The web hosting world is large and varied, with many services competing for your trust and dollars. There are many worthy choices, and AccuWeb Hosting ranks among them, thanks to its many robust hosting plans that offer plenty of flexibility. In fact, AccuWeb Hosting's dedicated hosting packages are so well rounded that they get our Editors' Choice nod. Although its Windows plans lack the ability to create unlimited email accounts, AccuWeb is still one of the best web hosting services around.
(Credit: AccuWeb)Shared Web Hosting
AccuWeb Hosting has an impressive variety of shared plans. If you're not hip to shared hosting, here is a brief rundown. Shared hosting places your website on a server with other sites; in other words, your site shares system resources with other websites on the server. This roommate environment lowers the hosting cost, resulting in cheap web hosting plans. You get what you pay for, however. Your site might slow down if one of these roommates gets on the front page of Reddit. If you get a massive traffic spike, on the other hand, you might find your site throttled to prevent your roomies from slowing to a standstill. Some services might even take you offline if your shared hosting traffic gets too far out of line.
AccuWeb offers numerous Linux- or Windows-based shared server plans. This includes budget-friendly packages that tick all the boxes you could want for cheap web hosting. Starting with the aptly named Budget plan ($1.99 per month), you get a modest 10GB of storage, 25GB of monthly data transfers, 500MB or RAM, and 25 email accounts. The higher-end Premium plan jumps to $5.99 with a 3-year commitment (or $8.99 upon renewal or by paying on a monthly basis), and offers 75GB of storage, 1TB of monthly data transfers, 1.5GB of RAM, and 500 email accounts. Not too shabby for cheap hosting.
If you want something a little more substantial, Ionos offers Linux-based solid-state servers starting at $5.49 per month for 36 months of service. The non-discounted, per-month renewal rate is $10.99. With that, you get unlimited domains, 10GB of storage, 150 email accounts, and 500GB of monthly data transfers. The priciest plan is the Windows-based Enterprise package; the cheapest option here is $12.49 monthly for a three-year contract. You can also opt for a per-month renewal, which costs $17.99 per month. With this tier, you get unlimited domains, 50GB of storage, 1TB of monthly data transfers, and 1,000 email accounts. In a nice touch, AccuWeb lets you pick a plan on a quarterly, and semi-annual basis, too.
These are quality shared hosting plans with competitive rates, but HostGator, the category's Editors' Choice, edges out the competition. Hostgator’s shared packages all include unlimited monthly data transfers, and email addresses—and unlimited domains if you sign up for either the Baby ($15.99 per month) or Business ($16.95 per month) plans. Likewise, DreamHost's shared packages have unlimited storage, domains, email, and monthly data transfers.
VPS Web Hosting
If your business demands a website with more power than what shared hosting offers, virtual private server (VPS) hosting is the way to go. Sites built on VPS servers have increased system resources compared to shared hosting, so your site will likely survive a link going viral. You're still renting a part of a shared server, but your site is more isolated from its server mates. If shared hosting stablemates are like roommates, sites on the same VPS server are more like tenants living in their own apartments in the same apartment building.
AccuWeb Hosting has multiple wallet-friendly Linux- or Windows-based VPS plans for webmasters to consider, ranging from Linux VPS Mercury (from $7.99 per month) to the Windows VPS Emerald (starting at $77.99 per month). The Mercury plan includes 20GB of storage, 1GB of RAM, 150GB of monthly data transfers, and unlimited website hosting. The Emerald package ups things with 125GB of storage, 8GB of RAM, and 1TB of monthly data transfers. Note: You can create unlimited email accounts with either Linux or Windows VPS plans.
The number of AccuWeb Hosting packages isn't much different from Hostwinds' offerings. Still, Hostwinds retains its position as the Editors' Choice for VPS hosting. The company includes unlimited monthly data transfers with every VPS plan, and has a high-end $395.24 per month plan that boasts an impressive 96GB of RAM and 750GB of storage.
