9 Best PHP Web Hosting Companies WAMP/ XAMPP

There are a lot of factors to consider when choosing the ideal PHP host for your website. Uptime and performance are two defining factors that affect how the end-user feels about your website. Think of a website that is offline when you visit it, isn’t that a big turnoff? Or one that takes forever to load. These are also two of the myriad of defining criteria that go into Google’s algorithms for host-level SEO. Obviously, as the website owner, you’ll also want to take cost into the equation when selecting the best PHP web hosting company to fit your budget.

What is PHP and Why is it Used?

PHP is a general-purpose programming language, most commonly used to build websites and applications. PHP stands for Hypertext pre-processor. Originally PHP stood for “Personal Home Pages”, which is a lot less glamourous, but that just lets you know where the PHP programming language was born. 

With almost 80% of all websites running on PHP, it’s the #1 programming language of choice for websites. W3Techs say that eight out of every 10 websites run on PHP. This means that there are a lot of different website hosts to choose from to power your PHP website. This article is meant to demystify all of the fluff and provide a list of reliable PHP hosts.

Choosing The Best PHP Hosting Companies

After working in the online space for two decades I’ve come across all sorts of web hosts, some great and others are simply frustrating. This article is meant to be a guide that allows you to omit the months (or even years) of overwhelm that it takes to find the ideal PHP website host. 

When selecting the best PHP web hosting providers for this list we took the following four criteria into consideration:

• Uptime
• Speed
• Pricing
• Customer support

PRO TIP: Also lookout for the “renewal price” when selecting a host for the long-term. A lot of hosts advertise low hosting prices for a short period of time. After which the price often quadruples.

1. HostGator Cloud (£2.18/mo)

BEST FOR – Unlimited bandwidth, unlimited email accounts, and unlimited storage

HostGator is one of the biggest names in the hosting world. HostGator offers all sorts of benefits that make it one of the top PHP hosting providers. For example, unlike Bluehost, you can migrate your site over to HostGator for free. 

HostGator offers unlimited bandwidth and storage, which makes it an amazing deal for just £2.18 per month. You’ll snag a free SSL certificate and unlimited email accounts as well if you decide to host with HostGator. 

When it comes to performance HostGator isn’t too shabby either. They have fast page load times and a 99.9% uptime. Making HostGator a great PHP hosting provider for SEO-friendly websites. 

A major downside to HostGator is that you’ll experience a steep price increase after the first 6 months have passed. The renewal costs are around £7.90 to £11.90 per month for most of their accounts. So that’s definitely something to look out for. 

You could jump ship and take advantage of another hosting provider after the 6-month period has passed.

Click Here To Visit Hostgator

Pros

• 15 Data centers
• Free lifetime domain
• Free Wildcard SSL certificate
• One-click installation
• Scalable

Cons

• Price jump after 6-12 months

3. Bluehost

BEST FOR – Uptime and Performance – Great for beginners

Despite being banded around the web as the best cheap hosting provider at just £2.43 per month, I’m here to burst that bubble. Sure, Bluehost offers a decent PHP hosting experience, but you need to pay for a whole year upfront. 

Putting a barrier in the way of setting up hosting for some people that may have a lower monthly budget. In fact, the low price is merely introductory, but you can lock it in if you sign up for 3 years, which is a long time in the online space. 

Bluehost is a leader in the industry and offers some great features, such as 99.99% uptime guarantee and a super simple website hosting setup. You can install CMS solutions like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla with one-click, which makes it a great solution for beginners who don’t mind paying for years hosting upfront. 

Another downside of choosing Bluehost that’ll only apply if you want to transfer your existing site over to them is the fact that they charge £118 to migrate your website onto their platform. This is super steep and some providers will offer you this service for free. 

On a positive note, you’ll get a free SSL certificate and professional email addresses to match your domain name. You’ll also get a free domain name for your first year from Bluehost. 

Click Here To Visit Bluehost

Pros

• Fast load time
• 30-day Money-back guarantee
• Great customer support
• Unmetered bandwidth
• cPanel

Cons

• You need to pay annually
• Don’t offer free website transfer

4. Hostinger (£2.59 per month)

Best for – Cheap, SEO-friendly PHP Hosting

Hostinger has data centers in 8 international locations. This is ideal for SEO as Google factors your website location into where they show your website. Hostinger also has an amazing page load time, which is great for SEO.

Like other hosts, you can only take advantage of the low prices when you sign up for a longer duration.

Most of the PHP hosting packages from Hostinger offer unlimited resources with the exception of their lowest plan.

You’ll get a free domain name with Hostinger for one year as well as a nice 30-day money-back guarantee. If Hostinger didn’t charge for priority support and SSL certificates they’d be higher up on this list for sure. 

