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Best Value
Best for Large Businesses
Hostinger is our pick for the best shared hosting service, with affordable plans starting at just $1.95/mo. If you’re looking for something a bit more powerful, ScalaHosting offers more server resources for the price. Bluehost is also a great option if you need shared hosting for WordPress.
Shared hosting is the ideal entry point for most first-time website creators. Keep reading for a detailed breakdown of our top web hosting picks and what makes each of them a smart buy.
Compare the best web hosting services for shared hosting
Hostinger: Best for affordability
ScalaHosting: Best for larger businesses
Bluehost: Best for WordPress
Do I need shared hosting?
Bottom line: The best web hosting service for shared hosting
FAQs
The best web hosting services for shared hosting
Compare the best web hosting services for shared hosting
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| Best for | Best for affordability | Best for larger businesses | Best for WordPress |
| Star rating | |||
| Starting price | Starts at $1.95/mo | Starts at $11.95/mo | Starts at $2.99/mo |
| Money-back guarantee | Yes — 30 days | Yes — 30 days | Yes — 30 days |
| Uptime guarantee | 99.9% | 99.99% | 99.99% |
| Monthly visits | 25K - 200K | 90K - 300K | 40K - 400K |
| Number of websites | 3 - 100 | Unlimited | 10 - 100 |
| Storage | 20 GB - 100 GB | 10 GB - 100 GB | 10 GB - 100 GB |
| Free SSL certificate | On all plans | On all plans | On all plans |
| Free domain for a year | Starting at annual plans | Starting at Start plan | On all plans |
| Learn more | Get Hostinger | Get ScalaHosting | Get Bluehost |
Hostinger: Best for affordability
What we liked
Weekly backups: Even with the most basic shared server plan, Hostinger gets you free website backups every week with data retention of up to 7 weeks.
AI-search optimized: Hostinger offers an LLM optimization tool that generates an LLMS.txt file to aid AI search engines in crawling your site. It works as a companion to your ROBOTS.txt and XML sitemap, which helps AI agents index your website content faster.
Beginner-friendly web builders: Every shared web hosting user gets free access to an AI website generator for static sites and a WordPress-specific AI website builder. Both offer plenty of visual tools to design and customize your site without any coding knowledge.
What we didn’t like
Throttling concerns: Hostinger maintains a policy of throttling your website speed once your monthly traffic crosses your plan’s limit. Any visitors who try to access your site after the traffic limit is exhausted will experience slower loading times.
No CDN on Premium plan: Hostinger’s Premium plan does not offer access to Cloudflare’s CDN. You’ll have to invest in the Business plan or choose a cloud hosting plan like Cloud Startup or Cloud Professional.
Test results
Hostinger maintained a flawless 100% uptime during our testing period with a solid average response time. When we put it through a stress test by sending over 200 virtual users to our test site within 1 minute, there were no loading errors or failed requests. And in our speed tests across the three locations in the U.S., Canada, and France, Hostinger received a score of 97/100.
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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
Hostinger is one of the most popular web hosting services out there. Its great value, additional features like its weekly backup, and reliability earned it a star rating of 4.9 out of 5 in our review.
Hostinger earned a near-perfect star rating of 4.9 because its user-friendly and comprehensive, provides reliable performance, and 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 |
ScalaHosting: Best for larger businesses
What we liked
Proprietary control panel: ScalaHosting’s own control panel, SPanel, is a modern control panel for beginners. It’s a lot less cluttered than cPanel, with clearly labeled tabs like emails, websites, and databases. You can even customize the dashboard to show you the most important highlights by dragging and dropping widgets onto the page.
Extremely good support: We reached out to ScalaHosting’s support team during our evaluation period, and every single time we were connected to an agent within a minute. Support agents demonstrated a high degree of product knowledge, with the ability to troubleshoot complex issues.
Outstanding resource value: With the Start and Advanced shared hosting plans, ScalaHosting gives you way more server resources than other options. You can host unlimited websites with zero bandwidth limits, with plenty of NVMe storage and a free CDN.
What we didn’t like
Added costs for cPanel: While ScalaHosting’s built-in SPanel dashboard will please most web hosting beginners, advanced users who want a familiar UI will have to pay an added premium for cPanel access.
Lacks two-factor authentication (2FA): ScalaHosting does not offer 2FA on any of the shared hosting plans. You’ll need to sign up for a VPS plan for more secure sign-in options.
Test results
ScalaHosting achieved an excellent 99.33 out of 100 score on average across our speed tests in Montreal, Dallas, and Strasbourg. During stress testing, it reported zero HTTPS failures even with a peak of 82 requests per second. Uptime Robot noted no downtime issues during our entire monitoring period.
