Web Hosting. Pay Monthly.

Last updated: Wednesday, April 01, 2020

These are the best web hosting providers that accept month to month payments, instead of charging for a full year up front.

1. DreamHost ($4.95 billed monthly)

DreamHost

DreamHost is one of the largest, independently owned web hosting companies. Founded around 25 years ago, it now hosts over 1.5 million websites. It has two shared hosting plans.

Shared Starter: supports hosting of one website, Unlimited traffic, Fast SSD Storage and Free SSL Certificate for $4.95 per month.

Shared Unlimited: adds Hosting of Unlimited Websites (with Free SSL certificates) and Free Email hosting for $10.95 per month.

You can add e-mail hosting to the Shared Hosting plan for $1.99/mo ($19.99/yr) per mailbox, but at that point it's a better idea to just get Shared Unlimited.

How to pick the best DreamHost Shared Hosting options:

Choose a Domain...

There are 3 options for a domain name DreamHost offers:

If you already have a domain, it's easy to point it to your DreamHost hosting account, and they will walk you through the process after checkout. If you don't already have a domain name, you can pick the second option and register it with DreamHost.

If you pick the monthly payment option, the domain name is not free, but you can add it for $7.99, and since Free Whois Privacy Protection is included, that's a great price for a domain name. If you pick a 1-year or a 3-year hosting option, the domain name is free.

Additional Options

The first three options, Pre-Install WordPress, DreamShield Protection and DreamHost Email are already checked, but you can just keep the first one which is free (if you use WordPress, of course), and uncheck the other ones. You can always add them later if you want.

Final conclusions

If you're looking for the cheapest hosting for one website, from a great company, that you can pay month to month, and you don't need email hosting, Shared Starter by DreamHost is the best choice for $4.95/month.

If you want to host multiple websites or you need email hosting, Shared Unlimited for $10.99 is the plan to get.

2. A2 Hosting ($9.99 billed monthly)

A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting is an independently owned company, started in 2001 in Ann Arbor, Michigan (A2 stands for Ann Arbor). Now it's one of the fastest shared hosting providers, with data centers around the world.

It offers three shared hosting plans, all of which include very fast SSD storage, Free SSL, PHP 7, SSH access, and a choice of global servers where you can host your website. All of the A2 Hosting plans include:

LITE plan supports 1 website, 5 MySQL Databases, 25 Email Addresses, Unlimited Disk Space and Unlimited Data Transfer for $9.99 per month.

SWIFT plan adds Unlimited Websites, Unlimited Databases and double the resources for $12.99 per month.

TURBO plan adds Turbo servers which load pages up to 20X faster compared to standard hosting for $24.99 per month.

All of the prices listed here are for monthly payments. There are additional discounts available if you choose to pay yearly. The same applies to almost all shared hosting providers.

How to pick the best A2 Hosting options:

Choose a Domain...

Since A2 Hosting $14.95 per year domain name DOES NOT include a free Whois Protection (it's an additional $9.95/year), the best option is to register your domain name at 3rd party registrar like Namecheap which does include a Free Whois Protection, so for around $12/year you get both, instead of paying $24.90 at A2 Hosting.

So, the best approach is to first register your domain name at some other registrar, then when you start buying your A2 Hosting, just choose the option "I will use my existing domain and update my nameservers". Enter your domain name and click "Use".

Here you can choose your Billing Cycle. 1 Month Price is $9.99 but you automatically get the 51% discount on your first bill, so the first month will be $4.90, or if you choose the longer term billing cycle like "12 Month Price - $8.99" you also get that 51% discount on your first bill, so the bill for the year will be $52.86.

Customize Your Hosting

Here you can leave everything as it is. You can choose between four data center locations where your website server will be located.

So, for example, if you expect most of your visitors to come from Europe, you could choose Amsterdam. If you're not sure, or if most of them will be from the US, or all over the world, you don't have to change anything, just leave Michigan selected.

At this point you don't need Turbo Boost, Dedicated IP, DropSuite Offsite Backups, Barracuda Spam Firewall, A2 Website Builder, Railgun or CloudFlare so you can leave them all unchecked. If you change your mind you can add them later.

You do need Let’s Encrypt SSL (Basic SSL Protection) but it's already selected and it's Free.

Additional Options

Auto-Install Application - If you just want to use WordPress anyway, you can skip a step later on, and just choose "WordPress - A2 Optimized" right away. That way WordPress will be already installed on your domain, so you can just log in and start using it.

Review & Checkout

Here you can review the selected options and see the total price. If everything is alright you can proceed to checkout.

The plan will renew at the full price (without the discount), which you already know if you've chosen the monthly payment plan, and if you've chosen the longer term plan you'll have a year (or more) to decide if A2 Hosting is worth it, or if you want to switch to a new host.

And since you've registered your domain name at 3rd party registrar, you don't even have to initiate a domain name transfer. You can keep your domain name where it already is, and just point it to your new hosting. (It's basically just entering your new hosts' name servers in your domain settings, which takes less than 30 seconds).

3. HostGator ($10.95 billed monthly)

HostGator

Hostgator has monthly payment options on all three of its shared hosting plans. All of them include:

HATCHLING Plan supports hosting of a single website for $10.95 per month.

BABY Plan allows Unlimited websites for $11.95 per month.

BUSINESS Plan adds a Dedicated IP for $16.95 per month.

All of these plans include QuickInstall tool, which you can use to install blogs, forums, CMS, wikis, photo galleries, E-commerce stores and a lot of other types of websites. All of these websites run on Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.

Coupon You can get the first month of any monthly payment plan for just $0.01 with the coupon code → MONTHLY

Coupon You can get the maximum discount on any HostGator plan with the coupon code → MAX

* The coupon code MAX is best used with yearly plans, since the discount is applied to the first payment only, so if it's a monthly plan, the discount is applied to the first month, and if it's a yearly payment plan it's applied to the full yearly price.

4. Kinsta ($30.00 billed monthly)

SiteGround

Kinsta is premium WordPress hosting provider. It's extremely fast, hosted on Google Cloud Platform. It has a lot of WordPress hosting plans. All of them include:

Starter Plan supports 1 WordPress install, 20,000 visits and 5 GB of disk space for $30.00 per month.

Pro Plan supports 2 WordPress installs, 40,000 visits and 10 GB of disk space for $60.00 per month.

Business 1 Plan supports 5 WordPress installs, 100,000 visits and 15 GB of disk space for $100.00 per month.

Beside these, there are multiple even larger plans.

5. DigitalOcean ($5.00 billed monthly)

SiteGround

DigitalOcean is one of the best VPS hosts. It offers multiple droplets, starting from $5 per month for 1 GB of RAM, 1 vCPU, 25 GB SSD Disk and 1 TB of Transfer.

A Virtual Private Server doesn't come with a control panel, web builder, Wordpress or any other software you get with shared hosting. It is a lot harder to setup than a standard shared hosting. You have to install your own Linux distribution, setup the web server and any other software you need. This is only for advanced users.

Free Credit $100, 60-day free credit from DigitalOcean →