Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Compare The Best Phone Services for Small Business

Want to jump straight to the answer? The best phone service for most small businesses is Nextiva or Ooma.

Today’s small business phone systems are affordable and you can deploy them in minutes. All your calls go through the cloud, so all you need is good internet. This is modern software your team can manage on their own. You don’t have to be an IT wizard to set up a phone tree, add an extension, or schedule a conference call.

All of the following providers are reliable and secure. However, they price out services in very different ways. I’ll review my top recommendations and walk you through how to find the best deal.

The Best Business Phone Service Providers for 2022

  • Nextiva — Best overall (For a limited time get 25% off, plus a free phone when you sign up!)
  • Ooma — Best physical phone system for small businesses
  • RingCentral — Best for businesses that love to text
  • Grasshopper — Best for solopreneurs
  • Phone.com — Smallest price tag for smaller operations
  • Vonage — Best for businesses that need it all
  • GoTo Connect — Best for helping your customers
  • 1-VoIP— Best if you need phones but don’t use them often
How to choose the best business phone service provider. Quicksprout.com's methodology for reviewing business phone services.

I’ve included some really affordable options in my top picks. You can find cheaper phone systems out there, but I would be cautious of going with a provider that’s not well known.

Below, you’ll find reviews to help you compare the pricing, plans, and features of each option on my list.

Following the reviews is a short guide that explains my recommendations and lays out the important considerations when choosing a phone service for your business.

Nextiva – The Best Overall

  • Starting at $11.95 per month
  • Affordable enterprise-level plans
  • Unlimited calls
  • Free local & toll-free number
Try Nextiva for free

Nextiva is an industry leader in the communication space. You can start fairly small with Nextiva and grow without ever having to switch providers.

They can outfit a small business with a phone system that makes employees reachable, or help you build out a world-class call center with voice, video, text, and chat.

If you want to keep using phones you have, no problem, though you can buy whatever hardware you need directly from Nextiva. It will all come pre-programmed ready to go out of the box.

Nextiva home page.

You can also just download the app and use a headset from any device. All the security is handled by Nextiva, so people can work wherever they are without causing IT headaches for administrators.

With the Nextiva App, you’ll be able to use the same phone numbers you use at your office desk from the comfort of your own home. You can even use the same extensions you’d use in the office.

Nextiva offers all of the essential phone system features, such as voicemail, call routing, and an auto attendant that automatically greets your callers and directs them to where they need to go. Customers also get access to voicemail to email which streamlines your voicemail inbox.

The auto attendant tool is helpful whether your business uses a physical office or if you’re distributed—allowing you to easily funnel your callers to the right people no matter where they are.

You get to choose between three simple plans. The price depends on the number of users and the length of your contract.  

Here are the starting rates:

  • Essential — $18.95 per month
  • Professional — $22.95 per month
  • Enterprise — $32.95 per month

These are some of the most affordable rates on a modern phone system. There’s not too much you can get for less than this without sacrificing on capabilities.

Some other highlights of Nextiva’s small business phone service include:

  • Unlimited calls
  • Call queueing
  • Automatic call forwarding
  • Hold music
  • Free online fax
  • Free local and toll-free number

Some sought-after features are not included in the Basic plan. If you want to use the Nextiva app, get unlimited conference calls, pre-recorded greetings, and text messaging, you’ll need to upgrade to the Pro plan.

Call recording, voice analytics, and voicemail to text delivery are only available on the Enterprise plan. Try Nextiva for free today.


Ooma – Best Physical Phone System for Small Businesses

  • Flat rate $19.95 per month
  • No contracts, cancel at any time
  • Unlimited calling
  • Virtual receptionist
Get Started Now

Ooma is an ideal solution for businesses that want to keep using hard phones. Some offices want a phone at everyone’s desk. Large organizations need numbers tied to locations, not people. Hotels aren’t going to offer guests headsets and a tablet.

The reason I like Ooma so much is that it’s a true plug-and-play system. It’s easy to set up, very straight-forward to customize to your workplace, and it’s going to tie into your existing technology without much of an issue.

Once you install an Ooma base station, you’ll be able to hook up any phones and fax machines with adapters.

New businesses might be swayed by their lucrative pricing. Just pay a flat rate of $19.95 per month per user. No contracts and you can cancel at any time.

You can use virtually any type of phone with Ooma, so it’s not a problem to keep using what you’re using. If you do want new phones, Ooma has excellent prices on all of the top models.

Ooma landing page for phone systems

But by purchasing your hardware with a relatively low one-time fee, you’ll end up saving the money in the long run as opposed to renting it each month.

Ooma does have a mobile app, which allows you and your staff to make calls on the go from your smartphones. So you could opt to go mobile-only and skip the hardware costs. But I don’t recommend this. There are better options out there if you’re looking for a business VoIP phone service without any hardware.

For those of you with a growing team, Ooma can scale with you. It’s easy to add on users, devices, and manage everything on your own.

Your plan will come with unlimited calling, a toll-free number, low international rates, and a virtual receptionist. Ooma also has exceptional customer support if you have any trouble setting up the hardware or managing your service. Learn more at Ooma.


RingCentral – The Best for Businesses that Love to Text

  • Unlimited SMS & MMS
  • 100 toll-free minutes per month
  • On-demand call recording
  • Small to enterprise solutions
Get Started Now

RingCentral is one of the most popular VoIP solutions in the industry. That’s because they offer an all-in-one phone service solution at a competitive price.

