Best Cheap Web Hosting Services: Top Budget Shared Hosts in 2020

Looking for the best cheap web hosting provider, but you can’t decide because all budget hosts seem to offer the same features?

You’re in the right place.

Quick summary:

Need a quick answer? Here are my top 3 low-cost providers:

• DreamHost – best value cheap host for bloggers and portfolio websites (from $2.59 / mo.)
• InterServer – best for 2 or more websites and for high-traffic sites (from $4.00 / mo.)
• SiteGround – best for hosting an e-commerce website (from $6.99 / mo.)

The three cheap providers above offer free SSL certificates, free auto website backups, easy WordPress installation, excellent customer service, hands-off security features, and excellent speed and uptime.

What’s on this page?

Choose your destiny!

Other InterServer plans

As far as cheap shared hosting goes, InterServer offers just the one plan I discussed above.

For more advanced users, Interserver offers services such as:

• Linux VPS – from $6.00 / mo.
• Windows VPS – from $10 /mo.
• Dedicated hosting– from $199 / mo.

See my detailed InterServer review for more details on pricing, tools & features, and my speed test results.

#3: SiteGround “StartUp” plan:

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“Startup” plan pricing (per month):

Total cost of hosting:

(First term / Renewal)

• 12-month plan: $84/ $180
• 36-month plan: $377.64/ $540

SiteGround is the most expensive of the cheap shared providers I cover here.

What you get for the money is the best speed and uptime (jump to my performance tests for the details) – both of which are very important for e-commerce and business websites.

You also get a support team with exceptional knowledge of the technical aspects of hosting. This will prove helpful when trying to troubleshoot the type of advanced hosting problems you might run into with an e-commerce website.

Although all of the web hosts I discuss here offer solid speed and performance (except where I say otherwise), the extra stability you get from SiteGround is important for e-commerce sites in particular.

That’s because even minor speed and uptime fluctuations that don’t matter for a personal website, can have a negative impact on an e-commerce website’s business and sales.

What’s included in the plan?

The shared StartUp plan comes with 10 GB of storage and support for one website.

While there is no official data transfer limit, SiteGround states that the plan is ideal for hosting a site that receives up to 10 000 visitors per month.

You also get all the basic tools and features such as a free SSL certificate and a free migration of an existing website, along with free automatic daily backups of your site.

Domain name costs

A .com domain from SiteGround will set you back $15.95 per year, while .org and .net domains both cost $17.95 annually.

Customer service

SiteGround’s technical support team is the best in the business.

I’ve spoken with well over a hundred support representatives from various cheap hosting companies while conducting my tests, and none seemed as genuinely courteous and eager to help as the good people at SiteGroud.

They make you feel as if they were your personal assistant, and their full attention is on solving your problem at all costs.

You can request help via live chat (24/7) or through email.

Other hosting plans

If you need to host more than one website or if your website serves much more than 10 000 visitors per month, consider SiteGround’s GrowBig ($9.99/mo.) or GoGeek ($14.99/mo.) plans.

These two upper-tier shared hosting plans aren’t cheap by any means, but they offer more resources.

SiteGround also sells high-end managed Cloud hosting plans starting at $80 per month.

See my full SiteGround review for more about their shared hosting plans.

Other popular cheap web hosting providers:

#4: Hostinger “Single” plan:

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“Single” plan pricing (per month):

Total cost of hosting:

(First term / Renewal)

• 12-month plan: $35.88 / $39
• 48-month plan: $47.52 / $103

Why isn’t Hostinger in my top 3?

Considering the low price alone, Hostinger is definitely the cheapest web hosting provider on my list.

So why didn’t I rank them as the #1 best cheap web host instead of DreamHost?

Three reasons:

1. In my experience, Hostinger’s post-sale live tech support can take an hour or more to respond.
2. Their user interface isn’t as beginner-friendly as DreamHost’s – even though Hostinger’s overall website design is great
3. Their servers aren’t as fast as DreamHost’s

I strongly believe that quick and responsive technical support is essential when it comes to customer satisfaction.

