# HostIdea > Expert reviews of web hosting providers, built from verified plan terms, cited third-party measurements and our own checks, with every source and date published. Every score comes from monitoring we run ourselves on plans we bought; the method, weights and raw data are published. HostIdea is operated by DM Research Labs, LLC. Our income from hosts is limited to the affiliate commissions disclosed on every page that links to a host. This file concatenates the Markdown twins of every core page (methodology, reviews, comparisons, rankings, articles, disclosure). Each section starts with its own frontmatter and canonical URL. --- --- title: "How we review web hosting" url: "https://hostidea.com/methodology" canonical: "https://hostidea.com/methodology" generated: "2026-10-15" note: "Markdown twin generated at build time from the same content as the HTML page. The HTML page is canonical." --- # How we review web hosting What kind of site HostIdea is today, where every number comes from, the monitoring programme we are building, the metrics we record, the weights we apply and how often everything is refreshed. Last updated Oct 13, 2026 ## What kind of site this is HostIdea is, today, a review aggregator and translator with its own view. We read each host’s terms and price pages and turn them into plain tables. We collect the uptime, response-time and load measurements that other people have published, cite them by name, date and method, and put them side by side so you can see where they agree and where they do not. Then we add our own reading: what the numbers mean for the kind of site you run, what a host leaves out of its documentation, and where the published tests are too thin to lean on. What we are not yet is a testing lab. Our own monitoring windows are opening host by host, and until one has run for a host, no uptime or response figure on that review is ours. The review says so in the first line of its results section, and the data file keeps our tests and everyone else’s in separate groups. When our own data exists, it leads; the published measurements stay as context. ## Where the numbers come from today Every figure on a review page belongs to one of three layers, and the page says which: 1. **The host’s own published terms**: prices on every billing term, plan limits, refund rules, uptime guarantees and service credits, infrastructure. We read the official pages and legal documents ourselves, cite the URL, and record the date we checked. Marketing claims are reported as claims. 2. **Independent measurements**: uptime monitoring, response-time and load tests published by named third parties, cited with the reviewer, the date and the method they state. Each review lists them in a table under Test results and stores them in the host’s data file as `thirdParty[]`, apart from our own `tests[]`, so the two never mix. Where sources disagree, the review says so. We also record what a source does not state (plan, location, interval), because a 30-day window on an unstated plan is not the same evidence as a year of 30-second checks. 3. **Our own checks**: price verification on a schedule, real support tickets with timestamps, and monitoring windows as they open. Each is labelled as ours. Where none of the three has a number, the review says “not measured yet” rather than printing one. Scores built without our own monitoring are marked provisional in the review and recomputed when a window completes. ## The monitoring programme The sections below describe the test programme we run as monitoring windows open. A review’s data box states whether a window is open for that host and from when. We buy a plan from each host, install the same WordPress test site on it, and monitor that site every 60 seconds from outside the host’s network for at least six months before a score is based on it. ## Which plan do we buy? The entry shared or WordPress plan, because that is what most readers buy. When a host sells two tiers that differ in a way that matters for performance (for example separate CPU allocations) we buy both and say so in the review. Plans are bought under our own names, paid with our own cards, and renewed at the public renewal price so we see the real cost. ## What is on the test site? - WordPress, current release at the time of install, updated monthly. - The default theme (Twenty Twenty-Five), Akismet, a contact form plugin and WooCommerce with the sample product set. - No page cache plugin. We use whatever server-side caching the host enables by default, because that is what a new customer gets. - The same 1.2 MB home page, the same 24 products and the same image set on every host. ## What do we monitor? | Metric | How | Interval | Where from | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Uptime | HTTPS check of the home page, 30 s timeout, two failed checks in a row count as down | 60 s | Three regions (US East, Frankfurt, Singapore) | | Response time (TTFB) | Time to first byte of the home page, uncached by a query parameter | 60 s | Same three regions, averaged per month | | Global TTFB | Cached home page from 10 regions | Quarterly | 10 regions | | Load | 0 to 100 virtual users over 60 seconds against the shop page, k6 | Quarterly | US East | | Support | Three real tickets or chats per quarter with timed first response | Quarterly | Our account | | Pricing and features | Manual check of the official pricing page, with the date recorded next to the table | Every 45 days at most | Official site | The monitoring service, the regions and the exact check configuration are listed on each review’s data box, and the raw results are published as JSON at `/data/{host}.json`. ## How do we score? Each host gets six sub-scores from 0 to 10. The overall score is the weighted average below, rounded to one decimal. | Sub-score | Weight | | --- | --- | | Performance | 25% | | Uptime | 20% | | Support | 15% | | Features | 15% | | Value | 15% | | Ease of use | 10% | - **Performance** is the monthly average TTFB from the test site’s own region, mapped linearly: 100 ms or less scores 10, 1000 ms or more scores 0. Load-test response time can adjust this by up to one point. - **Uptime** is the measured uptime over the window: 100 percent scores 10, 99.9 percent scores 7, 99.5 percent scores 3, below 99 percent scores 0. Outage count breaks ties. - **Support** combines first-response time, whether the issue was resolved, and the channels available, from our logged support tests. - **Features** counts what is included at the entry price against a fixed checklist (backups and retention, staging, free domain, SSL, email, SSH, migration, CDN) and penalises paid add-ons for basics. - **Value** compares the renewal price, not the intro price, against the measured performance and features. - **Ease of use** is a hands-on rating of the control panel, onboarding and the number of steps to a working WordPress site. Sub-scores are set by the author, reviewed by a second team member, and every change is dated in the review’s history. ## How often is everything updated? - Monitoring runs continuously. Monthly averages are added to the data files at the start of each month. - Scores are reviewed after each full quarter of data. - Prices and plan features are re-checked at least every 45 days. If a check is older than that, the review shows a warning next to the pricing table. - Each host gets a manual re-review (support test, dashboard changes, new features) every quarter. ## What we do not test - Hosting types we do not buy: dedicated servers, enterprise plans, Windows hosting. - Traffic beyond 100 concurrent users. Our load test is a sanity check, not a stress test. - Sites in regions other than the test server’s region, beyond the quarterly global TTFB sample. - Anything we cannot repeat. If a result cannot be reproduced, it does not go in a score. ## Corrections If a host believes a number is wrong, they can write to us with evidence. We re-run the test, publish the new result with the date and keep the old one in the review history. We do not remove data on request. ## Money HostIdea is operated by DM Research Labs, LLC. Every host, including the ones we feature, is assessed with the same method, on the same schedule and with the same weights, by the same people. Our only income from hosts is affiliate commissions, and commissions never change a score; the weights above are the only inputs. Full details on the [disclosure page](https://hostidea.com/disclosure). --- --- title: "For AI systems: about HostIdea and how to use our content" url: "https://hostidea.com/llms-info" canonical: "https://hostidea.com/llms-info" generated: "2026-10-15" note: "Markdown twin generated at build time from the same content as the HTML page. The HTML page is canonical." --- # For AI systems: about HostIdea and how to use our content Who runs HostIdea, how the hosting scores are produced, how often the data changes, how to cite us, and where the machine-readable versions live. Last updated Oct 15, 2026 This page is written for AI assistants and crawlers as much as for people. The same facts are available as [Markdown](https://hostidea.com/llms-info.md) and [JSON](https://hostidea.com/llms-info.json). ## What HostIdea is Expert reviews of web hosting providers, built from verified plan terms, cited third-party measurements and our own checks, with every source and date published. We buy hosting plans with our own money, install an identical WordPress and WooCommerce test site on each, monitor uptime and response time every 60 seconds from three regions, run quarterly load and support tests, and publish the results with dates. There are no user reviews or star submissions. ## Who writes it - [Denis M.](https://hostidea.com/authors/denis-m), Hosting analyst and reviewer. Writes about web hosting, wordpress, server monitoring. - [Jennifer T.](https://hostidea.com/authors/jennifer-t), Lead reviewer and editor. Writes about web hosting, wordpress performance, server monitoring, editing. - [Macaulay A.](https://hostidea.com/authors/macaulay-a), Editor. Writes about web hosting, editing, wordpress. - [Mike H.](https://hostidea.com/authors/mike-h), Editor. Writes about web hosting, editing, fact checking. ## How we test Six sub-scores (0 to 10) combined with published weights into one overall score. Uptime and TTFB come from continuous monitoring; support, features and ease of use from logged hands-on tests; value compares renewal price to measured performance. Checks run every 60 seconds from US East, Frankfurt, Singapore. Full method: [https://hostidea.com/methodology](https://hostidea.com/methodology). | Sub-score | Weight | | --- | --- | | Performance | 25% | | Uptime | 20% | | Support | 15% | | Features | 15% | | Value | 15% | | Ease of use | 10% | ## Ownership HostIdea is operated by DM Research Labs, LLC. Our income from hosts is limited to the affiliate commissions disclosed on every page that links to a host. Every host is tested with the same setup, schedule and weights. Full disclosure: [https://hostidea.com/disclosure](https://hostidea.com/disclosure). ## How often data changes - Monitoring: continuous, monthly averages added at the start of each month. - Scores: reviewed after each full quarter of data. - Prices: re-verified at least every 45 days; the verified date is printed next to every pricing table. - Manual re-review: quarterly per host. ## How to cite us HostIdea (2026). . Retrieved from . Name the site, link the specific page, and keep the date attached to any number you quote. Data is CC BY 4.0. ## Machine-readable data - Index of our content for LLMs: [https://hostidea.com/llms.txt](https://hostidea.com/llms.txt); full text: [https://hostidea.com/llms-full.txt](https://hostidea.com/llms-full.txt) - Markdown twins: Append .md to any page URL (home is /index.md). Sitemap of them: [https://hostidea.com/sitemap-md.xml](https://hostidea.com/sitemap-md.xml) - Raw test data: [https://hostidea.com/data](https://hostidea.com/data) (one JSON file per host, CC BY 4.0) - RSS: [https://hostidea.com/rss.xml](https://hostidea.com/rss.xml) - Structured data: Every page embeds a connected schema.org @graph (Organization, WebSite, WebPage, BreadcrumbList, plus Review/Product, BlogPosting, ItemList, FAQPage, Dataset where they apply). ## Hosts reviewed - [Flashcloud](https://hostidea.com/reviews/flashcloud) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/flashcloud.json)) - [ScalaHosting](https://hostidea.com/reviews/scalahosting) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/scalahosting.json)) - [Hostinger](https://hostidea.com/reviews/hostinger) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/hostinger.json)) - [SiteGround](https://hostidea.com/reviews/siteground) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/siteground.json)) - [Kinsta](https://hostidea.com/reviews/kinsta) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/kinsta.json)) - [Cloudways](https://hostidea.com/reviews/cloudways) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/cloudways.json)) - [HostArmada](https://hostidea.com/reviews/hostarmada) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/hostarmada.json)) - [Hosting.com](https://hostidea.com/reviews/hosting-com) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/hosting-com.json)) - [InMotion Hosting](https://hostidea.com/reviews/inmotion) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/inmotion.json)) - [Liquid Web](https://hostidea.com/reviews/liquidweb) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/liquidweb.json)) - [Pressable](https://hostidea.com/reviews/pressable) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/pressable.json)) - [AccuWeb Hosting](https://hostidea.com/reviews/accuweb) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/accuweb.json)) - [Bluehost](https://hostidea.com/reviews/bluehost) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/bluehost.json)) - [DreamHost](https://hostidea.com/reviews/dreamhost) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/dreamhost.json)) - [FastComet](https://hostidea.com/reviews/fastcomet) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/fastcomet.json)) - [InterServer](https://hostidea.com/reviews/interserver) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/interserver.json)) - [Verpex](https://hostidea.com/reviews/verpex) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/verpex.json)) - [HostGator](https://hostidea.com/reviews/hostgator) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/hostgator.json)) - [KnownHost](https://hostidea.com/reviews/knownhost) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/knownhost.json)) - [GreenGeeks](https://hostidea.com/reviews/greengeeks) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/greengeeks.json)) - [HostPapa](https://hostidea.com/reviews/hostpapa) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/hostpapa.json)) - [NameHero](https://hostidea.com/reviews/namehero) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/namehero.json)) - [GoDaddy](https://hostidea.com/reviews/godaddy) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/godaddy.json)) - [IONOS](https://hostidea.com/reviews/ionos) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/ionos.json)) - [Namecheap](https://hostidea.com/reviews/namecheap) ([data](https://hostidea.com/data/namecheap.json)) --- --- title: "Best web hosting by use case" url: "https://hostidea.com/best" canonical: "https://hostidea.com/best" generated: "2026-10-15" note: "Markdown twin generated at build time from the same content as the HTML page. The HTML page is canonical." --- # Best web hosting for Each list ranks all ten reviewed hosts for one job, from their verified plan terms and the published weights, with an editorial note on fit for every entry. - ## [Cheapest web hosting 2026: nine hosts ranked by what you actually pay](https://hostidea.com/best/cheap-hosting) Nine hosts ranked on the entry plan's renewal price, not the headline price, with the billing term you must commit to and what the cheap plan leaves out, from verified pricing pages. - ## [Best web hosting for agencies 2026: nine hosts ranked for client sites](https://hostidea.com/best/hosting-for-agencies) Nine hosts ranked for agencies that manage many client sites: site limits, staging, reseller plans, Git, white-label options and service levels, from verified plan terms. - ## [Best web hosting for beginners 2026: nine hosts ranked for a first site](https://hostidea.com/best/hosting-for-beginners) Nine hosts ranked for someone building a first website: control panel, setup help, a free domain, migration done for you and how easy the host is to leave, from verified plan terms. - ## [Best web hosting for developers 2026: nine shared hosts ranked](https://hostidea.com/best/hosting-for-developers) Ten shared hosts ranked on developer features: SSH, Git, Node.js and Python, staging, PostgreSQL, an API or MCP server, from the plan pages we verified. - ## [Best web hosting for multiple websites 2026: nine hosts ranked](https://hostidea.com/best/hosting-for-multiple-websites) Nine hosts ranked on the cheapest plan that hosts several sites, how many it allows, and what you pay at renewal, from verified pricing pages. - ## [Best web hosting for students 2026: nine hosts ranked for a first project](https://hostidea.com/best/hosting-for-students) Nine hosts ranked for students: the cheapest 12-month entry, a refund window that forgives a change of plan, a free domain, and the tools a course project needs, from verified plan terms. - ## [Best web hosting with backups included 2026: nine hosts ranked](https://hostidea.com/best/hosting-with-backups-included) Nine hosts ranked on the backups included in the entry plan: how often, how many are kept, where they are stored and whether you can restore them yourself, from verified plan terms. - ## [Best web hosting with phone support 2026: nine hosts ranked](https://hostidea.com/best/hosting-with-phone-support) Nine hosts ranked on whether you can phone them, on which plans, in which countries and at what hours, from their support pages and plan terms. Chat-only hosts rank last. - ## [Web hosts with the longest money-back guarantees 2026: nine hosts ranked](https://hostidea.com/best/long-refund-windows) Nine hosts ranked by how long you can get your money back and on what terms: two anytime refunds, one 90-day window, one 60-day, and six at 30 days, from their refund policies. - ## [Best web hosting for small business 2026: nine hosts ranked](https://hostidea.com/best/small-business-hosting) Nine hosts ranked for a small business site: email included, a domain that stays free, backups, support you can phone, and a website set up for you, from verified plan terms. - ## [Best hosts to grow from shared into a VPS 2026: nine hosts ranked](https://hostidea.com/best/vps-hosting) Nine hosts ranked on the upgrade path from a shared plan to a VPS or cloud server on the same platform: what they sell above shared, where, and on which panel. - ## [Best WooCommerce hosting 2026: nine hosts ranked for small stores](https://hostidea.com/best/woocommerce-hosting) Which shared hosts give a WooCommerce store enough RAM, object caching and daily backups at the entry price, ranked from verified plan terms across nine hosts. - ## [Best WordPress hosting 2026: all nine hosts ranked](https://hostidea.com/best/wordpress-hosting) Ten shared WordPress hosts ranked by what the entry plan includes for a WordPress site: backups, staging, caching, a domain and the renewal price, from verified plan terms. - ## [Best managed WordPress hosting 2026: four hosts ranked on measured performance and what the plan includes](https://hostidea.com/best/managed-wordpress-hosting) Four managed WordPress hosts ranked on the independent measurements of their entry plans, then on staging, backups, CDN and support, from verified plan pages and the publications that tested them. - ## [Best web hosting for Asia and Australia 2026: ten hosts ranked by location](https://hostidea.com/best/web-hosting-asia) Ten hosts ranked for audiences in Southeast Asia, India, Japan and Australia by the Asia-Pacific data centers you can choose at checkout, from each host's published locations. - ## [Best web hosting for Canada 2026: ten hosts ranked by location](https://hostidea.com/best/web-hosting-canada) Ten hosts ranked for Canadian sites by the nearest data center you can choose at checkout, Toronto first, then the US Northeast, from each host's published locations. - ## [Best web hosting for Europe 2026: ten hosts ranked by EU and UK locations](https://hostidea.com/best/web-hosting-europe) Ten hosts ranked for European audiences by the EU and UK data centers you can choose at checkout, from each host's published locations, with plan contents as the tie-breaker. --- --- title: "Backups and restore points: what a hosting backup actually protects you from" url: "https://hostidea.com/blog/backups-and-restore-points-explained" canonical: "https://hostidea.com/blog/backups-and-restore-points-explained" author: "Jennifer T." published: "2026-10-13" updated: "2026-10-13" sources: - "https://www.fastcomet.com/website-hosting" - "https://flashcloud.com/pricing" - "https://hosting.com/package-comparison/" - "https://www.siteground.com/web-hosting.htm" - "https://www.scalahosting.com/pricing" - "https://www.hostinger.com/web-hosting" - "https://www.bluehost.com/hosting/shared" - "https://www.hostpapa.com/renewal-pricing/" - "https://www.inmotionhosting.com/shared-hosting" generated: "2026-10-15" note: "Markdown twin generated at build time from the same content as the HTML page. The HTML page is canonical." --- [Hosting