September 11, 2017 , 121 Comments
If you've got a WordPress website, I'm willing to bet online advertisements from generic hosting services like BlueHost and HostGator have targeted you before.
How do I know?
These companies have massive advertising budgets and capture large swaths of uninformed and unsuspecting customers as a result. To ensure you won't be one of them, I'm not going to waste your time reviewing such big name brands and their dollar store hosting plans.
More...
UPDATE: Because I received so many requests to review SiteGround in the comments of the original post, I went ahead and included them in the Part 2 testing below to have a budget hosting service comparison for you.
Instead, I'm going to discuss a new breed of hosting companies that have been gaining ground in the past few years with two qualities I think are crucial:
If you’re just getting started and don’t have significant traffic yet, the generic hosting options might be good enough for you right now. But once your site starts to perk up, you'll want to dump them for something better.
In this overview, I'm going to show you the current landscape of WordPress specialized hosting services, what they have to offer and which ones deliver the best bang for your hard earned buck.
What I've started here is a huge undertaking that grows as I continue to get feedback from the ActiveGrowth audience. The goal is to use the typical ActiveGrowth level of scrutiny you've come to expect in order to create a comprehensive roundup review of WordPress hosting services.
If you read "Part 1" (the original version of this review), I began by selecting hosting candidates, analyzed their claims and then created some initial comparison tables for you.
Now in "Part 2" (the current version), I'm releasing my results on the first 5 hosting companies I tested. They include:
More hosts will be tested and added to this review for you in the coming weeks and months, but in my testing completed so far, I conducted practical tests to measure performance and quality differences as objectively as possible. Keep reading to see how these 5 hosting services stacked up.
This post consolidates the core features and unique selling points of SIXTEEN different WordPress hosting companies into a single overview article.
While tests of certain hosting services are still in progress, what you'll find here is already a comprehensive guide to the current marketplace available for WordPress specialized hosting.
The following is a short hit list of important benefits you should hold any hosting service to for your own WordPress website:
For each host, I'll run through this rapid-fire checklist to help give you an idea of what each company claims to provide via their online marketing materials.
You may be aware that over at Thrive Themes, Shane and the team are currently recommending WPX Hosting as the go-to solution.
This is a recommendation Shane made only after some very rigorous testing and he stands by it.
WPX Hosting is also featured in this roundup, but I won't be playing favorites. At ActiveGrowth, I have the capacity to do an in-depth roundup review unlike anything attempted before and I hope this review delivers!
And yes, ActiveGrowth is an affiliate for WPX Hosting, but as usual, we'll also be using affiliate links for all the other services – where affiliate programs are available. The deciding factor on hosting recommendations however, is the testing, not which affiliate programs pay out the most.
In case you're skeptical, consider this: if maximizing affiliate commissions was the goal, I'd just recommend BlueHost like everyone else...they pay really well. ;)
Most people try to compare marketing claims and technical specs to decide on their next hosting provider. Although this is necessary, technicalities alone won't give you the complete pre-purchase picture.
In an attempt to cut through the typical sales and marketing fluff, I actually emailed each company to ask – as nothing more than a potential customer – what made their services unique.
After receiving their email responses (or lack there of), I came away with a better understanding of each company's business culture. I included excerpts from their answers to help show you their customer service mindsets.
After all, if you're going to trust your online business foundation to one of these companies, it's good to know who you're actually shaking hands with.
It’s important to preface the performance testing presented in this review by noting that available online testing tools are both complex and often vague about how they conduct their analyses.
Therefore, it makes more sense to evaluate hosts on their performance trends rather than any one, specific test result. Just keep this in mind when reviewing the data below.
For example, take any web page and run it through the 3 most popular load time testing sites (Pingdom, GTmetrix and WebPageTest) and you’ll get 3 different load time results. Run the same tests on different days and you can get significant differences in the data.
In fact, here’s what I found when doing this little experiment with the ActiveGrowth homepage on two back-to-back days:
Pingdom
1.39 sec
GTmetrix
2.7 sec
WebPageTest
3.542 sec
Pingdom
1.26 sec
-0.13 sec from Day 1
GTmetrix
4.1 sec
+1.4 sec from Day 1
WebPageTest
3.362 sec
-0.18 sec from Day 1
The point here is that no test is perfect and it’s impossible to reproduce your testing scenarios every time.
In the course of my tool testing experiments using similar settings across these three testing platforms, I found that Pingdom consistently displayed faster load times over GTmetrix and WebPageTest.
As I researched why this was the case, I found that both the hardware and testing methodologies of these three services can be very different.