While their plans are great for your typical VoIP phone service and video conferencing needs, they also offer unlimited business SMS and MMS across all of their plans.

That’s an amazing deal if your team regularly relies upon text messaging for your day-to-day business. For example, this is great if you want to send automated text messages alerts to your team members frequently.

RingCentral stands out because they offer specifically designed plans for small businesses. It’s reliable, secure, easy to use, and delivers a high-quality voice for crystal clear calls.

RingCentral is also affordable. You can save over 30% if you sign up and prepay with an annual plan as opposed to a month-to-month contract.

RingCentral home page.

Here’s a quick overview of the plans and pricing:

Essentials

  • Starting at $14.99 per month per user
  • Up to 20 users
  • 100 toll-free minutes per month
  • On-demand call recording
  • Unlimited calls within US and Canada

Standard

  • Starting at $20.99 per month per user
  • 1,000 toll-free minutes per month
  • Unlimited internet fax
  • Unlimited audio meetings
  • Unlimited video conferencing (up to 4 people per meeting)
  • On-demand call recording
  • Custom app development and deployment

Premium

  • Starting at $26.24 per month per user
  • 2,500 toll-free minutes per month
  • Unlimited video conferencing (up to 100 people per meeting)
  • Automatic call recording
  • Multi-site support
  • Salesforce and Zendesk integration

Ultimate

  • Starting at $37.49 per month per user
  • 10,000 toll-free minutes per month
  • Unlimited video conferencing (up to 200 people per meeting)
  • Automatic call recording

For most, I recommend the Standard plan. It offers plenty of great features and all the essentials a business might need.

You can also customize your plan to pay extra for things like additional toll-free numbers, vanity numbers, international numbers, and international toll-free calling.

As mentioned before, all of the plans come with basic features like unlimited business SMS and MMS, along with mobile apps for iOS and Android, HD voice, team collaboration, call log reports, and 24/7 customer support.

The plan you choose will largely depend on how many toll-free minutes you plan to use as well as the number of users you’re going to onboard. Try Ringcentral today.


Grasshopper – Best Phone Service for Solopreneurs

  • Starting at $26 per month
  • VoIP and Wifi calling
  • No calling limits
  • 24/7 live support
Get Started Now

Grasshopper offers a handy virtual phone system targeted to smaller operations like freelancers, startups, and small businesses.

This is a simple phone system. You can make your first call minutes after downloading the Grasshopper app. They make it easy for you to find toll free numbers, vanity numbers, 800 numbers, local numbers, and or port your old number.

Once you have the app, you can set up greetings and after-hours messages, voicemail, and set up basic call flows if you have more than one line.

Instantly, your business is more professional. If you can’t get to the phone, callers are greeted by a menu. You’ll also be able to see what’s a business call and what’s personal, so there are no more surprises.

Grasshopper home page

Grasshopper’s Solo plan includes one phone number, three extensions, and every phone system feature the company offers, including:

  • VoIP and Wifi calling
  • Virtual fax
  • Mobile and desktop apps
  • Business texting
  • Ability to handle simultaneous calls
  • Call reporting
  • Call forwarding
  • Voicemail
  • Call transfers
  • Extensions

You never have to upgrade to get any of these features–every plan comes with every feature, you just need to pay for additional lines or extensions.

Grasshopper handles everything a basic phone system should and has modern add-ons like business texting that can help you grow your business.

You’ll want to upgrade to the Partner plan if you have a small group of up to three employees working for you. For anything more than that, you’ll need the Small Business plan to accommodate your needs.

Grasshopper also gives you the option to integrate your business interactions into one inbox that’s easy to manage. You can access your emails, texts, business calls, and contacts in one place.

Try Grasshopper for free.


Phone.com – Smallest Price Tag for Smaller Operations

  • Starts at $11.99 per month
  • Over 50 standard features included
  • E911 dialing options
  • Premium add-ons
Get Started Now

Phone.com offers some of the most straightforward and simple VoIP business phone plans that you’ll find.

They’re also incredibly affordable, with some of the lowest priced plans for small businesses out there.

And it’s not just the sticker price–the licensing is way more flexible than other top business phone systems.

With Phone.com, you can mix and match plans, which many other providers don’t let you do. You can buy basic plans for people who don’t use the phone a lot, and you can upgrade licenses only for your employees that need unlimited minutes, rather than upgrading everyone’s license to access a feature that only a small slice of your employees actually need.

Phone.com pricing

You can sign up and get started in minutes. Building and managing your entire business phone system from the intuitive dashboard is easy for anyone, regardless of their technical skill level.

Phone.com has more than 50 features that come standard, including:

  • Fax to email
  • SMS messaging
  • International dialing
  • HD conferencing
  • Call screening and blocking
  • Call routing
  • Call queuing
  • Auto attendant

You’ll also benefit from E911 dialing, which is not offered by all VoIP providers. Premium features like call recording, video conferencing, and CRM integration cost extra.

Another feature you can add is caller analytics. This helps you get a deep dive into the metrics of your call such as call durations over time, busiest hours, and your top performers. You can also see a handy breakdown of your incoming and outgoing calls by extension numbers.

That’s great for the data-driven companies out there. Plus it’s great to integrate into your sales funnels and marketing strategy.

Phone.com is HIPAA and HITECH compliant, which means it’s safe to use if your company is in the medical field.

They do all of this with an incredibly low price tag. In fact, it’s the lowest one on this list starting at $11.99 per user per month. With that you get 500 pooled minutes, 1000 pooled texts, and video conferencing for up to 10 people.

