Follow this step by step tutorial to build and launch a WordPress site on Amazon Web Services. Click here to return to Amazon Web Services homepage. Contact Sales Support English. This tutorial is not recommended for business-level websites with high scalability needs. Add /admin to the end of the URL so it looks something like 54.192.32.
Choosing the right hosting for your WordPress website is very important. Your website’s health will rely on the hosting provider your use.
But how do you know which one is the best WordPress host?
There’s so many to choose from: Bluehost, SiteGround, HostGator… etc.
Whichever host you’re going to choose, keep in mind the 3 most important factors of a WordPress hosting:
- Speed – also known as “load time”
- Uptime – needs to be at least 99.94%
- Customer Support – they should help you with WordPress related questions.
I tested out 10 most popular “WordPress” hosting providers and checked their uptime over a period of 12 months.
Full disclosure: I earn a commission if you end up purchasing any of the web hosting services listed on this site through my referral links. This helps me to keep WebsiteSetup up-to-date. Thanks for your support.
P.S. I cannot guarantee you will get similar uptime or speed to your website as this varies on several different factors such as the hosting package you choose, your site size and the number of visitors your website gets.
10 Best WordPress Hosting Services
Let’s jump to the best hosting providers first, then move down the list to see which ones you should avoid. Without further ado, here are the 10 best web hosting services for WordPress in 2019:
1. Bluehost (www.Bluehost.com)
- Uptime: >99.99%
- Load Time: 419ms
- Support: 5/5
- Website: www.Bluehost.com
Bluehost is a popular hosting service among small business owners and bloggers. Hence the reason, I’m recommending Bluehost for people who want to create their website using WordPress.
They’re hosting more than 2 million websites and they belong to EIG who also owns HostGator.
How did Bluehost compare? Turns out quite good:
Their last 12-month average uptime is >99.99% and load time is 406ms. This means they’re the most reliable web hosting with only 1 hour of downtime per year. Surely a strong top 1 host.
BlueHost has 24/7 customer service available for any questions you may have regarding website setup. They’re not cheap, though. Prices start at $2.75 per month, but they throw in a free domain name (for 1-year) plus site migration for new accounts, too.
- PROS: Strong uptime and load time, free site transfer, free domain name, recommended by WordPress.org
- CONS: No option to pay monthly. (click to see if $2.75/mo discount is still valid)
2. HostGator Cloud (www.HostGator.com)
- Uptime: 99.97%
- Load Time: 421ms
- Support: 5/5
- Website: www.HostGator.com
HostGator was founded back in 2003 by Brent Oxley and later sold to Endurance International Group (EIG).
According to their website, they host more than 10 million domains making them one of the most popular web hosting providers on the planet (next to GoDaddy).
And for a reason!
Their last 10-month average load time is 421ms and uptime 99.97%. Not bad, in, over the past 12 months they were offline for only 3 hours. Plus, they were the third fastest web hosting service, only beaten by A2 Hosting (with a lower avg. uptime).
To give you a better overview of HostGator Cloud performance, take a look at the graph below (last 10 months):
Keep in mind that this isn’t a regular, HostGator shared hosting option. It’s the new and improved cloud hosting. They come with a pricey cost – $13.99/mo, but they’re currently discounted to $2.99/mo if you decide to buy 1 month or 6-month plan. After that, it renews to the regular price.
- PROS: Good load time, reliable, one-click install for WordPress, 1 free site transfer
- CONS: Higher renewal fee (click to see if their $2.99/mo discount is still valid).
3. SiteGround (www.SiteGround.com)
- Uptime: 99.99%
- Load Time: 714ms
- Support: 5/5
- Website: www.SiteGround.com
Since 2004, SightGround has grown to a large network of over 800,000 domain names around the world. Most of their staff is located in Bulgaria, but they’ve servers worldwide.
In this example, the “Start-Up Plan” (cheapest) is being used to monitor uptime and average load time.
In terms of uptime, SiteGround maintained an average uptime of 99.99% followed by a solid (not the best) load time of 714ms.
