Top 7 Cheap Web Hosting Providers in 2020

Currently, as am writing this, I have more than 200+ websites using more than 70+ different hosts (ranging from high-quality and expensive to not so costly hosts), so I can say I have a lot of data that I can check and show here.

As part of the selection process, we looked at four main aspects:

1. Spent countless hours analyzing the best web hosting in terms of uptime and speed – at the end of the day, it all boils down to this, how fast a site load is one of the main factors for Google rankings and visitors staying on your website or not
2. Checking the web hosting companies history and seeing if they are legit or not – some of them have great deals, but they are not going to be around in 3+ months, and all your websites will be gone so we need to make sure these are real web hosting services that are going to be around in the years to come.
3. Analyze their offers in terms of resources and features offered: many of these web hosting vendors have low prices, but they have extra charges on features some may provide for free, like SSL, , cheapest domain and such.
4. Going and checking out how helpful and solution-focused their support is: hosting web is not always as easy as just pointing nameservers to an IP and then only paying the bills. There will always be problems along the way and your domain.

iPage is probably one of the cheap web hosting companies out there. Their lowest plan starts with $1.99/month, and you also get free registration of domain names. Cheapest, right?

• In terms of speed, it's average with a loading time of 939 ms
• If you register your domain for free with them, the costs will be quite high when renewing it.
• Also to get the $1.99/month price you'll have to commit for a three years plan.

At $2.95/month FastComet might be an excellent option for a low budget web hosting.

• Free website transfer
• Free Cloudflare CDN integration
• Free domain name
• 24/7 support

On the downside:

• Uptime is around 98.5% so you will experience some downtime
• Speed is 969 ms

Hostinger has various cheap web hosting plans starting from $2.15/mo for one single site package and going up to $7.95/mo for unlimited site package.

• Free domain name registration
• Weekly backups
• 30 days money-back guarantee
• PHP 7.x and MySQL 5.5

Downside:

• Speed can vary from 990 – 1.2 sec
• Support is not always customer-focused

While they don't have great loading times and features, BlueHost does a great job when it comes to customer support. Cost is a bit higher though with their lowest package starting at $3.95/mo.

• Free domain name
• Excellent customer support on email, phone or chat
• Weekly and monthly backups of your entire account

Downside:

• Speed is around 1.3sec
• Uptime is approximately 98%

HostGator is one of the most robust and most reliable web hosting companies out there. They have a $3.95/mo shared hosting plan, but I would strongly advise you to go for their cloud hosting package, which at only $4.95/mo will make a huge difference.

• Speed is 450 ms
• Uptime is around 99.9%
• Great 24/7 support
• Money-back guarantee

Downside:

• The domain name is not free

Usually, InMotion Hosting are more expensive, but they do have some promos running at the moment so we can include them in this cheap web hosting list.

• Speed is great at around 550 ms
• Uptime is approximately 99.9%
• SSD Drives
• Free backups

As for the downsides:

• For the lowest web hosting plan, you can only host two websites
• To get this price, you'll have to commit for two years.

eHost is one of the newer web hosting companies, but they've done an excellent job so far in terms of support and speed; hence we've included them in this list.

• Speed is 750 ms
• Free domain name
• You can host unlimited domains
• 30 days money-back guarantee

Downsides:

• Renewal plans are expensive

SiteGround is one of the most reliable web hosting companies in the industry and has made a name for itself due to its amazing 24/7 customer service and features.

• Speed is around 500 ms
• SSD Storage
• Daily Backups
• Free SSL
• 24/7 Technical Support

Downsides:

• You have to pay for one year upfront when joining

Related: Check out free web hosting wordpress post. 

Although you may think you'll never have any of these problems, you should know that they're more common than you think and for them to keep the costs low and be competitive, they will do lots of things to save costs.

Overloaded servers

Most of these web hosting packages will come on a shared server because of the low price point. That means you will share the same resources with hundreds of other websites. Now, it starts to be a problem when there are way too many sites using the same hosting resources, and the CPU gets overloaded.

Some will limit the number of sites on a server. However, most of the time they will add as many as possible to keep the costs low, and sometimes if your website is consuming too many resources you will be asked to either upgrade to a more expensive package or they will shut down your service.

So, even if the server specs look good, you will still have very high loading times and will also cause downtimes. In the end, it will lead to bad user experience on your site, and that will also affect your search engine rankings.

Bad neighborhood

Another common issue is to have your site hosted in a bad neighborhood. What is that you might ask?

Because of the multitude of sites hosted on the same server(same IP), some of them will get hacked and used for other malicious activities like mail spamming, phishing, and so on. It will most likely cause your IP to be blacklisted and then mark your site as 'bad' in the eyes of the search engines.

To avoid that, you should always go with a hosting provider that has a strict policy regarding this issue. The provider should keep a running firewall all the time and continually scan for malicious code.

Black Listed IP

Did it ever happen that your site just won't index in Google or other search engines? It may very well be because of your site IP. For these engines and Internet Providers to block scammers and hackers, they will often blacklist whole IP resulting in blocking all the websites on that IP.

In this case, the only thing that you're left to do is to request your hosting provider for a new IP or even move to a new host.

To check and see if your site IP is blocked you can use SpamHaus.

High or Hidden Cancellation fees

Another popular way for cheap hosting vendors to make extra money is to have a strict or hidden cancellation policy that will make it harder for you to cancel their service. They may also require a lot more than the market usual for things as SSL installs, site migrations, or even domain registrations, all to make an extra dime.

Bad Support team

One of the highest cost as a cheap hosting company is the support team behind. And because they don't affect the sales directly, only in time through user experience, some companies choose to overlook the importance of having a competent and well-trained team to help with hosting problems.

Therefore, although they are more competitive in price, you might have to wait 2-3 days to get a ticket answered and get your site back up when it's down. This overall makes it a painful experience when having to deal with such things.

That is why it's always good to know if they have a 24/7 team to handle live chats or some other way of direct communication.

Long term contracts for lower prices

To get such a cheap hosting price, some will require a long term contract(1-3 years), and most of the time, this will have to be paid upfront. It's a common sales tactic to present the lowest monthly price but when you get to the payment option to see that to get that price you'll have to commit for at least a year with all paid upfront.

You can avoid this issue by still choosing the monthly option but then the price will most probably double, and you won't save any cost. Because of this, it's crucial to do some extensive research before signing with any host as this will be a long term commitment from both sides. Trying to cancel early and asking for a refund for the remaining unused months is also a no go on 99% of them.

Expensive renewal fees

As I said in the last paragraph, in lots of cases, this will be a long term commitment, and because of that, hosts are prepared to take a loss in the first year of service but recoup all of it in the next years to come. That is why some renewal fees will cost 300-500% of the joining fee, and you will get a charge on your credit card without any previous notice.

To avoid this, you can try to move around hosts every few years to avoid the higher fees and take advantage of lower joining fees. You might think it's a hard thing to do, but most of them will offer one website migration free of charge when joining.