The Best Web Hosting for Canada In 2024

In this article, we’ll list, compare, and review the best web hosting options for Canadian businesses in 2024.

Our top pick for best web host Canada is Bluehost, a provider with an excellent uptime track record, an easy-to-use platform for beginners, and data centres in four locations worldwide.

These features make Bluehost an ideal choice for users looking to create websites quickly, run them without performance issues, and reach a global audience. However, it faces tough competition this year, so we’ll list 10 great web hosting providers to help you find the service that suits your business and personal needs.

Table of Contents Table of Contents

1. The Best Web Hosting for Canada Ranked
2. The Different Types of Web Hosting Explained
3. What Features Can I Expect From a Canadian Web Hosting Service?
4. The Best Web Hosts In Canada Compared
5. The Best Web Hosting Canada Reviewed
6. Factors To Consider When Comparing Web Hosts
7. Conclusion - What is the Best Web Host in Canada?
8. How We Test Canadian Web Hosts
9. How To Choose the Best Web Hosting In Canada
10. FAQs

Show Full Guide

Table of Contents

1. The Best Web Hosting for Canada Ranked
2. The Different Types of Web Hosting Explained
3. What Features Can I Expect From a Canadian Web Hosting Service?
Show Full Guide
4. The Best Web Hosts In Canada Compared
5. The Best Web Hosting Canada Reviewed
6. Factors To Consider When Comparing Web Hosts
7. Conclusion - What is the Best Web Host in Canada?
8. How We Test Canadian Web Hosts
9. How To Choose the Best Web Hosting In Canada
10. FAQs

The Best Web Hosting for Canada Ranked

Bluehost’s features make it the best web hosting service for small businesses in Canada, but opting for any of its competitors wouldn’t be a mistake. Here’s a quick rundown of what makes each of them a solid choice this year:

1. Bluehost — Best for small businesses looking for affordability and growth.
2. HostGator — Pre-installed WordPress makes it ideal for first-time users.
3. GoDaddy — Best web hosting company in Canada for shared hosting performance.
4. MochaHost — Best for creating unlimited websites with a single plan.
5. InMotion Hosting — Top-tier choice for large websites with unlimited NVMe SSD storage.
6. Hostwinds — Best for website building without prior experience.
7. Hostinger — Ideal for creating online stores with high traffic.
8. Siteground — Best for cloud web hosting company with free daily backup, even for the cheapest plan.
9. HostPapa — Excellent security with DDoS and antivirus protection.
10. DreamHost — Best for building a WordPress website with a drag-and-drop editor.

The Different Types of Web Hosting Explained

Before you start building your website, you must pick the best web hosting type that suits your business’s needs, budget, and requirements. Here, we’ll explain what each web hosting type does best to help you make an informed decision.

• Shared Hosting — Affordable and lets you host websites on shared servers, meaning you’ll share resources with other businesses. This web hosting type is ideal for smaller websites, blogs, and businesses on a budget.
• VPS Hosting — Virtual private server (VPS) offers more scalability and control than shared web hosting because it partitions a physical server into virtual servers, giving each website its own resources. VPS works best for small to medium-sized businesses.
• Dedicated Hosting — Provides a physical server dedicated to a single website, app, or organization, giving you maximum control, resources, and performance. Perfect for high-traffic, large websites.
• Cloud Hosting — Scalable, reliable, and flexible solution that uses a network of interconnected servers to distribute resources. It’s ideal for businesses expecting rapid growth and traffic spikes.

What Features Can I Expect From a Canadian Web Hosting Service?

The best Canadian web hosting sites offer more than website builders and domain registries. Here’s a list of features the best web hosting services provide to enhance your site’s security, functionality, and performance:

• Development Tools — Hosting services typically support popular programming languages like Python, PHP, Node.js, and Ruby. Additionally, you’ll have FTP and SSH access and access to tools for efficient code management with platforms like GitHub.
• Email Hosting — Most web hosting Canada services allow you to create email accounts associated with your domain for professional communication.
• Database Support — Hosting plans support databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Microsoft SQL for storing and managing data.
• One-Click Installation — Providers often offer tools to simplify the installation of content management systems (CMS), such as WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla.
• Security Features — Web hosting services offer SSL certificates, firewalls, malware scanning, DDoS protection, and similar security features to keep your websites safe and running.
• Monitoring and Analytics — Providers offer monitoring and analytics tools to help you monitor your website’s uptime, performance, and visitor behaviour.
• E-commerce Features — Web hosting services that support online stores offer e-commerce features like payment gateway integration, shopping cart software, SSL encryption, and more.

The Best Web Hosts In Canada Compared

Here, we’ll compare the best web hosting services for Canada head-to-head to help you find the one that best suits your needs and requirements. Prices have been converted to CAD where necessary but make sure to check current conversion rates.

The Best Web Hosting Canada Reviewed

Now that you’ve seen our suggestions for this year, we’ll break down their features and pricing structure, list their pros and cons, and compare them to their competitors.

1. Bluehost — Best Canadian Web Hosting Provider for Small Businesses

Bluehost is ideal if you’re looking for a beginner-friendly service that offers in-depth website customization without breaking the bank. In testing, Bluehost gave us the best page loading times of 0.6 seconds on average, thanks to Varnish, a powerful caching system.

Thanks to its affordable plans and exceptional performance, Bluehost is an excellent pick for small businesses looking to establish an online presence without major investments. Besides its low-cost plans, even its starter plan offers perks, such as a three-month trial for its professional email services, a benefit providers like Dreamhost lack.

Furthermore, Bluehost offers free content delivery network (CDN) benefits with its cheapest plan, while providers like HostGator and Hostinger don’t. These features make Bluehost the best web hosting Canada service for smaller businesses looking for a service that offers value for money.

However, its higher-tier plans come with storage, website, and email limits that providers like InMotion and HostPapa don’t impose, making them better for medium to large-sized businesses.

2. HostGator — Best Web Host in Canada with Pre-Installed WordPress

HostGator offers some of the best web hosting provider plans for beginners, especially if you’re interested in hosting a WordPress website. The tool also integrates your WordPress website into its control panel, making website configuration, content creation, and admin tasks a breeze.

Like Bluehost, it offers 10 GB of SSD storage, free SSL, and free domain with its cheapest plan, but it goes even further by allowing you to create email accounts tied to your domain for free, whereas Bluehost only offers a free email hosting trial for three months.

While Siteground offers free daily backups of your data, even with its cheapest plan, HostGator offers backups as a paid add-on. The add-on costs CA$2.70/month, meaning HostGator can get expensive quickly if you’re running a business on a budget.

With that said, HostGator’s user-friendly interface and the tips you get from the get-go as its user can be invaluable to a first-time WordPress hosting user, which makes it worth every cent if you’re just starting out.

3. GoDaddy — Best Web Hosting Canada for Shared Performance

GoDaddy is one of the most versatile services we tested this year. Its starting plan offers more, faster storage than our previous two picks. GoDaddy also has quicker storage due to using NVMe rather than SSD technology. So, what’s the difference between NVMe and SSD? NVMe operates at almost 10 times the speed of an average SSD translating to better performance.

With GoDaddy, you can create up to 10 websites with its higher-tier shared hosting plan for Canadian businesses. Bluehost, in comparison, lets you create up to five, while HostGator supports just three.

GoDaddy is also the best pick if you’re looking for a dedicated hosting provider for a small business, as its plans start at just $21.99 CAD/month for a server with 4GB of RAM and two vCPUs. That’s much cheaper than competitors like Dreamhost, which charges $202.36.

However, Dreamhost’s low-cost dedicated hosting server offers 1TB of HDD, while GoDaddy’s cheapest plan has just 100GB of NVMe.

