Are you looking to start your own writing website?

Then you want to start by picking a hosting plan for your site.

As a freelance writer, you don't need a fancy hosting platform to get your site running.

What truly matters is that you get a hosting provider that's fast, safe, reliable, and cheap.

With all the bad and repetitive blog hosting reviews I've read—most of which put the reviewer's own financial incentives over their reader's interests—I want to set the record straight.

In this article, I broke down the five features you must look for when shopping for blog hosting. Forget about all the weird-sounding technicalities—I have made everything extremely easy to understand, even for the most non-technical person.

I then analyzed the top five most popular blog hosting companies and how they perform for each of the five features.

Based on my blog hosting review, you will be able to come to your own conclusions and make the best decision possible.

Does that sound good?

Great, let's get started.

I'm sure the #1 question you must be having right now is:

"What's the best hosting for my writing site?"

Sadly, the only answer I can give you is: "it depends."

"Best hosting" depends on what you consider as "good."

Every hosting company will throw you a bunch of technical features so you get confused and buy the one with the most bells and whistles.

But let me tell you: you don't need most of them.

I believe that a "great" blog hosting service must meet the following criteria:

A slow, unsafe, and clunky website hosting platform is bad for business, no matter how cheap it may be.

Before I review the best blog hosting services for your writing site, let's analyze each of the criteria mentioned above so you can understand what to look for in your hosting service provider.

Each of these criteria items are organized in the following way:

Your site needs to be fast. Consider that Google may use site speed as a ranking factor, which means optimizing for it can lead to an increase in organic traffic. Site speed has also been known to impact on conversion rates, costs per clicks, and user experience. The slower a site is, the worse it is.

Even though a big part of a site's performance is tied to the way you have set it up, your hosting service provider still plays a big role in the overall performance.

Within this broad category of "performance," you want to look for the following two aspects for each website hosting provider:

To measure both criteria, I will use the data taken from HRank. Their analysis takes the performance of thousands of sites hosted in each of the five blog hosting providers mentioned below.

This isn't to say that their results are perfect—many other sites like Bitcatcha show different results, as you can see. But because HRank's analysis is broader in scope, I will take theirs as our benchmark.

Your hosting's performance is not the same as your site's speed. The former is the foundation upon which your site will perform. No matter how optimized your website is, if your server has low response times, your site won't be fast. The same applies to the other way around.

Both your site and your server must be optimized for speed.

Ignore affiliate marketers whose only motivation to promote a blog hosting company is their juicy commission. For what it's worth, ignore me too. Instead, check the reviews of current and former customers.

This includes forums, social media, and the comments people leave in specialized blogs. They will tell you the truth beyond what any marketer can.

Ideally, you want a blog hosting that has overwhelmingly positive reviews. You should read the negative ones to see the issues their customers raised. If you see a majority of negative reviews, then avoid the company.

To get the best and most trustworthy customer reviews, I will check the ones from Trustpilot.

At some point, you will have problems with your site. Maybe you see that your site is down, or maybe you have a problem installing a plugin. Whatever the case, you want to get professional support quickly. What's more, you should expect to get a solution fast, either immediately or in a matter of hours.

To measure a blog hosting customer support, I will analyze Trustpilot's customer reviews that talk about this specific aspect.

Your site can be vulnerable to security attacks. Even if your site is small, you never know what problems lie around the corner. You should always put your security as a top priority for you, especially for something as important as your website.

Think of your web security as the lock and keys you use in your home. You wouldn't use a cheap lock in your house, would you? Similarly, you don't want to use a cheap hosting provider that can put your business (and your visitors) at risk.

Some key aspects I will analyze for each of the blog hosting providers below include:

I will check all the security measures the blog hosting providers analyzed report. The more they explain about their measures, the better they will fare.

All large blog hosting providers offer more features that you need. While some of these features can be ignored, especially if you have a small site, others are useful.

Some of the features that any great hosting provider should include:

Most of these features are standard in every hosting provider. Since they don't make a difference in the quality of their service, these features won't impact their final review. I will still include them as an FYI.

