Web hosting

Which web host fits you?

Start with how long you can commit. Shared hosts price the first term far below the renewal, so when you compare offers, the prepay length and the renewal rate decide what you really pay, not the headline figure in large type.

• If you can prepay four years: Hostinger Premium. $143.52 covers all 48 months, the lowest four-year cost we found, and Hostingstep logged 99.99% uptime. Backups are weekly.
• If one year is your limit: DreamHost Launch. Year one costs $34.68 for 25 sites with daily backups.
• If you want a person on the phone: SiteGround, Bluehost or IONOS. SiteGround adds daily backups and staging but renews at $17.99 a month, the highest we rank.
• If you may leave within 12 months: IONOS Plus, $12 for the first year. Keep it for quiet sites: it was the only host here to fail Hostingstep’s 2026 load test, with 65.4% errors.
• If you’ve outgrown shared limits: a VPS such as DigitalOcean from $4 a month, or managed WordPress hosting if nobody wants to patch a server.

The default is Hostinger. Switch to DreamHost when a four-year prepayment ties up too much cash, and to SiteGround when phone support matters more than the renewal bill. Location changes the answer too. Visitors mostly in South America or Asia? Hostinger runs data centers on four continents, and GreenGeeks lets you choose North America, Europe or Asia-Pacific.

When should you not pay for web hosting at all?

Skip a hosting plan when your platform already includes one. Wix, Squarespace, Shopify and WordPress.com run the servers themselves, so a separate host only adds a second bill and a second login. Compare them in our website builder reviews.

One page needs even less. Carrd hosts three one-page sites free and charges $19 a year for a custom domain; see our landing page builders. Shared hosting earns its fee once you want WordPress with your own plugins, several sites on one account, or mailboxes on the same invoice.

Which web hosting traps catch most buyers?

Four traps cost buyers the most. All four sit on the pricing pages. The type is just smaller.

• The term behind the price. Hostinger’s $2.99 needs 48 months paid upfront; Bluehost’s $3.99 needs 36. That monthly figure is an average, not a bill.
• The renewal jump. SiteGround StartUp rises about 4.5 times after year one, GreenGeeks Lite about 4.7 times and IONOS Plus 14 times.
• Year-one freebies. Every host here gives the domain free for the first year only. Hostinger’s mailboxes last a year, DreamHost’s three months.
• Refund exclusions. Domain fees are usually non-refundable, and DreamHost refunds only card and PayPal payments.

Most people miss the freebie trap until the second invoice. In practice, the cheapest fix is to register the domain at a registrar that charges the same every year, such as Porkbun at $11.08 for a .com with fees included. Then compare hosts on four-year cost:

Don’t trust the monthly figure on a checkout page. When you renew, the bill arrives at the rate in the third column.

How do we build our web hosting reviews?

Every score is a research score: one published rubric applied to evidence you can check yourself. We don’t run uptime monitors or speed tests of our own, so each performance figure names its source.

Two outside sources carry that evidence. Review Signal’s 2026 under-$25 benchmark rated Bluehost, DreamHost and GreenGeeks Top Tier, but it measured WordPress plans priced $17.95 to $24.99 a month, not the entry shared plans. Hostingstep published uptime and load-test data from October 2025 to September 2026. It is an affiliate site and doesn’t name its monitoring tools, so we read it next to official terms, never instead of them. Prices are US list prices from each host’s own page; SiteGround’s come from its world site in USD before VAT, because siteground.com redirected us.

Read a score as a weighted summary of the five criteria below. Equal displays are ordered by the unrounded figure: Bluehost, GreenGeeks and IONOS all show 7.7. Commissions never move a score. Each category has its own rubric, so compare these numbers with each other, not with VPS scores. Web hosting sits inside our hosting and domains section.