with their approaches, meaning they continually upgrade their ways of doing things to remain up-to-date with all innovation and new releases. For instance, we have recently introduced new uptime and performance measurement processes, relying on real-time results.

Each ranking is category-specific. We establish the most important factors we’re looking at when we give rank for a particular category, in this case, WordPress hosting. Then, we allocate percentages to different factors depending on their importance for a WordPress hosting service – the higher the weight, the more critical the factor. Apart from independent tests and weighting, our ranking is also based on genuine user reviews.

HostAdvice’s AI technology has sorted the best WordPress web hosting providers based on several key factors:

• Types of WordPress Hosting Offered (5%): Availability of shared, VPS, cloud, and dedicated (VDS) WordPress hosting.
• Uptime Commitment (8%): Can the WP host keep your site online at all times? Offline website translates to the loss of customers, sales, and SEO. So, it would be best to strive towards an uptime guarantee of 99.95% or more. Also, make sure to get a provider that compensates you for downtime, acting as a reassurance of their quality.
• Speed Optimization (9%): A fast-loading website boosts your users’ experience and customer satisfaction. WordPress recommended hosts have more than one server location. Optimally, you would get a service close to your target audience to reduce latency. Other speed-enhancing components include free Cloudflare CDN, caching, and fast servers (Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd, Varnish, and Squid).
• Available Space and Bandwidth (7%): does the WordPress plan/hosting setup allows for one or more websites? What can you host (high-quality images, videos, etc.)? You should consider the type of storage, the amount of memory per website, and the available bandwidth for traffic.
• Scalability Options (6%): How many visitors can your WordPress hosting plan support? What if you exceed this limit? Can you quickly upgrade to more resources, and will the WP host help you in the process?
• Security Enhancements (7%): With WordPress hosting, you should look for specific security features, including daily backups, firewalls, malware scanning and removal, monitoring for malicious plugins, automatic updates, and SSL certificates.
• Ease of Use (8%): The best WordPress hosting solutions are beginner-friendly, providing easy-to-use workflow tools to facilitate your experience. It would be best if you got an intuitive interface to handle installs, add plugins, and more.
• WP-Specific Support (12%): Quality WordPress hosting plans come with a dedicated WordPress team available 24/7 to assist you in all issues you might face with the CMS. These professionals can understand, assess, and quickly resolve your queries.
• Developer Tools and Extras (5%): These features facilitate building and administering your website and are especially important for WP users with experience with the CMS – unlimited development sites, staging sites, updates, SSH/Bash Access, Perl, Python, Node.js, Git, WP CLI, Drush, PHP Frameworks, etc.
• User Reviews (30%): We especially value the experience of worldwide customers with a particular WordPress hosting service, including beginners, highly-experienced developers, and everything in between. User reviews form the base of our ranking since they provide insights into different aspects of operation; they are honest, transparent, and valuable.
• Starting Price (3%): Whether you are willing to get the most expensive or the best free hosting for WordPress, you should establish the quality you will get for the price, aka, the price-value ratio. For more about the cost of wordpress hosting,

Types of WordPress Hosting and Which Is the Right One for You?

As you can see, today’s market supplies you with a wide range of WordPress hosting services, and it’s up to you to choose. Sure, you must be confused – shared WordPress, cheap WordPress, managed WordPress, and so on. Which one should you get? Let us explain the different categories and their intended use; this way, you can make the best choice for your business.

As mentioned earlier, each type of web hosting can become WordPress hosting. The WordPress versions of shared hosting, VPS, and dedicated hosting solutions offer the same qualities as generic web hosting – the only difference is the addition of WordPress optimization.

Shared WordPress Hosting

Even though you share the server with other users, shared WP servers offer better performance than traditional shared hosting. You can expect one-click installs, automatic updates to the WordPress core, themes and plugins, and a knowledgeable support team within these plans.

Shared WordPress hosting is best suited for beginners and small businesses without significant skill or experience. With this option, the web host takes over server management and upkeep. As a customer, you will benefit from sufficient (but not excessive) resources and a user-friendly control panel. The best part is that shared WP hosting is the most affordable option.

However, the downside of shared WP hosting is that you can face security risks and cross-contamination from other websites on the same shared server. Your site can also suffer from downtime during server maintenance, and you will have no control over the server specs. So, if you go for this option, it’s imperative to choose a quality web host that properly configures the shared environment to protect its customers on the same server.