Last but not least, you need to analyze the price of your hosting provider. Obviously, you want to spend as little as possible while still getting a safe, high-performing site.

All shared hosting providers offer cheap plans starting for as little as $1.95. Sometimes, blog hosting providers offer special deals for less than a dollar. Whatever the case, your focus shouldn't be on the cost, but on the performance and quality of their hosting service.

The more features you want, and the more traffic volume your writing site gets, the more expensive your hosting will be.

In either case, all of the blog hosting providers shown here have pretty much the same prices as their service has been commoditized.

There are three different types of blog hosting (ordered from cheapest and least complex to most expensive and complex):

As a rule of thumb, if you are starting your first site and have a small or nonexistent audience, you want to start with a shared hosting plan.

Either a VPS or a dedicated server is unnecessary for your needs. For this reason, in this article, I will ignore the companies that offer these hosting types.

If you already have at least a few thousand monthly visitors and an email list with a few hundred subscribers, you consider switching to a managed WordPress hosting plan.

A managed WordPress hosting plan is a server optimized specifically for WordPress sites. They offer much better performance at a low price and can sustain higher volumes of traffic.

Some companies offer managed WordPress hosting in shared servers (all of the ones mentioned in this article), while others offer VPS (e.g., Flywheel, which I don't mention in this article, is one case).

The five blog hosting companies shared below offer both shared and managed hosting solutions. The prices you will see in the plans will reflect the cheapest plans for their shared hosting plans. But if you are interested in their managed hosting plans, you can check them in their respective sites.

Most review sites talk about the same blog hosting companies over and over. The reason for that is simple: they offer cheap plans and high affiliate commissions for those who promote them. This isn't to say they aren't good; they are, and I will share with you the best ones.

My blog hosting review will only be useful if you are a freelance writer and you want to:

The best five blog hosting companies I will review are:

From all the companies mentioned in this list, the best blog hosting platform is SiteGround.

Even though I have never used them, their reviews, features, performance, customer support, and security are the best on this list. And their prices are as low as they can be.

If I had to start a small site all over again, I would go with them. So if you want to pick one relatively cheap, high-quality blog hosting provider from this list, choose SiteGround.

Alternatively, if their price is too high for you, go with Dreamhost. They're the second-best according to my blog hosting review. And they offer dirt-cheap plans.

If you have read any article on blog hosting, you have heard about Bluehost. Ever since I started in the digital marketing world, Bluehost has been at the top of the rankings.

At first sight, it's easy to see why: the Utah-based company offers rock-bottom prices with great features. It is why the company hosts more than 2 million websites on their servers from all over the world.

Their popularity has led Bluehost to become one of WordPress's preferred hosting companies, next with SiteGround and Dreamhost, which are also in this list.

Performance (Response Time): Between 1064 ms to 1427 ms

Performance (Uptime): Between 99.834% and 99.975%

Reviews (Trustpilot): 1.5

Customer Support: Bad

Security: No information available

Price: From $2.75

According to HRank, Bluehost has shown an uptime of 99.967% over the past 30 days—this may change by the time you read this—and a response time of 1497 microseconds. That's a terrible performance; remember that 200 ms is the ideal.

Over the years, Bluehost has had yearly uptimes between 99.834% and 99.975%.

On the other hand, its response times have varied between 1064 ms to 1427 ms. Once again, awful numbers.

All in all, Bluehost has a pretty bad performance compared to dozens of competitors. Your performance may vary depending on the shared IP you get, but it's still something to consider before you choose them.

Similar to what I said before, Bluehost fairs horribly in Trustpilot, with a rating of 1.5 out of 5 stars.

With almost 500 reviews, Bluehost shows the following results:

Most of its bad reviews talk about:

These reviews follow the criticism Bluehost has received in the past few years regarding their decreasing service quality.

I'm surprised to see these reviews as I always had great experiences with them. If they are truly doing worse than before—something that's hard to deny given their appalling reviews all over the web—then I'd consider them only if you believe that their low prices are worth the potential problems in the future.

