Hosting Reviews

Hosting is the one infrastructure decision that affects everything else on a WordPress site. The wrong host makes caching plugins fight an uphill battle, turns Core Web Vitals into a project, and puts support on a 48-hour ticket queue when something breaks at 2am.

The reviews here come from running an agency managing 50+ client sites across a dozen different hosts. I test what actually matters in production: real TTFB under load, not cherry-picked marketing benchmarks. Time to first byte from EU datacentres. How the stack behaves when a post hits the front page of Google. What support is actually like on a Sunday night.

The hosting market splits into three tiers worth understanding. Shared hosting (SiteGround, Hostinger) works for new sites and budgets under €10/month — but you share resources with hundreds of neighbours. Managed WordPress hosting (Kinsta, WP Engine, Cloudways) runs on isolated containers or cloud VMs with a WordPress-specific stack: Nginx, object caching, CDN included. It costs more but removes the operational layer entirely. Self-managed VPS (DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Vultr) gives full control for developers who want to tune every layer — best performance per euro if you know what you're doing.

For most agency client sites, managed hosting on Cloudways or Kinsta is the right call. The time saved on server management, the included CDN, and the WordPress-specific caching stack pay for the price difference. I switch clients to VPS only when they have specific requirements (custom server configs, budget constraints, or sites big enough to justify a dedicated devops spend).

Every review below includes the hosting tier, realistic monthly cost at scale, measured TTFB, and who it's actually right for.