When your website is down or loading very slowly, you don’t want assistance an hour later – you want assistance right now.

Still, if quick technical support isn’t a priority for you and you don’t slightly slower (but still reasonably fast) website load times, Hostinger is a viable alternative to DreamHost.

Domain name costs

Hostinger offers a free domain for one year with their annual or longer shared hosting plans, which I didn’t expect considering the very low cost of their service.

Renewing a domain name costs $10.99/year, which is one of the best prices in the industry.

Customer service

As I mentioned earlier, live chat queues are very long; it can take more than an hour to connect to Hostinger’s post-sales live chat technical support department.

While I understand that cheap web hosting providers need to cut costs wherever possible, I don’t think support quality is where they should be looking for savings.

On the flip side, the quality of support – once I managed to connect – was very good, particularly for a provider with such wallet-friendly prices.

Support agents went out of their way to help and even consulted their colleagues when they didn’t have an answer to my question.

See my detailed Hostinger review for more.

#5: A2 Hosting “Startup” plan:

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“Startup” plan prices (per month):

Total cost of hosting:

(First term / Renewal)

• 12-month plan: $93.84/ $107.88
• 36-month plan: $107.64/ $323.64

Why isn’t A2 Hosting in my top 3?

Although they offer quality support and great speed, the fact is this isn’t enough – good support and speed are very common in the competitive shared hosting industry nowadays.

A2 is simply too expensive (as far as cheap hosts go), and I don’t feel that the price is justified.

The only exception is the 3-year contract ($2.99 per month). However, it renews for $8.99 per month, which is double what my top two web hosts charge.

Domain name costs

Unfortunately, A2 doesn’t offer a free domain.

The cost of registering and renewing a domain is currently $14.95 per year.

Customer support

Queue times are usually shorter than a minute, which I really enjoyed. The standard of support I received from A2 while testing their shared hosting service was very high.

See my A2 hosting review for more details about their shared hosting.

#6: Bluehost “Basic” plan:

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Basic plan prices (per month):

Total cost of hosting:

(First term / Renewal)

• 12-month plan: $65.40/ $107.88
• 36-month plan: $99/ $287.64

Why isn’t Bluehost in my top 3?

Bluehost is one of the most popular cheap shared hosting providers; more than 1.2% of the world’s active websites are hosted with them.

And while I would have probably recommended them five or ten years ago, ever since they’ve been acquired in 2010 by Endurance International Group (EIG), the quality of their service has gone downhill.

Currently, Bluehost suffers from two major drawbacks:

• Their shared hosting servers are overcrowded, as you can see in my review. This leads to frequent problems with website speed stability.
• Bluehost outsources its customer service. Their support agents aren’t native English speakers, which sometimes causes frustrating communication issues.

Granted, Bluehost has some upsides, such as a recognizable brand, free domain name registration for one year, competitively priced shared hosting subscriptions, and one of the best control panels.

However, DreamHost offers all of the above without sacrificing on performance or support quality, and they top things off with much cheaper renewals and a better set of advanced features and tools.

Domain name costs

Although you can get a free domain from Bluehost for 12 months, they have one of the most expensive domain renewals in the shared hosting industry – $17.99 per year.

Customer support

While knowledgeable and helpful, Bluehost’s support agents sometimes had difficulty understanding my questions.

They can also take a long time to reply to questions. Overall, their support is very far from the best.

See my full Bluehost review for more.

#7: HostWinds “Basic” plan:

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“Basic” plan prices (per month)

Total cost of hosting:

(First term / Renewal)

• 12-month plan: $39.48/ $83.88
• 36-month plan: $84.60/ $179.64

Why isn’t Hostwinds in my top 3?

Hostwinds gets all the basics right, and their shared hosting plans don’t break the bank.

Unfortunately, they fail to shine in any one particular area, and their renewals are a bit expensive compared to DreamHost’s and InterServer’s.

