To help blog users find the best blog hosting providers with affordable prices, high reputation, easy-to-use tools, outstanding reliability and world-class technical support, we have worked out a list of the top 3 providers after reviewed 50+ cheap blog hosts since 2010.
BlueHost, WebHostingHub and HostGator are recommended as the winners of the award. They all have more than 10 years’ blog hosting experiences, and they are famous for delivering high-quality blog hosting services.
Among the web hosting companies we have reviewed, the 3 companies provide the most affordable shared web hosting for blogging. In addition, the shared hosting plans they offer are integrated with plenty of outstanding features, fast page loading speed, excellent uptime and plenty of free advertising credits. In addition, the 3 companies offer 24×7 US-based technical support through a toll-free phone call, email and live chat.
1. BlueHost
BlueHost is designed to provide an affordable and reliable blog hosting solution for individuals and small businesses. The regular price of BlueHost blog hosting solution starts at $7.99/mo.
According to the 3384 real customer reviews viewed 290 of the bloggers voted to BlueHost positively. Particularly, 99.1% of the bloggers are satisfied with the overall performance and reliability, while 98.9% and 98.6% are satisfied with the control panel and customer support respectively. This customer satisfaction rate could be the highest one in the industry.
The BlueHost blog hosting plan includes the following competitive features:
- 1 free domain & unlimited domains hosted on 1 account.
- cPanel control panel – the most popular and user-friendly control panel in the market.
- SimpleScripts, 1-click installer for the various blog applications & software, such as WordPress & b2evolution.
- Free site builder with 1000+ free themes & templates.
- 24×7 US-based customer support via the toll-free phone number, live chat & email with average holding times less than 30 seconds.
- ANYTIME money back guaranteed for the secure purchase.
- Free $100 Google advertising credits, attractive for the bloggers who have a channel to resell the traffic.
2. WebHostingHub
As a well recognized reliable blog hosting provider, WebHostingHub was established with the purpose of providing the most affordable and reliable web hosting services.
The WebHostingHub hosting plan is available at the price of $8.99/mo originally.
The plans include unlimited disk space, monthly data transfer, parked domains, MYSQL databases and other blog-friendly features as following,
- 1 free domain name and allows unlimited hosted websites
- Fast creating a blog site with a premium website builder in only 5 minutes, which enables bloggers to start blogging as soon as possible.
- Easily customizing blogs with multiple stylish themes, skins, plugins & widgets.
- Full email functionality included in all blog accounts to have as many custom email addresses created.
- Easy-to-use cPanel control panel & script installer – the most effective tool to get a blog online by installing WordPress or b2evolution in 1 click.
- 90 days FULL money-back guarantee & no hidden fees.
- Free $250 credits provided to drive traffic to the blog sites.
As for uptime and speed, WebHostingHub also has many spotlights. Refer to the following table for detailed information.
- Web Servers – All the servers utilized by them is 100% DELL branded, coming with the highest specification of 4x Intel XEON E5500, 15K RPM RAID 10 drives, SSD RAID 10 drives, and 32GB memory. Thus, any hosted blog can run with peak performance.
- Data Center – They rent the best server space, featuring fully redundant power supply, automatic lighting, ventilation and cooling control, and advanced security system. Note that the data center is SAS 70 Type II compliant, and is monitored day and night.
- Network – This web host succeeds in building one of the best network routing and switching infrastructures in the industry, which operates via multiple layers containing redundant core routers, core distribution switches and carrier diversity.
- Performance Technology – In order to shorten the physical distance between visitors and website content, thus speed up the webpage loading and file downloading, this hosting provider offers the best CloudFlare CON for free.
3. HostGator
Founded in 2002, HostGator is a US-based hosting company that has 2 dedicated data centers in Houston and Austin, Texas, with multiple robust servers.
For such a great speed, the blog hosting plan is priced at only $6.95/mo.
Since HostGator always delivers the best value to the money that customers pay for its service, it offers not only unlimited disk storage, bandwidth, email accounts, but also the following useful features for bloggers.
- Free domain name & unlimited add-on domains allowed.
- cPanel control panel with Softaculous – easy 1-click installation of multiple applications including WordPress, b2evolution & Joomla.
- The promise of 99.9% uptime kept well.
- 24×7 technical support with professional support staff well prepared for prompt and accurate answers.
- 45 days FULL money back guaranteed for a worry-free experience.
- Up to $200 free advertising credits with Google AdWords, Bing and Yahoo!.
According to our real hosting experience with HostGator, this company really has done a good job in customer service. It has a group of knowledgeable and professional support staff, being able to help customers via phone calls, e-mail, live chat, and discussion board 24 hours a day, and 7 days a week. To ensure the best support efficiency, the waiting time of the phone and online chat is no more than 5 seconds, and the responding time of e-mail is less than 15 minutes.
What Is Blog Hosting
Blog hosting is a typical type of hosting solution that allows you to set up and run a blog featuring regular updates in form of blog posts.
Now, with the massive usage of blogging scripts, blog hosting also is about the features to help you install and use these scripts, requiring database support, script support, easy script installation and activation, along with plenty of disk space and monthly bandwidth.
When choosing a blog hosting solution, the first thing you should decide is whether to use the free service or the paid one.
Actually, if your blog site is a personal one that is just used to record your daily life or to keep in touch with your friends and family, free hosting is sufficient for you. Here, you can adopt some free blogging platforms such as Blogger and WordPress.com. T
hese platforms have a user-friendly interface to make blogging an easy thing. In addition, they do not require script installation or database configurations.
However, if you are looking to earn the income, you have to invest in the paid blog hosting solution. This way, you can have your own domain name and many more options for website customization and design. Also, with the paid hosting, you can put any ads as you like and accommodate the large organic traffic.
Popular Blogging Tools and Platforms
In the following, we have listed some famous and user-friendly blogging tools and platforms.
- WordPress.com – This is the largest blogging community on the Internet. It is powerful enough for a newbie to start a personal blog without spending even one penny. Here, if you do not care about the customization, this is a perfect choice for you.
- WordPress.org – This is the sister option of WordPress.com. With it, you can set up an eye-catching website of any kind. However, it requires you to register a domain, purchase the hosting and install this script on the hosting account.
- Blogger – This is the simple blogging platform that makes it easy to post and to publish.
- Weebly – If you care about the potential of SEO and are looking for the drag-and-drop feature, Weebly is your choice.
- Joomla – This is the older and more technical blogging tool. If you have some technical knowledge and expertise, you’ll like it.
Tips for Choosing Blog Hosting
In fact, to pick up the top 3 best blog hosting providers among a large number of candidates, we have done a lot of efforts. In the following, we’d like to list some tips we have used for choosing the final award winners, with which you can get some inspirations for selecting your preferred blog hosting company on your own.
Not Too Cheap or Too Expensive
For the majority of bloggers, they do not want to spend too much on this virtual platform that is mainly used for sharing something they are interested in online. In this case, the first requirement of the truly quality blog hosting is the affordable hosting charge. Note that the average hosting price is about $6/mo.
However, affordable hosting does not mean extremely cheap or even free hosting plans. Generally, these packages are full of scam, resulting in bad performance and support services for you.
Easy Blog Building
As researched, the majority of webmasters rely on some blog builders to start their blogging life. In this case, the hosting provider needs to be 100% compatible with all the widely used blogging tools such as WordPress, b2Evolution, TextPattern and many more.
In addition, as the manual installation of these scripts can be a hard task for almost all the common bloggers, the 1-click script installer is a must-have offering to achieve the automatic installation.
Hassle-Free Website and Account Management
In fact, many bloggers only want to focus their minds on blog posts. In this case, the web host needs to ensure the easy process for the website and hosting account management. To achieve this, the user-friendly cPanel control panel is necessary. With the extensible function and intuitive interface, you can control everything with much ease.
24/7 Available Technical Support
The technical support needs to be available all the time via multiple channels. In this case, whenever you are in trouble for blogging, you can get the best resolutions timely based on your ultimate convenience.