And remember–you can upgrade some plans if you have users that need unlimited minutes, call recording, or other advanced features. The ability to mix and match lets you drive the price even lower, because you’re not paying for more than you need.

That’s why we recommend it to small businesses where budgets are tight—but you still want a solid phone service to get you through your work day.

So if your calls are relatively short and infrequent, you can definitely save some money with one of these budget plans. Get started at Phone.com


Vonage – Best for Businesses that Need It All

  • 50+ voice & communication features
  • Compatible with Vonage Meetings
  • Simple to set up and scale
  • Three different plans
Get Started Now

Vonage offers a wide array of solutions and features that are great for organizations that need a bit of everything.

That includes their unified communications service which allows you to talk through voice, SMS, team messaging, fax, paperless fax, social—you name it.

It’s great for office settings and also gives you flexibility for conferencing. That’s why I recommend Vonage if your business needs a lot more than one or two communication channels and tools.

vonage home page.

Vonage offers three different plans, with rates based on the number of lines you need. Here’s a brief overview of the plans and costs:

Mobile: Make and receive calls from your mobile device and desktop computer. Best for smaller businesses that don’t need physical office phones.

1-4 lines — $19.99 per month per line

5-19 lines — $17.99 per month per line

20+ lines — $14.99 per month per line

Premium: Made for traditional office teams. Allows for calls from any device, including desk phones.

1-4 lines — $29.99 per month per line

5-19 lines — $27.99 per month per line

20+ lines — $24.99 per month per line

Advanced: The best option for businesses that need a phone service for team setups and onboarding.

1-4 lines — $39.99 per month per line

5-19 lines — $27.99 per month per line

20+ lines — $34.99 per month per line

If you want CRM integrations, you’ll need to sign up for the Premium or Advanced plan. The Advanced plan also comes with on-demand call recording, group calls, and visual voicemail. Learn more at Vonage.


GoTo Connect – Best for Helping Your Customers

  • Lots of all-inclusive features
  • Call recording & monitoring
  • Custom greeting & hold music
  • Enterprise-level communication

>> Compare Quotes

GoTo Connect is an all-inclusive business phone service.

They offer tools you usually pay extra for in other business phone services come with their plans at no extra cost.

GoTo Connect also strives to make enterprise-level communication available for small businesses. Their system is very easy to use, no matter how large or small your team is.

GoTo Connect landing page for business phone service

With them, you’ll get basic features like:

  • Call recording
  • Auto attendants
  • Call monitoring
  • Conferencing
  • Virtual fax
  • Custom greeting
  • Custom hold music
  • Dial by name or extension
  • Individual call logs

And that’s just the basic features.

Where they really shine though is their Support Center tool. It allows you to easily connect with customers to help answer their questions and walk them through technical issues with ease.

As such it’s perfect for IT or SaaS organizations that have agents who need to easily talk to clients, view their information on a single intuitive dashboard, and see real-time analytics.

GoTo Connect phones are extremely easy to set up. All you need to do is plug them in and you’ll be ready to make calls in minutes.

There are three pricing plans to choose from. Basic allows up to 20 users at $24 per user per month. Standard offers unlimited users at $29 per user per month. Premium includes a customized cloud contact center at $43 per user per month. You can try the Standard plan for 14 days free with up to five users.

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1-VoIP – Best If You Need Phones But Don’t Use Them Often

  • 40+ standard features
  • Pay for what you use plans
  • Cost-effective & flexible
  • Metered pricing structure

>> Compare Quotes

1-VoIP is a VoIP phone service that offers a solid solution for small to large businesses.

They offer a great metered pricing structure. That means you only pay for the time that you do use the phone. In this case, you’ll be charged just $0.02 per minute.

1voip home page.

Unlike other providers on the market, 1-VoIP doesn’t cut out basic features if you sign up for the metered plan. You’ll still have all of the features that come with the other plans, including:

  • Queues
  • Hold music
  • Virtual fax
  • Digital call forwarding
  • Call recording
  • Hours of operation
  • Extension transfers
  • Call waiting

Altogether, there are 40+ features that come standard.

This is a perfect solution for businesses that know they need a phone plan, but don’t necessarily anticipate the same call volume as, say, a telemarketing service or IT support organization.

If you’re only using up to 200 minutes per month, the metered plan will be your best bet. Otherwise, they have package plans starting at $19.97 and $29.97 per month per extension.

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How to Find the Best Business Phone Services For You

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Get matched up with a business phone service that fits your specific needs.

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You’ve read my reviews of the top business phone services. Now it’s time to choose a plan for your organization.

Below I have identified the essential qualities I looked for in each of the options above. My team benchmarked each of the business phone services against this methodology to narrow down the very best ones.

Now, you can use the same criteria to find the best business phone service for your own business.

Remote Access

If there’s one thing that organizations across all industries have learned from the pandemic, it’s that remote work is here to stay.

That’s why we honed in on each business phone services’ remote features when reviewing the options. Specifically, do they offer remote access?

First of all, every provider I recommended uses voice over internet protocol, or VoIP, which means calls are made over the internet instead of a phone line.

This means that your employees will be able to make calls and access voicemail wherever they have the internet. They simply sign into the service, and they can start making secure calls.

Services such as Nextiva facilitate this through handy mobile and desktop apps. Using the app, you’ll be able to take business-related calls on your smartphone.

RingCentral (pictured above) also offers a standout app that enables remote access and work. It includes excellent integrations with tools such as Office 365 and Google Workspace, so you don’t have to keep switching between windows constantly.

