1
Nexcess
Price
Starting at $9.50 per month
Uptime
99.99%
Customer Support
24/7 Support Team
2
Hostinger
Price
$1.39/month
Uptime
99.9%
Customer Support
24/7 Support Team
|
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Small businesses have a lot of expenses when they start, including the cost of creating a website. Creating and hosting a website doesn’t have to be expensive, though. There are plenty of cheap web hosting services available that are worth considering.
Avoid choosing a web hosting service just because it’s cheap. The best services offer more than cheap web hosting—they should give you ample storage space for any media you upload, high guaranteed uptime, fair terms and responsive support. In fact, if you have the budget for a more expensive web hosting service, than you might want to consider some of the more powerful offerings in our larger web hosting guide.
1
Price
Starting at $9.50 per month
Uptime
99.99%
Customer Support
24/7 Support Team
2
Price
$1.39/month
Uptime
99.9%
Customer Support
24/7 Support Team
$1
12
months
Unlimited
$1
12
months
Unlimited
Ionos by 1&1 offers one of the lowest monthly fees for web hosting. Its introductory price of $1 per month on a 12-month term for the Business plan is objectively cheap. The company doesn’t limit storage or bandwidth, so you don’t have to worry about uploading too many media files or having too many site visitors.
Paying $12 for a year of web hosting service is affordable for most, but Ionos also gives you a free domain name on top of that. Ionos also gives you a free domain name (including .com, .net and .org). Domain registration typically costs around $10 to $15, so it’s a great deal.
Who Should Use It: New businesses would do well with an Ionos hosting package. With a 12-month term, you’ll have enough time to decide whether it’s right for you, and if not, you’re out $12, and you can simply transfer your domain name to another host.
$2.75
36
months
Unmetered
HostGator makes it easy for anyone to get started with its cheap web hosting service. The Hatchling plan starts at $2.75 per month, if you agree to a 36-month term. Three years at that price is a great deal, and you get all the basics you’d expect, such as unmetered storage and bandwidth and a cPanel dashboard.
You’ll also get a free domain name with HostGator for the first year. After that, you’ll have to pay a pricey $17.99 for that same domain each year afterward. Something else to consider: There are lots of hidden fees. If you choose to add on malware protection, an upgraded SSL certificate, email, SEO tools and backups, you can end up paying as much as $200 more each year.
Who Should Use It: Beginner bloggers or solopreneurs might want to consider HostGator. You’ll have three years to build up site authority, and assuming you don’t upload too many files (HostGator doesn’t limit storage size, but it does stop you at 250,000 files), this could be a good web host for your needs.
$1.95
36
months
Unlimited
$1.95
36
months
Unlimited
MochaHost’s confidence in its service is unparalleled. Sign up for a low-cost web hosting plan at any term length, and you get 180 days to claim a refund (it’s prorated after 30 days). It’s one of the longest money-back guarantees we’ve seen. MochaHost also offers a lifetime discount, so if you sign up for the $1.95-per-month plan for the 36-month term, you can keep that discount if you renew for the same three-year plan.
As is standard in the web hosting industry, MochaHost gives you unlimited storage and bandwidth. The web host breaks from the standard when it comes to its uptime guarantee, though. It promises 100% uptime, which isn’t likely, but if you track any downtime of your site, you can claim a month of free service.
Who Should Use It: If you have experience managing a website, MochaHost’s low-cost plan could work for you. For all its perks, MochaHost severely limits users of its Soho plan. There’s no one-click installation of WordPress, no website builder, no migration assistance and no automatic backups. It’s like MochaHost created a beginner-unfriendly starter plan.
$1.75
36
months
Unlimited
$1.75
36
months
Unlimited
Stablehost advertises an attractive basic web hosting plan that’s affordable for any budget. At $1.75 per month for the Starter plan, you pay the entire balance upfront for three years of service. Similar to other cheap web hosting companies, your storage and bandwidth are unlimited, but you’ll also miss out on spam filtering and other security features.
Who Should Use It: Every Stablehost plan comes with its proprietary site builder, making this a good choice for anyone new to website building. The 24/7 live chat support team is quick to respond, so you’ll have help along the way. And if you decide you like Stablehost at the end of your term, the renewal price is still affordable at $3.50 per month.
$1.39
48
months
30GB
$1.39
48
months
30GB
Hostinger has made a recent pricing change. Contrary to the pricing in its Google ads, the $0.99-per-month plan is now $1.39. It isn’t the cheapest web hosting out there, but it’s still inexpensive. The caveat here is that you have to agree to a whopping 48 months with the company—that’s four years. Still, when you sign up for shared hosting, you can renew at $2.99 per month, which is still affordable.
When you consider storage and bandwidth info on Hostinger’s site, it could seem restrictive or transparent, depending on perspective. The starter plan limits you to 30GB of storage, and 300,000 site visitors per month. We agree that 30GB seems a bit limiting, but if you have 300K site visitors per month, cheap web hosting isn’t for you.
