Best Web Hosting (India) in 2023
We tested the top 5 hosting providers for Indians to help you save time and money.
Unfortunately you won’t find a big high-reputation host with data centers in India. Not even the biggest web host around: GoDaddy (with over 40% of the Indian host market-share as of 2020).
Earlier this year, the managing director of GoDaddy did say they may build a center in order to be closer to their local customers. At the moment, the closest centre (from any big host) is in Singapore.
Should site owners and businesses who are targeting Indian traffic go for a smaller host provider? What are the ways around this?
Table of Contents:
How CloudFlare Speeds Your Indian Website
Cloudflare works as the middleman for situations like this, by caching content in locations around the world.
Caching is a process browsers and apps use to store data to increase performance speeds. For instance, say you delete your web browsing history, this is also known as “clearing your cache”.
You’ve deleted stored files like images associated with the site 
, which means it will load slower next time. It’s like driving to a new location for the first time versus having the route already stored in your brain.
This lowers the number of requests needed to load the content, i.e. more speed.
5 Best Web Hosts in India 🇮🇳 (2023)
Below, you can look into the five best web hosts for India and decide which service best suits your specific needs. We've ranked the hosts based on testing in Chennai, New Delhi, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, and Jaipur. Those hosts that displayed particularly fast load times and great uptimes ranked higher with price also being a major factor.
Let's dive into it.
1. Hostinger: Cheapest & Fast Bangalore Speeds
Key Specifications:
PROS
CONS
This is one host to choose if you’re a new website owner or running something basic. You’ll get security, a 99.9% uptime guarantee and a good range of hosting types including one of the most powerful: cloud 
.
- India Uptimes: 99.99%
- Starting: £0.99/mo (48 Months)
Best Features 
What we like is the free Zyro website builder.
AI quickly customizes your site without coding or design skills necessary. Pick a ‘designer template’ that suits your business, run a few tweaks and add any videos (available even on the cheapest Single Web Hosting plan.)
If you just need a business card running online, somewhere where you can be found, or if you are a beginner, get going with very little starting costs.
Find: a free SSL cert, 100GB bandwidth, 1 MySQL database, and Github integration.
Drawbacks
Hostinger is best suited in the number two position because, while it has the cheapest plan available, there are few features.
For instance, you’ll get no backups on the Single Web Hosting tier, nor a domain name when you sign up (unless you want to pay an extra charge).
Most restrictive is the two subdomain limit.
Unless you only need a homepage and another for say contact details, this will probably be too much of a restriction, and you’ll need to hop up to the next level up, Premium Web Hosting, which is £1.99/mo.
India Uptime & Speeds
Despite some drawbacks, Hostinger beats HP in Bangalore speeds.
That's 331ms, compared to HP's 566ms, both well underneath a second, which is very good for conversions and user satisfaction.
Further tests show averages in the same ballpark at just over 300ms, almost too fast to notice. Chances are that this is the most applicable to basic websites that do not have complicated themes.
If you have a look at Hostinger’s live status server page, you will see they have a 99.99% running uptime average over the last two years.
In most cases, Hostinger manages to have servers online 100% of the time, each with 1000Mbps connection lines focused on max performance and stability.]
Try Hostinger: The Best Web Host India has.
2. SiteGround: Singapore Servers/Fast Cloud Hosting Bangalore Loadtimes
Key Specifications:
PROS
CONS
No VPS or dedicated plans, and pricier shared plans than our first two hosts, but Siteground’s performance scores are very good with impressive Bangalore speeds (possibly the best so far in this guide).
- India Uptimes: 99.99%
- Starting: £2.99/mo (12 Months)
Best Features
Siteground is an active company and this is possibly its biggest strength.
Their technology page shows recent technological integrations. For instance, the new NGINX Direct Delivery system improves on their content delivery network, delivering source coding and media files more efficiently.
A few other mentionables: level 1 caching, three popular hosting types, a free website builder, custom cPanel, unlimited bandwidth/emails, as well as a 24/7 support team (full Siteground review for more).
Drawbacks
VPS and dedicated plans are missing altogether. Siteground does provide cloud hosting though, which sits in somewhere between the two (with dedicated being the most powerful).
The second drawback is price regarding short-term cycles: monthly StartUp plans begin at £16.99! (Equivalent to basic cloud/intermediate VPS in price).
India Uptime & Loadtimes
SG has a stellar 99.99% uptime score (measured over 2 years). Can’t fault them here at all. If you want a website that’s always available, we recommend SG as a strong choice.
