How to Choose the Best WordPress Hosting?
Finally, you are ready with your business plan. You have figured out everything to run a successful WordPress and even started collecting all the major resources. Now, all you need is a good home for your WordPress site. A perfect WordPress hosting plan helps you know your goals and accomplish your business objectives.
With the huge number of WordPress hosting providers available in the market, it is a tough task to choose the best WordPress hosting for your business website. It is a decision that you need to invest time and energy in because the performance and services your hosting provider brings a direct image on your sales, SEO, website's performance as well as uptime.
There are many other factors that make it difficult to make your decision. In this guide, we will take yours through the process of choosing the right WordPress hosting that will help you make the right decision.
Before going through every hosting provider, first of all, determine what types of WordPress hosting services need. Here are different types of WordPress hosting available:
Some hosting providers like WP Engines and Kinsta offer WordPress managed to host services, built specially to host WordPress websites and blogs. You can easily start with their dedicated WordPress support team. It is quite helpful mainly if you do not want to get bogged down in the technicalities of your site.
Caching systems, WordPress auto-updates, CDNs, WordPress backups, these are some additional services offered by managed WordPress hosting providers.
Managed hosting can be the best choice if you do not want to get involved with the technical side of things. It allows you to focus all your attention on enhancing and adding great content to your site. And when your site grows, your site can easily be scaled with the additional resources that your web hosting company will provide.
Self-managed hosting is different from managed hosting. Under it, you rent the server or particular hosting space. Here, you have to install and set up everything yourself. It varies on time of self-managed hosting service you choose, probably with most hosting providers, you need to configure the web server, FTP, SSH, mail server, and all the required services yourself.
There is the only situation when you get support from the company when there are issues related to your server package and connection.
With VPS Hosting or virtual private service, you do not get the complete resources of any one server. Instead, they said the server is partitioned with your needs in mind. You get a certain amount of disk space, memory and processing power. You have root access by which you can modify the performance-related components of the server to suit your needs. It needs quite a bit of technical expertise. So this is not recommended if you have no previous info about the website and hosting.
Advantage of this hosting is that VPS plans and hardware are quite flexible and scalable. With most hosting plans, you just need to pay for the resource that your site uses.
If you with the VPS WordPress hosting, your site will never slow down and become unresponsive due to server overload. For this, you only need to make sure that it has adequate server resources available to it.
It is an ideal option for an intermediate level blogger or developer who wants to create a website made to measure for a specific purpose.
Initially, self-hosting may sound like a crazy thing but, it provides you with all the flexibility you need.
This is the best option for bigger businesses. With managed hosting, you are limited to running just WordPress and using the host's specific setup. This is great but some business needs more than that.
The only cons of self-managed hosting are that you need to take care security and management of the server. If you are not experiencing a system engineer, you cannot do it.
Now you need to decide what is the best hosting option for your WordPress website- shared hosting or dedicated hosting?
Under the shared hosting service, multiple websites share the resources of a single server. Shared hosting is a good solution for a beginner website with a few hundred visits a week. When the website traffic goes high, you need to migrate your site to a dedication service as the performance of shared hosting services is quite limited. Moreover, your site performance can get impacted by other websites. In a shared hosting environment, the security of your site depends on the security of other websites running on the same server.
Under a dedicated WordPress hosting plan, all the server's resources are used by your site. Besides, when you go with the dedicated one, you are free to install the software or application you want. Here, you get an additional task of taking care of the server's hardening, management and security.
See, the best WordPress hosting for your site may not be suitable for someone else. It varies as per your needs. Every different type of WordPress web host has its advantages and disadvantages. For your site, go with the option that brings all the range of features and functionality you require for your WordPress website.
After you decide on the type of WordPress hosting service you want to go for, now compare the hosting providers:
For many people, the cost is the primary consideration when choosing a web host. Here, the focus is to go for the cheapest offer that might be okay for beginners but it is not the best move to make.
Always remember that generally, you get what you pay for. Just like any other business, web hosts get profit when they seem to offer your unlimited everything. Overall, it is great having a good bargain, but always takes a closer look at features before jumping on the first cheap plan comes in your way.
Features and level of performance are two other major factors to look for when you are going to choose the best WordPress hosting. Also, choose the plan with features you need to run your site. It makes no sense to go for a WordPress hosting with features you do not need.
Prepare in advance and jot down a list of what you need today. Here is some point to consider:
Do you need to host more than one WordPress site?
Is HTTPS supported?
Does the hosting service provider offer a migration tool or service?
Are you okay to pay extra for backup services?
Do you get it suitable to take advantage of a free domain?
These are some questions you should ask yourself. After all, it is all about you and what you want to accomplish. With a solid and proper plan for your site, you can choose the right WordPress hosting.
It varies on your familiarity with different hosting providers. If you are expert in technical aspects and know WordPress installation, migration, security, caching, site backups, restorations, and other important things. However, you know everything, there is always the potential for that one issue that mess everything. It is better to have a web host who can support you. Today, most of web hosting services ensure some degree of support and provide support via phone, live chats, emails, support ticket system, and support forums.
The desired uptime of any site is as close to 100% as possible. But achieving a 100% uptime is almost impossible because the problem occurs and maintenance is required. Though many hosting provide a 99.9% uptime.
Reputed hosting providers back their uptime assurance with a reimbursement policy in their service level agreement. Many hosting companies have a status page on their sites, from where you can check the status for their network, servers' health, connections, etc.
Regular backup might not seem very important until your server's hard drive gives up and your data is not recoverable. Or perhaps your site will get infected so badly that restoring it from a clean backup point will be quite easier than manually cleaning up everything.
Under the managed WordPress, the hosting provider will back up your site on a regular basis. In case, the worst happens, your site will be covered. Make sure to read the fine print. Some companies do not back up the wp-content or upload folders that mean you lose all your images.
You have a lot of options to choose from. Every business has its unique needs, so what works for you does not necessarily work for others and vice versa. When going for any WordPress hosting solution, check our review. Also, go over what others are saying online. Contact with the hosting providers and get all your doubts clear.
Hopefully, having read this post, you now have a clearer picture of the different packages available, and you will be able to make the right decision based on your website, needs and budget.
Have we missed any important point? If you have doubt or question, let us know in the comment section below. We will be happy to hear from you.
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