4. MochaHost — Best Canada Web Hosting for Creating Unlimited Websites

Like GoDaddy, MochaHost offers NVMe SSD storage, 100% uptime, and fast page load speeds. However, you’ll lack free email hosting, which makes its plan more suitable for individuals and small businesses than larger companies and websites.

While advanced users may find its slightly outdated interface appealing, it’s not an ideal fit for beginners, making Bluehost and HostGator better picks if you’re going to launch your first website.

Unlike most competitors, MochaHost lets you pick between Linux and Windows hosting, offers free SSL certificates for all your domains and subdomains, and lets you host unlimited websites with all but its cheapest plan, making it one of the best picks for users looking to build content-heavy websites.

In addition, it has some of the best security features, including DDoS protection, anti-malware, brute-force attack protection, and more.

MochaHost also provides a one-click installation for WordPress, like HostGator, and it will keep your website bug-free with cutting-edge technology, like LiteSpeed. However, besides helping with your account’s setup, it lacks the managed WordPress hosting HostGator offers.

5. InMotion Hosting — Top-Tier Hosting Provider for Large Canadian Websites

While most of its competitors offer a free domain for the first year of your subscription, InMotion doesn’t. However, it makes up for that by providing an impressive 100GB of SSD storage and 10 email addresses with its cheapest plan.

Like MochaHost, InMotion offers a full security suite to keep your website safe from cyber threats and forced downtime, but its interface is more user-friendly. However, it will cost more to host unlimited websites with InMotion Hosting.

Opting for its top-tier plan, Pro, gives you a dedicated IP, advanced caching, unlimited email addresses, websites, and NVMe storage. These features make InMotion an exceptional choice for large websites that expect a lot of traffic spikes, something providers like Bluehost and GoDaddy couldn’t handle with their shared hosting provider plans.

However, if you’re looking for a service that makes website building a breeze, Hostwinds may be a better choice. InMotion doesn’t lack website-building tools, but they are outdated and may confuse first-time users.

6. Hostwinds — Best Canadian Web Hosting for Website Building

Hostwinds’ plan starts on the pricier side, but that’s because it offers unlimited disk space, dedicated servers, unlimited databases, and unlimited email accounts with all its shared hosting plans. Some of these features, like unlimited storage and emails, aren’t found even in Bluehost’s most expensive plan.

First-time web hosting service users will appreciate Hostwinds because of its user-friendly, intuitive web-building tool. Its simplicity will allow you to create a website from scratch in no time, and opening its cPanel lets you access Softaculous, which makes installing 400+ apps, including WordPress, a breeze.

HostGator may be a better pick if you’re looking to launch a WordPress website, as Hostwinds doesn’t offer managed WordPress hosting. Likewise, you’d be better off with Hostinger if you’re looking to host an online store. However, neither of those two providers will serve you better than Hostwinds if you want to launch a blog or small website.

What we liked the most about Hostwinds is its website migration service, which is free and managed by its experts. They do it quickly and efficiently, and you won’t have to lift a finger until they invite you to test your site once it’s already migrated to their platform.

7. Hostinger — Best Web Host for Online Stores in Canada

Hostinger starts strong, with its cheapest plan offering 100 email accounts, 100GB of SSD storage, a free domain, and excellent WordPress features with its low-cost plan. However, you won’t find a dedicated IP like with Hostwinds until you upgrade to its top-tier plan.

Cloud Startup is the plan that secured Hostinger’s place on our list this year. It’s one of the most feature-rich plans on this list and ideal for WooCommerce online stores. With Hostinger, creating WooCommerce websites with up to 1,000 listings and 500 monthly orders is a breeze, and you’ll notice no performance issues.

In addition, unlike its competitors like HostGator or Hostwinds, Hostinger provides an array of AI-powered tools. You can use these tools to create a logo for your store, analyze visitor behaviour via automatically generated reports, and even ensure that your SEO attracts as many visitors as possible.

Although it may not be a better choice than InMotion for large websites, first-time web hosting users looking to launch online stores won’t find a better service than Hostinger.

