Best Web Hosting Services for Performance & Speed
We’ve compared and tested 42+ web hosting providers to define the best web hosting services in terms of performance and speed. Check out our list to find a powerful solution for your needs.
Performance
Hostinger
Add to compare
Hostinger appeals to a global audience with its affordable shared, cloud, and VPS hosting, making it a popular choice among individuals and businesses seeking cost-effective yet powerful hosting solutions.
Pros
Well composed plans
Huge discounts on long-term contracts
Cons
Small websites pay for more than they need
Cloudways (DO)
Add to compare
Cloudways specializes in managed cloud hosting for PHP-based applications and offers the flexibility to choose between AWS, Vultr, Linode, GCE, and DigitalOcean as cloud providers for maximum flexibility and performance.
Pros
Great scalability
Flexible pricing and excellent value for money
Many integrated add-ons
Stellar speed performance
Flexible cloud options
Cons
Support quality differs between agents
Inmotion Hosting
Add to compare
Inmotion Hosting provides shared, VPS, dedicated, and cloud hosting services, catering to businesses of all sizes seeking reliable and responsive hosting solutions.
In top 3 for
Pros
30 day money-back guarantee
Hostgator
Add to compare
Renowned for its affordable and user-friendly shared, VPS, cloud, and dedicated hosting, Hostgator is a popular choice among individuals and small businesses for its balance of features and value.
Pros
Simple deployment
Good minimal needs
GoDaddy
Add to compare
As a leader among domain registrars, GoDaddy offers a diverse range of hosting services including shared, VPS, and dedicated, tailored for businesses and individuals seeking a one-stop-shop for their online presence.
Pros
Wide range of products
Convenient when managing multiple domains
Multilingual support
Linux and Windows hosting
Cons
Domains can be pricey
- If a provider offers general hosting and WordPress hosting separately, we ranked only the general hosting plan. This is because general hosting is cheaper and has better features, while it can still be used to host a WordPress site.
Deciding which web host to choose gets quite confusing when it comes to performance specifications. However, the characteristics of your site's server(s) characteristics are of utmost importance since they ensure a swift and seamless experience for end users. A good web hosting performance makes the difference between the success and failure of your website overall.
What Makes the Best Web Host for Performance?
In our research, web hosting performance is measured and qualified through uptime, CPU, RAM, storage, bandwidth, and the nature of hosting types. Sounds like a foreign language? In short, we made sure who offered the most speed, storage, and reliability related to each provider's pricing.
The importance of each attribute is rated as a percentage and contributes to the overall performance score.
Let’s break some terms down.
CPU
The CPU (central processing unit) is the control center that runs the server’s operating system and apps. It can consist of several “cores.” Each of those cores is lightning-fast but handles a single task at a given time.
CPUs can connect several cores in a network as servers require high capacities to assure a fast web hosting service. Most websites don’t have the workload for that many cores. Therefore, web hosts share server resources and mainly offer 1, 2, 4, and 8 cores. When ranking providers for performance, we looked at who offered the best CPUs and took this information into account when providers were directly competing with each other.
RAM
RAM is the short-term memory, where data is stored as the CPU needs it.
Higher RAM means better speed and performance because it is linked directly to the CPU. Thereby, it takes very little time for the cores to access and process data.
Though adding more RAM doesn’t make the server and website super fast, other binding factors like the speed of the networks and CPU make a lot of it, too. For the geeks out there, in our ranking, we measured RAM in GB divided by entry unit price times 50 and limited the top score to 10. The RAM weighs 20% on the web hosting performance score.
Storage
Storage defines the available space on a server to store your website's content (text, images, code, databases, etc.). Some files, like videos, occupy more space than others, such as text. Thus storage requirement boils down to the amount of data you will keep on a server. Your web page size should be as small as possible for quicker loading times and a better user experience. We calculate the storage score in GB per unit price. We multiply this value by 2 to measure it on a scale of 10.
Further, we differentiated between storage types as they also make up for a large part of the performance. SSDs and higher received a significant bonus as opposed to HDD use. The total storage score weighs 20% of the performance score.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth indicates the amount of data your website can transfer to users in a given time, usually within a month. It may be one of the two types: metered and unmetered.
Metered bandwidth puts a monthly limit on how much traffic your site can handle. If you exceed those boundaries, the site might crash and becomes unavailable for visitors.
The unmetered bandwidth is only restricted by the server’s capacity included in the pricing plan. It is the most common model for web hosting services, so you have nothing to worry about. With 20% weight on the performance score, we measured the bandwidth provided in GB per unit entry price and divided it by a factor of 10 to calculate it on a scale of 10.
Uptime
Uptime reflects the percentage of time that your servers are up and running (and so is your website). 100% uptime is impossible because all servers need maintenance and updates from time to time. While this is not a specifically weighted item, we also look at uptime and evaluate it when vendors are close to each other in the ranking.
