The best cPanel hosting providers make it simple and easy to setup and manage your website using cPanel on your hosting account.
1. Best overall
2. Basic for small business
3. Best affordable
4. Best for performance
5. Best for scalability
6. FAQs
7. How we test
Running a website can involve all kinds of tasks, from setting up emails, to installing or updating software, running backups, managing files and more. Most hosts offer some kind of graphical control panel to help walk you through each step, but it's important to check exactly what's on offer.
The best cPanel hosting providers make it simple to set up and manage your website(s.) Some hosts offer their own custom control panels, often to avoid paying license fees for anything else. That could make for lower hosting fees, but if you have less features, or it's more difficult to manage your site later, it's really not such a great deal.
CPanel is the best and industry-standard option, thanks to its mix of power, features and ease of use. Because it's so popular, there's a lot of competition amongst web hosts to offer great cPanel hosting deals, but in this article, we'll tell you who we think are the best cPanel web hosting companies right now.
We've also listed the best cheap web hosting deals.
The best cPanel hosting services of 2024 in full:
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Best overall
Bluehost offers easy-to-use cPanel site management everywhere, from its starter shared hosting plans, to VPS and dedicated hosting ranges, managed WordPress plans and WooCommerce-powered web stores.
And unlike some of the competition, Bluehost doesn't treat cPanel as an optional extra, where you're pay a premium to use in with your account. Just about every plan includes cPanel as standard, no additional costs involved.
Bluehost's benefits go way beyond cPanel, though, and the company delivers more than you might expect in just about every area.
Its Choice Plus plan is 'only' a mid-range shared hosting plan, for instance, but it still supports hosting three websites, with a free CDN, custom WordPress themes, a free domain name, and even free domain privacy to hide your personal details from spammers (often a premium extra with other providers.)
This isn't quite as generous as it sounds. Although Bluehost's plans often have low prices for the first term, these can sometimes more than double on renewal. If you're tempted, browse the small print very closely when you sign up, to be sure you avoid any unexpected price hikes later.
On balance, though, Bluehost is a polished and professional cPanel hosting provider which offers an array of powerful plans for just about every personal and business need.
Read our full Bluehost review.
Basic for small business
HostGator bundles cPanel for free as one of the benefits of its feature-packed shared hosting plans, but life is a little more complicated elsewhere. CPanel is a premium extra with its VPS plans, and although it's bundled with dedicated Linux hosting, you get the similar Plesk control panel if you're using Windows.
Shared hosting is a HostGator highlight. Unlike many competitors, even its cheapest shared plan includes all the core hosting essentials: 1-click WordPress installs; a free domain; free SSL; basic backups; unlimited bandwidth, subdomains and email addresses, and the list goes on.
There's more than enough there for personal and small business users, and upgrading to the Business plan takes the service to a whole new level. Unlimited websites and storage, professional web migration, Cloudflare CDN, a dedicated IP and a Positive SSL certificate make it a good choice for more demanding users.
If you're building a business-critical or high-traffic site, HostGator's VPS or dedicated hosting plans are more likely to deliver the power you need. The company doesn't have the number of plans or configurability that we see with some providers, and they don't offer the same value as HostGator's shared products, but these are still quality products which should be up to hosting the most heavy-duty of web projects.
Read our full HostGator review.
Best affordable
While most of its peers offer a number of shared hosting plans, iPage stands apart because of its choice of a single shared hosting plan. At $1.95/month, the Go Plan is certainly the cheapest shared hosting plan we’ve come across, but it surprised us with the vast range of offerings despite that rather lucrative price.
Unlike most other hosting providers which restrict the bandwidth or disk space, and also limit the number of websites you can host, the solitary shared hosting plan allows unlimited websites, email accounts along with unmetered bandwidth and disk space. These are features that the peers only offer in their costliest premium plans. Also, the shared hosting plan doesn’t provide cPanel control panel, which is only available in the VPS and dedicated hosting plans.
The provider claims that the shared hosting plan can handle the needs of 99.95% of its clients, but if you’re the rare exception that outgrows the shared hosting plan, iPage will help you migrate to a VPS or dedicated hosting plan.
In further departure from the industry standard, iPage also publicises the use of CentOS 7 to power its VPS servers. Most other hosting services are silent on the choice of distribution for their Linux servers.
Also, none of the hosting plans include any security measures or backups. This is because iPage sells these as separate add-ons. The Website Backup & Restore add-on, which provides automatic daily backups and single-click restoration must be purchased. Similarly, the Sitelock add-on, at $1.99/month provides daily malware scan, blocks automated bot attacks, automatically removes malware, etc.
Read our full iPage review.
Best for performance
A2 Hosting offers the choice of shared hosting, VPS, dedicated servers, cloud hosting and even reseller hosting.
A2 Hosting’s USP is its focus on performance and security. Each of the shared hosting plans include a variety of A2 offerings such as free HackScan Protection to block hacks before they can harm your website and data, along with protections against brute force attacks and DDoS protection.
Even better, A2 Hosting offers plans geared for WordPress hosting, and even allows installing hundreds of other software with a single click, thanks to Softaculous integration, which takes away the installation pains that might deter novice website owners.
