Search and compare WordPress hosting plans

INITIAL COST:

Hosting plans often offer the initial term (eg 36 months) at a lower rate.

Use the same ‘renewal’ rate as the ‘initial cost’ filters to see plans which keep the same cost for both initial terms and renewal terms. This represents a ‘good deal’ if the rates are low enough because they don’t differ from initial to renewal.

RENEWAL COST:

Hosting plans often ‘renew’ the initial term (eg 36 months) at a higher rate.

Use the same ‘renewal’ rate as the ‘initial cost’ filters to see plans which keep the same cost for both initial terms and renewal terms. This represents a ‘good deal’ over time.

SERVER TYPE:

A ‘shared server’ means you will have one server computer which handles traffic to your site AS WELL as other websites and will hence not quite be as fast. This is OK for small sites. If you are a business or expect a significant amount of traffic then choose ‘dedicated’ as this will mean you will have your website only on one server computer which will mean a faster website for you and your users. Dedicated servers will cost more.

MANAGED HOSTING:

A ‘managed hosting account’ will cost more as it does more for you by automating several of the software updates and security features needed to have a safe and well maintained website over time. It’s like maintaining your car in some ways.

TRUST PILOT SCORE:

This is the companies TrustPilot Review total out of 5. TrustPilot is an independent review platform so reviews can be more transparent. Do check out the reviews for any host, both good and bad, to see if there is anything you may feel uncomfortable about.

EIG is a large insurance company which also owns many many web hosting companies. Some people in the hosting community do not like to use these companies as they see them as polluting the industry with marketing of what some would say are not the best business practices. You can filter results by companies owned by the parent EIG or not. The later being independent companies.

HOSTING COMPANY:

There are many companies offering WordPress Hosting. We have only covered the companies you see in this list.

# OF WEBSITES:

It’s possible that you may have more than one domain name with which you want to host on the plan and as such you can choose a plan with multiple or even unlimited domain names.

# EMAIL ACCOUNTS:

The amount of email accounts you can create with a plan. If you have many staff then you may need a plan with many or even unlimited potential email addresses.

DISC SPACE:

This measures how much physical memory or storage your site will be able to have. For eg this would count images and the database as well as all the files. Images can bloat a website’s size in GB so be aware of this if your site is particularly image heavy. If so you may want a host plan on the larger end of this metric.

Whether or not this plan includes a free domain name with purchase of plan. If you already have a domain name then you don’t need to worry about this feature.

Some hosts will transfer your WordPress sites to their hosting platform on your behalf. Select yes to find hosts who will do this service for you.

Bandwidth is the amount of transferable data within a given amount of time and can roughly translate to how much ‘traffic’ you have on your site given that each user is using a small portion of it. The more users you have the more bandwidth you require.

This is a proxy for Bandwidth but a bit more palatable and gives you an idea of how many visitors your site will be able to handle on this plans shown. NB: These are assuming your site is performant and has been optimized. Your results may vary considerably if this is not the case.

The location of your server should be as close to your audience as possible. Often times this means anything in North America or Europe but could also be Sydney, Singapore or South America depending on your audience location. Don’t stress too much about this but some people like to maximize their load time by placing a server nearest their audience as there will be a small speed difference in page load when you align server location and your audience.