WordPress hosting is in high demand, leading to fierce competition among hosting providers. A significant portion of hosting services rely on selling WordPress hosting, and without it, they just wouldn’t survive.
People often ask us which hosting is the best for WordPress. Choosing the right WordPress hosting can feel overwhelming, with countless options promising the best performance. But the truth is, “best” depends entirely on your unique website. Understandably, you might be tempted to follow recommendations, but even trusted options might not be the perfect fit for your specific needs.
From simple blogs to resource-heavy online stores, each website has its own requirements. Matching your hosting plan to those needs ensures optimal performance and avoids unnecessary costs. Consider factors like expected traffic, plugin usage, and future growth potential. Don’t hesitate to reach out for personalised recommendations!
At Website Helper, clients can choose to add WordPress hosting as an extra service to our WordPress maintenance plan. We offer shared cloud hosting for small, simple websites and fully managed cloud VPS options using premium providers like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, 20iCloud, and Digital Ocean for demanding websites.
We do not force clients to host with us, all of our clients are free to host their WordPress websites with whomever they prefer. We simply offer the convenience of managing everything under one roof.
As our clients use various providers to host their WordPress websites, we’ve had the chance to evaluate and compare the performance of many web hosts, both large and small. Since we often get asked, ‘Which is the best WordPress hosting?’, we’re going to share our top recommendations for you to consider for your website.
Budget-Friendly WordPress Hosting
- Price Range: £1.99 – £9.99
If you’re just starting out or managing a small website, cPanel-based hosts are likely your best option. Most cPanel hosts offer LiteSpeed hosting, ensuring that their servers are finely tuned for optimal performance with WordPress websites
Some great-performing cPanel web hosts in the UK include StablePoint (brought to you by the guys who created Tsohost), Krystal, Guru, and Clook. All of these providers offer one-click WordPress installers, WordPress toolkits, staging options, email mailboxes (except Guru, which charges extra for email), LiteSpeed cache for performance, and daily backups.
Mid-Range WordPress Hosting
- Price Range: £13.99 – £34.99
If you seek a more powerful hosting solution built around premium cloud infrastructure, then SiteGround undeniably excels in this category.
This Bulgarian host stands out as one of the best mid-range WordPress hosting options available in the market. Their entire platform has been meticulously crafted from the ground up, abandoning the outdated cPanel interface they once used.
SiteGround leverages the Google Cloud Platform and includes exclusive features, all incorporated into their pricing. This includes out-of-the-box caching, a comprehensive security suite, email mailboxes, WordPress auto-updates, a free CDN, free SSL, daily backups, and an automated WordPress migration service.
If you are seeking unwavering performance and a hosting provider that eats, sleeps and breathes WordPress then SiteGround is a perfect choice.
Premium WordPress Hosting Options
- Price Range: £8.99 – £300+
Premium WordPress hosting usually doesn’t include email mailboxes, so you’ll need to find a separate email solution for your business. Google Workspace, Outlook for Business or Zoho Mail are great options.
Let’s start with Cloudways. While one could make the case that Cloudways falls into the mid-tier category for hosting providers due to its low-cost entry options, it has the capabilities to power extremely high-traffic websites. Cloudways, now a DigitalOcean brand, has differentiated itself by building its infrastructure around major cloud platforms like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and DigitalOcean (formerly also included Vultr and Linode).
Rather than rely on in-house servers, Cloudways engineered a highly-optimised WordPress hosting stack on top of these cloud providers and despite being a premium service, Cloudways allows you to get started for as little as $11/month with a modest 1GB RAM/1 vCPU/25GB storage DigitalOcean droplet. Performance and speed are reliable across all plans, with no bottlenecks. Cloudways uses a container-based setup, ensuring that no noisy neighbours will affect the performance of your website.
The management is comprehensive and includes migrations, security, backups, caching, a global CDN, SSL certificates, cache optimisation, Object Cahe Pro, and auto-healing technology.
Moving on to 20i. This company operates similarly to Cloudways, providing managed cloud hosting with a selection of 20iCloud, AWS, and Google Cloud servers. Based in the UK, 20i has experienced rapid growth and has gained prominence very quickly.
Unlike other managed WordPress hosts, 20i includes 10GB mailboxes on all plans, as well as DDoS protection and a global CDN. They offer a comprehensive WordPress toolkit and web acceleration suite to boost performance. Additionally, they provide daily backups, ElasticSearch, Redis cache, full DNS management, StackCache, and WordPress staging.
20i’s customer support is exceptionally reliable, mirroring the quality of their hosting services. We collaborate with 20i, and many of our clients are hosted on their platform through us.
Wrapping up with Kinsta. Kinsta stands out as one of the largest managed WordPress hosts, and like many premium providers, they rely on Google Cloud for their operations. Kinsta adopts a container-based setup where resources are shared, ensuring access during traffic spikes to keep your website online consistently. Their support team is known for its friendliness and availability 24/7.
All Kinsta plans come with free CDN, premium migrations, daily backups, free SSL, site cloning, and staging capabilities. Additionally, Kinsta offers various add-ons that are billed separately, including premium staging environments, Redis cache, NGinx Reverse Proxy, external backups, extra backups, disk space add-ons, and memory increases.
Wait, What About WPEngine?
While WPEngine is arguably one of the largest retail-managed WordPress hosts in the world, we are not fans. The issue with WPEngine is their lack of transparency – they don’t disclose the resources available to you and often sidestep questions about resources. At times, their support has been inconsistent, leading us to question their overall operation. It sometimes feels like they are merely another GoDaddy – strong in marketing but lacking in other aspects.
Kinsta is comparable to WPEngine, and though the pricing may differ slightly, we still prefer Kinsta for its transparency – you know exactly what you are getting.
The Big Players
If you’re curious about where major players host their WordPress websites, there’s one destination for them: WPVIP. Owned by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WPVIP provides enterprise-level WordPress hosting starting at £25,000 per year. Yes, you read that right. They offer hosting solutions that support some of the world’s largest websites, including major media and newspaper companies like The Sun, Metro, New York Post, USA Today, Aljazeera, and more. They also host websites for NASA, Disney, Salesforce, and other prominent organisations.
If you have questions about hosting or are unsure about your website’s hosting needs, feel free to reach out to us for advice.