What customers think, against what it costs
Every host we have reviewed, plotted on the rating its own customers gave it against what three years actually costs. Two figures from two independent places — and they disagree more often than either alone would suggest.
SiteGround is the best-rated host here at 4.9/5 — and at $468 over three years it is also among the most expensive to keep. Customers are not wrong about the service. The renewal is still the renewal.
Ratings from Trustpilot, read 29 July 2026, shown attributed — they are not our figures and are not part of this page's structured data. Costs are ours, from prices carrying the date each was read. How we source figures →
The four groups
Split at the median of each axis — $224 and 4.6/5 — rather than at a round number, so the lines describe these 16 hosts rather than an opinion about what “cheap” means. Cost runs on a log scale because the range is $25.92 to $1,260.
Hover or tap a point for the figures. Every point links to that host's page, where each price carries the date it was read.
Liked and cheap to keep 6
Rated at or above the median by customers, and at or below the median over three years. If you want a single place to start, start here.
| Host | Rating | Reviews | Intro / mo | Then / mo | 36-month cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MilesWeb | 4.8/5 | 538 thin | $0.72 | $2.28 3.2× | $25.92 |
| DreamHost | 4.6/5 | 8,122 | $2.89 | $10.99 3.8× | $104 |
| Hosting.com | 4.7/5 | 6,461 | $2.99 | $10.99 3.7× | $108 |
| Hostinger | 4.7/5 | 70,688 | $2.99 | $8.99 3.0× | $108 |
| HostGator | 4.6/5 | 17,550 | $3.75 | $10.99 | $135 |
| IONOS | 4.6/5 | 43,885 | $1 | $8 8.0× | $204 |
Liked, but expensive to keep 6
Customers rate these well and the three-year bill is above the median. Worth paying if the reason for the rating is something you need — and worth checking the renewal figure before you agree to it.
| Host | Rating | Reviews | Intro / mo | Then / mo | 36-month cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FastComet | 4.7/5 | 3,679 | $2.95 | $8.95 3.0× | $250 |
| ChemiCloud | 4.8/5 | 1,343 | $2.49 | $11.95 4.8× | $317 |
| GreenGeeks | 4.6/5 | 1,673 | $2.95 | $13.95 4.7× | $370 |
| Cloudways | 4.6/5 | 3,676 | $11 | $11 no rise | $396 |
| SiteGround | 4.9/5 | 29,928 | $2.99 | $17.99 6.0× | $468 |
| Kinsta | 4.7/5 | 1,126 | $35 | $35 no rise | $1,260 |
Cheap, but rated below the median 2
Low real cost with a customer rating in the bottom half. Cheap is not the problem; the question is whether the rating reflects something that would affect you.
| Host | Rating | Reviews | Intro / mo | Then / mo | 36-month cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bluehost | 4.5/5 | 31,030 | $2.95 | $8.99 3.0× | $106 |
| Namecheap Hosting | 4.2/5 | 21,507 | $2.28 | $3.88 | $120 |
Expensive and rated below the median 2
The hardest group to defend on these two figures alone. That does not make them bad hosts — it means the case for them is not in either of these numbers.
How to read this without over-reading it
A customer rating and a price are not the same kind of fact. One is tens of thousands of people's impressions, collected by somebody else, weighted towards those motivated enough to post. The other is arithmetic on published figures. We have deliberately not combined them into a single score: a composite would look authoritative and mean nothing, and it would hide the disagreement that makes this chart worth looking at.
Review counts matter as much as scores. 2 of these 16 hosts have fewer than a thousand reviews behind their score (MilesWeb, BigRock), and those are marked “thin” in the tables above. A 4.8 from five hundred people and a 4.7 from seventy thousand are not the same claim.
Neither axis measures speed or uptime. We publish no performance figures for any host, because measuring that honestly needs an account on each one serving identical content, and timing a host's own marketing site measures its CDN rather than the plan it sells you. The method page says where our knowledge stops.
The cost figure assumes you stay three years. If you plan to leave sooner, the ordering changes and some of the expensive hosts become reasonable. Price your own term with the true cost calculator.