How to Choose the Best WordPress Hosting
WordPress hosting. Get it right the first time and you’ll have a great time working in and/or on your WordPress-based business. Miss the mark the first time and you’ll regret it sooner or later. Choosing the best WordPress hosting isn’t something you want to take for granted, more so when you’re investing a lot of effort, time and money in growing your business. I mean, a great WordPress host will help you to achieve your online dreams easily and quickly, or rather, without hassles.
In this post, we will look into how you can choose the best WordPress hosting, so you can have the peace of mind you need to run your business. When you’re ready to choose the right WordPress hosting, I will recommend a few great WordPress hosts to make your work easier. By the end of this post, you should have everything you need to choose the perfect WordPress hosting for your online business.
Without wasting another second, let’s drop the anchor and set sail.
How to Choose the Best WordPress Hosting
In this section, you and I will go over the factors you need to keep in mind when choosing the perfect WordPress hosting for your business. But before that, what are the WordPress hosting requirements?
WordPress Hosting Requirements
If you’re a beginner, you might not know WordPress is a super light-weight script, with minimal hosting requirements. As such, the platform is almost compatible with any web hosting company worth its salt.
To run WordPress smoothly, the host you ultimately choose should provide MySQL version 5.0 or greater and PHP version 5.2.4 or greater. And that’s it. Of course, you should steer clear of web hosts who don’t provide stable versions of these platforms.
Choosing the Best WordPress Hosting
PHP and MySQL aside, what other factors should influence your decision when choosing the best WordPress hosting for your next project?
Cost of WordPress Hosting
A simple Google search will take you to a million and one hosting providers, each with their own quote. The temptation here is to go with the cheapest option, but this is usually the wrong move to make.
While we all want to save money, remember when it comes to web hosting – or anything else really – you get exactly what you pay for. What to do? Investigate the features you’re getting for the price. Are they commensurate the price you’re paying? Does the deal seem too good to be true?
Another thing, would you expect first-rate customer support from a web host who charges you $1 per month for “unlimited” bandwidth, storage and what not? I don’t think so. Oh by the way, in some cases, the “unlimited everything” trap is meant to suck you into shared hosting, which should be okay for a small WordPress blog. You will, however, need to upgrade to a better hosting package when your site starts generating tens of thousands of visitors a day.
The one million dollar question, therefore, is: How much should you pay for WordPress hosting? Well, that depends on your needs and the amount of money you’re willing to spend on hosting. Nothing is to stop you from bypassing the $6 a month shared hosting package in favor of the $100 managed WordPress hosting plan.
If you have the budget, please go for the $100 plan because you will definitely get a better deal there. If you must start right away, but your budget can only make room for a $6/month shared hosting plan, please let nothing hold you back. You can always upgrade to a better hosting plan with the growth of your site.
Note: There are many hosting packages spanning the $6 to $100 spectrum (and beyond), so don’t feel limited to our two examples above. All the same, the amount of money you shell out for a hosting package will ultimately depend on…
WordPress Hosting Features You Need
If all I need is a tiny WordPress blog to write about my grandma cookies, and my unusually active but uneventful nightlife, then a shared hosting package should provide all the features I need.
If, on the other hand, you wish to start an online education portal that will pull visitors in their millions, you can’t peg your hopes on a shared hosting package. You’re more suited to a dedicated server in the least. Enterprise WordPress hosting should provide you all the features you need to realize your big online dreams.
Everything boils down to one basic fact: Don’t go for a web hosting solution with features you don’t need to run your WordPress-based business. Have a plan in hand, so you can determine all the resources and features you will need when you finally launch, and in the future.
A few questions to ask yourself include:
- Will you host more WordPress sites in the future?
- Do you require dedicated email facilities or are you comfortable with the stock option?
- Does your WordPress host of choice provide reliable backups or will you need to invest in a standalone backup service?
- Other than WordPress, will you require other scripts? If so, does the host support the additional scripts?
- Does your WordPress hosting provider have traffic caps? If so, what are the limits? Are these limits in line with your traffic goals?
- Are there performance caps? Processor or memory limitations?
- Are you comfortable with the control, admin panels etc provided by your WordPress host?
Have a plan to work with – a plan that outlines all your business needs – and you won’t struggle choosing the best WordPress hosting for your online biz.
While web hosting companies will have the juiciest of promotional materials, you can always tell more about a particular company by visiting forums and reading reviews. Start with a Google search, and be thorough – this is your business – your livelihood – that we’re talking about. If you must, contact your prospective WordPress hosting company and ask questions.
WordPress Hosting and Customer Support
At some point, you will need to contact your web host because something isn’t working as it should. Happens all the time; it’s inevitable. Perhaps you just fell victim to a malicious hacker. Perhaps your site collapsed after a traffic spike. Perhaps a plugin you installed doesn’t play well with the rest of your site.
Thing is, can you get instant help should the nasty happen? Can the support team fix the problem quickly or will you have to wait at the expense of your business?
The best WordPress hosting companies are known for great support. They are available. Scratch that. They are readily available via multiple channels. They also have great reviews on the internet, so do your research.
Before we move on to WordPress hosting providers we love and recommend, here’s a short summary of the three sections above:
- On pricing – Choose a hosting provider depending on your needs and budget. However, don’t always look into pinching pennies when investing in a web host – this is where your business will live – stop playing the cheapskate card.
- On features – Go for the features you need now and in the future. You can always scale up later on, but it’s better to be prepared than getting stuck smack at the center of a stinking downtime when demand exceeds resources. Another thing, if you need a technical specialist to run your hosting account, it’s most probably the wrong hosting plan for you mate.
- On customer support – Go for WordPress hosting companies that provide nothing but great support, that’s a no brainer.
Recommended WordPress Hosting
Are you ready to test the waters? Ready to dive in? Presenting Millpond, a managed WordPress hosting.
Millpond
A prized product of Bluelupin Technologies, Millpond is an exclusive managed WordPress hosting solution that brings something fresh to the table. You no longer have to suffer under web hosting complexities – Millpond provides a seamless WordPress hosting experience supported by new-age web technologies meant to help you achieve so much more without breaking a sweat.
In terms of features, Millpond deserves the gold medal. You get exclusive servers, regional hosting for faster speeds, automatic security updates, top of the drawer malware detection, server health monitoring, proprietary site migration technology, HHVM support, firewalls, backups, 24/7 support and so much more! Millpond is the perfect solution for high traffic WordPress sites.
We offer great price models to boot: $50, $100 and Enterprise tiers depending on your needs. We are offering a 10% discount on the annual subscription, so you can save some vacation money while enjoying world-class WordPress hosting.
Additionally, you’re not charged a dime for multi-site WordPress installation, so yeah; you get to save even more! Well, don’t take my word for it, go check out the awesome features yourself.