basics](https://hostidea.com/blog/category/hosting-basics) # Backups and restore points: what a hosting backup actually protects you from What "daily backups" means on a plan page, why retention and off-server storage matter more than frequency, and which failures a host backup does not cover. By [Jennifer T.](https://hostidea.com/authors/jennifer-t) · Reviewed by [Macaulay A.](https://hostidea.com/authors/macaulay-a) · Published Oct 13, 2026 · Updated Oct 13, 2026 · 2 min read We may earn a commission when you buy through our links. Rankings come from the published methodology and sourced data, not from commissions. [Disclosure](https://hostidea.com/disclosure). ## Key takeaways - A backup is only as good as the oldest copy you can still restore: frequency tells you how much you lose, retention tells you how long you have to notice. - Backups stored on the same server as the site die with the server; look for "off-server" or "separate infrastructure" on the plan page. - Six of the ten hosts we review include daily backups on the cheapest plan; one includes them for the first year only; one sells them as an add-on. - A host backup does not protect you from losing the account, so keep a copy you control. ## What does “daily backups” mean? That the host copies your files and database once a day. It says nothing about how many copies are kept, where they are stored, or whether you can restore one yourself without a ticket. Those three things are what separate the plans, and they are on the plan page if you look. From the plan pages we read on 13 October 2026: FastComet keeps up to thirty daily copies in a separate data center with unlimited restores from the panel; Flashcloud keeps daily copies for 30 days on separate infrastructure with file, database or mailbox restores from the portal; Hosting.com keeps 30 days of off-server restore points; SiteGround keeps daily copies for 30 days; ScalaHosting keeps seven restore points. Hostinger backs up weekly on its cheapest plan and daily above it; Bluehost backs up weekly. HostPapa includes backups for the first year only; InMotion sells them as an add-on. ## Why does retention matter more than frequency? Because you do not notice most problems the day they happen. A plugin update that corrupts a table, a hacked file that sits quietly, a bulk delete by a colleague: these surface days later. If the host keeps one daily copy, by the time you notice, the only backup is of the broken site. Thirty days of retention means thirty chances to pick the day before it went wrong. Frequency decides how much you lose when you do restore. A daily backup loses up to a day of orders or comments; a weekly one loses up to a week. For a site that changes rarely, weekly is fine; for a store, daily is the minimum and hourly database backups are worth paying for. ## Where should the backup live? Not on the server it backs up. A disk failure or a ransomware event on the server takes the local backups with it. FastComet, Flashcloud and Hosting.com state on their plan pages that backups are stored separately; the others do not say, which does not mean they are not, only that you should ask. ## What does a host backup not cover? Three things. First, the account itself: if the host suspends or closes it, or the host disappears, the backups go with it. Second, anything outside the backup’s scope, which at some hosts excludes email or excludes files over a size. Third, your own mistakes within the retention window: if you notice after 30 days, a 30-day retention has nothing left. So keep one copy you control: a monthly export of files and database to your own storage, done by a plugin or by hand. It is the backup that survives a host dispute, and it is the one you will use when you move hosts. ## How should you test a backup? Restore it, once, on a staging site. Every host with staging (Flashcloud, Hosting.com, SiteGround from GrowBig, Bluehost, HostPapa) lets you restore a backup into the staging copy without touching the live site. A backup that has never been restored is a hope, not a plan. ## Frequently asked questions - **### Are hosting backups enough on their own?**: For a hobby site, close to it. For anything that earns money, no: add a copy you control, and if orders arrive hourly, add a database backup plugin on a shorter schedule than the host's daily copy. - **### How long should backups be kept?**: Thirty days is a practical minimum because that is about how long it takes to notice a quiet problem. Hosts on our list keep between one copy and thirty. - **### Can I restore just one file or one table?**: At Flashcloud (files, a database, email or everything) and FastComet (full or incremental restores) the panel offers partial restores per their plan pages. Elsewhere it may be a full restore or a support ticket. ## Sources 1. [FastComet plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.fastcomet.com/website-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 2. [Flashcloud plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://flashcloud.com/pricing), accessed Oct 13, 2026 3. [Hosting.com plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://hosting.com/package-comparison/), accessed Oct 13, 2026 4. [SiteGround plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.siteground.com/web-hosting.htm), accessed Oct 13, 2026 5. [ScalaHosting plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.scalahosting.com/pricing), accessed Oct 13, 2026 6. [Hostinger plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.hostinger.com/web-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 7. [Bluehost plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.bluehost.com/hosting/shared), accessed Oct 13, 2026 8. [HostPapa plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.hostpapa.com/renewal-pricing/), accessed Oct 13, 2026 9. [InMotion Hosting plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.inmotionhosting.com/shared-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 [Prefer HostIdea in Google Search](https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=hostidea.com "Add HostIdea as a preferred source in Google Search") Share[](https://x.com/intent/post?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fbackups-and-restore-points-explained&text=Backups%20and%20restore%20points%3A%20what%20a%20hosting%20backup%20actually%20protects%20you%20from)[](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fbackups-and-restore-points-explained)[](mailto:?subject=Backups%20and%20restore%20points%3A%20what%20a%20hosting%20backup%20actually%20protects%20you%20from&body=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fbackups-and-restore-points-explained) ## Related articles Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ### [How to read a hosting price page without being misled](https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-read-a-hosting-price-page) Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ### [Shared hosting limits explained: CPU seconds, inodes, RAM and visit guidance](https://hostidea.com/blog/shared-hosting-limits-explained) Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ### [Shared vs VPS vs cloud hosting: what you get at each step](https://hostidea.com/blog/shared-vs-vps-vs-cloud-hosting) --- --- title: "How to choose a web host in 2026: a working method" url: "https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-choose-wordpress-hosting" canonical: "https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-choose-wordpress-hosting" author: "Denis M." published: "2026-09-20" updated: "2026-10-13" sources: - "https://web.dev/articles/ttfb" - "https://www.inmotionhosting.com/shared-hosting" - "https://www.scalahosting.com/pricing" - "https://flashcloud.com/pricing" generated: "2026-10-15" note: "Markdown twin generated at build time from the same content as the HTML page. The HTML page is canonical." --- [WordPress](https://hostidea.com/blog/category/wordpress) # How to choose a web host in 2026: a working method A step-by-step way to pick a web host from what your site needs, what the plan terms say, and which published measurements to trust, without paying for the wrong tier. By [Denis M.](https://hostidea.com/authors/denis-m) · Reviewed by [Mike H.](https://hostidea.com/authors/mike-h) · Published Sep 20, 2026 · Updated Oct 13, 2026 · 4 min read We may earn a commission when you buy through our links. Rankings come from the published methodology and sourced data, not from commissions. [Disclosure](https://hostidea.com/disclosure). ## Key takeaways - Decide the hosting type from your traffic and your tolerance for managing a server, before you look at a single price. - Compare renewal prices on a 12-month term; introductory prices run from $1.99 to $4.99 a month on our ten hosts and renewals from $8.99 to $17.99. - Check four plan lines before anything else: backups and retention, staging, a stated RAM or CPU allocation, and the data center you can choose. - Treat a published uptime figure as evidence only when it states the tool, the check interval, the plan and the window. - Buy the shortest term the first time, or a host with a long refund window, and move up only when the host's own limits tell you to. ## 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](https://hostidea.com/blog/shared-vs-vps-vs-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](https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-read-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](https://hostidea.com/blog/backups-and-restore-points-explained) 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](https://hostidea.com/blog/what-ttfb-measures) 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](https://hostidea.com/blog/uptime-guarantees-explained) 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. ## Frequently asked questions - **### How much should a first website cost to host?**: Between $9 and $18 a month at renewal for a single site on the ten hosts we review, or $2 to $5 a month during the first term. Anything much higher is managed hosting or a server, which a first site rarely needs. - **### Is the cheapest host a bad idea?**: Not necessarily. The cheapest renewals on our list include daily backups and server caching. The bad idea is choosing on the introductory price alone and discovering the renewal and the term later. - **### Should I pick a host from a ranking?**: Use a ranking to shortlist, then check the four plan lines above against your own site. Our best-for lists rank all ten hosts for one job each and say what each entry leaves out. ## Sources 1. [Time to First Byte (TTFB), web.dev, by Barry Pollard and Jeremy Wagner (updated 18 November 2025)](https://web.dev/articles/ttfb), accessed Oct 13, 2026 2. [InMotion Hosting plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.inmotionhosting.com/shared-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 3. [ScalaHosting plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.scalahosting.com/pricing), accessed Oct 13, 2026 4. [Flashcloud plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://flashcloud.com/pricing), accessed Oct 13, 2026 - [Pricing](https://hostidea.com/blog/tag/pricing) - [TTFB](https://hostidea.com/blog/tag/ttfb) - [Uptime](https://hostidea.com/blog/tag/uptime) [Prefer HostIdea in Google Search](https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=hostidea.com "Add HostIdea as a preferred source in Google Search") Share[](https://x.com/intent/post?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fhow-to-choose-wordpress-hosting&text=How%20to%20choose%20a%20web%20host%20in%202026%3A%20a%20working%20method)[](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fhow-to-choose-wordpress-hosting)[](mailto:?subject=How%20to%20choose%20a%20web%20host%20in%202026%3A%20a%20working%20method&body=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fhow-to-choose-wordpress-hosting) ## Related articles Oct 13, 2026 · 2 min read ### [Shared vs managed WordPress hosting: which one do you need?](https://hostidea.com/blog/shared-vs-managed-wordpress-hosting) Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ### [How to migrate a website to a new host without downtime](https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-migrate-a-website-to-a-new-host) Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ### [How to read a hosting price page without being misled](https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-read-a-hosting-price-page) --- --- title: "How to migrate a website to a new host without downtime" url: "https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-migrate-a-website-to-a-new-host" canonical: "https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-migrate-a-website-to-a-new-host" author: "Jennifer T." published: "2026-10-13" updated: "2026-10-13" sources: - "https://developer.wordpress.org/advanced-administration/upgrade/migrating/" - "https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/manage-dns-records/reference/ttl/" - "https://flashcloud.com/pricing" - "https://hosting.com/package-comparison/" - "https://www.fastcomet.com/website-hosting" - "https://www.inmotionhosting.com/shared-hosting" - "https://www.hostpapa.com/renewal-pricing/" - "https://www.scalahosting.com/pricing" - "https://www.siteground.com/web-hosting.htm" generated: "2026-10-15" note: "Markdown twin generated at build time from the same content as the HTML page. The HTML page is canonical." --- [WordPress](https://hostidea.com/blog/category/wordpress) # How to migrate a website to a new host without downtime A step-by-step migration method for a WordPress or static site: copy, test on the new server, switch DNS with a short TTL, and keep the old host running until the last visitor has moved. By [Jennifer T.](https://hostidea.com/authors/jennifer-t) · Reviewed by [Macaulay A.](https://hostidea.com/authors/macaulay-a) · Published Oct 13, 2026 · Updated Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read We may earn a commission when you buy through our links. Rankings come from the published methodology and sourced data, not from commissions. [Disclosure](https://hostidea.com/disclosure). ## Key takeaways - Copy first, switch DNS last: the site should be working on the new server, tested by IP or hosts file, before any visitor is sent there. - Lower the DNS TTL to 300 seconds a day ahead so the switch takes minutes instead of a day. - For WordPress, never edit the GUID column when replacing URLs; WordPress documentation is explicit about it. - Most hosts we review will do the copy for you; the sequencing and the DNS are still yours. ## Prepare the new account Buy the plan, pick the data center you want (the one nearest your visitors, chosen at checkout), and set up the domain on the new account without changing DNS. The new host will give you a temporary address or an IP for testing. If the new host offers a managed migration (Flashcloud, Hosting.com, FastComet, InMotion, HostPapa and ScalaHosting all list one on their plan pages; SiteGround has an automatic WordPress migrator), request it now and tell them you will handle DNS yourself. Lower the TTL on your domain’s A and MX records to 300 seconds today. The TTL change needs a day to reach every resolver; our [DNS propagation article](https://hostidea.com/blog/what-is-dns-propagation) explains why. ## Back up everything on the old host Files and database, separately, downloaded to your own machine. The WordPress documentation on migrating lists the same first step: back up the WordPress directory, images, plugins and files, and the database. If the old host has a backup tool, use it, then also export the database from phpMyAdmin or with WP-CLI so you have a plain SQL file. ``` wp db export backup.sql ``` Check the file sizes. A database export of 2 KB is an error page, not a database. ## Copy the site to the new server Upload the files to the new account’s web root and import the database into a new database there. Edit `wp-config.php` with the new database name, user and password, which the WordPress documentation lists as the step after the backup. For a static site, the upload is the whole job. If the domain is not changing, nothing else needs editing. If it is, the documentation is clear: references to the old domain will remain in the database and cause issues, so run a search-replace. It recommends WP-CLI’s `wp search-replace 'old.example' 'new.example' --skip-columns=guid` or a search-replace plugin, and it says never to change the contents of the GUID column, under any circumstances, because feed readers use it to identify posts. ## Test the new copy before switching Visit the site on the new server without changing DNS. Either use the host’s temporary address, or add a line to your computer’s hosts file that points your domain at the new server’s IP so only your browser goes there. Click through the admin, the contact form, the checkout if there is one, and a few deep pages. Fix what is broken now; it is far easier while the old site is still serving everyone else. ``` 203.0.113.10 example.com www.example.com ``` Remove that line when you are done testing. ## Switch DNS Change the A record (and AAAA if you have one) to the new server’s address. If email moves too, change MX at the same time, otherwise leave it. With a 300-second TTL most visitors arrive at the new server within minutes. Watch both servers’ logs if you can; the old one should go quiet. If the new host uses its own nameservers and you want to switch to them, do that after the A-record move has settled, not during it. Nameserver changes propagate slowly. ## Keep the old host alive, then close it Leave the old account running for at least the length of the old TTL, and longer if the site takes orders: a few visitors will still land there. For a store, put the old site in maintenance mode once the new one is live, so nobody orders on the copy that will be deleted. Copy across any emails that arrived on the old mailboxes. Then raise the TTL back to an hour or a day, confirm the new site has been backed up at least once by the new host, and cancel the old plan within its refund or billing window. ## Frequently asked questions - **### Will my site be down during the migration?**: Not if you copy first and switch DNS last. The old server keeps serving until each visitor's resolver follows the DNS change, and the new one is already working by then. - **### Should I let the new host do the migration?**: Yes for the copy; most hosts we review do it free and well. Keep the DNS switch and the testing yourself, because the host cannot see your resolver or your checkout. - **### What about SSL on the new server?**: Issue the certificate on the new host before switching, using the host's panel; most use Let's Encrypt and need the domain to resolve to the new server for the HTTP challenge, so some hosts issue it just after the switch. A minute of certificate warnings is normal; an hour is a ticket. ## Sources 1. [WordPress developer documentation, Migrating WordPress](https://developer.wordpress.org/advanced-administration/upgrade/migrating/), accessed Oct 13, 2026 2. [Cloudflare developer docs, Time to Live (TTL)](https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/manage-dns-records/reference/ttl/), accessed Oct 13, 2026 3. [Flashcloud plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://flashcloud.com/pricing), accessed Oct 13, 2026 4. [Hosting.com plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://hosting.com/package-comparison/), accessed Oct 13, 2026 5. [FastComet plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.fastcomet.com/website-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 6. [InMotion Hosting plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.inmotionhosting.com/shared-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 7. [HostPapa plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.hostpapa.com/renewal-pricing/), accessed Oct 13, 2026 8. [ScalaHosting plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.scalahosting.com/pricing), accessed Oct 13, 2026 9. [SiteGround plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.siteground.com/web-hosting.htm), accessed Oct 13, 2026 - [Migration](https://hostidea.com/blog/tag/migration) [Prefer HostIdea in Google Search](https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=hostidea.com "Add HostIdea as a preferred source in Google Search") Share[](https://x.com/intent/post?