Best cheap web hosting of 2024

PRICE
VERDICT
REASONS TO BUY
REASONS TO AVOID
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REASONS TO BUY
REASONS TO AVOID
Web host logos on a TechRadar background
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The best cheap web hosting means the best value for money. What's the point in getting a good deal on features you don't need or paying a low price but left wanting? When looking for the best cheap web hosting I've looked at common requirements to help you find the best low-cost web hosting for you.

Some of the plans are cheap for the first year and then the price can increase quite steeply. In this scenario you can always jump between hosts after the initial subscription is over and settle on staying with the host you like the best. If you're looking for these cheap deals then you can try finding coupons like Hostinger promo codes or right now, the best Black Friday web hosting deals.


Reader offer: Get up to 75% off on hosting with Hostinger

Reader offer: Get up to 75% off on hosting with Hostinger

Great performance, extensive features, and value for money. Hostinger gives you a free domain, SSL, backups, and more. Upgrade for professional extras like NVMe storage, CDN, and WordPress caching if you need to.

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The best cheap web hosting of 2024

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DreamHost

DreamHost excels in WordPress hosting with over 26 years of experience, offering free migration and a user-friendly website builder. (Image credit: DreamHost)
A host with a cheap starting price and renewal price

Reasons to buy

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Pre-installed WordPress
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Free domain and daily backups
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Unlimited traffic
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Excellent support team

Reasons to avoid

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Custom control panel can be less intuitive
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Email is extra

DreamHost is only $2.59/mo for a 3-year subscription and renews at $5.99 a month. This makes it not only cheap on sign up but also after renewal. On top of this, DreamHost also offers a free WordPress migration service to move your website to their hosting service. This plan supports one website, a free SSL certificate, WP Website Builder, WordPress installer, and unlimited traffic. If you want to add a custom email address to this plan, you would need to buy it separately.

With Dreamhost, you can build websites with ease. Choose from over 200 starter sites and customize them with the user-friendly drag-and-drop builder, or create a unique site from scratch. The quick-start wizard helps you start with this website-building process smoothly and it even lets you design your own templates and layouts using 100 different design block options. Plus, if someone wants to build a Linux-powered website, Dreamhost can do that too.

During our testing, DreamHost caught our attention with its super intuitive staging environments. If you want to have a glimpse of your website or simply want to test it before making it live, staging is your go-to option. It simply creates a duplicate of your website in an isolated environment. Apart from analyzing your site, you can even edit your site, test plugins, and recheck if everything is on point. Dreamhost offers this service with its VPS hosting and WordPress hosting plans.

If your website goes down for some reason, you don’t get any phone support with Dreamhost. All you can do is reach out to their chat and email support which is available 24/7. However, its quick response makes up for this shortcoming.

DreamHost’s security standards also impresses well. It offers a malware remover tool, DreamShield, which gets rid of corrupt files, and free WHOIS Privacy registration that stops others from spamming your site, and limiting your personal details. Plus, it also gives a Transport Layer Security (TLS) and an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt without any extra cost.

Namecheap

NameCheap leads in affordability without compromising on security, offering a drag-and-drop website builder and advanced firewalls. (Image credit: Namecheap)
Best cheap for develoeprs

Reasons to buy

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Easy-to-use website builder 
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Free domain for the first year
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Strong security with PositiveSSL and anti-DDoS
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Automatic backups

Reasons to avoid

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Less storage space compared to other plans
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Not as geared to beginners as other plans

Namecheap started as a domain registrar and on the back of that success started providing web tools at reasonable prices. It now has a large range of web services including, domain names (of course), a range of hosting options, CDN, email, and marketing and security tools.

This pick-and-mix selection is what makes it cheap. Instead of bundling up unlimited sites, email, monthly visitors and data into a plan that costs a large amount dollars a month, there are options to select only want you need.

The Stellar plus shared plan is only $1.98 a month for the first year, and then $4.48 on renewal but still gives you 3 websites, 20 GB storage, and 30 mailboxes. If you want to add a CDN it'll be extra but only an additional $8.88 a month which still brings the total price under a plan with all the bells and whistles.

This plan is not just for developers, the tech savvy can take advantage of it too if they know what they want and don't want. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for beginners that are looking for a well resourced site because knowing what to add and leave out of the plan for the best performance for a site requires a level of knowledge. For that I'd recommend something more like Hostinger. Although that'll be more a month it's still cheaper than hiring someone to manage web hosting.

Hostinger

Hostinger offers great value with its SSD storage capacity and intuitive control panel (Image credit: Hostinger)
Great value for beginners

Reasons to buy

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User-friendly hPanel
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Fast LiteSpeed servers
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Free domain and SSL on most plans
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24/7 live chat and email support

Reasons to avoid

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VPS plans are unmanaged
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Tech savvy users can get a better deal elsewhere
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Website builder does not allow export to other hosts (but you can use WordPress instead)

If you're looking for a reliable and affordable web hosting service, Hostinger is a great choice. Its pricing plans cater to a wide range of audiences, from budget-conscious single website owners to those with more demanding website requirements. With the cheapest plan starting at just $2.49/month (for a 48-month commitment), it offers some really great features at this price point. It includes hosting for up to 100 websites, 100 GB of SSD storage, unlimited free SSL certificates, and bandwidth, along with a free email and a free domain (worth $9.99).

When it comes to performance, NVMe SSD storage reduces the loading time for websites, ensuring a good user experience. Plus, if you're someone who doesn't like to get into the technicalities, Hostinger is super user-friendly and offers a custom control panel (hPanel), which is very intuitive. It keeps things simple and organized so that all your important go-to items are right in front of you. You also get a setup wizard to streamline your setup process.

