The short version
One website, small storage, and a renewal price you know before you buy. That's it, that's everything.
We recommend Hostinger Premium at $1.99/mo on a one-year term. Before you buy, look at the renewal price in the table below.
A blog does not need what they sell you
A normal article loads once and gets cached. No accounts, no orders, no stock. Which means:
You don't need much storage. A blog with 200 posts and their images uses under 10 GB.
You don't need many websites. You have one blog. Plans advertising "unlimited websites" are selling you something you will not use.
You don't need daily backups. If a post is lost you restore it. Not like a store, where orders disappear — that difference is explained on the stores page.
You don't need a server. And you won't until traffic gets very large.
What you actually need
Speed. A reader who waits leaves. That comes from caching and the host, not from an expensive plan. Read site speed and hosting.
A free domain if you haven't bought one — it saves you roughly a month's fee.
An SSL certificate. Free everywhere, so don't pay for it.
A sensible renewal price. This is the biggest line, and it's next.
The number to look at
The first-year price is a promotion. The real number is the renewal, and companies differ a lot:
| Plan | First year | Renewal | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hostinger Premium | $1.99 | $10.99 | 5.5× |
| Namecheap Stellar | $2.28 | $5.88 | 2.6× |
The entry prices are close. After a year the difference shows.
Figures are read from our table when you open the page. See the comparison page.
What we recommend
If you're just starting
Hostinger Premium at $1.99/mo.
- Three websites — add a second blog later without upgrading
- 20 GB SSD — more than a blog needs
- Free domain for a year
- Weekly backups
- CDN
Before you buy: it renews far above the starting price, as the table above shows. So buy the longest term you can live with: on 48 months you pay $1.99/mo, and the first renewal comes only after four years.
When to upgrade
Not before you see one of these:
- Traffic grew and the site got slower without you changing anything
- Storage is nearly full
- You want to add a shop to the blog — then read the stores page
Before that, upgrading is money spent on something you will not use.
Quick questions
Is free hosting any good?
For a first experiment only. It has real problems, explained in free hosting: when it works.
WordPress or something else?
WordPress has the most tutorials and plugins you will find. What matters is in the best WordPress hosting.
I have a blog on Blogger and want to move it?
You can. The method is in migrating your hosting.
What does a blog cost per year?
Hosting as above, plus the domain if it isn't free. The full sum is in what a website costs.