Dedicated Web Hosting
Dedicated hosting is for people who are serious about their web hosting. With dedicated hosting, your website gets an entire server for itself. That means that it'll have a ridiculous amount of system resources at its disposal to handle large amounts of traffic. To continue the living-arrangements metaphor, dedicated web hosting services are akin to living in your own single-family home—and, depending on the plan you subscribe to, it might be a mansion.
AccuWeb Hosting has six excellent versions of configurable, Linux- or Windows-powered dedicated hosting servers. The most basic plan is the $105-per-month plan that includes 8GB of RAM, 1TB of storage, and 20TB of monthly data transfers. You will find servers for a variety of needs, such as Storage, High Availability, and even Game servers, which scale in power and price depending on your needs. As with the VPS plan, AccuWeb's Windows-based dedicated hosting plans let you create unlimited email accounts.
Depending on the plan you start with, you can outfit AccuWeb's dedicated servers with up to 512GB of memory, 4TB of storage (on up to 4 hard drives), and 50TB of monthly data transfers. As a result, AccuWeb reigns as the Editors' Choice pick for dedicated hosting.
WordPress Web Hosting
Webmasters who are serious about their WordPress installations will be happy to know that AccuWeb Hosting offers WordPress-specific hosting that gives your site the white-glove treatment. This includes a preinstalled content management system, automatic updates, and multilayer DDoS protection.
The WordPress Starter plan (starting at $9.99 per month with a one-year plan commitment) offers unlimited domains, 30GB of storage, 1TB of monthly data transfers, and free WordPress migration and Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate. The WordPress Pro plan (starting at 19.99 per month with a one-year commitment) has 50GB of storage, 2TB of monthly data transfers, a free domain name registration, and search engine optimization and page caching plug-ins. The top-tier WordPress Business plan (starting at $29.99 per month with a one-year commitment) builds upon the other tiers with 75GB of storage, and 3TB of monthly data transfers. All the plans include one-click installation, Google Apps integration, and free daily backups.
These packages nearly rival the ones offered by A2, the Editors' Choice pick for WordPress hosting. A2's Linux-based WordPress hosting (starting at $9.99 per month for 36 months) features unlimited storage and monthly data transfers at each tier. A2 states that its optimized WordPress environment is six times faster than traditional hosting. If you want to go the WordPress route, A2 is the path you should walk.
Bluehost has Editors' Choice-worthy WordPress plans, too. The Build plan is scaled for up to 50,000 monthly visitors and comes with daily scheduled backups, malware detection and removal, and domain privacy protection. The Grow plan uses the Build plan as a foundation, and adds SEO tools, 10GB of video compression, live ticket support, and 150,000 monthly visitors. Scale tops all managed plans by adding Blue Sky live chat support, unlimited video compression, PayPal integration, unlimited backups and restore, and support for up to 500,000 monthly visitors.
If you're new to WordPress, take a few minutes to get up to speed with our piece on how to get started with WordPress hosting.
(Credit: AccuWeb)Reseller Web Hosting
If you're looking to get into the web hosting business for yourself, but you don't want to deal with managing servers and other infrastructure matters, check out AccuWeb's Linux- or Windows-based reseller hosting packages. With reseller hosting, you rent server space from an established player and resell it to your own customers.
AccuWeb's plans, starting at $11.99 per month, have unlimited email, 30GB of storage, and 100GB of monthly data transfers. AccuWeb also lets you apply your own branding to the servers you rent, and it supplies 24/7 tech support, too.
Competitor Hostwinds goes the extra mile with stacked specs in a variety of server categories, however, including unlimited email, disk space, and monthly data transfer across all plans. As a result, Hostwinds remains the Editors' Choice pick for reseller hosting.
Cloud Web Hosting
Cloud hosting is a unique form of web hosting that sees your site draw resources from multiple servers instead of just one as with traditional hosting. Cloud hosting's use of multiple servers gives it certain advantages over traditional hosting. For example, if your website experiences a sudden traffic spike, it can pull resources from another server to prevent slow page loads or, worse, the site going down. In addition, cloud hosting makes it incredibly simple for you to scale resources up or down, as needed.
