Our Method

To avoid bias, we focused all comparisons on measurable metrics rather than personal opinion. We either collected and measured data that is available to the general public, or simply referred to the information already listed on the provider’s website.

We compared our most popular product, the Web Hosting Pro plan, with a similarly priced service offered by HostPapa, their Business Plan

The result is meant to be an informative comparison, broken down by topic, and intended to help you find the best web host for your needs.

The data collected is actual as of December, 2023, and may have changed since.

Company Basics

Hosting Essentials

Hosting essentials include important features such as how many websites you can publish, how big each website can be and how many people can visit them each month. Understanding these hosting essentials is important before any hosting purchase, because if you exceed these limitations you may find your service disabled or you may be asked to upgrade to a more expensive plan.

Both plans have the same core hosting essentials.

Pricing

Pricing features include the total price of the first term, total renewal price, and whether or not the company charges in Canadian dollars. Paying for recurring services like web hosting in Canadian currency can save Canadian businesses quite a bit in the long run, and in most cases companies that don’t charge in Canadian dollars are not Canadian-based.

The renewal price is another critical factor many people who are new to web hosting fail to consider. It is common practice for web hosts to offer a discounted price for the first payment term, with a significantly higher renewal price.

While WHC strives to keep costs as low as possible even on the renewal price, HostPapa’s price structure significantly increases the cost come renewal time. While this is a common practice among many web hosts, WHC goes against the grain here by offering affordable solutions across time.

Email & Communication

This includes features such as the total number of email accounts you may have on a hosting account, and the amount of space available for each email account. Email accounts (and the size of the inboxes) can be crucial for businesses that have large teams or send/receive many emails on a daily basis. Email storage is also an area where many web hosts strive to save money.

HostPapa’s 1GB per inbox storage limit can become a problem. In terms of size, this is only 50% of the 2GB inboxes allowed by Web Hosting Canada. In other words, with WHC you’ll spend a lot less time choosing between and downloading/deleting important emails.

WHC has slightly fewer emails per hour, but 200 is likely more than enough for average small business usage, and helps protect your account in case of breach. WHC also includes free email marketing software so you can keep in touch regularly with up to 500 contacts.

Security & Backups

Security and backups are a key feature which many web hosts either leave up to you or charge extra for. Having daily backups is important for the integrity of any live website, and maintaining security and encryption are essential for creating trust with your website’s visitors.

WHC’s daily backups are included in the base price, saving you nearly $40 per year. While that may not seem like a large annual charge, the cost of backups alone nearly double the overall annual price of the hosting. For a business or website that’s just getting started, those dollars could be better spent elsewhere.

Performance

Performance is arguably one of the most important categories in this comparison. While things like security and emails can be essential in many situations, if your website doesn’t perform well, no one will want to visit it.

That’s why Web Hosting Canada takes website performance so seriously, from the server hardware all the way up to the web application level.

WHC runs all of our hosting on LiteSpeed webserver, which can be 3-6x faster than Apache (used by HostPapa). This is according to cPanel, the company that provides the control panel software most used by both WHC and HostPapa.

Both hosts use eco-friendly datacenters (a win for Canadians overall), but WHC offers a larger number of Canadian points of presence, allowing for faster load times in your local area.

Marketing & SEO

Once you have a safe, stable, high-performing website, it’s important to get some visitors to it. That’s where the marketing and SEO aspects come in. SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is the process of creating content that will rank on page one of Google and other search engines. Other methods of driving traffic to websites include social media marketing and SEM (search engine marketing).

In order to get customers started with their search engine marketing, both WHC and HostPapa offer Google Ads credits as a bonus incentive. But only WHC has SEO assistance and green hosting badges available. A little push can mean a lot when you’re getting started with SEO, and a green hosting badge is a significant trust factor that will boost visitors’ confidence in your site.

Support & Service

For many web hosting customers, having excellent support and service is crucial. If you don’t have a working knowledge of web hosting and the web apps you’re using, it’s easy to run into problems. That’s where having experienced, knowledgeable support available 24/7 becomes so important.

Because support and service are so essential, it’s unsurprising that most of this category is even. WHC and HostPapa both provide 24/7 phone, chat, and ticket support, as well as free website migrations. Migrating a website, especially a large one, can be a tricky technical process best handled by experts, so this is a big benefit to less tech-savvy customers.

But looking at the services provided does not reveal the whole picture. It’s also important to consider the quality of those services, and according to public opinion, WHC is the clear winner. WHC's Google My Business, has a high ratings and over a thousand total reviews. WHC also has a great public rating on Facebook, while HostPapa’s Facebook page does not permit public reviews.

Potential For Growth

While WHC and HostPapa both offer reseller hosting and virtual servers that clients can use when they outgrow regular web hosting, only Web Hosting Canada provides a dedicated servers option.

Being able to scale to a fully dedicated server is useful for growing websites or web applications that have important performance, data, security or reliability requirements. Dedicated servers don’t share their hardware resources with any other clients or services, so their full power and potential are dedicated only to delivering your business and website content.

As a WHC customer, we’ll take the hassle out of migrating to a cloud or dedicated server by helping you each step of the way. This includes having our technical team schedule and perform the migration for you!

We believe that this difference represents WHC’s mission well: to empower small businesses to achieve great things, and that starts with having great, scalable hosting - without hassles or limitations.