Most popular web hosting companies offer big discounts on annual, bi-annual, and three-year payment terms. These discounts may be promoted as low monthly payments, but when you go to their checkout page, you’ll have to pay a hefty amount upfront to buy the web hosting.
Whether you are launching a new site or looking to switch providers, it is important to find a reliable and flexible hosting plan that fits your budget.
Monthly web hosting plans offer the flexibility to pay as you go without long-term commitments, making them ideal for startups, small businesses, and individuals.
To make this even easier, we have reviewed monthly plans for popular web hosting companies to see if they are worth the hype. This has helped us determine key factors like performance, uptime, customer support, scalability, and pricing.
In this article, we will share some of the best monthly web hosting plans that let you truly sign up for a month-to-month hosting service. We will also highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each plan, helping you make an informed decision.
If you are in a hurry, then take a quick look at our top picks to choose a monthly hosting plan.
| # | Hosting Companies | Pricing | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🥇 | DreamHost | $4.95/month | Small businesses |
| 🥈 | Hostinger | $2.69/month | Small online stores |
| 🥉 | Bluehost | $1.99/month | Bloggers |
| 4 | SiteGround | $3.99/month | Rapidly growing business |
| 5 | WP Engine | $24/month | Websites with high traffic |
Why Choose a Monthly Web Hosting Plan?
Many web hosting companies only offer discounts if you buy hosting for a full year or multiple years. That means it can cost hundreds of dollars just to get started.
Plus, if you don’t like the web hosting service, you may not be able to get a full refund, and you will lose your initial investment.
A true monthly hosting plan will be cheaper to get started. With a monthly billing hosting plan, you won’t commit to a hosting provider long-term, and it’s easier to move to another web hosting company.
This allows you to choose the best hosting provider with the features you need to host your WordPress website and build a professional online presence.
And more importantly, you will only pay a low monthly cost for the web hosting service you use.
How We Review Monthly Web Hosting Plans
To help our readers, we tested and reviewed the monthly plans offered by popular and reliable hosting companies. When doing that, we particularly focused on the following criteria:
- Ease of use: We have prioritized hosting companies with a beginner-friendly cPanel or other hosting dashboard, an easy setup process, and a one-click site migration option.
- Performance: We have used uptime monitoring and speed test tools to assess the loading times of websites hosted on the monthly plans.
- Scalability: For this showcase, we have included scalable hosting plans that allow you to downgrade or upgrade plans easily based on your site’s growth.
- Pricing: We analyzed the monthly cost, setup fees, renewal rates, and any hidden charges to ensure transparency and affordability.
Why Trust WPBeginner?
WPBeginner has a team of experts with 15+ years of experience in WordPress, online marketing, SEO, hosting, and more. We thoroughly test and review each hosting plan to give you the best recommendations. For details, see our editorial process.
Without further delay, let’s look at some of the best monthly web hosting plans for small businesses.
Video List
If you’d prefer a written list, then please keep reading.
1. Dreamhost – $4.95/mo.
DreamHost is one of the most well-known web hosting companies, and they’re an official WordPress-recommended hosting provider. They offer the cheapest month-to-month web hosting plan on the market.
We have a lot of experience with testing and using DreamHost. To find out more features, see our DreamHost review.
When reviewing the company, we realized that it provides a custom control panel to add your domain name, manage emails, and access web hosting features. Plus, it comes with automated website backups to ensure the complete safety of your content.
When it comes to DreamHost’s monthly pricing, their WordPress Starter or Shared plan costs $4.95/month with a free SSL certificate, free website migration, and more.
You will have to pay for the domain registration separately, which is fair.
But if you’re willing to commit for the year, WPBeginner users can get up to a 72% discount on their Shared plan with a free domain name, free website builder, SSD storage, and more.
Our DreamHost coupon code is applicable on the 1-year and 3-year payment plans.
DreamHost has other web hosting solutions, including VPS hosting, managed WordPress hosting, dedicated server hosting, cloud hosting, and WooCommerce hosting. All of these options make it an ideal choice for beginners.
2. Hostinger – $2.69/mo.
Hostinger is one of the leading web hosting companies on the global market. They offer WordPress website hosting, shared hosting, and cloud hosting plans.
Through our extensive testing process, we have found that their monthly hosting starts at an affordable $11.99 for a single website. Keep in mind that there’s a one-time setup fee of $4.99 associated with the monthly plan.
