Your website is a crucial branding asset that will set you apart from potential customers or followers. WordPress hosting is one of the most important aspects of every successful website and needs to be carefully chosen.
With the right hosting service, your website’s SEO will improve, and sales will increase.
Hundreds of WordPress hosting services exist, ranging from top-notch service to embarrassingly low quality. Your website’s overall health and functionality will rely heavily on the hosting provider you use.
With so many companies to choose from, it can be difficult to weed out the good from the bad providers. By following our comprehensive guide, you will feel more confident in selecting the best WordPress hosting service that suits your website’s needs.
WordPress Hosting Requirements
Believe it or not, WordPress is a lightweight script that is compatible with a number of quality hosting providers. WordPress makes it easy with only two requirements:
- PHP version 7 or greater
- MySQL version 5.6 or greater
How to Choose a WordPress Hosting Service
Before you start researching hosting providers, you need to think about what exactly your website needs. A few questions to ask yourself should be:
- What is your current website traffic (if any)?
- How do you expect your website traffic to grow in the next six months?
- How scalable does your WordPress hosting service need to be?
- Does your hosting company need to be developer-friendly?
- How much support will you need?
- What is your budget?
After you have these questions figured out, you can start identifying the features and services your hosting provider should have. By evaluating your own needs first, you can save hundreds of dollars and your own time.
When identifying WordPress hosting companies, think about three important factors: speed, security, and reliability.
Speed: Your RAM (processing power) and CPU (disk space) will depend on your site’s content and the number of visitors you have. However, a fast load time under 3 seconds is essential to your website’s overall performance.
Security: The uptime needs to be at least 99.94% to ensure your website is available to potential customers at all times.
Reliability: Customer Support should always be available for troubleshooting. You want your provider to care about their products and their functionality with your website.
Other features to consider are backup recovery, caching, git version control, built-in CDNs, security, and the physical location of the server data.
WordPress Hosting Types
There are five types of hosting options on the market: free, shared, VPS, dedicated, and managed WordPress hosting. While some types might be better in the long run to achieve your website goals, they are often more expensive.
Free WordPress Hosting
While there are a lot of free WordPress hosting services available, you need to be careful and read the fine print. These companies are often unreliable and offer very limited customer support.
They can be taken down at any time, leaving your website vulnerable to hacks, or you could lose all your data. You could also be constantly spammed to upgrade your account, purchase a custom domain, or buy additional space. Sometimes, the developer will want to have a banner ad or link to sell the advertising space on your website.
The main purpose of free hosting is to provide you with hosting upfront and hope you outgrow it. Once you outgrow it, you’ll hopefully upgrade with them.
If you’re serious about growing your website into a strong digital presence, stay away from free WordPress hosting providers and go with a more reliable service.
Shared WordPress Hosting
As the most popular hosting type for beginners, the shared WordPress hosting services offer affordable pricing and available customer service support. Shared WordPress hosting works by having multiple websites on the same server.
The catch with shared hosting is that if your site begins to take on more server load, they will ask you to upgrade your account. If sites have more power over the others, the overall performance of all the websites will suffer. With that said, shared hosting is a great solution for small businesses and bloggers.
WordPress VPS Hosting
Best for medium-sized businesses, larger blogs, and WordPress developers, VPS hosting gives almost as much control and privacy as a dedicated server. VPS divides a physical server into multiple servers to best suit the customer’s needs. These hosting providers are much more customizable and can be configured to run different software systems.
VPS hosting is typically used by medium-sized websites that are looking to scale and continue growing their traffic.
WordPress Dedicated Server Hosting
With a dedicated server, you can lease the physical server from a hosting provider. You will have full privacy control of the server and can choose your own software, hardware, and more. WordPress dedicated servers are only for websites that have a high amount of traffic and employ full-time administrators who can maintain updates.
While this may be the fastest WordPress hosting type, it does need extensive monitoring and costs. Dedicated server hosting is recommended for large companies
Managed WordPress Hosting
A managed WordPress hosting provider only hosts WordPress-based sites. Because of this specialization, you don’t have to worry about any upkeep. The provider ensures your site is secure, optimized, and performs routine backups. Customers also receive support from companies that have a lot of experience with WordPress management.