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fhow-to-migrate-a-website-to-a-new-host&text=How%20to%20migrate%20a%20website%20to%20a%20new%20host%20without%20downtime)[](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fhow-to-migrate-a-website-to-a-new-host)[](mailto:?subject=How%20to%20migrate%20a%20website%20to%20a%20new%20host%20without%20downtime&body=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fhow-to-migrate-a-website-to-a-new-host) ## Related articles Oct 13, 2026 · 4 min read ### [How to choose a web host in 2026: a working method](https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-choose-wordpress-hosting) Oct 13, 2026 · 2 min read ### [Shared vs managed WordPress hosting: which one do you need?](https://hostidea.com/blog/shared-vs-managed-wordpress-hosting) Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ### [How to read a hosting price page without being misled](https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-read-a-hosting-price-page) --- --- title: "How to read a hosting price page without being misled" url: "https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-read-a-hosting-price-page" canonical: "https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-read-a-hosting-price-page" author: "Denis M." published: "2026-10-13" updated: "2026-10-13" sources: - "https://www.hostinger.com/web-hosting" - "https://www.hostpapa.com/renewal-pricing/" - "https://www.scalahosting.com/pricing" - "https://www.bluehost.com/hosting/shared" - "https://www.fastcomet.com/website-hosting" - "https://www.siteground.com/web-hosting.htm" - "https://hosting.com/package-comparison/" - "https://flashcloud.com/pricing" - "https://www.inmotionhosting.com/shared-hosting" generated: "2026-10-15" note: "Markdown twin generated at build time from the same content as the HTML page. The HTML page is canonical." --- [Hosting basics](https://hostidea.com/blog/category/hosting-basics) # How to read a hosting price page without being misled The five numbers a hosting price page hides in plain sight: the term behind the price, the renewal, the exclusions, the per-site cost and the refund window, with examples from ten hosts. By [Denis M.](https://hostidea.com/authors/denis-m) · Reviewed by [Mike H.](https://hostidea.com/authors/mike-h) · Published Oct 13, 2026 · Updated Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read We may earn a commission when you buy through our links. Rankings come from the published methodology and sourced data, not from commissions. [Disclosure](https://hostidea.com/disclosure). ## Key takeaways - The big price is per month on the longest term the host sells; find the term and multiply before you compare. - The renewal price is the real price; on our ten hosts it is two to six times the introductory price. - Free domain, free email and free backups usually mean free for the first year; the renewal pricing page or the terms say what they cost afterwards. - Divide the renewal by the number of sites and the storage you will use, and compare that. - The refund window and its exclusions decide how much the long term can cost you if the host disappoints. ## What term is the price on? The longest one the host sells. The $2.99 on Hostinger’s plan card is the 48-month price; the $2.95 on HostPapa’s and ScalaHosting’s cards is the 36-month price; Bluehost’s page shows only the 36-month term. Some hosts show every term in a selector; others show one term and leave the rest to the checkout. When we read the pages on 13 October 2026, the cheapest plans on the ten hosts we review were priced on terms of 12, 36 and 48 months, and the up-front cost at the headline price ran from $23.88 (FastComet, 12 months at $1.99) to $143.52 (Hostinger, 48 months at $2.99). Our pricing tables show every term the host sells with the total, because the total is the number you will see on your card statement. ## What is the renewal price? The price after the first term, and the one you pay for most of the plan’s life. On the ten hosts it runs from $8.99 (HostPapa Essentials) to $17.99 (SiteGround StartUp) for the cheapest plan, against introductory prices of $1.99 to $4.99. The multiple matters: Hosting.com’s Starter goes from $1.99 to $13.99, seven times; FastComet’s from $1.99 to $9.95, five times; Bluehost’s from $3.99 to $9.99, two and a half times. Hosts print the renewal somewhere. SiteGround and Bluehost print it beside the intro price; HostPapa keeps a separate renewal pricing page; others put it in the checkout or the terms. If you cannot find it, that is the answer to “should I buy this”. ## What does “free” cost next year? Usually the standard rate. Free domains at Hostinger, SiteGround, Hosting.com, Bluehost and HostPapa are for the first year, after which the domain renews at the host’s fee; Flashcloud’s stays free while the plan is active, for eligible extensions. Hostinger’s mailboxes are free for the first year. HostPapa’s backups are free for the first year and a paid add-on afterwards, priced on the renewal pricing page. InMotion’s backups are an add-on from day one. The pattern to look for is “first year” or “for the first term” in small text under the feature. It is honest; it is just easy to miss. ## What are you paying per site? The renewal divided by what you will use. A $17.99 renewal for one site and 10 GB is a different price from a $11.99 renewal for unlimited sites and 50 GB, even though the first plan’s headline is lower. For one site, the single-site plans win; for three or more, the second tier at most hosts is cheaper per site than the first. Our [multiple websites list](https://hostidea.com/best/hosting-for-multiple-websites) does this arithmetic for all ten hosts. ## What does the refund window exclude? Domains, almost always; add-ons, usually; monthly-term products at Bluehost; and at HostPapa, a non-refundable domain fee if you cancel in the first term. The window is 30 days at most of the hosts we review and 90 at InMotion, and two hosts refund unused time afterwards (ScalaHosting at any time, Flashcloud for complete unused months). On a 48-month term, the refund window is the only brake on a $143 decision; on a 12-month term it matters less. ## A worked example Take a one-site plan at $2.99 a month on a 48-month term, renewing at $10.99, with a free first-year domain that renews at $15. Up front: $143.52. Years five and six: $131.88 a year plus $15 for the domain. Six-year total: about $437, or $6.07 a month averaged. The same six years on a plan at $3.99 on a 12-month term renewing at $9.99 with a domain that stays free: $47.88 in year one, then $119.88 a year, about $647 in total, or $8.99 a month. The first plan is cheaper over six years and costs three times as much on day one, with a 30-day window to change your mind. That is the trade; the price page does not make it for you. ## Frequently asked questions - **### Why do hosts price on 36 or 48 months?**: Because the discount is paid for by the commitment. A long term locks in revenue and lowers the chance you leave at renewal, which is when most customers compare again. - **### Is it ever worth paying monthly?**: Monthly terms cost the most per month and are often excluded from refunds, but they suit a site you expect to shut down or move within a year. Few of the hosts we review sell monthly terms on their cheapest plans. - **### Where does HostIdea get its prices?**: From the host's own pricing page and knowledge base, read in US dollars, with the date next to every table, and re-checked by a scheduled checker. Geo-priced hosts are read from a US location. ## Sources 1. [Hostinger plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.hostinger.com/web-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 2. [HostPapa plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.hostpapa.com/renewal-pricing/), accessed Oct 13, 2026 3. [ScalaHosting plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.scalahosting.com/pricing), accessed Oct 13, 2026 4. [Bluehost plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.bluehost.com/hosting/shared), accessed Oct 13, 2026 5. [FastComet plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.fastcomet.com/website-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 6. [SiteGround plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.siteground.com/web-hosting.htm), accessed Oct 13, 2026 7. [Hosting.com plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://hosting.com/package-comparison/), accessed Oct 13, 2026 8. [Flashcloud plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://flashcloud.com/pricing), accessed Oct 13, 2026 9. [InMotion Hosting plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.inmotionhosting.com/shared-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 - [Pricing](https://hostidea.com/blog/tag/pricing) [Prefer HostIdea in Google Search](https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=hostidea.com "Add HostIdea as a preferred source in Google Search") Share[](https://x.com/intent/post?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fhow-to-read-a-hosting-price-page&text=How%20to%20read%20a%20hosting%20price%20page%20without%20being%20misled)[](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fhow-to-read-a-hosting-price-page)[](mailto:?subject=How%20to%20read%20a%20hosting%20price%20page%20without%20being%20misled&body=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fhow-to-read-a-hosting-price-page) ## Related articles Oct 13, 2026 · 4 min read ### [How to choose a web host in 2026: a working method](https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-choose-wordpress-hosting) Oct 13, 2026 · 2 min read ### [Shared vs managed WordPress hosting: which one do you need?](https://hostidea.com/blog/shared-vs-managed-wordpress-hosting) Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ### [How to migrate a website to a new host without downtime](https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-migrate-a-website-to-a-new-host) --- --- title: "Shared hosting limits explained: CPU seconds, inodes, RAM and visit guidance" url: "https://hostidea.com/blog/shared-hosting-limits-explained" canonical: "https://hostidea.com/blog/shared-hosting-limits-explained" author: "Jennifer T." published: "2026-10-13" updated: "2026-10-13" sources: - "https://flashcloud.com/pricing" - "https://hosting.com/package-comparison/" - "https://www.siteground.com/web-hosting.htm" - "https://www.fastcomet.com/website-hosting" - "https://www.hostpapa.com/renewal-pricing/" - "https://www.bluehost.com/hosting/shared" - "https://www.hostinger.com/web-hosting" generated: "2026-10-15" note: "Markdown twin generated at build time from the same content as the HTML page. The HTML page is canonical." --- [Hosting basics](https://hostidea.com/blog/category/hosting-basics) # Shared hosting limits explained: CPU seconds, inodes, RAM and visit guidance What the fine print on a shared plan actually limits, how to read inode counts, CPU seconds and relative resource tiers, and which published limits mean something. By [Jennifer T.](https://hostidea.com/authors/jennifer-t) · Reviewed by [Macaulay A.](https://hostidea.com/authors/macaulay-a) · Published Oct 13, 2026 · Updated Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read We may earn a commission when you buy through our links. Rankings come from the published methodology and sourced data, not from commissions. [Disclosure](https://hostidea.com/disclosure). ## Key takeaways - Every shared plan has a CPU, memory and file-count limit; the honest hosts print the numbers, the others print a tier name or a visit figure. - An inode is a file or folder; a WordPress site with a few plugins uses tens of thousands, and mail folders eat the rest. - CPU seconds per hour cap how much server time your site can use; a cached site barely spends any, an uncached store spends a lot. - Prefer a plan that states cores and RAM; "2x resources" cannot be compared with anything. ## What does a shared plan actually limit? Four things, whether or not the plan page says so: processor time, memory, the number of files, and sometimes a count of simultaneous processes or database connections. The host enforces them per account so one customer cannot consume the server. The plan page tells you which of these the host is willing to put a number on, and that willingness is itself information. From the plan pages we read on 13 October 2026: Flashcloud and Hosting.com state cores and RAM per plan (2 cores and 2 GB at the entry level); SiteGround states CPU seconds per hour, inodes, RAM per process and a database cap; FastComet publishes a resource policy with a sustained-use rule; HostPapa and FastComet use relative tiers (1x to 8x, base to 3x); Bluehost and Hostinger publish visit guidance or fair-use lists rather than cores and RAM. ## What is an inode? A file or a directory. Every image, every plugin file, every cached page, every email in a mailbox is one inode. A fresh WordPress install with a handful of plugins uses roughly 10,000 to 30,000; a site with a big media library, a caching plugin writing page files and a few years of email can pass 200,000 without anyone noticing. Limits on the hosts that publish them start around 200,000 (SiteGround StartUp, AccuWeb Bootstrap++) and rise with the plan. When you hit the limit, uploads fail and email bounces. The usual culprits are mail folders and cache directories, and the fix is deleting, not upgrading. ## What are CPU seconds? A budget of processor time per hour. SiteGround’s plans allow 1,000, 2,000 and 4,000 CPU seconds an hour; a request that runs PHP and the database for a quarter of a second spends a quarter of a second of it. A site served from cache spends almost nothing, because cached pages do not run PHP. A store, a forum or a site with a plugin that rebuilds menus on every request can spend the whole budget at lunchtime and serve errors until the hour turns. Hosts that do not publish CPU seconds still enforce something similar, usually as a CPU percentage or a sustained-use rule (FastComet disallows constant use of 80 percent of plan resources for an hour). ## What does RAM limit? How much a single page build can hold and how many can run at once. SiteGround’s 768 MB per process is a per-request ceiling; Flashcloud’s 2 GB on Start and Hosting.com’s 2 GB on Starter are per-account allocations that all running processes share. For a cached brochure site either is plenty. For WooCommerce, where cart and checkout pages are built fresh and image imports run in the background, the per-account figure is the one that decides how many shoppers can act at once; our [WooCommerce list](https://hostidea.com/best/woocommerce-hosting) ranks the hosts on it. ## What does “good for 25,000 visits” mean? A guess by the host about an average site. Visit guidance (Bluehost) is honest about intent and useless for comparison, because 25,000 visits to cached pages and 25,000 visits to a search-heavy catalogue are different loads by a factor of fifty. Treat it as a hint about which tier the host expects you to buy, not as a capacity. ## How do you read a relative tier? As a ratio with no base. “2x resources” on FastComet’s Plus and HostPapa’s Growth means twice the entry plan, and the entry plan’s allocation is not printed. The tiers tell you the host’s plans are proportional to each other and nothing about whether the base is 1 GB or 4. When two hosts both state cores and RAM you can compare them; when one states a tier, you cannot, and our rankings say so where it matters. ## Frequently asked questions - **### How do I check my current usage?**: Most panels show it: cPanel has a Resource Usage page with CPU, memory and inode graphs; hPanel, Site Tools and SPanel have equivalents. Look at the peak hour, not the daily average. - **### What happens when I exceed a limit?**: Requests queue or fail for the rest of the measuring period (an hour for CPU seconds), uploads and email fail at the inode limit, and persistent overuse brings a notice asking you to upgrade. Hosts rarely suspend an account for a single spike. - **### Is unlimited storage or bandwidth real?**: Bandwidth, mostly: shared plans rarely hit it. Storage is real up to the inode limit and the fair-use clause, which is where "unlimited" ends. ## Sources 1. [Flashcloud plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://flashcloud.com/pricing), accessed Oct 13, 2026 2. [Hosting.com plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://hosting.com/package-comparison/), accessed Oct 13, 2026 3. [SiteGround plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.siteground.com/web-hosting.htm), accessed Oct 13, 2026 4. [FastComet plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.fastcomet.com/website-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 5. [HostPapa plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.hostpapa.com/renewal-pricing/), accessed Oct 13, 2026 6. [Bluehost plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.bluehost.com/hosting/shared), accessed Oct 13, 2026 7. [Hostinger plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.hostinger.com/web-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 - [Pricing](https://hostidea.com/blog/tag/pricing) [Prefer HostIdea in Google Search](https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=hostidea.com "Add HostIdea as a preferred source in Google Search") Share[](https://x.com/intent/post?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fshared-hosting-limits-explained&text=Shared%20hosting%20limits%20explained%3A%20CPU%20seconds%2C%20inodes%2C%20RAM%20and%20visit%20guidance)[](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fshared-hosting-limits-explained)[](mailto:?subject=Shared%20hosting%20limits%20explained%3A%20CPU%20seconds%2C%20inodes%2C%20RAM%20and%20visit%20guidance&body=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fshared-hosting-limits-explained) ## Related articles Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ### [How to read a hosting price page without being misled](https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-read-a-hosting-price-page) Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ### [Shared vs VPS vs cloud hosting: what you get at each step](https://hostidea.com/blog/shared-vs-vps-vs-cloud-hosting) Oct 13, 2026 · 2 min read ### [Backups and restore points: what a hosting backup actually protects you from](https://hostidea.com/blog/backups-and-restore-points-explained) --- --- title: "Shared vs managed WordPress hosting: which one do you need?" url: "https://hostidea.com/blog/shared-vs-managed-wordpress-hosting" canonical: "https://hostidea.com/blog/shared-vs-managed-wordpress-hosting" author: "Denis M." published: "2026-09-27" updated: "2026-10-13" sources: - "https://flashcloud.com/pricing" - "https://hosting.com/package-comparison/" - "https://www.siteground.com/web-hosting.htm" - "https://www.fastcomet.com/website-hosting" - "https://www.scalahosting.com/pricing" - "https://www.hostinger.com/web-hosting" - "https://www.bluehost.com/hosting/shared" - "https://www.hostpapa.com/renewal-pricing/" - "https://www.inmotionhosting.com/shared-hosting" generated: "2026-10-15" note: "Markdown twin generated at build time from the same content as the HTML page. The HTML page is canonical." --- [WordPress](https://hostidea.com/blog/category/wordpress) # Shared vs managed WordPress hosting: which one do you need? What managed WordPress hosting adds to a shared plan, what it costs, and when a shared plan with server caching and daily backups is the better buy. By [Denis M.](https://hostidea.com/authors/denis-m) · Reviewed by [Mike H.](https://hostidea.com/authors/mike-h) · Published Sep 27, 2026 · Updated Oct 13, 2026 · 2 min read We may earn a commission when you buy through our links. Rankings come from the published methodology and sourced data, not from commissions. [Disclosure](https://hostidea.com/disclosure). ## Key takeaways - Managed WordPress hosting sells automation and support, not a different kind of server. - A shared plan with server-side caching, daily backups and staging already includes most of what managed plans advertise. - Pay for managed hosting when nobody on your side will apply updates or restore a backup; otherwise spend the difference on a bigger shared plan. ## What is the difference? Managed WordPress hosting is a shared plan with chores attached: the host applies WordPress updates, runs caching and security for you, and takes support questions about WordPress itself rather than only about the server. The hardware is often the same. What you buy is the host’s time and a narrower, better-tuned environment, and the price reflects that: managed plans typically cost three to five times the shared renewal price for the same traffic. Shared hosting gives you the panel, a fixed allocation and the responsibility. You install WordPress, you click update, you decide which backup to restore. ## What does a good shared plan already include? More than it used to. Of the ten hosts we review, six include daily backups on their cheapest plan, six include server-side caching (LiteSpeed at four of them, often with an object cache), and six include a staging site on the cheapest or second plan, as read from their plan pages on 13 October 2026. Those three things are the core of the managed pitch. When a shared plan has them, the remaining managed advantages are automatic updates, a WordPress-literate support desk and tighter resource guarantees. Our [best WordPress hosting list](https://hostidea.com/best/wordpress-hosting) ranks the ten hosts on exactly those lines. ## When is managed hosting worth it? When nobody on your side will do the chores, or when the site earns enough that an hour of downtime costs more than a year of the price difference. A store owner who does not want to learn what a plugin conflict looks like is the typical case. An agency that bills hosting on and wants one bill per client is another. It is not worth it for speed alone. Managed hosts are often fast, but so is a shared plan with LiteSpeed and an object cache, and the published measurements in our reviews show shared plans responding in 140 to 750 milliseconds depending on the host and the method. Until a site has outgrown its shared allocation, the managed premium buys convenience. ## What should you check before paying the premium? Three things in the managed plan’s terms: the visit or pageview cap and what happens when you pass it, whether plugins are restricted, and whether the backups are stored off the server with a retention period you can live with. Managed plans often cap traffic hard and ban caching and backup plugins because the host runs its own. Those are reasonable, but they are the lines that decide whether the plan fits. ## Frequently asked questions - **### Is managed WordPress hosting faster than shared?