Shortly after its arrival in 2003, WordPress became synonymous as the go-to apparatus needed to launch a website or blog onto the world wide web.

Quite importantly, the program democratized the internet by making it easier for anyone with a computer and a dream to build and launch a website.

It is currently estimated that WordPress powers over 74 million websites. As of April of 2016, WordPress.com hosts about half of these. These are astounding shares, but it begs the question: what other website builders are being used?

In addition to our WordPress website review, this article will discuss some other players in the website creation world: Wix, Weebly, and SquareSpace.

WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org - What's The Difference?

To alleviate confusion, WordPress.com is a place where a WordPress website can be built and hosted. This differs somewhat from WordPress.org, which is where one finds the WordPress software to be downloaded onto an independent host’s server. This article focuses on WordPress.com and a few of its website builder competitors. For a more in depth explanation of what WordPress.com is (and isn't), see the video below.

WordPress Website Review

The beauty of WordPress is that not only are there hundreds of free and paid templates, but that you can still customize even further. There are over 40,000 plugins available, each extending the features and functions of a website.

So even after building a really enviable, loaded-to-the-seams-with-perks website, if you REALLY needed to extend the functionality of a website, WordPress can't be topped – it has far and away the most opportunities to customize.

This is something you will see mentioned in many WordPress website reviews.

WordPress Website Ease of Use

Regarding WordPress’s ease of use, well, it does take a while to be comfortable with its builder interface. It is a WYSIWYG interface, but it does require changing between screens to see exactly what’s been done.

Consequently, there’s a bit of jumping around between WordPress’s menus. There is also a rather heavy learning curve involved in seeing what the tools do and how tweaks appear on the site page.

WordPress.com Pricing Plans

The use of WordPress is free and WordPress.com hosting is available for free, with option plans that scale up to $24.92. The “Personal” plan, for example, is billed annually at $5.99 per month. Pretty cheap! With this, you get a custom domain name, hundreds of free themes, 3 GB of storage, and the removal of WordPress ads from the site. Be sure to look for a mobile responsive theme! 

You should also note that the WordPress community is enormous. Since WordPress is an open-source content management system, or CMS, anyone can contribute to improving and advancing the product. This sort of creative involvement has established a vibrant community of WordPress experts.

While it can be a bit of a struggle for non-technical people to get used to WordPress’s menus and intricacies, it has traditionally been known as the easiest way to waltz into the website owner’s ball.

Because the WordPress brand is so strong, it is hard for non-technical folks to realize that there are other, very powerful options in the website builder field.

Who Else Is Out There?

When considering WordPress website hosting reviews, it is essential that a brief discussion of similar players take place.

The competition for do-it-yourself website builders and hosts continues to grow, and the tools to create beautiful websites have definitely gotten easier to use.

No one, as of yet, has come close to matching WordPress’s extraordinary flexibility…but not everyone needs that flexibility. Some of the very innovative and appealing website builders on the market include Wix, SquareSpace and Weebly.

These drag and drop website builders allow the less technically savvy of us to get websites up and running very fast. Each company boasts gorgeous templates, and though not as numerous as WordPress’s, are certainly of such quality as to make their sites look professionally developed.

Wix Review

Founded in 2006, Wix is a cloud-based web development platform. It utilizes a drag-and-drop content builder and its themes are mobile responsive. Wix’s user interface is very easy and intuitive to use, allowing for speedy site development. One literally drags items from a menu board onto the page and the page is developed in real time in front of the user. No need to switch screens to see what has happened!

Wix has various feature packages ranging in price from $5 to $25. Moving up past the $5 and $10 Wix plans lands us at what it calls its most popular “Unlimited” plan for $14 per month. This plan removes Wix advertising from the site and includes several apps for forms and SEO boosting. It also includes unlimited bandwidth and 10 GB of storage. Wix has an active 3rd party app market that increases functions and allows for more flexibility.

SquareSpace Review

SquareSpace, launched in 2004, is a software as a service (or SaaS-based) CMS and it, too, uses a brilliant drag-and-drop content builder, but does require a bit more time to get used to its many user options. The company has several price and feature tiers that range from $12.00 up to $46.

Its entry-level “Personal” plan offers 20 pages with unlimited bandwidth and storage. One can pay monthly for SquareSpace, or get a healthy discount for stepping up to a yearly subscription.

SquareSpace’s lush themes are mobile responsive and quite beautiful. There are opportunities for builders to tweak designs without knowing how to code.

Weebly Review

Headquartered in San Francisco, Weebly also utilizes a drag-and-drop user interface, making it extremely easy for novice users to create a professional looking website.

Weebly’s feature bundles range in price from free up to $25.00. Its design tools are arguably the easiest to use, perfect for those with little time and technical know-how. Users can really do a lot with Weebly quite easily – creating viewer perception that a good bit of money was spent on site design. Since 2015, all of Weebly’s themes have been mobile responsive.

Stepping up from Weebly’s generous free offering is the Starter Level, where for $8 per month users can connect their own domain and remove Weebly’s advertising from the site. The package also includes unlimited pages and storage, as well as a Google advertising credit of $100.

Summing Up This WordPress Website Hosting Review

As the founder of “user-friendly” (that term being relative to one’s technical experience) website creation, it’s almost unfair that WordPress is still perceived as the go-to leader in this field. There are, after all, much easier interfaces to create and launch absolutely beautiful websites.

With this astonishing new ease of creation by competitors, there are sacrifices in flexibility. Users can only work with what they are allowed to work with by the developers behind Wix and Weebly and SquareSpace. The real developers of WordPress, “we the people,” have created a nearly limitless universe of options for website builders. If you are dreaming of a website feature that doesn't yet exist, chances are very good that a plugin can be developed to see the dream become reality.

“Free” always sounds musical to me, but I’ve learned that getting something for free can sometimes contain a flat note or two.

Taking advantage of the best free hosting sites may sound great, but it may mean that you will have to sacrifice things like speed, space, security and/or uptime among other things.

How Does Free WordPress Hosting Survive?

Companies offering free webhosting are generally not doing so out of the goodness in their hearts. They are in it to make a few bucks. There are several ways that companies offering free webhosting make money:

• They often place ads on all of your pages, and you will have no say in where those ads are positioned.

• They have no qualms about collecting your information and selling it off. So be prepared for emails and offers from obscure places.

Free WordPress Hosting Pitfalls

You should also be aware that, perhaps like you, these providers may be on a budget.

They likely can’t afford to bring you the latest server hardware. It is therefore possible that there will be occasional (or frequent) downtimes as resources become overloaded, taxed or possibly even virus-infected.

Indeed, some free or cheap hosting for WordPress providers may be employing very outdated software as well, which will limit your selection and use of available web applications.

Finally, the level of care and concern the host has for your endeavors is likely to be low. You are not spending money with them. They are not, therefore, likely to get too excited about helping to solve a problem with their services. Be sure to keep your data backed up!

In the following table for Best Cheap WordPress Hosting Providers, note that all these providers will upgrade features for more expensive plans. The features I’ve listed reflect their CHEAPEST plans.

Best Cheap WordPress Hosting

Image	Price	Space	Back Ups	Stats	Unlimited Email
	$1.46 month	500 MB	Yes	Yes	No
	$3.95 month	10 GB	Yes	No	Yes
	$1.95 month	50 GB	No	Yes	No
	$4.00 month	Unlimited	Yes	Yes	Yes
	$3.95 month	50 GB	No	Yes	No

Keep in mind that there are many alternatives offering very inexpensive, or cheap, WordPress hosting; the benefits these have over free hosting make it worth the effort to try and squeeze a few bucks out of the monthly cash allotment.

Most of these providers will have a few strings attached to the “cheap” subscription. They will ask that you pay more – the regular price – after the introductory term has expired. Other companies advertise the inexpensive rate but require a longer-term commitment on your part.

Free Or Cheap - Which Way To Go?

I believe that the benefits of spending even just a few bucks on a provider far outweigh the risks and hassle of associating with a free provider.

In the end, however, a budget is a budget; if there is NO money to spend, then free must be free. Hopefully these comparison tables will help guide you in making an informed decision about what is best for your needs.

These questions are important because the answers will help you thin your list of best WordPress hosts. Do you anticipate growth in your business and therefore an increase in website visitors and transactions? Some hosts charge a fee if you exceed whatever visitor allotment your plan allows. Will your host penalize you for growth?

Some hosts have custom website builder tools for your use. Are you building your own site or will you hire a designer? Perhaps the most basic and important determinant is deciding how much money you want to spend on hosting.

These are just a few of the numerous options provided with the best WordPress hosting (including the very own WordPress website). You can see that it is essential to have a good idea, in advance, of exactly what it is that you want your website to do.

What is the Best Hosting for WordPress - Managed or Shared?

Managed hosting provides several important benefits over shared hosting, most notably greater speed and security. (See below for shared hosting description). Managed WordPress hosting elevates those benefits by providing a server that is fine tuned and optimized to host only WordPress. Shared hosting servers usually must be able to run not only the WordPress CMS but other platforms like Joomla, Drupal, and Magento.

The top rated WordPress hosting providers should offer some or all of the following:

• Servers configured to provide better and faster performance.