VPS WordPress Hosting

Like shared hosting, with VPS WordPress hosting, you would once again share the server with other users. However, in this case, the web host utilizes a virtualization technology or cloud hosting to divide one physical server into multiple virtual units. In turn, you will get dedicated resources, such as CPU, RAM, or Bandwidth, at an affordable price.

On the good side, other users cannot pull your resources. Instead, each of you gets your personal virtual space. So, you can benefit from a share of allocated resources and self-contained software with an OS, mimicking a dedicated server with more flexibility.

Simply put, VPS WordPress hosting falls somewhere in between shared and dedicated WP solutions – you get the best of both worlds; reserved resources at an affordable price. It’s the perfect choice for SMBs and websites with medium to high traffic. It can also work for eCommerce stores, depending on the provider.

Still, VPS WordPress hosting can be a bit expensive. Also, if you are an enterprise in need of control over the hardware, a VPS will not be sufficient (a dedicated server is the better alternative in this regard).

Dedicated (VDS) WordPress Hosting

A dedicated WordPress hosting solution will store only your files and data. As the website owner, you will receive complete control over the server. You can optimize and configure the server to your liking without having to accommodate anyone else’s needs. You will get the ultimate freedom, better security for your site, unlimited bandwidth, and reserved resources.

Simply put, you won’t compete with neighboring sites for anything. Dedicated servers offer the best potential, performance, and speed, and due to this, they are the most expensive hosting alternatives.

Furthermore, dedicated WordPress servers also mean greater responsibility. You will have to take care of the server environment, including the operating system, IT solutions, maintenance, updates, etc. So, you will have to devote time and resources. After all, you cannot expect support for the simplest tasks, such as regular server scans and patches, when you are utilizing this advanced solution.

So, dedicated WordPress hosting is the best choice for enterprises and websites with high traffic, in-house development teams with skill and experience to make the most of the available resources.

Managed WordPress Hosting

Usually, providers utilize dedicated servers for managed WordPress hosting. However, you can also find this solution on VPS, cloud hosting, or even shared server environments – so it’s a unique offer.

The web hosting company, in this case, takes over all server optimization and maintenance responsibilities, meaning they handle all technical aspects, including backups, speed, uptime, security, and updates.

With this option, you would leave the “heavy-lifting” to professionals with extensive experience to control the server. In turn, you can expect a stable website, lightning-fast loading speeds, incredible security, staging sites, and dedicated support.

On the downside, managed WordPress hosting might impose some plugin restrictions. It’s also more expensive compared to shared WP hosting.

Managed WordPress hosting is the best choice for teams without advanced IT knowledge and skills or websites coping with high traffic levels and extensive data.

What Are The Requirements For A WordPress Server?

While some of the biggest brands use WordPress and know what they should be looking for, you might be experiencing some difficulty in this regard. So, let’s review what requirements should each WordPress server satisfy at a minimum.

First, WordPress recommended hosts offer PHP version 7.4 or greater, MySQL version 5.7 or greater/MariaDB version 10.2 or greater, and HTTPS support. In addition, the CMS recommends getting a web host that supports Apache or Nginx as the most robust and featureful server for running WordPress. Still, keep in mind that any server that supports PHP and MySQL will do.

It would be best if you also dedicated special attention to the security features of the WordPress hosting provider. If the web host runs PHP apps, such as WordPress, on your account’s username instead of the server’s default shared username, we are speaking of better security. Ensure you check the entire offer to protect your site from any malicious activities on time. Finally, it would be best to get 1 GB or more disk space, at least 512 MB RAM, and a 1.0GHz+ processor.

And if you are just starting– you shouldn’t worry much. Reputable WordPress hosting companies clearly state their offerings to be understandable to beginners and professionals. You can check how many websites a specific WP plan is sufficient for, the amount of bandwidth, storage, and so on.

What To Look At To Find Your Best WordPress Web Hosting?

