7 Best Web Hosting Services in 2023 (Server Speed & Uptime Tested!)

WRITTEN BY

Daren Low

UPDATED

September 27, 2023

Our research reveals Hostinger, with fast response times powered by LiteSpeed, and 10 strategically located data centers to help your site load quickly from anywhere.

We own over 45 web hosting accounts and have built over 95 test sites to measure their uptime and server speed. Today, we’ve handpicked the top 7 web hosts based on performance and service (all averaging less than 180 ms), just for you! By the end of this article, you’ll be able to make an informed decision on which web host is best for your website.

Top 7 Web Hosting Providers

 

#1

Best overall value web hosting

Hostinger

5.0

  /5

Jump to details

#2

Best WordPress hosting for beginners

DreamHost

5.0

  /5

Jump to details

#3

Great for small business websites

HostPapa

5.0

  /5

Jump to details

#4

Best optimized WordPress hosting

Bluehost

4.0

  /5

Jump to details

#5

Best premium managed WordPress hosting

Kinsta

4.0

  /5

Jump to details

#6

Best premium hosting for large businesses

SiteGround

4.0

  /5

Jump to details

#7

Best cPanel alternative web host

ScalaHosting

4.0

  /5

Jump to details

1. Hostinger

https://www.hostinger.com/

Hosting Plan

Premium Shared

Avg. Global Speed

136 ms

Price (USD)

$2.99 /mo

Key Features

• 100GB SSD
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Free domain & SSL
• hPanel
• Localised support

“Hostinger is a brilliantly well-balanced web host, offering high-level performance and support at great prices.”

VISIT HOSTINGER

With 95+ test sites created (so far!), you might guess that our Bitcatcha team knows a thing or two about web hosting. We love watching hosts evolve, and Hostinger is a brand that’s come a long way.

In fact – we recently conducted some brand research and found Hostinger to be the most sought-after web host of 2020. Hostinger is the most popular web host brand in the world today!

Why all the hype? We can take a guess: Hostinger is proving themselves more and more to be a very well-balanced host. They’ve grown to provide premium-level performance and support at prices that are surprisingly affordable.

Pros and cons of Hostinger

Hostinger performance

Hostinger passed our own performance tests with flying colors. We built 3 different test sites specifically to host on Hostinger and ran them through our server speed test tool.

Here are the results from their US datacenter from their Premium Shared hosting plan.

The numbers don’t lie – Hostinger’s speed test results were very impressive. With a global average server speed of only 136 ms, Hostinger gets itself a solid A+ ranking!

They’re particularly speedy in the USA, London, Canada and Germany, with expected slowdowns in locations further away from the data center, like Bangalore and Singapore. The great thing is that they have a grand total of 10 data centres strategically placed around the world. Pick the closest one to your target audience and you’ll enjoy the very best speeds!

Hostinger features and pricing

Hostinger’s plans come with further features to boost that site load speed. To name a few, there’s their very own Cache Manager, LiteSpeed cache, NGINX caching, PHP7 support and WordPress optimisation.

In fact – all of Hostinger’s plans come packed with plenty of premium features, and start at a very low introductory price if you opt for their longer plans.

For our tests, we opted for the Premium Shared plan that starts at $2.99/mo for a 48 month plan.

Hostinger doesn’t offer free daily backups, which isn’t that surprising given the price point. They do include free weekly backups, which serves our needs just fine.

Hostinger customer support

Hostinger’s support is a huge part of what makes them great. They offer helpful support 24/7 over live chat, and from our experience, the team responds almost instantaneously.

They currently run 4 support centres that serve over 20 countries in their native languages – something that goes above and beyond most hosts we’ve seen, and suggests they truly do care about communicating with their clients. The only caveat is that they don’t currently offer phone support, which may be important to some users.

Overall, with their impressive features, global presence and wallet-friendly pricing, we think Hostinger’s place as the #1 best web host is well earned.

