A startup’s website has an odd job. For months it is a landing page that costs almost nothing to run, then a launch or a funding announcement sends more traffic in a day than it saw all year. The hosts here either start cheap and grow with you or scale on their own when the spike comes. This is one of four audience lists beside our main WordPress Hosts list. The others cover small business, agencies and enterprise.
How we chose
- Cost at the start: a plan a pre-revenue company can justify.
- Scaling: more resources in minutes, without a migration.
- Developer workflow: staging, SSH or Git, and a way to test before going live.
- Spike handling: what happens on launch day.
- No lock-in: a standard WordPress install you can move later.
Verdict
Hostinger is the cheapest credible way to launch, and ScalaHosting gives you a managed server of your own for not much more. Pick Convesio if your traffic comes in bursts, since automatic scaling is the point of the platform. Technical teams that already run their product in the cloud can keep WordPress beside it on DigitalOcean, and founders who want no hosting work at all should look at WordPress.com. Once you have a team and steady revenue, the hosts on our enterprise list come into range. Our sister site HostList keeps the full rankings, and Seahawk’s WP Services can build the site while you build the product.