Managed hosting is great for websites that don’t want to worry about any server maintenance. The plan for these typically runs higher in cost, so it’s recommended for medium to larger-sized websites that expect their traffic to grow.
Best WordPress Hosting Providers
After you’ve evaluated the different hosting types and have found a fit, you can begin researching companies. WordPress hosting is a massive industry in the USA. In 2018, the hosting revenue grew 12.9% to reach a $27 billion total. Hosting companies continued to grow by 8.2% and employees by 6.8%.
Why does this matter to you? There are a lot of options to choose from.
You want to be deliberate in outlining the website goals you want to achieve and fully understand the features offered by each hosting service.
Additionally, pay attention to the reviews from other customers. Reviews help show past successes and give the company more purchase credibility.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed in choosing your WordPress hosting service, we have you covered. Follow along for our list of the top companies:
Bluehost
Starting in 1996, Bluehost has been one of the oldest and largest companies that host WordPress websites. Currently hosting over 2 million websites, Bluehost offers 24/7 expert support and is rated #1 in WordPress hosting for small businesses. Users like Bluehost because it’s hassle-free, and websites are never slow, even with a lot of traffic. Pricing starts at $2.75 per month and includes free domain name registration and an SSL certificate.
DreamHost
In business for 18 years, Dreamhost has a reputation for easy WordPress hosting for over 1.5 million websites. Users can expect unlimited space, a custom dashboard, automatic WordPress updates, and free SSDs, which will make your website run 200% faster. The cost runs at $2.59 a month with no setup fees and a free domain.
SiteGround
SiteGround is one of the best WordPress hosting companies and is highly rated within the developer community. By providing fast speed and security features, SiteGround is able to make your website as efficient as possible. The company provides 24/7 support, automatic updates, built-in WP caching, CDN, GIT version control, and more. Additionally, they house three data centers in the USA, Europe, and Asia. SiteGround pricing begins at $3.95 a month with 10 GB web space.
HostGator
As one of the most popular WordPress hosting companies on the market, HostGator supports over 8 million domains. With a 99.9% uptime guarantee and 421ms load time, this company is a smart choice for WordPress developers looking to ensure a great user experience. HostGator offers 24/7 support at a $13.99 cost per month.
A2 Hosting
Founded in 2001, A2 Hosting is relatively new in the WordPress market. Claiming to be 20x faster than competitors, A2 Hosting has an average 392ms load time and a 99.1% uptime. This WordPress hosting service uses a caching method, which creates an instant load time. A2 Hosting offers unlimited space and bandwidth, free site transfer, 24/7 support, optimized speed, and a money-back guarantee for $3.92 a month.
Flywheel
Flywheel is run on a Google Cloud platform and offers its users 250GB of bandwidth with 5GB of disk space. Ideal for beginners, Flywheel offers daily backups, multisite support, staging, SFTP, and a free SSL certificate. With a load time of 452.67ms to ensure your users have a great experience, this hosting service will cost $14 per month.
Kinsta
As a boutique hosting provider, Kinsta has the best performance for managed hosting WordPress templates. Kinsta works within the Google Cloud Platform but makes it more user-friendly and accessible for different websites. This hosting provider uses a custom panel instead of the traditional cPanel UI, meaning that users only focus on what’s important. Kinsta offers 24/7 support, and their monthly plan starts at $30.
Final Thoughts
Identifying a WordPress hosting provider is an important choice to begin marking your digital footprint. You need to focus on speed, service, and security while thinking of your own website needs.
To start, you need to determine your website goals and budget. Can you use a shared hosting provider, or do you need something with more power, like a dedicated server? How much money are you willing to allocate towards a hosting company, considering WordPress theme costs, developer fees, and additional marketing needs?
Ask yourself questions regarding your website’s future traffic, growth, developer tools, and more to determine the right WordPress hosting service. While your website will hopefully grow in a year, you need to be realistic with your goals and expectations so you’re not overpaying for services you do not need.
There are a lot of options to choose from, so it’s important that you make an informed decision for your website’s future. Oftentimes, you can upgrade or move to a different WordPress hosting company if you outgrow the one you are established with.
By following our comprehensive guide, you will understand the different pros and cons to find the perfect WordPress hosting site. Identifying a quality hosting company will help your website up successfully to meet all your business or blog goals.
Who is your WordPress hosting provider?
Share with us in the comments below!