The Best Cheap Web Hosting (2021)

Do you want to jump straight to the answer? The best cheap web hosting for most people is definitely Hostinger. Hostinger is lightning fast, offers excellent uptime and has a highly capable customer support team.

There are a ton of hosting providers which offer dirt cheap hosting plans.

But many of them offer a service that’s subpar. Unreachable customer support, slow loading times, a lot of downtime… Even if your site doesn’t have a commercial angle, this type of hosting just isn’t worth it.

I’ve extensively researched the hosting industry to come up with a short list of cheap, yet great hosting.

Is it possible to find cheaper hosting than the options listed in this guide? You bet. But most of these services are so bad that you’ll want to throw your laptop out of the window at some point.

The hosting providers in this guide however, close the gap between affordability and quality.

Besides discussing these hosting providers, I’ll share with you a neat little trick on how to pay as little as possible for your hosting and what to look out for when choosing cheap hosting. I’ll also answer some frequently asked questions about cheap hosting at the end.

The best cheap web hosting providers of 2021

• Hostinger – $0.99 per month (if you pay 4 years in advance)
• GreenGeeks – $2.95 per month (if you pay 3 years in advance)
• SiteGround – $6.99 per month (monthly fee before renewal)

Looking at our list, you can see why a direct comparison of hosting companies on price is so complicated. Each company prices their services differently.

Some things to keep in mind:

You’ll be a getting a much better deal when you pay in advance. Take a look at Hostinger for instance, and you might wonder why they offer a monthly rate at all.

There are however a few downsides to paying this much in advance:

• You have to make quite the investment before your site even goes live
• If at some point during your contract you grow dissatisfied with your provider: tough luck. If you switch hosting providers before your contract runs out, you’ll lose your money. Luckily, all hosting companies in this guide offer a 30-day money back guarantee. Thanks to this, you’ll be able to test the service extensively before committing

Most hosting companies have introductory rates. After Hostinger’s generous $0.99 a month fee is up after 4 years, you’ll be paying $2.99 per month. This still is extremely cheap, but it’s good to be mindful of this.

Hostinger

Visit Hostinger

✓ The best cheap hosting provider
✓ Free domain and SSL
✓ Super fast loading speed
✓ 30-day money-back
✓ Get a 90% discount

Over the past years, Hostinger has made a meteoric rise within the hosting industry. Their great prices combined with their excellent service have been responsible for this.  

Hostinger’s fees for their cheapest plan:

• 12 months: $2.99 per month (after renewal $5.99)
• 24 months: $1.59 per month (after renewal $3.99) 
• 48 months: $0.99 per month (after renewal $2.99)

This includes:

• 1 website
• 1 email address
• 10 GB storage
• SSL-certificate (https:)
• 24/7 customer support
• 1-click WordPress installation and WordPress acceleration

For a very basic website this gets you pretty far. Still, it would be wise to consider Hostinger’s Premium Shared Hosting. This plan has better features and comes with a free domain for one year.

These are Hostinger’s cheapest plans:

The biggest differences among them are the number of sites each plan supports and the amount of resources. For instance, Business Shared Hosting has 4x as many resources as Single Shared Hosting. What this means is that if you use Business Shared Hosting, your site can handle more visitors, has faster loading times and has better uptime.

There are differences as well between the amount of storage. Single Shared Hosting has with 10 GB a third of Business Shared Hosting’s storage. Keep in mind though that the vast majority of websites don’t ever come close to being 10 GB in size.

Business Shared Hosting also contains daily back-ups, instead of weekly backups that the two cheaper plans have.

Hostinger’s cheapest plans have a 99.9% uptime guarantee, 24/7 customer support, and come with an easy-to-use website builder.

These types of things ensure that even though Hostinger is cheap, it never feels cheap. At the end of the day, you’re getting an excellent service at an excellent price point.

More on Hostinger

Visit Hostinger >    Read our full Hostinger review

GreenGeeks

Visit GreenGeeks

✓ The most sustainable hosting provider
✓ Amazing 24/7 customer support
✓ Easy-to-use dashboard
✓ Automatic daily backups
✓ Sign up today

GreenGeeks is the greenest hosting provider in the world. They put 3 times the amount of energy they consume back into wind energy. Given that the internet is more polluting than the entire aviation industry, the value of this can’t be overstated.

But despite GreenGeek’s focus on sustainability, they are still remarkably affordable and offer a lot of value.  

GreenGeeks’ fees for their cheapest plan:

• 12 months: $4.95 per month (after renewal $9.95)
• 24 months: $3.95 per month (after renewal $9.95) 
• 36 months: $2.95 per month (after renewal $9.95)

This includes:

• 1 website
• Unlimited email addresses
• Unlimited storage
• SSL-certificate
• 24/7 customer support
• 1-click WordPress-installation and WordPress acceleration

The great thing about GreenGeeks is that their cheapest plan in no way feels limited. You’ll get a free domain for a year, a CDN and nightly backups. You can hook up as many email addresses to it as you please and your WordPress site will get automatically updated.

These are GreenGeeks’ cheapest hosting plans:

The biggest differences among them are the number of websites each supports and performance. The Lite plan lets you host one website while the Pro and Premium plans let you host an unlimited number of websites. The Premium plan has 4x performance which means your sites will load faster and have higher uptime.

All their plans come with 24/7 customer support. In my experience, GreenGeeks has the fastest customer support in the industry. I can’t remember a time where I had to wait more tahn one-and-a-half minute in order speak to one of their staff.

More on GreenGeeks

Visit GreenGeeks >    Read our full GreenGeeks review

SiteGround

Visit SiteGround

✓ Recommended by WordPress
✓ Fantastic 24/7 customer support
✓ Easy-to-use backend
✓ Automatic daily backups
✓ Get a 57% discount

SiteGround is pushing it a bit when it comes to qualifying as cheap web hosting. However, they are such a great provider that I wouldn’t want to keep them from you.

The interesting thing about SiteGround is that they are suitable for both really small and really big websites. Some blogs with millions of monthly visitors run on SiteGround, but so do some websites which barely draw in more than a few 100 visitors each month.

The good news here is that if you’ve got a small site but big ambitions, you won’t have to switch providers once you’ve made it to the big leagues.

SiteGround’s fees for their cheapest plan:

• 12 months: $6.99 per month (after renewal $14.99)
• 24 months: $9.99 per month (after renewal $11.99) 
• 36 months: $10.49 per month (same price after renewal)

This includes:

• 1 website
• Unlimited email addresses
• 10 GB storage
• SSL-certificate
• 24/7 customer support
• 1-click WordPress-installation and WordPress acceleration

And here’s what you pay extra for:

• SG Site Scanner – checks your website daily for hacks and malware ($19.80 per year)

SiteGround’s cheapest plan gets you pretty far. It can handle around 10,000 visitors a month, comes with daily back-ups and is fully optimized for WordPress websites. On top of that, it includes a free website builder.

While I’d recommend you only use Hostinger’s cheapest plan for hobby websites, SiteGround’s cheapest plan definitely suffices for small, simple business websites.

These are SiteGround’s cheapest hosting plans:

As you can see, their GoGeek plan already hardly qualifies as cheap. Then again, GoGeek is a heavy hitting hosting plan which supports up to 100,000 monthly visitors, uses the best server resources and gives you access to SiteGround’s most experienced customer support reps.

If we take a look at StartUp and GrowBig, then we see they differ mostly in the number of sites each plan supports, the number of monthly visitors they can handle, differences in caching and getting backups on demand.

There are 3 hosting companies which WordPress recommends. SiteGround is one of them. The company is legendary within the WordPress community. They run on the Google Cloud Platform, have optimized their service completely around WordPress, and offer top-notch customer support.

For the record, you can install every popular web application on SiteGround, not just WordPress.

And even though their cheapest plans are more expensive than the other options in this guide, you do get a fantastic service which is pretty much indistinguishable from that of much more expensive hosting providers.

More on SiteGround

Visit SiteGround >    Read our full SiteGround review

Cheap Web Hosting Explained

At the end of the day, you get what you pay for. Web hosting isn’t an exception to this rule. If a web hosting provider offers a deal which seems too good to be true, it in most cases is.

Think about this:

Web hosting which costs less than a dollar a month, isn’t profitable for any company. You give their customer support one phone call, and they’re already losing money on you.

These companies sincerely hope you’ll at some point upgrade to their more expensive plans. You can tell by the pop ups in your dashboard asking you to do so.

Quite some cheap hosting plans are really bare bones. You often don’t get an SSL-certificate, automatic backups and other goodies which make your life better.

The cheapest hosting options are always shared hosting. Bad cheap hosting providers stuff your site on a server with too many other sites. This can pose security risks. Also, visitor spikes at other sites can slow down your site. Good cheap hosting providers make sure this doesn’t happen, by not overloading their servers with websites.

In Conclusion: The Best Cheap Web Hosting

It’s pointless to spend loads of money on hosting for a new website. But finding good cheap web hosting can be quite a hassle.

What I recommend is to never only consider the costs. The quality of the service should always be the leading factor.

If your site runs into any problems due to its hosting, you expect the company to solve this swiftly. You’ll also want to ensure that your web hosting has the features your website requires. If it doesn’t, you’ll end up paying for add-ons, which defeats the purpose of picking a cheap hosting provider in the first place.

When looking at the prices hosting companies advertise, keep an eye on the fine print. In order to pay Hostinger’s sub-dollar fee, you’ll have to pay 4 years in advance. Also, most hosting providers have an introductory fee which differs from their renewal rates.

To sum it all up, here are the best cheap hosting services I recommend:

• Hostinger – $0.99 per month (if you pay 4 years in advance)
• GreenGeeks – $2.95 per month (if you pay 3 years in advance)
• SiteGround – $6.99 per month (monthly fee before renewal)

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are the most frequently asked questions about cheap web hosting: