Recommended WordPress hosts (by a WordPress developer)

As a professional WordPress web developer, I get a lot of people asking me where they should host their website and for recommendations for WordPress hosting. So here’s some insights in to my recommended and not-so-recommended WordPress web hosts.

Table of Contents:

1. What I look for in a WordPress host
   • Free SSL certificates
   • SSH access
   • WP-CLI
   • Support Git / Git deployments
   • A good admin panel (or cPanel)
   • Multiple user access
   • Off-site backups
   • Staging sites
   • 24/7 support – by email
   • Technical stuff
2. Red warning flags about hosts
   • Your plan is based on “visits per month”
   • Free domains
   • Talking about email and spam
3. My recommended generic web hosts for WordPress
   • For UK WordPress hosting
   • For USA WordPress hosting
4. My recommended “managed” WordPress hosts
   • For big-budget Enterprise WordPress hosts
   • For everyone else WordPress hosts
5. Other WordPress hosts I have yet to use
6. WordPress hosting you should avoid
   • GoDaddy
   • 34SP
   • Blue Host
   • WP Engine
   • WPX
   • WordPress.com
   • Pagely
   • Pressable
   • Exabytes Malaysia
   • Ionos / 1and1
   • 123-reg
   • Dreamhost
   • UK2.net
7. WordPress hosts that could have issues
   • 20i Hosting
   • Krystal.co.uk

What I look for in a WordPress host

Hosting companies are virtually the same, so I feel like small details make a big difference. Here is what I look for:

Your host should offer free SSL certificates

I think a good sign of a good web host is if they offer free SSL or not. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates are what puts the lock on your website address in your browser bar. They are simple to generate and costs a host nothing and only has upsides for their security and customers. One of the most popular ways to generate free certificates is Let’s Encrypt. This lets you generate free SSL certificates for domains, sub-domains, whatever. It’s free for the hosting company to install, so any hosting company still charging you for SSL (like GoDaddy) is trying to squeeze money out of you for no reason and should be avoided.

Web hosts should give SSH access to the server

Any decent developer is using SSH to speak to your server, put files on your server, deploy changes, monitor what’s happening and more. If your developer doesn’t have SSH access (sometimes called Shell Access or Terminal), it means they pretty much only have FTP and your hosts control panel to interact with your server, and this is just not a professional level of interaction. Mistakes will be made. Your host must offer SSH access.

For WordPress, the host should have WP-CLI installed

If you have SSH access, having WP-CLI setup will make administering WordPress sites much easier for your developer. One liner commands that can create new users, reset passwords, check options, fix issues, upgrade plugins and more.

They should support Git / Git Deployments

Related to the need for SSH, very often this is a requisite for using Git directly on your server or for setting up Git deployments from a service like GitHub or BitBucket. Using version control will make updates to your site quicker, faster, more reliable and easier to manage. Faster development, faster changes, more secure and can skip back and forth through changes easily.

A well-made admin panel (or cPanel access)

This one is hard to get info on in advance because it requires using the service to get a feel for it. But hosts often make their own admin panels where you can administer your sites. This can be great, or it can be a disaster. GoDaddy for example has a terrible buggy admin panel which many developers won’t use, so don’t use them. SiteGround has a great admin panel. And of course there is industry standard control panels – cPanel or Plesk. cPanel is the industry standard of domain admin, it’s quick and simple and you can do virtually everything you need to do without contacting support. If you have cPanel access, you can add sub-domains, add redirects, add files, create email addresses, install programs; everything you need to do. Plesk on the other hand is a big pile of shite, so avoid that.

Ability to easily add guest to web hosting account and to have multiple accounts

You want to invite your developer to your hosting account and not just give them your admin username and password. This lets you retain control should you have issues with your developer, and lets the developer login using their own security protocols. SiteGround handles this really well.

Daily / Hourly backups, preferably offsite

Of course you will have your own off-site backup solution (won’t you?!), but ultimately, you want a web host that might just save your skin one day, and for backups to be available at server level. Ideally they allow individual restoring of files rather than an “all or nothing” approach.

A staging area that can sync both ways

A staging area allows you to test upgrades and updates before letting them hit your live server. It’s important that the staging can be re-used and syncs both ways (from Live to Staging AND from Staging to Live, as you never know when you need it). SiteGround is one of the few hosts who don’t let you re-sync a staging area, and instead you need to delete it and create it again, which is really annoying.