Their Bangalore server response times (307ms) are impressive. So far, they have the fastest server response times in this hosting review guide. In terms of speed alone, SG might be the best hosting India provider.
How? As mentioned in the intro to this guide, no major host has datacenters currently running in India. The two closest will typically be in either Indonesia or Singapore.
SG works around this by having a host of CDN spots, represented by blue bubbles.
These act as middlemen, caching static data ready for your visitors to quickly access your page, even if they are not located in the same country as the source server.
All servers are green friendly and run on an ultra-fast network.
3. HostPapa - Best Web Host in India (Special Discount for our Readers Below)
Key Specifications:
PROS
CONS
Hostpapa should give you excellent value-for-money, serving the Indian subcontinent: speeds, uptimes and features all included.
- India Uptimes: 99.99%
- Starting: £1.95/mo (36 Months)
Best Features
The Starter Plan gives you everything needed for a basic setup: top-of-the-line security, two domains, a 99.9% uptime guarantee, unlimited bandwidth, above industry-standard performance, and extensive support.
They have a money back guarantee too and it’s three times longer than usual, at 90 days instead of a month: the overall best hosting India has for sheer value.
Jump ahead to the Speed/Uptimes section for more about HP’s performance.
Drawbacks
Mainly they’re lacking in some of the hosting types associated with intermediate to advanced websites (those with higher traffic and/or some other need for more power).
Fortunately, HP does offer VPS plans, but you will not find the two most powerful types: cloud and dedicated hosting.
We advise that you cancel the auto-renewals setting once you sign up, as this can leap-frog your monthly payments from £1.95 to £8.99 after your term expires. It’s pretty standard practice for hosts to do this, that said.
India Uptime & Loadtimes
We’ve said it time and time again that having a sub 1-second loading time for your site is very good for sales conversions.
As you can see, Bangalore times are well within this (results are not full loadtimes, just server response times).
[There are many speed factors but baseline metrics look great.]A week-long test of a HP-hosted site showed Bangalore response-times of 566ms, which is only a fraction more than Singapore times.
It's important to mention Singapore, as HP has a datacenter located there and it’s the closest to the Indian subcontinent. There’s only a fraction higher increase in loadtimes than Singapore.
Lastly, HP guarantees a 99.99% uptime, but in reality it's possibly somewhere closer to 99.95%. We’ve had to rely on independent testing, as HP unfortunately does not have their own live stages page giving monthly uptime percentages.
4. GreenGeeks: Best Hosting India for Eco-Friendliness
Key Specifications:
PROS
CONS
If you want a company that places a high value on eco-friendliness, while still delivering great performance (with fast Bangalore server speeds), this is a good option.
- India Uptimes: 99.98%
- Starting: £2.36/mo (36 Months)
Best Features
They guarantee a 300% renewable energy return investment.
In other words, GG will purchase three times the energy used to power their portfolio of websites. This is spent in the form of wind energy credits 
and amounts to over 600,000kWh of electric wind energy, compared to a consumption of only 12000.
They’re equally generous with Lite (most basic) plan; you’ll get: a website, free SSL, free domain for a year, and unlimited storage, plus more.
Drawbacks
The main drawback is that lack of cloud or dedicated hosting plans.
These two types are the top two for power, with VPS being next in line, underneath cloud hosting. If you are a bigger business trying to serve more traffic, GG may have a fatal glass ceiling.
India Uptime & Loadtimes
We mentioned in the intro just how powerful CDNs are.
CDNs are systems that cache or store information related to your website. In this case, GG uses a global CDN Network.
They hold up very well (Bangalore speeds). Results for a US-hosted website were even more extreme:
Hosting from the US and targeting Indian traffic? (See full GreenGeeks review).
GG may be an optimal solution, with datacenters in two parts of the US: Chicago and Phoenix.
Though the Amsterdam datacenter is the closest GG has to the Indian subcontinent, Bangalore requests are still among the fastest in this review guide.
If unsure as to whether you should commit to GG, in favour of a provider that offers datacenters closer by, you can try them out for 30 days under a money back guarantee.
5. HostGator: Best Web Host India For Range of Hosting Types
Key Specifications:
PROS
CONS
HostGator, though with the slowest Bangalore speeds, offers all host types: shared, managed WP, VPS, dedicated, even reseller + a good money back length (might be a partial refund).
