5 Best Monthly Web Hosting Plans (Starting at $4.95/month)

Are you looking for the best monthly web hosting plans?

Most popular web hosting companies offer big discounts on annual, bi-annual, and multiple-year payment terms.

These discounts may be promoted as low monthly payments, but when you go to the checkout page, you’ll pay a hefty amount upfront to buy the web hosting.

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.

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 makes 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 web hosting plan will be cheaper to get started. With a month-to-month 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 more importantly, you will only pay a low monthly cost for the web hosting service you use.

Without further delay, let’s look at some of the best monthly web hosting plans for small businesses.

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.

They provide a custom control panel to add your domain name, manage emails, and access web hosting features.

Moreover, DreamHost comes with automated website backups. These daily backups 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 name 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, website builder, SSD storage, and more.

Our DreamHost coupon code is applicable on the 1-year and 3-year payment plans.

DreamHost pricing plans and payment options

DreamHost has other web hosting solutions, including VPS hosting, managed WordPress hosting, dedicated server hosting, WooCommerce hosting, and cloud hosting.

Don’t miss our complete DreamHost review for more details on their shared hosting options and pricing plans.

2. Hostinger – $2.69/mo.

Hostinger is one of the leading web hosting companies on the global market. It offers WordPress website hosting, shared hosting, and cloud hosting plans.

The month-to-month shared hosting plan from Hostinger starts at $11.99 for a single website.

If you’re looking for a web hosting plan for multiple sites, then we recommend their WordPress Starter plan. It comes with a free domain name, a free SSL certificate, and free unlimited email accounts.

The Hostinger WordPress Starter plan costs $11.99/month.

You can use WPBeginner’s exclusive Hostinger coupon code to get a discount on your monthly web hosting plan. The Hostinger promo code offers more discounts on longer commitments.

For example, if you choose to pay for up to 12 months, the cost for the WordPress basic hosting plan reduces to $2.99/month.

And WPBeginner users get an additional discount that makes it $2.69/month.

In short, you’ll pay $32.29 at once to get WordPress hosting for the full year.

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.

We ran several tests on Hostinger, and here’s our complete Hostinger review that may interest you.

3. Bluehost – $2.75/mo.

Bluehost is one of the most popular web hosting providers and an officially recommended WordPress hosting partner.

Though they don’t offer a month-to-month web hosting plan, the initial cost is so low that we couldn’t resist adding them to this list.

And you’ll save triple your investment with a free domain name, free SSL certificate, and a BIG discount on your web hosting package.

So if you’re just starting out, 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 $33 for the first year.

This also includes your free domain name, free SSL certificate, and a 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.

On a side note, we thoroughly tested Bluehost for its features, speed, and uptime. And we recommend it to everyone, all the time.

Most of our WPBeginner users start their websites with Bluehost web hosting and grow their businesses to the next level.

4. SiteGround – $19.99/mo.

SiteGround is one of the best WordPress hosting providers. Their web hosting is optimized for speed and security. We use SiteGround to host the WPBeginner website.

Among top features, SiteGround 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 $19.99/month.

It’s an expensive monthly web hosting plan 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.

And WPBeginner’s exclusive SiteGround coupon code lets you buy their WordPress hosting plan with an 80% discount.

This reduces the cost to up to $2.99/month for the StartUp plan.

SiteGround pricing plan and payment options

SiteGround’s discount deal is only valid when you choose to pay for up to 12 months upfront. So you’ll pay $35.88 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, and basically any other Linux based app.

We have done a detailed SiteGround review which shared performance tests from various locations along with coverage of their additional services like Site Scanner.

5. WP Engine – $30 / 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.

WP Engine offers monthly cloud hosting plans starting at $30 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 $50 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 4 months free.

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.

We did a detailed performance test of their platform in our WP Engine review that we highly recommend you check out.

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 shared hosting plan costs $7.65 for the first month (including tax) for WPBeginner readers. The plan renews at $11.95 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 setup fee of $15 for the first time.

Which Month-To-Month Web Hosting Plan Should I Buy?

If you’re looking for true monthly web hosting 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 every month.

Most people that 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 one-year commitment.

We recommend Hostinger, SiteGround, or Dreamhost for those just starting out.

Hostinger’s 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.

On the other hand, SiteGround’s StartUp plan on a 12-month upfront payment ($35.88/for the first year) is close to Hostinger’s pricing for the basic starter plan.

However, SiteGround servers are blazing fast since it’s 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 web 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, 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.