Calling all students! This will compare the Best Students Web Hosting providers on the market, saving you from paying full price for your accommodation.
Students around the world are taking intuitive steps to get attention, earn money, or achieve their grades. Whether it’s creating a web portfolio, starting a business, or sprucing up a site as part of your course, creating a website has many benefits.
Of course, if you’re starting from scratch, you’ll need hosting as well. Things will start to get complicated and costly at this stage.
When you’ve got your last can of beans in the closet, it’s hard to justify dispensing in the enclosure. The good news is that there are many hosting providers who will not charge you a month’s rent to keep your website up and running.
Whether it’s cheap prices, student discounts, or totally free plans, we’ve found providers for even the most cash-hungry among you.
We know you don’t have time to scour the web trying to find accommodation deals – there are papers to write, exams to review, and performances to rehearse (not to mention you have to procrastinate a lot to try).
That is why we have conducted all of the necessary research on your behalf. We put in hours of research to find the most straightforward and cost-effective providers on the market. All you have to do now is choose your ideal hosting provider from the list and get started!
Table of Contents
The Best 6 Web Hosting Providers for Students
- Bluehost – best overall hosting provider
- HostGator – best for uptime
- InMotion – best for shared and VPS hosting
- SiteGround – best for reliability
- iPage – best for cheap plans but at the expense of speed
- DreamHost – best for storage space
We have found that Bluehost is currently offering great discounts, which means that shared hosting prices now start from just $2.95/mo (renews at $10.99/mo). But hurry up; these offers expire soon!
We will provide you with a summary of each vendor, pricing details, information on how they performed in our research, and recommendations on who qualifies for minimum pricing. There is no time, so let’s get started.
Head-to-Head Comparison
If you want powerful hosting and have a couple of dollars a month to spare, you’re in luck!
Some of these providers offer student-specific discounts, while others offer great deals for new users, whether you are a student or not. You will compare its key features side by side in the table below.
Provider | Storage | cPanel | Email addresses | SSD storage | Free backups |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Bluehost | 50GB | ✔ | 5 | ✔ | ✔ |
HostGator | Unlimited | ✔ | Unlimited | ✔ | ✘ |
InMotion | Unlimited | ✔ | Unlimited | ✔ | ✔ |
SiteGround | 10GB | ✔ | Unlimited | ✔ | ✔ |
iPage | Unlimited | ✔ | Unlimited | ✘ | ✘ |
DreamHost | 50GB | ✘ | 0 | ✔ | ✔ |
It is useful to determine these characteristics that are presented side by side, but now we are going to enter more details about each of those providers to help you select the simplest for your needs.
1. Bluehost
Best Overall Hosting Provider
💾 Disk Space: 50 GB
👌 Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets
Bluehost is the best overall provider on our list, and it starts off with a bang. He is a trusted and well-known supplier with an excellent journal. It performed solidly in our research, starting first overall, and it blew us away with its WordPress features, and no wonder, as it’s also the amount a provider recommended by WordPress itself!
Pros | Cons |
Number one recommended provider by WordPressGreat value for money | A little pricier than its competitors. |
Bluehost’s cheapest plan is their basic shared plan at just $2.95 per month.
You get a regular SSL license, unmetered bandwidth, and 50GB of storage for $2.95 per month. This package allows you to host one website with a free domain and backups. As you upgrade, you’ll gain access to more functionality, and Bluehost’s toolkit makes it a scalable choice.
You get tons for your money; you won’t find free domains and backups with all providers, plus solid and reliable service across the board. The renewal prices aren’t bad either, as the essential shared plan renews at $10.99 per month after your first term.
Bluehost is highly recommended because it blends outstanding features with low prices and excellent customer service. There are cheaper hosts out there, but Bluehost is well worth the money, particularly if you have a WordPress baby site and need the simplest start possible!
2. HostGator
HostGator has all the bases covered if you want the simplest uptime on the market. It also offers a great variety of hosting types, from shared to dedicated, and is good at what it does. HostGator is a student who is not the best in every class but is still the teacher’s favorite. In our research, it worked particularly well on dedicated hosting.
Pros | Cons |
Best host for uptimeBest provider for dedicated hosting. | No free domain. No free backups. |
Like most providers, HostGator’s cheapest prices accompany their shared hosting plans, which start at $2.75 per month. The adorable Hatchling plan gives you a 65% discount on the first price and also includes some nifty features. It includes:
- Free SSL
- Unmeasured bandwidth
- Unmetered storage
- One-click installations
- Unlimited free email addresses
In addition to not providing you with free backups or a free domain, HostGator checks all the boxes on their shared hosting plans. Once your first term ends, the Hatchling plan renews at $7.99 per month.