You got up here; now you are on to the purchase. So, the only question left is, what should you look for in a quality WordPress web hosting for your business? We’re here to help – here are the key traits you should look for in the best WordPress hosting:

• Type of WordPress Hosting: First things first, you must establish what you need for your business. Sure, you are getting WordPress-specific hosting, but you can go in any direction – including shared, VPS, or dedicated environment. Do you need managed support as well? Scroll up to our thorough explanations and recommended uses of each to be able to choose the best WP hosting type for your site.
• An Uptime Guarantee: It’s a must – regardless of what anyone says. The WordPress web hosting company should be able to keep your site online at all times. If you experience downtime, you can lose a lot of visitors, SEO ranking, sales and face lower customer satisfaction. It would be best to get a provider with at least 99.95% guaranteed uptime – the closer to 100%, the better.
• Blazing Speed: WordPress optimization by itself should boost your website performance. Nowadays, people want things, and they want them fast. Your visitors will leave your site if it takes over two seconds to load. On the good side, you can easily test a WP provider’s speed. At this point, you should look for a well-established data center network, along with features such as SSD drives, Apache or Nginx servers, caching, and Cloudflare CDN.
  
  Note

  Note: You want to be able to choose a server location that’s close to your target market’s geographical location to cater to their needs better – this reduces latency, thus improving speed and customer satisfaction.
• WP-Specific Security: You put up a lot of effort to build your site and publish great content to drive high traffic. It would be terrible to lose all the hard work because of a hack or DDoS attack. Ensure that the hosting provider supports a variety of WordPress security hardening technologies, including 2-Factor Authentication (2FA), Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), Secure Shell (SSH), activity log, and the dedicated firewall. Also, keep in mind that the best hosting for WordPress offers SSL certificates, the DDoS protection system, and the malware removal tool. Besides, look for backup solutions and the site cleanup feature, which are very important for restoring your website in the case of a security breach.
• Traffic Volume: You should also consider how much traffic your website gets when estimating your needs. Say you have 5,000 monthly visitors. You don’t want to be paying for 20,000 because you will spend your money and won’t get anything extra in return. At the same time, you don’t want to get a WP plan optimized for 2,000 visitors per month because it’s not sufficient – it will harm your performance, speed, and SEO rankings. Match your needs with the WP hosting provider’s offer, and you will be good to go.
• Bandwidth and Disk Space Limits: The same applies to your site storage, bandwidth, and any other resource in this regard. A good WP hosting company will be fully transparent in this regard. You should check how many websites the plan supports, what kind of files you can post, how fast the transfer is, how much you can transfer, and so on.
• Scalability Options: You chose the plan sufficient for your needs. But what happens when these needs increase – you might get more traffic or start posting more, so you need more storage or bandwidth? Whatever the case, the WordPress web hosting company should support your growth. They should not allow your site to crash but handle the influx instead. The best-case scenario is getting cloud WordPress hosting as the most flexible solution to scale.
• Plugin Access: The best WordPress hosting providers allow you the freedom to use any plugin that you like – they don’t restrict you to limited tools. Also, it would help if you looked for free licenses of different plugins, including Jetpack. It will help you to save money.
• WordPress Specific Support: The support team should focus only on WordPress rather than Drupal, Magento, or any other platform type. It ensures that you get support from the real experts, who can easily recognize the difference between a potential plugin conflict, a tricky theme, or a server-level issue. Also, they will help you with plugin updates and page optimization. The support team of the best WordPress hosting provider knows the exact setting required for your website to run at optimal performance.
• Other Features: Consider what other features you are getting with the WordPress plan. Will you enjoy the ease of use with the industry-standard cPanel and one-click installs? Can you expect a free domain name/transfer, website migration, free SSL certificates, and daily backups, or would you have to pay additionally for all this? Furthermore, consider WP-specific features, such as WordPress super caching, WP CLI, automatic WP updates, and more.
• A money-back guarantee: What if everything else fails and you’ve made a mistake with your choice? Well, you should at least be able to get your money back. Always check the refund policy before committing to a web host – it’s an additional security layer that you will be so grateful you got.

Our Expert Web Tips

While all might be perfect on paper, the reality can be pretty different. Here are the top five tips from our HostAdvice experts to easily detect shady WordPress providers.