As you do your own research, take a look at what remote options are available with the business phone service you’re interested in. Is it enough for your business’s needs? Will it grow with your business? These are important points to consider.

Audio and Video Connection Quality

Since the point of having a business phone service is effective communication, we also placed a high value on the services with the best connection quality.

We reviewed each phone service for HD video quality, instances and frequency of dropped calls, and connection issues. Both the audio and video quality needed to be top notch in order to be recommended on our list.

Providers like Nextiva will actually let you test your connection quality on their site. Run a speed test on up to 200 calls to see how your network performs.

Some services have a greater emphasis on video calls than audio (and vice versa). For example, RingCentral offers Glip, a video conferencing service that uses carrier-grade infrastructure to facilitate high-quality video calls for up to 100 people.

Whereas a service like Phone.com is more focused on—you guessed it—phone calls. The calls you can make with their service are pristine, though, with clear connections and high-quality audio.

A service like Vonage gives you the best of both worlds with phone call service and video conferencing solutions. Its interface is a lot like Zoom’s—that is to say, highly intuitive and straightforward. You can easily share meeting links for people to join as well as dial in numbers for those who prefer to use their phones.

SMS and MMS Messaging

Texting is a great way to keep in touch with coworkers, employees, and clients. It’s also a great way to send messages and share photos or videos quickly. That’s why it’s crucial to find a business phone service that lets you leverage this channel easily and often.

We took a close look at what each business phone service offered (or didn’t offer) for:

  • Short message service (SMS). This is your standard text messaging. Great for firing off quick messages to anyone you need to communicate with.
  • Multimedia message service (MMS). This is for sending pictures, video, and/or audio. It’s a great feature of media-based businesses that need more depth to their communications.

Some of the business phone services we reviewed offer plans with unlimited SMS and MMS messaging each month as part of their UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) offerings. This refers to a combination of different communication services businesses rely on such as phone, fax, video conferencing, instant messaging, SMS, and MMS.

For example, RingCentral offers unlimited SMS and MMS as part of their service. If sending text messages is important to you, I highly recommend going with them.

A few services—like Phone.com—only offer SMS messaging, which can also be fine if your business doesn’t rely on it as much.

Responsive Customer Support

For many businesses, if the phones go down, so do your profits.

You need a support team who will immediately spring into action to help. So we took an in-depth look at the responsiveness and helpfulness of the customer support of the options on this list.

We also checked reviews specific to customer support for each one to see what real clients’ experiences were.

You should also take a look at how often their support is available. If you’re a distributed company with employees all over the world, you’ll want to find a service like Grasshopper and RingCentral that offers 24/7 live support for all of their plans.

Vonage also has a very noteworthy support team who are responsive to any issues you might have. Along with the ability to contact them via an online contact form and a 1-800 number, Vonage has a comprehensive tutorial compendium called the VBC Training Center. It houses any tutorials and quick start guides you need for learning how to use their service.

And if you’re migrating from one service to another, you’ll want to make sure your new service has a team that will help you each step of the way. For example, Vonage’s customer support team will help you with everything from number transfers to using new equipment.

GoToMeeting offers a knowledge base for you to search for the answers you need quickly and easily. If you can’t find the answer, you can turn to their community of users or call for live support.

Conversely, Ooma only has live caller support, which may result in longer wait times to get the help you need.

The Top Business Phone Systems in Summary

Phone service needs can vary wildly from one organization to another. But no matter how big your team is or how small your budget is, you can definitely find a reliable phone service for your small business.

Most companies opt for a VoIP phone system instead of a landline. VoIP is easier to set up, easier to manage, and cheaper than traditional phones. You don’t have to worry about securing calls or maintaining any expensive equipment on site.

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Monday, August 29, 2022

Compare The Best Web Hosting for WordPress

Want to jump straight to the answer? The best web hosting for most people is Hostinger or Bluehost.

While it’s true that you can use any web host for your WordPress website, a WordPress-specific web hosting solution delivers better service, performance, and support for WordPress sites. If you’ve been feeling frustrated with your non-WP-specific web host and want something better suited to WordPress, you’re in the right place. 

I’ve gone through dozens of available hosts and ranked the 10 best options on the market today, including providers WordPress itself recommends. The solutions below provide the best security, performance, and reliability for websites built on WordPress.

The Top 10 WordPress Web Hosts for 2022

  • Hostinger – Most affordable WordPress web host
  • Bluehost – Best for creating your first WordPress website
  • GreenGeeksBest for eco-friendly website owners
  • WP Engine – Best for hosting multiple WordPress sites with tons of traffic
  • Nexcess – Best for effortless website staging
  • Siteground – Best for ecommerce websites with easy site migration
  • Flywheel – Best if you want experts to migrate your site for you
  • Kinsta – Best for managing unexpected surges in traffic
  • Scala Hosting – Most freebies in every WordPress hosting plans
  • Cloudways – Best for flexibility and extensive options
How to choose the best web hosting for wordpress. Quicksprout.com's methodology for reviewing web hosting for wordpress.

Depending on your goals, one of my recommended hosting providers may work better than another for your specific needs.

Below you’ll find in-depth reviews that explain my recommendations, followed by a brief tactical section to help you assess your options.

Hostinger — Most Affordable WordPress Web Host

  • Starts at $1.99 per month
  • Month-to-month pricing available
  • Free domain and SSL certificate
  • 30-day money-back guarantee
Get started now

Hostinger stands out for its low prices and stellar loading times.

