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Best for Value and Variety
Hostinger is the best managed server hosting option on the market today. Hostinger comes out on top because of its relative affordability, combined with how accessible the platform is for beginners.
For those looking for a premium hosting service to host an online store, there’s SiteGround, which is relatively expensive but very reliable. And if you specialize in WordPress? Well, so does Kinsta, and we rate it as the best in the WordPress game.
If you’re still not sure exactly which one of these hosting companies is right for your business, we’ve drilled down into the details to help you decide.
Compare the best managed hosting providers
Hostinger: Best for value and variety
SiteGround: Best for hands-off business hosting
Kinsta: Best for managed WordPress websites
Is managed web hosting worth it?
Bottom line: The best managed hosting provider
FAQs
The best managed server hosting providers
Compare the best managed hosting providers
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| Best for | Best for value and variety | Best for hands-off business hosting | Best for managed WordPress websites |
| Star rating | |||
| Starting price | Starts at $1.99/mo for managed WordPress | Starts at $2.99/mo for managed WordPress | Starts at $30/mo for managed WordPress |
| Money-back guarantee | Yes — 30 days | Yes — 30 days | Yes — 30 days |
| Uptime guarantee | 99.9% | 99.9% | 99.99% |
| Monthly visits | 25K - 100K | 10K - 400K | 35K - 750K |
| Number of websites | 3 - 100 | 1 - unlimited | 1 - 60+ |
| Storage | 20 GB - 100 GB | 10 GB - 40 GB | 10 GB - 100+ GB |
| Backups included | Weekly or daily | Daily | Daily |
| Free SSL certificate | On all plans | On all plans | On all plans |
| Free domain for a year | On all plans | On all plans | |
| Managed hosting types | Shared, WordPress, WooCommerce, VPS, cloud | Shared, WordPress, cloud | WordPress |
| Learn more | Get Hostinger | Get SiteGround | Get Kinsta |
Hostinger: Best for value and variety
What we liked
Simple dashboard: Hostinger’s management services focus on the background technology, updates, and maintenance. You’ll still need to decide what to put on your server, but with Hostinger’s admin UI, you won’t need to be a hosting expert anyway. You can install almost any popular CMS or web app in just a few clicks, or even one of several game servers.
Good support team: If you’re going to let your hosting provider handle the technical side of your server, you want the people working there to be helpful, knowledgeable, and efficient. In our experience, that describes Hostinger’s support team to a tee.
Excellent value for the money: Hostinger’s managed WordPress plan starts at a very reasonable $1.99/mo with a 4-year subscription. If you need more resources, the provider’s cheapest managed VPS plan starts at $4.99/mo and includes enough server resources (1 CPU core and 4 GB RAM) to keep a small site running.
What we didn’t like
No PCI compliance: Hostinger’s servers aren’t rated for storing your customers’ payment information. This means that if you want to sell anything online, you’ll need to use a third-party payment processor, like Stripe or PayPal.
Test results
In our testing of Hostinger’s shared hosting plan, it graced us with some of the best performance test results we’ve seen. Its solid website loading times were good, but the real indicators of excellence were its consistently low average server response times, 100% uptime result, and excellent performance under stress testing.
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| Uptime | 100% |
| Average response time | 138 ms |
| Did Hostinger pass the stress test? | Yes |
| Learn more | Get Hostinger |
Star rating summary
In our rating system, the features, performance, and security categories carry the most weight. Hostinger came out of our review process with a 5/5 for all three and had pretty high scores in all the other categories as well. Overall, we rate it as a very strong option for managed WordPress hosting, with affordable pricing, great support, and a highly intuitive UI.
Hostinger earned a near-perfect star rating of 4.9 because it is user-friendly and comprehensive, provides reliable performance, and is affordable for small- to medium-sized businesses.
| Decision factor | Weight | Verdict |
| Our experience | 10% | 5.0 |
| Value and capacity | 18% | 4.2 |
| Performance | 20% | 5.0 |
| Features | 25% | 5.0 |
| Security | 20% | 5.0 |
| Support and reputation | 7% | 4.9 |
SiteGround: Best for hands-off business hosting
What we liked
Hands-off hosting: SiteGround’s shared hosting plans are set up so you hardly have to configure them in any way yourself (although you can, if you want to). The shared plans come with tools that will automatically maintain and manage WordPress for you. And then there’s the cloud plans, which cost a lot more but are fully managed. You can ask the SiteGround team to set them up however you want, and you’ll be good to go.