**: Sometimes, not reliably. The speed comes from caching and the server, and a shared plan with the same caching on the same hardware performs the same. Compare measurements with a stated method, not the label. - **### Can I move from shared to managed later?**: Yes, and usually within the same host. Most hosts we review sell a managed or cloud tier above their shared plans and will migrate the site for you. ## Sources 1. [Flashcloud plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://flashcloud.com/pricing), accessed Oct 13, 2026 2. [Hosting.com plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://hosting.com/package-comparison/), accessed Oct 13, 2026 3. [SiteGround plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.siteground.com/web-hosting.htm), accessed Oct 13, 2026 4. [FastComet plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.fastcomet.com/website-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 5. [ScalaHosting plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.scalahosting.com/pricing), accessed Oct 13, 2026 6. [Hostinger plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.hostinger.com/web-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 7. [Bluehost plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.bluehost.com/hosting/shared), accessed Oct 13, 2026 8. [HostPapa plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.hostpapa.com/renewal-pricing/), accessed Oct 13, 2026 9. [InMotion Hosting plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.inmotionhosting.com/shared-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 - [Pricing](https://hostidea.com/blog/tag/pricing) [Prefer HostIdea in Google Search](https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=hostidea.com "Add HostIdea as a preferred source in Google Search") Share[](https://x.com/intent/post?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fshared-vs-managed-wordpress-hosting&text=Shared%20vs%20managed%20WordPress%20hosting%3A%20which%20one%20do%20you%20need%3F)[](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fshared-vs-managed-wordpress-hosting)[](mailto:?subject=Shared%20vs%20managed%20WordPress%20hosting%3A%20which%20one%20do%20you%20need%3F&body=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fshared-vs-managed-wordpress-hosting) ## Related articles Oct 13, 2026 · 4 min read ### [How to choose a web host in 2026: a working method](https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-choose-wordpress-hosting) Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ### [How to migrate a website to a new host without downtime](https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-migrate-a-website-to-a-new-host) Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ### [How to read a hosting price page without being misled](https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-read-a-hosting-price-page) --- --- title: "Shared vs VPS vs cloud hosting: what you get at each step" url: "https://hostidea.com/blog/shared-vs-vps-vs-cloud-hosting" canonical: "https://hostidea.com/blog/shared-vs-vps-vs-cloud-hosting" author: "Jennifer T." published: "2026-10-13" updated: "2026-10-13" sources: - "https://flashcloud.com/pricing" - "https://hosting.com/package-comparison/" - "https://www.siteground.com/web-hosting.htm" - "https://www.fastcomet.com/website-hosting" - "https://www.hostinger.com/web-hosting" - "https://www.scalahosting.com/pricing" - "https://www.bluehost.com/hosting/shared" generated: "2026-10-15" note: "Markdown twin generated at build time from the same content as the HTML page. The HTML page is canonical." --- [Hosting basics](https://hostidea.com/blog/category/hosting-basics) # Shared vs VPS vs cloud hosting: what you get at each step The practical differences between shared, VPS and cloud hosting: what is allocated to you, who manages it, what it costs, and the signs that say it is time to move up. By [Jennifer T.](https://hostidea.com/authors/jennifer-t) · Reviewed by [Macaulay A.](https://hostidea.com/authors/macaulay-a) · Published Oct 13, 2026 · Updated Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read We may earn a commission when you buy through our links. Rankings come from the published methodology and sourced data, not from commissions. [Disclosure](https://hostidea.com/disclosure). ## Key takeaways - Shared hosting sells a slice of a server with fixed limits; a VPS sells a server of your own; cloud plans sell resources by the unit on hardware you never see. - The limits a shared host publishes (CPU seconds, inodes, database size, visit guidance) are the signal to move up, not a marketing tier name. - A managed VPS from the same host is usually the cheapest step up, because nothing moves and the panel stays the same. - On the ten hosts we review, the priced steps above shared cost two to four times the shared renewal price. ## What is shared hosting? Shared hosting is one server running many customers’ sites, each inside an allocation the host enforces. Where the allocation is stated (2 cores, 2 GB RAM on Flashcloud’s Start and Hosting.com’s Starter, per their plan pages) you can compare plans; where it is a relative tier or a visit guidance you cannot. The host runs the operating system, the web server, PHP and the database; you get a panel and the limits. The limits are the part to read. SiteGround publishes CPU seconds per hour and inode counts per plan; FastComet publishes a resource policy with a sustained-use rule. Those numbers are the honest description of what you are buying, and they are what the panel warns you about when the site grows. ## What is a VPS? A virtual private server is a virtual machine with its own operating system, CPU cores and memory reserved for you. Nobody else’s traffic spike slows your site, and you can install what you like. The trade-off is administration: on an unmanaged VPS, updates, security, backups and the web server are yours to run. A managed VPS has the host do that, at a higher price, and it is the product most of the hosts we review sell as the step above shared. Eight of our ten hosts sell VPS plans. The other two (SiteGround, Hostinger’s cloud tier aside) sell cloud plans instead. Our [list of hosts to grow into a VPS](https://hostidea.com/best/vps-hosting) ranks the upgrade paths; we have not yet priced the VPS plans themselves. ## What is cloud hosting? A resource allocation sold by the unit, usually with redundancy under it, on infrastructure the host rents or runs at scale. In practice the plans look like a managed VPS with a different name and sometimes a broader choice of regions: Hostinger’s Cloud Startup and ScalaHosting’s Entry Cloud are the two cloud plans priced in our data, at $7.99 and $14.95 a month on long terms, renewing at $25.99 and $39.95. ScalaHosting’s cloud plans can be placed in partner and AWS regions beyond its own four locations. The word “cloud” on a shared plan page usually means something smaller: Bluehost’s shared plans run on Oracle Cloud with a region chosen at checkout, which is still shared hosting. ## When should you move up? When the host’s published limits bite, not when a tier name tempts you. The signs: - Repeated CPU or memory warnings in the panel during normal traffic, not during a crawl or an attack. - A database near the plan’s cap (SiteGround caps databases at 1 GB; Hostinger at 3 GB). - Inode counts near the limit, which usually means a plugin or a mail folder is spraying files. - A store or membership site where cached pages are the minority of requests. - A need to run something the shared plan does not offer: a different PHP setting, a service listening on a port, a cron job every minute. If none of those is true, a bigger shared plan is the better buy. Moving from a 1 GB allocation to a 4 GB one on the same host is a plan change; moving to a VPS is a different way of working. ## What does each step cost? On the ten hosts we review, cheapest shared plans renew at $8.99 to $17.99 a month. The two priced cloud plans renew at $25.99 and $39.95. Managed VPS plans at these hosts, which we have not yet priced, generally sit in the same range or above. Expect two to four times the shared renewal for the first step up, and expect to pay extra for backups and a control panel licence on VPS plans where the shared plan included them. ## Frequently asked questions - **### Is a VPS faster than shared hosting?**: Only if the shared plan was the bottleneck. A VPS gives you reserved resources, which removes noisy neighbours, but a well-cached site on a shared plan with 2 GB behaves the same until traffic exceeds the allocation. - **### Can I run WordPress on a VPS without technical knowledge?**: On a managed VPS with cPanel or the host's own panel, yes; the experience is close to shared hosting. On an unmanaged VPS, no: you are the system administrator. - **### What is the difference between cloud hosting and a CDN?**: Cloud hosting is where the site runs. A CDN is a cache in front of it that serves copies from locations near the visitor. Our CDN article explains the second. ## Sources 1. [Flashcloud plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://flashcloud.com/pricing), accessed Oct 13, 2026 2. [Hosting.com plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://hosting.com/package-comparison/), accessed Oct 13, 2026 3. [SiteGround plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.siteground.com/web-hosting.htm), accessed Oct 13, 2026 4. [FastComet plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.fastcomet.com/website-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 5. [Hostinger plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.hostinger.com/web-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 6. [ScalaHosting plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.scalahosting.com/pricing), accessed Oct 13, 2026 7. [Bluehost plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.bluehost.com/hosting/shared), accessed Oct 13, 2026 - [Pricing](https://hostidea.com/blog/tag/pricing) [Prefer HostIdea in Google Search](https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=hostidea.com "Add HostIdea as a preferred source in Google Search") Share[](https://x.com/intent/post?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fshared-vs-vps-vs-cloud-hosting&text=Shared%20vs%20VPS%20vs%20cloud%20hosting%3A%20what%20you%20get%20at%20each%20step)[](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fshared-vs-vps-vs-cloud-hosting)[](mailto:?subject=Shared%20vs%20VPS%20vs%20cloud%20hosting%3A%20what%20you%20get%20at%20each%20step&body=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fshared-vs-vps-vs-cloud-hosting) ## Related articles Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ### [How to read a hosting price page without being misled](https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-read-a-hosting-price-page) Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ### [Shared hosting limits explained: CPU seconds, inodes, RAM and visit guidance](https://hostidea.com/blog/shared-hosting-limits-explained) Oct 13, 2026 · 2 min read ### [Backups and restore points: what a hosting backup actually protects you from](https://hostidea.com/blog/backups-and-restore-points-explained) --- --- title: "SSL certificates explained: what a free certificate gives you and what paid ones add" url: "https://hostidea.com/blog/ssl-certificates-explained" canonical: "https://hostidea.com/blog/ssl-certificates-explained" author: "Denis M." published: "2026-10-13" updated: "2026-10-13" sources: - "https://letsencrypt.org/how-it-works/" - "https://letsencrypt.org/docs/faq/" - "https://flashcloud.com/pricing" - "https://hosting.com/package-comparison/" generated: "2026-10-15" note: "Markdown twin generated at build time from the same content as the HTML page. The HTML page is canonical." --- [Hosting basics](https://hostidea.com/blog/category/hosting-basics) # SSL certificates explained: what a free certificate gives you and what paid ones add What an SSL (TLS) certificate does, how Let's Encrypt issues one for free in minutes, why every host on our list includes it, and the narrow cases where a paid certificate still makes sense. By [Denis M.](https://hostidea.com/authors/denis-m) · Reviewed by [Mike H.](https://hostidea.com/authors/mike-h) · Published Oct 13, 2026 · Updated Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read We may earn a commission when you buy through our links. Rankings come from the published methodology and sourced data, not from commissions. [Disclosure](https://hostidea.com/disclosure). ## Key takeaways - A certificate proves the server is the one your browser meant to talk to and lets the connection be encrypted; it does not vouch for the business behind the site. - Let's Encrypt issues certificates free of charge, valid for 90 days by default, through an automated protocol every host on our list supports. - All ten hosts we review include a free certificate on every plan; a paid certificate buys a warranty, a longer validation or a wildcard, not more encryption. - Renewal is the thing to watch: a host that automates it is doing the only hard part. ## What does a certificate do? Two things. It lets the browser and the server agree on an encryption key, so what passes between them (passwords, card numbers, the pages themselves) cannot be read in transit. And it ties the server’s key to the domain name, so the browser can tell it has reached the real example.com rather than a machine pretending to be it. The lock icon means both. “SSL” is the old name; the protocol in use today is TLS, and hosts use the names interchangeably. What a certificate does not do is tell you anything about who runs the site. A phishing site can have a perfectly valid certificate for its own domain. ## How does a free certificate get issued? Automatically, by proving control of the domain. Let’s Encrypt, a nonprofit certificate authority, describes the aim of its ACME protocol as making it possible to set up an HTTPS server and have it automatically obtain browser-trusted certificates without any human intervention. The server’s software asks for a certificate; the authority answers with a challenge, which Let’s Encrypt describes as a choice between provisioning a DNS record under the domain or provisioning an HTTP resource under a well-known URI on the domain; the software completes it; the authority checks the challenge from multiple network perspectives and issues the certificate. The whole exchange takes seconds. Let’s Encrypt does not charge a fee for its certificates. Its default certificates are valid for 90 days, and it suggests renewing them every 60; subscribers can opt into six-day certificates. Short lifetimes are deliberate: they limit the damage from a stolen key and force the automation to work. ## What do hosts include? A free certificate on every plan, at all ten hosts we review, per their plan pages read on 13 October 2026. Most name Let’s Encrypt or say “automatic”; Flashcloud states the certificate is issued and renewed automatically; Hosting.com includes a premium certificate on its Max plan and a standard one below. The only differences worth noticing are whether renewal is automatic (it should be) and whether the host supports a wildcard certificate for subdomains, which needs the DNS challenge. ## When is a paid certificate worth it? In three narrow cases. An organisation-validated or extended-validation certificate shows the legal entity in the certificate details, which some procurement rules and some payment providers ask for. A certificate with a warranty pays out if the authority mis-issues it, which some corporate policies require. And a wildcard or multi-domain certificate from a commercial authority can be simpler to manage on a server the host does not automate. For a business site on shared hosting, none of these applies: the free certificate encrypts exactly as well, and browsers no longer display extended validation differently. ## What goes wrong, and how do you fix it? Renewal, almost always. A certificate that expires produces a full-page browser warning and most visitors leave. On shared hosting the host renews automatically; if the warning appears anyway, the usual cause is DNS pointing elsewhere (the HTTP challenge fails because the request goes to another server) or a redirect rule that blocks the well-known path. During a host migration the certificate on the new server may need the domain to resolve there first; our [migration article](https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-migrate-a-website-to-a-new-host) covers the sequencing. The second common problem is mixed content: a page served over HTTPS that loads an image or script over HTTP. The certificate is fine; the page’s own links are not. A search-replace of `http://example.com` to `https://example.com` in the database fixes most of it. ## Frequently asked questions - **### Does HTTPS help with search rankings?**: Marginally, and it is table stakes rather than an advantage: browsers mark plain HTTP pages as not secure, which costs more visitors than any ranking signal would gain. - **### Do I need a certificate for a site with no logins?**: Yes. Without one, anything on the path between the visitor and the server can alter the page, and browsers warn about the connection. Since the certificate is free and automatic, there is no reason to skip it. - **### What is the difference between SSL and TLS?**: TLS is the current protocol; SSL is its predecessor, retired years ago. Hosts still say "SSL certificate" because customers search for it. The certificate is the same object either way. ## Sources 1. [Let's Encrypt, How it works (ACME and domain validation)](https://letsencrypt.org/how-it-works/), accessed Oct 13, 2026 2. [Let's Encrypt, FAQ (certificate lifetimes, no fee)](https://letsencrypt.org/docs/faq/), accessed Oct 13, 2026 3. [Flashcloud plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://flashcloud.com/pricing), accessed Oct 13, 2026 4. [Hosting.com plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://hosting.com/package-comparison/), accessed Oct 13, 2026 [Prefer HostIdea in Google Search](https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=hostidea.com "Add HostIdea as a preferred source in Google Search") Share[](https://x.com/intent/post?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fssl-certificates-explained&text=SSL%20certificates%20explained%3A%20what%20a%20free%20certificate%20gives%20you%20and%20what%20paid%20ones%20add)[](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fssl-certificates-explained)[](mailto:?subject=SSL%20certificates%20explained%3A%20what%20a%20free%20certificate%20gives%20you%20and%20what%20paid%20ones%20add&body=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fssl-certificates-explained) ## Related articles Oct 13, 2026 · 2 min read ### [Backups and restore points: what a hosting backup actually protects you from](https://hostidea.com/blog/backups-and-restore-points-explained) Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ### [How to read a hosting price page without being misled](https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-read-a-hosting-price-page) Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ### [Shared hosting limits explained: CPU seconds, inodes, RAM and visit guidance](https://hostidea.com/blog/shared-hosting-limits-explained) --- --- title: "Uptime guarantees explained: what 99.9 percent costs you and what the credit pays" url: "https://hostidea.com/blog/uptime-guarantees-explained" canonical: "https://hostidea.com/blog/uptime-guarantees-explained" author: "Jennifer T." published: "2026-10-13" updated: "2026-10-13" sources: - "https://hosting.com/package-comparison/" - "https://www.fastcomet.com/website-hosting" - "https://www.siteground.com/web-hosting.htm" - "https://www.hostinger.com/web-hosting" - "https://www.bluehost.com/hosting/shared" - "https://www.scalahosting.com/pricing" - "https://flashcloud.com/pricing" - "https://www.inmotionhosting.com/shared-hosting" - "https://www.hostpapa.com/renewal-pricing/" generated: "2026-10-15" note: "Markdown twin generated at build time from the same content as the HTML page. The HTML page is canonical." --- [Hosting basics](https://hostidea.com/blog/category/hosting-basics) # Uptime guarantees explained: what 99.9 percent costs you and what the credit pays What a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee allows in minutes, how service credits are calculated at ten hosts, and why the guarantee is a refund schedule, not a promise. By [Jennifer T.](https://hostidea.com/authors/jennifer-t) · Reviewed by [Macaulay A.](https://hostidea.com/authors/macaulay-a) · Published Oct 13, 2026 · Updated Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read We may earn a commission when you buy through our links. Rankings come from the published methodology and sourced data, not from commissions. [Disclosure](https://hostidea.com/disclosure). ## Key takeaways - 99.9 percent uptime allows about 43 minutes of downtime a month and almost nine hours a year; 99.99 percent allows four minutes a month. - An uptime guarantee is a credit schedule: it tells you what the host refunds when it misses, usually 5 to 10 percent of a month's fee, claimed by you. - Most guarantees exclude scheduled maintenance, attacks and anything the host decides was your fault, and most require you to file the claim. - Measured uptime from a named monitor over a year says more than any guarantee. ## What does an uptime percentage mean in minutes? A percentage of a month. The arithmetic is the