7 Best Web Hosting Services Of 2025

Web hosts are like internet landlords, providing a place for websites to live in return for a rental fee. Some website builders offer hosting for free, but if you’re using a builder like WordPress you’ll have to pay for hosting.

Paid-for hosting can provide elevated security features and faster or more consistent loading times.

Domain hosting is a place for your website’s address to live, whereas web hosting is where your website’s content and code lives.

There are many providers who can host your domain and your website, which can be convenient.

While price is an important factor in choosing a web host, it’s not the only thing people consider.

A WordPress hosting survey (see table below) found almost one-in-three of those polled (31%) valued good customer support, 14% said price was important, while 14% said they cared most about ease of use.

The nature of your business will dictate your priorities. Security, for example, will matter a great deal for those handling sensitive customer data.

WHAT’S IMPORTANT	% OF USERS
Customer Support	31.39%
Price	14.92%
Ease of use	14.07%
Performance	9.78%
Reliability	9.78%
Features	8.92%
Security	3.26%
It’s free	2.74%

(Source: https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/wordpress-hosting-survey-results/)

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We all have favourites, but we put that aside to dig into all the data before testing our 17 candidates. Our rubric included 32 factors in four categories to ensure we looked at not only the most popular features but also what you need to ensure the best functionality for your websites. Then we weighted the scores based on importance to small businesses to come up with an overall score.

A few of the factors we considered include:

DECISION FACTOR	SCORING WEIGHT	DESCRIPTION
Consumer Sentiment	40%	Things change over time, and we wanted to see if user experiences were getting better or worse and where people were experiencing issues.
General Features	30%	This category included functional tools and things that make your life easier. SSL certificates, business email addresses, CDNs, website builders and automatic backups are just a small cross section of the features we checked.
Service and Support	10%	Murphy’s Law is the order of the day in web hosting and eventually, when you least expect it, something will go wrong. We looked at how quickly and easily you can get help when you need it.
Value	20%	Budgets are a given, but cheapest isn’t always best. We looked at what you get for your money to find the best deals.

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Let’s cut to the bottom line. If you have never had a website before, most people will only need a shared hosting plan. At the very least, check into these items when choosing a shared hosting plan:

• website traffic limits
• how much you have to pay upfront
• is it managed or unmanaged?
• are emails included?
• customer service options
• is there a website builder?
• uptime rates
• server response times
• bandwidth limits
• storage limits.
• Is it portable?

Essential web hosting features

Essential web hosting features will depend heavily on the type of hosting you need. A VPS will have very different specs than a bare metal cloud server. That said, some features do cut across most types of web hosting.

• bandwidth. How much data you can transfer to and from your website.
• storage. You need to store your files, customer data and media somewhere.
• SSL Certificates. This puts the “s” on the end of HTTP and encrypts data transfers.
• security. Tools such as two-factor authentication, zero-trust protocols and DDoS protections help prevent cyberattacks.
• backups. Ransomware, natural disasters or even an intern tripping over a power cord can tank your website. Backups help you recover quickly.
• support. You need someone to turn to when things go wrong. Even with your own IT team, sometimes you need the help of someone with physical access to the servers.

Hosts on our list stand out in these features. For example, Mochahost’s determined support team, TMDHosting’s security features and DreamHost’s strong uptime guarantee.

Value

Sometimes, cheap really is cheap, and you have to pay a little more for quality. Value is that fine point balancing cost, product features and product quality. Providers on our list offer reasonable values, but many require paying for one to four years upfront to realise that balance.

Not every business can afford large chunk payments and must look at the best value for monthly payment plans.

For overall value, Hostwinds, TMDHosting and Namecheap pull together strong combinations of features compared to costs when looking at monthly billing plans.

Customer service

Even if you have a great tech team, there are times you need customer support. Billing errors occur, issues with the control panel pop up or there’s a tech issue with the physical servers. Being able to reach someone quickly at your web host can mean the difference between no downtime and thousands in lost sales.

For quick customer service response times, look at hosts such as Mochahost and IONOS.

Portability

Even if you love your web host’s services, there may come a time when you need to move your website. Companies are sold, terms change or you might outgrow the hosting offerings. Portability means your website files are yours and can be migrated to a new host.

For the best portability, look for cPanel plans from hosts such as Mochahost, TMDHosting and Namecheap.

Scalability

Regardless of your business type, most of us are planning for some amount of company growth. As companies grow and website demands grow, especially e-commerce businesses, you’ll need more bandwidth and eventually to move from shared hosting to something like VPS where you can increase or decrease computing power on the fly.

For scalability with stronger hosting types, consider hosts such as IONOS, DreamHost and Hostwinds.

In the final analysis, which web host you choose will depend on your unique needs. While some points—including storage, speed, customer service, security and scalability—will be important to consider in every situation, it’s those unique characteristics of your business that will make the final call between a good host and the right web host for you.

For example, these are three common sets of situations SMBs run into:

• If you have limited technical experience, choose a managed web host such as TMDHosting.
• For a shoestring budget, look for a host with low monthly billing options such as Namecheap.
• If you already have a website but want to move to a more fully featured host, consider a host such as Mochahost that offers free migration.

Shared hosting suits smaller businesses because it’s the most budget-friendly option, especially if they don’t need to do much in the way of customisation. The downside is that shared hosting can mean compromising on performance and security, as your resources share a home with other organisations.

Virtual Private Servers (VPS) hosting solves these compromises with dedicated server resources and security. Growing businesses with websites which perhaps get moderate traffic can benefit from VPS hosting. There’s also managed and unmanaged VPS hosting, the latter providing maintenance and services to keep your site online, while the former is handled by your organisation.

WordPress websites can benefit from WordPress managed hosting. While there are less avenues for customisation, technical support and software updates can save you some hassle.

Cloud hosting distributes the hosting of your site across multiple servers. This gives you a boost in performance, as you’re not relying on a single point of failure, but it is often more expensive than other hosting types.

Dedicated hosting gives your website a server of its own, rather than some space on a server on which other businesses host their sites. This is good for performance and security, if you’re willing and able to pay the premium for it.

The difference in cost between different types of hosting, and even the differences within each type, can be significant.

• shared web hosting can cost up to £19/month
• VPS web hosting costs between £1 and £30/month
• WordPress managed hosting costs between £1 and £17/month
• Cloud hosting costs between £4 and £60/month
• dedicated server hosting starts at around £60 and rises to several hundreds of pounds per month.

Website hosting cost factors

The following factors influence how much you’ll pay for hosting:

• higher levels of data storage cost more to host
• websites that need to handle greater levels of traffic will pay more for hosting
• hosting multiple websites tend to increase hosting costs
• static IP addresses come with a premium
• some hosting plans charge extra for an SSL certificate
• hosting plans with more customer service options tend to cost more

Fees and add-ons

Some fees are non-negotiable. For example, there are hosting providers who charge fees for setting up your hosting, for support, or for registering/transferring a domain. Other fees are optional. For example, you might be able to pay a premium for additional security, or optimisation.

Multicloud hosting

We expect the trend towards multicloud hosting from 2024 to continue into and throughout 2025. Multicloud hosting involves having computing tasks handled by two or more cloud computing platforms.

Fewer on-site data centres

The continuing shift to cloud hosting inevitably means fewer third-party, on-site data centres. This has the benefit of making hosting cheaper, more flexible, while also making scaling easier.

Establishing an online presence for your business goes beyond hosting and domains alone. Here are some other things to consider:

Website builders: Even with a domain and hosting taken care of, you’ll still need to build your actual website. Website builders are designed to help people with little or no experience building websites to create something professional and functional. Some even integrate hosting for convenience.

Ecommerce functionality: If the main reason for wanting to get your business online is to sell your products there are hosting providers who can offer ecommerce functionality such as payment gateways, shopping carts, secure checkouts and so forth.

Email hosting: Professional email addresses such as [email protected] give you organisation credibility and establish trust. An email hosting service can help you to set that up.