Who Should Use It: Small businesses that don’t plan to include a blog would do well with Hostinger’s Single plan. If your website is meant to provide info, such as location, hours, etc., then you don’t need to worry about the limited storage.
Company | Company - Logo | Forbes Advisor Rating | Forbes Advisor Rating - Image | Monthly Cost | Term Length | Storage | Learn More CTA text | Learn more CTA below text | LEARN MORE |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Ionos by 1&1 | 4.5 | $1 | 12 months | Unlimited | View More | ||||
HostGator | 3.8 | $2.75 | 36 months | Unmetered | Learn More | On HostGator's Secure Website | |||
MochaHost | 3.8 | $1.95 | 36 months | Unlimited | View More | ||||
Stablehost | 3.8 | $1.75 | 36 months | Unlimited | View More | ||||
Hostinger | 3.8 | $1.39 | 48 months | 30GB | View More |
Web Host | Best For |
---|---|
Ionos by 1&1 | Best Monthly Fee & Low-Commitment Terms |
HostGator | Best Cheap Hosting for New Bloggers |
MochaHost | Best Money-Back Guarantee |
Stablehost | Best for Building a Cheap Website |
Hostinger | Best for Long-Term Website Builds |
To rank the best cheap web hosting services, we put a lot of weight behind the introductory monthly cost. That’s why you’ll see some web hosts you may not recognize or see well-known hosts lower on the list. We also gave more consideration to term lengths and a free domain—these speak directly to value. Still, we kept storage and bandwidth limits, uptime, and support in mind.
Our list of the best cheap web hosting companies focuses on monthly cost, term lengths and overall value. You should keep a few factors in mind when you’re choosing the best web host for your website, cheap or otherwise.
Web hosting services seem to shift between unlimited and unmetered in regards to storage and bandwidth with little explanation. If you read the fine print of the Terms and Conditions from each host, you’ll usually find the answer.
If your storage is unlimited, it often comes with conditions. For example, if you use too many resources on a shared server, as it relates to others on the server, the web host may ask you to remove files from your site.
Unmetered bandwidth usually means that the hosting company isn’t paying much attention to your site visitor numbers, but if it goes above a certain amount, say, 300,000 in a month, the host may ask you to upgrade to a virtual private server (VPS).
Even when you find a web host that promises 100% uptime, unlimited storage or $1 per month, it can change the terms any time. It’s a good idea to read any changes a web host makes to its policies to make sure it’s still a good fit for your website needs.
It’s common to see 99.90% to 100% uptime in web host marketing. What difference does .10% make? First, those uptime guarantees don’t apply to scheduled downtime for maintenance. If you notice your site is down, but the web host let you know it was going to happen, it doesn’t count. Unplanned downtime is when hosting companies scramble to get service back up because otherwise, they owe a lot of people free months.
If your website is up only 99.90% of the time, it’s about the equivalent of 44 minutes of downtime per month. Bump that uptime to 99.99% of the time, and you might have 4 minutes or so of downtime per month.
Server location can impact the speed of one’s website for some users. If you have a bakery in Chicago, most of your site visitors are likely to be local, so you would want to choose a host with servers in the central United States. Server location shouldn’t impact search engine optimization (SEO), so it shouldn’t affect your ranking in search engines. Some experts disagree, though, and believe server location can affect rankings.
If you’re doing your due diligence, you might have noticed the word inodes in a web hosting company’s policies. An inode is a data structure that includes all the attributes of a file. It includes information about a file or directory, such as file name, permissions and time of last change. Sometimes web hosts won’t limit storage, but will limit the number of inodes (HostGator limits inodes to 100,000 for shared plans).
The cheapest way to host a website is to choose a budget web host, like the ones listed above. Features and allowances are limited, so you may miss out on something you may need, depending on the type of site you want or need. For example, an online store may require more resources. Learn more about how to create a website for your business.
You can host a website free if you do it yourself. You need to use your PC and install server software, and your PC must stay on at all times. Your site is likely to load slowly, and you have to handle maintenance on your own. It’s free, but you’re likely to run into limitations, such as your internet service provider’s (ISP) bandwidth allowance.
Web hosting doesn’t have to be expensive—there are plenty of cheap web hosting options. However, hosting gets pricey for sites that require more resources. If you outgrow the storage and bandwidth allowances on your current web host, you may need to consider a virtual private server (VPS) or a dedicated server.
Amy Nichol Smith has more than 20 years experience as a journalist and editor, writing on a range of topics, including tech products and services, the gaming industry, and small business. She has been featured in Tom's Guide, L.A. Times, Business.com, Reader's Digest, and Investopedia. Her favorite tech product is a tie between her Roomba and gaming PC.
Adam Hardy is a former assistant editor at Forbes Advisor, where he covered small business and tech. Previously, he was a staff writer at The Penny Hoarder, specializing in the gig economy and entrepreneurship. His work has appeared in the Asia Times, Business Insider, Creative Loafing, the Tampa Bay Times, Yahoo! Finance and other publications.