Web Hosting Comparison 2026
Nine web hosts, compared only on what their own pricing pages and contracts actually say: the entry plan, what it costs to start and to renew, the uptime figure the provider is contractually committed to, and the support that tier includes. Every cell is scoped to the one plan named in its row, and every figure is linked to its source below.
About these prices — read before comparing
- All figures were captured on 20 July 2026 from a single connection, located in Europe, except where a row states its own capture date in its price column. They are what one visitor saw on one day.
- Hosting prices vary by region. Several providers detect your location and serve a different currency, and sometimes a different number. Rows marked † served a non-USD currency from where we fetched — SiteGround redirected to its EU storefront, and DreamHost's page carried the same numeral against both a dollar and a euro sign. We have printed what we actually saw rather than converting it, because a converted price is not a price anyone was quoted.
- Check the price on the provider's own site before buying. Intro rates are tied to the committed term shown, and where a renewal price is not published we say so rather than estimate it.
Scroll the table sideways to see every column.
| Host & plan | Price (intro → renewal) | Published SLA | Support | Verdict | Visit site |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Hostinger Premium (3 websites) | $2.99/mo intro rate, 48-month term — re-checked 4 October 2026 then $10.99/mo | 99.9% Per month. Remedy: on request, a credit of 5% of that month’s hosting fee, usable only for further Hostinger products and services. | 24/7 support Billed as "priority 24/7 expert support"; the channel is not specified on the plans page. | Lowest intro price here — but it renews at roughly 3.7× on a four-year commitment. | Visit |
Bluehost Starter | $3.99/mo intro rate, 36-month term — re-checked 4 October 2026 then $9.99/mo | 99.99% Shared hosting bought on or after 5 March 2025 only; excludes Reseller, VPS and Dedicated. Remedy: one coupon per month at 5% of the monthly fee. | 24/7 chat Phone support starts at the Business tier, not on Starter. | The strongest SLA among the entry shared plans here, and the renewal price is now printed on the plans page: $9.99/mo after the 36-month intro term. | Visit |
SiteGround StartUp | €2.99/mo† intro rate, 12-month prepaid then €15.99/mo | 99.9% Measured on an annual basis (ToS Art. 5). Remedy: one month free between 99.9% and 99.00%, plus one month per further 1% lost, capped at 12 months. | 24/7 chat, phone and tickets All three channels are included on the entry plan. | The only entry plan here that includes 24/7 phone support. Also the steepest renewal step-up in the table, at over 5×. | Visit |
WP Engine Essential (1 site) | $28/mo first-year price for new customers, billed annually ($336) — re-checked 4 October 2026 then Not published | 99.95% Standard SLA. The 99.99% figure applies only where an Enhanced SLA is designated — the plans page lists it for Core and Enterprise, not Essential. Remedy: 5% of the applicable monthly fees per full hour of downtime beyond target. | 24/7 technical support The channel is not specified on the plans page. Core adds priority support; Enterprise lists 1-minute target response times. | Managed WordPress at the highest entry price in this table. The SLA that applies to Essential is the 99.95% standard target, not the 99.99% shown for Core and Enterprise. | Visit |
Cloudways Flexible — DigitalOcean 2 GB / 1 vCPU / 50 GB | $11/mo standing rate billed hourly, not an intro offer — re-checked 4 October 2026 then Same — no step-up | None published Cloudways publishes a support-response SLA only, which states it covers the support console and "in no case" the availability of the underlying cloud provider. Availability is DigitalOcean/AWS/GCE/Vultr/Linode’s. | 24/7 chat and tickets Standard support targets 3 h for high-priority tickets; the faster Advanced (30 min) and Premium (10 min) tiers are paid add-ons. | The only paid standing rate here, so no renewal cliff. In exchange, it publishes no uptime commitment of its own. | Visit |
Cloudflare Pages Workers Free | Free static asset requests unmetered then 100,000 requests/day shared with Workers, resetting at midnight UTC | None published Cloudflare publishes an uptime SLA for Business and Enterprise plans only. Free and Pro have none. | Community forums and Discord No direct support channel on the free tier. | Free for static sites within a daily request cap. No SLA and no direct support at this tier — that is the trade. | Visit |