What’s more, Hostwinds don’t offer free website backups; they charge $3.00 a month for a premium backups add-on.

The quality of their live chat support is a bit hit-and-miss.

One upside is that they offer unlimited storage. However, you’re site is unlikely to ever need more than 10-20 GB of disk space. In fact, most WordPress sites – even large ones – take up less than 10 GB.

Overall, HostWinds is a decent budget provider with all the basic features in place (except free backups). It’s just that my top 3 picks offer much better value for the money.

Domain name costs

Hostwinds is one of the cheap web hosts that offer a free domain for one year, which is always great to see.

Renewing a domain after the first year costs $14.84/year, which is one of the better deals around.

Customer support

Even though live chat queue times are short, the quality of support I’ve received from Hostwinds has been mixed.

Instead of directly answering my questions, their support agents often provided me with links to extensive FAQ articles on their website and asked me to look through the articles for an answer to my questions.

Not exactly my idea of “quality support.”

See my Hostwinds review for more details.

#8 AccuWeb “Personal” plan:

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“Personal” plan pricing (per month):

Like Bluehost, Accuweb doesn’t sell a monthly term. There’s also very little difference in monthly fees between subscriptions.

Total cost of hosting:

(First term / Renewal)

• 12-month plan: $38.88/ $44.52
• 36-month plan: $111.24/ $127.80

Why isn’t AccuWeb in my top #3?

For exactly the same reasons as Hostwinds:

• Even though they are affordable and offer good performance, they don’t excel at one thing in particular
• Their customer support quality is mediocre

Accuweb is definitely cheap. But is it the best cheap web host for any particular purpose? I don’t believe so.

Domain name costs

You’ll get a free domain for one year if you purchase an annual-or-longer shared hosting plan.

After that, you’ll pay $12.99 per year for a .com – one of the best prices anywhere.

Customer service

Although live chat queues are short and the quality of support is good, I really didn’t enjoy the support experience overall:

1. I was disconnected from live chat in the middle of a conversation multiple times (my internet connection was fine). This is unacceptable.
2. Support agents sometimes take way too long to reply. Imagine asking a question, receiving a reply, then asking a follow-up question, and waiting 10 minutes to hear back.

See my AccuWeb review for more about their shared hosting services.

#9: HostGator “Hatchling” plan:

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“Hatchling” plan prices (per month):

Total cost of hosting:

(First term / Renewal)

• 12-month plan: $47.40/ $107.40
• 36-month plan: $99/ $250.2

Why isn’t HostGator in my top #3?

First, let’s get the obvious out of the way:

HostGator is a very popular shared hosting provider, and they have a cool crocodile as a company mascot. They also have reasonably cheap first terms.

Now for the bad:

• Poor technical support (post-sales). They’re just not that helpful.
• My test website experienced frequent speed issues; it would load quickly (in less than 2 second) at one time, but would take 5 or 6 seconds to load later in the day.
• Very expensive renewals given the average performance quality

HostGator would have to undergo some major changes to earn a spot in my “top 3” lineup.

Domain name costs

HostGator now offers a free domain name for one year with their 12-month, 24-month, and 36-month shared hosting plans.

After that, HostGator’s standard domain name renewal price of $17.99 applies.

Customer support

Like Bluehost’s, HostGator’s support agents are not native English speakers and often have communication difficulties.

I’ve also found them to be downright incompetent at times. For some examples, see my experience with HostGator’s live chat support.

#10: GoDaddy “Economy” plan:

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“Economy” plan prices (per month):

Total cost of hosting:

(First term / Renewal)

• 12-month plan: $59.88/ $107.88
• 36-month plan: $161.64/ $323.64

Why not in my top 3?

Like HostGator, GoDaddy is an extremely popular company.

In fact, around 6% of the world’s active websites are hosted with GoDaddy. This makes them the most widely used web host on the planet.

