Reviews and speed tests of the best Canadian web hosting and WordPress hosting companies. Here’s my list of the best Web and WordPress hosts for your Canadian business ⇣
Looking for the best host for your Canadian website? Good! Because here I am going to show you which web hosting company is the best for small businesses and startups operating in Canada. This table gives you a quick summary comparison of the top 10 website hosts I have reviewed.
| Web Host | Price | Canada Servers | Website |
|---|---|---|---|
| HostPapa | From $3.95 per month | Yes, in Toronto | www.hostpapa.ca |
| GreenGeeks | From $2.49 per month | Yes, in Toronto | www.greengeeks.ca |
| HostUpon | From $3.95/mo | Yes, in Toronto | www.hostupon.ca |
| A2 Hosting | From $2.99 per month | No, in Michigan US | www.a2hosting.ca |
| WP Engine | From $25 per month | Yes, in Montreal | www.wpengine.com |
| Cloudways | From $10.00/mo | Yes, in Montreal | www.cloudways.com |
| Kinsta | From $30.00/mo | Yes, in Montreal | www.kinsta.com |
| Bluehost | From $2.95/mo | No, in the US | www.bluehost.com |
| HostGator | From $2.75/mo | No, in the US | www.hostgator.com |
| InMotion Hosting | From $2.49 per month | No, in the US | www.inmotionhosting.com |
At the end of this article, I explain why the Canadian web hosting company you use can have a big impact on the potential success of your website.
Best Web Hosting in Canada in 2022
Here are the 10 best web hosting services in Canada right now:
1. HostPapa (Best Canadian web hosting company)
HostPapa is a Canadian-based web hosting company that has been around for a long time. They are trusted by thousands of businesses around the world.
HostPapa gives you a free domain when you sign up and offer 1-click install for hundreds of CMS platforms such as WordPress, Joomla, and Magento. They also offer free email hosting with every plan.
All their plans come with the easy-to-use cPanel control panel that you can use to manage your website. Their plans offer unlimited disk space and bandwidth with no overage costs.
Their support team can be reached around the clock via phone, email, or live chat. Their support team speaks English, German, French, and Spanish.
Speed Test From Canada:
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Plans start From $3.95 per month for shared hosting.
2. GreenGeeks (Cheapest web hosting Canada)
GreenGeeks offers cheap, high-performance web and WordPress hosting while being environmentally friendly at the same time.
Their plans offer unlimited SSD disk space, bandwidth, email accounts, and hosted domains. You also get a free domain name when you sign up. They also offer an easy way to install free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate on your website.
If you already have your website hosted on some other platform, you can get it migrated to GreenGeeks for free. They also offer quick 1-click installation for Cloudflare CDN.
Speed Test From Canada:
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Basic Plan Specs:
Plans start From $2.49 per month
3. HostUpon (Best Canadian owned web host)
HostUpon hosts over 10,000 websites. They offer affordable plans that come with unlimited everything. Unlimited Bandwidth & Disk Space. Unlimited Addon Domains.
HostUpon offers reliable and cheap Canadian web hosting that helps grow your business. Their support team can be reached via phone, live chat, and email. They have in-house support and sales team based in Canada.
Every shared hosting plan comes with a free domain name. You also get a free website transfer on every plan. HostUpon offers an easy script install that allows you to install WordPress and 100+ other software scripts with just a few clicks.
Speed Test From Canada:
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Basic Plan Specs:
Plans start from $3.95 per month for shared web hosting.
4. A2 Hosting (Best high performance web hosting)
A2 Hosting offers fantastic high-performance web hosting and WordPress hosting services. Their plans are affordable without compromising on innovative features, server speed and security.
A2 Hosting offers multiple server locations around the world to choose from (you should choose their Michigan US data center). Their support team of experts is available 24/7 and can be reached via email, phone, and live chat.
Their shared hosting plans come with unlimited bandwidth and disk space. You also get a free SSL that can be installed with just one click. See my A2 Hosting review to read about all of the amazing features they give customers.
They offer one of a kind anytime money-back guarantee. If you aren’t happy with their services, you can ask for a refund anytime.
Speed Test From Canada:
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cPanel Control Panel.
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A2 Hosting pricing plans start From $2.99 per month for shared hosting (They also have VPS, Dedicated, Reseller and WordPress hosting plans).
5. WP Engine (Best Canadian WordPress hosting company)
WP Engine is the most popular name in the managed WordPress hosting space. They manage your WordPress servers for you. With them, you don’t need to worry about your website going down because they monitor your website 24/7.
They serve over 80,000 customers who include professional bloggers and big media sites. If you want to run a WordPress site and don’t know how to manage a server, WP Engine is the way to go.
They use the best-in-class servers and offer a 60-day guarantee on every plan. All their plans come with the Genesis theme framework for WordPress along with 35+ Premium StudioPress themes. If you buy these individually, it will cost you well over $1,000.
WP Engine also offers a Global CDN with every plan without any additional costs. See all their features and read my interview with WP Engine in this review.
Speed Test From Canada:
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Basic Plan Specs:
WP Engine pricing plans start From $25 per month.
6. Cloudways (Best budget WordPress hosting Canada)
Cloudways delivers secure, fast and high-performance managed WordPress hosting that is user-friendly and affordable for complete peace of mind.
Cloud servers used to be a thing for programmers and computer geeks. Not anymore. Cloudways simplifies cloud hosting and lets you choose from 5 providers including Digital Ocean, Google Cloud, Linode, Vultr and more.