24/7 Support – available by email at least

This is important. You’d also be surprised (or maybe not) how many web hosts claim they have 24/7 support and then will only answer between 9 and 5. Make sure your host supports 24/7 support by sending them a question late at night and see how long they take to answer. Notice I said send them a question. Technical topics need to be written down – so emails, support tickets, and maybe Live Chat are OK. Offering technical support on the phone is INSANE, and this is what GoDaddy does. Also check their spelling and grammar (and nowadays, if they seem like a robot). This is important as it tells you if you are dealing with an outsourced support operation with no real access to your server, or if you’re dealing with an outsourced person using ChatGPT. Either way, could you rely on that person to help you in an emergency? Likely, no you couldn’t, so don’t use that company.

The technical stuff you should look for

When they talk about the disk space they offer, it should be stored on NVMe SSD. If they talk about HTTP, they should be delivery HTTP/2 or ideally HTTP/3. They should offer something like Litespeed or Varnish. They should mention Redis, and Object Cache Pro. They should mention CDN (but the quality of CDNs can vary so much it’s better not to rely on this too much). If they mention Enterprise CloudFlare or Fastly that’s pretty good (if they don’t mention a brand it’s probably not that good tbh). If they mention auto-scaling or load balancing thats a good sign.

Red warning flags about web hosts

If you see any of these things, it might be a sign that you’re picking the wrong host…

The hosts bases your plan on “visits per month” (i.e. 25,000 Visits per month!)

This is a big red flag. Big big big red flag. This is some new way in the last 10 years that web hosts have started categorising their plans, and I am amazed they are getting away with it. What is a “visit”? What happens when your product gets on Dragons Den? What happens when you have a DDoS attack? What happens if you have a 1gb of images on your home page? The term “visit” is so open to interpretation that you are beholden to the web hosts interpretation and guess what – you’re going to end up paying them more money. I once had a client on WP Engine who suffered a DDoS attack, and instead of helping the client solve it, WP Engine tried to sell them a plan upgrade 100x more than their monthly plan cost.

Free domain (guess what, it’s not free!)

You should never have your domain name and your web hosting in the same place. Never ever. When you do, you have one point of failure, but also you are completely attached to that web host, and getting out from under them can be difficult. Don’t fall for the trap of getting a free $5 domain, and then paying thousands extra in low quality web hosting.

Paid-for SSL certificates

Paid-for SSL or hard-selling SSL is a massive red flag. SSLs are a cash cow, and any company who doesn’t offer you free SSL or is trying to upsell you SSL probably can’t be trusted (Yes, I am looking directly at you GoDaddy).

They talk about email and spam

Email and spam protection pretty much has nothing to do with web hosts, so if they are talking about that, it’s either something that you will never use or simply does not matter. So disregard anything they say about email or spam.

No migration help

Any decent web host will help you migrate your existing websites to them and do it at a good time for your business (i.e. not in the middle of the day). So if your new host won’t help with migration, ditch them.

Support isn’t 24/7

Websites surprisingly do not keep 9-5 office hours. You need 24/7 support, and you need answers immediately, and not waiting until office hours.

Telephone only support

I’m again looking at you GoDaddy. Phone support is great for beginners, and bad for anyone especially coders or anyone technical.

Still using FTP to transfer files

FTP is not secure or a reliable way to update websites. Hosts need to offer SSH or Git deployments. Hosts like WPX only offer FTP in 2024, wow super dumb.

My recommended generic web hosts for WordPress:

Generic web hosts means that they support WordPress, but you can in theory install anything you want on the servers. Having staging sites with these hosts and moving between them is sometimes more complex that using a managed WordPress host (i.e. you need to manually make the staging site and keep it in sync yourself using a plugin). The plans can also be shared. I don’t have a problem recommending shared hosting if the company is reputable and your website needs are basic.

My recommended UK web host and general hosting

Guru – https://www.guru.co.uk – is UK-based, with fast SSD servers, Litespeed performance, 24/7 support (who seem knowledgeable), free SSLs via Let’s Encrypt, a reputable parent company (UK Dedicated), cPanel access, backups, HTTP/2, SSH access, WP-CLI.

I’ve been using Guru since 2016 and I’m very happy with them. I have also had many clients using them with the same results – i.e. it just works.

Pricing is from £9 per month. They offer the first month of hosting for £1, which is plenty of time to check out their service.

My recommended USA web host and general hosting

Hosting.com (previously A2 Hosting) – https://www.hosting.com – is a USA-based, cheap and cheerful web host. 24/7 support across multiple channels, cPanel, Litespeed support, Free SSL, SSH, CDN via CloudFlare. Overall A2 Hosting are very good and I’ve used them for around 10 years. A2 Hosting is my recommendation if you need a website for a USA audience but on a budget.

Pricing is from $3 per month+ (yes, super cheap!).