We also tested out their customer support by connecting with their live chat and asked several questions to evaluate their support team. They were friendly and helpful, answering questions quickly.
Additionally, SiteGround offers free transfers for existing website and they’re officially recommended by WordPress.
- PROS: Good uptime, stable speed, best WordPress support, free site transfer, officially recommended by WordPress, free SSL.
- CONS: Their GoGeek plan is expensive (click here to see SiteGround’s current pricing)
4. A2 Hosting (www.A2Hosting.com)
- Uptime: 99.91%
- Load Time: 392ms
- Support: 4/5
- Website: www.A2Hosting.com
Note from editor: We’ve put A2 Hosting here because they had the best load time. If we only take a look at their uptime, they wouldn’t be listed as #4th.
A2 Hosting is quite new in the WordPress hosting niche (founded in 2001). They became more popular only lately.
They claim to be 20x faster than their competitors. Somehow, they managed to achieve faster load time than SiteGround or HostGator.
They averaged 392ms in a period of 12 months. That is basically instant page loading, making impatient people happy because they won’t have to wait for pages to load. A2 Hosting implements caching, which stores data in a visitor’s browser, so they won’t have to request information from your website every time someone tries to access it.
Unfortunately, their uptime has slipped over the past few months to an average of 99.91% (currently 8 hours of downtime over a period of 12 months).
A2 offers 24/7 customer support through their live chat, email, phone, and ticketing systems. I checked this out by contacting their live support and they responded instantly with easy-to-understand responses.
- PROS: Fastest WordPress hosting, WordPress optimized servers
- CONS: Weak uptime (only 99.91%)
5. Site5 Hosting (www.Site5.com)
- Uptime: 99.98%
- Load Time: 704ms
- Support: 4/5
- Website: www.Site5.com
Site5, founded in 1999 by Matt Lightner (and later sold to EIG) promises the best web hosting for serious web designers.
After testing them for 12 months, Site5 delivered below average site load time of 704ms:
Their uptime isn’t anything spectacular. In fact, similarly to iPage, their avg. uptime over a period of 12 months is also 99.98% (ranked #6th).
They do provide good support through live chat, email, and phone support in case you have questions, along with a 90-day money back guarantee if you’d like to try them out anyway.
Site5 offers 3 pricing plans. The first, “hostBasic” is $6.95 per month, which allows you to have one website and free migrations. The second plan, “hostPro+Turbo” is $11.95 per month, which offers 24/7 live chat support, free migrations, and a free dedicated IP. The last plan, “hostPro” comes at $8.95 and offers unlimited websites and free migrations.
- PROS: Very flexible host
- CONS: Their price isn’t worth the value
6. iPage (www.iPage.com)
- Uptime: 99.98%
- Load Time: 831ms
- Support: 3/5
- Website: www.iPage.com
iPage was started in 1998 and has since grown to serve over one million websites. They’re once again owned by the Endurance International Group (EIG) brand. Honestly, I didn’t think they would perform well because they were suspiscously “cheap”.
I gave iPage Hosting a chance since they, too, call themselves as WordPress hosting. Luckily, I found them pretty reliable.
During this time they’ve managed to deliver 99.98% uptime.
The average loading time is 831ms. It’s not bad, but it’s well below the competition’s average.
iPage is cheap, though. They’re one of the cheapest hosting options I saw (behind one other hosting option) at $1.99 a month. This is the rate for 12-36 months, you would technically be locked into a super long-term deal to get that price. As you can see, you get what you pay for with speed and performance.
iPage is probably not the best option in hosting WordPress. Although the customer support and prices are nice, you don’t want to struggle with their slow speed and average uptime.
- PROS: Best cheap hosting for WordPress
- CONS: Not very knowledgeable customer support, bad reputation online.
7. Dreamhost (www.Dreamhost)
- Uptime: 99.94%
- Load Time: 724ms
- Support: 4/5
- Website: www.Dreamhost.com
The next WordPress hosting site that I looked at was DreamHost, who has another huge network of over 1.5 million sites (they’ve also been around since 1996).
They claim to be “Award-winning Web & WordPress Hosting” despite being under DDOS attack (in August) and providing data on an anti-Trump website with considerable court oversight.