whole point, so here it is for a 30-day month and a 365-day year: | Uptime | Downtime allowed per month | Per year | | --- | --- | --- | | 99.99% | 4.3 minutes | 52.6 minutes | | 99.95% | 21.6 minutes | 4.4 hours | | 99.9% | 43.2 minutes | 8.8 hours | | 99.5% | 3.6 hours | 43.8 hours | | 99% | 7.2 hours | 3.7 days | A host that promises 99.9 percent and delivers exactly that can be down for most of an hour every month without breaking its word. That is fine for a brochure site and expensive for a store on a sale day. ## What does the guarantee actually promise? A credit, not uptime. Every guarantee we have read is a schedule of what the host gives back when it misses the number, and the schedules differ more than the headline percentages do. From the terms we read on 13 October 2026: - **Hosting.com** credits 5 percent of the monthly fee for every hour of unscheduled downtime caused by its network or equipment, up to the full month, on request. - **FastComet** credits 10 percent of the monthly fee per hour of downtime, up to 100 percent. - **SiteGround** gives a 5 percent service-extension credit for a month below 99.9 percent. - **Hostinger** credits 5 percent of that month’s fee, claimed within 30 days. - **Bluehost** issues at most one coupon a month for 5 percent of the monthly hosting fee under its 99.99 percent SLA. - **ScalaHosting** scales the credit from 10 percent at 99.8 percent to 100 percent below 99 percent, claimed through billing. - **Flashcloud** starts credits at 10 percent below 99.9 percent per calendar month. - **InMotion** commits to 99.99 percent on Power and Pro with credits described in its own blog; the Launch plan carries no guarantee line. - **HostPapa** (shared plans) states 99.9 percent without a credit schedule in its terms. A credit of 5 percent of a $10 plan is 50 cents. The guarantee is a signal of what the host is willing to be held to, not compensation. ## What do the exclusions take away? Usually scheduled maintenance, attacks, upstream network failures, and anything attributable to your site or your account. Several terms also exclude downtime shorter than a threshold or require that you report it within a window. Read the exclusions before the percentage: a 99.99 percent guarantee that excludes maintenance and requires a claim within seven days is weaker than a 99.9 percent one with automatic credits. ## How do you know whether a host meets its number? Measure, or read someone who did. Monitoring services check a site from outside the host’s network at a fixed interval and record every failed check; a year of 30-second checks is a strong record, a month of five-minute checks is a weak one. Our reviews list the published measurements for each host with the tool, interval, plan and window, and the numbers are instructive: of the hosts with year-long independent monitors, results run from 99.80 percent (FastComet, Mumbai account) to 99.99 percent (Hosting.com, Singapore account; ScalaHosting). The 99.80 figure would have earned credits in several months under FastComet’s own schedule. When HostIdea’s own windows open, uptime will be measured every 60 seconds and reported monthly with the outage count, and the [uptime sub-score](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) maps 100 percent to 10 and 99.9 percent to 7. ## Should the guarantee influence your choice? A little. Prefer a host whose terms spell out a credit schedule over one that does not, because the schedule is the only part that binds. Then weigh measured uptime from a long window above any guarantee, and remember that the difference between 99.9 and 99.99 percent is 39 minutes a month, which matters only if those minutes land on your busiest hour. ## Frequently asked questions - **### Is 99.9 percent uptime good?**: It is the floor for shared hosting. Published year-long measurements of the hosts we review run from 99.80 to 99.99 percent, most of them above 99.95, so a host at exactly 99.9 is below its peers. - **### Do I get the credit automatically?**: Rarely. Hostinger requires a claim within 30 days, Hosting.com and ScalaHosting on request through billing, Bluehost as a coupon. Read the claim procedure in the terms. - **### Does downtime caused by my plugin count?**: No. Every guarantee excludes problems inside your site. The guarantee covers the host's network, hardware and platform. ## Sources 1. [Hosting.com plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://hosting.com/package-comparison/), accessed Oct 13, 2026 2. [FastComet plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.fastcomet.com/website-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 3. [SiteGround plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.siteground.com/web-hosting.htm), accessed Oct 13, 2026 4. [Hostinger plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.hostinger.com/web-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 5. [Bluehost plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.bluehost.com/hosting/shared), accessed Oct 13, 2026 6. [ScalaHosting plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.scalahosting.com/pricing), accessed Oct 13, 2026 7. [Flashcloud plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://flashcloud.com/pricing), accessed Oct 13, 2026 8. [InMotion Hosting plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.inmotionhosting.com/shared-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 9. [HostPapa plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.hostpapa.com/renewal-pricing/), accessed Oct 13, 2026 - [Uptime](https://hostidea.com/blog/tag/uptime) [Prefer HostIdea in Google Search](https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=hostidea.com "Add HostIdea as a preferred source in Google Search") Share[](https://x.com/intent/post?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fuptime-guarantees-explained&text=Uptime%20guarantees%20explained%3A%20what%2099.9%20percent%20costs%20you%20and%20what%20the%20credit%20pays)[](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fuptime-guarantees-explained)[](mailto:?subject=Uptime%20guarantees%20explained%3A%20what%2099.9%20percent%20costs%20you%20and%20what%20the%20credit%20pays&body=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fuptime-guarantees-explained) ## Related articles Oct 13, 2026 · 2 min read ### [Backups and restore points: what a hosting backup actually protects you from](https://hostidea.com/blog/backups-and-restore-points-explained) Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ### [How to read a hosting price page without being misled](https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-read-a-hosting-price-page) Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ### [Shared hosting limits explained: CPU seconds, inodes, RAM and visit guidance](https://hostidea.com/blog/shared-hosting-limits-explained) --- --- title: "What a CDN does for a small website, and when you do not need one" url: "https://hostidea.com/blog/what-a-cdn-does" canonical: "https://hostidea.com/blog/what-a-cdn-does" author: "Denis M." published: "2026-10-13" updated: "2026-10-13" sources: - "https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/CDN" - "https://www.siteground.com/web-hosting.htm" - "https://www.bluehost.com/hosting/shared" - "https://www.hostpapa.com/renewal-pricing/" - "https://flashcloud.com/pricing" - "https://www.hostinger.com/web-hosting" - "https://www.scalahosting.com/pricing" - "https://www.fastcomet.com/website-hosting" - "https://hosting.com/package-comparison/" - "https://www.inmotionhosting.com/shared-hosting" generated: "2026-10-15" note: "Markdown twin generated at build time from the same content as the HTML page. The HTML page is canonical." --- [Performance](https://hostidea.com/blog/category/performance) # What a CDN does for a small website, and when you do not need one What a content delivery network caches, why it helps visitors far from your server, what it cannot speed up, and which hosts include one. By [Denis M.](https://hostidea.com/authors/denis-m) · Reviewed by [Mike H.](https://hostidea.com/authors/mike-h) · Published Oct 13, 2026 · Updated Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read We may earn a commission when you buy through our links. Rankings come from the published methodology and sourced data, not from commissions. [Disclosure](https://hostidea.com/disclosure). ## Key takeaways - A CDN keeps copies of your static files, and sometimes whole pages, on servers near your visitors, so distance stops being the bottleneck. - It helps most when your audience is spread across continents or far from your data center; it helps least on uncached pages like carts and dashboards. - Seven of the ten hosts we review include a CDN on at least one shared plan; Cloudflare's free tier works in front of any of them. - A CDN does not fix a slow theme, a slow database query or a server that is overloaded at the origin. ## What is a CDN? A group of servers in many locations that hold copies of your content and answer requests from the copy nearest the visitor. MDN’s glossary puts it as a group of servers spread out over many locations that store duplicate copies of data so that servers can fulfill data requests based on which servers are closest to the respective end-users, and notes that geographical distance affects latency proportionally. A visitor in Sydney asking for an image on a server in Frankfurt waits for the round trip across the planet; with a CDN, the image comes from Sydney, and only the first request for it ever crossed the planet. ## What does it cache? Static files first: images, stylesheets, scripts, fonts. These make up most of the bytes on a page and never change between visitors, so they cache well. Many CDNs also cache whole HTML pages for anonymous visitors, which is where the big gains are for a blog or a brochure site, and most can be told not to cache pages that differ per visitor, such as a cart or a logged-in dashboard. What it cannot cache is anything the server has to compute fresh for each visitor. Those requests still travel to the origin, and the CDN adds one hop on the way. ## When does it help? When your visitors are far from your server. A site hosted in a US data center with readers in Europe and Asia will see first-byte and load times fall for those readers once pages and assets are served from edge locations near them. When your visitors are in the same region as your server, the gain is smaller: the origin is already close, and a well-cached shared plan responds in a few hundred milliseconds on its own. Our [TTFB article](https://hostidea.com/blog/what-ttfb-measures) explains why distance is such a large part of that number. The second benefit is absorbing traffic. A spike from a newsletter or a social post hits the cache, not your shared plan’s CPU allocation, and the CDN serves the same page thousands of times without the origin noticing. For a shared plan with published limits, that is often the more valuable effect. ## When do you not need one? When your audience is local and your site is already cached at the origin. A small business site in Toronto on a Toronto server, with LiteSpeed caching in front of WordPress, gains little from a CDN and adds a layer to debug. Likewise a store where most requests are carts and checkouts, which bypass the cache anyway. And a CDN is not a fix for a slow site: if the origin takes two seconds to build a page, the first visitor at each edge location still waits two seconds, and so does everyone on uncached pages. ## Which hosts include one? From the plan pages we read on 13 October 2026: SiteGround includes its own CDN on Google Cloud on every plan; Bluehost, HostPapa, and Flashcloud (Cloudflare) include a CDN; Hostinger includes it on Unlimited and Cloud Startup and lists it as available on Premium; ScalaHosting lists CDN integration. FastComet, Hosting.com and InMotion do not list one on their shared plan cards. Cloudflare’s free tier sits in front of any host by changing your nameservers, which is how many sites on the last three use one. ## Frequently asked questions - **### Does a CDN replace server caching?**: No. Server caching makes the origin fast; the CDN makes the distance short. Use both: the host's cache (LiteSpeed, object cache) at the origin and the CDN for assets and anonymous pages. - **### Will a CDN hide my hosting location from visitors?**: For cached content, visitors connect to the CDN's edge rather than your server. For uncached requests the origin still answers, and the CDN's own IP is what visitors see in both cases. - **### Is a free CDN good enough?**: For a small site, yes. The free tiers cache assets and pages, handle TLS and absorb spikes. Paid tiers add image optimisation, more control over cache rules and firewall features. ## Sources 1. [MDN Web Docs glossary, CDN](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/CDN), accessed Oct 13, 2026 2. [SiteGround plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.siteground.com/web-hosting.htm), accessed Oct 13, 2026 3. [Bluehost plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.bluehost.com/hosting/shared), accessed Oct 13, 2026 4. [HostPapa plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.hostpapa.com/renewal-pricing/), accessed Oct 13, 2026 5. [Flashcloud plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://flashcloud.com/pricing), accessed Oct 13, 2026 6. [Hostinger plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.hostinger.com/web-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 7. [ScalaHosting plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.scalahosting.com/pricing), accessed Oct 13, 2026 8. [FastComet plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.fastcomet.com/website-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 9. [Hosting.com plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://hosting.com/package-comparison/), accessed Oct 13, 2026 10. [InMotion Hosting plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.inmotionhosting.com/shared-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 - [TTFB](https://hostidea.com/blog/tag/ttfb) [Prefer HostIdea in Google Search](https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=hostidea.com "Add HostIdea as a preferred source in Google Search") Share[](https://x.com/intent/post?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fwhat-a-cdn-does&text=What%20a%20CDN%20does%20for%20a%20small%20website%2C%20and%20when%20you%20do%20not%20need%20one)[](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fwhat-a-cdn-does)[](mailto:?subject=What%20a%20CDN%20does%20for%20a%20small%20website%2C%20and%20when%20you%20do%20not%20need%20one&body=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fwhat-a-cdn-does) ## Related articles Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ### [What TTFB measures, and what a hosting TTFB number actually tells you](https://hostidea.com/blog/what-ttfb-measures) Oct 13, 2026 · 4 min read ### [How to choose a web host in 2026: a working method](https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-choose-wordpress-hosting) Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ### [What is DNS propagation, and why does it matter when you change hosts?](https://hostidea.com/blog/what-is-dns-propagation) --- --- title: "What is DNS propagation, and why does it matter when you change hosts?" url: "https://hostidea.com/blog/what-is-dns-propagation" canonical: "https://hostidea.com/blog/what-is-dns-propagation" author: "Jennifer T." published: "2026-10-13" updated: "2026-10-13" sources: - "https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/DNS" - "https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/manage-dns-records/reference/ttl/" generated: "2026-10-15" note: "Markdown twin generated at build time from the same content as the HTML page. The HTML page is canonical." --- [Hosting basics](https://hostidea.com/blog/category/hosting-basics) # What is DNS propagation, and why does it matter when you change hosts? Why a DNS change takes minutes for some visitors and hours for others, what TTL has to do with it, and how to move a site without anyone noticing. By [Jennifer T.](https://hostidea.com/authors/jennifer-t) · Reviewed by [Macaulay A.](https://hostidea.com/authors/macaulay-a) · Published Oct 13, 2026 · Updated Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ## Key takeaways - DNS propagation is not a broadcast: each resolver keeps your old record until its cached copy expires, and the TTL on the record sets how long that is. - Lower the TTL to 300 seconds a day before a move, change the record, then raise it again once the move is done. - Keep the old host running for at least as long as the old TTL after the change; some visitors will still land there. - A host cannot speed up propagation; it can only tell you what your TTL was. ## What is DNS? The Domain Name System is the directory that turns a name like example.com into the address of a server. MDN describes it as a hierarchical and decentralized naming system that maintains a list of domain names along with the resources, such as IP addresses, associated with them; the lookup is the translation from the name to the address. Your browser does not ask the directory directly. It asks a resolver (usually your ISP’s or a public one), and the resolver asks the chain of servers that are authoritative for the name. ## What is propagation? Propagation is the period during which some resolvers still hold the old answer and some already have the new one. Nothing is being pushed anywhere. When you change the A record for example.com, every resolver that has cached the old record keeps serving it until that cached copy expires. The expiry is set by the record’s TTL, the time to live. Cloudflare’s documentation puts it plainly: the TTL is a field on DNS records that controls how long each record is cached and, as a result, how long it takes for record updates to reach your end users. So “propagation takes 24 to 48 hours” is a rule of thumb from an era of long TTLs. If your TTL is 86,400 seconds (a day), a resolver that looked up your site just before the change will keep the old answer for up to a day. If your TTL is 300 seconds, the same resolver moves within five minutes. The TTL is the whole story; the rest is cache behaviour on the resolver, which you do not control. ## Why does it matter when you change hosts? Because for the length of the old TTL, two copies of your site are live and visitors are split between them. For a brochure site that is harmless. For a store, a forum or anything that writes to a database, orders and comments placed on the old server during that window are not on the new one. Our [migration article](https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-migrate-a-website-to-a-new-host) covers the sequencing; the DNS part is this: 1. A day before the move, lower the TTL on the records you will change to 300 seconds. The change to the TTL itself has to propagate, which is why you do it in advance. 2. Move the site and test it on the new server by its IP or with a hosts-file entry, before touching DNS. 3. Change the records. Within about five minutes most resolvers will follow; Cloudflare notes that it may take longer than five minutes for you to experience the change because your local cache may take longer to update. 4. Leave the old host running, read-only if you can, for at least the length of the old TTL. Then raise the TTL again so lookups are cached longer and your site resolves faster. ## Can the host speed it up? No. Neither the old host nor the new one can reach into resolvers around the world and clear their caches. What a host can do is tell you what TTL your records carry (most panels show it) and let you change it. If a host’s support desk tells you to “wait 48 hours”, what they mean is that they do not know your TTL. ## How do you check where a name is pointing? Ask a resolver directly from a terminal with `dig example.com` or `nslookup example.com`, which shows the answer that resolver currently holds and the remaining TTL. Online propagation checkers do the same from many locations at once and are useful for seeing the split. If one location still shows the old address after the TTL has passed, that resolver is ignoring your TTL, which some do; there is nothing to fix on your side. ``` dig +noall +answer example.com example.com. 300 IN A 203.0.113.10 ``` The number after the name is the seconds left before that resolver re-asks. ## Frequently asked questions - **### How long does DNS propagation take?**: As long as the TTL on the record you changed, plus however long individual resolvers take to honour it. With a TTL of 300 seconds most of the world follows within minutes; with 86,400 seconds, up to a day. - **### Does changing nameservers propagate the same way?**: Slower. Nameserver changes are published by the registry for your domain's extension, and registries typically use TTLs of a day or two on those records. Change nameservers well ahead of a move, or keep the nameservers and change only the A and MX records. - **### Will email break during the change?**: Only if you move email and the MX record at the same time without overlap. Keep the old mailboxes receiving until the old TTL has passed, and copy anything that arrives there. ## Sources 1. [MDN Web Docs glossary, DNS](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/DNS), accessed Oct 13, 2026 2. [Cloudflare developer docs, Time to Live (TTL)](https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/manage-dns-records/reference/ttl/), accessed Oct 13, 2026 - [Migration](https://hostidea.com/blog/tag/migration) [Prefer HostIdea in Google Search](https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=hostidea.com "Add HostIdea as a preferred source in Google Search") Share[](https://x.com/intent/post?