How low? Hostinger’s current managed WordPress plan starts at just $1.99 per month for a single website—which is unbeatable compared to other web hosts out there. While that is promotional pricing, even the contract renewal price of $3.99 per month is very affordable.

But here’s the kicker: for just two dollars more per month (currently $3.99), you can build 100 websites along with 100 GB of SSD storage, free email, and unlimited bandwidth.

That’s right, for the price of a single cup of coffee each month, you’ll be able to host up to 100 websites. That’s an amazing deal.

Hostinger WordPress Pricing Plans

With their great prices, does that mean you’ll be sacrificing quality? Nope. In fact, you’re going to get solid uptime reliability with Hostinger.

Loading times are speedy According to their website, their server response time clocks in at around 43 milliseconds, which is very fast. To give you a comparison, that’s just 13 milliseconds “slower” than a lightning strike. In our testing, every Hostinger hosting type (shared, VPS, and WordPress hosting) averaged well under one second for loading.

Hostinger recently implemented a new feature for page speed insights, where you can measure your site’s speed and see its performance history with just one click. If you find that you want to improve your loading speed, the new server transfer feature will recommend what to do.

The company also recently added an advanced malware scanner and a WordPress staging tool so you can test changes without actually changing your entire live site.

Overall, this is a great web host if you want good prices with quality hosting. If you want to maximize the number of sites you can host at a low cost, get signed up with Hostinger today.

Bluehost — Best for Creating Your First WordPress Website

  • Normally $8.99/month
  • Free domain and SSL certificate
  • Recommended by WordPress
  • 30-day money-back guarantee
Get a 67% discount

Bluehost is one of the three web hosts that WordPress officially recommends for people to use. That’s about as good of an endorsement as you can get for WordPress hosting.

People like Bluehost because it’s super simple to get started. With millions of users, all the kinks have been worked out.

Once you sign up, you’ll be able to install WordPress immediately. You’ll have your bare-bones site live within 15 minutes. Then you can follow our full guide to creating a website to get your site exactly how you want it.

You can reach out 24/7 to their award-winning customer support team if any issues arise.

Bluehost also has some of the lowest pricing around, with plans as low as $2.75/month. That’s incredibly cheap, especially for something that’s so reliable and easy to use.

Bluehost offer page.

As such, they’re the perfect host to choose if you’re just starting out.

Yes, you will be on shared hosting. So, if you or someone else on your server gets a huge spike of traffic, your site could go down.

But, honestly, this almost never happens. I’ve had websites on shared hosting for over a decade and never had a site go down.

If and when you want to upgrade, Bluehost also offers managed WordPress hosting that starts at $9.95/month. Not the lowest price point I’ve seen, but it’s still one of the lowest-cost options out there for managed hosting.

The value you get from Bluehost can’t be beat. It’s powerful enough for most websites, and the service is widely recommended throughout the industry.

Bottom line: Bluehost is a great option for the vast majority of people reading this—but especially those who are just getting started.

GreenGeeks — Best For Eco-Friendly Website Owners

  • Starts at $2.49 per month
  • 300% green energy match
  • Free WordPress install, migration, & updates
  • 30-day money-back guarantee
Get started now

If you want a shared hosting plan optimized for WordPress, GreenGeeks has you covered. With affordable rates, quick setup, and 24/7 live chat support, you will have everything you need to launch a professional WordPress website.

GreenGeeks has hundreds of WordPress-specific tutorials and information in their knowledge base. They also don’t charge extra fees for WordPress security, fast performance, or their 300% renewable energy match that makes them a carbon-reducing company.

GreenGeeks landing page with pricing information.

GreenGeeks really ups the security for WordPress sites. They monitor your site for malware and other threats and help clean your site if any issues occur. They also provide a free SSL certificate and automatically renew it for you every 90 days. And if you already have a WordPress site, you can move it over to GreenGeeks or let them migrate it for you for free.

As part of their managed WordPress hosting, every plan comes with free WordPress installation, migration, and automatic updates. You’ll also get a free SSL certificate, free CDN, free backups, a free domain for one year, built-in caching, and WP-CLI and SSH access. If you have any issues or questions, users say the 24/7 live chat service is staffed with knowledgeable, friendly people who respond quickly.

The Lite plan starts at $2.95 per month, Pro is $5.95 per month, and Premium is $10.95 per month. All of these prices are based on a three-year commitment and every plan comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Lite is for one website. Both Pro and Premium cover unlimited websites. 

You can learn more about GreenGeeks managed WordPress hosting and get started here.

WP Engine — Best for Hosting Multiple WordPress Sites with Tons of Traffic

  • Starts at $22.50/month
  • Biggest name in WP hosting
  • A premium product with a premium price
  • Easily the all-around best
Get started

For pros, I recommend WP Engine. It’s great for managed WordPress hosting.

In fact, WP Engine is what we use here at QuickSprout—and for very good reason. If you’re trying to get serious and build a high-traffic blog or business, it’s by far the best managed WordPress host out there.

But I don’t recommend it for anyone who’s just starting out, since it’s much more expensive. We’re talking between $30 to more than $100 each month versus a range of $4 to $15 with other products on my list.

Most WordPress sites would do much better with Bluehost or Siteground. You’ll save a lot of money and won’t be paying for WP Engine’s advanced features you don’t need.

For $23/month, paid annually, with their Startup plan, you can host one 10GB site with a limit of 25,000 monthly visitors. Their Professional tier of service is $56/month for three sites and 75,000 monthly visitors. If you get a spike in traffic and go over these traffic limits, you’ll get hit with overage fees.

