For a company or an individual, one of the best ways to make yourself known is to have a showcase site. The problem is to find a web host with a good quality/price ratio. Moreover, it must offer a good speed and a reactive customer service. How to choose? In this buying guide, you will find the best web hosting companies of the moment.
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Our selection
"Offering impeccable value for money and ease of use, Hostinger is made for beginners and advanced users alike. It offers impeccable up-time, more security, fast…"
"For a low price, o2switch provides you with an easy to manage platform for a single fee of 5 €/month. Even a beginner webmaster will…"
"Kinsta is a quality WordPress hosting solution with performance worthy of a high-end web host like WP Engine, with its robust Google Cloud Platform infrastructure."
"This Swiss hosting company offers 80 professional themes (costing $249 on the Elegant Themes platform) with which you can customize your website. The whole thing…"
Offering impeccable value for money and ease of use, Hostinger is made for beginners and advanced users alike. It offers impeccable up-time, more security, fast loading time, and competent and highly available customer service.
Read moreHostinger is an extremely reliable web hosting company that offers something for every webmaster profile: from beginners to experts. Currently, it is our web host with our 500,000 visitors per month. They offer excellent shared hosting plans that offer performance and availability at a very reasonable price. Hostinger will not disappoint anyone who plans to create their very first website for less than $1 and 10,000 monthly visits.
In addition to shared hosting, Hostinger will also offer VPS, Cloud hosting, or even specialized WordPress hosting. No matter what kind of plan you opt for, you will always have access to very affordable hosting. Hostinger also offers you an SSL certificate and a free domain name with the extension of your choice (.com, .net, .fr) to boost your credibility in the eyes of Internet users. Hostinger's interface is also very easy to use thanks to its hPanel dashboard which is an improved version of cPanel.
For a low price, o2switch provides you with an easy to manage platform for a single fee of 5 €/month. Even a beginner webmaster will find his way without any problem.
Read more
Kinsta is a quality WordPress hosting solution with performance worthy of a high-end web host like WP Engine, with its robust Google Cloud Platform infrastructure.
Read moreThe company is based in London, Los Angeles and Budapest and it is a platform specialized in hosting WordPress sites. By choosing Kinsta, you will be entitled to a free migration service and especially to a correction guarantee in case of hacking of your site. And this, on all offers! This host is known for its high performance, as evidenced by the presence of the Kinsta CDN powered by Cloudflare which accelerates the loading speed. Its intuitive panel will make it easy for you to get started, all options are just a click away.
With an automatic daily backup function and offering free SSL certificates, it is an alternative dedicated to demanding companies concerning the security of their data, the management and the performance of their website(s). Thanks to Kinsta's high quality services, many prestigious companies such as Ubisoft, Drift, Intuit, Buffer, Asos or Tripadvisor do not hesitate to trust it completely.
This Swiss hosting company offers 80 professional themes (costing $249 on the Elegant Themes platform) with which you can customize your website. The whole thing is charged from 7,25 €/month.
Read moreInfomaniak is a web host based in Switzerland (Geneva), which offers mainly shared and cloud hosting. This host is an excellent choice able to offer you an availability of 99.98%. Its datacenters meet the requirements for obtaining Tier III. As far as the speed and loading time provided by Infomaniak are concerned, they are on the whole quite satisfactory.
To create your first site, the "Web + Mail Hosting" program provides you with a minimum of 100 GB of SSD storage space, free SSL certificates, an unlimited number of databases and 5 email addresses. You can also customize at any time the disk space, the number of email addresses, and the number of sites that can be managed via your web hosting.
Any specific needs?
The best entry-level web host in 2021
The best high-end web host in 2021
Offers with free SSL certificate
Your guide :
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| The best | Inexpensive | Top of the line | Excellent | |
In accordance with our commitment, this buying guide does not contain any sponsored products. |
9/10 |
8/10 |
9/10 |
8/10 |
| OUR SELECTION |
Hostinger
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o2switch
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Kinsta
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Infomaniak
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Offering impeccable value for money and ease of use, Hostinger is made for beginners and advanced users alike. It offers impeccable up-time, more security, fast loading time, and competent and highly available customer service.
