Creating and maintaining a website used to be a complex, expensive, and long-winded affair that involved hiring a professional web designer, as well as someone to maintain your site, and shell out on an expensive web hosting plan.
But that has drastically changed over the past few years, and now anyone can create an affordable website. In fact, you can design, build and host your own website for the same price as a cup of coffee or a takeaway burger (and sometimes even cheaper than both) with a cheap web hosting service.
While it’s true that some web hosting companies are more expensive than others, many offer plans that cost as little as $2 per month and that don’t compromise on quality either. The best cheap web hosting providers offer domain names, email addresses, website builders, loads of website templates, ample storage and bandwidth, impressive performance, free SSL certificates, 24/7 support and lots more features in a single package.
If you’re looking for an affordable web hosting plan but don’t know which one to choose, you don’t need to worry as we’ve tested and ranked the most popular providers out there. Read on to find out the best cheap web hosting services currently available
The best web hosting deals
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Here are the best cheap web hosting services:
In at first place, top web host company Bluehost offers WordPress hosting for as cheap as $2.75 per month for 36 months. It also offers basic shared hosting from $2.75 monthly for the same period of time.
For the money you pay for Bluehost’s WordPress hosting, you get one website, 50 GB SSD storage and custom themes.
Not just a web hosting provider, Bluehost now also offers its very own website building service for a mere $2.75 (£1.98) per month (on a three-year contract).
Compared to its competitors, Bluehost’s cheapest managed WordPress hosting plan offers one WordPress website, 20 GB web storage, free SSL, all across 200+ global Edge servers for $9.96 per month for 36 months.
Investing your money into a Bluehost web hosting plan enables you to get an automated setup service for WordPress, not to mention other apps via a Mojo Marketplace-powered system. There’s also a cPanel-based area to allow expert users to tweak things.
With plans starting at $2.49 per month, InMotion Hosting is one of the cheapest hosting services on the market and offers a variety of nifty features to help you set up an amazing website.
That dirt-cheap price provides you with the ability to create one website, plus 10GB of SSD storage, unlimited bandwidth, a free email address, free SSL, a free website builder, a security suite and marketing tools.
When we reviewed InMotion Hosting, we were impressed with how great its account management console looks and how quick it is to create a website using this service. In fact, you can automatically install WordPress, Drupal, PrestaShop, Magento and lots of other website building services.
Another area that InMotion Hosting takes very seriously is customer support. It allows users to contact its customer service team 24/7, 365 days of the year, through live chat, email and phone. What’s more, the company offers plenty of online tutorials and advice in its community forum.
In terms of downsides, we felt that InMotion wasn’t the best in our shared hosting performance tests, but this is still a well-supported, feature-packed, great value web hosting service that’s well worth your attention.
As you can doubtless guess from the name, Namecheap is another affordable web hosting service. You can get a .com domain for just $8.88, while year-long shared hosting plans start at a thrifty price of $1.44 per month.
If you were to sign up for the cheapest shared hosting plan, you’d be getting 20GB of storage, 30 email accounts, unmetered bandwidth, the ability to host three websites, a free website builder, 24/7 support and many more impressive features.
However, there are lots of other plans that suit a variety of different needs. For example, if you specifically want to create a WordPress site, there’s a dedicated plan that will allow you to create and manage one of these sites from an easy-to-use dashboard.
What we also really like about Namecheap is that it’s easy and fast to get set up after you’ve purchased a plan. There are lots of handy how-to guides for getting started, and the control panel is pretty easy to use.
In our review of Namecheap, we did question the lack of more advanced features and bonuses. But overall, Namecheap is an affordable and easy-to-use web hosting service that will suit lots of different people.
If you’ve never signed up for a web hosting package before and don’t want to break the bank, iPage is a great option. It aims to provide “everything you need to get online at an unbeatable value.”
You can get a subscription for just $1.99 per month, which provides unlimited websites, unlimited storage, free SSL, a free domain for one year, an email address, access to an easy-to-use website builder and 24/7 support.
One of the best things about iPage is that it offers many different ways to design and build a website. Using iPage’s built-in website building functionality, you’ll be able to develop a mobile-friendly site easily. But you can also create a WordPress-based website with a single click. There’s access to other popular content management systems and hundreds of website templates, too.
For online sellers, iPage offers a free online store, a one-click installer, PayPal integration, email marketing integration, shopping carts and more. Other features include website traffic reporting, 24/7 network monitoring, high-performance servers, an enhanced security suite and a comprehensive control panel. If it turns out that this isn’t the right service for you, there’s a 30-day refund period, too.
