Good, Better, Best: Our Top Recommendations for WordPress Website Hosting

We often are asked what the best website hosting platform for a WordPress website is. While there are some clear "NOs" (looking at you GoDaddy and Bluehost), there are so many options out there that it's difficult to know what platform to choose from.

We've put together our recommendations based on price-point and specifically, managed WordPress hosting solutions.

Good: Dreamhost

We recommend Dreamhost's VPS Basic hosting for new and small websites at just $15 per month. Dreamhost is great for any and all websites - not just WordPress websites. You'll find better-known platforms such GoDaddy and Bluehost are similar in price, but not all hosting providers are the same - even if their price points are similar.

With a basic set up on Dreamhost, you can have your domain name registration, emails, and hosting all in one, easy-to-manage location.

Dreamhost's platform is more updated than others in this price range and they seem to be ahead of technological advancements while many of their competitors are a decade behind in making any significant updates to their systems.

This platform is great for our clients with more basic needs, but still includes great options such as free SSL certificates, and unlimited free email accounts.

For our larger and enterprise-level clients we typically recommend setting up email separately through Google Apps/GSuite or Microsoft 365, but for those with more basic needs or just forwarding email addresses, Dreamhost's included email solutions are good.

On Dreamhost, you can also have an unlimited number of websites on your server.

If you need a full-featured starter server to do it all — from domain registation and DNS mangement to email and from static hosting to Wordpress development — Dreamhost is a great bet.

Get started with a dreamhost account today!

Better: Cloudways

We recommend Cloudways' first tier aws hosted plan for more established businesses. With a price point that's less than $40 per month, you can count on 24/7/365 support and 24/7 real-time monitoring.

One of the biggest reasons to move into this tier is to take advantage of features such as automated backups, advanced caching, and staging enviroments.

With Cloudways, you can take advantage of free SSL certificates and the ability to host unlimited websites on your account.

One of the reasons we like Cloudways is the ability to add separate users with different permissions. When we set up our clients on Cloudways, they own the account and can manage billing and their account passwords, but we can also add ourselves as a technical user with limited permissions - enabling all of our clients to have full control over who has access to their account and what they are able to do within it.

With additional configuration you can setup staging environments, create a backup schedule, setup an integrated CDN, and tweak server performance settings.

Keep an eye on Cloudways, they are always improving their offering

Get started with a Cloudways account today!

Best: WP Engine

For the best WordPress hosting around, we recommend WP Engine's Growth plan, which starts at $115 per month.

With this plan, you can have up to 10 websites and 100,000 visits per month. You can count on 24/7 chat and phone support.

WP Engine is strictly for hosting WordPress sites, they don't provide email hosting, they don't provide domain registration or DNS hosting. Without these features, they have a singular focus, and they are able to create a world class environment for setting up WordPress sites.

WP Engine handles all of the security layers, and free SSL certificates. In addition, they provide integrated caching and many WordPress specific performance tweaks. There are some major benefits to developers such as one click staging environments which help to test new features without worrying about bringing down a client's site, the ability to test run new versions of Wordpress and PHP before going live, and good integrations with local development tools such as their recently aquired https://localwp.com/. The integrated and automatic CDN will speed up your static files. Daily backups out of the box will put your mind at ease. While other hosts have the ability to do all of this, we have not seen one that does it for you in such a seamless manner.

Get 3 months free on WP Engine when you signup using our referral link.

Below is a listing of each of the three plans we reccomend, and some of the additional details of the features provided by each.

*Please note, we have affiliate relationships with each of the companies we recommend here and receive commission payments when someone signs up by using the links above. We would reccomend these companies regardless.