Great reputation for service: SiteGround has a long history for reliability, and most of its customers seem pretty happy. Our own experience was perfectly satisfactory, and we found the support team to be prompt and helpful.
Built with ecommerce in mind: All of SiteGround’s plans, across the site builder and WordPress and cloud hosting offerings, include tools designed to help you set up an online store with minimal fuss. Many people looking for managed hosting plans will want to run their own stores online, and this makes the process much simpler and easier.
What we didn’t like
Relatively expensive: SiteGround’s shared hosting plans with managed WordPress features start at $17.99/mo with regular pricing, while the fully managed cloud plans start at $100/mo. When comparing SIteGround vs Hostinger for pricing, for example, it’s a fairly steep jump.
Test results
When we tested SiteGround’s shared hosting, it performed fairly well in terms of site loading times and for performance. It’s worth noting that there were a couple of indicators pointing to server instability, though. First, there were some interruptions in service during the test period, and second, we saw some significant fluctuations in server response times. The stress test, however, went well, with no dropped connections.
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| Uptime | 99.863% |
| Average response time | 634 ms |
| Did SiteGround pass the stress test? | Yes |
| Learn more | Get SiteGround |
Star rating summary
SiteGround got a 5/5 in our ratings across almost all categories. It’s pretty clear that the SiteGround team has put a lot of effort into justifying its price tag, so we can’t even complain about that too much. The only actual “flaw” we could find was that some new users may get a little confused by certain parts of the admin UI, but that’s a fairly minor concern when looking at SiteGround alternatives. In terms of managed WordPress hosting, SiteGround has a reputation for reliability and offers solid ecommerce support for online businesses.
SiteGround earned a perfect star rating of 5.0 because of its simple setup process, all-inclusive subscriptions, great performance results, and helpful customer support.
| Decision factor | Weight | Verdict |
| Our experience | 10% | 4.8 |
| Value and capacity | 18% | 5.0 |
| Performance | 20% | 5.0 |
| Features | 25% | 5.0 |
| Security | 20% | 5.0 |
| Support and reputation | 7% | 5.0 |
Kinsta: Best for managed WordPress websites
What we liked
Ultimate WordPress experience: Hostinger and SiteGround integrate well with WordPress, but Kinsta is all about WordPress. The entire experience is butter smooth, from creating a new site to finding that it’s already been optimized for speed and security 2 minutes later. You could easily argue that no one does it better.
Handy features for devs: Kinsta isn’t just for beginners. It’s for developers and even web agencies and offers all the tools you’d want for building WordPress sites at scale. WP-CLI, SSH, Git — it’s all there. There’s also a REST API, so you can create new sites, manage your existing sites, clear the cache, and even restart PHP from your own internal tools.
Great performance: WordPress isn’t known for being the most speed-optimized platform, but with a few careful server optimizations, WordPress sites can feel as fast as any powered by its competitors. As WordPress experts, Kinsta managed to impress us with just how well our test site performed.
What we didn’t like
Even more expensive than SiteGround: To be clear, Kinsta is fairly expensive, and it’s even more expensive than SiteGround’s shared hosting plans with managed WordPress features. The cheapest Kinsta plan starts at $30/mo and runs only WordPress.
Test results
The site loading times were perfectly respectable when we tested Kinsta’s shared hosting plans. The average server loading times were very low, with 100% uptime during our testing period. The stress test actually had a lower average response time under load than we saw in the uptime test, pointing to very stable servers.