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For a low price, o2switch provides you with an easy to manage platform for a single fee of 5 €/month. Even a beginner webmaster will find his way without any problem.
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Kinsta is a quality WordPress hosting solution with performance worthy of a high-end web host like WP Engine, with its robust Google Cloud Platform infrastructure.
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This Swiss hosting company offers 80 professional themes (costing $249 on the Elegant Themes platform) with which you can customize your website. The whole thing is charged from 7,25 €/month.
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Number of Websites
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100
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Several
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Several
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From 20
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Storage
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From 100GB of SSD storage
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Illimited
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From 10 GB of disk space
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From 100GB SSD
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Visits
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More than 25,000 visitors per month
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50 to 250 visitors per day
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From 25,000 visits
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-
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Email
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Free
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You can create multiple email accounts on a single hosting package
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5 email addresses and free @ik.me email for life
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Performance
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Availability
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Better than 99.99%
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Around 99.995%
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99.99%
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99.99%
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TTFB
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Under 400ms
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Under 500ms
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Under 350ms
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Under 500ms
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Data center certification
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Tier III
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Meets Tier IV certification requirements
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Kinsta has no data centers, it is managed by Google Cloud
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Tier III
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There is nothing worse than browsing a website that refuses to open or freezes at every manipulation. So make sure that your future web host offers excellent uptime. This factor, also called up-time, can be measured with a percentage. The closer the value is to 100%, the better the service availability guarantees.
When choosing your web host, keep an eye on this number and prioritize options that offer more than 99% uptime.
Only choose hosts with their own data centers. This way, they will be better monitored to protect you from any risk of unwanted intrusion and ensure excellent performance levels. Also, make sure that the data centers of your future host are Tier 3 or Tier 4 classified, to guarantee you excellent stability and an uptime close to 100%.
Some web hosting services have a certain monthly traffic limit. In practice, this means that after a certain number of accesses, the server will charge extra for "extra visitors" or simply stop displaying your site on the web.
Therefore, always pay attention to the information provided by the companies and make sure to use those with unlimited data traffic in order to protect your website from "outages" at some point.
Always aiming to provide the best experience to its users, Google always prioritizes the pages that load faster. So check if the web hosting service you are considering subscribing to offers good loading speed.
This speed is measured by the time it takes for a page to fully load and the server response time when a request is sent to it (TTFB). To this end, opt for a web host that provides a full load time around 1s and TTFBs approaching 100 ms.
Make sure that your future web host is able to fully protect your data by offering information redundancy and constant backups.
This way, even in case of natural or unexpected problems, your website will always be online and fully operational. Apart from that, know that a reliable web host usually offers, for free or not, SSL/TLS certificates or anti-DDoS protections in their offerings.
Opt for a host that offers WordPress hosting that comes with WP pre-installed. This will make it much easier for you to create your website. A Cpanel or hpanel access also provides a nice ease of use for both novice and experienced webmasters.
There are also the little extras that make the difference like the variety of payment methods, free migrations, the number of free domains, the included Cloudflare protection system, etc.
When it comes to websites or web hosting, it often happens that problems arise with the services offered in general. Therefore, it is essential that your future web host has a responsive customer service that is available 24/7 and can be reached by phone, email, and online chat. Otherwise, your sites may be down for a long time, which costs money.
The TTFB and the full load time of a page do not only depend on your host. Your on-page optimization also plays a role. Even if you subscribe to the best web hosting service out there, if your site is overloaded with unoptimized images and plugins, you will never get good results.
Since many web hosts want to gain as many subscribers as possible, some go so far as to make misleading advertisements with the indication "unlimited visitors". And yet, if you reach a peak of traffic voracious in resources, the host redirects you to a higher offer than yours.