But one of the main differences between the three platforms showcased above is what they report as their test load time. It turns out that Pingdom gives consistently fast results because it only reports the Onload Time event instead of the Fully Loaded Time like GTmetrix and WebPageTest do by default.
With this example in mind, approach the data in this review as comparative instead of absolute.
Our testing methodology was the same for every host – but on different days as I migrated from host to host over time – in order to present the best apples-to-apples comparison possible of the hosting services.
Below is a brief explanation of the performance testing methods used for this review.
The goal of this review is to offer an apples-to-apples comparison of entry level hosting service plans across the WordPress Hosting market.
The way I went about this was simple.
Any hosting feature that didn’t come included with the purchase of an entry-level plan didn’t get tested. This means that only those features and performance optimization options that were available – at no additional cost – from the hosting portal or WordPress dashboard were enabled.
Also, no third party plugins (including caching plugins) were installed on my test site except for the Thrive Themes Membership plugins suite.
Here's the setup of my test site for you at a glance:
WordPress Theme: | Thrive Themes Focus Blog |
Number of Blog Posts: | x10, 1500 word blog posts with various headers and media content |
Number of Landing Pages | |
Number of WordPress Plugins | x7, Thrive Themes Plugins |
For page load time testing, I used WebPageTest. Their system reported Fully Loaded Time measurements while also performing 3 tests per run. I used the median value of the 3 measurements as the data point for each hosting service.
Also, I ran each load time test using WebPageTest’s Dallas, Texas server with their Google Chrome browser environment selected.
I chose WebPageTest’s FIOS (fiber optic landline) bandwidth option to try and eliminate network simulation complexities from the data.
For each host, I tested load times for 3 different types of web pages:
This range of content was helpful in establishing how each host performs when it comes to serving up different kinds of web pages for your online visitors.
From the Fully Loaded Page Time testing, two performance tiers emerged:
Tier 1: WP Engine, WPX Hosting and Pressidium.
Tier 2: Siteground and Pressable.
I also wanted to test how each hosting service performed under heavy concurrent user loads. For example, if one of your guest blog posts on a heavily trafficked site generated large, simultaneous spikes in visitors to your own blog, how would each host's servers handle situations like that?
To test this, I used the online testing service LoadImpact to run simulated tests that ramped up from 1 to 50 concurrent users over 5 minutes. Each test was also configured to use the Google Chrome browsing environment with an “Unlimited” bandwidth.
In order to compare the concurrent user load tests against each other, I plotted the data points from each test in the graph below.
The graph shows the cumulative time of the tests on the x-axis, the page load times on the left vertical axis and the number of virtual users accessing the site on the right vertical axis.
There are 2 behaviors I look for when evaluating user load time testing graphs.
If large spikes or increasingly slower load times occur over the course of the test, it indicates that the servers can't keep up with the increasing user load.
As you can see from the comparison graph above, the data clearly breaks the hosting services once again into two performance tiers when it comes to handling high traffic loads:
Tier 1: WPX Hosting, WP Engine and Pressidium.
Tier 2: SiteGround and Pressable.
WPX Hosting, WP Engine and Pressidium did very well with up to 50 concurrent virtual users. Their performance remained steady as the number of concurrent virtual users approached and hit 50 so it’s safe to say they can handle even larger traffic loads.
Pressable and Siteground however, have slower performance baselines as compared to the Tier 1 hosts. Although they can handle 50 concurrent users, the increased load times at the end of their tests suggest that performance will diminish as the number of concurrent users goes above 50.
Okay, so by popular demand, I tested ONE bargain bin host for you.
Because there were so many requests from the ActiveGrowth audience to review the budget hosting service SiteGround, I decided to throw their entry-level, managed WordPress plan into this roundup review so you’d have a “budget” option for comparison.
First, here’s what SiteGround offers in their “StartUp” Managed WordPress hosting service:
Entry Level Plan | "StartUp" |
|---|---|
Monthly Cost | $9.95 |
Number of Websites | 1 |
Storage Space | 10 GB |
Monthly Bandwidth | Unmetered, ~10k visitors |
Money-Back Guarantee | 30 days |
Migration Services | 1 free migration |
Staging Site | Only included for the GoGeek plan |
Although SiteGround offers one free professional migration with their plans, I wasn’t able to test it.
SiteGround was the first host I tested for this review after releasing Part 1 so I actually built my testing setup on SiteGround instead of migrating my test site to it.
Like most other hosting services available today, SiteGround offers free Let’s Encrypt SSL certification that can be enabled with a single click from their cPanel.
A standard feature SiteGround offers on all of its plans is Cloudflare CDN access. Enabling this optimization feature did provide a small improvement to SiteGround’s performance results which I’ll show you next.