For those managing multiple websites, we recommend considering Hostinger’s WordPress Starter plan. This plan offers exceptional value, including a free domain name, a free SSL certificate, unlimited website bandwidth, and unlimited email accounts. The Hostinger premium WordPress plan costs $11.99/month.
You can use WPBeginner’s exclusive Hostinger coupon code to get a discount on your monthly plan. The Hostinger promo code offers more discounts on longer commitments.
For example, if you choose to pay for up to 48 months, the cost for the WordPress premium hosting plan is reduced to $2.69/month, and there’s no setup fee.
It also includes a free domain name for the first year (renews at a normal price).
Their shared hosting plans cost similar to WordPress hosting. However, you’ll need to pay an additional setup fee.
Hostinger also offers Virtual Private Server hosting (VPS hosting) plans, Minecraft server hosting, and other solutions.
You can click on the button below to get an exclusive discount.
3. Bluehost – $1.99/mo.
Bluehost is one of the most popular web hosting providers and an officially recommended WordPress hosting partner. We thoroughly tested the hosting for features, speed, and uptime, and we recommend it to everyone, all the time.
The WordPress monthly hosting plan costs monthly hosting plan costs $15.99. However, we suggest that you buy their 12-month service term plan because you will get the web hosting for $23.88 for a full year.
It will triple your investment with a free domain name, free SSL certificate, and a BIG discount on your web hosting package.
Your WordPress hosting plan will cost $1.99 per month!
If you’re starting out and worried about hosting costs, we recommend Bluehost as the best web hosting for beginners, startups, and small businesses.
The initial cost for your web hosting plan will be as low as $23.88 for the first year. This also includes your free domain name, free SSL certificate, and a user-friendly cPanel for a one-click WordPress installation.
However, on the renewal, you’ll need to pay the full cost for your web hosting plan and domain name. But by then, you’ll be able to grow your business to afford the price.
And if you still want to switch, you can easily move your WordPress site to a new web hosting company for a month-to-month hosting plan. Some web hosting providers also offer free migration services, so you’re safe anyway.
Most of our WPBeginner users start their websites with Bluehost web hosting and grow their businesses to the next level.
4. SiteGround – $3.99/mo.
SiteGround is one of the best WordPress hosting providers. Their web hosting is optimized for speed, security, and scalability. We use SiteGround to host the WPBeginner website and have had an amazing experience with it.
But don’t just take our word for it. Our detailed SiteGround review offers a comprehensive evaluation of their hosting services, including performance benchmarks and coverage of their additional features like Site Scanner. This will give you a clear understanding of whether SiteGround is the right choice for your website’s needs.
Among top features, SiteGround hosting offers automatic WordPress updates, a free CDN network to improve page load time, a custom web application firewall to protect your web server against malware and DDoS attacks, and more.
Their customer support team is available 24/7 to help you with any of your concerns, which you may rarely have with SiteGround web hosting.
SiteGround has data centers all over the world since they use the Google Cloud network. It’s the reason they can provide a 99.9% uptime guarantee on their web hosting platform. Over the years of using their platform, we have never had downtime for the WPBeginner site.
The SiteGround’s StartUp plan costs $3.99/month.
It’s a bit pricy compared to other hosting providers on the list, but it also includes functionality like free site migration, free SSL certificate, eCommerce support, basic WordPress site management, out of the box caching addons, and more.
SiteGround’s discount deal is only valid when you choose to pay for up to 12 months upfront. So, you’ll pay $17.99 for 12 months and get access to all their WordPress hosting features.
The best part is that they also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Aside from WordPress, SiteGround also has cheap web hosting for other content management systems like Drupal, Joomla, Magento, PHP, and basically any other Linux based app.
5. WP Engine – $24 / mo.
WP Engine is the most popular managed WordPress hosting company in the market. They are typically the go-to choice for large websites, enterprise customers, as well as small businesses and developers who want a fully managed web hosting platform with speed, security, and support.
We did a detailed performance test of their platform in our WP Engine review that we highly recommend you check out.
WP Engine offers monthly cloud hosting plans starting at $24 per month on a month-to-month billing, which gives you access to 10GB of disk space, 50GB of bandwidth, 10 premium themes from StudioPress, free automated migration, automated website backups, and more.
All their plans come with advanced developer tools like one-click staging, dev & prod site environments, threat blocking & security, built-in CDN for turbo website speed, transferable sites for easy client handoff, activity log, and more.
