When choosing the best web hosting for your business, you need to balance your desire to save via the best cheap web hosting with the need to fulfil business requirements. Many ultra-cheap web hosts exist, but choosing these tends to be a false economy, as they usually have limited disk space, poor performance, and lack of reliability.
Instead, you should choose a host that performs well and has all the features that your business needs. We’ve put together a series of the best deals available in the market, with all of these providers offering above-average uptime, good customer service, useful features, and fair pricing.
Remember that most hosts will advertise a low introductory price for the first year, and will raise the price for the following years: make sure to factor this into your decision.
The best cheap web hosting available
Hostinger’s cheapest plan, Single Shared Hosting, costs just $1.39 a month for the first term. After that, you’ll pay $2.99 a month. If you pay 48 months in advance, the first four years come to just $66.72 in total. The company is also currently offering up to 80% off premium web hosting ($1.99 a month) for a limited time only, alongside 60% off VPS hosting, and domains for $0.99.
But this ultra-cheap plan has severe limitations. You’re given just 100GB per month, 30GB of disk space, and one email address. No automatic backups of your website are taken, but you do get a free SSL certificate, 24/7/365 support, and a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee.
Though it’s more expensive at $3.99 a month ($8.99 on renewal), the business Shared Hosting from Hostinger has all restrictions removed, so you can have unlimited websites, email accounts, and traffic. Learn more about the host in our comprehensive Hostinger review.
HostGator is a top option if you like “unlimited everything” plans. With the cheapest plan, Hatchling, you get support for a single domain, a free WordPress website transfer, unmetered bandwidth, a free SSL certificate, and a free domain name. Disk space, subdomains, FTP account, MySQL databases, and email addresses are unlimited too.
You get all this for an introductory price of $2.75 a month if you sign up for three years. After the intro period, you’ll pay $6.95 a month, which is still reasonable. Besides the good pricing you get a generous 45-day money-back guarantee and a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee.
HostGator is a little frustrating however, because its website only shows low introductory prices, and hides prices you’ll pay when you renew in the fine print. For example, when you sign up for a shared hosting plan, it automatically adds a service called SiteLock that scans your website for malware daily. It’s listed as $1.99 a month, but a small disclaimer states that after 12 months, you’ll be billed $71.88 for each following year. We prefer hosts to be clearer with their pricing.
The company routinely updates its web hosting and website builders deals online, and if you use the coupon code SNAPPY, you can access a range of savings including 75% off VPS hosting, 60% off shared hosting, 50% off the Gator Website Builders, and 57% off WordPress hosting.
Learn more about HostGator’s services and web hosting in our HostGator review.
tsoHost is a top British hosting company that offers everything from cloud hosting to customized dedicated servers. Its inexpensive cloud hosting packages are a good choice for a UK company looking to get off the ground.
tsoHost’s Economy plan costs £3.99 a month + VAT, which is about $6.29. This is a discounted price for paying annually, and it should be noted that there’s no increase in price after the first year.
With this plan, you get a free domain name, 100GB of storage, unlimited bandwidth, and 100 1GB mailboxes. Other highlights are a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee, cPanel control panel, one-click app installer, and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
If you need more from the service, there are three more expensive plans that you can upgrade to. As tsoHost offers cloud hosting instead of shared hosting, it’s easy to scale your service up or down as you see fit. Find out more about the company in our tsoHost review.
The GoDaddy Economy plan costs $5.99 a month for the first term before increasing to $8.99 for subsequent terms. For this, you get 100GB of storage, unmetered bandwidth, and free Microsoft 365 email for the first year.
All plans include a one-click installer for over 150 popular apps, like WordPress and Joomla, and you get the industry-standard cPanel control panel at no extra cost. On the Economy plan, though, you can only host one website.
GoDaddy makes it easy to upgrade to its more powerful plans via a one-click purchase. Therefore, you could choose GoDaddy Economy at first and later expand to GoDaddy’s $12.99 a month Ultimate plan when you have more traffic.
Finally, at the moment the company is is offering its managed WordPress hosting for 70% off via coupon code GDD1mwp. Make sure to read our GoDaddy web hosting review to learn more about the packages and the services it offers.
Domain.com’s most popular web hosting plan is also its cheapest—the Basic plan costs just $3.75 a month, whether you purchase a one-year, two-year, or three-year plan. However, hidden away in the fine print is the renewal price: $4.99 a month.
It’s not a huge price increase compared to many on this list, and indeed, the renewal price is still excellent value for money, but we feel that Domain.com should make this information more prominent during the checkout process.
The Basic plan includes support for one website, 10 MySQL databases, and an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt. You get unlimited disk space and bandwidth too, subject to terms and conditions. Read our Domain.com review to learn more about the web host and its services.