1. Data intensive, dynamic content, video sales page:
2. Blog grid page:
3. Static, lead-generation page using a background image:
Although SiteGround does have site backup and restore tools, they do not allow you to execute full restores of your website through their cPanel interface.
The free daily backup SiteGround offers only allows you to restore individual files by yourself.
If you want to get a full restore of your site, you have 2 options:
Because of this additional feature cost above the base subscription price, I didn’t test SiteGround’s full restore backup functionality.
SiteGround’s support team is available through live chat, ticket submissions and phone conversations. I was able to get all my issues resolved via their live chat option.
Wait times were usually less than a minute and the support technicians were helpful in resolving my issues quickly.
All in all, SiteGround gets good marks for their onboarding and basic technical support.
I feel it’s important to note that SiteGround’s promotional marketing prices are a bit deceptive.
They tout themselves as bargain provider, but only for your first invoice. After your initial promotion period ends, your second invoice will triple in cost!
Because I was using SiteGround as my cheap little guinea pig to set up the test site for this review, I didn’t manage to get my setup done fast enough to test out their 30 day money-back guarantee claim. And since I had only signed up for a single $3.95 month using their entry-level StartUp plan, my following invoice morphed into a full year’s payment at $9.95 per month.
When I did try to cancel my plan to see if I could at least get a prorated refund, the answer was a definite and unyielding no.
After complaining for several minutes, the technician did award my whining with a free upgrade to their GrowBig plan, but a prorated refund was out of the question.
If you’re just getting started building your first website and have little to no traffic, SiteGround seems to be the best of the budget options out there to keep your costs down. Their initial promo rates are pretty cheap for the performance and support you receive.
Just be careful. After the initial promotion period ends, you’ll be paying triple the price you originally signed up for. Also, simple services like a full backup restore will run you an additional $39.95!
Once your site starts building a decent amount of traffic though, bail on SiteGround for a Tier 1 hosting alternative.
WPX Hosting serves small to medium sized websites.
Like I mentioned above, WPX Hosting is the only managed WordPress Hosting company currently endorsed by Shane and ActiveGrowth’s sister site, Thrive Themes.
The TL;DR checklist of Shane's WPX Hosting review is summed up as follows:
UPDATE: Since Part 2 of this review was published, WPX Hosting released a new feature in October 2018 for all their WPX customers called "WPX Cloud CDN". The speed test results shown below do not reflect this amazing speed upgrade.
Entry Level Plan | "Business" |
|---|---|
Monthly Cost | $24.99 |
Number of Websites | 5 |
Storage Space | 10 GB SSD |
Monthly Bandwidth | 50 GB |
Money-Back Guarantee | 30 days |
Migration Services | Free |
Staging Site | Yes |
What makes us stand out the most is the amazing load times we provide and top-notch support.
Migrating to WPX Hosting was quick and easy. After providing WPX Hosting with the access details to my previous hosting account via a migration request ticket, they successfully migrated my site in under 3 hours.
The only out-of-the-box hosting optimization provided by WPX Hosting is their free, Let’s Encrypt SSL certification. The certificate is one-click simple to setup.
WPX Hosting also makes it easy to create domain associated email addresses from their dashboard that will forward emails to the address of your choice (I sent them to my Gmail account). Also, I found the WPX Hosting email interface much easier to setup and work with as compared to the Cpanel email interfaces offered by hosts like SiteGround.
1. Data intensive, dynamic content, video sales page:
2. Blog grid page:
3. Small, static, lead-generation page using a background image:
UPDATE: Just before I pressed publish on Part 2 of this hosting review, I received a customer email from WPX Hosting describing an awesome upgrade to their backup system.
WPX Hosting added a manual backup and restore feature to their hosting dashboard allowing you to backup and restore your website whenever you wish and without needing to contact support as described below.
WPX Hosting keeps the previous 14 days worth of daily backups for you on a separate server in case you need to recall a previous version of your website.
Although WPX Hosting doesn’t charge retrieval fees to grab a backup version of your site, the restore process can’t be done through the dashboard. You must submit a support ticket requesting the exact backup day you’d like retrieved and restored.
In the case of my test site, the successful request, retrieval and restore process was painless and only took the WPX support team 15 minutes to complete.
WPX Hosting has both ticket and chat support that work through their hosting dashboard.
The response times are super fast (usually less than 5 minutes for tickets and no wait times for chat) and the support staff were always helpful in resolving my issues.
WPX Hosting made good on their money back guarantee. On day 30 of their 30-day guarantee period, I submitted a ticket requesting cancellation of my plan and the refund went through in under 30 minutes.
There’s a reason Shane recommends WPX Hosting for WordPress websites and through my recent testing, I now have firsthand experience why.
Their support staff is fast and helpful, their performance is top tier (even faster with their October 2018 WPX Cloud CDN feature activated!), and you get more bang for your buck in terms of storage space and the number of websites you can host as compared to WP Engine and Pressidium’s entry level plans.
WPX Hosting is definitely still highly recommended by the ActiveGrowth team.
WP Engine serves the spectrum from small to large scale websites.
Their smaller plans offer shared server environments while larger enterprise plans provide dedicated racks to single clients.
WP Engine stands by its security with a no hack guarantee. Any hacked site will be restored at no additional cost to you.
Entry Level Plan | "Personal" |
|---|---|
Monthly Cost | $29.00 |
Number of Websites | 1 |
Storage Space | 10 GB |
Monthly Bandwidth | 25 K visitors |
Money-Back Guarantee | 60 days |
Migration Services | Free |
Staging Site | Yes |
At WP Engine we are a premium provider. Comparing us to general hosting providers (Like GoDaddy, HostGator, BlueHost, etc..) is like comparing apples to oranges. We are 100% specialized in WordPress so our platform is completely optimized for it. General hosting providers don't have this kind of specialization, so they are typically competing off server specs and hardware providers.
Migrating your site to WP Engine is quick and is easy to do by yourself.
You just install the WP Engine migration plugin to your current site and enter the correct links and urls provided by your WP Engine hosting portal.
It took around two hours from the time I purchased my WP Engine hosting plan to receive their invitation email to join the portal and access the info I needed to begin the plugin based migration.
Also, be ready for a few back-and-forth support team emails with WP Engine to verify your billing and website addresses. This happened to me, but after my information was confirmed, the migration went smoothly.
After plugging in the correct information into the migration plugin and clicking Migrate, the actual BlogVault automated migration took exactly 7 minutes to complete for my test site.
With the entry level WP Engine hosting plan, your performance optimization settings include a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate and an Object Caching setting on your WP Engine Portal Utilities page.
WP Engine also provides a self-test performance check to grade the performance of your site along with suggestions and tutorials on how to optimize your site if needed.
Request your free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate with a single click from your WP Engine portal dashboard. In the case of my test site, I received email notification that the SSL certificate order had been completed in under a minute via email.
Back in the dashboard, one more click enabled and activated the SSL certificate on my test site.
Finally, under the “Utilities” section of the portal, you can enable the “Object Caching” setting with a single click.
For further speed optimization, WP Engine does not offer CDN services on their entry level “Personal” plan, but does allows you to pay an additional $19.95 per month (or upgrade your plan) to activate it on your site.
WP Engine also offers a staging site for all their plans that can be set up with a few clicks from within your WordPress dashboard.
Finally, when it comes to site optimization, it’s worth mentioning that WP Engine maintains a blacklist of plugins they will automatically remove from your site if installed. The types of plugins banned fall under 8 categories:
Because WP Engine does their own caching and daily backups of your site, you probably won’t need such plugins if you’re used to having them installed.
1. Data intensive, dynamic content, video sales page:
2. Blog grid page:
3. Small, static, lead-generation page using a background image:
Backing up your site with WP Engine is incredibly easy.
Not only does WP Engine automatically backup your site each day, you can manually backup your site on command as well. With a smaller test site like mine, the backup took 6 seconds and successfully restoring the site to a previous state took less than a minute to complete.
My interactions with WP Engine were all done through email and chat. WP Engine support is available 24/7 and I found their chat and email response times fast, professional and always helpful to resolve each of my issues.
Phone support isn’t available for the entry level “Personal” plan, but chat and email support was perfectly fine for any of the minor road blocks I came up against. Chat support wait times were either negligible or just a few minutes long.
WP Engine offers a generous 60 day money-back guarantee that they honored without hassle. Cancel your service and after a few days, your money will find its way back into your bank account.
WP Engine is a solid, Tier 1 WordPress hosting service. They offer strong performance and support with an easy to navigate hosting dashboard. Also, it seems like their “Object Caching” settings seemed to give them a performance edge in the page load speed testing.
Since their entry level hosting plan is one of the more expensive options available, if you need to host more than one website, WPX Hosting might be the better deal for you.
That being said, your single site will be in good hands if you decide to pull the trigger on WP Engine.
If there's one thing that instantly stands out about Pressidium, it's their focus on treating customers like partners.
To illustrate this, one of the co-founders instantly responded to my simple inquiry for more information with a detailed and personal reply.
With a global network of small to large scale customers, Pressiduim appears to be delivering scalable high-performance through their cutting-edge server architecture.
Entry Level Plan | "Micro" |
|---|---|
Monthly Cost | $24.90 |
Number of Websites | 1 |
Storage Space | 5 GB |
Monthly Bandwidth | Designed for 10 K visitors |
Money-Back Guarantee | 60 days (for monthly payment plans only) |
Migration Services | Free |
Staging Site | Yes |
Our architecture is entirely different to what is generally available on the market today. We don't offer either shared-hosting or VPS servers, as both these approaches are old-fashioned, based on conventional technology and are not used in mission critical environments. We are currently the only host to offer High-Availability across the board.
Your site is simultaneously hosted and served by multiple nodes, so that if any single node (server) would go down, no downtime is noticed and your site continues to operate the same as before.
Our expert support and DevOps team is staffed by actual engineers and not support agents so you're in for a totally different experience than with any of our competitors.
Migrating to Pressidium through their “Do-it-yourself” service was complex. I gave it the ol’ DIY try at first by following their dashboard instructions and downloading the Duplicator site cloning plugin they recommend.
However, the self-migration situation quickly got out of hand so I switched tactics and submitted a request for Pressidium’s support team to do the migration for me.
Pressidium then migrated the site for me without any issues, but it took around 20 hours to complete. Pressidium warns you that it can take anywhere from 24 to 48 hours for their technicians to migrate your site.
Pressidium provides a very advanced and easy to navigate hosting dashboard. From the dashboard, you get an initial overview of the health of your site, your current monthly traffic, and whether or not you have any overage charges.
If you click on your hosted website and enter the advanced settings, you can perform a 1-click install of your free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate as well as access your staging site.
You can also enable Pressidium’s CDN service for an extra $10 per month fee (or upgrade your plan), but it doesn’t come standard with their entry level Micro plan.
Most hosting services don’t offer staging sites as an entry level feature so Pressidium gets some bonus points in this regard. When you’re happy with any changes you make in your staging site, simply click “Push to Production” from the hosting dashboard to make them go live.
Quick access of your website’s wp-admin, MyPHPadmin and error logs are also conveniently available from the Pressidium hosting dashboard. You can easily toggle between PHP v7 and PHP v5.6 engines for both your Production and Staging site via the Pressidium dashboard.
1. Data intensive, dynamic content, video sales page:
2. Blog grid page:
3. Small, static, lead-generation page using a background image:
Pressidium’s one-click restore backup system really lives up to its name. Not only does Pressidium take daily backups of your site, but they also make instantaneous backups and restores available at the push of a button.
To restore your site, you just select the state from your backup history you’d like to restore and click “Restore”. The restore runs quietly in the dashboard background and you’re notified by both email and dashboard notification when it’s complete.
For my test site, the backup and restore features only took two minutes total to complete.
My Pressidium support experience was fast and painless.
All issues were taken care of through Pressidium’s support ticket dashboard and my requests for help were usually responded to within 2 to 5 minutes.
The support staff was effective in solving my issues fast (usually anywhere from just a few minutes up to half an hour), however Pressidium’s managed migration took the longest to complete (around 20 hours).
Pressidium also has an easily accessible knowledge base from within their dashboard that was helpful in guiding my self-help attempts when needed.
Pressidium made good on their 60 day, money-back guarantee.
However, it’s important to note that they don’t offer any money-back guarantees for plans purchased on annual subscriptions!
There’s no doubt that Pressidium is a high-tech WordPress hosting service. Their hosting dashboard and staging site made Pressidium feel a tech-step above the other Tier 1 hosts. And when it came to the concurrent user load testing, Pressidium had the fastest and most steady performance.
However, I find myself asking – what’s the point in being able to handle high traffic volumes if you’re limited to just 10k visitors per month on the entry level plan? If you need to accommodate more traffic than that, you’ll have to pay overage fees or upgrade to a more expensive plan.
With that said, if you already have multiple established websites that need to perform under heavy traffic loads, I think one of Pressidium’s more advanced plans may be the right choice for you.
Pressable is a small to mid-sized WordPress hosting solution.
Their plans meter traffic for price category determination but offer unlimited storage capacity across the board.
Pressable provides several features standard across all 5 of their pricing plans including CDN access, staging sites and collaborator access.
Entry Level Plan | "Small" |
|---|---|
Monthly Cost | $25.00 |
Number of Websites | 5 |
Storage Space | Unlimited |
Monthly Bandwidth | 60 K pageviews |
Money-Back Guarantee | 15 days |
Migration Services | 5 sites free |
Staging Site | Yes |
We have servers specifically configured for WordPress to improve your site performance, added optimizations that improve speed and stability, and also have premium CDN and caching set up on every site— along with unlimited storage and bandwidth for all of our customers!
