Are you looking to start your own writing website?
Then you want to start by picking a hosting plan for your site.
As a freelance writer, you don't need a fancy hosting platform to get your site running.
What truly matters is that you get a hosting provider that's fast, safe, reliable, and cheap.
With all the bad and repetitive blog hosting reviews I've read—most of which put the reviewer's own financial incentives over their reader's interests—I want to set the record straight.
In this article, I broke down the five features you must look for when shopping for blog hosting. Forget about all the weird-sounding technicalities—I have made everything extremely easy to understand, even for the most non-technical person.
I then analyzed the top five most popular blog hosting companies and how they perform for each of the five features.
Based on my blog hosting review, you will be able to come to your own conclusions and make the best decision possible.
Does that sound good?
Great, let's get started.
What to Look for In Your Blog Hosting
I'm sure the #1 question you must be having right now is:
"What's the best hosting for my writing site?"
Sadly, the only answer I can give you is: "it depends."
"Best hosting" depends on what you consider as "good."
Every hosting company will throw you a bunch of technical features so you get confused and buy the one with the most bells and whistles.
But let me tell you: you don't need most of them.
I believe that a "great" blog hosting service must meet the following criteria:
- It must be fast and reliable.
- It must have excellent customer reviews.
- It must have great customer support.
- It must be safe.
- It must be cost-efficient.
A slow, unsafe, and clunky website hosting platform is bad for business, no matter how cheap it may be.
Before I review the best blog hosting services for your writing site, let's analyze each of the criteria mentioned above so you can understand what to look for in your hosting service provider.
Each of these criteria items are organized in the following way:
- Performance (response time and uptime).
- Customer reviews.
- Customer support.
- Security.
- Price.
Performance: Uptime and Response Time
Your site needs to be fast. Consider that Google may use site speed as a ranking factor, which means optimizing for it can lead to an increase in organic traffic. Site speed has also been known to impact on conversion rates, costs per clicks, and user experience. The slower a site is, the worse it is.
Even though a big part of a site's performance is tied to the way you have set it up, your hosting service provider still plays a big role in the overall performance.
Within this broad category of "performance," you want to look for the following two aspects for each website hosting provider:
- High uptime: Your hosting must guarantee that no matter what, your site must be available to load at all times. Most hosting providers guarantee 99% uptime. The best ones have uptimes of 99.99x%, meaning that their uptime is between 99.990% to 99.999%. Every hundredth of a percent, as small as it may look, represents hours of downtime—a seemingly small problem that can have disastrous consequences for your site.
- High response time: Your hosting must react quickly to your visitor's request, serving them with your site's data in microseconds. This is measured by the "response time." Google seems to use 200 milliseconds as the ideal response time from an SEO perspective.
To measure both criteria, I will use the data taken from HRank. Their analysis takes the performance of thousands of sites hosted in each of the five blog hosting providers mentioned below.
This isn't to say that their results are perfect—many other sites like Bitcatcha show different results, as you can see. But because HRank's analysis is broader in scope, I will take theirs as our benchmark.
Your hosting's performance is not the same as your site's speed. The former is the foundation upon which your site will perform. No matter how optimized your website is, if your server has low response times, your site won't be fast. The same applies to the other way around.
Both your site and your server must be optimized for speed.
Customer Reviews
Ignore affiliate marketers whose only motivation to promote a blog hosting company is their juicy commission. For what it's worth, ignore me too. Instead, check the reviews of current and former customers.
This includes forums, social media, and the comments people leave in specialized blogs. They will tell you the truth beyond what any marketer can.
Ideally, you want a blog hosting that has overwhelmingly positive reviews. You should read the negative ones to see the issues their customers raised. If you see a majority of negative reviews, then avoid the company.
To get the best and most trustworthy customer reviews, I will check the ones from Trustpilot.
Customer Support
At some point, you will have problems with your site. Maybe you see that your site is down, or maybe you have a problem installing a plugin. Whatever the case, you want to get professional support quickly. What's more, you should expect to get a solution fast, either immediately or in a matter of hours.
To measure a blog hosting customer support, I will analyze Trustpilot's customer reviews that talk about this specific aspect.
Security
Your site can be vulnerable to security attacks. Even if your site is small, you never know what problems lie around the corner. You should always put your security as a top priority for you, especially for something as important as your website.