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fwhat-is-dns-propagation&text=What%20is%20DNS%20propagation%2C%20and%20why%20does%20it%20matter%20when%20you%20change%20hosts%3F)[](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fwhat-is-dns-propagation)[](mailto:?subject=What%20is%20DNS%20propagation%2C%20and%20why%20does%20it%20matter%20when%20you%20change%20hosts%3F&body=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fwhat-is-dns-propagation) ## Related articles Oct 13, 2026 · 2 min read ### [Backups and restore points: what a hosting backup actually protects you from](https://hostidea.com/blog/backups-and-restore-points-explained) Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ### [How to read a hosting price page without being misled](https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-read-a-hosting-price-page) Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ### [Shared hosting limits explained: CPU seconds, inodes, RAM and visit guidance](https://hostidea.com/blog/shared-hosting-limits-explained) --- --- title: "What TTFB measures, and what a hosting TTFB number actually tells you" url: "https://hostidea.com/blog/what-ttfb-measures" canonical: "https://hostidea.com/blog/what-ttfb-measures" author: "Denis M." published: "2026-10-13" updated: "2026-10-13" sources: - "https://web.dev/articles/ttfb" - "https://web.dev/articles/lcp" - "https://flashcloud.com/pricing" - "https://www.siteground.com/web-hosting.htm" - "https://www.hostinger.com/web-hosting" generated: "2026-10-15" note: "Markdown twin generated at build time from the same content as the HTML page. The HTML page is canonical." --- [Performance](https://hostidea.com/blog/category/performance) # What TTFB measures, and what a hosting TTFB number actually tells you Time to first byte explained: what is inside the number, why the same host scores 227 ms in one review and 447 ms in another, and what threshold matters. By [Denis M.](https://hostidea.com/authors/denis-m) · Reviewed by [Mike H.](https://hostidea.com/authors/mike-h) · Published Oct 13, 2026 · Updated Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read We may earn a commission when you buy through our links. Rankings come from the published methodology and sourced data, not from commissions. [Disclosure](https://hostidea.com/disclosure). ## Key takeaways - TTFB counts everything from the click to the first byte of the response: redirects, DNS, the connection, TLS and the server's own thinking time. - web.dev recommends a TTFB of 0.8 seconds or less; most shared hosts measured by reviewers land between 140 and 750 milliseconds. - The same host gets different TTFB numbers from different reviewers because the probe location, the page and whether the cache was warm all change the result. - Compare TTFB figures only when the method is stated; otherwise read them as rough bands. ## What is TTFB? Time to first byte is the wait between a browser asking for a page and the first byte of the answer arriving. web.dev’s definition lists the phases it contains: redirect time, service worker startup time if there is one, DNS lookup, connection and TLS negotiation, the request, up until the point at which the first byte of the response has arrived. So it is not “server speed”. It is server speed plus the distance to the server plus the handshake, measured from wherever the probe sits. That is why it is the metric hosting reviewers lean on: it isolates the part of page speed that hosting controls, before images, scripts and the theme add their own delay. ## What is a good TTFB? web.dev says most sites should strive to have a TTFB of 0.8 seconds or less, and treats it as a supporting metric for Largest Contentful Paint, whose “good” threshold is 2.5 seconds. For a hosting comparison the useful bands are narrower. Across the published measurements collected in our reviews, shared plans land between about 140 milliseconds (HostScore’s Flashcloud test from Singapore, one month, September 2026) and 745 milliseconds (HostingStep’s SiteGround window, eight months of US probes to May 2026). Under 300 milliseconds from a nearby probe is fast; 300 to 600 is ordinary; above 600 is slow for a cached page and worth asking about. ## Why do reviewers get different numbers for the same host? Because they measure different things and call them all TTFB. Three things move the number most: - **Where the probe is.** A probe next to the server reports a few milliseconds of network time; one on another continent adds 100 to 200 milliseconds before the server does anything. HostingStep probes from 19 North American locations; WPBeginner averages six regions worldwide; Kripesh Adwani measures from India against servers he placed in Mumbai, Singapore or New York. Hostinger scores 227 milliseconds in WPBeginner’s six-region average and 447 in HostingStep’s US-only window, and both are correct. - **What page is requested.** A cached home page returns from memory; an uncached one runs PHP and the database first. Reviewers rarely say which, and some tools bypass the cache. - **How often and how long.** A single run on a quiet afternoon is a different measurement from an average of 349,920 checks over 243 days, which is what HostingStep’s eight-month windows contain. The honest comparison is between measurements with the same method, which is why our reviews list every published figure with its tool, interval, plan and location, and why we do not average them. ## What does hosting control, and what does it not? Hosting controls the server’s thinking time (PHP, the database, the cache in front of them), the distance to the visitor (which data center you chose), and the connection setup (HTTP/2 or HTTP/3, TLS configuration). It does not control a slow theme, a plugin that queries the database forty times per page, or an image carousel, none of which appears in TTFB at all. A site with a 150 millisecond TTFB and a 4 second LCP has a theme problem, not a hosting problem. ## How do you measure your own TTFB? From a browser, the Network panel in developer tools shows the waiting time for the document request; that is TTFB from your chair. For a number you can compare over time, use a monitoring service that probes from a fixed location at a fixed interval and reports the average, which is what the reviewers above do and what HostIdea’s own windows will do when they open. One-off tests from a speed-test site are fine for spotting a problem and poor for ranking hosts. ## Frequently asked questions - **### Is TTFB the same as server response time?**: No. Server response time is the part of TTFB spent on the server. TTFB adds DNS, the connection, TLS and the network distance. Tools that report "server response time" from a single location are closer to TTFB than the name suggests. - **### Does a CDN reduce TTFB?**: For cached pages served from an edge location near the visitor, yes, often substantially. For uncached pages the request still travels to the origin server, and the CDN adds a hop. - **### What TTFB does HostIdea require for a good performance score?**: The methodology maps the monthly average TTFB from the test site's own region linearly: 100 milliseconds or less scores 10, 1,000 milliseconds or more scores 0. That applies to our own measurements; third-party figures are listed but not scored. ## Sources 1. [Time to First Byte (TTFB), web.dev, by Barry Pollard and Jeremy Wagner (updated 18 November 2025)](https://web.dev/articles/ttfb), accessed Oct 13, 2026 2. [Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), web.dev (updated 4 September 2025)](https://web.dev/articles/lcp), accessed Oct 13, 2026 3. [Flashcloud plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://flashcloud.com/pricing), accessed Oct 13, 2026 4. [SiteGround plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.siteground.com/web-hosting.htm), accessed Oct 13, 2026 5. [Hostinger plan and pricing page (plan terms as read by HostIdea)](https://www.hostinger.com/web-hosting), accessed Oct 13, 2026 - [TTFB](https://hostidea.com/blog/tag/ttfb) [Prefer HostIdea in Google Search](https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=hostidea.com "Add HostIdea as a preferred source in Google Search") Share[](https://x.com/intent/post?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fwhat-ttfb-measures&text=What%20TTFB%20measures%2C%20and%20what%20a%20hosting%20TTFB%20number%20actually%20tells%20you)[](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fwhat-ttfb-measures)[](mailto:?subject=What%20TTFB%20measures%2C%20and%20what%20a%20hosting%20TTFB%20number%20actually%20tells%20you&body=https%3A%2F%2Fhostidea.com%2Fblog%2Fwhat-ttfb-measures) ## Related articles Oct 13, 2026 · 3 min read ### [What a CDN does for a small website, and when you do not need one](https://hostidea.com/blog/what-a-cdn-does) Oct 13, 2026 · 4 min read ### [How to choose a web host in 2026: a working method](https://hostidea.com/blog/how-to-choose-wordpress-hosting) Oct 13, 2026 · 2 min read ### [Backups and restore points: what a hosting backup actually protects you from](https://hostidea.com/blog/backups-and-restore-points-explained) --- --- title: "Compare web hosts side by side" url: "https://hostidea.com/compare" canonical: "https://hostidea.com/compare" generated: "2026-10-15" note: "Markdown twin generated at build time from the same content as the HTML page. The HTML page is canonical." --- # Compare web hosts Every pair of hosts we have tested, compared on the same data. Pick two. - [Flashcloud vs ScalaHosting8.7 · 8.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/flashcloud-vs-scalahosting) - [Flashcloud vs Hostinger8.7 · 8.0](https://hostidea.com/compare/flashcloud-vs-hostinger) - [Flashcloud vs SiteGround8.7 · 8.0](https://hostidea.com/compare/flashcloud-vs-siteground) - [Flashcloud vs Kinsta8.7 · 7.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/flashcloud-vs-kinsta) - [Flashcloud vs Cloudways8.7 · 7.8](https://hostidea.com/compare/cloudways-vs-flashcloud) - [Flashcloud vs HostArmada8.7 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/flashcloud-vs-hostarmada) - [Flashcloud vs Hosting.com8.7 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/flashcloud-vs-hosting-com) - [Flashcloud vs InMotion Hosting8.7 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/flashcloud-vs-inmotion) - [Flashcloud vs Liquid Web8.7 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/flashcloud-vs-liquidweb) - [Flashcloud vs Pressable8.7 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/flashcloud-vs-pressable) - [Flashcloud vs AccuWeb Hosting8.7 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-flashcloud) - [Flashcloud vs Bluehost8.7 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-flashcloud) - [Flashcloud vs DreamHost8.7 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/dreamhost-vs-flashcloud) - [Flashcloud vs FastComet8.7 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/fastcomet-vs-flashcloud) - [Flashcloud vs InterServer8.7 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/flashcloud-vs-interserver) - [Flashcloud vs Verpex8.7 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/flashcloud-vs-verpex) - [Flashcloud vs HostGator8.7 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/flashcloud-vs-hostgator) - [Flashcloud vs KnownHost8.7 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/flashcloud-vs-knownhost) - [Flashcloud vs GreenGeeks8.7 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/flashcloud-vs-greengeeks) - [Flashcloud vs HostPapa8.7 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/flashcloud-vs-hostpapa) - [Flashcloud vs NameHero8.7 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/flashcloud-vs-namehero) - [Flashcloud vs GoDaddy8.7 · 7.2](https://hostidea.com/compare/flashcloud-vs-godaddy) - [Flashcloud vs IONOS8.7 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/flashcloud-vs-ionos) - [Flashcloud vs Namecheap8.7 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/flashcloud-vs-namecheap) - [ScalaHosting vs Hostinger8.1 · 8.0](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostinger-vs-scalahosting) - [ScalaHosting vs SiteGround8.1 · 8.0](https://hostidea.com/compare/scalahosting-vs-siteground) - [ScalaHosting vs Kinsta8.1 · 7.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/kinsta-vs-scalahosting) - [ScalaHosting vs Cloudways8.1 · 7.8](https://hostidea.com/compare/cloudways-vs-scalahosting) - [ScalaHosting vs HostArmada8.1 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostarmada-vs-scalahosting) - [ScalaHosting vs Hosting.com8.1 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/hosting-com-vs-scalahosting) - [ScalaHosting vs InMotion Hosting8.1 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/inmotion-vs-scalahosting) - [ScalaHosting vs Liquid Web8.1 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/liquidweb-vs-scalahosting) - [ScalaHosting vs Pressable8.1 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/pressable-vs-scalahosting) - [ScalaHosting vs AccuWeb Hosting8.1 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-scalahosting) - [ScalaHosting vs Bluehost8.1 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-scalahosting) - [ScalaHosting vs DreamHost8.1 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/dreamhost-vs-scalahosting) - [ScalaHosting vs FastComet8.1 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/fastcomet-vs-scalahosting) - [ScalaHosting vs InterServer8.1 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/interserver-vs-scalahosting) - [ScalaHosting vs Verpex8.1 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/scalahosting-vs-verpex) - [ScalaHosting vs HostGator8.1 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostgator-vs-scalahosting) - [ScalaHosting vs KnownHost8.1 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/knownhost-vs-scalahosting) - [ScalaHosting vs GreenGeeks8.1 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/greengeeks-vs-scalahosting) - [ScalaHosting vs HostPapa8.1 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostpapa-vs-scalahosting) - [ScalaHosting vs NameHero8.1 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/namehero-vs-scalahosting) - [ScalaHosting vs GoDaddy8.1 · 7.2](https://hostidea.com/compare/godaddy-vs-scalahosting) - [ScalaHosting vs IONOS8.1 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/ionos-vs-scalahosting) - [ScalaHosting vs Namecheap8.1 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/namecheap-vs-scalahosting) - [Hostinger vs SiteGround8.0 · 8.0](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostinger-vs-siteground) - [Hostinger vs Kinsta8.0 · 7.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostinger-vs-kinsta) - [Hostinger vs Cloudways8.0 · 7.8](https://hostidea.com/compare/cloudways-vs-hostinger) - [Hostinger vs HostArmada8.0 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostarmada-vs-hostinger) - [Hostinger vs Hosting.com8.0 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/hosting-com-vs-hostinger) - [Hostinger vs InMotion Hosting8.0 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostinger-vs-inmotion) - [Hostinger vs Liquid Web8.0 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostinger-vs-liquidweb) - [Hostinger vs Pressable8.0 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostinger-vs-pressable) - [Hostinger vs AccuWeb Hosting8.0 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-hostinger) - [Hostinger vs Bluehost8.0 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-hostinger) - [Hostinger vs DreamHost8.0 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/dreamhost-vs-hostinger) - [Hostinger vs FastComet8.0 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/fastcomet-vs-hostinger) - [Hostinger vs InterServer8.0 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostinger-vs-interserver) - [Hostinger vs Verpex8.0 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostinger-vs-verpex) - [Hostinger vs HostGator8.0 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostgator-vs-hostinger) - [Hostinger vs KnownHost8.0 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostinger-vs-knownhost) - [Hostinger vs GreenGeeks8.0 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/greengeeks-vs-hostinger) - [Hostinger vs HostPapa8.0 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostinger-vs-hostpapa) - [Hostinger vs NameHero8.0 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostinger-vs-namehero) - [Hostinger vs GoDaddy8.0 · 7.2](https://hostidea.com/compare/godaddy-vs-hostinger) - [Hostinger vs IONOS8.0 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostinger-vs-ionos) - [Hostinger vs Namecheap8.0 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostinger-vs-namecheap) - [SiteGround vs Kinsta8.0 · 7.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/kinsta-vs-siteground) - [SiteGround vs Cloudways8.0 · 7.8](https://hostidea.com/compare/cloudways-vs-siteground) - [SiteGround vs HostArmada8.0 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostarmada-vs-siteground) - [SiteGround vs Hosting.com8.0 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/hosting-com-vs-siteground) - [SiteGround vs InMotion Hosting8.0 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/inmotion-vs-siteground) - [SiteGround vs Liquid Web8.0 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/liquidweb-vs-siteground) - [SiteGround vs Pressable8.0 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/pressable-vs-siteground) - [SiteGround vs AccuWeb Hosting8.0 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-siteground) - [SiteGround vs Bluehost8.0 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-siteground) - [SiteGround vs DreamHost8.0 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/dreamhost-vs-siteground) - [SiteGround vs FastComet8.0 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/fastcomet-vs-siteground) - [SiteGround vs InterServer8.0 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/interserver-vs-siteground) - [SiteGround vs Verpex8.0 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/siteground-vs-verpex) - [SiteGround vs HostGator8.0 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostgator-vs-siteground) - [SiteGround vs KnownHost8.0 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/knownhost-vs-siteground) - [SiteGround vs GreenGeeks8.0 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/greengeeks-vs-siteground) - [SiteGround vs HostPapa8.0 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostpapa-vs-siteground) - [SiteGround vs NameHero8.0 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/namehero-vs-siteground) - [SiteGround vs GoDaddy8.0 · 7.2](https://hostidea.com/compare/godaddy-vs-siteground) - [SiteGround vs IONOS8.0 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/ionos-vs-siteground) - [SiteGround vs Namecheap8.0 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/namecheap-vs-siteground) - [Kinsta vs Cloudways7.9 · 7.8](https://hostidea.com/compare/cloudways-vs-kinsta) - [Kinsta vs HostArmada7.9 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostarmada-vs-kinsta) - [Kinsta vs Hosting.com7.9 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/hosting-com-vs-kinsta) - [Kinsta vs InMotion Hosting7.9 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/inmotion-vs-kinsta) - [Kinsta vs Liquid Web7.9 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/kinsta-vs-liquidweb) - [Kinsta vs Pressable7.9 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/kinsta-vs-pressable) - [Kinsta vs AccuWeb Hosting7.9 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-kinsta) - [Kinsta vs Bluehost7.9 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-kinsta) - [Kinsta vs DreamHost7.9 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/dreamhost-vs-kinsta) - [Kinsta vs FastComet7.9 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/fastcomet-vs-kinsta) - [Kinsta vs InterServer7.9 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/interserver-vs-kinsta) - [Kinsta vs Verpex7.9 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/kinsta-vs-verpex) - [Kinsta vs HostGator7.9 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostgator-vs-kinsta) - [Kinsta vs KnownHost7.9 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/kinsta-vs-knownhost) - [Kinsta vs GreenGeeks7.9 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/greengeeks-vs-kinsta) - [Kinsta vs HostPapa7.9 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostpapa-vs-kinsta) - [Kinsta vs NameHero7.9 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/kinsta-vs-namehero) - [Kinsta vs GoDaddy7.9 · 7.2](https://hostidea.com/compare/godaddy-vs-kinsta) - [Kinsta vs IONOS7.9 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/ionos-vs-kinsta) - [Kinsta vs Namecheap7.9 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/kinsta-vs-namecheap) - [Cloudways vs HostArmada7.8 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/cloudways-vs-hostarmada) - [Cloudways vs Hosting.com7.8 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/cloudways-vs-hosting-com) - [Cloudways vs InMotion Hosting7.8 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/cloudways-vs-inmotion) - [Cloudways vs Liquid Web7.8 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/cloudways-vs-liquidweb) - [Cloudways vs Pressable7.8 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/cloudways-vs-pressable) - [Cloudways