8. Siteground — Best Cloud Web Hosting for Canada

Siteground should be your first pick if you’re looking to start a high-traffic website with a cloud hosting plan and need to migrate an existing server to a different platform. It offers free domains, SSL certificates, emails, and even email migration.

That means you won’t need to start from scratch, as Siteground will transfer everything down to the content of your emails, with no technical expertise required. On the other hand, its shared hosting plans pale compared to its competition, mainly because the providers offer low storage.

However, large businesses looking to launch a high-traffic website are in luck. Siteground offers exceptional, fully managed cloud hosting with numerous features to support growth and help avoid unexpected errors.

Unlike most competitors, its cloud hosting service offers auto-scaling. This feature automatically adds more resources to your server during traffic spikes, ensuring the visitors to your website face no inconvenience, such as slow loading times.

However, not even its top-tier cloud hosting plan offers unlimited storage. If that’s a feature your business requires, InMotion Hosting is still a better option for your high-traffic website.

9. HostPapa — Best Web Hosting Canada – Excellent Security

HostPapa’s cheaper tiers aren’t as fast as some competitors, like GoDaddy or InMotion Hosting, but it’s one of the most secure providers you could pick. It’s also one of the only web hosting services to provide phone customer support for all customers, which is excellent news for first-time users.

Its starting plan offers industry-standard benefits, such as a free SSL certificate and free domain, but it also has 100GB of SSD storage right from the start. In addition, the plan offers Cloudflare-compatible servers bundled with its DDoS protection and cloud cybersecurity features.

Opting for its top-tier shared hosting plans offers unlimited storage, bandwidth, and websites. In addition, unlike most competitors, it provides a Wildcard SSL certificate, which automatically secures all subdomains.

Another unique feature is its fully managed web application firewall, which will block malware from reaching your website by providing proactive security. However, its interface and control panel are outdated, making Hostinger or DreamHost better picks if you’re after a modern interface.

10. DreamHost — Best Canadian Web Hosting Site for Building a WordPress Website

DreamHost is a provider that often makes the top five on our lists, but this time, it fell behind others because of its recent uptime issues. Compared to its competitors, like Bluehost and Siteground, who guarantee and maintain 99.86% to 100% uptime, DreamHost is more prone to being responsible for your website’s downtime.

However, DreamHost is still the best choice to create a WordPress website from scratch. Its website-building tools, paired with numerous professional templates and a site-design wizard to guide you through the process, can help you create a WordPress website much faster than others.

In addition, DreamHost offers some of the most comprehensive managed WordPress hosting plans, a hosting type providers like MochaHost lack entirely. Its WordPress plans provide one-click staging, which lets you test new plugins, themes, and code before pushing the changes live.

In addition, its top-tier WordPress plan, DreamPress Pro, offers priority customer support. This support team will proactively monitor your websites, help with troubleshooting, and provide expedited assistance, making up for the service’s below-average uptime.

Factors To Consider When Comparing Web Hosts

Whether you’re looking to launch a blog or a high-traffic website for an enterprise, evaluating the features of your future web hosting provider is crucial. Here are the key factors to consider before you decide on a plan:

• Pricing and Plan Features — Found a plan you like? Before you subscribe, compare it to plans other providers offer in the same price range. You may find that another provider offers better features with their plans in the same tier, such as unlimited emails or free CDN.
• Server Responsiveness and Speed — Your website’s performance doesn’t just affect the load times of your visitors but also your SEO rankings. That’s why the best SEO web hosting providers offer excellent performance and server speed. Don’t opt for providers with loading times longer than 2 seconds or HDD storage.
• Uptime — Having a perfect or nearly perfect uptime is important for businesses, as it affects user experience and engagement. Downtime leads to shorter session durations, higher bounce rates, and decreased engagement. Look for providers with a 99.9% or higher uptime guarantee to ensure a smooth experience for your audience.
• Intuitive Dashboard — If the web hosting service’s interface is hard to use, you’ll struggle to configure and optimize your websites. Look for a service with a modern, easy-to-use interface to ensure your website’s performance won’t suffer from technical issues.
• Security — Don’t opt for providers that don’t offer a free SSL certificate, anti-malware, and DDoS protection. In addition, ensure your future web hosting provider keeps its server software and infrastructure updated to prevent data breaches and other cyber threats.
• Customer Support — Technical issues, such as downtime, can be frustrating. Look for a provider that offers 24/7 customer support. Preferably, opt for a service with phone, live chat, and email support, and read through third-party user reviews to ensure they’re responsive.