Learn more about Hostinger

2. DreamHost

https://www.dreamhost.com/

Hosting Plan

Shared Unlimited

Avg. Global Speed

118.4 ms

Price (USD)

$2.95 /mo

Key Features

• Unlimited SSD
• Unlimited traffic
• Free domain & SSL
• 100% Uptime Guar.
• 97-day money back

“Affordable and high-performance hosting optimized for WordPress and perfect for beginners”

VISIT DREAMHOST

DreamHost almost needs no introduction – they’ve been around since 1997 and are one of the most recognizable names in the industry.

Still, the REAL reason we’re putting them #2 is for the value they bring for all aspiring WordPress website owners. DreamHost and WordPress run together like… well, a dream. It’s little wonder they’ve earned an official WordPress endorsement from the big guys themselves.

We think they’re especially ideal for beginners or anyone who needs a simple solution, as they have plenty of foolproof features to help your site up and running fast.

Pros and cons of Dreamhost

DreamHost performance

Their server speeds blew us away. When running our 2 DreamHost test sites through our speed test tool, DreamHost actually emerged as THE fastest host on this entire list, scoring an A+ grade. Perhaps, since they utilize SSD servers – said to be x2 as fast as traditional HDD servers.

DreamHost’s server speeds are especially zippy around the US region where their 2 data centers are located, which makes them perfect for anyone with audiences in this part of the world!

The downside? Because they don’t have any data centres outside the US, this means slightly slower speeds for anyone accessing your site from Asia or Oceania. However, their average worldwide speed is still great at 118.4ms!

DreamHost features and pricing

All DreamHost shared hosting plans come with unlimited bandwidth, a user-friendly interface, an easy drag-and-drop website builder, and hundreds of professional templates to help you build and launch your site quickly. In all – you’re all set and optimized to untap the full potential of WordPress.

They have two tiers of plans – we’d recommend the Shared Unlimited if you want more resources to play with – like unlimited websites and emails.

What’s also definitely worth mentioning is their money back guarantee. Whilst most hosts offer a standard 30-day money back guarantee, DreamHost takes it to the next level by extending it up to 97 days! You even get the rare option to pay on a monthly basis. Don’t expect to unlock the cheapest prices this way, but you may appreciate the flexibility.

In all, we think DreamHost offers everything that a WordPress site owner could ask for, especially for beginners or those who just want a great and fast website up, ASAP.

DreamHost customer support

DreamHost offers in- house customer support via Live Chat and ticketing, and from our own trials, they responded within minutes. But on top of having access to a team of WordPress experts, you can also make use of their active forum and their pretty sweet knowledgebase.

There are some limits though. Live Chat support is limited to 5:30AM – 9.30PM Pacific Time, so if working overseas and in another timezone, you may need to sometimes rely on their ticketing system.

There’s also no free telephone support, but you can request a call-back if you don’t mind paying $9.95 per call.

Learn more about DreamHost

3. HostPapa

https://www.hostpapa.com/

Hosting Plan

Starter Hosting

Avg. Global Speed

121.7 ms

Price (USD)

$3.95 /mo

Key Features

• Free domain & SSL
• 1 website
• 100GB SSD
• 99.9% uptime guar.
• cPanel

“Best independent, eco-friendly web hosting that’s really easy to use! Suitable for beginners and small businesses.”

VISIT HOSTPAPA

Coming in next is Canada’s very own big daddy of web hosting, HostPapa!

As well as offering great hosting performance and support, one of HostPapa’s big pluses is that they power their data centers and office spaces with 100% green renewable energy!

Pros and cons of HostPapa

HostPapa performance

HostPapa might be considered a small, independent company but don’t let that fool you – their performance in terms of speed gives the big boys a good run for their money.

On their Canadian data center, HostPapa scored a global average of a hot 121.7 ms, which is faster / as fast as most top rated web hosts available out there! They’re obviously fastest in Canada at 8ms, but they’re lightning quick in Germany, London, and the USA too.

