5 Best Cheap Hosting Providers

As a freelancer or a small business on a shoestring budget, finding a web hosting provider that isn’t a burden on your finances can seem like a daunting task, especially if you need more than what a bare-bone web hosting plan can offer. While the truism “what you pay for is what you get” holds true in most cases, the idea of finding a hosting provider that is both cheap and good is not as far-fetched as you may think, especially that web hosting prices have steadily decreased over the years and competition between hosting businesses has increased. This prompted hosting companies to improve the features of their services and include all kinds of freebies like marketing credit or free backups with their plans.

What is Cheap Hosting?

When we talk about cheap hosting, we’re referring to shared hosting plans, and exclude the somewhat pricey VPS and dedicated hosting plans. As opposed to dedicated or VPS hosting, shared hosting means that server resources are shared with more websites or web hosting accounts. This means reduced costs for everyone involved, which explains the low costs hosting companies charge for shared hosting plans. These plans are specially created for websites with low to medium traffic, and even though some hosting providers promise uncapped bandwidth and storage space, these are understood within the confines of the regular use of small and medium-sized websites. Therefore, throttling problems and server failures may appear if websites exceed certain allotments imposed by the hosting provider.

Shared hosting plans come in different configurations, higher tier plans offering extra bandwidth and storage space and other benefits such as free domains, spam protection or free backups.

How much does cheap hosting cost?

What does cheap mean in the context of web hosting? Generally speaking, monthly fees around and below $10/month are considered cheap, but also good enough to meet even more complex hosting requirements in terms of security for example. While shared hosting can sometimes cost as low as $1.99/month due to certain promotions (e.g. iPage’s shared hosting plan now has the promotional price of $1.99/month instead of $11.95/month), we’re focusing on regular prices as promotions are for a limited time only.

While promotions are ubiquitous in the field of web hosting, it’s a good idea to also consult regular prices as well, because once the promotional period comes to an end, your web hosting plan will switch to the regular price.

How to choose a good web hosting provider?

Irrespective of which hosting has the best promotions lined up for you to sign up with them, and how cheap their plans are, there are some features that you need to consider before signing up with any hosting provider.

• Flexibility: Your website may suddenly get some traction one day and you’ll need to keep up with the influx of traffic that’s coming your way. A flexible web hosting will allow you to seamlessly upgrade your account to a higher tier shared hosting plan or even to a VPS or dedicated hosting plans.
• Customer service: The importance of 24/7 customer service may not factor into your decision-making process, however, when your website is inexplicably down at 2 am, you’ll be glad to be able to talk to someone who can shed some light on the issue. Customer service responsiveness is another important aspect, so make sure you read some reviews about your prospective hosting company before you sign up with them.
• Usability: Usability is something else worth thinking about. Having a user-friendly hosting interface is crucial especially for novices. The industry standard is cPanel, which may have different configurations from provider to provider.
• Security: Using a shared hosting usually means lighter security, however, there are hosting companies that use shared SSL and SSH. The very best hosting providers will offer free backups and free spam protection for your email accounts.
• Extra features: To sweeten the deal, many hosting businesses will offer all sorts of perks and benefits such as a free domain, free advertising credit, free website migration, free themes, free website builder tools, etc.
• Money-back guarantee: A good hosting company should also offer money-back guarantee, so if you’re dissatisfied with their service you can cancel your account. A 30-day money-back guarantee is the bare minimum any good hosting company should offer.

Taking into account the above considerations, we’ve chosen 5 hosting companies that we think offer the best cheap hosting plans, that is, hosting businesses with the most affordable and complex shared hosting plans.

Best Cheap Hosting Providers

Which are the best cheap hosting providers that will provide amazing value for your money? Here are our top suggestions:

iPage

iPage is another veteran of the hosting industry. iPage’s website has recently received a “facelift” and their hosting plans come with improved features. iPage has a single shared hosting plan – the Essential – to meet all your hosting needs. The Essential plan now costs only $1.99/month, which currently makes iPage the best budget hosting. Normally this plan costs $11.95/month, however, it includes $500 worth of freebies.

The best features of the Essential shared plan are: free domain, free website builder tools, unlimited storage, scalable bandwidth, free security tools (SiteLock with malware scanning and network scanning), free marketing tools ($100 Google AdWords credit, $100 Yahoo/Bing credit, site analytics suite, yp.com listing), 30-day money-back guarantee, 24/7 e-mail/chat/phone support, Weebly website builder, mobile optimized site builder, hundreds of themes, 1-click installer, eCommerce functionality (PayPal integration, PrestaShop, Zen Cart, Open Cart, Agora Cart, etc.).

iPage has other types of hosting plans including WordPress hosting, dedicated hosting, and VPS hosting, thus, they have you covered even if your hosting needs change over time.

BlueHost

While BlueHost offers all types of hosting plans, their shared hosting plans are one of the most affordable in the industry. A great thing about BlueHost is that they allow you to upgrade to more powerful hosting plans with just one click whenever your existing hosting plan no longer meets your needs.

BlueHost has three shared hosting plans, whose currently discounted prices meet our definition of cheap hosting. The Basic plan’s current price is $2.95/month ($7.99/month regular price), and includes hosting for one website, 50GB web space, unlimited bandwidth, free domain, 5 e-mail accounts, each with 100 MB email storage, 5 parked domains and 25 subdomains. The next shared hosting plan is the Plus, which is also BlueHost’s bestselling plan normally costing $10.95/month, but now available at the discounted price of $4.95/month. This plan includes a free domain, hosting for unlimited websites, uncapped bandwidth and storage space, unlimited email accounts and email storage space, $200 worth of marketing offers, and SpamExperts included. BlueHost’s most powerful plan is the Prime plan, which, based on its normal price that is $19.99/month would not qualify as a cheap hosting plan, however, now it only costs $10.95/month. This plan comes with all the features of the Plus plan, but it includes SiteBackup Pro and Domain Privacy as well.

BlueHost is regarded as one of the most reliable and suitable hosting for WordPress websites, especially that they also offer WordPress hosting plans.

InMotion Hosting

No list of the best web hosting providers is complete without InMotion hosting, which is one of the most appreciated hosting providers for their shared hosting and premium hosting plans all laden with great features.

At InMotion, those looking for a shared hosting plan can select from three options only two of which can be regarded as cheap web hosting in our definition. The first shared plan is the Launch plan, available now at the discounted price of $4.19/month ($7.99 normally). The Power plan is now available for $5.39/month instead of $9.99/month. The last shared plan is the Pro plan, which is currently available for $8.99/month, but normally costs $15.99/month, being on the costlier end of the pricing spectrum and no longer qualifying as cheap hosting.

InMotion offers a 90-day money-back guarantee for their plans, which is the highest money-back guarantee offered by hosting providers. All their plans include a free domain, free SSD, free data backups, SSH Access, free 1-click installer and over 310 applications, cPanel, free website transfers, BoldGrid website builder, WordPress, Joomla or PrestaShop pre-installation, real-time spam filtering, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, free advertising credit, 24/7 support, etc.

WebHostingHub

WebHostingHub offers a variety of online services, shared web hosting plans being one of them. Shared hosting plans are backed with a 90-day money back guarantee, free advertising credits, free SSD, SSH Access, free website builder, auto-installed WordPress and Shopping Cart, backups for $1/month, and free website transfer. Plans differ in the number of websites they allow you to host on a single account, the number of MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, and the amount of advertising credit.

Of the three shared plans they offer only two qualify as cheap hosting plans in the real sense of the word. Thus, the Spark starter plan costs $8.99/month normally, but it’s now available at $4.99/month; the Nitro plan is aimed for small businesses who need better performance, and it costs $12.99/month normally or $6.99/month discounted; and the Dynamo plan, which was created for dynamic websites that need more resources, has a discounted price of $8.99/month, but normally costs $16.99/month being slightly cheaper than BlueHost’s Prime plan, but it’s not cheap enough for being labeled as a cheap hosting plan.

Apart from its shared hosting plans, WebHostingHub doesn’t have more powerful hosting types, therefore, if your website happens to outgrow its current plan, you’ll need to switch web hosts.

eHost.com

With a history of two decades in the web hosting industry, eHost aims to provide feature-rich low-cost shared hosting. Unlike other hosting providers that also offer VPS, dedicated or managed hosting plans, eHost offers a single shared hosting plan. They pride themselves with hosting over 1 million websites on their platform.

The regular price for their shared hosting plan is $5.50/month, and it’s now available at the discounted price of $2.75/month. eHost’s shared hosting plan includes the following features: free domain name, unmetered storage space and bandwidth, 45-day money-back guarantee, free website builder, 1000’s of free templates, free email address, free ad credits (Google AdWords and Bing/Yahoo), hosting for unlimited domains in a single account, 24/7 email, phone and chat support, and cPanel hosting interface. With eHost’s shared hosting plan, you can gain access to over $200 worth of freebies.

The only downside of eHost is that you don’t have the option to scale up to other types of hosting plans. eHost is perfect, however, for small personal or business sites with low or medium traffic.

Conclusion

As you can see, cheap hosting doesn’t equate with lack of quality. Some of the hosting companies reviewed in this article are in fact providing complex web hosting packages. While it’s hard to decide which hosting company delivers the best services, having a clear overview of your hosting needs will help you decide which plan or provider is the most suitable for you. Some hosting providers offer free backups and excellent discounts, while others offer great security and lots of freebies, but only by pinpointing your exact needs, will you be able to pick one over the other.