• Installation and automatic updating of the application software (like WordPress, for example)

• Accessible and responsive 24/7 customer service via phone, chat or email with experts that know WordPress well

• Regular Virus and malware scans - a more secure situation

• One-click installs

• At least 99% uptime

• A website builder tool

• Email accounts

• Site migration (moving your old site from its old host to the new host)

It is likely that you will find more of these options with a managed host. Not every managed server offers ALL of these, but you should expect that the best WordPress hosts offer most of these. Expect that your monthly fee will be more than what you’d pay for shared hosting, understandably.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting, often provided very cheaply or even for free, means that a group of websites share space on a single server and draw from the same pool of resources, mainly disk space and bandwidth. Rule #1 in this situation is that resources must be shared equally: one website demanding more than its allotted share of resources at any given time means that another website will suffer and may not be viewable. It’s a very democratic system and must remain that way in order for each member to operate.

If you picture an apartment building, with shared plumbing and electrical systems, you can begin to see the concept of shared hosting: a neighbor running some sort of heavy business out of his apartment begins to hog resources - and the other neighbors suffer because of it.

Shared hosting, then, is a good situation for people whose sites won’t be demanding a bunch of resources. Bloggers and small businesses, job hunters, artists: are all good clients for shared hosting.

Questions About Shared Hosting

A major concern of shared hosting is that security may be lax: shared hosts are not always running virus and malware scans. If one site welcomes a virus, it may affect the other websites on the server. If one of your neighbors begins to hang around unsavory characters, for example, then bad things could possibly happen to you or any of the other tenants. Knowing you have good neighbors can help assure that no viruses are carried into the building, putting everyone at risk.

Companies offering free or cheap webhosting are generally not doing so because they are generous souls. They are in it to make a few bucks. There are several ways that companies offering free webhosting make money:

• They often place ads on all of your pages, and you will have no say in where those ads are positioned.

• They have no qualms about collecting your information and selling it off. So be prepared for emails and offers from obscure places.

You should also be aware that these providers may be on a budget: they likely can’t afford to bring you the latest server hardware and so it is possible that there will be occasional (or frequent) downtimes as resources become overloaded, taxed or possibly even virus-infected. Indeed, some providers may be employing very outdated software as well, which will limit your selection and use of available web applications.

Finally, the level of care and concern the host has for your endeavors is likely to be low. You are not spending money with them. They are not, therefore, likely to get too excited about helping to solve a problem with their services. Be sure to keep your data backed up!

Who Does WordPress Recommend?

A quick visit to the WordPress.org website indicates what they feel is the ideal hosting environment. They say that the best hosts support PHP (a scripting language) version 5.6 or greater, and MySQL (a popular program for storing and retrieving data) version version 5.6 or greater OR MariaDB version 10.0 or greater.

This means, when you are checking out a prospective host, they should be upfront with what version of these things they are using. If you see older versions of these programs, you may want to go in a different direction. As WordPress.org states, “these versions have reached official “End of Life” and as such may expose your site to security vulnerabilities.”

As far as hardware goes, WordPress states on its site that they recommend Apache or Nginx as “the most robust and featureful server for running WordPress, but any server that supports PHP and MySQL will do.”

Also keep in mind that WordPress opens up a survey on hosting several times during the year. At these times, hosts can seek inclusion as a favored host on the WordPress site by meeting certain standards. Inclusion on this list considers whether the applicant has made any contributions to WordPress.org (contributions like advancing the software in some way with a plugin, for example, or providing solutions to problems), the size of the host’s customer base is considered as a factor for inclusion, as is ease of WordPress install on the host site, ease of upgrading to newer WP versions, and using up-to-date software and equipment are other, but not all, considerations.

WordPress Preferred Hosts:

Currently, there are four hosts that are recommended by WordPress: Bluehost, Flywheel, SiteGround and DreamHost.

Bluehost

For over 10 years WordPress has been touting Bluehost as a prefered host for its program. Bluehost offers introductory feature packs ranging in price from $19.99 on up to $49.99 for the first term, After that, plans range from $39.99 on up to $129.99. The entry level plan comes with one-click installs, allows 100 million visitors per month, 30 GB of storage, unlimited bandwidth, and 2 GB of RAM. They utilize SiteLock security. The company hosts over one million WordPress websites and offers 24/7 support from trained technicians. They offer an enhanced c-panel with some custom made tools.

Flywheel

WordPress also favors Flywheel, which positions itself as host uniquely designed for web developers and agencies. Flywheel offers several plan tiers: Pay per Site, Bulk Plans, and is even open to customizing plans. The Pay-Per-Site tier has feature packs ranging from “Tiny” at $15 per month to Personal ($30) to Business ($75). The most popular plan is the $30 Personal Plan, which allows 300 million visitors per month, 10 GB disk space, and 500GB of bandwidth. The company offers staging sites where new features can be tested out before fully integrated and live on the website.

SiteGround

Another managed hosting site recommended by WordPress is SiteGround, which seems to be among the least expensive of the managed hosts. Their “Start Up” Plan costs $3.95 each month and includes 10GB of disk space and up to 10,000 visitors each month. The Grow Big Plan allows multiple sites, has 20 GB of space, and allows 25,000 visitors a month. This plan has some additional premium features including SuperCacher and one year of free SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) for data encryption.

