How can I choose the best WordPress hosting?
In this post we’ll tell you how to choose the best hosting platform or server for your WordPress website or blog.
You might be starting out a new venture or online blog or website for your personal or business, or might be migrating away from your current web hosting service. Don’t worry, in this post we will cover this very important point.
Let’s begin with few basic questions.
Why choose WordPress for your website or blog?
It is one of the best open source CMS/blog online that powers more than 35% of the internet websites. There are plenty of reasons to choose WordPress over other open source platforms like Drupal, Joomla, Typo3, concrete5, TextPattern, Bolt, Silverstripe, b2evolution, Django, Nucleus, Lifetype etc. There are certainly many benefits that WordPress provides over other hosted & paid platforms like Medium, Ghost, Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, Google Blogger etc.
- Free to use commercially
- Strong online community as support and answer queries
- Thousands of plugins to extend the website functionality
- Free themes to extend design
- Actively developed by developers around the world
- Can be extended to build anything like LMS, CMS, Blog, Corporate website, Mail Management, HRIS, Podcasts, Project Management, Invoicing, CRM, Client Management, E commerce, Communication etc.
- Multi-blogs management
- SEO optimized for best performance
- Multiple options to host – self-hosted, free WordPress hosted, Managed WordPress hosting etc.
If you search these keywords online –
- Best WordPress Hosting, Cheapest WordPress Hosting, 99.9% uptime WordPress Hosting, Fast and Secure WordPress Hosting, Fastest WordPress Hosting, Best hosting service for WordPress, Top 10 WordPress hosting services etc.
You may try any of these combinations and you will get 100s of results on Google and Bing. The question is how to choose the best out of these 100s results that will help you get the best page ranks in Google and Bing but also performs best for your users at the same time with more than 99% uptime.
There are many hosting options that are available online like – Free hosting at WordPress.com, Shared Website Hosting, Virtual Dedicated Servers (VPS), Dedicated Servers, Business hosting on cloud, and managed WordPress hosting. In this guide, we will try to help you choose the best WordPress hosting for your website or blog.
Now prioritize the factors that will help you choose the best solution as per your needs –
- Development – Are you a developer or will hire a developer to develop or code your website. If you are going to self-develop the website and can code then self-hosted solution is best. Just download the WordPress community edition and install on your server and host it. If you do not want to design it yourself, you can hire a developer or try a free WordPress solution
- Price – Decide your budget. A typical hosting will cost you from $3 to $20 per month depending upon your system requirements. If this is something that you can spend and hire a developer or do coding yourself then go with self-hosted solution. Remember in free solutions there are lot limitations and branding issues. You want to showcase yourself as a freebie user to the world if you are here to do some real business.
- Support – What type of support you need. If you can code and research the online support documentation or you can pay for support and everything than Managed WordPress Hosting is best
- Scale – How fast you want to scale up the website or blog. The service provider should be able to support you with scale up when you need it by providing enough resources and up-gradable options. On cloud you should be able to handle traffic spikes and if required should be able to add RAM and CPU power on few clicks. the upgrade should not be manual. Manual upgrades are painful and may result in loss of data if you are not a experienced developer.
- Simple Setup – The setup should be completed in few clicks and fully automated. Even if it is for upgrades as mentioned earlier. We provide a simple interface from where you can simply install the WordPress in the domain directory of your choice and then login and start creating pages and blog posts in less than 5 minutes.
- Security – The servers should have latest software and hardware to avoid hacking attacks. You should also backup your website regulalry by using automated methods or manual. There are plenty of plugins to support this and we also provide backup service to backup your data on cloud.
- Speed – Burstable resources. There could be sudden spikes in traffic from social media or Google or Bing due to some campaign then all these traffic should not cause slowness or delay in response time from your website. The servers should allow burstable RAM or CPU to your website for temporary usage without causing any increase in your billing. This is perfectly managed in our Managed WordPress Hosting.
To cover all the aspects and plan your future, it’s always best to have a self hosted solution and to manage scale-ups and expansion go for Managed WordPress Hosting.
Some other guides related to WordPress that you would need to manage WordPress on your own. You can find these answers in our knowledge base.
- How to install WordPress on your hosting account manually using MySql, Php, Apache?
- How to install a plugin in WordPress?
- How to install and customize a theme in WordPress?
- Managing Users in WordPress?
- Managing SEO settings in WordPress?
- Installing woocommerce plugin and running an ecommerce website in WordPress?