Their page loading times came in at an average of 724ms over the same period. Not so good, huh?
Since they got DDOS attack their uptime is obviously very low – 99.90%. DreamHost also throws in a few other nice little add-ons.
First, you get unlimited bandwidth. They’ll credit your account for every hour that there was an issue with uptime. When I contacted customer support to ask a couple of questions, I got a fairly quick response.
One of DreamHost’s big drawbacks is their pricing. Their lowest plan is still almost double what some other hosting sites offer – $7.95 per month. On the plus side – you get the longest money back guarantee from DreamHost (97-days) to test drive their service before getting locked into a lengthy contract.
- PROS: Reliable, fast, good customer support
- CONS: Recent DDOS attack, expensive option for beginners
8. InMotion Hosting (InMotionHosting.com)
- Uptime: 99.94%
- Load Time: 803ms
- Support: 4/5
- Website: InMotionHosting.com
InMotion hosting was founded in 2001 and is a privately held hosting provider with a customer base of over 300,000 domains.
They also own a hosting website named “Web Hosting Hub”.
They advertise themselves as “best web hosting for business” and they’re pricing starts from $4.99.
First, let’s see how InMotion hosting performs:
InMotion delivered not so impressive uptime of 99.94% over the last twelve months. That seems to be consistent over the last months.
Keep in mind that the average speed in the hosting industry is about 790ms, and my InMotion Hosting test site’s average page loading time is slower than that – 803ms. So it seems not be as fast as HostGator or A2 Hosting, but it’s not the worst.
One of the drawbacks with InMotion Hosting is that there’s no instant account access. That means if you’re an international customer, outside North America for example, there might be a delay and a hassle when attempting to verify your new account.
In overall, you’d be “OK” with InMotion’s service, but don’t expect much more.
- Customer support: Reliable, fast, good customer support
- CONS: No instant activation for people outside the US
9. GreenGeeks (www.GreenGeeks.com)
- Uptime: 99.93%
- Load Time: 520ms
- Support: 4/5
- Website: www.GreenGeeks.com
GreenGeeks, founded in 2006 by Trey Gardner is now hosting over 300,000+ websites over their nine years in business.
They are the only “truly” green host in this list. They claim 99.9% uptime on their website. That’s almost zero downtime. It’s a bold claim to make! Can they live up to the hype?
When tested their performance, GreenGeeks delivered 99.93% uptime. So 0.03% above their promise. Not that bad.
That equates to 6 hours of downtime (not as good as SiteGround or HostGator Cloud, though).
Fortunately, GreenGeeks did show the same great results in speed as they did in uptime.
Their average loading time was 520ms – this is 36% higher than the industry average.
GreenGeeks has 24/7/365 U.S. based support via live chat, phone, or email support. Some of their other features are free data transfers, free domain name, and free site migration.
GreenGeeks goes for $3.95 per month and they offer a 30-day money back guarantee. Each pricing plan is all-inclusive too. Although GreenGeeks has excellent speed, their uptime is barely average. Which is kinda a deal breaker. I suggest you look at some of the better hosting options reviewed (like #1 and #2 above) that go for around the same price.
- PROS: Strong uptime, green hosting provider, free site transfer
- CONS: Load time for WordPress website should be better
10. Arvixe (www.Arvixe.com)
- Uptime: 97.75%
- Load Time: 5,977ms (!)
- Support: 2/5
- Website: www.Arvixe.com
Arvixe was originally founded in 2003 before later being acquired by EIG (again!).
Things aren’t starting great with their 99.75% uptime.
Take a close look at their average speed on the my Arvixe test site:
The industry average for speed is around 790ms. Even that is not very fast, to be honest – some of the fastest hosting providers load within ~300ms (or almost twice as fast).
How did Arvixe perform? An abysmal 5,779ms. That is unbelievably slow. Nearly impossibly slow. Just one second delay in page load time could cost Amazon 1.6 billion. Think what it can do to your online business.
Seems like Arvixe is just slow in general. Their customer support was slow too. I tried reaching out to ask a few basic questions and it took over an hour for a response.