My recommended “managed” WordPress-focused hosts:

These are managed WordPress services, so the ability to do anything other than WordPress is restricted.

My big budget Enterprise WordPress hosting recommendation:

Pantheon – https://pantheon.io – Pantheon have some of the fastest servers I’ve ever used, and offer some great deployment and staging utilities. Pricing is not cheap though, and when you go to Elite level hosting with them the cost is prohibitive to many of my clients. Everything you want, they got. They even have PR-level CI integration, so each change to your code can have its own server spun up to test changes. Brilliant.

Downsides is their support – my experiences with their support has been pretty lame (and this is on an account I would consider to pay A LOT of money for), live chat rarely have answers and tickets are not responded to for some days. For me, this is mostly fine as it’s not often I need support, but for others its likely a deal breaker.

Overall, Pantheon is a professional technically superior solution, but if you have issues you’re probably on your own. From $42 (£30) per month, but this is unfortunately limited by visitors (25,000).

For everyone else Managed WordPress hosting recommendation:

SiteGround – https://www.siteground.com – I’ve ignored SiteGround for many years. I put them in the cheap, cheerful and crap bucket along with BlueHost and GoDaddy. But a few years back a new client came with a SiteGround site, and I was truly expecting another GoDaddy custom web admin monstrosity. But what a surprise! SiteGround has a really good custom admin – things work! Their support works! Their sites are fast! They have SSH, free SSL, staging sites, backups, WordPress management, a free SiteGround Optimizer plugin which is actually pretty good and does good things. I recommended to GoGeek plan for the max resources and speed – from $40 (£30) per month+.

My gripes with SiteGround involve two things – the staging sites and pre-provisioning SSL certs. Staging sites can be easily created and setup, but they cannot be updated from the live site again. I found this really weird, it means you have to fire up a new staging site each time you want to get new details from the live site (which is often in most sites cases). Maybe this is easier if you host your domain with SiteGround, but you really shouldn’t do that (so all your eggs are not in one basket), and none of my clients do that.

SiteGround don’t pre-provision SSL, so if you are transferring a site to them from another host, YOU WILL HAVE DOWNTIME while the DNS updates and then the SSL is finally issued. Lame.

Which WordPress hosts are next on my list to checkout?

I’ve not got around to using these WordPress hosts yet, but I am eager to:

• Cloudways (I’ve used them for a Laravel project and were surprisingly good)
• Templ
• GreenGeeks
• Convesio (A conversion-orientated host, could be good for WooCommerce)
• Scala Hosting (An A2 Hosting alternative)
• Kinsta (but doesn’t support plugins like All-in-One WP Migration or Updraft)

Have you tried any of these? Let me know in the comments.

Hosting companies to avoid…

Avoid these companies like the plague. You have been warned! These are WordPress hosts that you should not use. When I say avoid, don’t bother trying their trial, turn down clients who host on them, and do anything you can to get away from them. Don’t believe the hype. Don’t believer a random blogger who uses Bluehost (they conveniently forget to tell you Bluehost pays the highest affiliate commission). Don’t believe their Google ads. The more a company spends on ads, the less they are spending on their business and ultimately you the customer.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy have assimilated lots of hosting companies under their brand – resulting in a mess of broken integrations. Their premium WordPress hosting is a mess, and suffers from frequent DNS issues. No free SSL via Let’s Encrypt. Delegated access to other accounts is a total turd. Their custom control panel is a total mess. Support is the major bad point for me, it’s slow as you have to phone each time, and cannot simply email explaining your entire problem in one hit. Or worse you need to use Live Chat which I am guessed in based in India somewhere which results in 45-60 mins of back and forth before they answer simple questions. I’ve found the best way to get support from them is to tweet at GoDaddy as the team who handles that is US-based, and seems know what they are doing to about the best you will get. Avoid.

34SP

I had really high hopes for 34SP, but a lot about them feels out of date like they haven’t been managed properly in 5-10 years. Manual setup of SSH, manual weird setup of Git integration (which I have yet to get working), mail / PTR issues. Feels like a hosting company that hasn’t made progress in 5-10 years. Migration was done via Updraft, which they left installed, and the default install files and folders were all just left in our sites root, a bit sloppy. Support is prompt enough, some support docs could do with improvement (but many wouldn’t be needed if the control panel was improved) but the support can be curt in an exclusively British way and you just know that these IT guys are sitting there thinking “RTFM you moron”. Price is OK and site speeds seem OK for UK clients, I just wish it felt a bit more robust and professional. Won’t be using again.