- India Uptimes: 99.98%
- Basic: £2.20/mo (3 Years)
Best Features
HG’s tech support team will migrate any pre-existing website you have, for no added cost: your domain name, databases, site & cPanel backup files, as well as source scripts.
In terms of price, they’re somewhere in the middle (when you factor in each element like ‘add-on fees’). Certainly not the cheapest in this review guide but you get (almost) everything you should need for a basic website: a free SSL certificate, unlimited storage, and a free domain name with website builder.
Drawbacks
We mentioned almost what’s needed for a basic website. You’ll have to pay more (‘add-on fees’) for “available” extras.
Extras include security Sitelock monitoring, backups, Gmail, and SEO tools. If your site is basically functioning as an online business card, these elements might not matter to you so much, however.
India Uptime & Loadtimes
HostGator’s guarantee offers a month free for any sever drops below 99.90% uptime.
Monitoring them over a 12-month period, they averaged in at about 99.98% off time, which is near-enough the very top tier of Hosting providers.
The speeds are not nearly that impressive, which may be due to them only having data centers in the US: one in Houston, Texas and the other in Provo, Utah (see HostGator review for more).
Their server request times for Bangalore are roughly double the average times for the other hosts in this guide (not a good start, though request times aren’t the full picture).
We've added HG as an option for best web host India as, firstly, it has the full range of housing types. Still, unless you have a very good reason, we would advise you choose a web host higher up in our rankings.
The other reason you might choose HG is surprising, considering that they also don't use SSD storage (unless you opt for cloud hosting).
Those two factors should go against page loading speeds. Neither do they use NGINX servers or advanced caching tools like Siteground’s SuperCacher. Despite this, HostGator still manages surprisingly fast loading times. Consider trying them out for a 45-day period and seeing whether you get good results.
One of the best web host providers India has.
Best Web Host India: Buying Guide💳
When deciding between web hosting providers, you want to keep these factors in mind:
Server Location
People often say the internet is in the cloud, but the opposite is true.
The world is connected to cyberspace by about 300 underwater cables supplying the world with 99% of internet data traffic.
These oceanic submarine cables connect stock traders in New York to those in London, and transmit PewDiePie from the US to New Delhi.
Each line is owned and operated by private companies and is the backbone of international internet as a global network (in development for 157 years, beginning with telegraph lines, railroad lines, then entering waters as submarine cables).
Also known as transatlantic networks, the primary reason for the delay (or latency) in the transmission of data (even if only milliseconds), is proportionate to the length of the cable line… though data travels at light speed, these cables are not 100% efficient.
To serve Indian traffic, you’ll optimally want a datacentre located in Singapore or Indonesia.
Storage
If you intend to run a website that contains a lot of high file-size components, factor in hard disk space. In that case, try not to bottleneck yourself: choose a provider with a high or unlimited storage option.
For instance, for media & game/product reviews sites, expect you’ll use a lot of media files: Flash files, images, audio and video.
And eCommerce sites usually have lots of individual product pages with high quality images and zooming features, which take up significantly more space than a blog that has mostly words.
Bandwidth
Similar to the above: your website bandwidth is a measurement of how much data it’s allowed to use within a specific time period.
Things that can increase bandwidth usage include traffic (aka the number of visitors). And the amount of resources (i.e. data) your visitors are using up will also drain your bandwidth.
Uptime & Speed
Uptime is the opposite to downtime.
Having more uptime means your website is available at more or all hours of the day and night. There are a range of studies suggesting that your website going down is a good way to lose long-term visitors.
The speed of your pages (also known as loadtimes) also heavily impacts.
As you can see from this graphic, the slower your website loads, the lower the conversion rates. There's a dramatic drop from 3.3 seconds to just a second more. From there, things get worse.
CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A content delivery network is an immense network of servers connected around the world. The servers store a cached version of your site.
No matter where your visitors are accessing your site from, loading times are decreased as a result of much of the prerequisite data being readily available. It will not have to download again on the visitor’s computer.
For instance, even if a website is being hosted from a server in Canada, a person in New Delhi can access a CDN server nearest to where they are located, rather than the one in Canada doing all of the heavy lifting (which is why HostGator and GreenGeeks are included as best hosting India contenders). There's also some protection against DDoS attacks.
Related Read: How to Delete Google History
SSL Certificates
Getting an SSL certificate is one of the simplest ways to boost your SEO ranking.
Not having one could generate a warning on the browser of your website visitor, alerting that your website may not be secure to visit. This might put them off. But exactly what does an SSL certificate do?