• There’s a difference between regular rates and renewal rates: While you might get a one-time discount on your WordPress hosting plan, you should check whether it applies to the renewal rate as well (usually, it doesn’t). So, what if you get a monthly plan with a 90% discount? Well, you would face quite a shock when it renews the following month – you will pay way more. At this point, you should also compare the monthly offer with the annual plans. Web hosts usually offer better deals on longer-term contracts. However, to be able to benefit from this promotion, you would have to commit to the company for a year or more.
• Read the offers carefully: Free domains, free backups, free SSL certificates, free this, and that. But is it for real? Will you get this with the cheapest WordPress hosting plan, or is it just advertising? Usually, you have to get the most expensive plan or commit a year to benefit from these free add-ons. It’s a famous marketing trick among web hosts, so you should be wary of it!
• Unlimited is always limited: There’s no way, in reality, you can get unlimited storage, bandwidth, or websites. WordPress hosting plans are stored on physical hardware, which has its limitations. So, while a company might be advertising ‘unmetered’ resources, you should read the fine print to know what you are getting. You should contact customer support to get these details upfront if not specified. While these unlimited resources are sufficient for bloggers or small websites, they are indeed insufficient for high-traffic sites and large businesses.
• Know when you need a website migration: If you switch from one WordPress hosting provider to another, you need to transfer your website. The better alternative is to find a web host to migrate it for you for free. So, when you are looking for a new company, check whether this is included in the offer or not. Not all WP providers will grant the service for free. So, if you are paying for it, you should at least ensure it’s a human-powered migration to avoid any hassles and mistakes.
• Avoid unmanaged WordPress hosting: If you don’t have the skill, time, or experience to manage your WP-optimized plan, it’s best to leave this task to professionals. Unmanaged WP hosting plans grant you complete freedom over your server – you can install any tool you want and customize the environment to your liking without any hassle (well, that’s until you know how). You also get access to a full-featured hosting control panel and more features to utilize, and the best part is, it’s much cheaper than managed solutions. However, there will be no dedicated team of experts to guide you with everything. Instead, you have to rely on yourself or a team of developers. If you aren’t in such a position, the unmanaged solution will cost you way more in terms of lousy website performance, slow speeds, and bad SEO rankings.

Best WordPress Hosting By Region

Are you serving a particular target market in a specific geographic region? I would match the server location with my customer’s location if I were you. See, when the data center/server location is closer to your audience, you will reduce load times and eliminate latency. When visitors access your website, they will get all data and content without any delays. For instance, if your audience is in Germany, get a server in Germany (or at least in the surrounding areas in Europe). In turn, if your target market is the US, get a server in the US, and so on.

Fortunately, WordPress hosting providers tend to specialize in this regard. If you don’t know which provider to choose, feel free to follow our recommendations:

• Verpex– Best WordPress Hosting In The UK
• Bluehost – Best WordPress Hosting In India
  
  Note

  Note: While you might find negative reviews of worldwide customers of Bluehost, the company certainly excels in India – shown by a majority of positive reviews by real users. In other words, you can rest assured it’s the best WordPress hosting alternative for that particular region.
• Hostpapa – Best WordPress Hosting For Canada
• HostArmada - Best WordPress Hosting In Europe
• Interserver – Best WordPress Hosting In The USA

Best WordPress Hosting By Other Popular Demands

• 000Webhost - Best Free Web Hosting For WordPress
• Flywheel – Best WordPress Hosting For eCommerce
• WPEngine – Best WordPress Hosting For Agencies
• Convesio – Best WordPress Hosting For Bloggers
• HostArmada – Best WordPress Hosting For Beginners
• Webdock – Best WordPress Hosting For Developers
• Hostinger – Best WordPress Hosting For Designers & Photographers

Best WP Hosting: Final Recommendations

You can indeed “get away” with regular web hosting if you have a WordPress website. However, we honestly advise you to get a WP-optimized plan to make your site faster, easier to navigate, and more secure.

Still, you have to dedicate some time and effort to regular updates to maintain optimal performance. If you can’t do so, it’s best to go with managed WordPress hosting. This way, you can entirely rely on the web host to run your project smoothly, covering all plugin, theme, and PHP updates. But remember, this luxury comes at a price – you’ll always face a trade-off, and it’s up for you to decide.

In summary, the best WordPress hosting plan for your business will always depend on your requirements and preferences. Following the above-explained steps, tips, and recommendations, will surely put you on the right track. So, what are you waiting for? Get your WordPress-optimized plan today!