Think of your web security as the lock and keys you use in your home. You wouldn't use a cheap lock in your house, would you? Similarly, you don't want to use a cheap hosting provider that can put your business (and your visitors) at risk.
Some key aspects I will analyze for each of the blog hosting providers below include:
- Their firewalls.
- Their security policies for their shared servers.
- Their hacking prevention systems.
- Their security policies for detected attacks.
I will check all the security measures the blog hosting providers analyzed report. The more they explain about their measures, the better they will fare.
Other Features
All large blog hosting providers offer more features that you need. While some of these features can be ignored, especially if you have a small site, others are useful.
Some of the features that any great hosting provider should include:
- Unlimited bandwidth and disk space.
- SSD (solid-state drive) storage by default.
- Free domains.
- Free server transfer.
- Free CDN.
- Free email.
- Unlimited databases.
- Money-back guarantee.
- Multiple host locations.
- Environmentally-friendly hosting.
Most of these features are standard in every hosting provider. Since they don't make a difference in the quality of their service, these features won't impact their final review. I will still include them as an FYI.
Price
Last but not least, you need to analyze the price of your hosting provider. Obviously, you want to spend as little as possible while still getting a safe, high-performing site.
All shared hosting providers offer cheap plans starting for as little as $1.95. Sometimes, blog hosting providers offer special deals for less than a dollar. Whatever the case, your focus shouldn't be on the cost, but on the performance and quality of their hosting service.
The more features you want, and the more traffic volume your writing site gets, the more expensive your hosting will be.
In either case, all of the blog hosting providers shown here have pretty much the same prices as their service has been commoditized.
What Hosting Type Should You Choose?
There are three different types of blog hosting (ordered from cheapest and least complex to most expensive and complex):
- Shared: In this type of server, your site is a folder in a server that shares the same computing power with other sites.
- VPS: Private hosting, also known as "virtual private server" (VPS), is a virtual machine that works as a standalone server. You also share your private server with other people, but unlike a shared server, you can control your VPS as if it was an independent unit.
- Dedicated: Unlike shared and VPS hosting, a dedicated server gives you an entire server just for your site. You have full control over your operations. At the same time, you are also responsible for keeping it working properly.
As a rule of thumb, if you are starting your first site and have a small or nonexistent audience, you want to start with a shared hosting plan.
Either a VPS or a dedicated server is unnecessary for your needs. For this reason, in this article, I will ignore the companies that offer these hosting types.
If you already have at least a few thousand monthly visitors and an email list with a few hundred subscribers, you consider switching to a managed WordPress hosting plan.
A managed WordPress hosting plan is a server optimized specifically for WordPress sites. They offer much better performance at a low price and can sustain higher volumes of traffic.
Some companies offer managed WordPress hosting in shared servers (all of the ones mentioned in this article), while others offer VPS (e.g., Flywheel, which I don't mention in this article, is one case).
The five blog hosting companies shared below offer both shared and managed hosting solutions. The prices you will see in the plans will reflect the cheapest plans for their shared hosting plans. But if you are interested in their managed hosting plans, you can check them in their respective sites.
The 5 Best Blog Hosting Sites for Writers: A Detailed Review
Most review sites talk about the same blog hosting companies over and over. The reason for that is simple: they offer cheap plans and high affiliate commissions for those who promote them. This isn't to say they aren't good; they are, and I will share with you the best ones.
My blog hosting review will only be useful if you are a freelance writer and you want to:
- Have a basic site with a home page, a service page, a writing portfolio, and a contact form.
- Write about your knowledge of your potential clients.
- Build an audience and sell digital products or services like coaching.
The best five blog hosting companies I will review are:
TL;DR: Here's Where to Host Your Writing Site
From all the companies mentioned in this list, the best blog hosting platform is SiteGround.
Even though I have never used them, their reviews, features, performance, customer support, and security are the best on this list. And their prices are as low as they can be.
If I had to start a small site all over again, I would go with them. So if you want to pick one relatively cheap, high-quality blog hosting provider from this list, choose SiteGround.
Alternatively, if their price is too high for you, go with Dreamhost. They're the second-best according to my blog hosting review. And they offer dirt-cheap plans.
Bluehost
If you have read any article on blog hosting, you have heard about Bluehost. Ever since I started in the digital marketing world, Bluehost has been at the top of the rankings.
At first sight, it's easy to see why: the Utah-based company offers rock-bottom prices with great features. It is why the company hosts more than 2 million websites on their servers from all over the world.
Their popularity has led Bluehost to become one of WordPress's preferred hosting companies, next with SiteGround and Dreamhost, which are also in this list.
Performance (Response Time): Between 1064 ms to 1427 ms
Performance (Uptime): Between 99.834% and 99.975%
Reviews (Trustpilot): 1.5
Customer Support: Bad
Security: No information available
Price: From $2.75
Performance
According to HRank, Bluehost has shown an uptime of 99.967% over the past 30 days—this may change by the time you read this—and a response time of 1497 microseconds. That's a terrible performance; remember that 200 ms is the ideal.
Over the years, Bluehost has had yearly uptimes between 99.834% and 99.975%.
On the other hand, its response times have varied between 1064 ms to 1427 ms. Once again, awful numbers.
All in all, Bluehost has a pretty bad performance compared to dozens of competitors. Your performance may vary depending on the shared IP you get, but it's still something to consider before you choose them.
Customer Reviews
Similar to what I said before, Bluehost fairs horribly in Trustpilot, with a rating of 1.5 out of 5 stars.
With almost 500 reviews, Bluehost shows the following results:
- Excellent: 9%
- Great: 1%
- Average: 2%
- Poor: 3%
- Bad: 84%
Most of its bad reviews talk about:
- How Bluehost deleted their websites (yikes!).
- Their lousy customer support.
- Bad performance—mostly caching issues and slow speed.
These reviews follow the criticism Bluehost has received in the past few years regarding their decreasing service quality.
I'm surprised to see these reviews as I always had great experiences with them. If they are truly doing worse than before—something that's hard to deny given their appalling reviews all over the web—then I'd consider them only if you believe that their low prices are worth the potential problems in the future.
Bluehost and EIG
⚠️ Warning! In contrast with its independently-owned competitors on this list, Bluehost is owned by Endurance International Group, one of the largest hosting conglomerates in the world. This fact has put Bluehost in the spotlight because EIG has been called out for bad practices that seem to put their interests above their customers'. Later you will see what I mean.
Bluehost is the only blog hosting service provider that I used from my list, and in the five years I've worked with them, I never had an issue. While my sites never got more than 10,000 monthly visitors per month at any given moment, I didn't have any issues with their server.
For this reason, I recommend them. Still, you should read the reviews below and think for yourself—my experience may not apply to you.
Customer Support
All of the four and five-star reviews talk about Bluehost's great customer support. Sadly, these are an exception because most of their bad reviews talk incessantly about their terrible customer support.
Extremely unprofessional, rude, and poor customer service. Please save yourself and your business time and money and don't use Bluehost. Suggest your clients the same. — Hidayat Rizvi
If I treated customers the way Bluehost treated me, I wouldn't have any customers. I have owned my successful restaurant for 24 years. — Peter Parles
Literally the worst experience I have ever had with any company. A shambles would be a kind way to describe them. No idea what they are doing, you will be asked to repeat yourself constantly and with no solutions, just more problems. — Sim Ram
It seems that Bluehost—or, dare I say, EIG—has outsourced their customer support, and their quality of service has decreased.
Security
Unlike the other blog hosting providers in this list, Bluehost explains little about its security measures. All I could find about is the following:
- The company theoretically offers complimentary daily, weekly, and monthly backups. However, they aren't guaranteed. In other words, they do it, but you should do your own backups as well. This kills the whole purpose of getting backups, so I'm not sure why they promote this "complimentary" service.
- The company neither publicly acknowledges the location or nature of their data centers nor their security measures. Sketchy.
Sadly, there's little else I can say about their security. To me, this is a red flag. Even if their price is low, you should always make your security a priority, especially if you share your IP with others. Low prices may attract the wrong crowd, so if you get paired with bad neighbors, you may get in trouble.
Price
Basic Plan: $2.75 /mo
- 1 website.
- 50 GB SSD storage.
- 5 parked domains.
- 25 subdomains.
Plus Plan: $4.95 /mo
- Unlimited websites.
- Unmetered SSD storage.
- Unlimited parked domains.
- Unlimited subdomains.
Other Features
All of Bluehost's plans include the following extra features:
- Automatic WordPress installation.
- Automatic WordPress updates.
- Secure configuration for their login credentials.
- Free domain name for the first year.
- Free SSL certificate.
- SSD Storage by default.
Verdict: Bluehost is the only blog hosting company I tried from this list, and my experience was good the years I used them. I can't say anything bad about them. Maybe I was lucky. Maybe I was reckless and never realized how terrible their service was because I didn't know better.
Whatever the case, given everything I learned through my research and compared to its competitors, Bluehost is the last of the five cheap blog hosting companies I would recommend on this list.
Why Do "Experts" Recommend Bluehost?
If you have read other hosting comparisons, you may have seen Bluehost at the top of their list. Even hosting "experts" recommend them. But why?
Simple: because they provide the best affiliate commissions.
Unlike the other companies in this list, Bluehost gives high commissions that start at $65 per sale. Other companies provide a bit less than that, and their commissions vary by volume.
Dishonest recommendations like the ones I read from Bluehost are the reason why people hate affiliate marketing. And I agree with the sentiment; it's unethical to sell a product that provides terrible service to its customers.
As someone who, not long ago, was in the same place and had the same doubts you have, it seems unfair to present you with an offer that's not as good as it looks. You may be a beginner in this "digital" world, but you don't deserve to be misguided.
If you still want to go with Bluehost, fine. I haven't had any bad experiences in the past, so maybe these criticisms I've read are exaggerated.
But if you do end up facing the issues presented above, you already know why.
SiteGround
SiteGround is a popular web hosting provider that hosts over 2 million domains. Founded in 2004 and based in Sofia, Bulgaria, SiteGround has more than 500 employees in offices both in Europe and North America.
Performance (Response Time): Between 499 ms to 683 ms
Performance (Uptime): Between 99.978% and 99.992%
Reviews (Trustpilot): 4.7/5 stars
Customer Support: Great
Security: Extensive
Price: From $6.99
Performance
According to HRank, SiteGround has shown an uptime of 99.989% over the past 30 days—this may change by the time you read this—and a response time of 649 microseconds.
Over the years, SiteGround has had yearly uptimes between 99.978% and 99.992%.
On the other hand, its response times have varied between 499 ms to 683 ms.
Compared to the dozens of hosting sites on HRank's list, SiteGround is one of the best performers, ranking in the top 10 for the last three years among the best blog hosting services.
Customer Reviews
SiteGround has a strong record in Trustpilot, with a rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars.
With 5,284 reviews, SiteGround shows the following results:
- Excellent: 93%
- Great: 1%
- Average: <1%
- Poor: <1%
- Bad: 4%
This shows that almost everyone who has reviewed their service is delighted with it. Considering the volume of reviewers, it's also hard to discuss their statistical significance.
Most of its reviews talk about their excellent service and their quality customer support, as you will see below. It's surprising to see that most of the five-star reviews are recent and whose users have only one review under their profile. They also seem to be short and tend to say the same things repeatedly.
I'm not sure as to whether this is a coincidence or if the company is doing something special that leads its new users to give these reviews. Since I have no proof of this, I can't point to anything sketchy, but I would take some of these reviews with caution.
Customer Support
Since the company has such a large number of positive reviews, most of which focus on its customer support, I can assume their service is good.
Like all companies in this list, SiteGround promises "24/7 live help via chat, email (ticket system), and phone. This last one is quite unique, as not every company offers it.
Security
SiteGround has extensive information about the security measures they take to protect their servers and their users. Here's everything you need to know:
- All their servers use the latest PHP 7 version with the latest security fixes.
- They use "sophisticated" IDS / IPS systems that block malicious bots and attackers.
- By default, SiteGround uses a ModSecurity firewall on all of their shared servers. They also update their security rules weekly.
- They provide free auto-updates for WordPress core versions.
- They keep the software that provides database services (FTP, SMTP, IMAP/POP3, HTTP, HTTPS) up to date with the latest security patches.
- They run an Intrusion Prevention System called 1H Hawk, which identifies whenever someone tries to hack a password through brute force and disables their access to their IP address.
- Their server login isn't allowed to anybody outside their admin team.
- They also have an isolation system in place that protects a website from being hacked when someone on a server is compromised.
All in all, it seems like SiteGround takes its server and user security seriously. They use strong firewalls and hacking-prevention systems.
Using shared servers is never a smart decision security-wise, but unlike Bluehost, SiteGround seems to at least take some steps to prevent any potential breaches.
Price
StartUp: $6.99 /mo
- 1 website.
- 10 GB bandwith.
- 10,000 visitors.
GrowBig: $9.99 /mo
- Unlimited websites.
- 20 GB bandiwth.
- 25,000 visitors.
- Backup copies.
- Staging.
- Caching.
- Collaborators.
GoGeek: $14.99 /mo
- Unlimited websites.
- 40 GB bandwith.
- 100,000 visitors.
- Priority support.
- More resources.
Other Features
SiteGround also provides the following features to all its users:
- Unmetered traffic (this means, there's no limit to the number of visitors you can send to your site, but as some say, it also means you will get slower speeds).
- Free SSL certificates.
- Daily backups.
- Free CDN.
- Free email.
- Managed WordPress (in a shared server).
- Unlimited databases.
- 100% renewable energy match (thanks to their leverage of Google Cloud's platform, which matches every kilowatt of energy consumed from non-renewable sources with renewable ones).
- 30-days money-back guarantee.
Verdict: SiteGround seems to be one of the best on this list, with great security measures in place, high performance, positive reviews, and standard but still useful features.
If I had to choose a cheap blog hosting provider from this list, I'd start with SiteGround.
DreamHost
Launched in a dorm room back in 1997, DreamHost is an independently-owned blog hosting provider. It currently hosts 1.5 million websites—750,000 of which are WordPress sites—for over 400,000 customers in more than 100 countries. The company is one of the few recommended hosting providers by WordPress.org, we can assume thanks to its reliability and quality service.
Performance (Response Time): Between 383 ms to 424 ms
Performance (Uptime): Between 99.888% and 99.948%
Reviews (Trustpilot): 4.6/5 stars
Customer Support: Limited live support; reported to be good.
Security: Extensive
Price: From $2.59
Performance
According to HRank, Dreamhost has shown an uptime of 99.850% over the past 30 days—this may change by the time you read this—and a response time of 424 microseconds.
Over the years, Dreamhost has had yearly uptimes between 99.888% and 99.948%.
On the other hand, its response times have varied between 383 ms to 424 ms.
Even though their response times are the lowest in this list, their uptimes are among the worst. That's why Dreamhost fares among the worst hosting providers in HRank's list.
Customer Reviews
Dreamhost has a strong performance in Trustpilot, with a rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars.
With 1,173 reviews, Dreamhost shows the following results:
- Excellent: 75%
- Great: 11%
- Average: 5%
- Poor: 3%
- Bad: 6%
Compared to Siteground, Dreamhost doesn't show the same strong results, but they're still many times better—both in volume and quality—than Bluehost's.
Among the bad and poor reviews, the (former) users seem to complain about extra fees, lack of backups, and lousy support.
Since these are a minority, and they were published over a long time—most negative reviews have weeks between one another—I can assume these are exceptions to the rule.
Customer Support
The company claims to have 24/7 US-based customer support. At a closer inspection, its full-availability only applies for its chatbot—a big "duh," if you asked me.
Their human-based support is available every day between 5:30 AM to 9:30 PM PST. Far from ideal, if you asked me.
Whatever the case, DreamHost's support was often praised in Trustpilot, with most people thanking the company for its speed and quality.
Security
Dreamhost shares its security practices openly, stating their main policies towards protecting their user's data:
- They use a custom malware remover they appropriately called Dreamshield.
- They use http/2 support in all of its nginx offerings. This is a new standard that improves web encryption.
- They use a web application firewall (WAF) called "lua-resty-waf" that's both secure and fast, allowing hundreds of thousands of requests per second.
- They use a modified "mod_security" firewall for their Apache servers.
- They offer free and open SSL/TLS certificates to all its users.
DreamHost seems to have a pretty good security policy in place. They don't seem to mention anything about DDoS attacks and brute force hacking. In any case, their default security measures are suitable for a cheap blog hosting provider.
Price
WordPress Starter: $2.59 /mo
- 1 website.