Hostwinds proves that you can still get a high-performance web hosting service at an affordable price point. Its cheapest shared hosting plan costs $6.74 per month, providing unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space and one domain.
All subscriptions come with solid-state drives, instant setup, free website transfers, access to an easy-to-use control panel, unlimited subdomains, unlimited email accounts, unlimited databases, a free dedicated IP, free SSL and Weebly site builder.
If you want to create more than one website, there are two other shared hosting plans available. The Advanced plan offers four domains, while the Ultimate option has unlimited domains. Impressively, both are decently priced: $8.24 per month and $9.74 per month respectively.
When you create and publish a website via Hostwinds, you can expect great performance. In fact, the company promises to “guarantee 99.9999% uptime so your site will always be ready to greet your visitors”. If you experience an issue, you can speak to the Hostwinds support team via live chat, email, phone and online forums.
Along with shared hosting plans, Hostwinds also offers cloud hosting, VPS hosting and dedicated hosting. So whatever you’re looking for, you should find a product that suits your needs.
Charging $5 per month ($2.50 at the moment, due to a sale) for its cheapest plan, InterServer isn’t nearly as cost-effective as most of the other providers mentioned in this list. But you’re still getting a good helping of features for this price point.
With InterServer’s standard web hosting plan, you get unlimited SSD storage, unlimited email accounts, over 450 cloud applications, global content caching, free website migration, free SSL, a simple control panel, a website builder, InterShield protection and many more features.
We were really impressed with the large amount of cloud apps provided by InterServer. They include WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Prestashop, Magento, Mambo and lots more. With these apps, you’re able to create a website in one click.
Another plus point with InterServer is that it offers different tools to ensure your website is always secure. Its free security solution, InterShield Security, consists of a cyber-attack blocker, an automatic virus scanner, a machine learning-based firewall and a malware database.
It’s also worth mentioning that InterServer offers a price-lock guarantee, which means that you’ll continue to pay the same price that you signed up with. So if you were to go for the $5 per month plan, you don’t need to worry about this amount ever increasing. So long-term, this could work out a much cheaper option than at first glance…
Fasthosts is an excellent option if you’re looking for a reputable web hosting provider that offers affordable prices. Having launched in 1999, the company has built up an impressive reputation, particularly over the past few years.
The UK-based outfit has four web hosting plans on offer. Ignite is the cheapest of the plans, costing £1 ($1.40) per month. For this price, you’re provided with one website, unlimited bandwidth, 10GB of SSD storage, two 1GB databases, a single 2GB mailbox, a few basic SEO tools, a year-long free domain, 24/7 support and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
But if you’re happy to spend a bit more money, you can get more features with the other three plans. The “recommended” plan, called Momentum, costs £5 ($6.52) per month and gives you three websites, 20GB of SSD storage, 20 x 1GB databases, 100 x 2GB mailboxes, and all the features you get with the basic plan.
Meanwhile, the Ultimate plan offers unlimited websites, 120GB SSD storage, 120 x 1GB databases and 1090 x 2GB mailboxes for £10 ($13.25) per month. So it’s fair to say there’s a plan for everyone.
Whichever plan you choose, you’ll still receive standard features like SSH, raw log files, an online file manager, unlimited subdomains, custom error images, unlimited email forwarders, unlimited FTP accounts, a one-click app installer and more.
Given that its prices begin at $3.99 per month, SiteGround may seem costly compared to other cheap web hosting services. But it actually offers plenty of value, given what you’re getting, and SiteGround has plans for everyone.
The $3.99 StartUp plan includes a website, 10GB of web space, 10,000 monthly visits, unmetered traffic, free SSL, daily backup, a free content delivery network service from Cloudflare, free email, managed WordPress, unlimited databases and more.
Should you need more space, visits and other advanced features, you can opt for the $6.69 GrowBig or $10.69 GoGeek plans. However, unless you’re running a large business, the StartUp plan will be fine for most people.
When creating your website, you can use either Weebly or WordPress. Both of these are free across all plans. And if you’re looking to develop an online store, there’s access to Magento, WooCommerce, OpenCart and Prestashop. SiteGround also enables users to install popular content management systems like Joomla and Drupal quickly.
If there’s ever an instance where you need help with something, you have plenty of support from SiteGround. Its support team is available 24/7 and should be able to help with a range of issues.
Just like Fasthosts, DreamHost is another provider that…