Our support team is comprised of experts in the WordPress domain—they can help you with plugin and theme issues, and provide insights as to the best practices in the WordPress community. Our team will be glad to migrate your site over to Pressable, and we do this at no cost to our customers!
Migration to Pressable was very simple. As part of the signup process, you just enter the details necessary to setup your free migration and it’s underway.
The total time it took to migrate my test site was about 6 hours. Not lightning fast, but not too shabby either.
All Pressable plans come standard with a staging site (a.k.a. Development Mode) to help manage modifications to your site before pushing them live.
I really liked how Pressable migrated my site into the staging area first, allowing me to review it in Development Mode before I switched it over to “Production Mode” with a single click.
Once in Production mode, Pressable automatically enables server caching and their CDN to optimize the performance of your site.
Unfortunately, these optimization tools didn’t seem to help much as my testing showed Pressable well behind WPX Hosting, WP Engine Pressidium and even SiteGround in terms of performance.
1. Data intensive, dynamic content, video sales page:
2. Blog grid page:
3. Small, static, lead-generation page using a background image:
Even though Pressable claims to offer daily backups of your website, it turns out that you must have an Amazon Web Services or Rackspace cloud storage account to do so.
That means additional costs for you on top of your monthly Pressable hosting fee just to make sure your website data is protected.
As most other hosting services manage your backup storage as a standard feature, it’s disappointing that Pressable burdens their customers with this added cost and complexity.
Accessing Pressable’s help desk and online ticketing system first requires you to set up a separate username and password from your actual hosting account to get help. I was not impressed by this additional support hoop requiring me to manage two different Pressable usernames and passwords (luckily I use LastPass to make this complexity hassle free).
On top of that, I was once again unimpressed by Pressable’s support response times as they were usually in excess of 30 minutes.
Pressable offers a 14 day free trial service to get started. Although you must enter your credit card details to sign up, you won’t be charged until your trial period is over.
Because of their poor performance, sluggish support and lack of an in-house backup service, I don’t recommend Pressable.
With other similar priced hosting services on the market that exceed Pressable’s service and performance in every way, take a pass on Pressable.
Pagely is a senior WordPress hosting service that focuses solely on providing high-end plans to large companies across various industries.
Their distinguished client list includes such giants as Disney, Verizon and Facebook.
Pagely uses Virtual Private Server (VPS) technology across all of their plans. Unfortunately, their entry level VBurst-2 plan only provides up to 6 hours of VPS-1 speed and traffic capacities per day.
If you're not a major player in your industry already, Pagely probably isn't the small business solution you're looking for based on the entry plan overhead cost alone.
Entry Level Plan | "V Burst-2" |
|---|---|
Monthly Cost | $299.00 |
Number of Websites | 15 |
Storage Space | 30 GB |
Monthly Bandwidth | 50 GB |
Money-Back Guarantee | 30 days |
Migration Services | 2 sites free |
Staging Site | Yes |
Apart from unmatched performance and uptime, our unique characteristic would definitely be the ability to best scale to our customers' needs.
We actually pioneered the managed WP hosting space about seven years ago and have arguably the most mature platform and experienced team for managing and scaling high-traffic WP sites.
DreamHost's managed WordPress plan is called DreamPress and offers a low-cost hosting solution for a single website. DreamHost also provides VPS and Dedicated plans if your looking for more power without the WordPress specialization.
DreamPress touts unlimited bandwidth and 24/7 phone, chat and ticket support – which is surprising considering their bargain-bin price point.
Note that DreamPress doesn't offer a money-back guarantee, provides no help with your migration and tacks on an extra $9.95 monthly fee for each additional website you install.
Entry Level Plan | "DreamHost" |
|---|---|
Monthly Cost | $19.95 |
Number of Websites | 1 |
Storage Space | 30 GB |
Monthly Bandwidth | Unlimited |
Money-Back Guarantee | None |
Migration Services | None |
Staging Site | No |
Our Managed WordPress Hosting platform, DreamPress, is built and optimized specifically for WordPress. DreamPress is a web-hosting platform built on two VPSs (Virtual Private Servers), one web-hosting VPS and one MySQL VPS, in addition to having built-in Varnish caching which helps with site load times and performance.
DreamPress includes unlimited email hosting.
Kinsta is a medium to large scale WordPress hosting solution.
Across their 8 Business and Enterprise plans, customers have a wide range of storage and bandwidth options to fit their specific website needs.