- 1 email for $1.67/mo.
WordPress Unlimited: $3.95 /mo
- Unlimited websites.
- Unlimited emails.
Other Features
DreamHost offers the following to all its users:
- Free domain to its annual users.
- Unlimited traffic—once again, I can assume this is unmetered traffic, which technically allows for unlimited traffic at the cost of performance.
- Pre-installed WordPress.
- Free automated WordPress migrations.
- WP website builder.
- SSD storage.
- Free SSL certificate.
- Free domain privacy—unlike most web hosting providers, DreamHost does not charge any extra fees to mask your personal information.
- Automatic daily backups.
- 100% uptime guarantee.
Verdict: DreamHost is another excellent option for those writers who want a cheap, secure blog hosting at a low price.
Their reviews aren't as strong as SiteGround, and their support isn't as extensive as all of the other companies in this list (unless, of course, they also lie about the human support they offer, something I couldn't find any proof of).
Their performance wasn't that good either, especially when it comes to their uptime.
Still, Dreamhost looks like an acceptable hosting provider to consider if you are looking for cheap blog hosting for your writing site.
GreenGeeks
GreenGeeks is the only ecologically-friendly web host provider from this list—next to SiteGround—and one of the largest in the world—at least in the cheap hosting niche.
In the past 12 years since its foundation, the company has hosted more than 500,000 websites for 40,000 customers. Overall, the company says they have replaced more than 615.000 kWh per year.
Their environmentally-friendly approach has been under scrutiny as GreenGeeks' servers don't use 100% green servers. Instead, they use carbon-offsetting credits, something they explain here.
Buying carbon credits isn't the same as using renewable energy to power your servers, unlike what other hosting companies do. While it's not ideal, their practice is legal and perfectly fine as these credits help to lower the consumption of energy. But for the ecology-conscious users who take this issue seriously, this fact may be a bit of a let-down.
In either case, the company has won dozens of awards for its quality service and its environmentally-friendly approach to the industry.
Performance (Response Time): Between 789 ms and 888 ms
Performance (Uptime): Between 99.967% and 99.977%
Reviews (Trustpilot): 4.7/5 stars
Customer Support: Great
Security: Extensive
Price: From $2.95
Performance
According to HRank, GreenGeeks has shown an uptime of 99.757% over the past 30 days—this may change by the time you read this—and an average response time of 868 microseconds.
Over the years, GreenGeeks has had yearly uptimes between 99.967% and 99.977%.
On the other hand, its response times have varied between 789 ms and 888 ms.
All this shows that GreenGeeks has acceptable performance, with good uptime and mediocre response times. The company ranks in the middle of the HRank's list.
Customer Reviews
GreenGeeks has a high mark on Trustpilot, boasting a rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars.
With over 300 reviews, GreenGeeks shows the following results:
- Excellent: 91%
- Great: 3%
- Average: <1%
- Poor: <1%
- Bad: 5%
Unlike its competitors, GreenGeeks has a lower volume of reviews, making them not as relevant to be considered representative of its quality. But unlike the other examples in this list, GreenGeeks' reviews are very descriptive, which makes them much more valuable.
Remember when I said before that SiteGround's reviews were very short and similar to one another? This case is the opposite.
The reviews talk about the great service they provide, and the difference the users found compared to other companies. They praise their great prices and reliability.
The negative reviews are interesting to analyze, as the users complain that GreenGeeks isn't GDPR compliant. This doesn't affect US-based businesses as much as European ones. While I can't be sure if this has changed lately—the reviews are dated—it's an issue to consider if you are based in Europe.
Overall, the company looks like it's trustworthy. It seems to provide a service that's as good as they promise.
Customer Support
GreenGeeks promises phone and live chat support, and 24/7 email support.
The quality seems to be high considering that most of the positive four and five-star reviews highlight customer service as high-quality. I even found a negative review that praises their service, despite the problems the user had with the company.
Besides these specific bad reviews, GreenGeeks support seems to be great.
Security
GreenGeeks shares their security policies openly, stating they use the following measures to protect their servers and users:
- They use a container-based approach for their accounts, providing them with their own dedicated computing resources and secured virtual file system (Secure vFS). This means that if one user takes too much data or resources, it doesn't affect the other ones.