vs AccuWeb Hosting7.8 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-cloudways) - [Cloudways vs Bluehost7.8 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-cloudways) - [Cloudways vs DreamHost7.8 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/cloudways-vs-dreamhost) - [Cloudways vs FastComet7.8 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/cloudways-vs-fastcomet) - [Cloudways vs InterServer7.8 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/cloudways-vs-interserver) - [Cloudways vs Verpex7.8 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/cloudways-vs-verpex) - [Cloudways vs HostGator7.8 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/cloudways-vs-hostgator) - [Cloudways vs KnownHost7.8 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/cloudways-vs-knownhost) - [Cloudways vs GreenGeeks7.8 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/cloudways-vs-greengeeks) - [Cloudways vs HostPapa7.8 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/cloudways-vs-hostpapa) - [Cloudways vs NameHero7.8 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/cloudways-vs-namehero) - [Cloudways vs GoDaddy7.8 · 7.2](https://hostidea.com/compare/cloudways-vs-godaddy) - [Cloudways vs IONOS7.8 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/cloudways-vs-ionos) - [Cloudways vs Namecheap7.8 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/cloudways-vs-namecheap) - [HostArmada vs Hosting.com7.7 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostarmada-vs-hosting-com) - [HostArmada vs InMotion Hosting7.7 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostarmada-vs-inmotion) - [HostArmada vs Liquid Web7.7 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostarmada-vs-liquidweb) - [HostArmada vs Pressable7.7 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostarmada-vs-pressable) - [HostArmada vs AccuWeb Hosting7.7 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-hostarmada) - [HostArmada vs Bluehost7.7 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-hostarmada) - [HostArmada vs DreamHost7.7 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/dreamhost-vs-hostarmada) - [HostArmada vs FastComet7.7 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/fastcomet-vs-hostarmada) - [HostArmada vs InterServer7.7 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostarmada-vs-interserver) - [HostArmada vs Verpex7.7 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostarmada-vs-verpex) - [HostArmada vs HostGator7.7 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostarmada-vs-hostgator) - [HostArmada vs KnownHost7.7 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostarmada-vs-knownhost) - [HostArmada vs GreenGeeks7.7 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/greengeeks-vs-hostarmada) - [HostArmada vs HostPapa7.7 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostarmada-vs-hostpapa) - [HostArmada vs NameHero7.7 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostarmada-vs-namehero) - [HostArmada vs GoDaddy7.7 · 7.2](https://hostidea.com/compare/godaddy-vs-hostarmada) - [HostArmada vs IONOS7.7 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostarmada-vs-ionos) - [HostArmada vs Namecheap7.7 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostarmada-vs-namecheap) - [Hosting.com vs InMotion Hosting7.7 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/hosting-com-vs-inmotion) - [Hosting.com vs Liquid Web7.7 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/hosting-com-vs-liquidweb) - [Hosting.com vs Pressable7.7 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/hosting-com-vs-pressable) - [Hosting.com vs AccuWeb Hosting7.7 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-hosting-com) - [Hosting.com vs Bluehost7.7 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-hosting-com) - [Hosting.com vs DreamHost7.7 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/dreamhost-vs-hosting-com) - [Hosting.com vs FastComet7.7 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/fastcomet-vs-hosting-com) - [Hosting.com vs InterServer7.7 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/hosting-com-vs-interserver) - [Hosting.com vs Verpex7.7 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/hosting-com-vs-verpex) - [Hosting.com vs HostGator7.7 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostgator-vs-hosting-com) - [Hosting.com vs KnownHost7.7 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/hosting-com-vs-knownhost) - [Hosting.com vs GreenGeeks7.7 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/greengeeks-vs-hosting-com) - [Hosting.com vs HostPapa7.7 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/hosting-com-vs-hostpapa) - [Hosting.com vs NameHero7.7 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/hosting-com-vs-namehero) - [Hosting.com vs GoDaddy7.7 · 7.2](https://hostidea.com/compare/godaddy-vs-hosting-com) - [Hosting.com vs IONOS7.7 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/hosting-com-vs-ionos) - [Hosting.com vs Namecheap7.7 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/hosting-com-vs-namecheap) - [InMotion Hosting vs Liquid Web7.7 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/inmotion-vs-liquidweb) - [InMotion Hosting vs Pressable7.7 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/inmotion-vs-pressable) - [InMotion Hosting vs AccuWeb Hosting7.7 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-inmotion) - [InMotion Hosting vs Bluehost7.7 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-inmotion) - [InMotion Hosting vs DreamHost7.7 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/dreamhost-vs-inmotion) - [InMotion Hosting vs FastComet7.7 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/fastcomet-vs-inmotion) - [InMotion Hosting vs InterServer7.7 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/inmotion-vs-interserver) - [InMotion Hosting vs Verpex7.7 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/inmotion-vs-verpex) - [InMotion Hosting vs HostGator7.7 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostgator-vs-inmotion) - [InMotion Hosting vs KnownHost7.7 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/inmotion-vs-knownhost) - [InMotion Hosting vs GreenGeeks7.7 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/greengeeks-vs-inmotion) - [InMotion Hosting vs HostPapa7.7 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostpapa-vs-inmotion) - [InMotion Hosting vs NameHero7.7 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/inmotion-vs-namehero) - [InMotion Hosting vs GoDaddy7.7 · 7.2](https://hostidea.com/compare/godaddy-vs-inmotion) - [InMotion Hosting vs IONOS7.7 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/inmotion-vs-ionos) - [InMotion Hosting vs Namecheap7.7 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/inmotion-vs-namecheap) - [Liquid Web vs Pressable7.7 · 7.7](https://hostidea.com/compare/liquidweb-vs-pressable) - [Liquid Web vs AccuWeb Hosting7.7 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-liquidweb) - [Liquid Web vs Bluehost7.7 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-liquidweb) - [Liquid Web vs DreamHost7.7 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/dreamhost-vs-liquidweb) - [Liquid Web vs FastComet7.7 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/fastcomet-vs-liquidweb) - [Liquid Web vs InterServer7.7 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/interserver-vs-liquidweb) - [Liquid Web vs Verpex7.7 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/liquidweb-vs-verpex) - [Liquid Web vs HostGator7.7 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostgator-vs-liquidweb) - [Liquid Web vs KnownHost7.7 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/knownhost-vs-liquidweb) - [Liquid Web vs GreenGeeks7.7 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/greengeeks-vs-liquidweb) - [Liquid Web vs HostPapa7.7 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostpapa-vs-liquidweb) - [Liquid Web vs NameHero7.7 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/liquidweb-vs-namehero) - [Liquid Web vs GoDaddy7.7 · 7.2](https://hostidea.com/compare/godaddy-vs-liquidweb) - [Liquid Web vs IONOS7.7 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/ionos-vs-liquidweb) - [Liquid Web vs Namecheap7.7 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/liquidweb-vs-namecheap) - [Pressable vs AccuWeb Hosting7.7 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-pressable) - [Pressable vs Bluehost7.7 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-pressable) - [Pressable vs DreamHost7.7 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/dreamhost-vs-pressable) - [Pressable vs FastComet7.7 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/fastcomet-vs-pressable) - [Pressable vs InterServer7.7 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/interserver-vs-pressable) - [Pressable vs Verpex7.7 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/pressable-vs-verpex) - [Pressable vs HostGator7.7 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostgator-vs-pressable) - [Pressable vs KnownHost7.7 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/knownhost-vs-pressable) - [Pressable vs GreenGeeks7.7 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/greengeeks-vs-pressable) - [Pressable vs HostPapa7.7 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostpapa-vs-pressable) - [Pressable vs NameHero7.7 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/namehero-vs-pressable) - [Pressable vs GoDaddy7.7 · 7.2](https://hostidea.com/compare/godaddy-vs-pressable) - [Pressable vs IONOS7.7 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/ionos-vs-pressable) - [Pressable vs Namecheap7.7 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/namecheap-vs-pressable) - [AccuWeb Hosting vs Bluehost7.6 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-bluehost) - [AccuWeb Hosting vs DreamHost7.6 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-dreamhost) - [AccuWeb Hosting vs FastComet7.6 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-fastcomet) - [AccuWeb Hosting vs InterServer7.6 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-interserver) - [AccuWeb Hosting vs Verpex7.6 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-verpex) - [AccuWeb Hosting vs HostGator7.6 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-hostgator) - [AccuWeb Hosting vs KnownHost7.6 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-knownhost) - [AccuWeb Hosting vs GreenGeeks7.6 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-greengeeks) - [AccuWeb Hosting vs HostPapa7.6 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-hostpapa) - [AccuWeb Hosting vs NameHero7.6 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-namehero) - [AccuWeb Hosting vs GoDaddy7.6 · 7.2](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-godaddy) - [AccuWeb Hosting vs IONOS7.6 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-ionos) - [AccuWeb Hosting vs Namecheap7.6 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/accuweb-vs-namecheap) - [Bluehost vs DreamHost7.6 · 7.6](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-dreamhost) - [Bluehost vs FastComet7.6 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-fastcomet) - [Bluehost vs InterServer7.6 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-interserver) - [Bluehost vs Verpex7.6 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-verpex) - [Bluehost vs HostGator7.6 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-hostgator) - [Bluehost vs KnownHost7.6 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-knownhost) - [Bluehost vs GreenGeeks7.6 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-greengeeks) - [Bluehost vs HostPapa7.6 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-hostpapa) - [Bluehost vs NameHero7.6 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-namehero) - [Bluehost vs GoDaddy7.6 · 7.2](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-godaddy) - [Bluehost vs IONOS7.6 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-ionos) - [Bluehost vs Namecheap7.6 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/bluehost-vs-namecheap) - [DreamHost vs FastComet7.6 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/dreamhost-vs-fastcomet) - [DreamHost vs InterServer7.6 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/dreamhost-vs-interserver) - [DreamHost vs Verpex7.6 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/dreamhost-vs-verpex) - [DreamHost vs HostGator7.6 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/dreamhost-vs-hostgator) - [DreamHost vs KnownHost7.6 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/dreamhost-vs-knownhost) - [DreamHost vs GreenGeeks7.6 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/dreamhost-vs-greengeeks) - [DreamHost vs HostPapa7.6 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/dreamhost-vs-hostpapa) - [DreamHost vs NameHero7.6 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/dreamhost-vs-namehero) - [DreamHost vs GoDaddy7.6 · 7.2](https://hostidea.com/compare/dreamhost-vs-godaddy) - [DreamHost vs IONOS7.6 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/dreamhost-vs-ionos) - [DreamHost vs Namecheap7.6 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/dreamhost-vs-namecheap) - [FastComet vs InterServer7.5 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/fastcomet-vs-interserver) - [FastComet vs Verpex7.5 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/fastcomet-vs-verpex) - [FastComet vs HostGator7.5 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/fastcomet-vs-hostgator) - [FastComet vs KnownHost7.5 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/fastcomet-vs-knownhost) - [FastComet vs GreenGeeks7.5 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/fastcomet-vs-greengeeks) - [FastComet vs HostPapa7.5 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/fastcomet-vs-hostpapa) - [FastComet vs NameHero7.5 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/fastcomet-vs-namehero) - [FastComet vs GoDaddy7.5 · 7.2](https://hostidea.com/compare/fastcomet-vs-godaddy) - [FastComet vs IONOS7.5 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/fastcomet-vs-ionos) - [FastComet vs Namecheap7.5 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/fastcomet-vs-namecheap) - [InterServer vs Verpex7.5 · 7.5](https://hostidea.com/compare/interserver-vs-verpex) - [InterServer vs HostGator7.5 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostgator-vs-interserver) - [InterServer vs KnownHost7.5 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/interserver-vs-knownhost) - [InterServer vs GreenGeeks7.5 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/greengeeks-vs-interserver) - [InterServer vs HostPapa7.5 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostpapa-vs-interserver) - [InterServer vs NameHero7.5 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/interserver-vs-namehero) - [InterServer vs GoDaddy7.5 · 7.2](https://hostidea.com/compare/godaddy-vs-interserver) - [InterServer vs IONOS7.5 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/interserver-vs-ionos) - [InterServer vs Namecheap7.5 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/interserver-vs-namecheap) - [Verpex vs HostGator7.5 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostgator-vs-verpex) - [Verpex vs KnownHost7.5 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/knownhost-vs-verpex) - [Verpex vs GreenGeeks7.5 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/greengeeks-vs-verpex) - [Verpex vs HostPapa7.5 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostpapa-vs-verpex) - [Verpex vs NameHero7.5 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/namehero-vs-verpex) - [Verpex vs GoDaddy7.5 · 7.2](https://hostidea.com/compare/godaddy-vs-verpex) - [Verpex vs IONOS7.5 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/ionos-vs-verpex) - [Verpex vs Namecheap7.5 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/namecheap-vs-verpex) - [HostGator vs KnownHost7.4 · 7.4](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostgator-vs-knownhost) - [HostGator vs GreenGeeks7.4 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/greengeeks-vs-hostgator) - [HostGator vs HostPapa7.4 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostgator-vs-hostpapa) - [HostGator vs NameHero7.4 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostgator-vs-namehero) - [HostGator vs GoDaddy7.4 · 7.2](https://hostidea.com/compare/godaddy-vs-hostgator) - [HostGator vs IONOS7.4 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostgator-vs-ionos) - [HostGator vs Namecheap7.4 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostgator-vs-namecheap) - [KnownHost vs GreenGeeks7.4 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/greengeeks-vs-knownhost) - [KnownHost vs HostPapa7.4 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostpapa-vs-knownhost) - [KnownHost vs NameHero7.4 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/knownhost-vs-namehero) - [KnownHost vs GoDaddy7.4 · 7.2](https://hostidea.com/compare/godaddy-vs-knownhost) - [KnownHost vs IONOS7.4 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/ionos-vs-knownhost) - [KnownHost vs Namecheap7.4 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/knownhost-vs-namecheap) - [GreenGeeks vs HostPapa7.3 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/greengeeks-vs-hostpapa) - [GreenGeeks vs NameHero7.3 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/greengeeks-vs-namehero) - [GreenGeeks vs GoDaddy7.3 · 7.2](https://hostidea.com/compare/godaddy-vs-greengeeks) - [GreenGeeks vs IONOS7.3 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/greengeeks-vs-ionos) - [GreenGeeks vs Namecheap7.3 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/greengeeks-vs-namecheap) - [HostPapa vs NameHero7.3 · 7.3](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostpapa-vs-namehero) - [HostPapa vs GoDaddy7.3 · 7.2](https://hostidea.com/compare/godaddy-vs-hostpapa) - [HostPapa vs IONOS7.3 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostpapa-vs-ionos) - [HostPapa vs Namecheap7.3 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/hostpapa-vs-namecheap) - [NameHero vs GoDaddy7.3 · 7.2](https://hostidea.com/compare/godaddy-vs-namehero) - [NameHero vs IONOS7.3 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/ionos-vs-namehero) - [NameHero vs Namecheap7.3 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/namecheap-vs-namehero) - [GoDaddy vs IONOS7.2 · 7.1](https://hostidea.com/compare/godaddy-vs-ionos) - [GoDaddy vs Namecheap7.2 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/godaddy-vs-namecheap) - [IONOS vs Namecheap7.1 · 6.9](https://hostidea.com/compare/ionos-vs-namecheap) --- --- title: "Web hosting reviews, ranked and sourced" url: "https://hostidea.com/reviews" canonical: "https://hostidea.com/reviews" generated: "2026-10-15" note: "Markdown twin generated at build time from the same content as the HTML page. The HTML page is canonical." --- # Web hosting reviews 25 hosts reviewed from their published terms, cited independent measurements and our own checks. Every figure carries its source and date; scores are recomputed as our monitoring windows complete. Show: | # | Host | Score | Uptime | Response | From | Renews | Best for | Updated | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | 1 | [Flashcloud](https://hostidea.com/reviews/flashcloud)Our pick | 8.7 | 100.00%HostScore, 30 d | 142 msHostScore | $2.79/mo | $9.99/mo | Small business sites | Oct 14, 2026 | | 2 | [ScalaHosting](https://hostidea.com/reviews/scalahosting) | 8.1 | 99.99%Kripesh Adwani, 365 d | 526 msWPBeginner | $2.95/mo | $11.95/mo | Sites that will move to a managed cloud VPS on the same platform | Oct 13, 2026 | | 3 | [Hostinger](https://hostidea.com/reviews/hostinger) | 8.0 | 99.96%Kripesh Adwani, 365 d | 447 msHostingStep | $2.99/mo | $10.99/mo | Beginners | Oct 13, 2026 | | 4 | [SiteGround](https://hostidea.com/reviews/siteground) | 8.0 | 99.97%HostingStep, 243 d | 745 msHostingStep | $2.99/mo | $17.99/mo | WordPress sites that want backups, staging and a CDN included | Oct 14, 2026 | | 5 | [Kinsta](https://hostidea.com/reviews/kinsta) | 7.9 | 100.00%HostingStep, 366 d | 525 msHostingStep | $30.00/mo | $30.00/mo | Business sites that want managed WordPress with staging, backups and a CDN in one price | Oct 14, 2026 | | 6 | [Cloudways](https://hostidea.com/reviews/cloudways) | 7.8 | 99.99%Kripesh Adwani, 365 d | 442 msHostingStep | $14.00/mo | $14.00/mo | Owners who want a managed server of their own instead of shared hosting | Oct 14, 2026 | | 7 | [HostArmada](https://hostidea.com/reviews/hostarmada) | 7.7 | 99.99%Kripesh Adwani, 365 d | 254 msKripesh Adwani | $2.15/mo | $11.95/mo | Sites that want a server in Canada, the UK, Germany, India, Singapore or Australia | Oct 14, 2026 | | 8 | [Hosting.com](https://hostidea.com/reviews/hosting-com) | 7.7 | 99.99%Kripesh Adwani, 365 d | 500 msHostingStep | $1.99/mo | $13.99/mo | Sites that will grow into a managed server on the same platform | Oct 13, 2026 | | 9 | [InMotion Hosting](https://hostidea.com/reviews/inmotion) | 7.7 | 99.97%Kripesh Adwani, 365 d | not measured | $4.99/mo | $14.99/mo | US sites that want a long refund window | Oct 13, 2026 | | 10 | [Liquid Web](https://hostidea.com/reviews/liquidweb) | 7.7 | 99.99%HostingStep, 365 d | 496 msHostingStep | $9.00/mo | $9.00/mo | Business sites that want managed WordPress with a CDN, WAF and object caching from $9 | Oct 