How to Choose the Best WordPress Hosting
WordPress is an open-source solution that allows individuals, businesses, governments, and various other entities to create highly capable websites, even if they don’t have access to a high degree of technical expertise. In total, approximately 43.2% of all websites use WordPress.
However, if you build a WordPress site, you need the right hosting platform to make it accessible to the world. Here’s a look at how to choose the best WordPress hosting.
Types of Hosting
WordPress hosting involves paying a provider to essentially give your website a home on one of its servers. There are five main types of WordPress hosting, including shared, dedicated, VPS, cloud, and managed hosting.
With shared hosting, your site resides on a server that’s also used by others, reducing the cost but potentially limiting access to resources or hindering performance. Dedicated hosting gives you access to your own separate hosting environment, so the performance is better, but it comes with a higher price tag.
VPS hosting is essentially a hybrid solution between shared and dedicated, giving access to a virtual server all your own that resides on a shared server. Cloud hosting is similar to VPS but relies more heavily on cloud network technology, which enhances scalability.
Managed hosting allows companies or individuals to get more technical support from the provider. Essentially, a third party handles all of the setup, maintenance, and troubleshooting for you, reducing the administrative burden in exchange for a higher price point.
Features to Look For
Security
In today’s landscape, ensuring your website is suitably secure is a must. When you’re choosing a WordPress hosting company, focus on providers that prioritize security, make updates available quickly, and offer an array of built-in features to reduce the odds of hacks or attacks.
Performance
When you’re exploring WordPress hosting options, performance is another critical factor. Typically, slow or lagging performance drives visitors away. Since that’s the case, you want to ensure that the solution can provide visitors with short load times and suitable functionality, even if you get an unexpected spike in traffic.
Scalability
Scalability ensures that you have access to enough resources to support higher amounts of traffic should they occur. Usually, this means having the ability to make manual or automatic adjustments to the resource allocation through the hosting provider, ensuring you aren’t stuck with diminished performance if your site grows faster than you expected.
Customer Support
Having access to reliable customer support is essential regardless of your level of tech-savviness. At some point, issues are practically guaranteed to arise. As a result, you want to know that your hosting provider is there for you when complex problems happen, allowing you to get critical guidance to correct the issues fast.
Top Provider Options
Usually, the top WordPress hosting providers have reputations for meeting all of the criteria above. Plus, most of them have generally reasonable pricing, and many offer services beyond WordPress hosting, like access to domains, company email addresses, and more. As a result, they’re an excellent place to start if you’re looking for a suitable solution.
Here is a list of the top provider options for WordPress hosting:
- Bluehost
- Cloudways
- DreamHost
- HostGator
- Hostinger
- Lyrical
- SiteGround
