To identify the best affordable web hosting, we started from the beginning, creating a brand new nm website on each provider we review below, evaluating performance, contacting customer support, and comparing cost versus value for weeks. We did all of this to figure out what's real and what's not, and we discovered Cloudway's to be the best affordable web hosting for most individuals. It's user-friendly, dependable, provides excellent customer service, and costs as little as $2.99 a month for a year of shared hosting.
Hostinger
Hostinger
Hostinger
Want good performance and a plethora of features on a low budget? Get everything you need for your new website and fast site performance, and a simple onboarding procedure at the most affordable rates accessible. Hosting your website with CLOUDWAYS is the best method to stretch your budget.
>> Begin right away.
If you're like most people, you want the most straightforward approach to building a website. CLOUDWAYS dominated the competition in this and other areas after more than a month of intensive testing.
Despite its meager price, it does not skimp on any critical features. The entry-level package from Hostinger contains everything you need to launch your first (or next) website. At $1.39 per month (for a four-year plan), you get more features than most other hosting providers in the same price range. It's our top pick for a reason: it provides the best value, ease of use, and performance of any product on the market.
There are dozens upon dozens of hosting solutions available, with prices ranging from free to hundreds of dollars each month. Fortunately, shared hosting is relatively inexpensive and is an excellent starting point for new websites.
When you initially start in web hosting, keeping your costs low is critical. You may worry about fancier, more powerful alternatives later when your site gains popularity and attracts many users.
You need to dip your toes into the water without breaching the bank. Fortunately, you may be surprised at how effectively some of these low-cost web hosting alternatives function, which means you may continue to save without needing to change as soon as your site becomes popular.
#1 – CLAUDWAYS — Best Low-Cost Web Hosting for Most Users
CLAUDWAYS
Best for the majority
Want good performance and a plethora of features on a low budget? Get everything you need for your new website and fast site performance, and a simple onboarding procedure at the most affordable rates accessible. Hosting your website with CLAUDWAYS is the best method to stretch your budget.
>> Begin right away.
Overall rating: 3.9 out of 5
CLAUDWAYS is the way to go if you want affordable hosting that is also reliable, fast, and simple to use. Not only do you get a lot of bang for your buck, but it's also a low-cost web host that doesn't feel low-cost. It has the best price/performance ratio on the market, making it our top pick.
Here are CLAUDWAYS rankings in our six major categories:
Initial Investment = 5/5
Rates of Renewal = 5/5
4/5 for the onboarding process
4/5 for website speed
Customer Service = 2.67/5
1/5 for server uptime
CLAUDWAYS received a perfect score for upfront expenses since you can purchase hosting for $2.99 per month—less than the cost of one Starbucks latte per month.
Except for a domain name, the entry-level hosting package includes everything you need. As a result, you'll have to purchase one separately. You can do so through CLAUDWAYS or one of our recommended domain registrars.
If you buy one from CLAUDWAYS, you'll pay $8.99 per year plus $5 per year for domain protection. We strongly advise against using personal information (phone number, complete name, and address) to register a domain name because it masks your contact information in the WHOIS domain registration database. It's less crucial to note as a business because your company's information is already public.
The total cost for everything, including upfront charges, a domain name, and protection for the first year, is a measly $49.87. For less than USD 50, you receive everything you need to get started.
On the entry-level plan, you get:
One website
One email address
Free SSL certificate
One-click WordPress installation
24/7 customer assistance
If you're not comfortable paying for a year in advance, you can opt for a monthly plan instead.
Heads up, though, if you're thinking about monthly billing—CLAUDWAYS charges a one-time setup cost of $4.99 on month-to-month contracts. The monthly charge also climbs far up to $9.49. It could make sense to do it for short-term projects. But it's considerably more economical to pay for at least a year in advance.
CLAUDWAYS gives top benefits for a fraction of the price of most web providers, and they keep actual prices clear. That apparent predictability is excellent for you and your budget while you're just starting started.
Renewal Rates 5/5 – Another fantastic quality of CLAUDWAYS is they provide the cheapest renewal pricing out of all the hosts we tested—you'll pay just $5.99 per month after your first year (with 12 months owed in advance) (with 12 months due in advance).
That means your second year of hosting is just $71.88. That's better than the initial cost of some of the other providers on this list, making it an excellent deal.
Though it's double the price of CLAUDWAYS discount rates, the low startup costs allow them to provide you with the best pricing both in the short and long run.
If you're looking for hosting that won't throw you out of business with outrageous renewal charges, CLAUDWAYS is the way to go. You can count on stable and inexpensive pricing throughout the lifetime of your account.
