In the vast world of website hosting, finding a reliable yet budget-friendly solution is a top priority for businesses and individuals alike. In this brief guide, we delve into the realm of affordable website hosting, exploring the top-budget providers that strike the perfect balance between cost and performance.
Cost-effective hosting doesn’t mean compromising on quality. Our list showcases hosting providers known for their reliability, customer support, and feature-rich offerings—all while fitting comfortably within budget constraints. Join us as we compare the strengths and features of these top-budget hosting providers, allowing you to make an informed decision for your website needs. Whether you’re launching a personal blog, an online store, or a small business website, our comprehensive comparison will help you identify the ideal hosting partner that ensures your online presence flourishes without breaking the bank.
All businesses, ranging from small sole-owned businesses to multi-million enterprises require a website to grow, and for a website to run smoothly, you need web hosting. Without having an online presence, there’s no way to reach the untouched audience and your target market. Even if you don’t want a fancy, multi-page website or an eCommerce store, then you wouldn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars per month on web hosting. Just for the mere online presence that provides your customers with all the basic information about your product and services. But, the best thing to do with the website is leverage it to sell your products and services. With a cheap web hosting service provider, you can take advantage of all the features.
But, the point remains, not every business needs an eCommerce store, and not every company can afford to build and maintain an online store. Sometimes, you just need a simple page containing the hours and locations, and maybe a little blogging functionality to keep things running smoothly. When choosing a web hosting provider, the cost is one of the biggest factors. So you need to make sure that you choose a cheap web hosting provider, however cheap doesn’t mean limited functionalities and poor performance. It’s true that you get the features you pay for, but there are some cheap web hosting providers, and knowing about them can help you in having a good website.
Read our guide on 10 budget website hosting providers and comparison.
What is Website Hosting?
It’s pretty simple to understand web hosting. A web host is a company with servers that you can use to store and deliver the files that comprise your website. Large businesses can spend hundreds and thousands of dollars annually on dedicated web hosting or a virtual private server (VPS hosting), but there are plenty of web hosting that cater to the needs of small businesses.
In our list of top 10 budget web hosting providers, we’ve added web hosting providers that are affordable, and offer good functionalities, and features, without burning a hole into your wallet.
The prices in our list of cheap web hosting providers contain monthly, and annual prices. The budgets of some businesses are really tight, and some projects may not even last a year. If you’re looking for affordable web hosting plans, then you can say goodbye to the industry leaders such as A2, Hostwinds, and GoDaddy. You’ll be able to find lesser-known budget shared hosting providers and budget VPS hosting providers, but they still offer great service. Make sure you don’t end up choosing a hosting provider that offers initially lower prices to trick customers.
Web hosts that offer monthly and annual prices tend to offer services at the same prices.
Common Web Hosting Features Offered by Service Providers
Setting up a website with your own domain name is easy, and the best part is that the website doesn’t have to be expensive. You need to make a list of features you need, do you need email, blogging service, email marketing, eCommerce, file-sharing or do you need anything else? Make sure that you compare all the common features offered by web hosting providers.
Also, the ideal web hosting provider needs to provide good enough customer support. If your website goes down inexplicably and you don’t know the solution, you’ll want a customer service rep that can provide the answers you need. If your website ends up staying down for too long, you can and will lose potential customers.
Budget Shared Hosting Providers
If you want to host a website, that doesn’t mean that you have to break the bank. Shared hosting is when your website and hundreds of other websites share the same server, and they also share bandwidth and storage space. Sharing server resources makes this web hosting option one of the most affordable methods.
|
Hosting Provider |
Price (monthly) | Storage space | Free backups/domains |
Uptime |
| $0.99 | Unspecified | N/A |
99.90% |
|
| $2.49 | 10GB | Yes | 99.97% | |
| $2.75 | Unlimited | N/A |
99.99% |
1. Hostinger
Hostinger offers an incredibly cheaper shared hosting plan than other providers. When it comes to budget-shared hosting providers, then Hostinger should be your first and foremost choice.