Overall, if you're looking for a cheap web hosting plan that can handle your website, offer immense features, and even guide you through your hosting and website-building journey, Hostinger is a great choice.

SiteGround

SiteGround blends 99.99% uptime with cutting-edge technology, ideal for small businesses and personal projects. (Image credit: SiteGround)
Best cheap managed WordPress

Reasons to buy

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Fast Google Cloud platform
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Automatic migrations
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Free SSL and CDN
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24/7 support 

Reasons to avoid

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Limited disk space compared to competitors

SiteGround is ideal for someone who is looking to start a small business or for personal projects. You could get the cheapest hosting plan for $2.99/mo(annual subscription) where you get to host a single website, 10 GB web space, 10,000 monthly visits, and many other perks. With a solid uptime guarantee of 99.99%, SiteGround is a reliable web host that can run your website smoothly.

When it comes to managed hosting, this platform goes a step ahead and delivers hassle-free website management through its ultrafast managed WordPress hosting. With SiteGround, you get expert server management, including setup, maintenance, and security configurations. Plus, it also offers automatic updates for server software, including the operating system, web server software, PHP, and MySQL, ensuring that websites run on the latest, most secure, and fastest server configurations without manual intervention.

SiteGround used to have the classic cPanel until 2020, but then they replaced it with their custom control panel called Site Tools. It’s quite easy to use even if you’re a beginner, and it also delivers various modern options, including pinning your favorite/ most useful tools to the top of the screen. That’s not it. You even get a one-click install feature for various popular tools like WordPress, OpenCart, osTicket, Drupal, and Moodle. And, if you’re just starting out, SiteGround has named its tools quite well, like Backups and Site Scanner, and SSL Manager, which makes it even easier to understand.

Unlike its competitors, who offer a CDN plugin in their control panel, SiteGround comes with a CDN feature directly from Cloudflare. It comes free of cost for premium users only up to a certain time. What makes this hosting service even better is its utility of Google Cloud’s super-fast network, which is highly reliable. This lets your websites run on high performance and low latency, all being crucial factors for SEO and user journey.

But, if you’re on a tight budget and disk space is your top priority, SiteGround might not fullfil all your needs because of its super limited offering as compared to its competitors. For instance, Siteground offers 10 GB of disk space compared to Hostinger’s 100 GB of SSD storage. And, if you wish to upgrade your storage on SiteGround, you would need to upgrade to their cloud hosting plan, which is much more costly.

That said, if storage is not your priority and you want to build a small, powerful website that has a stellar performance and high loading speed, SiteGround can do it all for you with it’s CDN and caching.

After the renewal price at $17.99/mo it might not seem cheap but it still beats rivals like WP Engine which is $20/mo. You can get cheaper managed WordPress hosting from other hosts such as GoDaddy but the resources you get don't make it value for money and the reviews are not brilliant. For example, you can purchase GoDaddy's Manage WordPress Basic plan for $12.99/mo but you don't get daily backups or email both of which are worth the extra $5/mo extra.

Best cheap cloud

An image of HostArmada's logo

(Image credit: HostArmada)

Host Armada

Best cheap cloud

Reasons to buy

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Unique shared cloud hosting plans
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Class-leading 45-day money-back guarantee
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Easy to use, even for beginners
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Comprehensive security features on all plans

Reasons to avoid

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Less storage, even if you opt for the highest-end plan
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Prices spike upon renewal

HostArmada is on par with Namecheap and the others when it comes to being a great pick for bargain hunters, thanks to very low initial prices. You can get started with its entry-level “Start Dock” plan at just $1.49 per month if you choose to pay for three years upfront. The good news keeps coming, as the same plan on a 2-year and 1-year billing cycle offers similar rates: $1.64 and $1.79 per month, respectively.

Don't be fooled by its cheap prices, though, as HostArmada packs a lot of value into its shared cloud plans. For instance, the basic plan mentioned above offers 15 GB of fast NVMe storage, 2 GB of RAM, and 2 CPU cores. Additionally, it also comes with free SSL for all websites, daily backups, and plenty of security features, including malware scanning and removal, network firewall, brute-force and antivirus protection, etc.

However, the biggest advantage of HostArmada is that it offers shared hosting in a cloud environment, allowing you to benefit from the cost-effectiveness of a shared hosting scheme and the reliability (less downtime), scalability (more resources available when you need it), security (stricter isolation protocols), and improved performance of cloud hosting. Plus, as I mentioned earlier, it does so at pretty much the exact same rates as the other providers charge for typical shared hosting.

The service is also easy to use, thanks to industry-standard cPanel (which is present free of charge, by the way) and an intuitive dashboard that makes it super convenient to manage your hosting services, account information, domain, and email accounts. Still, if you happen to run into an issue, you can reach out to HostArmada’s customer support via email or live chat 24/7 and expect your query to be resolved almost instantly.

A minor gripe I have with the service is its low storage. For example, even on the highest-end “Speed Reaper” plan, you only get 40 GB of storage, which is quite pale in comparison to the competition, such as Hostinger and GreenGeeks.

Rounding off an excellent overall shared (and cloud) hosting package is a best-in-class 45-day money-back guarantee. While others in the industry give you 30 days, HostArmada adds an extra half a month to give you ample time to try it out without putting on any risk.

Read our HostArmada review

James Capell
B2B Editor, Web Hosting

James is a tech journalist covering interconnectivity and digital infrastructure as the web hosting editor at TechRadar Pro. James stays up to date with the latest web and internet trends by attending data center summits, WordPress conferences, and mingling with software and web developers. At TechRadar Pro, James is responsible for ensuring web hosting pages are as relevant and as helpful to readers as possible and is also looking for the best deals and coupon codes for web hosting.

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