Click Here To Hostinger

5. SiteGround (£3.14 per month)

BEST FOR –  Daily backups and WordPress optimized hosting for smaller websites.

If you want to lock in the low price from SiteGround, you just need to sign up for a year, which isn’t too bad compared to other hosts. However, you need to keep an eye out for the higher renewal price after the first twelve months, when the price will jump to £9.48 per month. 

I’m a fan of hosts that offer daily backups and Siteground offers this service, which is nice. This keeps your website safe in the event it gets hacked or there is a server error, you can restore it in minutes. 

You get just 10GB of storage and bandwidth that’ll support 10k monthly visitors inside the price displayed, which is ok for a smaller website, but you’ll quickly need to upgrade with this size of hosting plan. 

SiteGround has servers in several global locations, which is great for selecting the most appropriate location for your server in relation to your ideal website visitors. If you are looking to move an existing PHP website over to Sitehost then they offer this service free of charge. 

Click Here To Visit Siteground

6. A2 Hosting (£3.11 per month)

BEST FOR –Blazingly fast page load times

If you are looking to port your website over to A2 Hosting you’re in luck, they offer free site migration. A2 Hosting also has blazingly fast page load times that will please the most impatient website surfer, not to mention Google. Google penalizes slower websites so this is certainly a HUGE selling point for A2 Hosting. 

You’ll also get a free domain name, free SSL certificate and some great customer service if you choose A2 Hosting as your hosting partner. They also offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee. 

The renewal price for A2 Hosting is £7.93 per month, which isn’t too steep. 

On the other hand, the basic (cheapest) plan from A2 Hosts only allows for one PHP website and 5 MySQL databases.

Click Here To Visit A2hosting

7. GoDaddy (£2.90 per month)

BEST FOR – Established PHP host that is easy to use with great performance

GoDaddy is probably the most well-known website hosts of all time. They currently boast 18.5 million customers and they have over 9k employees all over the world.

Although they are one of the most famous brands, they are not great when it comes to bang for your buck. You’ll need to pay extra for features like emails, backups and SSL certificates, which can bring them in at a much higher price. You cant do without most of these features, so really these features should be bundled as part of the package.

GoDaddy also only offer a free domain with some of their more advanced hosting solutions, like their WordPress hosting that comes in at £6.34 per month. 

The storage offered is pretty decent though, you’ll get 100GB of disk space and unmetered bandwidth, which is enough for most medium-sized PHP websites.

Click Here To Godaddy

8. iPage (£1.50 per month)

BEST FOR –Cheap PHP hosting for beginners who already own a domain name

iPage is a great host for people who are on a budget. The low price of £1.50 is locked in for the first three years, which is way cheaper than a lot of other hosts who have higher renewal prices. They are also an eco-friendly host, which is ideal for the times we live in. 

You’ll benefit from great 24/7 customer support and a free SSL certificate as well as free professional email addresses when you choose iPage as your host. 

On the flip side, domain names are extortionate from iPage and they also charge £120 for transferring your PHP site over to their hosting. This is a lot when you think about other hosts that offer this service for free. If you don’t have a site to port over and already have a domain name from another host, then iPage could be a great option for you. 

iPage doesn’t perform so well when it comes to page load times, hence it’s ended up lower down on our list. 

When you look at the acceptible use policy with iPage their “unlimited bandwidth” is actually not what it seems. It actually amounts to 2-3GB of storage when you look at the fine print.

Click Here To iPage

9. DreamHost

BEST FOR –Established eco-friendly PHP hosting

DreamHost was founded way back in 1996 and is a pretty well-known host with over 400,000 customers and over 1.5 million websites. They offer unlimited bandwidth and a massive 97-day moneyback guarantee. If you’re looking for a host that is eco-friendly then Dreamhost could be a great choice for you as they are a carbon-neutral PHP hosting provider. 

DreamHost is also extremely cheap at just £2.06 per month for PHP hosting. 

DreamHost doesn’t offer cPanel, instead, you get their own control panel, which will take you time to learn. I can’t say I am into other types of control panel as cPanel is best in class, so its a pity they don’t offer cPanel. 

The load times and uptime from Dreamhost are OK but nothing special.

Click Here To Dreamhost

The Bottom Line

There are many cheap deals that allow you to get up and running with your PHP website in a matter of hours. However, it pays to check out the renewal price. 

Often the introductory price is quite low and tempting, but the price rises significantly in around 6 months. Sometimes the price can be locked in for up to 4 years, so make sure you consider this and also read the fine print – such as the “Acceptable use policy” that outlines what unlimited means to that particular company.