Arvixe’s pricing is also on the expensive side of the fence at $7 a month. Upfront and in advance for a full two years. Any shorter plans means paying much more per month. Arvixe does offer unlimited bandwidth and a free domain name for life to their credit.
But you can do so much better than Arvixe. Once again, take a look at the first few names in this review for companies that exceed across the board in uptime, page loading times, customer support, and pricing.
- PROS: None
- CONS: Very slow load time, worst uptime, high cost, untrained customer support
Best WordPress Hosting? Quick Recap
There, now you have it!
A detailed review of the top ten WordPress hosting providers.
Each review was based on my test site’s speed, uptime and cost. Third-party sources, like Pingdom, were used to monitor and analyze performance.
In short, I recommend using a web hosting provider that provides a decent uptime of 99.95% and up, while keep their load time less than 700ms.
WEB HOSTING | COST | MONEY BACK | LOAD TIME | UPTIME | MY RATING |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1. Bluehost WordPress | $2.75/mo | 30 days | 409ms | >99.99% | ★★★★★ |
2. HostGator WordPress Cloud | $2.99/mo | 45 days | 421ms | 99.97% | ★★★★ |
3. SiteGround WordPress Hosting | $3.95/mo | 30 days | 714ms | 99.99% | ★★★★ |
4. A2 Hosting | $3.92/mo | 30 days | 392ms | 99.91% | ★★★ |
5. Site5 | $6.95/mo | 90 days | 704ms | 99.98% | ★★★ |
6. iPage | $1.99/mo | 30 days | 831ms | 99.98% | ★★★ |
7. Dreamhost | $7.95/mo | 97 days | 724ms | 99.94% | ★★★ |
8. InMotion Hosting | $3.99/mo | 30 days | 803ms | 99.94% | ★★ |
9. GreenGeeks | $3.95/mo | 30 days | 520ms | 99.93% | ★ |
10. Arvixe | $7.00/mo | 45 days | 5779ms | 97.75% | ★ |
In my in-depth WordPress hosting review, I came to a conclusion that you can’t go wrong with HostGator Cloud, SiteGround or Bluehost. They all offer strong uptime, fast page loading times, great customer support, and an unbeatably low prices.
If you already have a web host, but want to switch hosts after reading this post, see this guide here.
Some of them offer free site transfer, too.
Feedback and reviews on different (WordPress) hosting providers are more than welcome in the comments section below.
I'm posting this as a community wiki because I'd like to get a collaboratively edited list of features for a high-end WordPress webhost.
For example, if you are running a high-traffic WordPress-based site and/or a WordPress site that needs really hardened security what features would you love to see offered so that you don't have to implement everything that exceeds the most basic installation of WordPress core? Many of us know that WP Engine has just launched and it's the closest thing to a high-end webhost specifically for WordPress that I'm aware of. But rather than have there be only one, it would be great if there were many webhosts offering a much higher level.
Admittedly I'm weak in this area which is one of my reasons for posting but I'll start with a strawman list of desired features. Let's ignore the non-WordPress related things like 24 hour phone support, etc. and ask that we also be specific i.e. don't just say 'performance optimized' or 'highly secure' like you see on this site, but actual specifics that indicate a specific implementation:
- Preinstalled Memcached support
- Standard .htaccess tuning for GZIP support
- Optional integration with Amazon Cloud Front for upload files
- Automatic file and database backup with an advanced admin console like a 'Time Machine' on the Mac but for WordPress in the Browser.
- Files that are automatically versioned upon FTP upload into SVN or GIT
- Automatic database versioning into SVN or GIT
- Pre-selected list of verified and supported plugins
- What else? I'm sure there's a much longer list than I've come up with.
Another speciality feature could also be White-labeled turnkey WordPress multisite hosting. What I mean by this is a service that allows someone with marketing and sales experience in a vertical niche (for example, 'Dry Cleaners') to offer website hosting for their market without having to do any technical work whatsoever, including having the host handle all support as well as signup and billing but do it white-label. I think there's a huge market for this.