We do wish they had better coverage across Asia and Oceania as they only currently have servers within Europe and North America. That said – even their slowest location isn’t all that slow, coming in at 231 ms all the way from Singapore. With that, HostPapa is an A+ ranked host.

HostPapa features and pricing

Feature-wise, what HostPapa offers ain’t too shabby.

Their cheapest $3.95 plan works well for small single sites, but their Business Plan is where things really ramp up. For $4.95 a month, you’ll unlock unlimited websites, a free domain, unlimited SSD storage, unlimited emails, free SSL and free Cloudflare.

That said, the lack of free automatic backups is also a little bit of a letdown, and their uptime guarantee can be a little suspect.

They may not have as many frills as some of the other hosts on this list, but they have leaned into what they do best – providing a great user experience with solid basic services.

HostPapa customer support

HostPapa’s customer service team is fondly referred to as the ‘PapaSquad’, and they do do a fantastic job. We never had to wait very long on live chat, with replies consistently coming in less than a minute.

Their interface is very well thought out and their knowledgebase is full of handy videos and tutorials. If you’re having any trouble getting started, or just want to ask someone any questions about hosting or setting up a website, you can even get a one-on-one video/phone session with them! We haven’t seen that offered with many other hosts, and could definitely come in handy for beginners.

Learn more about HostPapa

4. Bluehost

https://www.bluehost.com/

Hosting Plan

Basic

Avg. Global Speed

153 ms

Price (USD)

$2.95 /mo

Key Features

• Linux & cPanel
• Unlimited resources
• CodeGuard Basic
• Resource protection
• Cloudflare CDN

“Endorsed by WordPress, amazing value, paired with decent speeds - Bluehost is best for WordPress blogs and small business sites!”

VISIT BLUEHOST

As another web host officially recommended by WordPress, Bluehost has more than 19 years of experience in the hosting industry. They understand what people are looking for when it comes to web hosting – speed and reliability!

They currently offer most services under the hosting umbrella, including Shared Hosting, WP, VPS, dedicated, reseller, and cloud hosting.

Pros and cons of Bluehost

Bluehost performance

We purchased their Basic plan and set up a grand total of 6 test sites to host on Bluehost.

Turns out their servers were excellent, providing lightning quick response times across the board in our server speed tests.

With a global average of 153 ms, Bluehost proves their mettle as an A+ ranked web host, performing incredibly well in the West US (23 ms), East US (78 ms) and Canada (92 ms).

Their response times in the other locations aren’t too shabby either, mostly scoring below 180 ms, with the slowest location all the way in Bangalore at 330 ms.

Bluehost has only 1 datacenter, which is based in the USA. Although they’re generally really fast, nothing beats proximity to the target audience, and them only having one datacenter means those targeting people located further away would be at a disadvantage.

Also, do note that they don’t have an uptime guarantee.

Bluehost features and pricing

Bluehost’s many tiers are a great choice for small blogs and online businesses on WordPress.

Features offered by them are quite solid, with 10GB of SSD storage, free SSL, SEO services and a free domain included in their Basic plan. Not bad at all, considering the low entry price of only $2.95 a month (with 12-month plan).

That said, the amount of storage offered at each price point isn’t quite as much as you’d get from several of the other hosts on this list. On top of that, renewal prices do jump up quite significantly.

If you feel that you need a boost of speed, you’ll be glad to learn that they’ve got a free CDN built directly into the account, available at just a click.

Bluehost customer support

Bluehost outsources their support team to India and currently offers support via Live Chat and phone. We did run into some hiccups and unhelpful trainees when we first started using Bluehost, but things do seem much better now. They also have a pretty robust knowledge-base filled with useful tutorials and guides.

