What does your site actually need?
Start from three facts about the site, not from a price. First, expected traffic: a few hundred visits a day is shared-hosting territory; a few thousand with a store or a membership plugin is where stated resources start to matter; tens of thousands is a VPS or cloud question. Second, what the site does: a brochure site reads from cache almost entirely, a store or a forum does not, so RAM and an object cache matter far more for the second kind. Third, how much server you want to manage yourself: none at all means shared or managed hosting, some means a managed VPS, a lot means an unmanaged server.
Write those three answers down. They rule out most of the plans on any host’s page, which is the point.
Which hosting type fits?
Shared hosting fits most first sites and most small business sites. The host runs everything; you get a panel, a fixed allocation and a low price. Managed WordPress hosting is shared hosting with updates, caching and security handled for you, at three to five times the price; it is worth it when nobody on your side wants to touch WordPress. A VPS gives you a server of your own; a managed VPS has the host administer it. Cloud plans are VPS-like allocations sold by the resource. Our article on shared, VPS and cloud hosting walks through the trade-offs.
If you are unsure, start on shared. Every host we review sells a shared plan and most sell a next tier on the same panel, so moving up later is a support ticket, not a migration.
How do you read a hosting price?
Compare the renewal price and the term the discount requires, not the headline number. Across the ten hosts we review, introductory prices on the cheapest plan run from $1.99 to $4.99 a month, but five of them require a 36- or 48-month term for that price, and renewals run from $8.99 to $17.99 for the same plan. A plan at $1.99 on a 48-month term costs $95.52 up front; at renewal it may cost more per month than a plan that started at $3.99.
Our guide to reading a hosting price page goes line by line. The short version: find the renewal price, find the term, find what is excluded (domain renewal, backups, email), and only then compare.
Which four plan lines matter most?
Backups, staging, stated resources and location. Check them in that order, because they are the things you cannot add later without paying or moving.
- Backups. Daily or weekly, how many copies are kept, and whether they are stored off the server. Six of the ten hosts we review include daily backups on their cheapest plan; one includes them for the first year only; one sells them as an add-on. Our backups article explains what the retention number means in practice.
- Staging. A copy of the site to test updates on. Cheap on the host’s side, so its absence on a plan page tells you something.
- Stated resources. A plan that says “2 cores, 2 GB RAM” can be compared with another; a plan that says “2x resources” or “good for 25,000 visits” cannot. Prefer the stated number when the site does anything beyond serving cached pages.
- Location. The data center you can choose at checkout, not the ones listed on the about page. Distance sets the floor on every page load; our TTFB article explains why.
Which published measurements should you trust?
A measurement with a method. Reviewers publish uptime and response-time figures for most hosts, and the useful ones state four things: the tool, the check interval, the plan tested and the window. “99.99 percent uptime” over 30 days of five-minute checks on an unstated plan is a weak claim; 99.96 percent over 365 days of 30-second checks on a named plan in a named city is a strong one. Our reviews list every published measurement we could find in a table under Test results, with those four fields and a note where the source leaves one out, and our uptime guarantee article explains what the percentages cost in minutes.
What we do not do yet is publish our own measurements. HostIdea’s monitoring windows are opening host by host; until one exists for a host, every figure on its review is attributed to someone else, and the scores are marked provisional.
How should you buy?
Buy the shortest term the host offers at a sensible price, or buy from a host with a long refund window. Refund windows on the hosts we review run from 30 days (most) to 90 days (InMotion), and two hosts (ScalaHosting, Flashcloud) refund unused time after the window. A 12-month term costs a little more per month than a 48-month term and limits the damage if the host disappoints; after a year you know whether to commit for longer.
Then move up only when the host tells you to. Shared plans publish their limits (CPU seconds, inodes, database size, visit guidance), and the panel shows you when you are near them. That is the signal to look at the next tier, and by then you will know what the site actually needs.