3. InMotion Hosting
Best for Shared and VPS Hosting
💲 Price: USD $2.29/mo
💾 Disk Space: 10 GB
👌 Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets
Pros | Cons |
The best provider for shared and VPS hosting. The student plan includes a free domain. | Pricey renewal cost. Regular sales can come out cheaper than the student discount. |
InMotion offers a student discount on its shared hosting power plan, reduced from $9.99 to $4.16 per month. Oftentimes, this is InMotion’s intermediate shared hosting plan, recommended for small businesses, and it has the features you would like to create and manage your site.
The Power plan comes with an excellent array of features, including a free domain for one year, free SSL security, unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited email. You’ll also greet marketing tools and 24/7 support, so you won’t be alone if your site crashes at 4 a.m.
If you want to grow your site, the InMotion Power plan will comfortably place you in your appreciation for bigger and better things.
Pricing
How generous is that discount? Well, how long you sign up depends. You’ll pay $4.99 per month for the six-month plan or $4.16 per month for the 12-month plan. That’s a 58% discount once you sign up for 12 months!
The discount applies to your first period; the facility plan will renew at a monthly rate of $7.99. The free domain lasts one year, then renews at $15.99 annually.
It is always worth checking what sales the vendor is running at the time of sign-up. The new user promotion is often cheaper than the student discount and will generally lock in that price for up to 3 years. So please confirm that you are getting the simplest offer you can get.
To check out InMotion’s student plans, all you have to try is enter your .edu email and claim your discount. If you don’t have a .edu email address, that’s fine: register the Confirmation Team with your student ID, and they will set you up.
4. SiteGround
SiteGround can be a hosting provider that will calculate for a safe, solid, and reliable service. It has been recommended by WordPress for its easy and fast WordPress hosting, and it manages 2 million domains.
Pros | Cons |
Reliable hosting. Free daily backups. | No free domain. Limited disk space. |
SiteGround offers discounted accommodation for university students and free accommodation for faculty to share with their students, so if you would like to receive accommodation for your course, it is worth asking.
Students can get web hosting for only $3.99 a month, with all of SiteGround’s standard StartUp shared hosting package features. There are some of them:
- 10GB of storage
- Automatic daily backups
- Free email accounts
- Unmetered traffic
- cPanel with Softaculous
- Support 24/7
That’s not an unpleasant list of features for just $3.99 per month, which is 73% off the regular price.
The main drawback is that you don’t get a free domain on the academic plan, so you will have to use an existing domain, buy a replacement one, or use the free subdomain provided by SiteGround. We recommend replacing this along with your own domain because it will appear as if this “Anything.sgedu.site”, is not very professional.
You pay the normal student price of $3.99/month during the primary year, then pay the regular price of $14.99/mo after the first year ends. However, if your university has already partnered with SiteGround, you don’t need to pay a penny!
You must be a student in North America to qualify and use your university email address once you register.
5. iPage
Best for Cheap Prices, but at the Expense of Speed
💲 Price: $1.99/month
💾 Disk Space: Unlimited
👌 Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets
For its shared hosting, iPage offers a very easy and appealing pricing structure; it’s just a charge. Until the promotional period expires, your “one-size-fits-all” shared hosting costs $1.99 a month for all. That’s a 75% discount off the regular price!
Pros | Cons |
Free domain. Great features. | Poor uptime score: 99.94%. No free backups. |
iPage is not the most powerful or fastest provider out there, but it is one of the most profitable. Their single shared plan starts at $1.99 per month and comes with features to benefit both small and growing sites.
The best thing for college students is that this package comes with a lot of free extras. The list goes on and on a free domain, free SSL, free drag-and-drop website creator, free domain upload, free 24/7 support, free email address…
The promotional price lasts for your first period and then automatically renews at $7.99 per month. Your free domain lasts for one year, renewing at $14.99 per year at that time. Anyone can sign up for the current plan, so don’t worry if you’ve lost your student ID card.
6. DreamHost
Best for Storage Space
💾 Disk Space: Unlimited
👌 Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets
DreamHost is another provider on this list that has been officially recommended by WordPress, so if you want to host your WordPress site, this is often an honest place to look. He also called for our investigation into the amount of storage space he includes in his plans.