- Their Secure vFS protects every account from "bad neighbors"—no account can see or access other accounts in the same server.
- Their kernel-level file tracking helps the company identify potential unsafe files. Once they find one, they scan them for malware in real-time. If they find a problem, their Secure vFS framework isolates those files immediately.
- They use a combination of "proprietary and third-party software" to identify and protect against potential attacks within their servers.
- They offer nightly backups.
- They implement proactive, real-time monitoring of all critical services.
Their security measures seem to be extensive and effective at ensuring their user's safety at all times.
Price
Lite: $2.95 /mo
- 1 website.
- Standard performance.
Pro: $5.95 /mo
- Unlimited websites.
- 2x performance.
Premium: $11.95 /mo
- Free dedicated IP.
- 4x performance.
Other Features
Most of the features GreenGeeks offers are the same for all of their users, including:
- Unlimited webspace.
- Unlimited data transfer.
- Free SSL certificate.
- Free domain name for the first year.
- Free backups.
- Free CDN.
- Unlimited email accounts.
- WordPress installation and updates.
- Unlimited databases.
- LSCache included for better performance.
- 300% green energy match.
- 99.9% uptime guarantee.
- 30-day money-back guarantee.
Verdict: Thanks to GreenGeeks' environment-friendly approach to blog hosting, it's the best option for ecology-conscious writers. Their reviews also back their quality up—even if some criticize them for not being as "green" as they would like—focusing on their low prices and high performance.
Their prices are low, their performance is acceptable, and their service seems to be of high standards.
Hostinger
Hostinger is a blog hosting provider that powers 29 million websites from 178 countries. Founded in 2004, Hostinger has bootstrapped its business since then and currently has seven data-centers around the world.
Performance (Response Time): Between 28 ms to 331 ms.
Performance (Uptime): Between 99.89% and 100%
Reviews (Trustpilot): 4.5/5 stars
Customer Support: Great
Security: Limited; recently suffered a large breach.
Price: From $0.99
Performance
For Hostinger, HRank doesn't show any results. That's why I had to take a different approach, borrowing the results from Bitcatcha.
The company claims to have a response time of 143 ms. According to Bitcatcha's test, Hosting's response times vary greatly from this number depending on the location from where the test was run. US-based tests showed response times of 28 ms, while those run from Bangalore showed response times of 331 ms. Still, a pretty good performance, the best one on this list.
They have also found that Hostinger has shown 100% uptime since March in the US and Europe-based servers, and 99.89% in its Singapore-based one.
This shouldn't be taken as a fact, as they only measure the performance of one site—HRank measures thousands of sites. Unfortunately, then, I can't say with precision Hostinger's uptime. Since this is the best we've got, we can still assume their performance is great.
Customer Reviews
Hostinger is another strong performer in Trustpilot, with a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars.
With over 1,500 reviews, Hostinger shows the following results:
- Excellent: 87%
- Great: 6%
- Average: <1%
- Poor: <1%
- Bad: 5%
Their distribution is similar to most of the other companies, except for Bluehost. Most of their reviews are positive, showcasing the company's friendly UI, performance, and prices.
The bad reviews, many of which have been posted recently, criticize their migration process and bad support, which I will explore below.
Most of the positive and negative reviews tend to be specific and detailed, so I believe them to be trustworthy and representative of their service.
Customer Support
The company says that 98% of its users rate their support as excellent. While the same cannot be said based on its Trustpilot reviews, it seems quite an accomplishment.
They also explain that their support team takes an average of 50 seconds to respond to a ticket.
Whatever the case it may be, the support was both praised and criticized on Trustpilot. Given that the majority of the reviews are positive, I can assume they offer responsive, professional support.
Also, it's worthy of notice that Hostinger puts a lot of effort into answering the negative reviews of their users on Trustpilot. To me, this shows the company cares about its reputation and its users, something that no other company in this list can say.
Security
Hostinger shares very little about its security measures. Or, they simply provide little security to their servers. Whatever the case, the few ones I could find are:
- They use the "FTP over SSL" protocol for encrypting the data transfer between their users and servers.
- They use Cloudflare's hotlink protection that forbids third-parties to link directly to your images.
- They claim to use advanced security modules in their servers, including the Apache mod_security, Suhosin PHP hardening, and PHP open_basedir protection.