Cloudways provides managed WordPress hosting at an affordable price. They offer 24/7 support via email and live chat. Their plans come with Cloudways CDN to help speed up your website.
They offer regular backups for your content and managed service. Because they offer services from cloud platforms such as Digital Ocean and Amazon AWS, you can easily scale your operations with only a few clicks. You can any time of the day increase the RAM or disk space for your server with only a few clicks without knowing much about administering servers and programming.
Speed Test From Canada:
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Plans start from From $10 per month.
7. Kinsta (Best premium WordPress hosting Canada)
Kinsta offers fully managed WordPress services to thousands of websites big and small around the world. Their clients include hobbyist bloggers to big multinational corporations like Intuit and Ubisoft.
Their plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee and free site migrations. Kinsta’s services are powered by Google’s Cloud Platform which means the best-in-class services and over 18 global data center locations to choose from.
Kinsta’s WordPress hosting services support WordPress multisite and multi-user environments. Their support team is available 24/7 via phone and email. They also offer a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate and CDN.
Speed Test From Canada:
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WordPress hosting plans start From $30 per month.
8. Bluehost (Best web host for WordPress beginners)
Bluehost is one of the many WordPress.org recommended web hosts. If you don’t know already, WordPress.org is the official website for the WordPress community of developers. Bluehost is recommended as a web host by the makers of WordPress.
Bluehost hosts over 2 million websites around the globe. They have been in business since 2002. Their offerings include shared hosting, managed hosting, WordPress hosting, and dedicated servers.
Their plans are very affordable for beginners and come with dozens of great features. With every plan, you get a free domain name and a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate. You also get 50GB of SSD disk space and unlimited bandwidth.
Bluehost also offers 5 hosted email accounts on the basic plan with 100 MB of storage available for each of them. They offer daily, weekly and monthly backups of your whole website.
They offer an enhanced version of the cPanel control panel to help you manage your website. Their in-house support team is available around the clock via live chat, phone, and email.
Speed Test From Canada:
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Basic Plan Specs:
Plans start From $2.95 per month.
9. HostGator (Cheapest web hosting)
HostGator is one of the most well-recognized web hosting companies, because of their cheap yet feature-rich web hosting services.
HostGator’s shared hosting plans are some of the cheapest you can find. They offer unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth on all shared hosting accounts. They also offer unlimited subdomains, FTP accounts, and parked domains.
All their shared hosting plans offer unlimited email accounts and come with a 45-day money-back guarantee. Their plans come with free website transfer. Even their most basic plan offers unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth
When you sign up, you will receive $100 in both Bing and Google advertising credits.
Speed Test From Canada:
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Basic Plan Specs:
Plans start From $2.75 per month.
10. InMotion Hosting (Best small business web hosting)
InMotionHosting has been around for a very long time and serves thousands of customers both big and small.
Offers free no-downtime website transfer
Generous 90-day money-back guarantee
SSD drives on all plans
InMotion Hosting provides web hosting with excellent uptime, speed, performance and technical features.
Their plans for shared hosting are very affordable for beginners. They all come with unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth. You also get unlimited hosted email accounts with every plan.
Speed Test From Canada:
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Basic Plan Specs:
Plans start From $2.49 per month
Traffic is the lifeblood of any business.
Entrepreneurs and marketers spend hours of time and a ton of money driving traffic to their website. Improving their website’s speed is the last thing on their mind.
But what most of them don’t realize is that a slow website is like a leaking bucket with a dozen holes. 47% of visitors abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
There are a lot of things that impact the speed of your site but latency is the most important one…
(If you know all about this and why it matters, then jump to the web hosting Canada comparison below)
Why Latency Matters
Reducing round-trip time latency for website visitors is key, as the closer, the server is to the site visitor, the faster the site will load
When someone puts your website’s URL in their browser, their browser has to send a request to your website’s server which takes time.
This time increases as the distance between the user and your server increases.
So, if your website is hosted in Singapore and your visitors are from Canada , then the latency will be very high.
To load a website, web browsers have to download every single file like images that make up the web page. The time it takes to download a file and display it is increased by the latency.
Download time is impacted by how big the file is and the latency between the server and the user.
The bigger your website, the more it will be affected by latency.
Have a look at the below screenshot:
As you can see for yourself in the above speed test screenshot, the latency increases as the distance increases.The bottom line?Reduce latency to increase the speed of your website.
Should I Host My Website in Canada?
Now, the answer depends on a lot of factors.
But here’s a question you should ask yourself to decide:
Are most of my website visitors visiting my website from the same country? Even better, have a look at your analytics dashboard if you have one.
If you own a local business that currently only serves local clients, you should host your website locally. If you do, then your website’s speed will be doubled overnight.
On the other hand, if the majority of your website visitors are from outside your country say from the UK or Australia, then you should host your website in the country where most of your visitors are situated.
Best Canada Web Hosting: Summary
If you own a business that serves customers locally in Canada, then it makes a lot of sense to host your website on a server that is either in or close to Canada. Because most of your website visitors will be from the same location.
So what is the best Canada web hosting service?If you are a beginner just getting started, you should go with GreenGeeks because their hosting services are cheap and packed with good features, and your site will be hosted on Canadian data centers.
On the other hand if you are looking for a fully managed WordPress hosting service, WP Engine is your best choice. Using them to ensure that your site loads super fast and is secure.
This content was originally published here.