Hostinger’s shared plans range from $0.99 to $15.99 per month, based on the plan and timeframe. Similar to most providers on the list, Hostinger offers 3 different shared plans to choose from. If you end up buying annual plans, then the price can become even cheaper.
Every Hostinger shared a plan with 1 email account and 100 GB of bandwidth. Budget shared hosting providers such as Hostinger, often offer email accounts with their plans.
Pros:
- Strong onboarding experience for WordPress plans
- Multilingual support for customers
Cons:
- No over-the-phone support
- Low uptime percentage
2. iPage
iPage has only one shared hosting plan, and the plan is capable of receiving up to 500,000 visitors a month. The plan costs $1.99 per month, if you upgrade to an annual plan, then the prices will go down:
- 12-month contract: $2.99/mo ($35.88 total)
- 24-month contract: $2.49/mo ($59.76 total)
- 36-month contract: $1.99 per month ($71.64 total)
If you think you want an upgrade from budget shared hosting providers such as iPage, then the upgrade is a VPS plan. There are some places where iPage feels weaker compared to other providers. Its uptime percentage is the lowest of all providers at 99.94%.
Pros:
- Free domain included
- Unlimited disk space
- Supports up to 500,000 monthly visitors
Cons:
- Lowest uptime percentage
- Costs $100 to restore website backups
3. HostGator
HostGator has been trying to capture the top industry place for years, and they’re now seen as the industry leader. Without a doubt, they’re one of the best budget shared hosting providers, and their places can cost as little as $2.75 per month on a three-year deal, as for the annual prices, the plans start at $5.95/mo.
HostGator doesn’t have any free backups and domains to offer, but still, HostGator’s offerings are unparalleled. Users get unlimited email accounts and 24/7 dedicated customer support. Combine that with the 99.99% uptime guarantee and it makes HostGator one of the best budgets shared hosting providers.
Pros:
- Brilliant 99.99% uptime
- Optional website builder
Cons:
- No free backups or domains
- Can only host one website on the starter plan
Budget VPS Hosting Providers
VPS web hosting is a great choice for any new website that has been getting nice results and has outgrown its shared hosting plans. Often VPS hosting providers are expensive, but if you go on a hunt for the best budget VPS hosting providers, you can find excellent options for your website. Here’s our list of best Budget VPS Hosting Providers:
|
Hosting service provider |
Plan | Monthly price |
| Hostinger | 2vCPU |
$9.95 (24 months) |
|
DreamHost |
Basic | $10.00 (36 months) |
| Namecheap | Pulsar |
$11.88 (12 months) |
1. Hostinger
Hostinger’s six VPS plans and each one of them offers different degrees of memory, storage, and bandwidth. Here’s how the offerings range:
- 1-8 GB memory
- 20-160 GB storage
- 1,000-8,000 GB bandwidth.
The best plan from Hostinger is the VPS Server Plan 2, which costs $9.95 per month when you choose the 24-month contract. If you want to pay for the 4-year plan, then the prices are expected to go down even more.
With Hostinger VPS web hosting, you also get to choose whether you want Windows or Linux VPS hosting. It’s nice to know that Hostinger can accommodate all types of user needs. All this makes Hostinger one of the best budget VPS hosting providers.
Pros:
- Linux and Windows VPS hosting are available
- Wide variety of features
Cons:
- No phone customer support
- Low uptime percentage
2. DreamHost
If you’re concerned that the price of your plan will increase after the promotional period ends, then DreamHost is one of the best budget VPS hosting providers. The initial price that you pay barely changes throughout your relationship with them.
With DreamHost’s basic plan, you’ll get 30GB storage and 1GB RAM. The storage space will be enough for most sites, but the websites that deal with tons of traffic may struggle with just 1 gigabyte of RAM. The only low point in DreamHost’s VPS web hosting plan is that it doesn’t give you root access. This means you won’t have full control over the server environment.