Note I'm not asking because I want to create such a service, I don't, but I would like to see a definitive reference for webhosts who would consider offering such a service.
UPDATE #1:
- Another feature that would be nice to have would be to have a service that could synchronize WordPress core, themes and plugins across multiple servers so that managing multiple server instances for a site that needs to scale would be easier and handled by the hosting company. (ref: Ticket #13067 - Configuration of Plugin and Theme Repository/ies)
UPDATE #2:
- Yet another feature would be to offer an option to use a Sphinx Search server and to interface it with WordPress using one of these plugins:
- Search API (See Also)
UPDATE #3:
- Cron scheduling via robust and reliable Linux cron as an alternative to WordPress' pseudo-cron (see also and this). Possibly incorporate admin functionality i.e. with one of the following plugins:
UPDATE #4:Over on the LinkedIn WordPress group someone offered free hosting and I asked him what his service would offer to which he replied the following (need to become a member to see this link, membership is free but I think you have to be approved by the group moderator first):
- PHP Mcrypt and all Dependancies
- W3 Total Cache plugin for use with Highwinds CDN
In addition to those items he also mentioned:
- Latest up to date version of PHP
- Latest up to date version of MySql
- MySql configured with high allocations of RAM
- Systems configured to do their best not to run anything in Swap
And in addition to all the above someone else in the group suggested it would be nice to have:
- Opcode PHP cache like APC or eAccelerator
UPDATE #5:
- The question 'What steps can I take to optimize wordpress in regard to server load' has some useful comments related to this topic.
closed as not constructive by anu, Brian Fegter, Wyck, kaiser, Stephen HarrisSep 24 '12 at 10:51
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6 Answers
I think we also need a few more features:
- Minifying JS, CSS and the HTML that is being sent down the wire.
- Caching the op-code of the PHP that will be generated (apart from Memcached).
- Upload the JS, CSS and Images that are used in the theme and/or plugin to a CDN and sync automatically.
- Option to use one of the public CDN netwoks like Google for common resources like jQuery.
- Offer a common CDN for all the WordPress admin scripts and images (which should be the exact same on multiple installations of WordPress) so that I can have that work just a little faster.
- Managed DNS - To ensure that they can restore a backup of your site on another location automatically in case they have issues with the current hardware. With this they can automatically switch your domains over to the new settings.
It always depends on the point of view. A webhost should offer
- much RAM
- much more RAM
- much CPU
- much more CPU
- a separated Database Server from the Server hosting the Website (HTTP Server)
- to setup the Database as Master/Client
- to automatically outsource Files to a (private or public) CDN
- a hosting service for comments so they don't rely on your blog (like outsourcing Comments to Disqus)
- automatically cache your wordpress site with a special, wordpress aware caching module running in apache.
- a Bytecache like xcache (to complete the list for Zend Optimizer, APC etc. that were already named)
From a security and performance perspective I think a high end WordPress web host should be run more like a managed server than a hosting company meaning that users would not have access to a control panel and should only be permitted SFTP access to a subdomain directory where their WordPress was installed. This would eliminate the need to run SuPHP and allow the host to run APC or another opcode cache.
High End WordPress Host Features
- Staging area for development and testing before going live with changes
- Nginx front end proxy for static content
- Dedicated MySQL server
- version control and alerts on file changes
- Redundant nightly file and databasebackups
- Built in support ticket system in WP admin
- SFTP and WordPress admin panel access only
- Pre-configured caching plugin
Access to a shell for the operations better done from the command line than the dashboard.
If you do all the caching, CPU, compression, RAM, and database tweaks, and still need more performance, consider a web farm for your blog, as in hooking up a shared NFS volume among several web nodes, and have your web nodes all use the same central MySQL database. You can build something like this with a free package called Ultra Monkey.
Hmmm, interesting... no one mentioned using LiteSpeed web server.
I ran some informal benchmarks in a review of 4 web hosts and the LiteSpeed server (MDD) had some of the fastest numbers. Scroll down the page to see the spreadsheet view: http://wpverse.com/eak
I forgot but I also saw one web host company said they were using SSD based RAID for their MySQL database farm.