Onboarding Process 4/5 – When we set up our website on CLAUDWAYS, the checkout and onboarding process was beginner-friendly, with step-by-step guidance throughout the entire process. You're never left guessing what to do next—even if you've never designed a site before.
It's surprisingly straightforward in the normally over-complicated realm of web hosting. After selecting your plan, evaluating your choices, and finalizing your services, you're greeted with a welcome message.
Once you click "Start Now," you'll choose a theme and start a guided website setup procedure. There are various high-quality selections to choose from—but don't spend too much time here. You can always change your theme later.
Also, consider that functionality and general layout matter more than colors, style, and feel.
Just like everything else with CLAUDWAYS, getting started is smooth and easy so far.
After that, you're transported to your hosting dashboard, where you can examine your plugins, manage your email, and even add or remove additional domain names.
In just a few short minutes, you have WordPress installed, a theme set up, and basic configurations complete.
CLAUDWAYS makes sure you get a site that is complete and functional when you're done. They hold your hand through the process, and it's virtually impossible not to have a website when you're done. It's as simple as following these three steps, making it not only easy but wicked fast to go from nothing to a ready-to-go website.
They lost a point because of the unexpected setup fee for monthly plans. But the overall onboarding process is pleasantly straightforward.
Website Speed 4/5 – Now, you might be wondering, "What about site speed? Is CLAUDWAYS fast?"
Rather than relying on third-party data, we ran a one-month site speed test of our own. We set up a demo site with a fresh WordPress install and monitored server response time at one-minute intervals for 30 days.
Over those 30 days, our site was pinged over 43,000 times to check the server's response time.
Here's what we found:
While we were making sense of the data, we came to a few conclusions:
Cloudways average response time was 670 milliseconds—anything under a second is great.
The average of all the hosts we tested was 745 ms. Cloudways performed better than average.
Occasionally, we'd see spikes to a two-second response time—this is consistent with a shared hosting environment and nothing to be alarmed of
While Cloudways isn't the fastest option we tested, it's better than average. Its speeds are comparable to more expensive hosts, so why pay more for the same performance?
While Cloudways isn't the fastest option we tested, it's better than average. Its speeds are comparable to more expensive hosts, so why pay more for the same performance?
Given Cloudways rock-bottom pricing, you get exceptional speed.
Customer Support 2.67/5 – To get a first-hand look at customer support, we reached out to Cloudways support team on three different occasions.
We used their live chat and asked questions about how to improve security, set up an email address for the domain, and improve speed. Each time we sat around for 30 minutes before getting any response at all.
Sure, we received good responses—but most providers respond in about five minutes.
Slow response times are the main reason for Hosting's less-than-average score for customer support. Overall, Cloudways support is willing and eager to help, but you'll have to wait a while to get your questions answered.
Server Uptime 1/5 – This is where Cloudways flopped and struggled. They declare online their uptime is reliably 99.99 percent. Our research demonstrates differently.
Over 30 days, they maintained 99.68 percent uptime, the lowest proportion of any web server, with a total downtime of 2 minutes.
CLOUD HOSTING PROVIDERS
Cloud-based web hosting services are increasingly ubiquitous, but Cloudways does several intriguing things with its cloud hosting that makes it stand out in a developing sector. It lets you select from one of five platforms, including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, offers wallet-friendly pay-as-you-go plans, and even allows you to sign up for a trial run without taking out a credit card. The shine is tarnished a bit by its lack of conveniences, such as domain registration and bundled email. Still, this superb cloud hosting service is well worth investigating.
Unlike most other web hosting providers, Cloudways enables you to establish a site without spending a thing. You may sign up for a three-day trial account by generating a username and password or login in using either Github, Google, or LinkedIn credentials, which is a great touch. After you've logged in, you're tasked with selecting a content management system (CMS) from various prominent and renowned sources, including Drupal, Joomla, Koken, Magento, Media Wiki, PHP Stack, Prestashop, and, of course, WordPress. There's a lot of flexibility on display here.
This versatility also extends to the server choices since you may construct a site atop one of the numerous infrastructure-as-a-service solutions, including Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud Platform, Linode, Stackpath, and Vultr. You also pick one of the multiple server locations distributed around the country.
Cloudways
Cloud Hosting Packages
Cloudways balances your website load by leveraging the resources of numerous clustered servers; it does not provide standard shared, VPS, or dedicated hosting solutions. Instead, the company offers multiple pay-as-you-go, hourly cloud hosting solutions that only charge you for the time you utilize. For example, if you cancel a plan while there is still ten days into the month, you will only be charged for ten days of hosting. Even if you cancel a week into the cycle, hosts like the Editors' Choice award-winning DreamHost and HostGator charge you for the entire month. Cloudways also provides standard monthly billing.