AccuWeb Hosting also offers Linux Cloud Hosting (starting at $4.79 per month, with a 36-month agreement), Windows Cloud Hosting (starting at $5.09 per month with a 36-month term), and Linux Cloud VPS (starting at $9.99 per month).
By comparison, DreamHost has excellent pay-as-you-go packages that start at $0.0075 per hour (capping at $4.50 per month) for 512MB of RAM, 80GB of SSD storage, and unlimited monthly data transfers. DreamHost tops out at $0.16 per hour (or up to $96 monthly) for 16GB of RAM, an 8 vCore processor, and the aforementioned 80GB of SSD storage. As a result, DreamHost is our co-Editors' Choice for cloud hosting services. That's right: co-Editors' Choice. DreamHost is the reigning champ for small business cloud hosting, while Ionos holds it down for enterprise-level cloud hosting.
Building a Website
Creating an AccuWeb Hosting account is quite simple. After signing up for a plan, we received welcome emails and a note that it could take up to 48 hours for AccuWeb Hosting to set up the account. Fortunately, we didn't have to wait two days; the URL was up and running roughly two hours later.
We appreciated AccuWeb Hosting's custom cPanel back-end interface, as it's far easier to read and navigate than the traditional cPanel. We used it to access the Softaculous software library and to install WordPress as the content management system. We're quite familiar with WordPress, so it was a breeze to create posts and pages and apply an attractive theme. In fact, even if you aren't familiar with WordPress, it should be simple to use. There is also non-WordPress website building software, including Joomla and RVsitebuilder.
(Credit: AccuWeb)E-Commerce and Security Options
As part of our testing, we used Magento to create an online AccuWeb store. It let us quickly create an attractive e-commerce shop in just a few minutes, mostly spent dragging and dropping website elements. We like that Magento has the flexibility to house multiple storefronts and integrate eBay accounts.
AccuWeb Hosting gives you plenty of options for safeguarding your website from those who would do harm. You can add a 256-bit SSL certificate ($49 per year) and SpamExperts spam blocker (starting at 7.90 per quarter). If you're serious about your site's security, you should look into all of these options.
Good Uptime
Website uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service. While your site is down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services—and they might not come back.
For this testing, we used a website-monitoring tool to track our AccuWeb Hosting-hosted test site's uptime. Every 15 minutes, the tool pinged our website and sent us an alert if it was unable to contact the site for longer than one minute. We looked at the data culled from the last 14 days. In our latest tests, AccuWeb Hosting proved incredibly stable.
Excellent Customer Service
AccuWeb Hosting offers both web chat and 24/7 telephone customer support. When you ask a question via web chat, AccuWeb Hosting serves up links to a knowledge database. When we asked about the difference between regular hosting and cloud-based hosting, AccuWeb Hosting linked satisfactory answers. If the knowledge base doesn't help, you can talk live over web chat. In fact, the rep we chatted with was amazingly responsive, replying to our questions in a minute's time.
We also gave the 24/7 telephone support a call with the same question. The rep there gave us a satisfactory answer, too. We were incredibly pleased by AccuWeb Hosting's help representatives. It was easily one of the best customer service teams we've encountered in the web hosting space.
If for some reason you're not satisfied, AccuWeb Hosting has a decent 30-day money-back guarantee, DreamHost bests most services with an impressive 97-day money-back guarantee for its shared hosting plans.
5 Things You Need to Know About Web HostingA Terrific Web Host
AccuWeb Hosting is a feature-stacked web hosting service that truly shines in the dedicated hosting category, for which it is the PCMag Editors' Choice pick. Though, if you desire unlimited email accounts (if you're pondering signing up for an AccuWeb Windows-based plan), you may need to look elsewhere, such as the Editors' Choice award-winning HostGator. Still, AccuWeb shines as an excellent, robust service for business and personal web hosting.
For more on getting started online, read our tips on how to create a website. You might also want to check out our story on how to register a domain name for your website.
Mike Williams contributed to this review.