With 24/7 support over email, chat and phone, A2 Hosting has a sharp focus on providing the best user experience to its customers. As the focus is on speed and performance, A2Hosting also lets you choose the server location. You can choose the server closest to you on the order form itself, and the options are Michigan and Arizona in the USA, Amsterdam in Europe and Singapore in Asia.
The ability to handle traffic spikes is a key factor in deciding the hosting provider. You can get peace of mind with the Turbo plans, which also include Litespeed Web Server. The result is a site far faster than those powered by Apache or Nginx. Coupled with free automatic backups and easy restoration of data, it’s easy to see why these top tier plans make sense for businesses and professionals alike.
But if you’re not limited by your budget, the VPS plans might make more sense for established businesses and websites that expect heavy traffic, such as online stores with a catalogue of hundreds of products catering to thousands of unique visitors a month.
Read our full A2 Hosting review.
Best for scalability
With InMotion Hosting, it’s a case of saving the best for last. InMotion offers a number of hosting plans, be it shared, dedicated or VPS. With the exception of the cheapest shared hosting plan, all other plans include cPanel control panel.
For each of it’s four shared hosting plans, InMotion provides the ideal target user. For instance, the Core plan, at $2.29/month is stated to be meant for beginners and offers 100GB storage space, one free email address, a host of security tools such as DDoS protection, SSL certificate, malware protection and automatic backups, as well as marketing tools to help you promote your online venture. The Power shared hosting plan targets websites that expect heavy traffic, while the Pro plan, at $12.99/month is meant for online stores.
Also, the Core, Launch and Power shared hosting plans only allow for a one, two or three year commitment, and it’s not possible to buy a monthly subscription for these plans. If you want to purchase a monthly plan, your only recourse is to opt for the Pro plan.
InMotion also provides a choice of managed VPS servers. The prices are significantly higher if you opt for less than a three year subscription. For more advanced users who are skilled in the arts of system administration and confident with their command-line skills, or already have a trained administrator at hand, InMotion Hosting also offers a choice of nine unmanaged Cloud VPS plans.
Apart from all that, InMotion Hosting also offers four dedicated hosting plans with resources enough to host your own gaming server, or media streaming platform.
Read our full InMotion Hosting review.
Best cPanel hosting FAQs
Hosting a website involves carefully weighing a great number of disparate factors, such as search engine optimization (SEO) and security, in addition to the amount of expected visitors per month, the type of content hosted on the website, etc.
More importantly, a website is more than just a collection of data. It’s an amalgamation of many different but essential components that help you provide a cohesive and professional experience to all visitors. There’s the database, which is home to all your data. An email service to help you communicate with your clients. A properly configured web server that ensures visitors to your website have a seamless and smooth experience when accessing the different parts of your website. Even apart from that, there’s a whole other piece of analytical information that can help you get a better understanding of your visitors.
A control panel, such as cPanel provides an intuitive user interface that helps you manage all these different yet intricate components of your website, without overwhelming you. Whether it’s creating or managing email accounts, installing software, managing backups, checking visitor stats, or otherwise performing administrative tasks, cPanel can be used to easily manage all these different operations from the comfort of a web browser.
You can gauge the popularity of cPanel from the fact that just about all hosting providers offer it as the default control panel to manage their services. Not only that, many times, hosting providers receive poor reviews for featuring non-standard control panels, by which we mean a control panel that’s quite different from cPanel.
What are the best cPanel hosting providers?
There are two fundamental methodologies for deploying a website. The first is to host it by yourself. This is a far more complicated and involved process, and involves not just hunting after the right hardware to deploy your server, but also ensuring its maintenance and upkeep. You’ll also have to bear the responsibility of applying security patches, updating and securing essential components such as PHP, etc. Even after all that, you are also responsible for the operating system as well as all the other software that’s installed on the server, and have to ensure the safety and security of your data.
The alternative is to opt for a web hosting solution, so that the task of setting up and maintaining the server is handled by professionals.
Apart from various configurations of storage space, RAM, choice of shared hosting, dedicated hosting or VPS hosting, many hosting providers also let you choose the underlying operating system, be it Linux or Windows.
As cPanel is only available for managing Linux powered servers, Linux hosting is often referred to as cPanel hosting.
How to choose the best cPanel hosting service for you
To choose the best cPanel hosting service for your site, you'll need to know exactly what your website needs.
If you're looking for an intuitive interface, enhanced customizability, browser compatibility, and software installation capabilities, you'll definitely need to choose a quality cPanel hosting provider.
A great tip is to check the provider's refund policy and money back guarantee promise, which will allow you to test the cPanel hosting service and make sure it's the right one for you.
How we test the best cPanel hosting services
We test all cPanel hosting services by signing up and going through all the features on offer from easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI) to the support documentation.
If your web host doesn't come with cPanel hosting, which is rare because most of the major players do, you’ll also have to bear the responsibility of applying security patches, updating and securing essential components such as PHP, etc. We test these features and compare them against each other.
Pricing is also a crucial factor as well as customer support, therefore, in the same way we test web hosting services in these categories, we look for the cPanel hosting provider that's affordable but doesn't compromise on the quality of its service.
We've also listed the best cPanel alternatives.
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