Not all expensive web hosts are great. But great web hosting doesn’t come cheap. There’s a price to pay for blazing fast speeds, stability, customer service, and features. Here are three expensive web hosts that are great at what they do.
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Expensive Web Host #1: Kinsta for WordPress Hosting
I’m showcasing Kinsta over WP Engine because of its reliability, features, and customer service. Kinsta WordPress hosting isn’t cheap. It starts out at $29.17 per month, and scales to $833.33/m. Here’s a complete Kinsta review.
This is the best offer you can get right now:
Kinsta doesn’t offer coupon codes like other web hosts. Instead, they give you 2 months of free hosting when you sign up for their yearly plan. What makes this great, is that this is a recurring discount, which means you save a certain percentage each year, as opposed to other hosting providers who only give you discounts for the first billing cycle.
Why is Kinsta Expensive?
Kinsta’s infrastructure is crafted exclusively for WordPress. Just recently, they even doubled their disk space and performance at no extra charge, by migrating to Google Cloud Compute’s new C2 VMs. Kinsta uses Google’s cloud servers to offer WordPress hosting at 17 different locations. Here are some of the key features:
Kinsta is hands down the best managed WordPress provider you can find.
- NO Overselling. Your resources are yours, and yours alone
- Free CDN
- Free backups (two weeks)
- Amazing customer support
- Built in server caching
- Free fixing of hacked sites
As always, it’s customer service that makes or breaks a web host. Unlike other hosts, Kinsta has taken a stand against phone support and offers only live chat or ticket-based service. They claim that this is more efficient since users can share screenshots, there’s no miscommunication, no need to verify the customer’s identity, etc. I have to say, I agree.
Kinsta is so confident in the efficiency of their WordPress hosting infrastructure, that they completely disallow 3rd party caching plugins, image optimization plugins, and other social media, security, and backup tools. They claim that their in-house processes do all this much more efficiently, and 3rd party tools will only slow things down.
So if you’re looking for quality WordPress hosting that doesn’t skimp on hardware, and treats your website like a princess, then Kinsta is the right one for you!
Expensive Web Host #2: Liquid Web
Far back in 2016, Liquid Web decided to forego traditional shared hosting packages. The fact is that the margins provided by low-cost hosting are simply unsustainable if you’re trying to provide quality service. Since then, Liquid Web’s plans are some of the most expensive on the market.
Their “Cloud Sites” is the closest thing they have to shared hosting. Prices start at $51/m. Here’s a complete Cloud Sites review.
This is the best deal you can get on Cloud Sites right now:
Why is Cloud Sites Expensive?
Liquid web cloud sites is for developers who have several clients that they want to manage simultaneously. They can provide each client with white-labeled logins so they can see how each is doing. The cloud infrastructure ensures that your sites won’t go down.
In addition to top-quality hardware, Liquid Web’s customer support alone is worth the money. Each rep undergoes 300 hours of training in the first year alone. They not only help you out when something is wrong, but they can also work with you to find the right architecture to suit your needs.
Level 3 technicians constantly monitor their private data centers, to ensure that they stay up throughout the year.
Expensive Web Host #3: Nexcess for WooCommerce Hosting
If you have a WooCommerce store and need guaranteed speed for hundreds or even thousands of transactions, the Nexcess WooCommerce plan is for you. Nexcess is quite expensive – even more so than Kinsta at the higher tiers, and they don’t have a lot of features. They focus solely on speed. So if that’s what you’re looking for, then this web host is for you. Here’s a complete review of the Nexcess WooCommerce plan.
Here’s the best pricing for Nexcess that you can get right now:
Why is Nexcess WooCommerce So Expensive?
The entire Nexcess infrastructure is built around supporting WooCommerce. They have a greater number of PHP workers for the buck than any other provider. Nexcess builds custom WooCommerce tables just to extract the maximum speed possible, and this allows them to handle hundreds or thousands of transactions per hour.
WooCommerce exerts a unique load on WordPress servers. That’s why Nexcess is so expensive
WooCommerce is a dynamic plugin, and the store demands a lot from servers. Unlike traditional WordPress which is mainly static, WooCommerce requires a lot of dynamic and customer-specific content. For example, you need a login page, constantly changing inventory, updated cart values, and a lot more. Because of this, hosting plans that are perfectly fine with ordinary WordPress crumble under the load of WooCommerce.
Nexcess guarantees the performance of its stores in terms of the number of transactions per hour. The most basic plan is suitable for a staggering 500 transactions per hour, and it only scales up from there. This is the reason why Nexcess WooCommerce is so expensive. The resources used scale up linearly with the size of the store because web hosts can’t take advantage of normal performance-saving measures like caching.
A VPS is The Best Alternative to Expensive Web Hosting
If you’re willing to try something new, I strongly recommend that you consider a VPS. I recently migrated my websites to a VPS, and the speed blew me away. I didn’t know WordPress could run that fast! The fast dashboard loading speed was a revelation. I’m paying as much for my starter VPS as I was paying for the highest tier shared hosting plan, and there’s no comparing the speed difference.
Migrating to a VPS will be less costly – but be prepared for a lot of server management!
Providers like Kinsta and Nexcess charge you based on the number of sites you have. This can get expensive quickly if a few of your sites don’t get much traffic, or aren’t very profitable. On a VPS, you get dedicated resources and can mix and match slow and fast websites. It’s much more cost-effective.
However, there is a caveat. Moving from shared hosting to a VPS is hard. You need to understand server management and be ready to harden your server against security threats. Even if you choose a managed VPS solution, there’s no getting around the fact that you need to get into the weeds with SSH, firewall configurations, and even installing software like a persistent object cache – either Memcached or Redis. So it’s not for the faint of heart.
But if the idea of managing your own server intrigues you, then you just might be tempted enough to switch to your own VPS server. Here’s a list of the cheapest VPS plans – both managed and unmanaged.
Customer Service is a Huge Component of Price
Out of all the components of web hosting costs, customer service is the one aspect that can’t be efficiently mass-produced. You can get cheap storage in bulk, cheap bandwidth, and lots of CPU speed by pooling your resources. But quality customer service? That’s non-scalable.
In my article on web hosts with the best customer support, you can see that it comprises of:
- Local reps who speak your language
- Qualified, trained staff
- 24×7 support with response time guarantees
These aren’t cheap. For large providers, it takes up the maximum share of costs by far! So while these web hosts are famous for their excellent, and reliable hosting, their customer service sets them apart from the competition.
Why I Don’t Include SiteGround
For a long time, SiteGround used to be on my list of most worthy web hosting providers despite the cost. However, in the past few years, they’ve increased their pricing far too much, and I don’t feel that the features justify the cost anymore. This is why I no longer recommend SiteGround.
The Best Alternative to SiteGround: NameHero
Where I used to recommend SiteGround, I now recommend NameHero as the best SiteGround alternative. They’re not as expensive, and they share the most important features. In addition, NameHero also uses the LiteSpeed webserver on its shared hosting plans which comes with improved performance. The CEO Ryan Gray is personally involved in the customer service, and I feel that it’s a superior web host overall compared to SiteGround.
SiteGround Isn’t Cheap
If you look at their pricing, you might get the impression that SiteGround is competing with regular shared hosting providers. Here’s the SiteGround coupon 2024 list. After all, their initial pricing starts at just $2.99/m. That’s pretty close to the ordinary prices of web hosts like Bluehost and Hostgator.
But while the initial price is pretty low, they’re only for the first year. If you look online, you’ll see that a lot of people freak out over SiteGround’s actual price when their first billing cycle runs out.
So contrary to your expectations, SiteGround isn’t all that cheap. And here’s why.
Why is SiteGround Expensive?
First of all, SiteGround’s customer support is far, far superior to anything provided by other standard web hosts like Hostgator or Bluehost. I’ve personally used them since 2013, and I can attest that their reps are incredibly knowledgeable. They’ve fixed complicated issues like misconfigured Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates in a matter of minutes.
Second, SiteGround has a lot of value-add services. From server-based caching to staging, daily backups, and more. Moreover, SiteGround is always on the cutting edge of the latest developments in the web hosting world. For example, they had SSD drives and free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates long before anyone else. And they’re also the first to implement the QUIC protocol.
But like I said, they’ve increased their prices a little too much for my taste.
Bottom Line
Expensive shared hosting isn’t for everyone. And not all expensive shared hosting is worth it! But the examples in this article are most certainly worth the price. You pay for reliability and customer service. And sometimes, you just can’t put a price on those!
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