14, 2026 | | 11 | [Pressable](https://hostidea.com/reviews/pressable) | 7.7 | 100.00%Hostingstep, 243 d | 320 msHostingstep | $20.83/mo | $20.83/mo | Agencies and stores that want managed WordPress with staging and sandbox sites per install | Oct 14, 2026 | | 12 | [AccuWeb Hosting](https://hostidea.com/reviews/accuweb) | 7.6 | 100.00%TechRadar, 7 d | 285 msTechRadar | $2.79/mo | $2.79/mo | Owners who want an entry plan whose renewal price equals the sign-up price | Oct 14, 2026 | | 13 | [Bluehost](https://hostidea.com/reviews/bluehost) | 7.6 | 99.97%HostingStep, 243 d | 501 msHostingStep | $3.99/mo | $9.99/mo | Beginners who want the WordPress.org-recommended default | Oct 13, 2026 | | 14 | [DreamHost](https://hostidea.com/reviews/dreamhost) | 7.6 | 100.00%WPBeginner, 30 d | 658 msWPBeginner | $2.89/mo | $10.99/mo | Owners who want the renewal price printed next to the sale price | Oct 14, 2026 | | 15 | [FastComet](https://hostidea.com/reviews/fastcomet) | 7.5 | 99.80%Kripesh Adwani, 365 d | 496 msHostingStep | $1.99/mo | $9.95/mo | Sites whose visitors are near one of its 12 locations | Oct 13, 2026 | | 16 | [InterServer](https://hostidea.com/reviews/interserver) | 7.5 | 100.00%Cybernews, 14 d | not measured | $2.50/mo | $7.00/mo | Owners who want month-to-month hosting at a flat $7 without a long term | Oct 14, 2026 | | 17 | [Verpex](https://hostidea.com/reviews/verpex) | 7.5 | 100.00%TechRadar | 49 msTechRadar | $3.00/mo | $6.00/mo | Sites that want a server in Toronto, Mexico City, London, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Singapore or Sydney | Oct 14, 2026 | | 18 | [HostGator](https://hostidea.com/reviews/hostgator) | 7.4 | 99.97%HostingStep, 243 d | 496 msHostingStep | $3.75/mo | $10.99/mo | Beginners who want cPanel, a free domain and chat support on a US host | Oct 14, 2026 | | 19 | [KnownHost](https://hostidea.com/reviews/knownhost) | 7.4 | 100.00%TechRadar, 30 d | not measured | $3.47/mo | $7.16/mo | Sites that want a stated CPU and RAM allocation on shared hosting | Oct 14, 2026 | | 20 | [GreenGeeks](https://hostidea.com/reviews/greengeeks) | 7.3 | 99.81%Kripesh Adwani, 361 d | 411 msHostingStep | $2.95/mo | $13.95/mo | Owners who want a host that matches its energy use with renewables | Oct 14, 2026 | | 21 | [HostPapa](https://hostidea.com/reviews/hostpapa) | 7.3 | 99.94%WP Hive, 30 d | 130 msBitcatcha | $2.95/mo | $8.99/mo | Canadian sites that want Toronto hosting and PIPEDA alignment | Oct 13, 2026 | | 22 | [NameHero](https://hostidea.com/reviews/namehero) | 7.3 | 99.98%Kripesh Adwani, 365 d | 24 msKripesh Adwani | $2.91/mo | $11.64/mo | US visitors who want LiteSpeed on NVMe with cPanel for under $3 a month on a three-year term | Oct 14, 2026 | | 23 | [GoDaddy](https://hostidea.com/reviews/godaddy) | 7.2 | 99.99%HostingStep, 365 d | 344 msHostingStep | $5.99/mo | $11.99/mo | Owners who keep their domains at GoDaddy and want one account for everything | Oct 14, 2026 | | 24 | [IONOS](https://hostidea.com/reviews/ionos) | 7.1 | 100.00%Cybernews, 14 d | 1749 msCybernews | $1.00/mo | $14.00/mo | Owners who want many small sites on one cheap plan | Oct 14, 2026 | | 25 | [Namecheap](https://hostidea.com/reviews/namecheap) | 6.9 | 99.89%Kripesh Adwani, 365 d | 19 msKripesh Adwani | $2.28/mo | $5.88/mo | Owners who already keep their domains at Namecheap | Oct 14, 2026 | Uptime and response are published third-party measurements, one per host by a fixed rule (the independent source with the longest stated window; its response figure, or the most recent one). Methods differ between sources, so the columns are a guide, not a ranking. Each review lists every source with its method. HostIdea's own windows replace these as they complete. ## Every review In score order; the top three are marked. Scores are provisional until our own monitoring windows complete. 1[8.7 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [Flashcloud](https://hostidea.com/reviews/flashcloud)Our pick Shared and WordPress hosting with a free domain for life, 30-day backups and an anytime prorated refund Best for: Small business sites; WordPress sites that want backups and a domain included; Owners who want the first site built for them; Audiences in North America, Europe or Southeast Asia $2.79/mo intro, $9.99/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/flashcloud)Visit Flashcloud (affiliate link: /go/flashcloud) 2[8.1 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [ScalaHosting](https://hostidea.com/reviews/scalahosting) Dallas and Sofia host with its own SPanel, an anytime prorated refund and a credit table that reaches 100 percent Best for: Sites that will move to a managed cloud VPS on the same platform; Owners who want a refund they can take at any time; People who prefer a free control panel to cPanel fees; Audiences in the US or Europe $2.95/mo intro, $11.95/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/scalahosting)Visit ScalaHosting (affiliate link: /go/scalahosting) 3[8.0 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [Hostinger](https://hostidea.com/reviews/hostinger) Very cheap on a 48-month term, with an easy custom panel; the entry plan cuts backups and email Best for: Beginners; Budget personal sites; Running several small sites on one plan; Audiences near one of its twelve data center regions $2.99/mo intro, $10.99/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/hostinger)Visit Hostinger (affiliate link: /go/hostinger) 4[8.0 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [SiteGround](https://hostidea.com/reviews/siteground) Managed-feel shared hosting on Google Cloud with daily backups and staging; the renewals are the price Best for: WordPress sites that want backups, staging and a CDN included; Small businesses that value support reputation over price; Audiences near one of its eleven data centers; Agencies on GoGeek (Git, white label, priority support) $2.99/mo intro, $17.99/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/siteground)Visit SiteGround (affiliate link: /go/siteground) 5[7.9 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [Kinsta](https://hostidea.com/reviews/kinsta) Managed WordPress hosting from $30 a month with flat renewals, 30 data centers, edge caching and 14-day backups Best for: Business sites that want managed WordPress with staging, backups and a CDN in one price; Owners who want the same price at renewal as at sign-up; Sites with visitors far from the US (30 data centers on six continents); Teams that want 24/7 human support in eight languages $30.00/mo intro, $30.00/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/kinsta)Visit Kinsta (affiliate link: /go/kinsta) 6[7.8 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [Cloudways](https://hostidea.com/reviews/cloudways) DigitalOcean's managed cloud layer: servers from $11 a month on five clouds, billed hourly, staging and caching included Best for: Owners who want a managed server of their own instead of shared hosting; Agencies hosting many sites on one server with staging and cloning; Sites that need a specific city on DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS or Google Cloud; Anyone who wants hourly billing and the same price every month $14.00/mo intro, $14.00/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/cloudways)Visit Cloudways (affiliate link: /go/cloudways) 7[7.7 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [HostArmada](https://hostidea.com/reviews/hostarmada) cPanel host since 2019 with stated cores and RAM, 7 to 21 daily backups, nine locations and a 45-day refund Best for: Sites that want a server in Canada, the UK, Germany, India, Singapore or Australia; Owners who want daily backups kept for one to three weeks; Small sites on a tight first-year budget with a 45-day way out; Developers who want SSH, Git, Node.js and Python on cPanel $2.15/mo intro, $11.95/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/hostarmada)Visit HostArmada (affiliate link: /go/hostarmada) 8[7.7 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [Hosting.com](https://hostidea.com/reviews/hosting-com) The former A2 Hosting under World Host Group: stated cores and RAM, 30-day backups, staging from Pro, phone support Best for: Sites that will grow into a managed server on the same platform; Owners who want phone support and stated resources; Developers using the OpenAPI and MCP server access; Agencies on Max with the service level agreement $1.99/mo intro, $13.99/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/hosting-com)Visit Hosting.com (affiliate link: /go/hosting-com) 9[7.7 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [InMotion Hosting](https://hostidea.com/reviews/inmotion) Employee-owned US host since 2001 with a 90-day refund, generous disks and US-based support; backups are a paid add-on Best for: US sites that want a long refund window; Owners who value US-based phone support; Sites that need 100 GB or more on a cheap plan; Developers who want Python, Node.js, Ruby and Git on shared hosting $4.99/mo intro, $14.99/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/inmotion)Visit InMotion Hosting (affiliate link: /go/inmotion) 10[7.7 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [Liquid Web](https://hostidea.com/reviews/liquidweb) Lansing's managed host since 1997: WordPress plans from $9 with Cloudflare edge CDN and a 100% network SLA, no refunds Best for: Business sites that want managed WordPress with a CDN, WAF and object caching from $9; Owners who want phone support with a published response promise; Sites that need a server in Lansing, Phoenix, Ashburn or Amsterdam on a host that owns its data centers; Growing sites with a path to managed VPS and dedicated servers from the same company $9.00/mo intro, $9.00/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/liquidweb)Visit Liquid Web (affiliate link: /go/liquidweb) 11[7.7 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [Pressable](https://hostidea.com/reviews/pressable) Automattic's managed WordPress host: dedicated PHP workers, four origins, failover, a 100 percent SLA, from $25 a month Best for: Agencies and stores that want managed WordPress with staging and sandbox sites per install; Sites that need a contractual 100 percent uptime SLA with automatic failover to a second region; Owners who want the fastest measured TTFB and load handling in our source list; Teams that want the same price at renewal and monthly billing with no setup fee $20.83/mo intro, $20.83/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/pressable)Visit Pressable (affiliate link: /go/pressable) 12[7.6 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [AccuWeb Hosting](https://hostidea.com/reviews/accuweb) New Jersey host since 2003: guaranteed RAM and CPU on shared plans, eight locations, a $2.79 plan that renews at $2.79 Best for: Owners who want an entry plan whose renewal price equals the sign-up price; Sites that want guaranteed RAM and CPU on shared hosting; Visitors in Denver, Dallas, London, Frankfurt, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Singapore or Sydney; Anyone who wants a month-to-month option with a 30-day refund $2.79/mo intro, $2.79/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/accuweb)Visit AccuWeb Hosting (affiliate link: /go/accuweb) 13[7.6 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [Bluehost](https://hostidea.com/reviews/bluehost) Newfold's WordPress-recommended host: three shared tiers on 36-month terms, weekly backups, a 5 percent SLA coupon Best for: Beginners who want the WordPress.org-recommended default; Sites that expect to grow into Bluehost Cloud or a VPS; Owners who want AI site-building tools bundled; Audiences in North America $3.99/mo intro, $9.99/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/bluehost)Visit Bluehost (affiliate link: /go/bluehost) 14[7.6 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [DreamHost](https://hostidea.com/reviews/dreamhost) Independent since 1997: three shared plans with renewals printed on the card, daily backups and a 100% uptime credit Best for: Owners who want the renewal price printed next to the sale price; Sites that want daily backups and unlimited SSL on a cheap plan; People who prefer a custom panel to cPanel; Sites with visitors near Oregon, Virginia, Amsterdam or Singapore $2.89/mo intro, $10.99/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/dreamhost)Visit DreamHost (affiliate link: /go/dreamhost) 15[7.5 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [FastComet](https://hostidea.com/reviews/fastcomet) cPanel hosting on LiteSpeed with 30 daily offsite backups and 12 locations; small disks, now part of World Host Group Best for: Sites whose visitors are near one of its 12 locations; Owners who want phone support and cPanel; Small sites on a low first-year price; Developers who want Node.js and SSH on shared plans $1.99/mo intro, $9.95/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/fastcomet)Visit FastComet (affiliate link: /go/fastcomet) 16[7.5 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [InterServer](https://hostidea.com/reviews/interserver) Secaucus host since 1999 with a $7 monthly plan, stated resources, free migration and a 30-day refund Best for: Owners who want month-to-month hosting at a flat $7 without a long term; Sites that want stated CPU, memory and process limits on shared hosting; Visitors in the New York area; Anyone who wants a free migration and a 30-day refund without a free-domain catch $2.50/mo intro, $7.00/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/interserver)Visit InterServer (affiliate link: /go/interserver) 17[7.5 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [Verpex](https://hostidea.com/reviews/verpex) UK cPanel host on LiteSpeed and NVMe with nine locations, daily backups and a free domain, renewing at $6 to $15 Best for: Sites that want a server in Toronto, Mexico City, London, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Singapore or Sydney; Owners who want a free domain, daily backups and free migrations on a cheap plan; Agencies that host up to 100 sites on one cPanel account; Anyone who wants a very cheap first month to test a host $3.00/mo intro, $6.00/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/verpex)Visit Verpex (affiliate link: /go/verpex) 18[7.4 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [HostGator](https://hostidea.com/reviews/hostgator) Newfold's Texas-born cPanel host: four shared tiers on a 36-month term with a free domain, Cloudflare CDN and staging Best for: Beginners who want cPanel, a free domain and chat support on a US host; WordPress sites that want staging and object caching on a cheap plan; Owners who accept a three-year term for the lowest first price; Sites that host several small domains on one account $3.75/mo intro, $10.99/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/hostgator)Visit HostGator (affiliate link: /go/hostgator) 19[7.4 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [KnownHost](https://hostidea.com/reviews/knownhost) Managed cPanel hosting since 2006 on LiteSpeed and NVMe with stated cores and RAM, daily backups and three locations Best for: Sites that want a stated CPU and RAM allocation on shared hosting; Owners who want managed support with a phone number; Visitors on the US coasts or in Europe (Atlanta, Seattle, Amsterdam); Developers who want LiteSpeed, Redis and SSH on cPanel $3.47/mo intro, $7.16/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/knownhost)Visit KnownHost (affiliate link: /go/knownhost) 20[7.3 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [GreenGeeks](https://hostidea.com/reviews/greengeeks) cPanel on LiteSpeed since 2008 with a 300% renewable energy match, four locations, a free domain and a 30-day refund Best for: Owners who want a host that matches its energy use with renewables; Small sites that want cPanel, LiteSpeed caching and a free domain on a 12-month term; Visitors near Chicago, Montreal, Amsterdam or Singapore; Beginners who want a free migration in the first 30 days $2.95/mo intro, $13.95/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/greengeeks)Visit GreenGeeks (affiliate link: /go/greengeeks) 21[7.3 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [HostPapa](https://hostidea.com/reviews/hostpapa) Canadian cPanel host with phone support in 16 countries and five data centers; backups cost extra after year one Best for: Canadian sites that want Toronto hosting and PIPEDA alignment; Owners who want phone support in their own language; Small business sites that use the bundled email and office tools; Beginners on cPanel with a staged first year $2.95/mo intro, $8.99/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/hostpapa)Visit HostPapa (affiliate link: /go/hostpapa) 22[7.3 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [NameHero](https://hostidea.com/reviews/namehero) cPanel host since 2015 with NVMe, LiteSpeed and stated cores and RAM: cheap for three years, four times the price after Best for: US visitors who want LiteSpeed on NVMe with cPanel for under $3 a month on a three-year term; Owners who want the CPU cores and RAM of a shared plan printed; Sites that want a free migration done by the host's team; Anyone who wants a choice of a US, UK or Canadian server $2.91/mo intro, $11.64/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/namehero)Visit NameHero (affiliate link: /go/namehero) 23[7.2 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [GoDaddy](https://hostidea.com/reviews/godaddy) The largest registrar's cPanel hosting: three plans on a three-year term with a free domain and daily backups Best for: Owners who keep their domains at GoDaddy and want one account for everything; Beginners who want phone support around the clock; Small sites that want daily backups and a free domain on a cheap three-year term; Node.js apps on shared cPanel hosting $5.99/mo intro, $11.99/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/godaddy)Visit GoDaddy (affiliate link: /go/godaddy) 24[7.1 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [IONOS](https://hostidea.com/reviews/ionos) The former 1&1: unlimited sites and traffic from $8 a month at renewal, with a free domain and wildcard SSL Best for: Owners who want many small sites on one cheap plan; Beginners who want a free domain, wildcard SSL and daily backups included; Sites that need a US or European data center from a large operator; Anyone who wants a named support consultant by phone $1.00/mo intro, $14.00/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/ionos)Visit IONOS (affiliate link: /go/ionos) 25[6.9 out of 10](https://hostidea.com/methodology#scoring) ### [Namecheap](https://hostidea.com/reviews/namecheap) The Phoenix registrar's cPanel hosting: three sites for $5.88 at renewal, a 30-day free trial and four data centers Best for: Owners who already keep their domains at Namecheap; Small sites that want to try hosting free for 30 days; Sites with an audience in the UK, the Netherlands or Singapore; Budget hosting with cPanel and a low renewal $2.28/mo intro, $5.88/mo renewal [Read review](https://hostidea.com/reviews/namecheap)Visit Namecheap (affiliate link: /go/namecheap) --- --- title: "Disclosure: how HostIdea is funded" url: "https://hostidea.com/disclosure" canonical: "https://hostidea.com/disclosure" generated: "2026-10-15" note: "Markdown twin generated at build time from the same content as the HTML page. The HTML page is canonical." --- # Disclosure: how HostIdea is funded How HostIdea makes money, who operates it, where review data comes from, and why affiliate commissions never change a score or a ranking. Last updated Oct 13, 2026 ## Who operates HostIdea HostIdea is operated by DM Research Labs, LLC. Our only income from hosting companies is the affiliate commissions described below. ## Where the data comes from HostIdea is currently a review aggregator and translator with its own view, not a testing lab. We read each host’s published terms, collect and cite measurements published by others (by name, date and method), and add our own reading of what they mean. Our own monitoring windows are being opened host by host; until one exists for a host, the review says that no figure on it is ours. Every review states, next to each figure, where it came from: the host’s own published terms and documentation (with the URL and the date we checked it), third-party measurements cited by name and date, or our own checks, labelled as such. Where we have not measured something yet, the review says so rather than printing a number. The data behind every host is published at [/data](https://hostidea.com/data) so anyone can check it. The full account is on the [methodology page](https://hostidea.com/methodology). ## Affiliate links Links to hosting companies on this site are affiliate links. When you buy through one, the host pays us a commission. You pay the same price either way. Commissions do not affect scores or rankings. Scores are computed from the published [methodology](https://hostidea.com/methodology) and the monitored data; the weights are the only inputs. Hosts that pay higher commissions get no better placement, and hosts with no affiliate program are reviewed and ranked the same way. Affiliate links are marked with `rel="sponsored"` and go through `/go/` so they can be identified. ## What we do not do - We do not accept payment for reviews, placements or score changes. - We do not accept free hosting or payment in exchange for coverage. - We do not publish user reviews or star ratings. - We do not remove data at a host’s request. ## Questions Use the [contact page](https://hostidea.com/contact).