Kinsta is geared towards established online businesses as their entry level plan starts at $100 per month for a single site with limited storage.
Their plan pricing escalates rapidly from there.
Entry Level Plan | "Business 1" |
|---|---|
Monthly Cost | $100.00 |
Number of Websites | 1 |
Storage Space | 5 GB |
Monthly Bandwidth | 50 GB |
Money-Back Guarantee | None |
Migration Services | 1 site free |
Staging Site | Yes |
We use linux containers orchestrated via LXD on the fastest Google machines available. We are the only host to finish Top Tier in every load testing category we entered.
Synthesis is the WordPress specific hosting subsidiary of parent company Rainmaker Digital. Synthesis is also a sister company to the content marketing education site CopyBlogger.
Synthesis supports small to mid-size websites with monthly visitor limits separating their plans.
All Synthesis accounts have access to Rainmaker Digital's Scribe content marketing system. Scribe was the predecessor to CopyBlogger's new Rainmaker Platform – an all-in-one website builder, sales, content marketing, and membership site.
Entry Level Plan | "Standard" |
|---|---|
Monthly Cost | $47.00 |
Number of Websites | 1 |
Storage Space | 20 GB |
Monthly Bandwidth | 2 TB, 10 K visitors per day |
Money-Back Guarantee | 30 days |
Migration Services | $99 per site |
Staging Site | No |
In general, we believe that our lightweight NGINX architecture and proprietary caching configurations give our customers the best WordPress performance possible.
Several hosting companies focus on hosting just WordPress sites. What separates us is that we don’t just give you specialized hosting, we also give you the tools to make the most of it. We do this by including a standard Scribe account for content and site optimization – an account that used to cost more per month than a basic Synthesis account!
WPOven is a managed WordPress hosting solution aimed at web agencies, developers and resellers.
Users can create "on the fly" sites using WPOven's Recipe Builder allowing them to mix themes and plugins for rapid website delivery for clients.
Under the 'Professional', 'Business' and 'Agency' plans, users have access to the WPOven Client Manager. It's a white-label Client & Project management platform that gives users the ability to manage, bill and invoice their WordPress website clients.
The client manager feature also allows customers to create and assign client websites to Virtual Private Servers as needed.
Entry Level Plan | "Tiny" |
|---|---|
Monthly Cost | $19.95 |
Number of Websites | Unlimited |
Storage Space | 10 GB |
Monthly Bandwidth | 1 TB, 25 K visitors |
Money-Back Guarantee | 14 days |
Migration Services | Free |
Staging Site | Yes |
What sets WPOven apart from the other hosting services is firstly Value for money. WPOven provides dedicated servers with the highest server resources for the price.
Another feature that sets WPOven apart from other Managed WordPress VPS hosting services is the Unlimited sites and Visitors. This means we do not set any limit to the number of sites you want to add on the server – neither do we count or limit the number of visitors on your sites.
Our custom dashboard also provides a host different tools which can help you manage your sites better. For example, one click site cloning, site staging and sync, database manager.
Flywheel offers a range of managed WP hosting services from single site options for individuals up to bulk install plans for agencies.
Flywheel's custom dashboard is built with web designers and developers in mind providing a way to manage client websites all in one place. Team and client collaboration is also streamlined through individual logins and passwords where access is easy to grant and revoke.
Flywheel also provides free demo sites across all of its plans as well as staging site access to all but its 'Tiny' plan.
With Flywheel's "Blueprints" feature, you can reuse your custom theme designs and plugin combinations to help you build future client websites faster.
Entry Level Plan | "Tiny" |
|---|---|
Monthly Cost | $15.00 |
Number of Websites | 1 |
Storage Space | 5 GB |
Monthly Bandwidth | 250 GB, 5 K visitors |
Money-Back Guarantee | 3 days |
Migration Services | Free |
Staging Site | Only on upgraded plans |
Flywheel is a delightful platform that empowers designers, developers and digital agencies to focus on what they do best – build beautiful, functional websites for their clients.
PressLabs is a professional to enterprise-scale WordPress hosting service built for handling websites with large audiences.
Presslabs has two pricing plans that each offer unmetered bandwidth and storage space for a base monthly charge plus a $0.10 per 1000 page view fee.
The 'Enterprise' plan provides a dedicated hosting infrastructure where the 'Publisher' plan offers shared server infrastructure.
PressLabs claims to be hack-free since their first customer in 2009 so security is a badge of pride for the company. PressLabs uses a multi-layer backup system to restore site code, static files and databases immediately in case of a downtime event.
