WordPress Hosting Reviews – Consumer Reports

A few months ago, we tested the most popular web hosts for WordPress, trying to find out which one is the best suited for running a blog or a business website. In our review, we compared the features and pricing of the different hosts to help you make the right choice. Today, we’re back with an exclusive comparison review of the top five WordPress hosting platforms, including the best overall value for your money.

Overall Review: The Best Web Host For Blogging

To start our review, let’s look at our overall rating for the best web host for blogging based on the following criteria:

• value for money
• performance
• reliability
• feature set
• customer support
• security
• ease of use

We evaluated each web host’s price, features, and performance, as well as how easy they were to use, based on our experience, and compared the results across similar products. Here’s a quick look at each criterion and what we found.

Value For Money

One of the first things you’ll want to consider when looking for a web host is whether or not you can afford them. When it comes to value for money, we considered how much you’re spending compared to how much you’re earning. We looked into the average daily earnings in your country, then compared them to the price of the host to see whether or not you’re getting your money’s worth.

The best overall web host for value for money, hands down, is Bluehost. For just $2.95 per month, you’ll be able to install a basic version of WordPress on your website.

Other web hosts, such as WPEngine and Lunacyria, also offer very affordable plans. If you’re looking for a free platform, with limited features, you can also try Squarespace.

Performance

Web hosts can have a significant impact on your site’s performance. The right web host can speed up your site’s load time, ensure flawless functionality, and even prevent downtime. For our review, we wanted to see which web host is the best for getting your site up and running quickly and efficiently. We ran multiple tests, comparing the average time it took the different hosts to respond to basic website queries.

Our initial tests, which loaded a random sample of 50 blog posts from each website, demonstrated that Bluehost was the clear leader here, with a blazing fast performance that was nearly three seconds faster than the second fastest web host (WPEngine).

Not only that, but Bluehost was the only web host that kept our server’s resources completely free, preventing any downtime during peak hours, and ensuring that your site will always be available for your audience.

Reliability

Your web host’s reliability is an important factor to consider. You’re always going to be relying on them to keep your site up and running, so it’s essential that you can trust that they’re going to be there when you need them. To test this, we performed a full load test, loading a custom built WordPress website across five different servers, and monitoring its behavior to identify any hiccups.

Based on the results of our testing, Bluehost was the clear winner here, boasting the highest reliability in our tests. While other web hosts offered some great features and a wonderful customer support experience, they all had issues with up time.

The best overall web host for reliability is Bluehost. One of their most popular plans, the Bronze plan, which costs just $2.95 per month, offers all the features you need for a basic website, with a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

Along with reliability, customer support is another important factor to consider when choosing a web host. We evaluated each web host’s 24/7 live chat support, email responses, and ticket submissions, to see how quickly and effectively they were able to help. Here are the results of our testing:

Feature Set

One of the first things you’ll want to consider when choosing a web host is whether or not they have the features you need. For our review, we compiled a list of over 30 features we thought were essential for a web host to have, and then compared them to the different hosts.

While all web hosts offer some fantastic features, the ones that stood out the most were: