Since we are in the age of digitalization, every business, even the smallest ones, has to be visible on online platforms. For some businesses, simply setting up a business profile in Google Maps or equivalent is enough; however, having a website to showcase the business’s products and services will still be better. In that matter, one of the cheapest solutions is using a shared hosting service for the website.
What is shared hosting?
Shared hosting is one of the hosting types that most hosting service providers offer. This type of hosting service basically puts many shared hosting customers’ websites on a single server; those websites share their resources with other customers. Hosting is not separated through virtualization in shared hosting; thus, if one or more customers on the same server use excessive resources, the remaining customers’ website performance might be affected. While this is not generally ideal for any website, it would still be okay for websites with very low-volume visitors.
Choosing the right shared hosting provider
Choosing the right hosting provider for shared hosting is quite important. Shared hosting plans often include additional services, such as free CDN or domain, which might be helpful for further reducing the initial costs of preparing a website for a business. Additionally, good customer service and a money-back guarantee are crucial. There are also many other aspects to consider while choosing a shared hosting service, such as storage type, bandwidth, storage limit, the control panel, uptime, and others.
Here are the top overall shared hosting service providers.
Best shared hosting service providers
Bluehost
Bluehost was founded in 2003 and is currently one of the biggest web hosting service providers. Bluehost uses cPanel as its control panel. It offers SSD storage and free CDN for all of its shared hosting plans, which automatically translates into better performance of websites. It also provides custom WordPress themes and a free domain for the 1st year for all its plans. All of Bluehost’s shared hosting plans include Google Ads, Google My Business, and resource protection, which is crucial to avoid the performance degradation caused by other websites on the same server.
Bluehost shared hosting plans and pricing
The first price is the discounted price, and the second one is the regular price.
- Basic – $2.95 | $10.99: The lowest tier shared hosting plan of Bluehost offers 10 GB of storage, supports one website, and comes with a free SSL certificate for the first year.
- Choice Plus – $5.45 | $19.99: Choice Plus focuses more on privacy and security features, offering 40 GB of storage, supporting unlimited websites, providing domain privacy and malware scanning features, backing up the websites for the first year, and including the Yoast SEO plugin.
- Online Store – $9.95 | $24.95: This plan focuses on ecommerce features, comes with an exclusive store theme, and provides store analytics. It has 100 GB of SSD storage and no limit on the number of websites deployed. Daily website backup, domain privacy, and malware scanning features are provided for the entire subscription period. Yoast SEO pack is also included in this plan. Additionally, it offers $450 worth of plugins directly for ecommerce sites.
- Pro – $13.95 | $28.99: Bluehost’s highest tier shared hosting plan provides almost the same package as Choice Plus but also adds better CPU resources for better performance, a free dedicated IP, and daily website backup for the entire subscription period into the basket.
Bluehost speed and uptime
Bluehost’s uptime for the last month when we wrote this article was 99.93%, with an average of 616 milliseconds of response time. While the uptime is quite impressive, the 616 ms latency is a bit high.
SiteGround
SiteGround is a very experienced web hosting service provider; it was founded in 2004. The shared hosting plans of SiteGround come with a custom control panel instead of cPanel. SiteGround leans more to the expensive side of shared hosting; however, even the lowest tier plan comes with many handy features. The company provides free SSL, daily backup, CDN, email, ecommerce, caching, website builder, and other features by default and does provide unmetered traffic for all of its shared hosting tiers. SiteGround has three tiers, all of which use 100% renewable energy.
SiteGround shared hosting plans and pricing
The first price is the discounted price, and the second one is the regular price.
- StartUp – $3.99 | $14.99: The lowest tier of the SiteGround shared hosting plan offers 10 GB of SSD storage and allows one website to be built on the system. The server resources are labeled as “essential” and suitable for an average of 10k monthly visits.
- GrowBig – $6.69 | $24.99: GrowBig tier comes with additional performance; thanks to its PHP acceleration feature, the “premium” server resources are suitable for 100k monthly visits. It comes with 20 GB of SSD storage and allows you to build an unlimited number of websites on the server. Additionally, it provides on-demand backups and staging features.
