Freelancing opens up a new world of growth and opportunity. You get to set your own schedule, be your own boss, and experience freedom like never before. But with great power comes great responsibility, and freelancing comes with its own set of challenges.
One of the first challenges is setting up your website. While modern platforms like WordPress can help you get up and running without knowing a lick of code, you’ll still need to secure web hosting.
Your web host can make or break your site’s launch, and it continuously affects overall speed and reliability. Since these factors play a massive role in client retention and SEO efforts, you need to get them right. Luckily, you can avoid any issues by choosing the best web hosting for freelancers.
I’ve been a freelancer for over five years, and I’ve launched several sites for myself and clients. Now, I’m here to help you skip past the trial and error period and get started on the right foot.
Here are my freelance web host recommendations.
Contents
Best Web Hosting for Freelancers: Top 5 Options
Without further ado, let’s take a look at the five best web hosts for freelancers, beginning with my favorite option overall.
1. Bluehost
The best web hosting for freelancers overall
Bluehost is among the biggest names in hosting, acting as the backend for over two million websites.
The reason for Bluehost’s success is simple: starting plans are quite affordable, ranging from $2.95 to $13.95 per month, and the product is excellent.
Bluehost makes it easy to launch your website, whether built from scratch or designed atop WordPress. The folks at Bluehost make the latter option particularly easy, with a drag and drop WordPress builder that lets you assemble your site just the way you like.
If you opt to build your site with WordPress — which I recommend — and don’t want to design anything, you can also check out the official theme repository. This archive boasts nearly 10,000 free templates for use with your Bluehost WordPress site.
As for pricing? The Basic plan costs just $2.95 per month when you purchase 12 months ($35 total) and comes with a free domain. Your entire site also receives a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate for advanced safety features and gains a massive speed boost atop Cloudflare’s CDN platform.
In other words, your site won’t just be secure and reliable — it’ll load before your guests have time to blink. You also get 50GB of storage space for all those flashy designs and unmetered bandwidth (traffic), ensuring all the room in the world to grow.
One common complaint I want to mention is that Bluehost is part of a network of sites owned and operated by the same parent company: Endurance International Group.
Although Endurance gets a lot of online hate due to its status as a massive conglomerate, I’ve found its services quite reliable. The customer service team even offers phone support, a rarity among such budget hosts.
In summary, I wholeheartedly recommend Bluehost for your freelancing endeavors.
2. Bigscoots
The best web hosting for freelancers on a budget
Bigscoots isn’t the most popular web host around, but it is one of my favorites.
Why do I consider Bigscoots among the best web hosting for freelancers?
First of all, its shared hosting plans offer unbeatable value. The generous 105CC starting plan costs $5.95 per month and lets you host up to five domains with 100GB of bandwidth. What’s more, each domain features unlimited databases and mailboxes, as well as free SSL certificates and premium DDoS protection.
One of the things I like most is that there’s no bait and switch payment plan. Since there are no yearly contracts, you pay the same amount every month, and there’s no massive price hike once your initial term has lapsed.
Bigscoots doesn’t just offer shared hosting, either. You can find the same quality and affordability with its dedicated servers, VPS, and reseller accounts.
Host all your WordPress or static sites with Bigscoots, and enjoy an intuitive backend with cPanel integration. Whether you’re just starting out or scaling up, Bigscoots has you covered with a power solution offered on a reasonable month-to-month basis.
The one downside is that the service isn’t the most reliable.
Bigscoots suffers from a short outage or two every few months (usually under an hour of downtime). That’s a bit of a bummer, given how critical uptime is to a growing website.
But on these rare occasions, the customer service team is always quick to respond, and they also send out emails explaining what went wrong and how they’ll shore up the backend to prevent similar issues.
While I dislike any downtime, I do appreciate and respect that the company addresses it head-on instead of sweeping things under the rug.
Overall, they’ve earned their spot as one of the best web hosts for freelancers.
3. WordPress.com
The simplest web hosting for freelancers
Look — managing a website is hard. Designing isn’t for everyone, and the thought of learning an entire content management system and hosting backend can seem daunting. That’s where WordPress.com comes in.
WordPress.com is different from other types of WordPress, as it removes all the legwork associated with getting up and running. It’s a bit confusing, so let me break things down.
WordPress.org is the self-hosting form of WordPress. It’s free and open-source to anyone who wants to download and install it on their servers.
WordPress.com, on the other hand, is owned by a company called Automattic. This company offers a dumbed-down version of the original WordPress product for an affordable monthly fee (there’s also a simple free plan).
The biggest detraction is that you don’t get access to the digital ecosystem that makes WordPress so great in the first place. Automattic restricts your ability to download and install plugins and themes, instead offering a small, less attractive selection designed for absolute beginners.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It can make starting much easier, and you can still transfer out once you’re ready.
How easy is it, exactly?
All you have to do is head over to the WordPress.com website, sign up, select your theme, and customize the content. Then hit publish. It’s that easy.
While WordPress.com’s lack of extendibility and SEO-oriented features may be unsuitable for freelance web designers or freelance copywriters, it’s perfectly fine for freelance musicians, photographers, tutors, and those outside the digital realm.
Plus, it’s insanely affordable. You can start for free and switch to a paid plan that starts at just $4/month and comes with a free domain name, plenty of bandwidth, and all the essential customization options you need. I highly recommend it for beginner freelancers seeking the best web hosting for freelancers without all the hassle.
4. SiteGround
The best-rated web hosting for freelancers
SiteGround was one of the first web hosts I ever used. I purchased a year of the Grow Big plan for $71.40 and was off to the races. There were never any issues the entire time. It took a little research to figure out cPanel (the hosting backend), but everything just worked.
Before I knew it, a year had gone by, and the price jumped to a whopping $25 per month! It went from being a dream to a nightmare, just like that.
That’s how most of the big hosting companies get you. They offer a sweet annual deal to entice you, then jack up the price when your plan expires.
Still, SiteGround is one of the most respected web hosts out there, especially for WordPress users. It was one of the first hosts recommended by the development team behind WordPress, and it’s still a lightning-fast servicer.
The StartUp plan is $3.99 per month when you buy a whole year, or $14.99 month to month, and lets you host one site with up 10,000 visitors month per month. This is just fine for freelancers beginning their journey.
Once you’re starting to see serious traffic, you can jump to the GrowBig plan for an extra $10. This lets you host unlimited sites with 100,000 visitors, all backed by free SSL certificates.
The sky’s the limit from there, but that gives you a pretty good idea of overall value.
SiteGround is one of the best-rated web hosts, and among the best web hosting for freelancers. I highly recommend it for users willing to pony up a little extra cash. Alternatively, you can start there for cheap and swap over when the price increases.
5. Flywheel
The best WordPress hosting for freelancers
Flywheel lives and breathes WordPress. In fact, WordPress hosting is all it offers!
The company’s managed hosting plans begin at $15 per month for 5,000 visitors. Pretty costly, but a decent starting point for folks who want a straightforward, hands-off approach.
Flywheel isn’t as easy to use as WordPress.com (self-hosted WordPress will always be more complicated), but it’s pretty darn close. You can install WordPress with one click and get going with minimal effort.
If you want to test WordPress or design your site before unleashing it to the world, Flywheel even offers a program called Local. It’s the best WordPress creation environment (it lives right on your desktop), and it syncs with your Flywheel account for incredible convenience.
You can also sync with WPENGINE (which purchased Flywheel back in 2019). That said, I recommend steering clear of WPENGINE while you’re still in the beginning stages and looking for the best web hosting for freelancers.
Concerning speed, Flywheel is blazing fast via advanced caching and built-in Fastly CDN integration. Its support team is no slouch either. When I experienced an issue with them at one point, all it took was a quick phone call to get it straightened away.
The company primarily caters to web designers and their clients, making it the best web hosting for freelance web designers. But it’s also great for freelancers and small businesses. The platform’s easy, intuitive tools make WordPress simple for everyone.
What To Look for in the Best Web Hosting for Freelancers
In this section, let’s touch on a few of the most important considerations when choosing a freelancing web host.
1. Speed
Website speed is vital. With the rollout of Google’s Core Web Vitals algorithm change, it’s one of the most important factors regarding how well your site ranks in the search engines.
It’s also critical for overall user experience. Nobody wants to wait around while your site loads. Given our ever-shrinking attention spans, your guests will click away if they don’t get what they want pronto.
With that in mind, sites should always load in under five seconds. A great way to ensure this is to use a CDN or content delivery network, which caches your files worldwide to provide the fastest load times in any location. For that reason, I recommend hosts that integrate with CDNs like Cloudflare.
2. Uptime
The last thing you want is a client or prospective client going to your website only to get greeted by an error page. That leaves a terrible impression, and they may never come back.
99.9% uptime is the industry norm, and you need to make sure that your web host meets or exceeds that at all times.
3. Customer support
Things can and do go wrong. Technology is finicky, and web hosts are maintained by ever-fallible humans. That’s why you need customer support.
That said, email support takes too long and isn’t reliable enough. Ticketing systems are the next best thing, and you can generally expect a response within minutes. However, the best web hosting for freelancers also offers phone support, giving you a live human to communicate with as you troubleshoot any issues.
Reliable phone support is particularly important for designers and developers hosting client websites, as you’ll need to fix any issues that arise immediately.
4. Security
Digital malfeasance is a massive and growing problem. According to Forbes, over 30,000 websites get hacked every single day.
Don’t be one of them!
Choose a web host that offers free SLL certificates, backend firewalls, and DDOS protection. Also look for hosts that provide free backups to restore your site should anything go wrong.
5. Features
Every host comes with a unique set of features. Most of today’s top options offer one-click installation and access to cPanel for static HTML site deployment. But you can also find hosts that offer free domains, integrated website builders, complementary ad credits, various integrations, and more.
The more features, the better (at least as far as I’m concerned). Just be sure that the performance is up to snuff. Some hosts hide behind fancy-sounding ‘features’ to hide gaps in site performance or customer support.
6. Value
Last but not least, there’s bang for your buck. The best web hosting for freelancers doesn’t need to be expensive. If you purchase yearly plans, you can get started for a few dollars a month.
If there’s a host that offers something particularly valuable to you, don’t worry about spending a few extra dollars, as long as it’s in the budget. Unreliable or unsupportive hosting is a nightmare, and a few dollars now is worth hours of headache down the line.
Who Do You Host With?
Thanks for stopping by and checking out my article on the best web hosting for freelancers.
Do you agree with this list?
Let me know down in the comments who you host with and why you recommend them! It’ll give me something to research, and it may help your fellow freelancers secure the perfect host.