The Best Cheap Web Hosting Services for 2025

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Creating a website is an excellent way to establish your brand, promote your business, or simply share ideas on the world wide web. However, budgeting for one can be stressful, especially if you’re operating on a small scale. Cheap web hosting is the answer, and we're here to help you in your search. PCMag has covered web hosting services for more than 10 years, so you can count on our expertise to steer you in the right direction. For example, Editors' Choice winner AccuWeb Hosting has helpful customer service and featured-packed plans for budget-conscious site builders. It isn't your only choice, though. Read on for the top cheap web hosts we've tested, followed by what to look for when selecting a low-cost service.

How We Pick the Best Cheap Web Hosts

We look at pricing here based on companies' regular annual prices, with no discounts applied. Our cutoff for inclusion? A web host must charge no more than $99.99 per year. It means some of our top choices for best overall web hosts, such as A2, GoDaddy, and Hostwinds, don't make the cut. We avoid web hosting services with initial cheap prices that go up after an introductory period. This is true low-cost web hosting!

Web hosts offering monthly and annual plans are judged in both areas. Naturally, if a web host only offers monthly or yearly plans, we adjust our expectations accordingly.

The Cheap Web Hosting Features You'll Need

A web host is a company with servers you use to store and deliver the files that make up your website. Large businesses can spend hundreds of dollars each year on dedicated web hosting or virtual private server (VPS) hosting. Still, plenty of web hosts are designed specifically for very small businesses (and personal use, too).

Setting up a website with your domain is easy, and most importantly, it doesn't have to be expensive. Do you need email, blogging software, basic email marketing (not marketing automation), e-commerce, and file sharing? Many of these features are included with cheap web hosting plans.

Also worth highlighting is the service's customer support. While it's nice to have FAQs and forums, when it's 3 a.m. and your website is inexplicably down, you want someone available immediately. Look for 24/7 customer support.

Cheap web hosting excludes the powerful and relatively pricey dedicated and VPS hosting options. Instead, you'll need to pick a shared hosting or WordPress hosting plan.

Shared hosting is a setup in which the hosting company runs multiple websites on a server along with your site. Don't let the "shared" bit worry you, though, since you can't peek into anyone else's files and no one else can touch yours. The benefit? Sharing the server space translates to cheap prices for everyone. The downside? Neighboring sites that consume too many resources may cause your site to run at less than peak performance.

Optimized WordPress hosting services let you set up and run a WordPress blog with minimum fuss. If your business website's primary function is blogging, do your wallet a favor and don't bother with shared hosting plans or other types of web hosting.

One thing we learned while reviewing web hosting services is that reading the fine print matters, especially if you are concerned about keeping prices low. Many web hosts have several service tiers, with introductory features in starter packages and expanded offerings in higher-priced plans. Don't get swayed by the big fonts touting the monthly fee: Make sure that a particular tier offers what you need.

Some hosts charge extra for the tools you might use to design your website. Other hosts require you to commit to a three-year hosting agreement to get that low per-month price. Or the price is an introductory one; after a month, you will revert to a higher price. Don't commit to annual plans until you know what features you need and how quickly you plan to grow.

Uptime Is Important, Even With Cheap Web Hosting

The aforementioned features are valuable to the web hosting experience, but none match the importance of site uptime. If your site is down, clients or customers cannot find you or access your products or services. Every customer turned away is a potential sale lost and traffic not monetized. So, look for a web host's uptime guarantee before signing up. Many have 98% (or higher) uptime promises to keep your site online consistently.

The Cheap Hosting Alternative: Website Builders

If your primary goal is cheap service, there's another option: website builders. If you simply want a good-looking website without any extras—a brochure-ware site, for example—you can skip traditional web hosting and check out website builder services, such as Gator and Wix.

If you don't care about owning a domain and don't want to do a lot of behind-the-scenes tweaking, you should consider one of these online website builders. They let you create surprisingly attractive and functional sites hosted under their domains. Furthermore, these services can be incredibly cheap: Some offer free plans, which generally means you'll have branding on your site for the website builder's company. You can often pay for a domain, and that typically removes the branding, as well. Web hosting is the way to go if you need control over your domain and a little more functionality.

Dependable, Affordable Web Hosting

Not all cheap web hosting services are created equal. For example, some have data transfer allotment and storage caps worth investigating. Read the fine print for the unlimited offerings, too, as gotchas that might sneak up on you later. Other services limit the applications or plug-ins you can use.

The web host you select depends entirely on how you plan to use it—and your budget. If you are ready to choose a great web hosting service that's also cheap, click the links in the charts to check out our in-depth reviews of the best names in the space.

If you're just getting started in the web hosting game, check out our primers: 10 Easy But Powerful SEO Tips to Boost Traffic to Your Website, 5 Things You Need to Know Before Signing Up for Web Hosting, and Linux vs. Windows: How to Pick the Best Server OS for Your Website.

Mike Williams contributed to this article.