Entry Level Plan | "Publisher" |
|---|---|
Monthly Cost | $599 + $0.10 per 1 K pageviews |
Number of Websites | 1 |
Storage Space | Unlimited |
Monthly Bandwidth | Unlimited |
Money-Back Guarantee | 2 week trial |
Migration Services | Free |
Staging Site | No |
We offer real-time human support with our engineering team. The founders and CEO also do support.
We have had 0 hacks since starting out in 2009.
We serve sites from 6 locations, simultaneously: Singapore for Asia, Melbourne for Australia, Frankfurt and London for Europe, Manassas for US East Coast, San Francisco for US West Coast. The geo serving mechanism is built on top of Amazon's highly available DNS service Route 53, and the server locations are close to Amazon's regional data centers.
KahunaHost is low cost managed hosting service targeting WordPress beginners.
As you might've guessed from the name, KahunaHost is based out of Hawaii and is a sister company to OrganicThemes – a WordPress theme membership site.
Along with their managed hosting plans, KahunaHost offers a basic "Theme Setup" service that includes installing WordPress, setting up an Organic Theme as well as the "essential plugins".
KahunaHost has partnered with World Wide Web Hosting to provide its hosting services.
Entry Level Plan | "Aloha" |
|---|---|
Monthly Cost | $20.00 |
Number of Websites | 1 |
Storage Space | 5 GB |
Monthly Bandwidth | 25 K visitors |
Money-Back Guarantee | 45 days |
Migration Services | Free |
Staging Site | No |
Kahuna Host never replied to my request for more information about their managed WordPress hosting services.
WPCloud.ca is a Canadian WordPress hosting service specialized to serve the Canadian market.
Take note that even their pricing shows Canadian dollars in the quick comparison table below!
The WPCloud.ca servers are located across Canada in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver to reduce Canadian load times.
If data localization and residency issues are important to you, WPCloud's bandwidth is 100% Canadian owned & operated. This ensures that your data is being stored in compliance with Canadian privacy regulations and corporate governance.
Entry Level Plan | "Business 10" |
|---|---|
Monthly Cost | $24.00 CAD / ~$18.00 USD |
Number of Websites | 2 |
Storage Space | 10 GB |
Monthly Bandwidth | 25 GB |
Money-Back Guarantee | 30 days |
Migration Services | Free |
Staging Site | Yes |
WPCloud.ca never replied to my request for more information about their managed WordPress hosting services.
mWPCloud is a small scale WordPress hosting service targeting bloggers and small online businesses.
Note that mWPCloud is now powered by CooliceHost's NGINX + Varnish SSD servers and support team.
Entry Level Plan | "Personal" |
|---|---|
Monthly Cost | $9.95 |
Number of Websites | 5 |
Storage Space | 1 GB SSD |
Monthly Bandwidth | 60 GB |
Money-Back Guarantee | 60 days |
Migration Services | Free |
Staging Site | No |
Take a deeper look at our VPS hybrid plans. They are really good for any kind of WordPress site thanks to their specific features. Plus you will have DDoS protection with no extra charge.
We are specialized in providing fast ultimate solutions not only for most popular CMSs, but also for all projects based on PHP. This makes us a part of the big WordPress game.
Lightning Base is a WordPress only hosting service that offers basic management for clients.
Lightning Base's plans are segregated primarily by bandwidth, local storage and page view metering.
Lightning Base servers use SSD storage and modern Xeon processors.
Entry Level Plan | "Personal" |
|---|---|
Monthly Cost | $9.95 |
Number of Websites | 1 |
Storage Space | 1 GB SSD |
Monthly Bandwidth | 10 GB, 10 K pageviews |
Money-Back Guarantee | 30 days |
Migration Services | Free |
Staging Site | No |
Lightning Base is known for being very good in terms of price/performance (3rd party tests have often shown our services to match some of the very fastest providers at a much lower price).
We are much smaller than a lot of the big hosts, meaning you receive more personalized support. Tickets won't be handed back and forth between a dozen different support people, and our support is both experienced and friendly.
Don't worry, I'm not done with this WordPress hosting review yet. There's still several hosts listed above (and a few not yet mentioned) that I'm planning to migrate my test site to so I can share the overall experience and performance results with you.
It takes time and effort to do obsessively objective testing right so stay tuned for more to come!
As always, we'd like to know what you're excited to learn about when it comes to WordPress hosting.
Do you have any experience with these companies that you'd like to share?
Did I miss a WordPress hosting service you think should be included in the mega-list above?
Please contribute your thoughts in the comments section below to help us assemble a no-holds-barred WordPress Hosting review tailored to your online business needs!
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