Learn more about Bluehost

5. Kinsta

https://kinsta.com/

Hosting Plan

Starter

Avg. Global Speed

179.5 ms

Price (USD)

$35 /mo

Key Features

• Google Cloud
• 25,000 visits /mo
• Daily backups
• WP expert as support
• Hack fix guarantee

“Managed WordPress hosting built on Google Cloud Architecture! Best for SMEs and sites with high traffic.”

VISIT KINSTA

Kinsta is a lean, mean, hosting machine. Powered by the Google Cloud gods themselves, Kinsta is able to leverage on their space-age tech to provide users with high quality web hosting.

Kinsta has spent the past 15 years focusing exclusively on Managed WordPress hosting. In other words – these guys know WordPress like the back of their hands.

They recently expanded their host plans to application and database hosting, but are still continuing to release and improve their Managed WordPress offerings.

Pros and cons of Kinsta

Kinsta performance

Many of Kinsta’s core strengths come from it being hosted on Google Cloud’s Premium Tier. This not only gives you access to 29 data centers around the world – but unlocks uber-fast speeds and scalability.

The numbers speak for themselves – check out the results from our server speed test below.

Since the datacenter for this test site is located in Europe, Kinsta’s response times from London and Germany are lightning-fast at 10 ms and 13 ms.

Signs of sluggishness started showing the further away the locations are, with Japan at 221 ms, Sydney 266 ms, Singapore 287 ms and Bangalore at 487 ms. Regardless, Kinsta still scored a global average of 179.5 ms which earns them a coveted A+ rank! Select the data center closest to your customers and you should be all set.

It’s a great choice for larger WordPress eCommerce sites, or anyone expecting a spike in traffic – Kinsta’s cloud-based infrastructure can easily scale upwards to keep your site online no matter what.

Kinsta features and pricing

With more than 10 years worth of experience with WordPress, Kinsta easily provides one of the best Managed WordPress Hosting solutions in the scene. Sign up, build your site, and let the Kinsta team take over from there. You practically won’t have to worry about a thing as they manage your site for you – looking after things like automated updates, and monitoring for security flaws.

Features are plentiful, you get daily backups, your uptime is guaranteed, and you get software to turbo-charge your site. We’re talking KeyCDN, NGINX, MariaDB, the works.

That said – Kinsta is a premium WordPress host. And that comes with premium pricing.

$35 a month (with a 12-month plan) is significantly more expensive than the other hosts on this list. You’re gonna want to make sure that there’s a solid return on your investment. Also, they lack email hosting and phone support, so keep that in mind if those things matter to you.

That said, if you sign up or upgrade to an annual plan – you do get 2 months for free.

Kinsta customer support

Kinsta offers 24/7 support via the Intercom widget. But more importantly – their support team is amazing. It’s composed entirely of veteran WordPress developers and Linux hosting engineers, so the level of tech support is pretty hard to match. You won’t be bouncing between level 1 or level 2 support reps – you’ll always be talking to real experts. From direct experience, every query we sent was replied to in under 3 minutes.

Learn more about Kinsta

6. SiteGround

https://www.siteground.com/

Hosting Plan

GrowBig

Avg. Global Speed

136.9 ms

Price (USD)

$6.69 /mo

Key Features

• Google Cloud
• 20GB SSD
• Unlimited websites
• SuperCacher
• Daily backup

“Excellent premium web hosting that’s ideal for businesses - with fast speeds and secure servers!”

VISIT SITEGROUND

In 2004, SiteGround was a small enterprise freshly founded by a few friends in their uni dorms in Bulgaria. Today, SiteGround competes with the giants of the hosting world – they have datacenters in 6 countries and service over 2.8 million domains! Phwoar.

Officially WordPress-endorsed and built on the Google Cloud Platform, SiteGround definitely deserves all the recognition they’re getting.

Pros and cons of SiteGround

SiteGround performance

We actually have multiple accounts with SiteGround for testing purposes, but we’ll be having a look at their entry-level GrowBig plan.