- GoGeek – $10.69 | $39.99: The highest shared hosting tier of SiteGround has “geeky” resources, which makes it suitable for 400k monthly visits. It has 40 GB of SSD storage and pre-installed Git. In addition to white-label hosting and free private DNS features, it offers priority support for GoGeek customers.
SiteGround speed and uptime
SiteGround’s uptime for the last month when we wrote this article was 100%, with an average of 368 milliseconds of response time. It is an excellent uptime and a very good response time.
InMotion Hosting
InMotion Hosting is an interesting company that is owned by its employees and was founded in 2001. InMotion Hosting’s shared hosting plans are pretty generous about the storage spaces as well as the number of supported websites on its lowest tier. InMotion Hosting offers unlimited bandwidth, no-downtime website migration, dedicated IP address, SSL, automatic backups, and BoldGrid website builder. It also allows unlimited subdomains as well as customers to choose a data center. It comes with Google Workspace and uses cPanel as its control panel application. InMotion Hosting has four tiers for its shared hosting product.
InMotion Hosting shared hosting plans and pricing
The first price is the discounted price, and the second one is the regular price.
- Core – $2.99 | $9.49: The lowest shared hosting tier comes with 100 GB of SSD storage and allows customers to build two websites on it. It also comes with ten free email addresses, making it appealing to new start-ups.
- Launch – $5.99 | $12.99: Launch shared hosting tier brings NVMe SSDs to the table, with unlimited storage space, and removes the two-site limitation. Additionally, it provides an unlimited number of email addresses and improves performance.
- Power – $5.99 | $16.99: The Power tier is quite similar to the Launch tier; however, it boosts the performance further, delivers advanced caching, and allows customers to receive support through phone calls instead of chat.
- Pro – $13.99 | $23.99: The highest tier of InMotion Hosting’s shared hosting plans further improves the performance compared to the Power tier, provides a dedicated IP, and comes with a service level agreement for a 99.99% uptime guarantee.
InMotion Hosting speed and uptime
InMotion Hosting’s uptime for the last month when we wrote this article was 99.99%, with an average of 388 milliseconds of response time. Both numbers are very good for a shared hosting service.
HostGator
Founded in 2022, HostGator is also an experienced web hosting company. It leans more toward the cheap side of shared hosting, keeping the prices as low as possible. HostGator provides a free domain for one year for all of its tiers and allows free domain transfers. It also includes SSL certifications and uses cPanel as its control panel. Bandwidth is unlimited, as well as the number of email addresses you can use on all plans. HostGator has three shared hosting tiers.
HostGator shared hosting plans and pricing
The first price is the discounted price, and the second one is the regular price.
- Hatchling – $2.75 | $11.95: The lowest shared hosting plan of HostGator allows users to set up one website on its 10 GB of disk space.
- Baby – $3.50 | $12.95: The Baby plan allows customers to build up to 5 websites on the hosting service and offers 40 GB of storage. It comes with $500 of Google Ads and $100 of Microsoft Advertising credits and allows customers to receive support through phone calls.
- eCommerce – $7.25 | $17.95: eCommerce removes the website amount and the disk space limitations from the Baby plan, delivers free Cloudflare CDN, dedicated IP, additional SEO tools, professional website migration, MySQL and script transfers, and upgrades the SSL certificate to Positive SSL.
HostGator speed and uptime
HostGator’s uptime for the last month when we wrote this article was 99.89%, with an average of 614 milliseconds of response time. It’s not great, not terrible.
A2 Hosting
A2 Hosting was founded in 2001, and it focuses on cheaper plans for shared hosting as well while maintaining high performance. All of the shared hosting plans of A2 Hosting come with raid-10 SSD storage and unlimited bandwidth. Additionally, all plans offer free SSL certificates, website migration, server location choice, unlimited email addresses, and many other features. A2 Hosting is very transparent about all details of its plans; they have a very long feature list you might consider looking at. A2 Hosting uses cPanel as its control panel and has four shared hosting tiers.
A2 Hosting shared hosting plans and pricing
The first price is the discounted price, and the second one is the regular price.