Most hosts guarantee an uptime between 99.90% and 99.99%. This percentage difference looks insignificant, equating to nine hours of downtime per year. However, 99.99% amounts to less than an hour of downtime per year. Since these 8 hours can make a difference for larger companies, we also take them into account. Providers that are below the 99.9% are of course rated negatively.
Now that you know the significant areas of web hosting performance that directly affect your website and how we incorporated them into our ranking, let’s clarify why you want a fast web hosting service.
Research conducted by Think with Google gives a sufficient reason why your website loading times should be under 1 second:
Hosting Type
The hosting type also has a significant impact on the performance of websites. Simply put, compared to Cloud Hosting, VPS Hosting, and Dedicated Hosting, you are sharing server resources of all kinds with others when you use Shared Hosting. It makes your website less reliable and optimized for speed than all other hosting types. While there are also differences between the different hosting types, we have decided not to take this further as it’s less relevant when looking at our scores combined. That said, Cloud Hosting, VPS Hosting, and Dedicated Hosting each receive a bonus in our performance score, which reflects 20% of the weight.
10 Best Web Hosting Services for Performance & Speed
- 1
- Cloud Hosting
- 2
- Cloud Hosting
- 3
- VPS Hosting
- 4
- Cloud Hosting
- 5
- Dedicated Hosting
- 6
- VPS Hosting
- 7
- Cloud Hosting
- 8
- VPS Hosting
- 9
- VPS Hosting
- 10
- Cloud Hosting
How to Choose a Fast Web Hosting Service
The type of your website and expected traffic will have a great impact on the best web hosting platform in terms of speed and performance for you. The hardware used by the servers and which resources a web host offers play a significant role to match that. This is also the reason why we don't do benchmark speed tests, because every website is different and reaches people in different places around the world.
Focusing on the hosting providers that put together their pricing plans with optimal features for performance gives you the best foundation for a fast website. In addition to these features, look at what else is important to you and cross out those providers that fall off the grid, leaving only one left.
If you want to dive into more details, try our Comparison Tool to compare providers side by side.
If you feel like you need more help choosing a fast web hosting platform that meets your business needs, try our web hosting Finder Tool.
Kyung Yun
Kyung Y.
Updated: Apr 16, 2025
Software engineer with a weakness for collecting too much data. I live for web hosting and cloud computing. If I’m not online, I like to go fishing and create weird things with my 3D printer.
Why Trust Softailed
Our writers are industry professionals with hands-on experience in the niches they cover. Every article undergoes a multi-step review: fact-validation, peer editing, and final approvals. We prioritize accuracy so you don’t have to second-guess. Learn more about our editorial guidelines.
FAQ
Why is performance not equal to speed performance?
Why is performance not equal to speed performance?
While both terms go hand in hand to a certain extent, there are still apparent differences between the two. Speed, as the name suggests, refers only to parameters that relate to how fast a web host can be. Performance as a whole, on the other hand, also includes reliability (e.g., uptime), how much sense the offer makes in combination with the offered parameters, and the relation to the price.
How much RAM is necessary for optimal web hosting performance?
How much RAM is necessary for optimal web hosting performance?
There is no one-fits-all answer here. We recommend you keep in mind the following factors:
- If you have many videos, images, or animations on the site, you will need more RAM;
- Dynamic or high-traffic sites need more RAM;
- Servers operating on Windows require more RAM than Linux;
- A CMS takes about 0.5 GB of RAM to run smoothly (we recommend 1 GB for WordPress). Add some more space for custom apps.
So many variables should be taken into the equation that it’s almost impossible to accurately suggest how much RAM your website will need without knowing more about your project.
It’s much the same with CPUs; there is no precise way to calculate how many CPU cores your site will need and how the quality of CPUs can be measured in relation to the rest.
However, that’s precisely why we calculate the base of each provider. It allows you to start small or at any entrance level (if you already run a website or application) to scale up with max flexibility. Some hosting providers, such as Cloudways, even provide a dashboard to monitor how many resources you are currently using and if you should consider an upgrade soon.
Does server speed equal site speed performance?
Does server speed equal site speed performance?
No, the server speed is just one part of the overall website speed performance. The fastest web host will not save your website from slow loading times if it’s not properly optimized for speed. On the other hand, your server can effectively speed up your site to a degree, which is primarily reflected in the time to first byte (TTFB). The TTFB indicates how long it takes for browsers to request and receive the first byte of the page. Another key variable that depends on the server is the component loading time related to cached content, which shows how fast a server can load cached content.
To test your website speed, you can use GTmetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights to get a rough indication of where you stand and what should be optimized. Make sure to re-test your site several times to obtain data for a cached version of your website. Businesses with significant traffic should pay more attention to the Web Vitals from Google. They show the Chrome User Experience (CrUX) Report, which provides data from real-world users.