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| Uptime | 100% |
| Average response time | 665 ms |
| Did ScalaHosting pass the stress test? | Yes |
| Learn more | Get ScalaHosting |
Star rating summary
ScalaHosting is a very powerful shared hosting service that offers VIP support, solid security, and a free AI website builder. These aspects earned it a 4.9 star rating during our review.
ScalaHosting received a near-perfect star rating of 4.9 due to its intuitive setup process, comprehensive web hosting solutions, and good performance.
| Decision factor | Weight | Verdict |
| Our experience | 10% | 4.8 |
| Value and capacity | 18% | 4.6 |
| Performance | 20% | 5.0 |
| Features | 25% | 5.0 |
| Security | 20% | 5.0 |
| Support and reputation | 7% | 5.0 |
Bluehost: Best for WordPress
What we liked
WordPress integration and AI builder: Bluehost supports one-click WordPress installation for all users via its web hosting management dashboard and has an official WordPress recommendation. It also features a very easy-to-use AI website builder optimized specifically for WordPress.
Security features: Bluehost offers SiteLock Essentials, SSL monitoring, IP blockers, and DDoS protection as standard across all hosting plans. It also comes packed with a Cloudflare CDN for enhanced security and performance.
Beginner-friendly UI: Bluehost features an intuitive dashboard called Account Manager that centralizes all your hosting details on top of cPanel for traditional server management. There’s no need to log into cPanel again once you’re signed into Account Manager, which keeps things simple for new users.
What we didn’t like
Post-sales concerns: Bluehost has a mixed reputation among customers due to its poor handling of renewals and refunds. Many users report long lines for accessing live support, which is only made worse by the aggressive upselling by agents during sessions.
Reports of security issues: Some users have reported server issues, and there are complaints of at least one data breach in 2023. While we weren’t able to verify the data breach claims, several user reviews do talk about security issues affecting their sites in the same year.
Test results
During our most recent performance tests, Bluehost recorded a 100% uptime with an average response time of 135 ms. It received a perfect score on speed tests across Montreal, Dallas, and Strasbourg. There were zero HTTP failures during stress tests with over 250 virtual users in 1 minute.
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| Uptime | 100% |
| Average response time | 139 ms |
| Did Bluehost pass the stress test? | Yes |
| Learn more | Get Bluehost |
Star rating summary
Bluehost has a 4.8 star rating in our review thanks to its stellar WordPress integration, beginner-friendly UI design, and an AI site builder that’s purpose-built for the platform.
Bluehost received a high star rating of 4.8 due to its extensive web hosting features and reliable performance.
Bluehost offers everything you need from a web hosting service, but it's not as affordable as its competitors. We also believe the WordPress installation process could be improved.
| Decision factor | Weight | Verdict |
| Our experience | 10% | 4.5 |
| Value and capacity | 18% | 4.2 |
| Performance | 20% | 5.0 |
| Features | 25% | 5.0 |
| Security | 20% | 5.0 |
| Support and reputation | 7% | 4.8 |
Do I need shared hosting?
When looking for a web host, there are a few different types of hosting you can choose from. Shared hosting is a great choice for beginners for its cost-effectiveness, even if the performance may leave room for improvement.
VPS hosting splits a single physical server into multiple virtual servers, giving you dedicated resources at an affordable price. There’s also cloud hosting, where resources are spread across multiple servers for improved redundancy, and dedicated hosting, which reserves an entire physical server for a single client or site.
| Shared | VPS | Cloud | Dedicated | |
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Bottom line: The best web hosting service for shared hosting
Hostinger is our pick for the best shared hosting service due to its excellent value. It’s also one of the best web hosting services we’ve tested based on its overall value, performance, and ease of use.
We recommend ScalaHosting for growing teams that expect to scale quickly with demand, while Bluehost is the platform of choice for most WordPress beginners.
All three hosting providers offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, letting you freely test their paid plans. You can also scale your shared server resources up or down any time you renew your plan.
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
Is shared hosting better than dedicated hosting?
Shared hosting isn’t necessarily better than dedicated hosting, but it is cheaper. Shared hosting plans may be better suited for smaller teams and professionals who don’t want the complexity of a dedicated physical server.
Which shared hosting provider is the best?
Hostinger is our top web host pick for most new users. It offers good security, ample resources, a beginner-friendly UI, and AI tools to simplify your website launch.
What is shared hosting?
Shared hosting is where multiple users and websites share CPU, RAM, storage, and bandwidth across the same physical server. Resources are ultimately assigned on a first-come, first-served basis when it comes to moment-to-moment spikes in usage.


