WordPress is by far the most used platform in the world. Over 25% of the web is powered by WordPress and over 50% of new websites are built with WordPress. WordPress is ubiquitous with creating a new website in today’s world. Due to its popularity, there are a huge amount of WordPress hosting options. Thus, it is hard to decipher which ones are good and which are not worth bothering with. Here is a list of several hosting companies that I think are worth using for various situations. We have experience with all of these companies and feel they all do a fairly good job of hosting WordPress, some better than others of course.

Low Cost

Bluehost: Bluehost is part of the conglomerate Endurance International and is the leading hosting brand of the company. They are definitely a top small business WordPress hosting company and have been doing it for almost fifteen years now. They promote both WordPress and WooCommerce optimized hosting, showing their focus on WordPress as a platform. WordPress Hosting plans start at $19.99 a month. Media Temple: Media Temple has been around for almost 20 years, and powers over 1.5 million websites. Based out of Los Angeles California, Media Temple is a leading WordPress hosting company that focuses mainly on WordPress and no other major CMS. They also have an Amazon Web Services WordPress hosting offering. WordPress Hosting plans start at $19.99 a month. Siteground: Siteground has very cost effective hosting starting at just 3.95 a month. They have been around for over 10 years since 2004 and host more than $500,000 domains. Siteground specializes in WordPress and is definitely a good cost-effective option if you are looking to minimize costs as much as possible. WordPress hosting plans start at $3.95 a month. Dreamhost: Dreamhost hosts over 1.5 million websites, a massive amount of sites for a small-medium size business. Dream host was founded 20 years ago in 1997 and continues to focus on the WordPress market that continues to explode. Their WordPress hosting packages are only $7.95 and $16.95 respectively making them very cost effective for a small business. WordPress Hosting Plans start at $7.95 a month. Godaddy: Although Godaddy might have a bad reputation for being a large company with poor hosting quality because of its sheer size. It may seem like its “cheap” but it actually offers a pretty good WordPress hosting offering for a very cost-effective price. The other advantage is that there are likely the place you will want to register your domain keeping it all in one place with your hosting. Godaddy has made a significant investment in WordPress and even has a dedicated portion of their site to WordPress. WordPress Hosting plans start $3.99 a month.

High-Quality Scalability & Enterprise Plans

Amazon Web Services: Arguably the most scalable hosting infrastructure in the world that is growing rapidly is a great way to invest in scalability. You can get high quality dedicated servers for around $150 a month that you can configure specifically for WordPress. The downside is you won’t get the managed services you get from a company like Pantheon or WPengine so if something goes wrong it’s on you to fix it. Amazon Web Services does have a support service but it’s just not quite the same as managed hosting company so its best you only use this if you have the technical chops to do so. WordPress Hosting plans start as low as the server specs and instances you setup. T2.nano starts at about $4.2 per month. Chances are you will want something much larger than this though. Pantheon: Pantheon is an incredible high-end WordPress and Drupal hosting company that is newer to the industry starting in just 2010. They have incredible developer tools and innovation in the hosting space. Every account comes with a production, staging, and development environment. With a fairly cost-effective starting price, Pantheon is a great platform to scale and speed up development operations overhead which can be a huge time suck. WordPress Hosting plans start at $24.99 a month. WPengine: WPengine is arguably the leading WordPress hosting company in the world. They power 5% of the online world! That is an incredible amount for a hosting company. They provide great support and also auto update plugins and help you keep your WordPress site up to date and healthy. They don’t allow certain plugins which can be good and bad because sometimes you may want to use one, but they do that also to ensure that your site stays healthy and away from bad plugins. WordPress Hosting plans start $29.99 a month. Liquid Web: Liquid Web is a leading hosting company that has been around for 20 years serving over 500,000 sites worldwide. They are known for incredible customer service and have a great team of over 600 dedicated employees. They offer simple self-managed hosting solutions that work well in the $100 to $10,000 range for hosting costs. They host many WordPress sites and have excellent WordPress support. WordPress Hosting plans start at $119.00 a month.

Shared Hosting Vs Dedicated Hosting Vs Cloud Hosting

Shared hosting is great for low cost, but it is the slowest and most risky hosting. Shared hosting means other websites are on your server and could crash or slow down your server which is completely out of your control. Shared hosting is the worst option in terms of flexibility and security, but is also by far the cheapest. Dedicated hosting is an actual server dedicated to you or multiple servers. Dedicated hosting is great because you scale your website much more than shared hosting and control your own destiny. The downside of dedicated is it’s not quite as easy to add new servers like you could with cloud hosting at which you can more easily scale up and down as you need. Cloud hosting is a different model in which you are actually paying per hour on an on-demand basis. Typically you might be paying for just one or two servers, but you can continuously add servers in real time and scale them down in real time, only paying for the hours used. This is particularly useful for traffic spikes and seasonal businesses.