WP Engine pricing page.

That might seem like a lot of money for fewer resources (especially when compared to services like Hostinger and Bluehost) but, remember, this is managed WordPress hosting.

As a managed host, WP Engine professionally maintains speed and security at the server level—meaning you don’t have to do anything to maximize performance on your end.

You don’t have to research and rely on plug-ins to shave seconds off your load time or become an expert on the best practices for building a lean site.

Nor do you have to carve out time to install and update your plugins, run backups, or implement security features to ward off brute force attacks. WP Engine takes care of it all behind the scenes.

The customer service is also excellent, with 24/7 support that includes trackable service tickets and a comprehensive knowledge base.

WP Engine’s support staff are WordPress experts, providing detailed answers to your questions and issues.

Every time I’ve had to reach out to their customer support, I’ve always been impressed. Their speed, thoroughness, and expertise are world-class.

Bottom line: WP Engine is an excellent solution if you want to get serious about growing your WordPress sites.

Nexcess — Best for Effortless Website Staging

  • Price starts at $12.67/month
  • Designed for advanced users
  • Extremely customizable
  • Server-level access
Get started

Nexcess, by Liquid Web, is a powerhouse designed to service other powerhouses, like if you’re an enterprise customer or are charged with manning multiple WordPress sites.

What I really love about Nexcess, though, is how easy they make it to stage a website. Their one-click staging tool allows you to easily create a facsimile of your website that you can edit and test to your heart’s content—without worrying that you’re screwing up the actual website.

They also offer a ton of great plans that make it easy to scale. Prices start at just $12.67 per month for one website (as long as you pay for the entire year up front). The discount for paying annually is equivalent to four months free versus paying month to month.

If you need more features than the lowest-priced tier provides, the cost jumps quite a bit—to $52.67 per month—but you get up to five sites and 40 GB storage with that plan. Nexcess calls its most popular plan the Designer tier, which offers up to 10 sites and 60 GB of storage for $72.67 per month.

In all, they offer six plans. The most expensive plan is the Executive tier, which provides up to 100 sites and 500 GB of storage. If you’re an agency or freelancer who plans to host websites for clients, one of the higher-end plans is a great solution for you.

Nexcess pricing plans

If you need more control but doing everything yourself through AWS isn’t appealing, then Nexcess is for you, too. You won’t have to do nearly as much setup and upkeep as AWS while still having a lot more control than other hosts give you.

It also automatically updates WordPress and your plugins. That’s fewer headaches for you and your team.

You’ll get all-level access to MySQL, SFTP, and SSH. You also get Git version control. Security, speed, and customer support are virtually unparalleled.

Nexcess is obviously not right for everyone. Small businesses should choose one of the other options, as Nexcess plans would be overkill.

For power users, though, Nexcess is the WordPress hosting that you’ve been looking for. Use coupon code QUICKSPROUT to get 40% off 2 months of any Nexcess hosting plan.

SiteGround — Best  for Ecommerce Websites with Easy Site Migration

  • Starts at $3.99/month
  • Free SSL, email, CDN, & backups
  • Recommended by WordPress
  • 30-day money-back guarantee
Get a 73% discount

SiteGround is another of WordPress’ recommended web hosts. They offer incredibly affordable managed hosting solutions that are powerful as well.

Where they really shine is how easy they make it to:

  • Migrate to their host. Their free migrator tool lets you easily port your old website over to their website in just a few days time. No development or coding knowledge required.
  • Set up an online store. With the powerful combination of WordPress and WooCommerce, you’ll be able to set up an ecommerce site to start making money in a snap. Seriously, it just takes a few clicks.

I also like their advanced features for WordPress, like automatic updates and enhanced security on all the SiteGround plans. You’ll also get free daily backups. That’s an amazing deal for the lowest tier pricing.

This covers most of the problems you could run into, freeing up more of your time to focus on your business or project. You can read even more about their offered services in my complete SiteGround hosting review.

I recommend the StartUp plan. It gives you 10GB of space and up to 10,000 visitors for one site. This intro-level plan is $3.99/month for your first year (paid up front).

SiteGround pricing page.

You can boost your WordPress or WooCommerce site even further by going one step up to GrowBig. That lets you tap into SiteGround’s own Ultrafast PHP to speed up the visitor experience even more. Plus, you get the safety of on-demand copies of your site backups, all for $6.69 per month. The biggest plan is GoGeek for $10.69 per month with 40 GB web space, priority support, staging + Git, and ability to white-label clients.

All told, this is a great host for web stores on WordPress, ecommerce sites who want to switch to a better host, and anyone who wants solid security and easy site backups for their pages.

Get started with SiteGround today.

Flywheel — Best If You Want Experts to Migrate Your Site for You

  • Price starts at $14/month
  • Geared toward freelancers and agencies
  • Easily build and transfer sites to clients
  • User-friendly interface
Get started

Flywheel is a managed WordPress host that really puts the “support” in customer support.

They offer a great migration service that takes care of the often stressful process of site migration for you. They have a dedicated team that handles the entire process of moving your site to their web host so you don’t have to.

The best part: It’s absolutely free.

That’s right. They’ll take care of everything at no extra cost.

They’re also fantastic because of great features like “blueprints” that allow you to save customized themes and plugins you use over and over again.

You’ll also have 14 days on a free, password-protected demo site to show your work before having to pay. You can also easily transfer billing on any of your sites to a client.