WP Engine also offers managed hosting solutions for WooCommerce online stores starting at $29 per month, as well as enterprise cloud hosting starting at $600 per month.
But if you use the WPBeginner’s WP Engine coupon code and pre-pay for annual plans, then you will get an additional discount and up to 6 months of free web hosting.
WP Engine also offers additional services like automated plugin updates, extra SOC2 level security with managed WAF, site monitoring, and more, which can be purchased separately.
BONUS: Other Popular Month-to-Month Web Hosting Options
6. HostGator: One of the most popular web hosting providers, HostGator offers unmetered bandwidth, a 99.9% uptime guarantee, and more. Their hosting plan costs $1.99 for the first month (including tax) for WPBeginner readers. The plan renews at $10.99 per month from the second month.
7. GreenGeeks: The eco-friendly WordPress hosting offered by GreenGeeks comes with multiple types of hosting, including reseller hosting, dedicated hosting for websites, and more. It has built-in caching for fast performance, which costs $11.95 per month. You also need to pay a $15 setup fee, which makes your total cost $26.95 for the first month.
Which Month-To-Month Web Hosting Plan Should I Buy?
If you’re looking for a true monthly hosting plan with no long-term commitment, then DreamHost has the best monthly web hosting packages.
DreamHost’s top features include free website migration, free SSL, security, and a 97-day money-back guarantee.
With that said, when you’re starting a website, you want to get the best web hosting deal because it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be switching hosting providers on a monthly basis.
Most people who choose a reliable hosting provider rarely ever switch. In over a decade of running the WPBeginner website, we have switched hosting providers only once, and that was after 10 years when we outgrew our previous provider.
So, in that case, what’s more important is that you choose a provider that’s giving you the best deal with a one-year commitment.
We recommend Hostinger, SiteGround, or Dreamhost for those just starting out.
Hostinger WordPress Starter plan ($32.29 for the first year) is the cheapest web hosting option on paying upfront for 12 months, and you get a free domain name worth $9.99/year.
Hostinger also allows you to pay for up to 48 months upfront with an additional discount, which reduces your web hosting price to $2.24 per month ($107.57 for 4 years). It’s the best deal for a long-term commitment.
On the other hand, SiteGround’s StartUp plan on a 12-month upfront payment ($17.99 for the first year) is close to Hostinger’s pricing for the basic starter plan.
However, SiteGround servers are blazing fast since they are hosted on Google Cloud, and you get tons of advanced performance and security features, which is why we use SiteGround for the WPBeginner website.
If you’re looking for a more managed web hosting provider with enterprise support, then WP Engine is going to be your best bet since they offer monthly hosting plans for cloud hosting.
Note: At WPBeginner, we regularly look into dozens of web hosting companies that are not listed in this article, like A2 Hosting, GoDaddy, InMotion Hosting, Cloudways, Namecheap, LiquidWeb (Nexcess), and others. We decided not to list them all in this article because we don’t want to cause choice paralysis. If you choose a host from our recommended list, then you won’t go wrong.
We hope this article has helped you find the best monthly web hosting plan. You may also want to check out our other guides on related web hosting and business growth.
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Dennis Muthomi
The comparison table is super helpful. I just started another small online business(as a side hustle) so I went with Hostinger’s monthly plan. Your tip about considering longer term commitments for better value is spot on. I’d also add that check if they offer free site migration and Hostinger has it because it can save time and hassle when switching from another provider. This is a great resource for anyone new to web hosting.
Jiří Vaněk
I’m still trying to find a web hosting provider for our international website. I went through some of the reviews here and finally decided on Hostinger. I just wanted to thank you for your promo code, which helped lower the standard price, making the hosting more affordable. This is really valuable in today’s times, so thank you for that.
Ralph
I prefer paying for whole year as is often cheaper (sometimes is not) but for my own convenience. I don’t like to remember about such things and prefer paying once a year but everyone to their own liking.
But after checking out the deals here… These are so cheap and tempting!
Jiří Vaněk
On the other hand, if you need to test the website for support, speed, and availability, it’s sometimes better to pay for just one month and then decide whether to stay with that provider. Personally, I do it this way, testing the service first and making a decision based on my experience after a certain period of operation. Sometimes, paying for a year in advance can be very limiting if you find that the services are not of good quality.