Last updated: Friday, February 26, 2021
These are the best web hosting providers that accept month to month payments, instead of charging for a full year up front.
The best monthly payment option for hosting one website is Shared Starter plan by DreamHost for $6.99 per month, paid monthly.
The first 3 months are discounted to $4.95.
If you want to host multiple websites, or need Email, Shared Unlimited plan by DreamHost includes both for $11.99 per month.
The first 3 months are discounted to $8.95.
There are additional discounts for annual payments. One year of hosting for $47.40, and that also includes a free domain name.
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 $6.99 per month.
Shared Unlimited: adds Hosting of Unlimited Websites (with Free SSL certificates) and Free Email hosting for $11.99 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.
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.
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.
If you're planning to use WordPress for your site, it will be automatically installed and set up for you. Now it also includes WP Website Builder for free.
DreamShield is an add-on that you can enable through the panel, and use it to automatically scan your website weekly, looking for malicious code. You can add it anytime you want, so you can uncheck it for now and decide if you need it later.
Shared Starter plan doesn't come with Email hosting, so you can add it here, or you can choose a Shared Unlimited plan which includes it for free.
This is the standard Google Business Suite, and you can also add it later if you want to.
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.
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 four 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:
STARTUP plan supports 1 website, 100 GB Disk Space and Unlimited Data Transfer for $10.99 per month.
DRIVE plan adds the ability to host Unlimited Websites on the same plan and Unlimited Disk Space for $12.99 per month.
There are two additional, even larger shared hosting plans, but the first two provide the best value for the price.
All 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.
Since A2 Hosting doesn't include a free domain name with its hosting plans, but charges $14.95 per year for the domain name PLUS an additional $9.95 per year for Whois Privacy Protection (which you absolutely need, unless you want your name, address, phone number and email to be publicly posted at Whois registry), the best option would be 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/year at A2 Hosting.
So, the best approach would be to first register your domain name at some other registrar, then, when you start buying your A2 Hosting, 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 (the longer billing cycles are heavily discounted, like at all hosts, but will renew at full rates).
Scroll down for additional options.
Here you can leave everything as 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.
At this point you don't need Dedicated IP, DropSuite Offsite Backups, Barracuda Spam Firewall or A2 Website Builder, so you can leave all the default values - None. You can always add them later if you change your mind.
You do need Let’s Encrypt SSL (Basic SSL Protection) but it's already selected and it's Free.
Auto-Install Application - If you you were planning to use WordPress for your website, you can install it right away, by choosing "WordPress - A2 Optimized".
Here you can review the selected options and see the total price. If everything is alright you can proceed to checkout.
There are no discounts for monthly payment plans, so the price will always be the same. If you've chosen the longer billing cycle, you do get the discounted price, which renews at full price, but 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).
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.
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.
DigitalOcean is one of the best VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosts. It offers multiple droplets (virtual machines) that you can provision in just 55 seconds. You can choose between Standard, General Purpose, CPU-Optimized, or Memory-Optimized configurations.
Standard droplets are the most popular, because they are the cheapest, and they come with a mix of memory and compute resources, best for small projects that can handle variable levels of CPU performance, like websites, blogs, web apps, microservices, small databases and dev/test environments.
The cheapest standard droplet, which includes 1 GB of RAM, 1 vCPU, 25 GB SSD disk and 1 TB transfer is $5/month.
A Virtual Private Server is a type of hosting that 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 →
Namecheap is one of the largest domain name registrars, now also including web hosting. It offers monthly payment options on all three of its shared hosting plans. All of them include:
Stellar: supports hosting of 3 websites, 20 GB SSD Disk Space, 30 Email Accounts and 50 MySQL Databases for $2.88 per month.
There's a discount for yearly payments, and the additional 45% discount on 1st year, so you can get it for $18.44 (renews at $33.88/year).
Stellar Plus: adds Hosting of Unlimited Websites, Unmetered SSD, Unlimited Email Accounts and AutoBackup for $4.88 per month.
Stellar Business: adds Cloud Storage (Evenly-distributed server loads, Data Replication and Zero Interruptions) for $8.88 per month.
All of the Namecheap's hosting plans include the Softaculous Apps Marketplace. This includes over 100 free Apps like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, Zen Cart, Cube Cart, SMF, photo gallery and other software.
SSL certificates from Namecheap are free for the first year and get automatically installed and are secured for up to 50 websites. The SSL renewal rate is 50% off the second year ($4.44) and renews at a standard rate ($8.88) on the third year.
If you want to use free Let's Encrypt certificates instead, you can use SSL For Free to generate the LetsEncrypt certificates and then install them using cPanel. The downside is that you have to renew each one manually every three months.