Pros:
- Unlimited email accounts and domains
- Unlimited bandwidth
Cons:
- No live chat support
- Only 30GB of storage on the basic plan
3. Namecheap
Namecheap is one of the best budget VPS hosting providers, and they only offer 2 hosting plans:
- Pulsar: $11.88/mo
- Quasar: $19.88/mo
Both of these plans offer a free domain name, privacy protection, full root access, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. One of the best things about Namecheap is that it offers free backups, so you can feel secure about the data on your website.
Namecheap also offers great customer support through its knowledge center and 24/7 live chat availability. Unfortunately, Namecheap doesn’t offer phone customer support.
Pros:
- Free Domain
- Free backups
Cons:
- Less bandwidth and RAM than competitors
- No phone support
Best Dedicated Cloud Hosting Provider
Cloud hosting is when your site is stored on a variety of servers which allows users to leverage resources from multiple places. This makes cloud hosting one of the best, most flexible, scalable, and reliable types of hosting. Here is our collection of the best dedicated cloud hosting providers:
|
Provider |
Max RAM | Max CPUs | Max Bandwidth | Max Storage | Uptime % |
| A2 Hosting | 32GB | 12 | 9TB | 250GB |
99.95% |
|
Cloudways |
384GB | 96 | 20TB | 3840GB | 99.99% |
| Kamatera | 524GB | 104V | 40GB | 1000GB |
99.95% |
| SiteGround |
10GB |
8 | 5TB | 120GB |
99.98% |
1. A2 Hosting
When it comes down to the best-dedicated cloud hosting provider, A2 Hosting does a great job. The plans aren’t really expensive either, the starter plan costs only $4.99 per month, although the uptime isn’t the best. Users do get an endless range of features, and it also offers a money-back guarantee, something that’s not offered by other providers.
These features include 250GB of storage, 12 CPU cores, and 32GB RAM. Additionally, you can host an unlimited number of websites. Unfortunately, you have to pay for an SSL certificate, if that could be improved, A2 will be considered one of the best-dedicated cloud hosting providers.
Pros:
- Great disk support
- Abundance of features
Cons:
- No SSL included
- Uptime could be improved
2. Cloudways
Cloudways ranks second number in our list of best-dedicated cloud hosting providers, but based on your need, it could be number one. With Cloudways, you can choose a cloud server from over 25 global locations and also choose regions and cities.
This means you can choose a server that’s closest to you and it will severely impact the speed of your website. It also means that the plans are more flexible compared to their competitors.
Cloudways offers very impressive customer support service across all their plans, and it includes 24/7 live chat and an easy ticketing system. However, you’ll have to sign up for one of the two paid support plans if you want more basic features.
Pros:
- Great CPU performance
- Huge RAM capability
Cons:
- Needs better customer support
- You’ll need to pay for plans if you need more than just basic features
3. Kamatera
Kamatera is the only hosting solution that provides you with complete control over your cloud hosting. It is one of the best-dedicated cloud hosting providers, as you get root access to your servers.
The plans offer tons of flexibility when you want to scale your website upwards or downwards. Any changes you want to your web hosting can be made in mere minutes, such as increased or decreased elements like CPU, RAM, storage space, and even firewalls.
If you want uptime over customization, then you should know that Kamatera can only guarantee 99.95% uptime.
Pros:
- Extremely supportable and skilled staff
- The cloud VPS is easy to scale
- Great choice of servers from Linux, Ubuntu, CentOS, Windows, BSD, and more
Cons:
- The price gap between a dedicated and managed server is too much
- There are no shared hosting plans
4. SiteGround
SiteGround ranks among the top options as the best-dedicated cloud hosting provider solely based on the excellent help and support offered. There are a couple of places where SiteGround feels weak. It doesn’t offer domain names with its plans. Plus, the starting price is more expensive than the competitors.
Regardless of that, SiteGround generally scores well overall, and their combination of great uptime, incredible customer support, and 5TB bandwidth.
Pros:
- Faster website loading times
- 6 data centers in 4 countries
- User-friendly custom dashboard
Cons:
- Limited resources
- Higher renewal price