Despite their (few) publicly-shared security measures, in mid-2019, Hostinger had a massive security breach that exposed over 14 million users to hackers. According to a report: "The server [hacked] contained the company's internal system API and associated database, which held customer usernames, email addresses, first names, IP addresses, and hashed passwords."
Yikes.
The company claims to have improved its security after this attack. While I have no reason to disbelieve them, it feels like once you get such a large breach, it's a bit too late to recover your image.
There's a saying that no lighting strikes twice in the same place, so Hostinger most likely provides good security to their users. Still, their past attack is something to consider before signing up, as it may represent a problem down the road, should this ever happen again.
Price
Single: $0.99 /mo
- 1 website.
- 1 email.
- 100 GB bandwidth.
- Free SSL certificate.
- 1X allocated resources.
Premium: $2.89 /mo
- Unlimited websites.
- Unlimited email accounts.
- Unlimited bandwidth.
- WordPress LiteSpeed cache acceleration.
- Free SSL certificate and domain.
- 2X allocated resources.
Business: $3.99 /mo
Same as the previous plan, plus:
- Daily backups.
- 4X allocated resources.
Other Features
Some of the other features Hostinger provides to all of its users include:
- A powerful control panel.
- Webmail access.
- DNS management.
- Weekly backups.
- 1-click installer.
- Cache manager.
- 99.9% uptime guarantee.
- 24/7/365 customer support.
Verdict: On paper, Hostinger is as good as any other company on this list—especially Bluehost—thanks to its high performance and low prices.
Sadly, their scarce security measures and their recent security breach represent a threat to anyone who takes their data privacy seriously. If this isn't an issue, then Hostinger is a great option to consider.
Their performance seems to be the best of the list, but since we can't compare them with HRank's methodology, this is to be taken with caution.
Blog Hosting Comparison: A Head-to-Head Analysis
| Hosting Company | Price | Score |
|---|---|---|
| Bluehost | $2.75 /mo | ⭐️ 2/5 |
| SiteGround | $6.99 /mo | ⭐️ 5/5 |
| DreamHost | $2.59 /mo | ⭐️ 4/5 |
| GreenGeeks | $2.95 /mo | ⭐️ 3.5/5 |
| Hostinger | $0.99 /mo | ⭐️ 3/5 |
How to Decide the Best Blog Hosting for Your Freelance Writing Site
All of the hosting providers analyzed above are pretty much the case cost-wise, so if you aren't sure which one to choose from, the following list will help you make a better decision:
- If you care about what other people say, choose Bluehost.
- If you care about performance and security, choose SiteGround.
- If you care about reliability at a low cost, choose Dreamhost.
- If you care about the environment, choose GreenGeeks.
- If you care about speed and resources, choose Hostinger.
A Summary of the Best Website Hosting for Writers
This post is extremely long and filled with weird, technical jargon. So let's summarize it.
After my research, I found that the best cheap blog hosting site is SiteGround. I can honestly tell you they are the company I'd try if I had to launch a writing site all over again.
On a close second position, we have Dreamhost. They have very similar features and prices; my only concerns relate to the security measures and their reviews.
In third place comes GreenGeeks. I only say that because they have a nice "green" spin I like. But since SiteGround also offers a green-match through the use of Google's Cloud platform, GreenGeeks' USP doesn't seem to be as unique. Still, their performance and support seem to be of high standards, and that's a big plus.
In fourth place, we have Hostinger. Their service seems to be good, cheap, and reliable. Their unfortunate security breach is the only big killer I don't like and which makes me want to avoid them. Use them at your own peril.
Finally, we have Bluehost. I'm sure you know as well as I do that everyone recommends them. Since every blogger and "expert" promote them, I thought they had to be good.
But now I know they aren't good. The only reason why others recommend them is because of their hefty affiliate commissions. There's nothing wrong with that—I use them in this post as well. The problem is when financial incentives are put above the interests of the reader—you, that is.
Their services aren't bad—I used them for many years, and I don't recall any issues. But their customer reviews and lack of transparent security policies makes me doubt them. If I were you, I'd avoid them.
After writing this piece, I learned a lot about blog hostings, more than I ever knew before. I hope you have learned a lot as well.
If you have any comments or questions, please share them below.