Speedwise, our test site proves that SiteGround’s servers are speedy as hell with a global average of 136.9 ms, earning them an A+ ranking!

If you’re in need of even faster speeds, no probs. Cloudflare is integrated into the system, and all you have to do is enable it to get your minds blown.

With 6 data centers strategically spread out across the globe (all on the Google Cloud Platform), all you need to do is pick the closest one to your audience and let SiteGround work its magic.

And if you’re in the market for cloud hosting, we performed a test on SiteGround’s cloud hosting plan as well and the results were pretty good!

SiteGround features and pricing

SiteGround offers a range of plans for a range of users.

The GrowBig plan is fairly priced at only $6.69 a month, and comes packed with a bunch of little goodies, which doesn’t just boost your server speed, but overall efficiency as well. Their SuperCacher boosts site load speed up to 4x quicker, you get to enjoy free daily backups, free priority support and free restores!

The downside? Obviously, price. SiteGround’s renewal prices can get expensive. Be mentally prepared to pay more than double the introductory prices to renew the contract. Is it worth it? For the service you’re getting – we think so.

SiteGround customer support

SiteGround offers support via 24/7 Live Chat, ticketing, and also the phone. We’ve consistently found SiteGround’s team to be extremely capable, and used their Live Chat extensively. The wait is never long, and our problems were usually resolved very quickly.

When calling them on the phone, we never needed to wait longer than 5 minutes to connect, and our experiences with their ticketing system usually got a reply within 10 minutes.

If you’re getting their GrowBig plan or above, you get access to their 30-day priority support – where your tickets get replied to within minutes!

Learn more about SiteGround

7. ScalaHosting

https://www.scalahosting.com/

Hosting Plan

Start

Avg. Global Speed

151.7 ms

Price (USD)

$8.95 /mo

Key Features

• 50GB SSD
• 1-click WordPress install
• Free domain & SSL
• Daily remote backup
• SPanel

“Powerful servers with great features! Their SPanel provides users with a fantastic experience, and is compatible with cPanel!”

VISIT SCALAHOSTING

ScalaHosting is one of the OGs of web hosting, and they’ve obviously put all the experience they’ve accumulated into good use.

They’ve been consistently improving their services throughout the years, and now their data centers have joined the BDC, or the Best Data center Club(™).

Pros and cons of ScalaHosting

ScalaHosting performance

While their shared hosting plan is decent, they really shine with their Managed VPS plan, which gave us one of the best user experiences so far.

We ran a speed test on their Europe server and discovered that their response times are real hot in Germany and London, at 30 ms and 45 ms respectively. The slowest location would be in Sydney at 285 ms, but that’s expected given the distance.

With a global average of 151.7 ms, ScalaHosting packs a real mean punch when it comes to speed, earning them an A+ ranking.

ScalaHosting features and pricing

Feature-wise, the web hosting provider made great effort in making the customer feel like they’re getting plenty of value.

Even their cheaper plans provide a whole host of unlimited goodness, such as websites, storage, bandwidth. They then throw in freebies like free migrations, free domains, free SSL and free CDN. If those aren’t enough for you, ScalaHosting decided to sweeten the deal by throwing in a free 7-day automatic backup too!

On top of all that, you’ll be able to enjoy their critically acclaimed SPanel, which is ScalaHosting’s very own control panel. It’s one of the best control panels we’ve had the pleasure of using. Very user-friendly and fully compatible with cPanel!

At only $29.95 a month for their 3-year contract of Managed VPS hosting (and $3.95 / mo for their mini shared hosting plans). ScalaHosting provides a whole host of generous resources with their quality servers that won’t let you down. Great for WordPress sites and small business users!

However, ScalaHosting unfortunately is late to the SSD game – they only offer SSD storage on mechanical drives, unless you’re willing to splurge on their VPS plans.

ScalaHosting customer support

ScalaHosting offers award-winning 24/7 support via Live Chat and ticketing. They claim that that’s why their customers stay with them for 7 years on average!

Learn more about ScalaHosting

How We Choose the Best Web Hosting Providers

Here are some things we always look for in an outstanding web host:

Why You Should Trust Us

At Bitcatcha, we’ve been testing web hosts since 2014. We manage a whopping total of 95+ test sites hosted across plans from 45+ different web hosts.

We then use our Bitcatcha Speed Test Tool (as seen on LifeHack and HuffPost) to analyze each hosts’ server speed, and employ uptime trackers to monitor server uptime. These results are then used to produce data-driven host reviews and comparisons.

For a more detailed breakdown of how we write our web hosting reviews, head to our article on “How We Review Our Web hosts”.

What Are The Types Of Web Hosting?

This might all sound mundane, technical and even boring, but believe me it’s highly important. If you select the wrong type of hosting service, you probably won’t realize it until much later when your site starts picking up traffic.

Then, you’ll realize that you’ll need different sorts of resources for your website, but it’s too late to back out and you’re stuck paying for a service that doesn’t quite do your business justice.

Take it from us, because we’ve made that mistake before.

Let’s jump in and have a look at the different types of web hosting services available, so you don’t make the same mistake we did.

1. Shared hosting

Shared web hosting is exactly what it sounds like. You’ll be sharing server space with a bunch of other users on the same server, with the resources split evenly among everyone.

This is by far our most recommended web hosting type, as it’s great for general purpose use, and actually performs surprisingly well if you go for a reliable brand that takes no nonsense from errant users.

Learn more about Shared Hosting.

2. Cloud hosting

While shared web hosting hosts multiple websites on a single server, with cloud web hosting, your website will exist across multiple servers – a cluster of servers, to be exact, in the cloud.

This means that the provider can literally choose other servers to load up your site from, if a particular one is under stress or is facing performance issues, which ensures stable, consistent, site load speeds!

Learn more about Cloud Hosting.

3. VPS hosting

VPS servers, otherwise known as Virtual Private Servers, are actually quite similar to the abovementioned cloud hosting.

The key difference between these two is that while cloud hosting utilizes several different machines on the cloud, VPS hosting uses one massive physical server which is then partitioned into several different servers.

Learn more about VPS Hosting.

4. Dedicated hosting

For those of you looking for complete control over your servers, or if you just have deep pockets and a deep dislike for sharing, you might want to look into dedicated hosting plans.

With dedicated web hosting, you’ll practically be renting an entire server with ALL of its resources, dedicated just for you or your business. That’s the equivalent of booking out an entire restaurant or movie theatre, just for a date.

Learn more about Dedicated Hosting.

5. Managed WordPress hosting

Managed WordPress hosting is just the bees knees of… well, hosting WordPress sites.

If you’re running an enterprise site based on WordPress (and if your wallets are deep enough) we’d always recommend using managed WordPress hosting services.

Learn more about Managed WordPress Hosting.

Verdict: Which is the BEST web hosting for 2023?

If you ask us which web hosting is best for your company, the honest answer is that there’s no one best provider out there. There’s only the one that best serves your needs.

Having said that, it’s important to note that all the hosts that made an appearance on this list are ranked A+. That means they’re all great, with tried-and-tested awesome speeds. Select any one of these and you shouldn’t be disappointed!

Obviously, our choice for the very BEST web hosting provider for 2023 goes to Hostinger, thanks to their amazing performance, affordable prices and their dedication to constantly improving the hosting experience for customers.

Their server speeds are fantastic; globally fast, even in locations further away from their data center. In fact – they’ve got a bucketload of speed-enhancing features, including:

They have 10 strategically-located data centers to provide a wide coverage area for their users. But more than that – they also offer local versions of websites and support staff!

It’s little wonder that Hostinger emerged as the fastest-growing web host in 2020. Hostinger is the most popular web host brand today!