Best web hosting in the USA: how to choose

What separates hosts

• The renewal price, not the introductory one. Many hosts are cheap for the first term and much more after.
• Server location and whether a content network sits in front of the site. It decides how fast your visitors see it.
• Backups: how often, how long they are kept, and whether you can restore them yourself.
• Support: hours, channels and speed of reply. A support ticket answered in two days is no help when the site is down.
• What the plan limits: storage, traffic, number of sites, email accounts and databases.
• Whether you can leave: exporting your site and domain without a fee.

Hosting in the USA

• Most US hosts run data centres close to American visitors, so for a US audience location rarely separates them — price at renewal, support and backups do.
• Introductory prices are often much lower than the renewal price. Read the renewal price before paying for several years upfront.
• If you serve customers in other countries too, a host with a content network in front of it matters more than where the server sits.

Match the plan to the site

• A small brochure site or blog: shared hosting or a site-builder is usually enough.
• A shop or an app: choose a plan that gives you backups, a staging copy and room to grow.
• A static site or front-end project: a static hosting service with a content network is often cheaper and faster than traditional hosting.

Compare your shortlist

Name two or three hosts in compare⁄io and say what you are building — "a WordPress shop for customers in the USA" — and it researches each with a live web search and shows where the facts came from. For scoring them yourself, use the weighted decision matrix; for how to compare anything that is not in a catalogue, see how to compare anything.