Most visibly, it adds an “s” to the HTTP section of your URL.
Behind the scenes, it encrypts data transferred between your site’s server and the visitor, with an extra layer of protection from intrusion attempts. The most basic SSL is a DV SSL (domain validated).
Support
You don't think you’ll need support until you do, and in many cases, it becomes needed much sooner than expected.
Whether you need to migrate data from your previous website, or are having a technical issue while getting the DNS servers to speak to each other so that your website is running online, or there’s a sudden crash when you upgrade WordPress - tech support can take charge of this all on your behalf.
That way you save time, maybe a lot of it. We recommend you always ensure your chosen provider offers live chat as well as phone support; and preferably 24/7, so that you can get help any time of the day.
Backups
Even weekly backups are better than none: if you happen to be hacked or infected, or WordPress crashes for some unknown reason, it's much better to have a carbon copy of all of the hard work you did, rather than having to recreate it from scratch.
It’s also worth checking the cost to redeploy the older version of your site, as it's not always free.
Number of domains/sites & subdomains allowed
We mentioned that hosting our only gives you two subdomains, even though it's cheapest plan is extremely cheap.
It's also very common for website owners to own more than one. Perhaps you have to separate products or you would like to create a separate photo page that is not linked to your main domain name.
FAQs
What is a Domain Name?
Domain names are alphanumeric tags visitors can use to gain entry to websites. Think of these as like attractive masks.
Without this alphanumeric alias, each person would have to remember the numerical IP address coding for the site they are trying to visit (e.g.: 192.168.3.11).
Fortunately, domain names were invented to substitute for IP addresses which makes it a lot simpler to browse. You instead type in Facebook.com, for example, rather than a string of digits (the IP address).
What are Domain Registries?
Domain name registrars (see the best domain registrars) have authority to sell and manage a directory of internet domain names, all with assigned IP addresses.
For a registrar to operate legally, it has to be authorized by a top level domain registry (aka gTLD), or by a country code registry (ccTLD).
Once so, these companies can manage the sale of domains by paying customers. In order to do so, the registrar has to let the top-level registry know that a reservation has been made (many are made each day).
All of the hosting providers on this list are also domain name registrars. However, we recommend that you purchase your domain name from a specialist, so that the ownership is not tied to the hosting plan.
What’s the Best Hosting India Option: Linux or Windows Web Hosting?
This depends on what app it is: if you’re using one of the more popular CMS systems like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, or an eCom platform, you’ll be using a PHP framework. In that case, you will want to go for Linux hosting.
However, if it’s an application that’s based on the ASP, .NET, or another Microsoft related system, you will want to host it on a Windows server.
Which is the Best Web Host India Has?
There's not really a clear-cut answer to this. It will depend on what your project is mostly.
We listed the basic plans for each provider in this guide, but if you are looking to have a particularly capable website, look at some of the higher level hosting types, starting with VPS as a minimum for businesses - and even going further to something like cloud hosting.
The further up the ladder you go, the more you will have to pay for the extra performance.
Having a website is not always about making direct online sales or building organic traffic. You may just want a place where people can see your website, as though handing out a business card.
Those on our list even offer free website builders too.
In that case, particularly for simple websites, a starter tier should be good enough in most cases. In that case, you have to divide what the best hosting India provider looks for you by your budget vs. performance needs. See the quick summary below.
Summary 📝
-
Best Web Host India: Cheapest Offer
Hostinger is the cheapest option on this list, and fast (for basic sites), but you have to be clear about what your baseline needs are, and keep in mind that you'll be limited to 2 subdomains. -
Best Hosting India: High Traffic
Siteground improves upon HP’s offerings by giving the option for cloud hosting, though this will only be needed if you are a website already with a significant amount of monthly traffic. -
Overall Best Web Host India for Value
We believe HostPapa gives the best combo of load/uptimes and pricing, with VPS plan types which are an essential for small businesses (as a minimum). -
Best Web Host India: Eco-Friendliness
GreenGeeks wins here, offering 300% renewable energy investments for the energy it spends on hosting your websites, while still managing to have terrifically fast server response times in Bangalore.Our dark horse?
To end our summary, HostGator may offer surprisingly good Bangalore speeds, with a 45-day money-back guarantee to boot.
To end our summary, HostGator may offer surprisingly good Bangalore speeds, with a 45-day money-back guarantee to boot.You Might Also Like:
