The Best Web Hosting for Beginners – a Magnificent 7 of Awesome Providers to Kickstart Your New Blogging Adventure Today

As with many things in life, when choosing the best web hosting for beginners there is a certain trade-off between the features that you want and the price that you are prepared to pay.

If you wanted a car with the following features:

• A top speed of 218mph
• Acceleration from 0-62mph in 2.6 seconds
• Gorgeous design
• Manufactured in limited numbers

Then you might pick a Ferrari LaFerrari.

Back in 2017, Forbes showed it at a cost of circa £1.6M ($2.2M)! (No doubt it would cost more now)

This probably wouldn’t be a great choice of car for somebody that has just passed their driving test. They are likely to be looking for something at the cheaper end of the spectrum until they have a little more experience and know exactly what they want.

Of course, if they could find a car that had the features that they wanted at a reasonable price then that would be ideal.

And so it is with looking for the best web host for beginners.

1. What Features Do You Want From Hosting?

I’ve covered the main features in my Starting a Blog in Retirement post.

To reiterate, the key factors may be summarised as follows:

1.1 Cost – Value for Money

As we saw in the introduction, there is always a trade-off between what we want and what we are willing to pay for it.

I would suggest that, as a beginner, you shouldn’t immediately go for one of the more expensive packages from a hosting provider.

See how you go for the first 12 months or so and then re-evaluate. If you pick a good host, it is fairly easy and pain-free to either upgrade your service with the same host or change to a service with a new host.

None of the recommendations that I’m going to make is expensive. In fact, I’ll split them into 2 sections, one based solely on looking for a low price (but still providing a good service) and one looking for ones that focus a little more on performance.

Renewal Prices

Keep in mind that, as with many businesses, there will likely be offers in place that reduce the initial cost for new customers – be aware that prices are likely to increase at renewal.

That said, there is nothing to stop you from moving to another web host at that point – site migration is a fairly painless operation these days.

VAT / Sales Tax

Another thing to keep in mind is that if you live in the UK then VAT will be added to the cost of the service.

Other forms of Sales Tax may apply in other countries.

1.2 Performance – Fast Speed is Vital

Nobody likes waiting for web pages to load.

In fact, Google research found that 53% of users would leave a page that hasn’t loaded in 3 seconds. 3 seconds!!

1.3 Help – Good Customer Support

There are few things that irritate us more than IT that doesn’t work.

Especially when the first ‘helpful’ suggestion from Tech Support is “Have you tried switching it off and on again?“!

Part of picking the best web hosting is choosing a host that has good customer support.

I know from painful first-hand experience that the support at some hosts is more concerned with the rating that you give them at the end of the session than actually resolving your issue.

2. Best Web Hosting vs Affiliates

I’m about to be upfront with you and include my affiliate notification paragraph, so this is a good point to discuss a major influence in the hosting recommendations that you will read online.

Let’s skip back to the car analogy.

Typically a car manufacturer provides its cars to a car dealership and this dealership then sells the cars to the customer. The dealership, of course, makes a certain amount of money from this even though they haven’t manufactured the car.

In the web hosting world, it is common for web hosts to use affiliates to increase the sale of their services. In much the same way as the car dealership, these affiliates make a commission on the sale of the hosting service.

For example, you will find that a great many affiliates promote hosts like BlueHost. This is just one of the many hosting companies owned by a company called Newfold Digital – formerly Endurance International Group (EIG).

They promote them because of the relatively high commission payments from this business and not because they are a good choice for the customer. Be careful!

I will freely admit that the links to the hosts that I recommend below are affiliate links. And I very much hope that you will use them when you make your choice of the best web host for you.

However, my primary objective is to help you make the right choice of hosting provider. If you are at all uncomfortable with using my links please just navigate directly to the host’s website.

And, after all that, here’s the paragraph:

3. Best Web Hosting for Beginners – Cost

In this section of looking for the best web host for beginners, we’re going to focus on 3 providers who offer a great service for a low cost.

All 3 providers offer a starter service for less than a tenner (pounds or dollars).

Let’s take a look:

3.1 WHUK

3.2 A2 Hosting

3.3 NameHero

4. Best Web Hosting for Beginners – Performance

OK, there is a different focus in this section.

If you are not constrained by cost and are more interested in a service that focuses on speed then these next 3 hosts are for you.

But first …

Email Hosting

In this section, there are 2 hosts where email hosting isn’t provided as part of the service, so it’s worth reflecting on this.

The majority of top-level hosts don’t offer email hosting.

The reason for this is that they consider themselves to be experts at providing web hosting, but not email hosting. It’s a matter of specialisms.

Furthermore, it offers a level of protection for the customer in that if one service should go down it will not take the other down with it.

If you decide to choose one of these web hosting-only providers then you’ll want a separate email host. A solid choice for this would be Google Workspace (Gmail).

Bandwidth

You’ll also notice that while the bandwidth for all of the hosts in the previous section was unlimited, in this section there are limits.

Is this an issue?

Let’s start by considering what bandwidth is.

Think of it in plumbing terms, the water flowing through a pipe is analogous to your website data and the size of the water pipe is analogous to your bandwidth – the bigger the pipe, the more water can travel through it in any given period.

So, whether or not restricted bandwidth is an issue for your new site will depend upon a combination of the amount of data on your site, the number of users that you have, and how many pages those users view.

How much bandwidth will you need?

Let’s say that you have 500 visitors per month, each visitor looks at an average of 4 pages, and the average page size is 5MB. The monthly bandwidth would be:

500 x 4 x 5 = 10,000MB (10GB)

Let’s have a look at a real-world example.

Jenny Marsland owns the popular blog site Jenny in Neverland. One of her recent posts (Some thoughts on turning 30) is around 8.5MB in size. She has around 8,000 monthly visitors. We’ll estimate an average of 4 page views:

8,000 x 4 x 8.5 = 272,000MB (272GB)

It’s unlikely that your blog will reach this level for quite a while (Jenny has been blogging for a number of years and devotes a great deal of time to her site). I’ve included the figures just to give some context.

So, something like 20GB should be more than enough for somebody just starting out.

What happens if you exceed a bandwidth limit?

Don’t worry, your website won’t be taken down. There will just be an additional charge for the extra bandwidth used.

Reducing bandwidth costs

All of the hosts listed here provide more than enough bandwidth for a beginner.

However, if you’d still like to reduce your bandwidth then there are 2 things which will make a substantial difference:

1. Image size
   Reducing the size of the images that you use on your posts will make a big difference to the size of your pages and, therefore, your bandwidth.
   
   Consider using an Image Optimisation plugin like the excellent ShortPixel.
2. CDN
   If you make use of a Content Delivery Network then your bandwidth costs will relate only to the data travelling between your site’s origin servers (at the host) and the CDN provider. Your viewers then receive the cached data from the CDN, thereby reducing your costs.
   
   The 3 Performance-based hosts all have a CDN included in their offerings (thereby reducing the impact of not having unlimited bandwidth).
   
   Where hosts use LiteSpeed servers (NameHero and Krystal) then you are able to use the Quic.Cloud CDN. It is likely that, for a beginner site, the Free quota for this service will be sufficient for your needs.
   
   The remaining hosts (WHUK and A2) do not directly provide a CDN offering. However, anybody can make use of the free Cloudflare CDN so you don’t have to miss out.
   
   

4.1 Rocket.net

4.2 WPX

4.3 Cloudways

5. Best Web Hosting for Beginners – Support

And so we reach the final category.

Krystal could easily sit in the Best-Cost section with its starter package retailing for £4.99 ($5.74). And its LightSpeed servers, especially when combined with the QUIC CDN, provide excellent performance too.

However, what has really impressed me about Krystal is the support.

It is all UK-based and the replies are always prompt, pleasant, and professional (sounds like one of my old school reports!).

I’m sure that some of my queries are things that they have answered many times before, or are just ridiculously easy for people with their experience, but they always provide the answer that I’m looking for in a friendly and helpful manner.

5.1 Krystal Hosting

6. FAQ

Which web hosting is best for beginners?

It’s the classic answer … it depends!

What is your priority from a web host? Cheapest price? Best performance? Professional support?

As a beginner on a budget, it’s probably best to test the waters first with a relatively cheap host – you can always migrate to another host later. However, if cost is not a constraint then look for a host that focuses on performance.

Which hosting is best for WordPress beginners?

Pretty much all web hosts have an option for installing WordPress when you start with them. In fact, with many, it is installed automatically.

However, while many hosts have very good support teams, it is unlikely that they will be able to help with WordPress matters. That would be like buying a laptop from Dell, installing Excel, and then directing your spreadsheet queries to Dell – it just isn’t their area of expertise.

How much does web hosting cost?

How much does a car cost? That’s right, it depends on what features you want and how much you are prepared to pay for them.

If you aren’t unduly concerned about speed, perhaps if you are just starting out, then there are great packages available for less than £10 per month.

On the other hand, if performance is a priority, there are packages that retail at over £2,000 per month.

How do I start a WordPress blog?

The process for starting a WordPress blog is:

1. Pick a niche that you want to blog about
2. Choose a domain name (either related to the niche or to you personally)
3. Pick a web hosting provider
4. Install WordPress (if it wasn’t done automatically by the host)
5. Pick and install a theme
6. Install some key plugins to add features and functionality
7. Start writing!

7. Conclusion – What is the Best Web Hosting for Beginners?

I’ll let you into a little secret …

There is no single host providing the Best Web Hosting for Beginners!

There is only the best web host for you. What suits one person may not suit another.

Every choice outlined here offers good value for money, good speed, and good customer service.

All of these Magnificent 7 hosts have a money-back guarantee period of at least 30 days. So, if you like the look of one take a look and evaluate it for a while.

If you like it, excellent. Job done.

If you don’t, ask for your money back and try another.

Whatever the result, please let me know the outcome in the Comments section below. Your feedback may prove useful to others.

Here are some quick links if you’ve already decided:

Category	Host
Cost	Webhosting UK (WHUK)
	A2 Hosting
	Namehero
Performance	Rocket.net
	WPX
	Cloudways
Support	Krystal Hosting