Pros | Cons |
A large amount of storage is available. 97-day money-back guarantee. | Not the best help and support on the market. |
DreamHost’s cheapest plan is their Shared Starter hosting plan for $2.59 per month. You get website hosting, a free domain, free SSL security, and WordPress pre-installed. These things are designed to make running your site as easy as possible.
DreamHost’s shared hosting plans also come with a 97-day money-back guarantee, which is extremely generous and means you will sign up risk-free.
The $2.59/mo price applies to the three-year plan, so this price would last for that three-year period and then renew at the regular rate of $4.95/mo.
Are There Any Other Web Hosts For Students?
We have explored the best university student accommodation providers and support our research in-depth.
However, these aren’t the only hosts you can choose from, which is why we’ve also lined up three of the simplest (aka free) web hosts for you to check out. We have not included them in the main part of this review because we have not yet subjected them to our rigorous research process.
These are the simplest free web hosting providers:
- AccuWeb
- InterServer.net
- ZNetLive
Before you get too excited, bear in mind that most hosting companies would enable you to purchase their hosting after a certain amount of time.
Let’s take a look at what you get from these providers and, therefore, the free student accommodation they provide.
Head-to-Head Comparison
Features | AccuWeb Hosting | Interserver.net | ZNetLive |
---|---|---|---|
Storage | 2GB | Unlimited | 500MB |
cPanel | |||
Email addresses | 25 | Unlimited | 5 |
SSD storage | |||
Backups |
Now that you know the basics each provider offers, we’ll dive into more detail for each of them.
1. AccuWeb
Best for Free Student Hosting
💲 Price: $1.99/month
💾 Disk Space: 5 GB
👌 Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets
AccuWeb Hosting was founded in 2002 and offers a variety of hosting options, including shared, cloud, VPS, WordPress, and dedicated hosting. It also offers services like domain registration and SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates.
AccuWeb Hosting prides itself on positive customer relationships, ensuring 99.99% uptime, hassle-free cancellation, and 100% customer satisfaction. That is quite promising!
Pros | Cons |
Free until you graduate. Lots of features. | Requires some work to apply. No free SSL is included in student hosting. |
AccuWeb student accommodation offers you the essential features of your shared hosting plan. These include:
- 2GB SSD Storage – Room to store your site data, with fast SSD (Solid State Drive) storage for the simplest performance
- 30GB Bandwidth – The amount of knowledge that will be transferred between your site and your users determines the proportion of traffic your site can handle.
- There are 25 free email addresses available, which are ideal for running a company.
- Free backups ensure that your website is not affected by server failures or data loss.
- Free CloudFlare – speeds up your site and keeps it safe from online threats.
You can host a website with the free student plan, and there will be no pop-ups, banners, or ads cluttering up your pages. Although the 2GB storage doesn’t sound like much, it should be sufficient for many medium-sized websites.
If you already have a website, you will migrate it to the AccuWeb student plan for free. Because AccuWeb uses cPanel for its dashboard, it’s easy to add any extras you want, like WordPress, with a single click.
The downside to the AccuWeb hosting package is that a free SSL certificate is not included. SSL encrypts information like login and master card details found on your site and is important for any website.
You can buy SSL directly from AccuWeb starting at $49 per year or find cheaper deals through a registrar like GoDaddy.
The good news is that your accommodation will remain completely free until you graduate.
As long as you are a student at a well-known university (or close to becoming one) and can provide documentation proving your enrollment, you are eligible to use it.
The actual application process requires a bit more effort but shouldn’t take an inordinate amount of time. First, you must love and follow AccuWeb on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
Once you’ve checked that, you’d like to make a two-minute video on the next big tech trend in the next 10 years. Post it on one of your social channels, like YouTube, then email AccuWeb; it is best to send it from your student email account.
AccuWeb says it offers two to three students free hosting accounts a day. Our top tip would be to search YouTube for “Free Student Hosting at AccuWeb Hosting” for other candidates’ videos. If you give AccuWeb feedback about your experience, you seem to have a better chance of getting your account approved.
2. InterServer.net
Best for Unlimited Features
💲 Price: $2.50/month
💾 Disk Space: 5 GB
👌 Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets
InterServer.net can be a hosting provider that offers a good variety of services, from standard shared hosting to dedicated servers. It is known for being an inexpensive provider with a helpful 24/7 support team.
Pros | Cons |
A clear price plan means you know what you’re signing up for. Unlimited storage, bandwidth, emails, and websites. | Only free for the first year. |
InterServer.net’s free student hosting service provides a slew of useful features. This is due to the fact that it is a premium web hosting package, which normally costs $2.50/month. You get infinite data, bandwidth, websites, and email accounts. That’s pretty much limitless!
