Best Wordpress Hosting
A Review of the Top 4 Websites That Offer the Best Wordpress Hosting
It’s hard to imagine that anyone today hasn’t heard about Wordpress. It truly is one of the easiest ways to build a website for any type of industry. Our review will discuss four (4) web hosting firms to determine who offers the best Wordpress hosting.
Anyone who has or intends to build a website will need to setup web hosting. There are so many hosting companies today, it’s hard to pick the right one. If I had to pick the two most important issues to consider when selecting a hosting provider, it would be tech support and website speed.
We’ve been around for a while, and have had the opportunity to try out many hosting firms. Some have been good, and some should not be in the business.
Out of the many 100’s of web hosting firms, we’ve narrowed it down to four. Out of these four, two are in the low cost range and the other two are in the higher price range.
All of them advertise managed Wordpress hosting, and offer various options. After each category, we’ll give you our honest opinion as to who has the best Wordpress hosting.
The hosts that we will review are Bluehost, SiteGround, WP Engine, and Kinsta. We’ll begin in the order they are listed.
- 99.98% up-time
- Pricing starts at $3.95 per month
- 24/7 chat & telephone support
- Organized in 2003
- Recommended by Wordpress
Bluehost is one of the large hosting providers and is very popular with those who are just starting out with their first website. After you sign up with them, you can usually begin to install Wordpress in about 15 minutes.
Because of their low price, it makes them an obvious choice for many who are on a limited budget. For that price range, you’ll be on a shared server. What that means is if some other website on your server has a large spike in traffic, your site is slowed down or may even go down.
Let me hasten to say that in the many years that I have had sites on shared hosting, my site has never gone down. I have seen periods of slow loading times, however.
- 99.9% up-time average
- Pricing starts at $3.95 per month
- 24/7 chat & telephone support
- Organized in 2004
- Recommended by Wordpress
- Daily backups
On SiteGround, you’ll find more features like daily backups and enhanced security. These additional options, however, won’t be as good as the fully managed Website hosting you will see on our last two reviews.
In my experience with them, I found support very fast to respond, and very knowledgeable. There are many more good features at SiteGround, most being done in the background automatically. This frees you up to do other things.
This is also shared hosting like in Bluehost, and subject to the same problems. I can recall a couple of occasions when my site slowed down to a crawl because of a couple of other sites on my server that must have been quite busy.
I complained to tech support, and they moved my site to a different server, solving that problem quickly. Just in case you haven’t sensed this, I’m a speed geek and will go to almost any length to get it, as you will see shortly.
Of the two web hosts reviewed in the lower price range, I believe that SiteGround is the best Wordpress hosting for the money. The additional features add more positive feelings and I do recommend them.
- 99.9% average up-time
- Pricing starts at $30.00 per month
- 24/7 chat & telephone support
- Organized in 2010
- Managed Wordpress hosting
No, your eyes weren’t playing tricks on you – the lowest price is $30.00 per month. But, if you want the site loading times of the pro’s who use this website host, it’s not cheap. The primary reason that it can offer high speed is that it runs on the Google Cloud Platform.
WP Engine has grown in the past year or so by acquiring Flywheel, a competitor in the hosting arena. I used Flywheel for a short time and found it cumbersome. Another acquisition was StudioPress, a designer of Wordpress themes.
If you’re just starting out, the price may be too high to overcome. One complaint that I have is their additional pricing if you exceed the limits in traffic. They have a way of pricing that can add a lot of money to that $30.00 per month.
The majority of site owners don’t exceed those limits, so it probably isn’t too material. As a managed Wordpress hosting firm, most of the normal tweaks and adjustments are handled at the server level, meaning you don’t have to do it.
They have a list of Wordpress plugins that they have banned because they conflict with their system. Tech support is top notch and very responsive as well. Telephone support is available from the second-tier level and up.
- 99.9% average up-time
- Pricing starts at $30.00 per month
- 24/7 chat & support ticket
- Organized in 2013
- Premium Wordpress managed hosting
Kinsta is also a fully managed Wordpress hosting firm and offers very fast site loading times. I can testify to this. I moved my website to them a couple of months ago (remember I said I was a speed geek).
From day one, it loads in under one second using Pingdom as the test. At the other low budget hosts, 2 to 3 seconds was the norm, and if during a high traffic period, longer.
Kinsta, like WP Engine, runs on the Google Cloud Platform, and handles all caching at the server level. As a result, site loading times are very fast. They also have a listing of banned plugins, and do not allow any caching plugins. Gzip compression is handled at the server level as well.
All of Kinsta’s hosting plans offer the same features, and there is no reason to upgrade to get them. Kinsta offers a highly secure and stable environment and has clients like Intuit and General Electric.
Tech support is absolutely fantastic. They only hire Wordpress and Linux engineers who are experienced as developers. They also offer multilingual tech support with your choice of one of 10 languages for your dashboard and website.
I had first hand experience with their tech support on several occasions setting up my site. They answered my request in a matter of minutes, and quickly resolved the problem. They even followed up to make sure I was okay.
On another occasion, I needed to make some changes in the DNS section, and wasn’t sure if I could do it. Tech support offered to do it for me, but I wanted to learn it myself.
So, who offers the best Wordpress hosting?
For me, the first choice is simple, based on my experience. I believe that Kinsta is slightly ahead of WP Engine in features and is the best Wordpress hosting in this class. Both offer the same entry pricing of $30.00, and the basic features are about the same.
The old saying, “you get what you pay for”, hits the nail on the head with WP Engine and Kinsta. When they say managed Wordpress hosting, they mean it. The only down side with it is that it costs a little more.
Most individuals will be perfectly satisfied with the cheaper shared hosting. I know because I used it for many years. Unfortunately, I spent most of my time trying to make my web site faster, but you’re always at the mercy of the web host when you are on a shared hosting server.
Once you try sites like Kinsta or WP Engine, and you’re a speed geek like myself, you never want to go back. Try this demo at Kinsta just to give you an idea. And speed is not all of the criteria to make a judgement. Tech support is critical, and these two excel in that area.
For those who opt for the lower cost hosting would do well with either Bluehost or SiteGround. My personal choice for the best Wordpress hosting in that class is SiteGround. With my experience at these two hosts, I believe that SiteGround is slightly ahead of Bluehost.
There are those that will disagree with me, and that’s okay. Try them during an introductory period and pick the one that you feel offers the best Wordpress hosting for you.
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Gust Lenglet – Platinum Author