That makes FlyWheel an excellent option if you’re an agency or freelancer working on client websites. If you build sites for clients, we highly recommend you start using Flywheel.

Flywheel offers a single-site plan with 5,000 monthly visitors and 5GB of disk space for $13/month. From there, you can scale up to a souped-up single-site plan for $25/month, or accomodate more sites in the two highest packages.

FlyWheel pricing page.

Bottom line: I’d use Flywheel if I were looking for a hassle-free migration experience and/or developing websites for clients.

If that sounds like you, go with Flywheel as your web hosting provider.

Kinsta — Best for Managing Unexpected Surges in Traffic

  • Price starts at $30/month
  • Premium managed WordPress hosting
  • All features included across all plans
  • Built for scalability
Get started

Kinsta is a a great alternative to WP Engine if something about WP Engine doesn’t gel with you.

What truly separates them from WP Engine, though, is their auto-scaling feature. In the event of an unexpected surge in traffic, their servers will automatically allocate more CPU and RAM to your website.

That’s great for websites that frequently see infrequent spikes in traffic like when an article goes viral or if you have sporadic product launches.

That means you won’t have to worry about your website slowing down or crashing when you get an influx of readers. Instead, Kinsta takes care of it for you.

This can be very good for websites that experience inconsistent traffic performance (e.g. viral articles and videos, big product launches).

They also offer a ton of pricing plans for excellent scalability. In fact, they offer 10 plans as well as a customizable enterprise solution.

Kinsta pricing page.

Pricing starts at $30/month for 25,000 monthly visitors and scales up from there.

Bottom line: Kinsta can handle any volume of traffic that you need. You won’t have to worry about switching from outgrowing them.

One especially nice thing about Kinsta is that you get access to the same features across every plan, as opposed to upgrading to a higher-priced plan to unlock something.

It also makes Kinsta’s pricing super simple. Pick the plan based on your traffic and you’re good to go.

Scala Hosting — Most Freebies in Every WordPress Hosting Plan

  • Affordable plans across the board
  • Free migration of as many sites as you need
  • Seven daily backups
  • Robust security features
Try it Today

WordPress hosting can be deceiving. While a lot of providers will boast about WordPress optimization on their servers, what more are you getting from them specifically?

Scala Hosting not only makes sure their servers help your WordPress site perform better, they also throw in a ton of useful features on almost every plan.

It starts with a free website migration, which not every provider offers. And it’s not just one website—Scala’s specialists will carry over as many WordPress sites as you need to their service, free of charge.

They’ll handle the migration and verify everything’s working before you point the site to your new servers. That way, there’s no downtime for your sites whatsoever in the process.

Security features are also prevalent in all Scala WordPress hosting plans. You get a dedicated firewall installed on your behalf, plus a brute force attack blocker, custom security rules that Scala’s team implements without you having to lift a finger, malware scans and removal, and automated updates to prevent vulnerabilities from arising.

All their plans also include:

  • Seven daily backups with restore points kept for a week
  • Free content delivery network
  • Free SEO analysis and tools

You can also unlock additional useful features by going with plans above Scala’s entry-level WP Mini (one website, 20 GB storage) package. Those are:

  • WP Start: unlimited websites, 50 GB storage, double the CPU power of WP Mini
  • WP Advanced: unlimited websites, 100 GB storage, quadruple the CPU power of WP Mini

On those plans, you get managed service, meaning Scala’s support team of WordPress experts will help you with everything from plugin issues to overall troubleshooting.

You also get a free domain if you opt for WP Advanced. And not just one year, either, like most providers. Each year that you prepay for, you get a free year of your domain. That’s a very nice bonus.

Scala pricing page.

Scala’s pricing is also very competitive with other providers on this list and in the WordPress hosting space at large:

  • WP Mini: $3.95/month for a three-year commitment, $4.95 for two years
  • WP Start: $5.95/month for a three-year commitment, $7.95 for two years
  • WP Advanced: $9.95/month for a three-year commitment, $10.95 for two years

Give Scala Hosting a try or get connected with their representative to learn what more they can do for you. If you want worry-free WordPress hosting at a competitive price, Scala Hosting should be near the top of your list.

Cloudways – Best for Flexibility and Extensive Options

  • Five IaaS provider options
  • Fast and reliable managed hosting
  • Only pay for what you use
  • Starts at just $10 per month
Try it free

Cloudways has been providing managed WordPress hosting for over 11 years and has hosted 600,000+ WordPress websites. Another impressive statistic is that Cloudway has access to more than 120,000 active servers!

Cloudways strives to provide flexibility to all of its clients. Some examples of this flexibility are offering unlimited WordPress websites, pay-as-you-go pricing with hourly plans (so you only pay for what you actually use), one click to add more server space, unlimited staging URLs, and more.

And with an extensive knowledge base and 24/7 expert support, you don’t have to be a technical expert yourself to jump in with Cloudways.

Cloudways managed wordpress hosting homepage

Cloudways currently has 62 data centers in 15 countries and 33 cities, so no matter where you are in the world, you will get speedy, reliable performance.

For plans and pricing, the rates depend on several factors, including selecting from five Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers, plus the level of RAM, processor cores, storage, and bandwidth you need. The IaaS provider options are:

  • Linode
  • DigitalOcean
  • Vultr 
  • AWS
  • Google Cloud

The managed WordPress plans run the gamut of pricing. The least expensive is $12 per month including DigitalOcean Standard hosting charges, with 1 GB of RAM, 1 core processor, 25 GB of storage, and 1 TB bandwidth. The most expensive is $3569.98 per month including the AWS hosting charges. That plan includes 384 GB of RAM, 96 vCPU, 20 GB of storage, and 2 GB of bandwidth.