⚠️ Warning! In contrast with its independently-owned competitors on this list, Bluehost is owned by Endurance International Group, one of the largest hosting conglomerates in the world. This fact has put Bluehost in the spotlight because EIG has been called out for bad practices that seem to put their interests above their customers'. Later you will see what I mean.

Bluehost is the only blog hosting service provider that I used from my list, and in the five years I've worked with them, I never had an issue. While my sites never got more than 10,000 monthly visitors per month at any given moment, I didn't have any issues with their server.

For this reason, I recommend them. Still, you should read the reviews below and think for yourself—my experience may not apply to you.

All of the four and five-star reviews talk about Bluehost's great customer support. Sadly, these are an exception because most of their bad reviews talk incessantly about their terrible customer support.

Extremely unprofessional, rude, and poor customer service. Please save yourself and your business time and money and don't use Bluehost. Suggest your clients the same. — Hidayat Rizvi

If I treated customers the way Bluehost treated me, I wouldn't have any customers. I have owned my successful restaurant for 24 years. — Peter Parles

Literally the worst experience I have ever had with any company. A shambles would be a kind way to describe them. No idea what they are doing, you will be asked to repeat yourself constantly and with no solutions, just more problems. — Sim Ram

It seems that Bluehost—or, dare I say, EIG—has outsourced their customer support, and their quality of service has decreased.

Unlike the other blog hosting providers in this list, Bluehost explains little about its security measures. All I could find about is the following:

Sadly, there's little else I can say about their security. To me, this is a red flag. Even if their price is low, you should always make your security a priority, especially if you share your IP with others. Low prices may attract the wrong crowd, so if you get paired with bad neighbors, you may get in trouble.

Basic Plan: $2.75 /mo

Plus Plan: $4.95 /mo

All of Bluehost's plans include the following extra features:

Verdict: Bluehost is the only blog hosting company I tried from this list, and my experience was good the years I used them. I can't say anything bad about them. Maybe I was lucky. Maybe I was reckless and never realized how terrible their service was because I didn't know better.

Whatever the case, given everything I learned through my research and compared to its competitors, Bluehost is the last of the five cheap blog hosting companies I would recommend on this list.

If you have read other hosting comparisons, you may have seen Bluehost at the top of their list. Even hosting "experts" recommend them. But why?

Simple: because they provide the best affiliate commissions.

Unlike the other companies in this list, Bluehost gives high commissions that start at $65 per sale. Other companies provide a bit less than that, and their commissions vary by volume.

Dishonest recommendations like the ones I read from Bluehost are the reason why people hate affiliate marketing. And I agree with the sentiment; it's unethical to sell a product that provides terrible service to its customers.

As someone who, not long ago, was in the same place and had the same doubts you have, it seems unfair to present you with an offer that's not as good as it looks. You may be a beginner in this "digital" world, but you don't deserve to be misguided.

If you still want to go with Bluehost, fine. I haven't had any bad experiences in the past, so maybe these criticisms I've read are exaggerated.

But if you do end up facing the issues presented above, you already know why.

SiteGround is a popular web hosting provider that hosts over 2 million domains. Founded in 2004 and based in Sofia, Bulgaria, SiteGround has more than 500 employees in offices both in Europe and North America.

Performance (Response Time): Between 499 ms to 683 ms

Performance (Uptime): Between 99.978% and 99.992%

Reviews (Trustpilot): 4.7/5 stars

Customer Support: Great

Security: Extensive

Price: From $6.99

👉 Get SiteGround

According to HRank, SiteGround has shown an uptime of 99.989% over the past 30 days—this may change by the time you read this—and a response time of 649 microseconds.

Over the years, SiteGround has had yearly uptimes between 99.978% and 99.992%.

On the other hand, its response times have varied between 499 ms to 683 ms.

Compared to the dozens of hosting sites on HRank's list, SiteGround is one of the best performers, ranking in the top 10 for the last three years among the best blog hosting services.

SiteGround has a strong record in Trustpilot, with a rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars.

With 5,284 reviews, SiteGround shows the following results: