While many hosts offer managed WordPress hosting as an option, WP Engine specializes in it exclusively. With all its resources optimized for one particular piece of software, it can provide some fantastic features.

Let’s see how WP Engine justifies its name.

Getting Started with WP Engine

Signing up takes all of a few minutes, but you can only pay with a credit card.

Upon completing the payment, you get your logins and an email linking to the knowledge base. It’s pretty cool since knowledge base resources are the most useful in your first few days.

Admittedly, starting out is a bit complicated. Configuring the DNS, in particular, is tricky. It’s best to find the related tutorial or ask the support for help.

After that, it gets easier. The control panel is easy to navigate, though there’s a bit of a learning curve.

WP Engine is a relatively straightforward WordPress host.

WP Engine Plans & Features

WP Engine has three standard plans:

• Startup—10Gb storage, 50Gb bandwidth, allows 1 website and 25,000 monthly visits
• Growth—20Gb storage, 200Gb bandwidth, allows 5 websites and 100,000 monthly visits
• Scale—30Gb storage, 400Gb bandwidth, allows 15 websites and 400,000 monthly visits

You can also get a custom plan if you outgrow these. Purchasing more websites is possible from the dashboard.

The feature list is extensive and includes some fantastic premium themes, caching, and a staging environment.

WP Engine does ban some plugins.

Faulty plugins are behind tens of thousands of breaches each year, so you can’t really complain. That said, some popular plugins are on the disallowed list, which can be annoying.

WP Engine also has no email hosting. If you want a custom email address, you need to get a professional email service like MailChimp, which is one of the best email marketing services.

Despite the banned plugins, WP Engine’s features come together astonishingly well. It has the strongest offer among WordPress web hosting providers.

WP Engine Support

The knowledge base articles are insanely detailed. WP Engine leaves nothing to chance, so you’ll really love it if you’re a DIY person.

The support team is always available through email tickets and live chat. Unfortunately, phone support is not available 24/7 with the cheapest plan.

The support deals exclusively with WordPress hosting. This means WP Engine hires exclusively WordPress pros that can answer all your questions.

Plus, the support is thorough in making sure your WordPress experience goes as intended. From the first interaction, it’s obvious WP Engine goes the extra mile to provide a smooth experience.

Very few companies can boast a support team as effective as WP Engine’s.

WP Engine Performance

WP Engine offers a 99.95% uptime guarantee and returns 5% of your monthly hosting fee for each hour of downtime.

According to a year of testing, uptime is well above 99.99%—your site will be safe.

WP Engine’s servers are expertly configured. Even with all the speed optimization turned off, it can still load a basic WordPress page in 0.63 seconds.

With 0.11 seconds to respond, WP Engine has the fastest WordPress hosting across the board.

WP Engine has unmatched performance.

TechJury Verdict

WP Engine’s offer so far has been nearly perfect. This, however, does not come cheap.

The cheapest plan costs $35/month and limits you to 1 website and 25,000 monthly visitors. Every 1,000 visitors over the limit incur an extra $2 charge.

The features more than justify the pricing. Whether the plans pay off, though, depends on your website.

The features are top-notch, but there are safer options if you’re not sure you can cover the expenses.

If money’s not an issue, though, WP Engine offers the best WordPress hosting you’ll find.

SiteGround is one of the three official WordPress hosts. Unlike most providers who offer separate WordPress plans, SiteGround optimizes its hosting for WordPress across the board. That means its managed and shared plans are essentially the same—which extends to the price as well.

Let’s see how this affects its offer.

Getting Started with SiteGround

Signing up for SiteGround’s WordPress hosting service is fairly straightforward. You just need to pick between standard WordPress and WooCommerce.

SiteGround states it only accepts VISA, MasterCard, American Express and Discover payments. In actuality, you can also contact the support about paying through PayPal.

You can use SiteGround’s Starter plugin to set everything up. It helps you choose a theme and set up a contact form and useful plugins like Yoast SEO. It helps beginners get a head start.

From there, you can enjoy SiteGround’s custom control panel. It’s cPanel enriched with a few features and customized for easier navigation. The end result is delightfully smooth.

Not much more to say here—SiteGround is as beginner-friendly as a WordPress host can get.

SiteGround Plans & Features

SiteGround’s feature list is extensive, but many tools are reserved for the more expensive plans. For instance, the StartUp plan only has static content caching, while others come with a dynamic data cache and database queries results cache as well.

The startups plan limits you to one website with 10Gb of storage. The other two plans come with unlimited websites and 20/30Gb of storage space.

Bandwidth is unmetered, but SiteGround suggests the plans are best for 10,000, 25,000, or 100,000 visitors per month. Unlike with WP Engine, these numbers are just suggestions and not hard limits, so you don’t have to pay overage fees if you get more traffic.

As far as managed WordPress hosting goes, the resources are conservative. SiteGround makes up for this with some of the top features in the game, though.

The plans are perfect for starting out. If you want to scale beyond 100,000 visitors, though, a few other hosts have more robust offers.

SiteGround Support

SiteGround has one of the top knowledge bases, complete with a free ebook on optimizing WordPress—fantastic if you’re still learning.

You can reach support 24/7 through ticket, live chat, and phone.

The support team is among the best in the industry. The agents are upbeat and are proper WordPress experts. The extensive training SiteGround puts them through definitely shows.

I can’t praise the support enough—it is one of SiteGround’s top features.

SiteGround Performance

SiteGround offers the industry-standard 99.9% uptime guarantee. Тhe actual uptime even stays above 99.99%.

With 0.18 seconds to respond and 0.68 seconds to load up a basic WordPress page, SiteGround is beyond fast. In a side-by-side WordPress hosting comparison, only WP Engine gets better overall results—and only by a few milliseconds.

If you want to see how fast WordPress can get, host it with SiteGround.

TechJury Verdict

The price is the same as with regular shared plans, starting at $3.95/month—more affordable than most.

For comparison, SiteGround’s medium plan costs six times less than WP Engine’s starter plan, and it handles the same number of visitors. It is perfect if you want a cheap WordPress hosting.

SiteGround is fantastic for a strong start in the world of WordPress.

The second official WordPress provider houses millions of websites and is a proud proponent of open-source. What’s more, WP Pro plans are intended as a VPS upgrade to BlueHost’s shared WordPress plans.

So let’s see how its managed hosting measures up against the top providers.

Getting Started with BlueHost

BlueHost uses cPanel. Setting everything up is easy enough, and cPanel is practically industry-standard. Everything’s pretty straightforward.

Unlike with previous WordPress hosting, BlueHost does little to provide additional help.

Both BlueHost’s website and a few expert reviews mention a “concierge call.” Nobody makes it clear this is only available with the most expensive plan.

Don’t get me wrong, the call is excellent as a crash course in WordPress. The problem is it’s only useful to beginners, who have no reason to start with the most expensive plan.

All in all, navigation is easy, but the concierge call is pretty pointless.

BlueHost Plans & Features

BlueHost offers unmetered resources across the board.

I’ve discussed the actual limits with the support. By realistic estimate, the plans should handle up to a million monthly visitors. This depends heavily on the website, though, so only take it as a ballpark number.

The plans differ in the features you get. The more expensive plans come with custom promotion tools, video compression, and a few useful ecommerce tools.

BlueHost has the best WordPress hosting if you want to run three or four websites, but it’s a bit of an overkill for only one.

BlueHost Support

The knowledge base is helpful and has plenty of video tutorials.

The support itself is available through a ticket system, a live chat, and phone.

The support team is among the more competent in the hosting business, but you can definitely feel it’s spread thin. This is a prevalent issue among larger hosts.

In BlueHost’s case, it only results in a few minutes of delay. Nevertheless, a few hosts have faster support.

There’s nothing to complain about otherwise—the agents are managed WordPress hosting pros.

BlueHost Performance

BlueHost doesn’t have an official uptime guarantee, but uptime stays around 99.99%. It’s as good as you can expect.

With 0.39 seconds to respond and 0.68 seconds to fully load a page, BlueHost is among the fastest providers.

The extra speed optimization with the managed WordPress plans makes it easy to maintain fast loading.

TechJury Verdict

With $18.06/month to start and $27.15/month to renew the smallest plan, BlueHost is reasonably priced. It’s an amazing deal if you want to run several websites of decent size, although it’s a bit overkill for a single site.

All things considered, it’s safe to say BlueHost is back to its former glory. It is a contestant for having the best managed WordPress hosting in 2022.

Kinsta is another host that specializes exclusively in WordPress. It is so sure of its services, it states it can outperform any other provider.

Let’s see how Kinsta earns its place among the best WordPress hosting in 2022.

Getting Started with Kinsta

Signing up is quick, and you get a link to the documentation twice—through email and chat—which is handy.

Configuring everything might take some time, though. Kinsta is geared towards experienced users, so you have to rely on your wits in the beginning. You can refer to the knowledge base if you get stuck, though.

The control panel is straightforward. Kinsta is constantly adding new features, so its choice of a custom control panel is expected.