To do this, go through a fine-tooth comb:
Always be sure that the offer you are going to subscribe to meets 100% of your project's needs before thinking about subscribing.
Ideal to start with your first site, shared hosting is intended for beginners, sites that attract less than 50,000 visits per month, e-boutiques and blogs with very little traffic.
The advantage with shared hosting is that in addition to being very economical (more economical than other types of hosting by the way!), it is also very easy to use and configure thanks to the cPanel, as well as the tools provided by the hosting services.
However, since this type of hosting is to be shared with other websites, the performance allocated to each site is limited. This will also significantly impact the uptime of each site. In addition, advanced users will not have the ability to customize the configuration of their web server.
On the security side, if one of the hosted sites is not up to date, it may be vulnerable to attacks from a hacker. If this were to happen, the whole server as well as all the hosted sites will be in danger.
As its name indicates, this type of hosting is entirely dedicated to you. It is especially suitable for advanced webmasters and therefore requires some knowledge of system administration. It is also expensive with an entry price around 100€/month.
With this type of hosting service, you are the only one responsible for technical problems that may occur, unlike with a shared hosting service where you have no control over the problems that may occur. During heavy traffic peaks, the server may crash if resources run out.
Performance wise, this type of hosting is the best. The advantage with dedicated hosting is that it offers the possibility of customization to better suit the needs of your website.
To be able to make some savings, it is possible to install several sites on a single dedicated server.
Halfway between dedicated hosting and shared hosting, VPS or Virtual Private Server hosting, is a hybrid system where part of a server is entirely dedicated to you. It requires a good foundation in system administration and is therefore suitable for advanced users who want to benefit from excellent performance without necessarily subscribing to an expensive dedicated server.
It is also suitable for medium-sized e-boutiques as well as high-traffic sites and blogs. With this type of hosting, determining your real needs is crucial to avoid ending up with too few or too many resources.
Compared to a shared hosting service, this hybrid system allows you to choose the parameters (RAM, memory, disk space) of the server that is intended for you. This solution protects you from technical problems caused by other hosted sites, and the configuration, installation, shutdown or restart of your virtual server can be done by you, at any time.
VPS hosting is a custom hosting solution that allows the user to adapt the virtual server to all their needs.
Cloud hosting service is the most flexible hosting solution of all. It relies on multiple servers (cloud computing) and the user only pays for the resources they actually use.
By opting for this type of hosting, you enjoy excellent performance and traffic peaks are easy to manage. Your availability is always well over 99%. The downside of Cloud hosting is that it is more expensive than shared and VPS hosting services, especially if your site has a high traffic rate each month.
On the security side, it is important to make sure that the provider has everything in place to secure your data since cloud computing involves saving your data outside of your company.
There are many advantages offered by a paid web hosting service. First, there is the possibility of customization. Everything is customizable: your site, its presentation, its design, the features of your blog, etc. A great asset for expert webmasters. It is also an excellent way to improve your performance in terms of natural referencing or SEO.
In terms of security, your data will be well protected from hackers. You can access them at any time to better control and monitor them. You will also benefit from automatic backups and easy access to your data. If you plan to change your web host later on, your data will be easy to migrate. With a paid web host, you also have the right to advertise on your site if you want to and you can enjoy a transparent management of your site.
And for the benefit of all users, you will be notified if your site consumes too many resources. This is to ensure the fair distribution of resources among webmasters. You will also have a customer service available 24/7 when you need help.
In short, you will have understood! A paid web host leaves nothing to chance. However, to take advantage of all that this provider has to offer, you will have to pay a high price, at the rate of a hundred euros per month. A considerable amount of involvement on your part is also required to control the technical settings, not to mention the fact that you need to master the features offered and get to know your host. Finally, if one day you think of changing host, you will not be reimbursed on your remaining unused months of subscription.
It is quite understandable that not everyone can afford the services of a web host. Since the costs of hosting a website are considerable, some users prefer to turn to free hosting solutions.
The advantage with this type of host is that no advertising will pollute your website. Some providers still offer a good level of performance and a fairly satisfactory loading time. You will also be entitled (with most free web hosts) to a free domain name. But be aware that this name will not necessarily be .net, .com, or .fr. This will hurt you from a SEO point of view to the point that you will lose all credibility in the eyes of Internet users.
Although opting for the free services of a web host is tempting, you should know that the quality will not necessarily be there, to the point of disappointing you. First, your up-time will be catastrophic. This means that every month, your website will be unavailable for many minutes, which will have a considerable impact on your turnover.
In most cases, you will not have a customer service available for you at any time. You won't have an email account or a free SSL certificate. You also risk losing your data at any time because the host does not allow automatic daily backups.
In conclusion, nothing is better than a subscription to a paying host which is much more profitable in the long term, especially if your ultimate goal is to have a good visibility on the Internet.
However, if you still prefer free solutions, at your own risk! You should know that there are many cheap web hosting services like the ones proposed in this comparison, which you can rely on.
For a better performance of your website
Today's Internet users are always in a hurry: they want everything, right away, so you only have a few seconds to grab their attention before they leave your site (and never come back). If your site takes forever to load, your visitors won't linger and won't see what you have to offer. This will not only cost you money, but also potential customers.
The performance of your site will also affect your search engine rankings. With a high quality web host, loading speeds will not be a problem for you. Once you fix your website's slow load times, you should find that your site loads incredibly fast.
For exemplary technical support
If you provide products or services through your website, you will realize the importance of timely and helpful customer support. Imagine you're in the middle of a big launch; everything is going great until your site goes down for some reason you don't know. What would you do? Every moment you're offline you're losing a lot of money.
With a web hosting company, you will always be able to get support from your provider and they will be able to fix your technical problems as soon as possible.
For an e-mail address associated with the domain name
If you want to look professional, you will need a branded email address that uses your domain name. For example, if your domain is "xxxx.com", you will need an e-mail address that says "[email protected]". If you are contacting customers by e-mail, it would be more professional to have an e-mail address associated with your domain name.
When you use a quality hosting service provider, you will have the option of creating your own e-mail address specific to your domain name. Some hosting providers limit you to one address, while others will allow you to create an unlimited number of email addresses.
For a better security of your data
While it's nearly impossible to have a 100% secure website, you never really know where the next threat will come from. You can always take steps to ensure that your website is as secure as possible. The foundation of your website's security starts with your hosting service provider.
After all, that's where all the files for your site are going to be stored. A quality host will have multiple layers of security in place and is better prepared for all eventualities.
For high level reliability and availability
A good hosting service guarantees you up-time and visibility on the web. The availability of your site is the number of times your site will actually be online. Most hosting companies have a clause in the hosting contract that specifies the percentage of time your site will be online.
For most hosting companies, this number is 99.9%. This small percentage of time that your site is offline is when maintenance is being done or when the server is experiencing problems.
In our opinion, the best brands of web hosts in 2022 are :
Founded in 2004, Hostinger is the most popular web hosting company in the UK and around the world at the moment. It richly deserves its first place in our comparison because of its high quality of services, its excellent level of performance (CPU, RAM, bandwidth, etc.), its wide choice of servers, and its ability to meet all the needs of users, whether they are experienced or beginners.
o2Switch is a French web host whose headquarters, as well as the data centers, are located in Clermont-Ferrand. The advantage of using the services of o2switch is that LiteSpeed and LSCache are included in its offer, it also offers a domain name and SSL certificate, the customer service is very competent and available at any time. Apart from that, the hosted websites enjoy stable and satisfactory performance. However, o2switch only offers a single package that does not necessarily meet all needs. Its administration interface also leaves something to be desired.
It is a Swiss web host that also specializes in video on demand, as well as audio and video streaming. It is mostly appreciated for its eco-friendly data centers, responsive, competent and available customer service at any time. This Swiss company also offers satisfactory performance and a free SSL certificate. Too bad it can't offer a domain name and the number of sites to host is limited.