All plans come with 24/7/365 support, free SSL, CDN add-on, free migration, unlimited application installation, 24/7 real-time monitoring, automated backups, advanced caches, auto-healing, and more.

You can try Cloudways for free with a three-day free trial to test their managed WordPress hosting and how it will work for your needs.

How to Choose the Best Web Hosting for WordPress

Now you know about some of the best choices for hosting your WordPress site. But what’s the best one for you and your business?

Different factors are important to different people. But there are some common priorities among all WordPress website owners. We zeroed in on the following considerations when choosing the top 10 to include on this list.

Note: We intentionally didn’t include speed and uptime on our list. Those two things should be self-evident when looking for a good web hosting provider of all stripes.

Evaluate the following to guide your decision when choosing a WordPress web hosting provider.

Multi-Site vs. Single-Site Hosting 

Each provider on our list offers different solutions if you plan to host multiple sites. That’s why it’s important to make sure the provider you choose can support all the sites you’ll be hosting in the future. You’ll also want to factor in price and the features you get for each package.

For example, WPEngine offers a few great packages if you’re managing multiple websites. Their multi-site hosting packages start at $44.25 per month with three sites included. You’ll also get 125 GB of bandwidth each month along with 15 GB of storage.

It scales up from there to their Growth package that’s $86.25 per month—quite the jump. But you end up getting 10 sites included in that package with more bandwidth and storage.

Kinsta is also another great option if you’re looking for multi-site solutions. Their packages scale well, too. So, if you end up getting more clients who need websites, you can just upgrade your package as needed.

With providers like Bluehost, you can get unlimited websites at just $5.45 per month—but that comes with a catch–it is completely unmanaged.

That means it doesn’t come with the level of customer support and automatic maintenance you’d get with managed hosting (but we’ll get into that more later).

Customer Support That’s Actually Supportive

You want your website to work as smoothly as possible, especially if you’re making money from it. So when something goes wrong—say your website goes down, or you encounter a security breach or cyber attack—you want someone in your corner to get you out of the jam.

That’s why good customer support is an important consideration when you’re deciding on a WordPress host.

WordPress hosting platform WPEngine offers one of the best-reviewed customer support teams. The team is on hand 24/7/365 to help you with any and all issues that arise. 

Of course, the trade-off is that they’re a managed WordPress host. That means they come at a steeper cost. With that price tag comes a stellar hosting service, though, along with a support team that’ll be at your disposal whether you need to optimize your website or guide it through any down times.

Even better, the help desk and support staff of a managed WordPress site are WordPress experts. They understand your site and the plugins you’re using. They are essentially optimized to help you—unlike a general host with customers running all sorts of applications.

On top of that, managed hosts have built their business model on providing timely, reliable service. Contrast this to cheaper hosts that don’t put much of an emphasis—if any—on helping customers in their time of need.

That’s not to say that all unmanaged options offer inferior customer support. In fact, hosts like Bluehost offer award-winning 24/7 customer support for all of your needs. They just might not know your site as well as a managed WordPress host does.

Managed vs. Unmanaged Hosting

This is probably one of the most important decisions when it comes to choosing a WordPress web host from this list. It determines everything from your level of customer support to security to price.

First, let’s talk about the WordPress hosting most people are familiar with. You get a regular web host and that host usually gives you an easy way to install WordPress. You have a host, WordPress is installed, and that’s it.

This is known as unmanaged WordPress hosting—and most WordPress hosting works like this. After a one-click install, you get the basic version of WordPress, the same version that you’d get if you installed WordPress on a server that you owned.

Managed WordPress hosting steps things up a notch, and offers a bunch of extra features.

Instead of a basic host with WordPress installed, everything is built from the ground up with WordPress in mind. The hosting infrastructure is tailored to WordPress and the hosting company usually customizes WordPress itself to make it better.

Your site will be a lot faster and more secure. You’ll also have much better support since the hosting team specializes in WordPress.

The downside is that managed WordPress hosting is more expensive, but this makes sense. You’re getting more value for the higher price tag.

Headache-Free Site Migration

WordPress hosting is typically an upgrade from old shared hosting solutions. As such, you’re likely migrating your website to a new web host altogether.

A good web host will help you migrate your website between web hosts easily and seamlessly. This might mean they’ll have a dedicated technician work through the process for you, or they’ll have a customer support team to guide you through the process yourself. Some might even charge you a little more in order to migrate your site—and it’s usually worth the price in my opinion.

As you research, see what each hosting provider gives you in terms of site migration. SiteGround, for example, has a free migrator tool you can use to get your website on their host.

WPEngine is another host that offers a migration plugin. Once downloaded, the plugin takes care of all the complicated work for you.

Flywheel has experts on hand to help you migrate your website. Their migration team will take care of the whole process, so you don’t have to.

If you want to transfer your website to a new host, be sure to check what the WordPress hosting provider offers to help transfer your website. You’ll want as much assistance as you can get to make the transition smooth.

The Top Web Hosting For WordPress in Summary

WordPress web hosting puts your site on a server that’s only used for WordPress. This improves the security, performance, and enhances the overall experience for your website visitors.

Factors like site traffic, technical experience, and scalability are all important factors to consider here. Beginners launching a new WordPress website likely won’t use the same solution as a high-traffic site that wants to switch hosts.



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