You also get free backups and a free SSL certificate, so you don’t need to worry about extra costs. Get $7.99 Domain Registration, InterServer.net uses SSD storage for better performance and features the simple cPanel as a standard instrument panel.
The InterServer.net student plan is free during the elementary year. Then it renews at $2.50 per month, which isn’t bad, although you may want to look around to make sure you don’t miss out on even better deals.
It’s easy to sign up for free student housing of the year; all you have to try is to register with your student email address (ending in .edu) or contact InterServer directly.
3. ZNetLive
ZNetLive started in 2002 and now offers hosting, domain, email, security, and more. Whether you want SSL certificates or business email, ZNetLive has something for everyone. It provides WordPress hosting on shared, cloud, and dedicated servers.
Pros | Cons |
Free domain name. Very user friendly. | Free domain name. Very user-friendly. |
ZNetLive aims to provide students with free, straightforward, and easy-to-use hosting plans – encourage brainstorming and stand out from the gang. This is often an excellent philosophy, but what characteristics do you get to make this concept a reality?
Well, you get a reasonably long list of decent hosting features, including:
- 500 MB storage
- Unlimited data transfer
- Five email accounts
- Free name
- Backups
- Free SSL
You also get more technical tools, like Secure Shell (SSH) access, which allows you to connect with your server remotely. ZNetLive also uses cPanel and the Softaculous script installer, making it easy to install additional applications.
Your student accommodation package is certainly free until your first renewal, so if you sign up for an annual contract, your first year will be free. Your plan is then re-evaluated at each renewal, so theoretically, your plan should remain free until you graduate.
However, ZNetLive cannot guarantee that you will continue with the free plan in the future, so there is a small chance that your hosting package will not be free forever, which is not ideal!
All you have to try is submit your student ID as proof once you sign up for the free hosting plan.
Summary
This article has trained the simplest providers for college students, from zero-dollar plans to hero hosting providers that charge a tap for tons more quality. We have compared and broken them down to give you the simplest idea of which one is the real one for you.
Recap
- Bluehost – best overall hosting provider, from $2.95/month
- HostGator – best for uptime, from $2.75/month
- InMotion – best for shared and VPS hosting, from 2.29/month
- SiteGround – best for reliability, student discount of $3.99/month
- iPage – best for cheap plans but at the expense of speed, from $1.99/month
- DreamHost – best for storage space, from $2.59/month
The best student hosting provider is Bluehost. It’s generally the simplest, so if you’re not sure which host is best for you, it’s an honest idea to start with Bluehost’s shared plans. It’s also the simplest WordPress host, so keep that in mind when choosing!
HostGator has an impressive uptime, and InMotion can be a powerhouse of features (especially on its shared and VPS plans). SiteGround offers the most profitable student discount, but remember that the price won’t last forever.
If you have the time and motivation to make a video for AccuWeb Hosting, this is often the best option to get free hosting, as you won’t have to pay the slightest bit until you graduate. However, you will need to purchase your own SSL certificate, and there is no guarantee that your request will be successful.
In fact, you can find the simplest deal among the regular sales for new clients that most hosting providers offer. Much like finding a bargain at a name-brand store rather than a charity shop, this will guarantee value and quality in the long run. You’ll lock in your sale price for up to 3 years, while student discounts often end after just one year.
Whichever you choose, you will expect low prices and great things from these providers; the only question is, which one will you decide on?
Best Students Web Hosting: FAQs
Which hosting provider is the cheapest overall?
AccuWeb Hosting’s free student plan is the best you will find, provided your application is successful. Otherwise, iPage and SiteGround have the most profitable selling prices on the market with promotions of $ 1.99 per month.
Is it important whether or not my provider uses cPanel?
It depends on you! Your dashboard is the central hub where you manage your account, servers, and sites. cPanel can be a popular dashboard option because it’s easy to use and really reliable, so you’ll be confident that it will give you a clean and simple interface from which to run your site. However, not all providers use it, and that’s fine; it really depends on personal preference!
What is the most profitable type of accommodation?
Shared hosting is the cheapest type of hosting because it shares resources with other sites on an equivalent server. While it is the most limited of all types of hosting, it is also the most cost-effective and is offered by most providers. In our research, InMotion turned out to be the best-shared hosting provider, while DreamHost offered the best value for money.
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