The Best WordPress Hosting (2024): 65 Plans Compared In 5 Spreadsheets: Specs, Resource Limits, Policies, Complaints (v2)

What green means:

• A number is above average compared to other plans in a spreadsheet (i.e. a resource limit or server locations). Green is also used when a lower number is preferred (price, TrustPilot complaints, or auto-renewals that charge you ‘days’ before your renewal date).
• A technology or service is supported (SSH, malware scans, dynamic caching in their CDN, or they have an uptime status page).
• Something has a distinct advantage over its typical alternatives (NVMe storage, LiteSpeed’s PHP, off-site backups, scalability).
• Reviews are deemed positive or negative. There is bias here since I personally chose which reviews to include (and sometimes sources). Reviews were selected from what I deemed “legitimate” reviews (typically based on patterns or things I’d want to know).
• There are other unique cases, such as when a host advertises one thing, but several reviewers say something else (there’s a catch).
• A host scores 4.5/5 – 5/5 (or 90%) on a rating site. Take these with a grain of salt since reviews are often solicited or manipulated.
• A software version is considered current (not outdated) such as PHP 8.2/8.3, MySQL 8, while something like PHP 7.4 would be red.
• ⓘ icons (see row 1) are often used to cite sources for clarification purposes while red reflects the opposite of the descriptions above.

How TrustPilot complaints are calculated:

• Reviews were scanned 9/15/2024 and I plan on updating them 1x per year.
• 1-2 star reviews (referred to as complaints) were searched for category-specific words.
• These were compared to the host’s total number of complaints (giving us % of complaints).
• These were then averaged between all hosts in the same spreadsheet for a fair comparison.
• This tells us if a host’s complaints were above average (red) or below average (green) for each category.
• It also explains why a host can have a high TrustPilot rating but score poorly in a specific category or spreadsheet.
• Sometimes, keywords detected the wrong category (i.e. slow website falls under performance while slow support falls under support). In these cases, irrelevant reviews were omitted manually. Due to interpretation bias, accuracy is not guaranteed.

1. Choose a specialist: not your domain registrar, page builder, or a host who spreads themselves out too thin by developing many different products/plans (there are plenty of good CDNs/optimization plugins out there already). You just want WordPress hosting.
2. Avoid long contracts with fixed resources – some (usually shared) hosts offer higher discounts for multi-year contracts. If at any point you exceed your plan’s resource limits (specifically CPU, RAM, storage, inodes, I/O, and database size), your site can become slow, unusable (5xx errors), or suspended. You must optimize it to fall within your plan’s limits or your “discount” turns into wasted money. There are many things that impact resource usage (server type, traffic, plugins, cache plugin, bots, email) and even a change to the host’s infrastructure. Some shared hosts offer a resource boost add-on, but it’s best to avoid long contracts without scalability.
3. CDNs affect TTFB more than server location – static sites can usually get a ~100ms global TTFB by using a good CDN with dynamic caching. Dynamic sites should use smart routing (i.e. Cloudflare Argo) on top of dynamic caching for best results. Your CDN should be fast (Tbps) with locations near your visitors. When this is the case and TTFB is ~100ms nearly everywhere in the world, server location hardly matters. Instead, focus on things like stack + reliability. Location matters if visitors are only in 1 location and no CDN is needed.
4. Keep hosting separate from domain/email: Bill Hartzer had great domain advice and I prefer Google Workspace for email hosting. Emails eat up resources (specifically inodes) and transferring domains/emails between hosts is a pain. Keep both of these separate.
5. Unlimited doesn’t exist – resources listed as “unlimited” either have limits in the TOS/AUP, are at the discretion of the host, or are unmetered (not directly measured). Any mention of “no limit” in the spreadsheets can be considered unmetered, but not unlimited.
6. Ask about unspecified hardware – do they use fast CPUs with 4+ Ghz turbo frequencies, PCIE 5.0 NVMe SSDs, and DDR5 RAM? Most hosts don’t specify key technology that makes hosting fast, yet these play a major role in the performance of your site and wp-admin.
7. Turn off auto-renew for yearly plans: there are 4 renewal traps often found in the TOS: plans can renew before the renewal date (sometimes 15 days prior), at the plan’s current price, for the full term you originally signed up for, and this is usually non-refundable.
8. Take your own backups: “we are not responsible for data loss” was found in every TOS I read, and failed backups aren’t uncommon. Use a backup plugin (like UpdraftPlus) to store your own backups to the cloud, and use a cron job to schedule them during low traffic.
9. Don’t count on uptime guarantees – almost all these exclude planned maintenance with contingencies (i.e. you reported it to them in a timely manner). If a host actually considers compensating you, they use their own internal records and often only credit 1 month.
10. Learn how to optimize CPU/database usage – this can save a lot of money in hosting costs and yield better performance. I have an article on reducing CPU usage and plan on writing one for database optimization. For now, try scheduling WP-Optimize, remove junk in phpMyAdmin, and set up Redis persistent object cache. MySQL and MariaDB can also be tuned, but this is more for your host to do.

• SpeedVitals TTFB Test – measures TTFB in 40 global locations. The developer recommends running a couple tests to ensure resources are cached and your CDN serves files from the closest data center. This is why multiple tests usually yield better results.
• WordPress Hosting Benchmark – runs CPU, memory, database, object cache, and network tests. Shows an overall score out of 10.
• WP Server Health Stats – shows stats about your server (software, CPU cores, CPU usage, RAM, RAM usage, database/PHP info, etc).
• WPPerformanceTester – a plugin Kevin Ohashi (from wphostingbenchmarks.com) uses to stress PHP, MySQL and run wpdb queries.
• Importance – your host/CDN are the top 2 TTFB factors which is also 40% of LCP. WordPress also lists hosting as the #1 speed factor.