AccuWeb Hosting WordPress Hosting Review

Disclaimer: Our reviews are not sponsored, as we used our own money to purchase hosting subscriptions. Our reviews are 100% based on our sole opinions. Reviews contain affiliate marketing links where we get a commission when you purchase or subscribe to that service. Read our Affiliate Marketing Policy here. Also, please verify all product and pricing information directly with the linked brands, as product offerings change often. FastestWP.Website is not responsible for errors or product discrepancies.

We proudly host our website on Rocket.net.

AccuWeb Hosting is over 20 years old and claims to manage over one million websites. While AccuWeb provides WordPress hosting, they also offer several other hosting solutions. In fact, the founder started AccuWeb because he could not find a good Windows hosting platform. Today, AccuWeb offers Linux and Windows VPS, dedicated hosting, and even special hosting for forex traders.

We will only be reviewing AccuWeb’s WordPress hosting in this review. We review AccuWeb’s WordPress hosting features and show you our results of testing AccuWeb’s service in the real world.

AccuWeb Hosting WordPress General Features

We love how many standard features AccuWeb includes in its WordPress plans, especially for the money. For under $10/month, AccuWeb includes a free SSL certificate, firewall support, malware detection, up to 150 email accounts, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee. While many of these features are standard with other WordPress hosts, those hosts are often more expensive, especially if they don’t include email hosting.

We always recommend using a professional website transfer the host offers so you don’t have to waste your time. Plus, in case something goes wrong, you aren’t left trying to clean up the mess. Thus, we love that AccuWeb Hosting provides free professional site transfers, including transferring your cPanel settings if you currently use cPanel. Finally, we appreciate that AccuWeb has server locations worldwide, except for South America.

AccuWeb Hosting Optimization Features

The first thing we noticed about AccuWeb is that they host on LiteSpeed servers. We have had wonderful experiences with LiteSpeed, especially the LiteSpeed plugin. One benefit to hosting on LiteSpeed servers is that LiteSpeed gives you free QUIC.cloud credits in the LiteSpeed plugin. You can use these credits for image optimization or to generate unique CSS per page to speed up loading.

In terms of speed, AccuWeb offers both Brotli data compression and HTTP/3 support. These are the latest Internet standards and perform better than their predecessors, GZIP and HTTP/2. Additionally, AccuWeb provides full-page caching, although only on the server side through LiteSpeed. Full-page caching speeds up initial load times, although the fastest caching is also on the CDN-side, which is not provided by AccuWeb.

Speaking of CDNs, AccuWeb offers its own proprietary CDN, which AccuWeb claims has 62 edge servers in 25 countries. Although AccuWeb’s geographic presence is quite good, note that Cloudflare offers over 260 edge servers. We appreciate that AccuWeb includes its CDN on the Professional and Advanced WordPress plans. However, we did not appreciate that AccuWeb does not mention on its website that you must purchase a one-year or three-year plan to receive the CDN. Monthly plans do not get the free CDN.

As such, we don’t recommend getting the lower-level WordPress Startup plan unless you only serve local customers and thus don’t particularly need a CDN. While AccuWeb allows you to buy their CDN as an add-on for $3.95/month, note that it only comes with 10GB of bandwidth per month. You are better off purchasing the Professional or Advanced plans if you intend to get a CDN.

AccuWeb Hosting WordPress Hosting Plans

As mentioned above, we wouldn’t recommend the lowest-tier Startup plan unless you don’t need a CDN and are running relatively simple websites. If you need a CDN, we’d recommend the Professional or Advanced plans. In fact, the Professional plan is our recommended plan overall because we believe it provides the best combination of features and pricing.

We love that the Professional plan has unlimited websites and plenty of storage space – 75GB! Plus with monthly allowances of 2TB of bandwidth and 250,000 visitors, you’ll have plenty of resources to run your websites. We’d only recommend the Advanced plan if you need extra storage space, bandwidth, or monthly visitors. The Advanced plan also comes with 4GB of RAM instead of 3GB on the Professional plan if you really need that extra GB.

Note that you can buy an extra 10GB of storage space for $6/month or an extra 100GB of bandwidth for $20/month. However, these prices seem very expensive compared to the WordPress plans AccuWeb offers. You would only want to purchase these upgrades if you already have the Advanced plan and you maxed out. Otherwise, it is cheaper to just upgrade to a higher plan and get way more storage space and bandwidth for less cost.

AccuWeb Hosting WordPress Performance Tests

As with all of our web hosting reviews, we tested AccuWeb Hosting using our test WordPress website to see how AccuWeb performs in real life. We ran all of these tests using the mid-level WordPress Professional plan. There are three components: Google Core Web Vitals, GTMetrix Performance, and worldwide speed testing. The results are below.

Google Core Web Vitals – Lighthouse Scores

We are impressed with AccuWeb’s performance on Lighthouse, especially its overall performance score of 91. Top-tier WordPress hosts scored 93-94 using our real-world test website, so 91 is quite good comparatively. Note that AccuWeb did especially well in the LCP category, scoring 68. Many of the lower-tier hosts scored way below 50 on LCP, contributing to a low overall performance score in the 80s.

GTMetrix Performance

Unlike AccuWeb’s Lighthouse performance, AccuWeb stumbled on GTMetrix testing because we tested the Professional plan without the AccuWeb CDN. However, as we based our website on AccuWeb’s server in the United States, it is not surprising that its North American performance is excellent. San Francisco and Vancouver both had excellent scores, closely riveling top-tier web hosts such as GoDaddy and Rocket.net. Chicago wasn’t as fast, although it still posted good scores.

Outside of North America, scores weren’t that great. However, for not having a CDN, we feel that AccuWeb’s international performance is quite good and a lot better than many other cheap hosts we tested. Also, remember that if you only serve customers in your local region, you may not even need a CDN. Since AccuWeb has servers in Europe, Asia, India, and even South Africa, you can locate your server where your customers are and expect quality performance, especially for the price.

Worldwide Load Testing

As mentioned regarding the GTMetrix scores, we tested AccuWeb without their CDN. Thus, it is no surprise that load test scores worsened further away from North America. Yet again, the scores are not bad, accounting for not having a CDN. We tested WordPress hosts with way worse scores in the same price range. Plus, these scores will change depending on where your server is located. Thus, when looking at this map, use North America as the guide for your local performance based on your server location.

Our AccuWeb Hosting WordPress Review Recommendation

We really liked AccuWeb, especially the value its Professional plan provides. In general, we found that all of AccuWeb’s WordPress plans come with all of the standard features we want, including firewall support, malware detection, free SSL certificates, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. We also love that AccuWeb uses LiteSpeed servers, as we have excellent results when using LiteSpeed.

AccuWeb’s performance on our real-world test websites was quite good, especially in North America where we hosted our test website. We are disappointed that AccuWeb does not include its proprietary CDN on its lower plan, nor does AccuWeb include the CDN on monthly Professional and Advanced plans. We would hope that AccuWeb improves its advertising in this area to make this clear, or better yet, just add the CDN to the monthly plans so you can try it out.

Nonetheless, for not having a CDN, AccuWeb performed quite well on our tests. Our recommended plan is the Professional plan because it comes with unlimited websites, a lot of resources, and the price is super reasonable. However, if you need top-tier web hosting, we recommend considering Rocket.net, Kinsta, or WPX.