Monthly web hosting plans start at $10 (for 25GB of storage, 1TB of monthly data transfers, 1GB of RAM, and a single-core processor) and scale up to $1,035 (for unlimited storage, 1TB of monthly data transfers, 1GB of RAM, and a single-core processor) (for 3840GB of storage, 12TB of month data transfers, 192GB of RAM, and a 32-core processor.) The high-end option outperforms the most powerful dedicated server plans offered by several web hosting. In fact, Cloudways' top-tier specifications are more in line with the SMB-friendly Liquid Web, which allows you to outfit a server with a whopping 512GB of RAM. If you prefer hourly billing, the aforementioned options begin at just over $0.01 and grow up to just over $1.43.
Unfortunately, Cloudways does not provide domain registration; therefore, you must purchase a domain through NameCheap or another supplier. Another URL-related disadvantage: Cloudways' oddly constructed back end makes pointing that purchased URL to your hosting setup a headache. I had no trouble connecting the connections after perusing the web documentation, but the process may be perplexing to newcomers. Furthermore, unless they're dead set on Cloudways, I can easily see users never returning if they have to go somewhere else just to get started.
Another point to consider is the service's email offering, as Cloudways' plans include no email accounts. Instead, Cloudways, in collaboration with RackSpace, expects you to pay $1 per email account per month. Depending on your requirements, this could be pricey. Most other web providers include some level of service in even the most basic package.
Cloudways may lack some of the traditional web hosting components, but creating a website is a rather simple process. In testing, I used WordPress as my CMS of choice, and the service set up a server in about seven minutes. I logged up with my Cloudways credentials, chose a theme, modified the appearance of pages and posts, and added images. It was a painless experience.
Because this WordPress flavour is managed, your installation gets the white-glove treatment by auto-updating the CMS, performing automated daily backups, and offering real-time site monitoring and WordPress-specific security. Cloudways also supports one-click cloning (which allows you to easily replicate your apps and servers) and staging spaces (so you can test website elements without placing them live on your site).
Cloudways enables clients to monitor individual applications hosted on a server. This application-level monitoring is divided into two parts: Analytics and Logs. Analytics displays information about traffic, PHP queries, MySQL requests, and disc usage. Logs, on the other hand, display the access and fault logs for your website.
Many e-commerce technologies are available in Cloudways' app library, including the popular Magento and Prestashop platforms. By dragging and dropping website elements, I was able to design an appealing store in only a few minutes using Magento.
In terms of security, Cloudways experts protect your installation from threats by releasing frequent operating system and firmware upgrades as a managed cloud hosting platform. Furthermore, Cloudways provides free Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certifications, which should be considered critical data security if you plan to sell something. Furthermore, for enhanced protection, the suggested Rackspace email includes Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) authentication technologies.
Outstanding Uptime
One of the most significant components of a hosting service is website uptime. Clients or consumers are unable to find you or access your products or services while your site is down, and they may not return. That is why I am pleased to inform that Cloudways has a great uptime.
I utilised a website-monitoring application to track the uptime of my Cloudways-hosted test site for this testing. The programme pings my website every 15 minutes and sends me an email if it is unable to contact the site for more than one minute. For each site's review, I look at the data from the most recent 30 days. Cloudways proved to be highly stable in my most recent tests. It didn't even go down once.
Cloudways provides customer assistance that is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. However, there is a catch if you want to speak to a human being. To request a phone or Skype call, you must first complete out a form.
You can also communicate with a customer support person via webchat. That way, you can get responses right away. I never had to wait more than a few seconds before a Cloudways representative answered one of my chat questions. The personnel is also very knowledgeable. The members provided me with precise information regarding the differences between cloud and traditional hosting, as well as the company's pricing system. I also received a primer on infrastructure-as-a-service.
Cloudways' refund policy differs from the standard 30-, 60-, or 90-day money-back guarantee seen with most other web hosting. The structure is so comprehensive, in fact, that Cloudways' customer service team merely sent me to this page. It's a lot to take in.
Cloudways has a number of positive aspects. The service offers versatile cloud hosting plans, quick setup periods, good web-based customer assistance, and high uptime. It's a business you can rely on to maintain your site accessible to services that provide those products. Furthermore, some individuals will be put off by the unusual method of contacting a customer support representative. Give Cloudways a chance if those caveats aren't a deal-breaker. You might discover that it provides exactly what you need to get and maintain your website online.