Founded in 2007, PlanetHoster is a French-speaking web hosting company based in Laval (Montreal - Quebec). Although it offers rather expensive rates, this is quickly compensated by the many advantages offered by this host. These include highly qualified and available customer service by phone, an AutoPeakPower option on HybridCloud hosting, very good free hosting offers, more than satisfactory performance, and assisted site configuration/creation (for Joomla, PrestShop, WordPress, etc.).
Founded in December 2013, Kinsta is a managed WordPress host based on a solid Google Cloud Platform high-end infrastructure like WP Engine. While it's not one of the biggest hosting services out there, it still offers solid offerings that are worth the price tag for small and medium-sized businesses. This includes free unlimited basic migrations from other hosts and free premium migrations.
The diagram below will help you to get an idea of the typical prices for each price range (entry-level, mid-range and high-end).
However, more expensive does not necessarily mean better.
We therefore advise you to always consult our ranking before deciding, rather than blindly relying on price ranges.
What you can do with a web host
Web hosting is a service that offers businesses and individuals to publish a website or web page on the Internet on their behalf in order to be seen by Internet users. A web host, or web hosting service provider, is a company that provides the technology and services necessary to get the website or web page posted on the Internet.
Elements you need to have on hand before creating a website
To build a website, you will need both a domain name and a web hosting account. Buying a domain name alone only gives you the right to use that particular domain name for a limited time (12 months). You will need web hosting to store your website files.
Migrating a website
A site migration is a term used by SEO specialists to describe any event in which a website undergoes monumental changes in areas that can significantly affect search engine visibility. These are typically changes in location, platform, structure, content, design of the site.
A website migration thus redirects all your old web pages to new pages to reduce any negative impact on your SEO caused by moving or changing your site.
Creating a website without using a web host
You can of course create a website without hosting but you need to master WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP) first. This is for the simple reason that it will be very difficult if not impossible for you to set up a hosting server, without spending days or even weeks learning to familiarize yourself with these applications and programs.
Getting a free domain
Bluehost is a better way to get a free domain name. Simply sign up for a web hosting plan and the site will give you a free domain for a year. There are other ways to avoid paying for a domain, such as using a free subdomain, joining an affiliate program, or using a sketchy ccTLD service.
It is a dashboard that provides you with exemplary ease of use in managing your websites. Thanks to this tool, novice webmasters will easily find their way around because no basic knowledge of system administration is required.
Cpanel allows you to manage and create your databases, install WordPress, set up forums, blogs, etc., modify your security settings, determine the traffic rate on your site, control your resources and bandwidth, and many other possibilities. It is for all these reasons that it is essential that your future web host be able to make the cPanel available to you.
Here's how to finda web host for a Windows website. First find the owner of the IP address (the host) of the website. Once you have this IP address, press the WIN and R keys simultaneously. The Win key is between Ctrl and Alt. Then type "cmd" in the window that just opened. Press the "Enter" key. After that, type "pinwww.nomdusite.com" to get an answer like "Answer from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx [...]". The numbers separated by dots are the IP address of the host.
To be able to carry out your project and be legally compliant, first think about a budget of about 1000 Euros. Such a sum includes your company's registration fees, a broadband internet connection, billing software and a year's subscription for a reseller hosting plan. Then choose the hosting plan that will meet the needs of your project.
You also need to have the tools that provide users with ease of use, such as cPanel which is the most widely used control panel by web hosting companies at the moment. There is also the WHM which, in conjunction with cPanel, will allow you to do a multitude of things such as change the password and bandwidth usage of clients, terminate an account, etc. To get customers to be interested in you, offer as many free services as possible in your subscription offers. Something that most web hosts offer at an additional cost.
Not at all. In the event you are not satisfied with your current hosting service, simply migrate to a new web host. The latter will take care of transferring your site for free. All you have to do is provide them with some information necessary for the migration, such as FTP access or your database.
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