Conclusion – What is the Best Web Host in Canada?

After thorough research, we’ve picked Bluehost as the best web hosting provider in Canada this year. And while this ranking stands for individuals, small businesses, and low-traffic websites, the other providers on our list can handle any other challenges.

Bluehost offers the most affordable web hosting plan for one website, with free SSL, a free domain, managed WordPress, a free content delivery network, and more features to help you launch a website.

Alternatively, you can opt for one of its dedicated hosting or VPS hosting plans if you’re looking for a service that will handle high-traffic spikes and offer more performance. Bluehost has a 30-day money-back guarantee for its shared hosting plans, allowing you to try it risk-free today.

How We Test Canadian Web Hosts

We took a multi-faceted approach to testing these web hosting providers, from analyzing their plans to subscribing and using their services. Here’s what we checked to help you make an informed decision:

• Pricing — We compared dozens of web hosting providers and included the ones offering the most value for money.
• Features — All providers on our list offer unique features and excel at providing a specific type of service.
• Integrations — We looked for providers compatible with third-party integrations that will help you launch and moderate your websites.
• Automation — Website migration, resource allocation, and website setup can all be tedious tasks, so we included providers to help you handle them efficiently.
• Ease of Use — While some providers on our list offer more user-friendly interfaces, we didn’t include providers with outdated or dysfunctional panels and features.
• Third-Party Reviews — We combed through third-party reviews from their long-term users to ensure no service on our list has an overwhelmingly negative score or unresolved issues.

How To Choose the Best Web Hosting In Canada

Choosing the right web hosting service can be crucial to your business’s success. That’s why you should carefully evaluate your budget, needs, and preferences before you commit to a subscription, as it’s often a long-term choice. Here are some factors to consider before you make the call:

• Budget — Cheap web hosting services can be ideal for individuals and small businesses, but you should still compare them to competitors and ensure they offer transparent pricing.
• Ease of Use — Look for a provider that offers guides, step-by-step tutorials, and a modern interface. Launching your first website can be far less daunting with the right tools.
• Compatibility — If your website requires constant monitoring, opt for a provider with well-designed mobile apps to help you monitor your website’s performance or manage its cloud infrastructure.
• Key Features — Ensure the provider you opt for offers all the features you need for your project. For example, if you want to launch a WordPress website, look for the best WordPress hosting providers, as they’ll offer better management, customization, and scalability.
• Scalability — If you’re running a growing business, look for providers that offer numerous plans with features you may need soon. For example, starting a small website with just 10 GB of SSD storage is fine, but if you expect it to grow, ensure the provider offers unlimited storage as well.
• Customer Support — Ensure that your future web hosting service offers knowledgeable, responsive customer support. Ideally, it should be available 24/7 via multiple channels, including phone, live chat, and email. Additionally, read third-party user reviews on websites like Trustpilot to ensure the service’s long-term users are satisfied.

FAQs

Ilijia Miljkovac

Technology Writer

Ilijia Miljkovac

Technology Writer

Ilijia Miljkovac is a Techopedia writer with seven years of experience covering all things tech. He writes about cybersecurity topics, spanning VPNs, antiviruses, and hosting, helping to inform B2B and B2C audiences about the latest products and services. He's written for publications such as Business2Community, TheTechReport, Comparitech, and more. When he's not working, Ilijia spends his time hiking in nature or holed up in his apartment gaming.

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