DreamHost Web Hosting Launch | 2.89/mo† intro rate, yearly term then 10.99/mo | 100% Remedy: one day of hosting credited per hour (or part hour) of interruption, capped at 10% of the next pre-paid renewal. Excludes announced maintenance, customer code and upstream providers. | 24/7 chat and email No phone support listed. | The strongest published uptime commitment in this table, by contract rather than by marketing claim. | Visit |
HostPapa Essentials | $2.95/mo intro rate, 3-year discounted term (billed as "save 77%") — captured 13 August 2026 then Not published on the plans page | 99.9% Stated as an uptime guarantee on the plans and service-guarantee pages, with a footnote pointing to the Terms of Service for the SLA itself. No service-credit remedy or exclusion list is printed on either page — read the ToS before relying on it. | 24/7 phone, live chat and email The widest support surface in this table: telephone (with international numbers published), live chat and email, staffed in multiple languages. | Sits between the budget rows and the managed ones. The draw is support — phone, chat and email around the clock, where most rows here are chat-and-email only — plus a 30-day money-back guarantee on hosting fees. The catch is the commitment: the $2.95 rate needs a three-year prepayment, and HostPapa does not publish what it renews at, so you are agreeing to an unknown step-up. Domain fees are non-refundable even inside the 30 days. | Visit |
Polar55 PLUS+ (their only package) | €0.80/mo intro rate, first 12 months, new customers only; excl. VAT — captured 9 August 2026, unchanged on 4 October 2026 then €3.46/mo | 99.9% Printed as a specification line on the plan page. We did not find a service-credit remedy or exclusion list published alongside it — check their terms before relying on it. | 24/7 email Email only (support@polar55.com); no phone or live chat is listed. The Finnish-language site additionally advertises its 24/7 support as Finnish-speaking. | The lowest renewal price in this table by a distance — €3.46/mo rather than a 3–4× step-up — and the intro rate is not tied to a multi-year prepayment. One package only: 10 GB (upgradable to 100 GB), 2 GB RAM, unlimited domains, sites, traffic, databases and mailboxes, daily backups. A small Nordic host rather than a global brand, and support runs through email alone. | Visit |
What this table does not measure
- Speed. We have not run our own load tests, and no independent benchmark covers all nine of these providers on comparable plans. Rather than publish a rating scale we invented, we have left speed out. The most credible public source we found is Review Signal's WordPress hosting benchmarks, but participation is opt-in and it tests only three of the hosts listed here, at different price tiers.
- “Published SLA” is a contract, not a measurement. It is the uptime the provider commits to in writing, together with what you get if they miss it. It is not observed uptime — that would need our own monitoring, which we do not run. Where a provider publishes no uptime SLA for the tier listed, the cell reads None published. We have not substituted an industry-average number in its place.
- SSL is not compared because there is nothing to compare: every host in this table includes a free SSL certificate on the plan shown.
Sources
Every price and SLA above was read from the provider's own pricing page or service agreement on 20 July 2026, or on the later date the row itself states. Providers change these without notice — check the source before you buy.
- Hostinger (Premium (3 websites)) — Pricing · SLA
- Bluehost (Starter) — Pricing · SLA
- SiteGround (StartUp) — Pricing · SLA
- WP Engine (Essential (1 site)) — Pricing · SLA
- Cloudways (Flexible — DigitalOcean 2 GB / 1 vCPU / 50 GB) — Pricing · Support SLA
- Cloudflare Pages (Workers Free) — Pricing · Plan SLAs
- DreamHost (Web Hosting Launch) — Pricing · SLA
- HostPapa (Essentials) — Plans and pricing · Uptime and refund guarantee
- Polar55 (PLUS+ (their only package)) — Plan and specifications · Prices
Six of the nine rows are affiliate links: Hostinger, Bluehost, Cloudways, DreamHost, HostPapa and Polar55. SiteGround, WP Engine and Cloudflare Pages are plain links. The order of this table is unchanged from before and is not arranged by what pays us. See our disclosure.