Like WP Engine, Kinsta bans certain plugins because they either impede its performance or security. A few popular plugins are on the list so check it out before purchasing a plan.

Otherwise, it takes little time to get used to Kinsta.

Kinsta Plans & Features

Kinsta has the broadest range of pricing tiers on this list. The ten different plans range from one WordPress install to 150.

The plans are suitable for anything from 20,000 to 3,000,000 monthly visits. If you overstep your limit, you get an overage fee of $1 per 1,000 visits, which is annoying but not terrible.

The storage limits are sort of restrictive. You get 5Gb of storage with the starter plan, which is slim in and of itself. If you host the maximum number of websites with the largest plan, though, you get little over 1Gb per site—hardly what you want to hear when you’re paying $1,500/month.

The resources are fairly slim, especially for a high-end WordPress hosting service.

Kinsta Support

The knowledge base is extensive. Even experienced users will take something away from it.

The support is available by live chat and email, but not by phone.

Kinsta does try to make up for the lack of phone support. Instead of having multi-level support, it claims all of its live chat agents are highly skilled Linux engineers and WordPress developers.

I can’t really check the credentials of each agent, but the chat support is efficient. It can resolve even complicated matters without escalating queries to email tickets—Kinsta has some real pros working in its support team.

The support is fantastic, but the lack of phone support is palpable. Even cheap WordPress hosting providers include it in their offer, so it’s only expected from Kinsta.

Kinsta Performance

Kinsta uses Google Cloud’s infrastructure, which instantly instills some confidence. Yes, an outage is possible, but that means YouTube would be down as well.

As expected, my testing recorded no outages—perfect uptime.

With a basic WordPress site, Kinsta took 0.24 seconds to respond and 0.65 to load the home page. This makes it one of the faster providers out there, competing with WP Engine and SiteGround.

Google Cloud infrastructure does its magic with Kinsta.

TechJury Verdict

Since Kinsta has 10 different pricing plans, the WordPress hosting cost ranges from $30/month to $1,500/month. Kinsta seems to be a direct competitor to WP Engine but lags behind it a bit.

Both providers are excellent, though. You’ll have a fantastic experience whichever you pick, but Kinsta needs just a little more to be the king of WordPress hosts.

With around 300,000 users, InMotion hosting might not be the most popular hosting provider. However, pop into any Reddit thread that discusses which is the best WordPress hosting, and you’ll see it’s well-loved by its community.

It offers both shared and VPS managed WordPress plans, so let’s see if one of those is for you.

Getting Started with InMotion Hosting

The signup process is standard, and you get cPanel as with most hosts.

One outstanding feature here is the BoldGrid website builder. Its drag-and-drop feature helps customize page layout and appearance.

Getting the appearance right is one of the more time-consuming chores. BoldGrid frees up this time for more important things.

InMotion Plans & Features

InMotion Hosting’s solutions cover a wide range of resources. It’s suitable if you want to grow a fledgling website all the way to the high end of VPS.

One thing to note is that transferring to VPS WordPress hosting does not necessarily entail a resource upgrade. Both the medium and largest shared plans have more storage capacity than the smallest VPS one.

The resource allocation is generous, but the three-website limit with shared plans will annoy some users.

Otherwise, the offer is solid.

InMotion Support

InMotion Hosting boasts the best knowledge base around, and the community uses the website as a forum to post their own solutions. It’s a fantastic learning experience all around.

Support is available via chat, ticket, phone, and, interestingly enough, Skype.

The support is courteous and knowledgeable. Only the best managed WordPress hosting providers can match it.

InMotion Performance

InMotion Hosting has a 99.9% uptime guarantee. It honors it with 99.95% average uptime.

Response time averages between 0.5 and 0.6 seconds, but it fluctuates quite a bit. It gets as low as 0.3 seconds or as high as a full second.

Time to load a page averages at 0.7 seconds. It is fast, but a bit slower than the top providers.

InMotion Hosting’s data centers are in the U.S. In North America, the speed is in line with the best WordPress hosting providers. However, if you want to target audiences outside the U.S., your speeds will likely suffer.

TechJury Verdict

InMotion hosting has one of the most complete offers among managed WordPress hosts.

One thing about the price is that the starting VPS plan is three times as expensive at the largest shared one—quite a leap if you ever need to upgrade. It’s something to keep in mind as your website grows.

Otherwise, it’s a fantastic offer, through and through.

A2 Hosting is proud of its speed. Its hosting plans all have names like “Turbo” or “Swift.” Of course, it has the speed optimization to back it up.

Let’s see if it’s enough to take the title of best WordPress hosting in 2022.

Getting Started with A2

A2 Hosting makes a mess of navigating to the managed plans, and the pricing is no simpler. You might need a pen and paper to figure out how all the different discounts apply.

With every plan, you get a Plesk control panel. The panel is almost identical to cPanel, so you’ll have an easy time getting around.

As far as ease of use goes, A2’s managed WordPress hosting is relatively average.

A2 Plans & Features

A2 Hosting doesn’t track bandwidth usage. The limits on the plans are:

• 1-Site—One website/10Gb of storage
• 3-Sites—Three websites/25Gb of storage
• Unlimited—Unlimited websites/40Gb of storage

You’ll notice storage shrinks relative to the number of sites—not ideal if you want 5+ websites.

Otherwise, the plans are similar to the largest shared plan, meaning you get all the speed optimization A2 hosting has to offer. Of course, you also get the standard managed hosting features like WordPress staging, automatic backups and updates, and so on.

It also ramps up allowed RAM and CPU usage with each plan. This makes A2’s WordPress hosting service optimal for running several larger websites.

A2 Support

The knowledge base is decent—it covers all the key issues.

The support is available 24/7 through email, chat, phone, and Skype.

The support team adopts a hands-on approach. Instead of knowledge base linking, it prefers to go in and fix the issue as soon as possible. This is a perfect fit for managed plans as it saves you a bunch of time.

A2 Performance

A2 Hosting has a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Uptime stays around 99.99%, which is as reliable as shared hosting gets.

With 0.54 seconds to respond on average and 0.77 seconds to fully load a page, A2 Hosting is fast, but a few other providers outperform it.

Keep in mind these are default server speeds without extra speed optimization. A2 Hosting has some powerful tools in its arsenal that ensure the content gets delivered in a jiffy.

A2 Hosting is among the more reliable providers.

TechJury Verdict

A2’s starting WordPress hosting cost falls at the low end of managed hosting. However, renewal prices can be tricky. Even though A2 Hosting lists $24.46/month as the default price for the cheapest plan, it can go up to $32.59 if you pay month-to-month.

All things considered, A2 Hosting is a perfect option if you have up to three websites and want to serve a large user base. (Or have that option in the future.) Otherwise, a few other hosts have more generous plans.

These reviews wouldn’t be complete without the last official WordPress host. DreamHost loves open-source and is a major sponsor of events like WordCamps.

So let’s see what its managed hosting plans, dubbed DreamPress, can do for you.

Getting Started with DreamHost

Signing up is simple enough. A few users complained their welcome email ended up in the spam folder, so check there if you don’t get it after a few minutes.

The control panel is sort of hit-and-miss. It has a few advantages over cPanel, like more intuitive navigation and being lightweight resource-wise. On the other hand, it does lack a few of cPanel’s functions.

DreamHost also offers a WordPress website builder. It offers sleek templates and a drag-and-drop editor—similar to BoldGrid and great if you want to save time on designing your website.

DreamHost is among the more beginner-friendly WordPress web hosting providers.

DreamHost Plans & Features

The starter plan gives you 30Gb of storage, and each following plan doubles this. The rest of the resources are unmetered.

The plans are suitable for about 100,000, 300,000, and 1,000,000 monthly visitors. It’s just an estimate, though, and you don’t get charged more if you exceed it.

The two larger plans come with Jetpack Professional installed. The plugin costs $299/year otherwise, so it’s a cool freebie. Plus, it helps you with security and digital marketing.

The rest are standard managed WordPress features.

One caveat is that DreamHost only allows one website per subscription. The strategy is sort of opposite to the unlimited WordPress hosting BlueHost provides.

The resources are more than generous for running a single website, though. The obvious drawback, however, is that you must purchase several plans to host multiple sites.

DreamHost Support

Users can refer to the knowledge base or forum—both useful resources for DIY users.

24/7 support is available only through email tickets, which can be problematic if you need quick help with a minor issue.

Live chat is available only 16h a day. You can also request a callback, but this is paid with the smallest DreamPress plan.

The support agents are amazing WordPress pros, but the lack of 24/7 support leaves something to be desired.

DreamHost Performance

DreamHost offers a 100% uptime guarantee. Anything up to an hour of downtime gets you a day of free hosting once you renew the plan.

DreamHost’s uptime is nearly perfect, though, so there’s nothing to worry about.

As for speed, DreamHost takes 0.28 seconds to respond and 0.6 seconds to load a page fully. Its speed can match the best WordPress hosting providers.

As with InMotion Hosting, the servers are all in the U.S. You can get fast load times in North America, but there are better choices if you target remote audiences.