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| Uptime | 100% |
| Average response time | 173 ms |
| Did Kinsta pass the stress test? | Yes |
| Learn more | Get Kinsta |
Star rating summary
As you’d expect from our top picks, Kinsta scored highly across most categories, with full marks for performance and security. It scored less well for features — despite offering some web app hosting options — as Kinsta really focuses on only one thing: WordPress. If all you want is WordPress hosting, then Kinsta is essentially perfect, and as a premium managed WordPress web hosting service, it’s an extremely strong contender.
Kinsta earned a solid star rating of 4.4 because it showed great performance, offers easy-to-use, WordPress-focused web hosting, and includes almost all features across all plans.
Kinsta only received a score lower than 4.0 in the value and capacity category because its expensive compared to other web hosting services.
| Decision factor | Weight | Verdict |
| Our experience | 10% | 5.0 |
| Value and capacity | 18% | 3.75 |
| Performance | 20% | 4.5 |
| Features | 25% | 5.0 |
| Security | 20% | 5.0 |
| Support and reputation | 7% | 5.0 |
Is managed web hosting worth it?
Managed hosting services offer convenience and the peace of mind that comes with entrusting your hosting infrastructure to professionals. The host’s team of techs can install more or less whatever you want (in some cases), handle all the updates, and even resolve issues before you find out about them.
Managed hosting plans do have limitations, though. Some hosts will offer managed services only for specific server technologies, or even specifically for software like WordPress, but not for Drupal, for example. Sometimes, there may also be delays in response if the support team is dealing with emergencies on other servers.
To note, there aren’t a lot of differences between managed VPS hosting and managed dedicated servers. In both cases, server maintenance, configuration, updates, and software installation are handled for you. Managed dedicated server hosting means that there’s someone on hand to help you get your server restarted if a reboot goes wrong, but your host should be doing that even if the server is classed as being unmanaged.
The best managed dedicated hosting is an expensive service, and businesses with a good IT team and very specific requirements may prefer to take full control of their virtual, dedicated, or cloud servers themselves for full server management. Others may decide that the lower cost of unmanaged servers makes it worth learning how to manage them in-house.
When you run a lot of servers at scale, it can be better to handle as much of the maintenance as you can in-house, so you can respond quickly if things go wrong. Some hardware nerds might also choose unmanaged servers because they think managing servers is fun. Like we do.
But for most individuals and small businesses? The convenience may well be worth it.
Bottom line: The best managed hosting provider
Hostinger, with its reputation for quality and relative affordability, takes the top spot for managed hosting. Most small- to medium-sized businesses will be more than happy with the tools on offer and the automatic management of their servers.
If you want to build a large business site and don’t mind paying the extra money, SiteGround offers excellent service and an even more hands-off approach to hosting. On the other hand, if you plan to build your site on WordPress or build many WordPress sites, then Kinsta is the best in the business.
How we test web hosting services
We use our proprietary grading rubric to evaluate web hosts based on performance, ease of use, features, support, and overall value. Our hands-on approach ensures our ratings reflect how each service actually performs in the real world, so you can choose a host with confidence.
Our process starts with signing up for each service and setting up a real website, just like you would. We run page speed, uptime, and stress tests to measure reliability and performance under load. We also explore the dashboard, test security tools, and contact support to see how responsive and helpful it is.
To learn more about how we test, check out our full testing methodology here.
FAQs
Will managed hosting make my website faster?
Managed hosting can make your website faster, but it depends on the host. Most managed server hosts implement a number of performance optimizations for speed, which can help a lot. Some might leave that sort of optimization up to you, though, while the host’s team focuses on security and stability.
Do you need managed WordPress hosting to start a website?
No, you don’t need managed WordPress hosting to start a website, but it makes starting new WordPress sites a lot easier. However, if you’re interested in learning the ins and outs of hosting and web development or want the cheapest deal possible, we recommend learning how to manage these things yourself when getting started. That way, you’ll know what to look for in a managed server host.
How much does it cost to build a website with managed WordPress hosting?
Hostinger’s managed WordPress plans cost $1.99/mo with introductory pricing, and the provider has a managed VPS plan for just $4.99/mo. Premium services like SiteGround start at $2.99/mo for shared hosting with “Managed WordPress features,” and at $100/mo for managed cloud plans, with many other, more expensive options also available.


