Best WordPress Hosting 2024: Top 7 Hosts Ranked by Speed & Reliability

Over the last five years, we have rigorously tested over 15 WordPress hosting providers to bring you unbiased, no-sugar-coated, hard data-based WordPress hosting reviews. 

We signed up at popular hosting companies, set up test WordPress sites, and tracked crucial metrics like uptime, speed, load test, and hardware performances. We have not done one-time tests but rather performed 24/7, 365 days of testing in the last five years.

*Speed (lower is better), Uptime (higher is better), Load handling speed(lower is better)

Premium Managed WordPress Hosting Providers 2024:

*Speed (lower is better), Uptime (higher is better), Load handling speed(lower is better)

Best overall WordPress Hosting in 2024 (November)

1. Hostinger

Hostinger is our overall recommended WordPress hosting in November 2024. It has powerful performance, affordable pricing, superior features, and excellent customer support.

Regarding performance, Hostinger offers faster speed and uptime as measured using our test site. It offers affordable first and renewal pricing compared to its competitors. Feature-wise, Hosting allows you to host up to 100 websites on a starter plan, and it offers the highest Inodes among all shared hosting companies, ranging from 400,000 to 3,000,000 inodes.

The only downside of Hostinger is their limited load handing capacity and not suitable for high traffic sites.

Check Hostinger Review

Best Managed WordPress Hosting

2. Kinsta

Kinsta is the best managed WordPress host that delivers a sophisticated WordPress experience. Their control panel is one of the industry’s best, and it will take some years for other hosts to catch them. Kinsta uses Google’s top CPU servers, which have been unbeaten in our hardware benchmarks. They also provide the highest data center options, 37 global locations, to host your sites closest to your visitors.

Their plan starts at $30/month and the best way to save money on Kinsta is to pay annually where you can save a minimum of $70 to a maximum of $1350 based on your plan.

Read Kinsta Review

Best VPS Hosting for WordPress

3. Cloudways

Cloudways is the best VPS WordPress hosting and it helps you choose between multiple cloud providers (DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, AWS and Google Cloud). Their pricing starts at $11/month and offers superior performance, but they don’t offer the luxury of easy site management.

We strongly recommend Cloudways for its pricing and performance. If you feel like trying, there is a 3-day free trial available. You can explore the dashboard, install a demo site and see how it looks good for your needs.

• Read Cloudways Review

Best Shared WordPress Hosting

4. A2 Hosting

If you are starting or moving from an existing shared hosting, A2 Hosting is our most recommended hosting provider. It has perfectly matched performance and pricing. We’ve been testing them for the last five years and not for a single year, we’ve seen a decline in their performance.

We bought the Startup plan for our testing and it comes with Apache web server and SSD storage. We are pretty much satisfied with its performance, but we also recommend you to try their Turbo plans, which come with NVMe drives and Litespeed web server.

However, we stand by what we see with our naked eyes, so if you are just getting started, the Startup plan is enough to make your site reliable and speedy.

• Read A2 Hosting Review

5. GreenGeeks

GreenGeeks is our next recommended choice for new to mid-level WordPress sites. Their performance and pricing are very similar to A2 Hosting, but it comes with a Litespeed server on all their plans, so the caching comes pretty much built-in. They’re also a green host, meaning they will plant a tree for each hosting account sold.

• Read GreenGeeks Review

Best Fastest WordPress Hosting

6. Rocket

Rocket is the fastest and best managed hosting for WordPress. We have been testing their starter plan and since then, they’ve secured the top spot in our WordPress hosting benchmarks. Many companies claim to offer Cloudflare Enterprise, but Rocket does best integration, offering the highest range of speed and uptime. If you are moving from shared to managed hosting, then Rocket should be your ultimate choice.

Their plan starts at $30/month and you can try them for $1 for the first month.

• Read Rocket.net Review

Honorable Mentions

Nexcess: It’s a great hosting service with a good user interface, affordable plans, an auto-scalable solution, and email hosting. In my opinion, their plans are very suitable for agencies. Plans start at $21/month, and their performance is above average (not bad, but they can’t beat competitors).

Templ: This is where we have hosted our site. It comes with a complete Google tech stack (Google data center, DNS, and CDN), and we rate its performance highly ahead of Rocket and Kinsta. If you are looking for a Cloudflare CDN alternative hosting service, Templ should be your ultimate choice. 

WPX: It targets users looking for affordable managed WordPress hosting. Their plans start at $25/month and they are among the top performers in our benchmark tests. However, their user interface is slow and limited.

FastComet: They are just another cPanel shared hosting service. They have had mixed performances in the last five years. They performed very well in 2023 benchmarks but showed a poor uptime in 2024 data (till August). Considering the long-term data, we cut them out as A2 Hosting, GreenGeeks, and Hostinger do a better job.

WordPress Hosts Which We Don’t Recommend:

Some might be surprised because we don’t recommend big names like HostGator, Bluehost, SiteGround etc. We have data-driven reasons to avoid them for most user needs.

HostGator: This is the slowest host among all the 15+ hosts we’ve tested. Be it TTFB, uptime, or load handling, they come last in performance.

Bluehost: The company has been showing some performance improvements recently (we have got better TTFB and uptime in 2023 compared to 2020-2022 data), but it’s not adequate as we have shown good providers on our list.

SiteGround: If we look into performance, their TTFB is not good (ranked #12 out of 16 hosts tested) and is comparable only to Bluehost. Their load test works well without their CDN, but the results are mediocre when used along with CDN. Considering the price-to-performance ratio, SiteGround is not worth the money. 

DreamPress (DreamHost): The hosting was slow on all the tests. In fact, it’s the slowest managed WordPress host we’ve tested so far. It’s definitely not worth paying the premium price of $23/month. 

ChemiCloud: It comes with powerful tech stacks and looks impressive on paper. But we are testing their starter plan, and their uptime is worrisome (99.85%). They also struggle with TTFB and load tests.

How do we test to pick the best WordPress hosting services?

To pick the best WordPress hosting provider, we sign up as a customer and buy a hosting account, which is probably the starter plan. Then we buy a domain for each hosting, for example, hostperf-bh.com for Bluehost and install WordPress, configure the domain and hosting. Once the site goes live, we will put it on for rigorous performance testing. It includes TTFB, Uptime and load tests. We also do some advanced tests like global TTFB, WPBenchmarks and Core Web vitals, which are available in our benchmark reports.

Unlike other sites that never show how the test was done, we are transparent, sharing all the details of our test bench setup and the data obtained from our tools.

The TTFB and uptime are measured using the Pingdom synthetic monitoring tool, where the test sites are pinged every 60 seconds once to calculate the TTFB and uptime. This test was done from 22 North American regions, the data is collected from all these locations and averaged to find the overall average TTFB and uptime of a hosting provider.

The load test is done using the loader.io tool. We send 0 – 500 concurrent visitors to the site and measure the average response time. The lower the response time, the faster the servers. 

With five years of historical data, we can identify the consistent performers and eliminate hosting providers with mixed performance.

How are we different from other sites that review WordPress hosting providers?

Our transparent data is what makes the difference. Unlike others, we don’t have favoritism to put favorable companies that pay big in our top list. We are data-driven, so based on the latest data, we keep updating our top WordPress hosting providers irrespective of what the company pays us.

Many other review sites strive to test and share some data, but they can’t be verified. Most sites include some performance data only when Google made it mandatory in 2021 to test things they recommend.

However, At Hostingstep, we have a long history back to 2016 when we started testing companies and provided valuable insights to our clients through our agency. Then, we refreshed our test bench, started an improved process in 2020, and made our whole data public.