Otherwise, DreamHost showcases solid reliability.

TechJury Verdict

DreamPress plans start at $16.95/month.

It’s steep, considering you can only host one website. A significant benefit, though, is that DreamHost’s WordPress hosting cost stays the same on renewal.

DreamHost works wonders if you want to focus all the power of managed hosting on one big website. If you want to host several smaller sites, though, you can get better value with other providers.

HostGator is one of the largest hosting providers out there. It also claims to have the best managed WordPress hosting.

I put its claims to the test.

Getting Started with HostGator

HostGator makes signing up easy enough. You can pay with a credit card, debit card, or PayPal.

From there, things get tricky. HostGator uses a custom control panel, which is user-friendly enough.

However, WordPress plans are a cloud hosting solution. This means you can ramp up resource usage as needed. This type of hosting is a massive money-saver if you have unpredictable traffic, but getting the hang of it takes research and practice.

HostGator Plans & Features

The three plans let you create one, two, or three websites.

Storage and bandwidth are unmetered. HostGator estimates the plans are suitable for between 100,000 and 500,000 monthly visitors. This makes it a happy medium between SiteGround’s smaller plans and massive ones like BlueHost’s.

It is a cloud solution, so I suggest looking into the actual CPU and RAM usage. It is awesome if you have unpredictable traffic spikes, but there’s a steeper learning curve than usual.

It’s a great solution, otherwise.

HostGator Support

Support is available through email, phone, and chat.

As for the support quality, it’s, well… sort of average. The team is knowledgeable, but kind of sluggish.

There could be various reasons for this, but the result is the same. The best WordPress hosting providers on the list simply have faster support.

The knowledge base is respectable and updated frequently.

HostGator Performance

HostGator has a 99.9% uptime guarantee and 99.99% uptime—pretty reliable.

With 0.63 seconds to respond and 1.21 to fully load a page, HostGator could be faster. It’s faster than most providers, mind you, but lags behind the top ones.

All things considered, you can run a website smoothly, but HostGator needs more work to make the top of the list.

TechJury Verdict

The prices range from $5.95/month to $9.95/month, plus any additional fees if you ramp up the resources. Taking everything into account, you get cheap WordPress hosting that’s also scalable.

HostGator lands somewhere in the middle—it can handle more traffic than SiteGround and FastComet, but less than BlueHost. If this fits your needs, HostGator is a reliable solution.

Just keep in mind it allows a maximum of three websites with the biggest plan.

FastComet is a relative newcomer to the hosting world. Which is why it’s still yet to catch up to the big players in terms of user count.

Still, it’s always good to see a fresh face in hosting. Let’s see if FastComet can go toe to toe with the established WordPress web hosting providers.

Getting Started with FastComet

FastComet takes a page from SiteGround’s book and optimizes all its plans for WordPress. If you look up WordPress plans, you’ll be redirected to shared hosting.

Basically, you need to purchase shared hosting and use the 1-click WordPress installer to get started.

You get cPanel, which is a standard solution.

And that’s about it—FastComet does little to make the start less traumatic.

FastComet Plans & Features

You are essentially getting a shared hosting plan. You get 15, 25, or 35Gb of storage depending on the plan. FastComet estimates the plans can accommodate 25,000, 50,000, and 100,000 visitors.

Considering the price is the same as with shared plans, FastComet has extremely cheap WordPress hosting. However, the resources might come up short if you try running several demanding sites.

Since you’re getting the same plan as everyone else, FastComet doesn’t store you on a server with WordPress websites exclusively. Consequently, other providers can calibrate their servers more smoothly.

However, you do get all the standard benefits like server monitoring, automatic updates, and expert WordPress support.

FastComet Support

Speaking of support, the agents are among the better in WordPress hosting. They are fast and efficient. FastComet obviously invests plenty of resources into its support team.

Support is available via an email ticket, phone, and live chat—the usual channels.

The knowledge base is nothing to scoff at either. You can use it to solve the most common issues.

FastComet Performance

FastComet includes the usual 99.9% uptime guarantee. The actual uptime averages at 99.99%.

As far as speed goes, FastComet has a 0.62-second response time and takes 1.01 seconds to fully load a page. It needs improvement to catch up with the fastest WordPress hosting providers.

TechJury Verdict

FastComet’s pricing starts at $3.95/month. The starting cost is similar to SiteGround’s, but the renewal is cheaper with larger plans. If you’re on the fence about managed hosting, FastComet offers a compromise between that and regular shared hosting.

Just remember it works best with low traffic websites.