What are the best website hosting companies for beginners? These are the hosting companies that I would recommend to my friends. I’ve tried and tested many different website hosting companies, and frankly, a lot of them are complicated or waste your time and money by offering upsells for things that you just don’t need, or should have already been included in the price.
These are my top recommended website hosting companies that will offer you great value for money, and excellent performance and will make it easy for you to get started.
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What do you really need from Website Hosting?
Let’s talk about website hosting. I want to help you figure out what you need. So that you don’t overpay have a good experience and understand exactly what you need to achieve your website goals.
When you are building a website there are several layers to getting it to work.
The first layer is your domain name. That is the name of your website and you can also use it as your email address. So the domain for my website is www.realwebsitehints.com and my email address is tim@realwebsitehints.com.
The first step in getting a web presence is getting a domain name. For some people, this might be all that you need to get started.
If you have only a domain name you can have email at your domain as well as forward your domain address to one of your social media pages like Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest or something else. You get the benefits of a professional-looking email address at your domain and you can worry about building your website later.
Email hosting and Website hosting are always separate, even if you have one company that provides both of these services to you. Technically they are separate services, so you can have a different email hosting provider from the provider for your website hosting.
The next layer is website hosting. This is the server/computer that hosts the files and databases that make up your website.
So domain name registration, email hosting, and website hosting are the 3 basic and separate components of owning a website. Many companies offer all three of these together which can make managing these easier.
What Website Hosting Should You Get?
With years of experience and testing different hosting options, these are my top recommendations for hosting companies. It really depends on what type of website you are trying to create and how much money you are able to spend on your hosting. With WordPress hosting you can always move to a new hosting company. So don’t stress too much about picking the right Hosting company for the long term. Pick the one that will help you get started now!
Best Hosting For Only Domain Name and Email Hosting
If you only need a professional email and a domain name, my favorite service for just getting these on their own is Hover.
With Hover getting your domain name is super simple. They don’t try to upsell you because all they do is domain names and email hosting.
After you register your domain name with Hover they also make it very simple to either forward that domain name to one of your social media accounts or forward that domain name to the website hosting company of your choice.
Adding email to your domain with Hover is also a great value. For only $5 per year you can have that email forwarded to your current email service like Gmail for example, or for only $20 per year you can have Hover host your email address. Both of those are incredible deals.
So, if you are not ready to build a website yet, but want to lock down your domain name and get a professional-looking email address Hover is my top pick. You can get started with Hover on your own, or check out my detailed tutorial on How to get a domain name & email.
Best Low-Cost Website Hosting
Hostinger is a great website hosting company to get started with. It’s very affordable and so easy to use.
As a company, Hostinger’s goal is to simply offer you great quality hosting that is simple and easy to use at a low cost. And that is exactly what they do. They also have servers worldwide and accept payments from many different global payment services.
What’s Great About Hostinger:
- It’s Easy!
- Great pricing
- Global Presence
- Easy to manage
- Low-Cost Plans for multiple websites
Signing up for Hostinger is very straightforward. Just choose your plan no crazy upsells here!
The WordPress Starter plan includes the first year of your domain registration for free and free email hosting at your domain for multiple email addresses. You can also build up to 100 websites with this plan. This is great for people just starting out and who may want to try building a few different websites to see what works.
If you are trying to keep your costs as low as possible and you have already registered your domain name elsewhere, the Single WordPress Hosting plan allows you to get started at a very low cost. You only get one email address and one website, but the price is right!
One of the features that I appreciate that Hostinger offers is the option for you to give access to your website to a third party easily without needing to share your login credentials, Hostinger makes it easy to give access to your account to an outside party. This makes it easier to get outside help when building your website.
Things that could be better about Hostinger.
You need to remember to add the SSL certificate. It’s free and easy to set up, but it doesn’t happen automatically.
They do pre-install a lot of plugins when they install WordPress for you. I like many of the plugins that they pre-install, but I’m not a big fan of companies adding plugins for you because the best way to keep your website running smoothly is to use as few plugins as possible.
Should you choose Hostinger website hosting?
If you are just getting started and are looking for an easy and economical way to start building your website give Hostinger is my top pick.
Getting started is very easy and using the hosting dashboard is also very easy. They have clearly spent a lot of time making their service easy to use.
Hostinger offers a 30-day money-back guarantee so there is no excuse not to get started!
Best Website Hosting For Bloggers Looking To Grow:
DreamHost offers some competitive low-cost pricing, with many of the same options as Hostinger, but the plan that stands out for DreamHost is the DreamPress Plus WordPress Hosting Plan.
In fact, this is the plan that I use for Real Website Hints, and I have been using DreamHost for website projects for over 10 years, so you could say that I’m a satisfied customer.
If you have extra money to get started with and are serious about having your website ready for growth we recommend DreamHost’s DreamPress.
What’s not so good about DreamHost?
The DreamPress Plus package can be expensive for people just starting out so the pricing might not be right for you.
The Hosting interface is very cluttered with lots of different things. Over the years they have been streamlining it, but it can be easy to get lost in the interface.
With DreamPress most of the things need to work with you will find in the WordPress tab on the hosting dashboard.
Fortunately, DreamHost has a very good and competent customer service staff who are happy to help point you in the right direction and oftentimes even complete the task for you!
Should you choose DreamHost hosting?
If you have the extra money to get started the DreamPress Plus plan will help get you started the right way with the right tools for success. Managing your hosting can be more complicated than Hostinger, but fortunately, after the initial setup, you rarely need to do much in the way of managing your hosting.
I’ve been using DreamHost for over 10 years and I’m very happy with their service
If you aren’t satisfied with Dreamhost they offer a 97-day money-back guarantee, one of the best in the hosting industry. With WordPress, you can always move your website to another hosting company so we say give DreamHost a try!
Best Website Hosting For Online Stores
WordPress is a great platform for building websites and blogs, but when it comes to creating an online store WordPress is too complicated and it’s very difficult to create a great customer experience.
The Shopify platform is all about helping people build and manage an online store. It offers the simplicity of setup and management that will make it easy for your to run and maintain your online store.
The customer experience browsing your store and checkout is streamlined and offers the same experience that customers are used to.
In personally testing and using Shopify I have also found their customer support to be excellent. That extends to the customer support for the independent plugin makers that offer extended functionality to Shopify stores. It’s a platform to help business owners and that is huge!
As a business owner managing your orders and customer relations is clear and simple from the Shopify dashboard. Shopify also allows you to make phone or in-store purchases with their iOS and Android apps.
You can check out my complete review of Shopify which I used to build an online store several years ago that’s still happily humming away on Shopify.
The best way to know if Shopify will work for you is by setting up and using it. They offer a free trial where you can test the platform and see if it will work for you.
Which Web Host Should You Choose?
I’ve kept this list brief and narrowed it down to only the hosting companies and services that I would recommend to a close friend who asked me for advice.
My advice to you if you are thinking about building your website is to just get started! Take advantage of the money-back guarantees or trial period and just start doing it!
What’s Next?
Start building your website! The next step to building a website with WordPress is building your website. To do that you’ll need a great theme. Check out my current best WordPress themes recommendations.