InterServer is a web hosting company that offers standard web hosting, active server page hosting, virtual private server (VPS) hosting, cloud storage, and dedicated servers. At $2.50 a month, it’s one of the cheapest hosts on our list, and we do like that the price you pay to sign up for is locked in forever, and the plan is quite well featured.
For your $5, you get unlimited disk space, email accounts, bandwidth, FTP accounts, and email forwarders. There’s more: you also get free SSL certificates, RAID and Cloudflare caching, automatic malware scanning, weekly backups, and a free website migration.
With the one-click installer, you can easily install over 450 popular cloud apps, including software like WordPress, Joomla, osCommerce, Magneto, phpBB, YetiForce, and ownCloud. If you’re looking for a cheap web host that has transparent pricing and doesn’t cut any corners, InterServer is a good bet.
IONOS by 1&1 advertises its Business plan as $0.50 a month, but this is a gimmick, as after the first year, you pay $10 a month. For a cheaper ongoing price, you can choose the $4 a month Essential plan.
It’s fairly restrictive, with just 10GB of storage, 10 email accounts, and support for just one website, but it’s easy enough to upgrade to the Business plan if you need to expand, and unlike that plan, the Essential plan only increases to $6 a month after the first year.
With IONOS, you’re not locked into a long contract, so it’s easier to make these business decisions on the fly based on your current requirements. IONOS handily outlines how many visitors per minute that each plan should support. The Essential plan works for up to 50 visitors per minute to your site, the Business plan can handle up to 200 visitors per minute, and the Expert plan can handle 500 visitors per minute.
Other features include automatic daily backups and site scans, direct denial of service (DDoS) protection, a one-click installer for over 70 applications, 10 MySQL databases, a free domain for a year, 10 email accounts, a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee, and 24/7 customer service.
iPage is a cheap hosting product that’s owned by Endurance International Group (EIG). This huge conglomerate also owns HostGator and Domain.com, and as one of the largest web hosting providers on the internet, EIG can offer great deals.
If you choose a three-year plan with iPage, you’ll pay $1.99 a month for the first three years. After that, the price quadruples to $7.99 a month, so factor that into your buying decision. With this plan, you get a free domain name, SSL certificate, and domain transfer. Disk space, bandwidth, and domains are all unlimited, subject to fair use.
Certain services, like daily automatic backups, domain privacy, and WordPress optimization, cost extra. A wide range of ecommerce solutions are available for setting up a shop, and there’s 24/7 phone and chat support.
iPage is a safe choice from a big industry player. The introductory price is excellent, but after the initial term, the service isn’t so cheap.
If you’re looking for the best price with a well-known web host, Denmark-based One.com is a reasonable choice. Its plans start at just $2.49 a month, with a renewal price of $4.99 a month after the first term.
With this cheap plan, you get 50GB of SSD storage, unlimited traffic, automated backups, 100 email accounts, and 75 Google Ads credit. Features such as one-click WordPress installation are reserved for One.com’s more expensive plans. One.com has over 1.5 million active users, and there are five pricier plans that you can upgrade to if you need more webspace.
123 Reg is a well-known brand in the UK that started as a domain name registrar and moved into web hosting. Now it offers a range of reasonably-priced hosting plans. The cheapest one is the Starter plan, which is £2.99 ($3.93) a month for the first year, paid annually. After the first year, prices are bumped 40 percent.
With the Starter plan, you get a free domain, one mailbox, 100GB of web space, unlimited bandwidth, and 10 1GB MySQL databases. Email mailbox size is only 5GB, which is a little tight compared to the competition.
123 Reg has three more expensive plans if you find yourself needing more webspace, email mailboxes, or CPU power. This makes it easy to expand in the future.
What to look for in a cheap web host
When looking for a cheap hosting provider for your site, it’s important to bear quality in mind, as most major hosts have a range of cost-effective plans, but not all provide the same level of value.
The best web hosting providers offer excellent support, reliable uptime guarantees, and fast server response times as well. A cheap shared hosting plan won’t offer the same server speeds or support as the most expensive dedicated hosting.
It’s also worth remembering most hosts will cap maximum storage and bandwidth on cheaper plans, so you must make sure you choose the plan that works for your business.
What’s the difference between free and cheap web hosting?
Some web hosts offer limited versions of their services for free, but these are usually meant to help customers get a sense of hosting before signing up. Free web hosting rarely ever offers the same number of features as paid hosting, and imposes many restrictions to cap usage for economic feasibility.
Only go for free hosting if you want to test-run things before launch, or if you require a site for personal use. Professionals and business owners should always consider paid hosting.