- Startup – $2.99 | $11.99: A2 Hosting’s lowest tier comes with 100 GB SSD storage and allows customers to deploy one website. It has a five-database limit as well.
- Drive – $5.99 | $14.99: The second tier makes the number of websites, storage space, and total website unlimited and comes with A2 Cloud Backup.
- Turbo Boost – $6.99 | $22.99: Turbo Boost adds a vast amount of new features to the package, including NVMe drives instead of SSDs, way better hardware, LiteSpeed Web Server, pre-configured site caching, and more.
- Turbo Max – $14.99 | $28.99: The highest tier of A2 Hosting shared plans further improves the performance by doubling the RAM and CPU cores; the rest is the same as the Turbo Boost tier.
A2 Hosting speed and uptime
InMotion Hosting’s uptime for the last month when we wrote this article was 100%, with an average of 288 milliseconds of response time. Both numbers are great for a shared hosting service.
DreamHost
DreamHost was founded in 1996; it is one of the most experienced web hosting companies on our list. It keeps the shared hosting plans quite simple and cheap, offering only two options. Both tiers come with SSD storage and pre-installed WordPress. It offers automated daily backups, a free domain with privacy, automated WordPress migrations, unlimited traffic, and an SSL certificate. Dreamhost uses a custom-built panel instead of cPanel.
DreamHost shared hosting plans and pricing
The first price is the discounted price, and the second one is the regular price.
- Starter – $2.59 | $5.99: Shared plan allows one website to be deployed on its 50 GB storage, and subdomains are limited to five, MySQL databases are to six.
- Unlimited – $3.95 | $10.99: The higher plan, Unlimited, removes the limitations of the number of WordPress websites, storage space, subdomain, and MySQL databases.
DreamHost speed and uptime
DreamHost’s uptime for the last month when we wrote this article was 99.98%, with an average of 1,836 milliseconds of response time. While the uptime is very good, the response time is higher than expected.
Hostinger
Founded in 2004, Hostinger is a well-known web hosting company. It offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee, a website builder, weekly backups, caching solution, Curl SSL, and Git for all its tiers. The hosting solution uses the CloudLinux platform for better efficiency and uptime, as well as a custom-built control panel. It comes with three tiers, one of which is the cheapest on our list.
Hostinger shared hosting plans and pricing
The first price is the discounted price, and the second one is the regular price.
- Single – $1.99 | $3.99: The lowest tier of Hostinger’s shared hosting plans comes with a 1-website limitation with 100 GB bandwidth. It offers 50 GB of SSD storage and one email account.
- Premium – $2.99 | $6.99: Premium shared hosting comes with 100 website limitation, which is basically unlimited, as well as unlimited bandwidth and email accounts. The SSD storage upgrades to 100 GB, comes with a free domain for one year and provides WP-CLI access as well as the WordPress Multisite feature.
- Business – $3.99 | $8.99: The highest tier for Hostinger further upgrades the storage to 200 GB SSD, upgrades the backup feature from weekly to daily, and provides a WordPress staging tool and object caching feature.
Hostinger speed and uptime
DreamHost’s uptime for the last month when we wrote this article was 99.98%, with an average of 435 milliseconds of response time. The uptime and the response time are both good.
FAQs
Is shared hosting suitable for my website?
Shared hosting is suitable for websites that have low visitor volume. When the volume gets higher, you will need to upgrade your plan because of performance issues.
What is uptime, and why is it important?
Uptime is the percentage of your hosting’s availability during a time period. If the uptime is 100%, it means your hosting service provider has delivered a perfect service without any interruptions. Uptime is an important metric because it indicates interruptions on your hosting service, which directly translates into “your websites”. When the hosting is not available, visitors will not be able to see your website.
Which shared hosting provider offers the best customer support?
It also depends on your shared hosting plan since some of the plans do not include support through phone calls, allowing customers to only receive support via chat. But BlueHost, A2 Hosting, InMotion Hosting, and SiteGround are well known for their quality in support.
Can I upgrade my shared hosting plan if my website grows?
Yes, you can upgrade your shared hosting plan if your website grows. You might also consider moving to VPS hosting plans when you need additional performance.
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