Unfortunately, they have so many drawbacks I’m not sure where to begin:

• As far as “cheap web hosting” goes, GoDaddy’s plans are expensive
• Hosting renewals cost more than twice as much as what you’ll pay at DreamHost
• My GoDaddy test website couldn’t handle 10 simultaneous visitors without issues
• They constantly try to sell you on add-on services you don’t need
• Live chat queue waits are often longer than 60 minutes (phone support is much faster)
• Their domain name renewals are the most expensive around ($18 / year for a .com)
• Their privacy agreement is way more complicated than it needs to be
• Their 3-month plan comes with a 48-hour money-back guarantee instead of their usual 30-day money back guarantee.

I would strongly recommend against hosting with GoDaddy.

Performance tests

I purchased a cheap shared hosting account with each host I discussed above and set up a test website with each one. (Here’s my procedure for setting up a test site.)

I then performed the following tests for each site:

• Uptime tests – to measure the length of time each website remained accessible online
• Speed tests – to see how quickly each website loaded
• Traffic spike tests – to see if the website can maintain good performance even under heavy traffic loads

Here’s what my research revealed.

#1: Uptime test

I used Uptime Robot to track the uptime of all websites for 3 months:

Uptime (availability) expresses the amount of time a website remains accessible online. The higher the uptime percentage, the better.

The lower the uptime percentage, the more downtime your website experiences. When your site is down, visitors can’t access it.

Here are examples of how long your website would be offline in a typical month for a given uptime percentage:

An uptime below 99.95% should be a red flag. Luckily, all of the hosts I tested had up-times of 99.95% or higher.

#2: Speed test

I used GTMetrix to test the speed of my sites once per hour for an entire week. That’s close to 170 speed tests per website.

Here’s the average load speed for each cheap shared hosting provider:

SiteGround outperformed all competitors with a stellar load speed of 0.6 seconds (600 milliseconds).

All websites loaded in less than 2.0 seconds, which is very good.

Traffic Spike Test

I used LoadImpact to simulate real-user activity on each of my test websites.

During the simulation, I kept an eye out for:

• HTTP request errors
• I/O timeouts

HTTP errors and I/O timeouts suggest that the host experienced difficulties handling the sudden onslaught of traffic. A real user would experience this as a page failing to load or loading very slowly.

Simulation #1 – 100 simultaneous visitors:

Only SiteGround, InterServer, and A2 were able to handle 100 concurrent website visitors without problems.

DreamHost handled 63% of requests correctly, meaning that around 37% of requests resulted in an error – an obvious sign of resource overload. The remaining hosts did even worse than DreamHost.

HostWinds and Hostinger performed the worst – my test sites were under so much stress that they went offline.

Overall, if your site serves 100 or more simultaneous visitors on a regular basis (that’s a lot of traffic; most sites don’t ever come close to this), and you don’t want any of your visitors to have trouble loading your pages, I strongly recommend that you choose SiteGround, InterServer, or A2.

Simulation #2 – 50 simultaneous visitors:

At 50 concurrent site visitors, HostWinds was now able to handle 100% of incoming traffic – a great improvement over the previous test.

Hostinger is still at the bottom of the barrel

Simulation #3 – 25 concurrent users:

Now, iPage was performing flawlessly, and Hostinger saw a great improvement (from 21% to 90%).

GoDaddy was barely able to handle 51% of server requests correctly. Clearly, 25 simultaneous website visitors was too much for GoDaddy.

Simulation #5 – 10 concurrent users test:

I was shocked to see that even at 10 simultaneous users, GoDaddy’s web servers were struggling and returning an error for 25% of traffic.

Verdict: best cheap shared hosting for high-traffic sites

Based on my traffic spike research, here is my conclusion:

If your site regularly serves 100 concurrent visitors, you probably have a monster of a website with thousands of daily visitors. In that case, InterServer is my top recommendation overall.

For new or smaller sites with dozens or hundreds of daily visitors, any shared hosting provider will do – just make sure to avoid GoDaddy and HostGator.