Site Ground’s GoGeek Plan also allows multiple websites with 30GB of space, allowing 100,000 visitors per month. With this plan, the company also says they host fewer accounts per server.

DreamHost

DreamHost fills out the last of the hosts recommended on WordPress’s website. DreamHost claims 100% uptime, offers 24/7 support, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, with plans starting at $16.95. They utilize one-click installation to get sites up and running in a jiffy. They do not offer a site builder, so website newcomers may need a bit of hand-holding to get through set-up and construction.

Who Else Is Out There?

WPEngine

WPEngine has garnered a lot of attention for its dedication to managed WordPress hosting. WPEngine’s plans run anywhere from $29.99 on up to $249.99 and above for high end custom requirements. WPEngine’s Personal Plan starts at $29.00 and has 10GB storage, unlimited data transfer and 25,000 visitors per month. The company claims to be four times faster than the competition.

WPEngine’s Professional Plan allows not one, but ten installs, 20 GB of storage and is $99.00 per month. The top of the line Business Plan allows 25 installs, 400,000 visitors per month and 30 GB of storage. There are actually several unpriced tiers over and above the Business Plan: Premium and Enterprise levels that promise even more installs, visitors and disk space - the company encourages a phone call in this instance in order to work with the customer on developing a more customized plan. WPEngine also utilizes a staging site for developers to test out changes before they go live.

InMotion

InMotion offers an optimized WordPress hosting experience on three levels: Launch comes at an introductory price of $5.99 ($7.99 later) for unlimited disk space and bandwidth and free SSD. Features increase with the Power Plan at $7.99 ($9.99 later) and Pro Plan, $13.99 ($15.99). InMotion offers $250 in advertising credits with each package. The company also touts its in-house site-builder, BoldGrid.

HostGator

HostGator offers a Starter Plan, their recommended Standard Plan, and a Business Plan. The Starter Plan, at $5.95, offers a single site with a 25,000 visitor limit. This plan offers 50 GB of storage and 1 GB back ups. With the Standard Plan, at $7.95, you get 2 sites, 200,000 visitors per month, 150 GB of storage and 2 GB of backup. For $9.95 the Business Plan offers 3 sites, 300,000 visitors and 3 GB of backups. These prices all reflect the deepest discounts for signing on for a three year term.

Page.ly

Page.ly offers monthly plans from $99 per month up to $1,249. Obviously, for these fees, this choice is not necessarily for those who just want to write a personal blog (unless, of course, the blog is about carefree spending). Page.ly aims for those deeply committed to high volume commerce. Their large stable of clients includes Visa, Crate & Barrel, Comcast, Disney and even Facebook. Page.ly, then, is known as a hosting site that can scale and that provides top notch customer support and solutions.

Page.ly’s $99 Neutrino plan offers 5 sites, 20 GB of storage, 25 GB of bandwidth. They will do two free site migrations and offer a 30 day money back guarantee. The substantial next step up to the VPS-1 plan ($499), allows 30 websites with 50GB storage and 200GB of bandwidth. The company places no limits on the number of customer visits - so no penalties or fees to worry about if volume suddenly spikes. Page.ly claims that 81% of customer tickets are resolved within two hours.

iPage

iPage touts itself as “the best value in town.” While their $3.75 per month Starter Plan is enough to get you up and running, their WP Essential Plan at $6.95 per month adds in enhanced security features and a support plan that includes WordPress experts. This pricing requires a multi-year commitment - not unusual for introductory offers. iPage provides curated WordPress themes, plugins and an easy to use customized control panel. This plan also includes a daily backup, unlimited mailboxes, unlimited disk space. They offer Weebly as a website builder.

Media Temple

Media Temple offers its entry level Personal managed WordPress hosting plan beginning at an introductory price of $13.40 per month for the first three months, then $20 thereafter. This plan supplies two sites with 30 GB of SSD storage space and allows 400 thousand visitors monthly. A step up, to the Studio Plan, increases its offerings to 10 sites with 100 GB SSD storage space, two million monthly visitors. This plan rings up at $40.20 per month for three months and then increases to $60.00. Additional plans are available.

Media Temple aims its services at WordPress designers, developers and bloggers; some of its biggest clients include CBS and Samsung. The company claims it uses “WordPress-certified” support working 24/7 out of their Los Angeles offices.

A Final Word...

With so many hosts and option packages being offered, it’s almost as exhausting to choose a provider as it is to build a website! I hope this guide proves to be of some small help in your journey. Just remember: know thyself - know exactly what it is you want your website to do, and you will be able to eliminate some players quickly, finding your way to the best hosting for WordPress in less time.