Bluehost

Bluehost really are a terrible host, who stuffs hundreds of websites on to one server, each with virtually no protection between them. Every single customer who has hosted with Bluehost has been hacked and have had no help/support from Bluehost, without them trying to upsell their own recovery services. TTFB is shockingly bad, and they don’t give full cPanel access. Most bloggers recommend Bluehost as they pay the most affiliate referral payments! Don’t believe the hype! Avoid!

WP Engine

Used to be a great company. But for multiple reasons I would not go with them now. Support is shockingly poor, when it used to be great. It seems they have hired a right bunch of doughnuts to give support, and waiting times are getting real long. Their new UI interface is shockingly bad – I’m never quite sure where I am in staging/production environments (dangerous!). The worst downside is that they charge per page views and do nothing to remove or reduce bad actors on domains – hence, if you get spammed with a DNS attack, look forward to a bill in the thousands of pounds instead of £30 per month!

WPX

What a beautiful website, makes lots of promises, but what a shoddy service. Their dashboard seems so poorly put together its amateur hour, and their support has that fantastic Eastern Europe “we don’t give a fuck” type of attitude or “you must be a total beginner” attitude. Billing system is wonky (clients paid, it processed twice, but the account still marked as pending, customer service was no help in resolution). They have a dumb system where any contact on the account receives all correspondence email – i.e if account owner emails about billing, any response is sent to all account contacts. This is super dumb, as CEOs are often named contacts but don’t want potentially hundreds of inane emails hitting their inbox from their team. It also means any issue you contact them about is shared across all team members. Dumb. Definitely not a service for Enterprise or any professional level. They also do not offer SSH access or GitHub deployments, WHAT YEAR IS IT??? Avoid.

WordPress.com

I love WordPress, but WordPress.com is not WordPress the software, and in my opinion doesn’t offer a great hosting experience. You have no option but to leave some plugins installed on your site, they inject scripts in to your site, require a lot of money to use plugins, and don’t give SSH access or staging websites. Avoid.

Pressable

Have heard great things about Pressable, but then realised they were now owned by Automattic, so basically WordPress.com in disguise. Avoid.

Pagely

Pagely was acquired by GoDaddy in 2019 and it seems that the company has not innovated or improved in any way since then, so any glowing reviews or opinions are from the pre-acquisition days. Docs are out of date, processes are basic and a lot of manual setup is required to configure staging etc. Plugin and core updates are rolled out to sites immediately – so if a dev somewhere ships a breaking change (shout out to the WooCommerce plugin developers) then your site will be immediately affected and be taken down or broken. If a plugin ships breaking changes, you’re dealing with them in production. Fucking amateur hour. Pagely don’t allow plugins like UpdraftPlus (their banned plugin list is long). Their support can be curt, to the point of being unhelpful. They charge an extra 50% for using UK servers. Avoid.

Exabytes Malaysia

Nearly all my experiences with Exabytes have been bad. Bad website uptime (averaging 95% per month). Customer support is clueless. Overloaded servers (your site crashes when doing simple WordPress upgrades!). They are so bad, I dedicated a post to them – Exabytes is a terrible WordPress web host.

Ionos / 1and1.co.uk

Overloaded servers, not offering multiple free SSL via Let’s Encrypt, their own domain and web control system is clunky, and frequent billing errors. I am still getting emails from them about domains due for renewal I stopped renewing over 15 years ago. They keep changing their name for a reason! Avoid.

123 Reg

123 Reg are a domain company who has started to offer web services. Clunky web admin. Mad firewall blocks to login unless you are based in the UK. And they charge you for EVERYTHING! Avoid avoid avoid them.

Dreamhost

It boggles my mind how a company this bad can still be in business. A bulk host who doesn’t care about customers. Avoid them.

UK2.net

Famous for free domains in the early 2000’s, but the servers are massively overloaded and support is poor. Avoid them.

Namecheap

Another company that used to be great, but now suck. And suck hard. Sure maybe use them for domains, but don’t make the mistake of using them for hosting too. Avoid them.

WordPress Hosting that might be OK, maybe not

These are hosts that I’ve checked out but never fully committed too and paid for services. Rather I’ve researched them, sent them emails and tested their support.

20i Hosting

The last time I look at 20i Hosting in 2017 they didn’t offer backups, gave limited SSH access and have some crappy custom administration screens. But they’ve changed a lot it seems in 2024. Maybe worth another look?

Krystal

Krystal claimed to offer 24/7 support but I found myself waiting and waiting for support. I don’t have time for companies who claim rapid support and are slow to respond. To be fair, they seem to have made support a key feature of their service now and I appreciate that. Maybe worth another look?

What do you think of my analysis of WordPress hosts? Have you had good experiences where I have not? Let me know in the comments.