Once you have settled on a tier, the spec sheet is the next thing between you and a decision. And spec sheets are written to be compared favourably, not to be understood. Some entries on them genuinely change how your site behaves. Others are either universal — so not a differentiator — or defined loosely enough to be meaningless.
Here is what to read and what to skip.
Mostly marketing
"Unlimited bandwidth"
Bandwidth is the cheapest thing a host buys, so it is the easiest thing to give away. Meanwhile the acceptable use policy will contain a clause about "excessive resource usage", and CPU, memory and inodes are all capped.
What to look for instead: the CPU and process limits, usually in the knowledge base rather than on the pricing page. That is the number that determines when your site slows down or gets suspended.
"99.9% uptime guarantee"
Two problems. First, 99.9% permits about 43 minutes of downtime a month — a guarantee that is easy to meet. Second, read what the guarantee pays: almost always a pro-rata credit on the hosting fee for the affected period, which for a $3 plan is a few cents. It does not cover your lost sales.
What to look for instead: whether they publish a status page with history. A host that shows you its incidents is telling you more than one that promises 99.9%.
"Free SSL certificate"
Let's Encrypt made TLS certificates free for everyone in 2016. Every host on this site includes SSL. Listing it as a feature in 2026 is like advertising that a car has seatbelts.
The exception worth checking: whether it renews automatically and whether wildcard or subdomain certificates are included. Manual renewal is a genuine annoyance.
"Free domain for the first year"
Real, and worth roughly $12. Two things to check: what the domain renews at in year two — sometimes above market rate — and whether you can transfer it away freely. A domain locked to the host is leverage against you at renewal.
"Free website migration"
Usually genuine and usually good. Check the limits: often one site, sometimes only from certain control panels, and frequently only during the first 30 days. If you have five sites to move, ask before buying.
Genuinely worth reading
Storage type: NVMe versus SATA SSD
This one is real. NVMe drives are several times faster than SATA SSDs on the random reads that database-driven sites do constantly. On a site with a lot of queries the difference is noticeable, not marginal.
Caveat: it only matters if you are actually disk-bound. A site serving cached pages barely touches the disk. It matters most for busy admin areas, large WooCommerce catalogues and anything with heavy search.
Storage amount
10 GB sounds small and is usually plenty — a large WordPress site with hundreds of posts and images is often under 5 GB. It becomes the binding constraint if you host video, large downloads or keep many backups on the same disk.
The web server: LiteSpeed, Nginx or Apache
LiteSpeed with its caching plugin is genuinely quick for WordPress and needs less configuration than Nginx to get there. Nginx is excellent and more common on VPS plans. Plain Apache without a caching layer is the slowest of the three for uncached PHP.
What actually matters more: whether page caching and object caching are set up. A properly cached Apache site beats an unconfigured LiteSpeed one.
Datacenter location
Physics, not marketing. Every request makes a round trip, so a visitor in Mumbai hitting a server in Virginia pays roughly 200ms before anything else happens. Pick a region near your audience.
A CDN helps with images and static files but not with uncached HTML, logged-in sessions or checkout. If most of your traffic is Indian, host in India — see our India hosting ranking.
PHP version control and SSH
Boring and important. Being able to switch PHP versions from the control panel means you can upgrade on your own schedule instead of waiting for the host. SSH access means Composer, WP-CLI and real deployment rather than dragging files over FTP. If you build anything custom, these are requirements rather than nice-to-haves.
Staging environments
A one-click copy of your site to test changes on. The single most useful feature on this list if you update plugins on a site that people use, because it turns "I hope this works" into "I checked".
Backups: frequency, retention and restore
Ask three questions, in this order: how often, how long are they kept, and can you restore one yourself. Daily backups you have to open a support ticket to restore are much less useful than daily backups with a button. Also check whether restoring costs extra — on some budget hosts it does.
The refund window
The most underrated line on the sheet, because it is the only part of the purchase that is genuinely risk-free — long enough, and you can move your real site in and test it properly before committing. It ranges from a 3-day trial to 97 days at DreamHost across the hosts we track. A long window means you can test with your real site and real traffic before committing.
A five-minute checklist
- What is the renewal price, and how long is the intro rate locked for? (Why this is the first question.)
- Where are the datacenters, and is one near your audience?
- What are the CPU and process limits — not the bandwidth?
- Can you restore a backup yourself, without paying?
- Is there a staging environment?
- How long is the refund window?
Nothing on that list is the headline number on a pricing page, which is roughly the point. Every host on this site has these recorded on its review page, with the date each figure was checked.
The spec that is not on the sheet
One number decides more than anything above, and it is never in the feature table: what the plan renews at. Across the hosts here it averages about three and a half times the advertised rate — see how to avoid a hosting renewal price increase, and the glossary for the limits, like inodes and entry processes, that enforce the ones that are.