A2 Hosting
was founded in 2003 in Michigan, USA. They offer entry-level shared hosting packages, managed VPS and dedicated servers and seller hosting.
Their shared packages are standard cPanel packages, with SSD-based storage and a promise of reserved CPU and RAM resources — even with the smallest of plans.
Their LITE plan begins at $2.96 per month, which allows for one website. Their SWIFT plan has unlimited websites, starting with $3.70 per month. And their TURBO plan starts at $7.03 per month. These prices are — as the A2 website claims — a 63% discount.
They offer free migration, 24/7 support, DDOS protection and “99.99% uptime commitment”, which is always nice to know.
SiteGround
is a “holding of companies registered in the USA, UK, Bulgaria, and Spain that manages four offices and several datacenter locations around the world”. Established in 2004, it has become somewhat of an institution in the hosting world that’s been recommended by WordPress itself.
SiteGround’s hosting range is similar to A2’s, and starts from the entry-level shared packages all the way to cloud products and dedicated servers. The company also offers bespoke enterprise solutions.
SiteGround offers packages similar to A2’s plans — although its GrowBig and GoGeek plans cost a bit more than a comparable A2 plan.
Bluehost
was founded by Matt Heaton in 2003, and enjoyed immense popularity until 2011, when it was acquired by EIG. Since the acquisition, it has remained one of the most prominent players in the hosting scene, but it has been plagued by mixed reviews regarding its user experience.
Bluehost offers a similar range of products to the others — from entry-level shared plans to VPS, dedicated servers, ecommerce and WordPress packages. But it currently offers the lowest prices of the three mentioned in this category (for a 36-month term; prices go up as you’d expect for shorter terms).
WPEngine
was founded in 2010 in Texas, USA, and quickly conquered the enterprise WordPress hosting market. In 2011, Automattic (the company behind WordPress) took part in its first funding round.
They have three fixed hosting plans — at $35, $115 and $290 per month — and custom plans for mission-critical, large websites.
Like the rest of the lineup in this category, Kinsta’s packages are not the cheapest in the market, but they are good value for what you get.
They have ten different plans, ranging from $30 a month to $1500 per month, so you have plenty of options to choose from in regards to your needs and budget.
The differences in the plans, aside from price, vary for things like storage (SSD), the number of PHP workers, the number of monthly visits and limits to the number of WordPress installations you can have.
Kinsta
provides a fairly extensive list of the technical inclusions in its plans. It includes one-click staging environments, daily backups, SSH access on all its plans, detailed performance analytics. All Kinsta’s plans also include free migration.
Kinsta uses LXD host containers on Google Cloud infrastructure, with LXC containers for every site. These LXC containers then use the latest LEMP stack — NGINX, PHP 7.3, MariaDB.
As a rare thing in this category, Linode also offers managed services, from server tunings, to migrations, software deployments, and system administration — at a premium, of course. It offers block storage for network-connected storage needs, S3-compatible Object Storage for unstructured data and static site hosting, and a managed Kubernetes service.
Its plans used to start at $20 per month, but with stiff competition from DigitalOcean and other competitors, Linode’s plans now start at a competitively priced $5 per month, just like DigitalOcean.
Linode keeps things a bit simpler than DigitalOcean — but it does offer a number of interesting add-ons. Like many providers, this includes a range of One-Click installs, from apps like WordPress, Minecraft, and cPanel to tech stacks, such as LAMP, LEMP, or MEAN. Its Longview server monitoring solution is one of the more interesting add-ons, as well as its dedicated GPU instances.