13 Feb How to Find a Reliable Hosting for Your WordPress Website?

How to find the best WordPress web hosting is one of the main questions you need to ask yourself to have a successful WordPress blog or website because hosting has a direct impact on its work and performances, sales, and SEO. Without reliable hosting, your blog or website won’t be visible on the Internet.

Hosting company is like a big building that has many tenants, that is, owners of blogs and websites. The same as tenants need apartments to live in the building, a website needs a hosting provider to secure the server and proper technology. There are numerous features oh hosting providers and choosing which one meets your needs when starting your WordPress blog isn’t easy. What’s the best option for one website doesn’t necessarily have to be the best option for the others.

Don’t be misled that you must purchase a hosting service from the same company from which you bought a domain. A company from which you bought a domain will always offer you to host your website but with your web address/domain, you can purchase hosting from any of the providers that exist.

Ask Yourself Some Questions Before Choosing a Hosting

Before you start comparing features of hosting companies, you need to give yourself answers to several questions in order to comprehend what are your exact needs as WordPress website owners and hence save money.

• Will your website have plenty of pages or just a few?
• How many visitors do you expect to come on your website in the near future?
• How many storage space will your files need at the moment and how many in the near future?
• Will your website or blog have scripts, apps, or any downloadable material, that is, will it require a greater processing speed?
• What kind of tech support do you need?
• How much money can you pay?

Nearly all hosting companies provide their services for WordPress websites because of their popularity in the previous years and ease of installation in a few clicks. What you need to check immediately is if a certain company supports PHP version 7.0 or higher as well as MySQL database 5.6 or higher. Anything less than these values will give you a lot of headaches and possible website crashes. Now, this is what you have to consider when choosing a hosting company for your WordPress website.

Types of WordPress Hosting

Given that most hosting companies fulfill basic demands to host WordPress websites, let’s mention types of hosting for this platform.

Free Hosting – It’s easily accessible and usually owned by a reseller, who acts as a middle-man. Using free hosting is followed by ads popping up without permission and sudden service shutdown that leads to losing a provider. But, the WordPress.com platform offers free hosting that won’t just disappear and allows you to create a subdomain in a jiffy.

Shared Hosting – It’s the most popular hosting for WordPress websites. In this case, one server shares several websites. Shared hosting packages have good WordPress tools, easy to use cPanel, and tech support at your disposal. Shared hosting doesn’t come with unlimited storage space.

VPN – Virtual private server is one server that’s split into several ones so each of the users has the privacy of their own server. You can choose which components to use so, VPN is good for bloggers with a significant number of visitors.

Dedicated Hosting – It’s intended to one user only, which means you’ll have your own server on some location. It’s recommended for websites with heavy traffic and will prevent them from crashing. Dedicated hosting brings the utmost stability and security.

MySQL Hosting – This hosting can be included in nearly each one of the above-listed types of hosting. It hosts the MySQL database management system through which relational databases of a website are managed. It’s open-source software whose source code can be changed to suit particular needs. When choosing MySQL hosting provider, you need to pay attention to various features that are offered to keep your website alive. That’s because doing serious development on top of MySQL, that goes beyond using local MySQL server, requires a remote dedicated MySQL server to access it all the time.

There are two more types of WordPress hosting and they are intended for users with no technical knowledge whatsoever: Managed Hosting and Cloud Hosting.

Quality of Hosting Support

One of the most important factors in picking a hosting provider is tech support because only this can provide you with assistance and solve problems when your website is down. A response time, technical expertise, and knowledge matter when it comes to tech support.

If you have just started your WordPress website and left aside dealing with the matters of migration, installation, backup, caching, and security, you’ll need support who knows everything about hosting the WordPress platform. This support can come via calls, emails, forums, or ticketing system. Besides reading forums about hosting or reviews on the company’s website, you can directly ask hosting tech support questions before your purchase their services as well as to make sure of the quality of their service during a trial.

Hosting Performances and Speed

For this, a hosting company has to have the latest hardware technology, that is, disk space and type of disk (HDD, SDD), memory capacity (RAM), and a fast processor (CPU). You can usually find info about this in the cPanel or on the company’s website. Hosting providers, or at least respectable ones, use Apache web server and are mostly equipped with Linux, PHP, and MySQL which is great news for WordPress users.

The speed of a processor and memory depends on the kind of content on your website and the number of visitors. If you purchase cheaper hosting and suddenly get heavy traffic, it will slow down your website or blog. So, choose a bit more expensive hosting package than the starter. This is also important due to the fact that Google considers website loading speed as important in ranking your website. Faster the loading, the better the ranking in search results will be. Not to mention how important this will be to your visitors.

How Much Uptime Is the Hosting Provider Offering?

The uptime, i.e. amount of time during which your website is continuously running, is a highly important factor and this figure should be nearly 100%. Most hosting companies guarantee an uptime of 99.5% because 100% is simply impossible, if nothing, because of power outages or Internet shutdowns. Even when you are offered 99.9% don’t bite the bait. It won’t happen. A slowdown of 0.1% might seem irrelevant to you but if your incomes depend on your blog, it can affect you a lot. Some hosting companies have the policy to compensate for any slowdown below 0.1%. Many companies publish their uptime statistics on separate pages at their websites. Check them carefully!

How Hosting Companies Care About Website Security?

Hosting companies must have firewalls and security systems that rely on modern technology in order to defend your WordPress website from hackers. What can help you to decide if the company takes good care of security is to learn if it offers a system against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Or, does it have automated solutions in case such a problem occurs? Does it provide help with installing SSL certificates? All this can be easily checked on hosting company’s websites.

Maintenance and Care of the Data

Several options regarding the maintenance and improving your WordPress website’s performance are important and you should choose a hosting provider that offers them in the package:

Backup – Does your company backup your WordPress website or blog and how often, or you’ll have to do it yourself? Does the package include free backup, do you have backups on-demand and at any time? You need to know this because, in case of an attack or losing data, you must have the option of restoring previous versions of your website.

Caching – Choose hosting companies that provide caching service within the server plus additionally, which enhances the website speed.

CDN – A content delivery network (CDN) will help you a lot to improve your website’s performance. Most importantly, it will improve bandwidth in case you use a lot of multimedia content.

Location of Data Center – Closer your visitors are to hosting providers’ data center, faster the loading speed of your website is.

How Much Money to Spend on Hosting?

Regardless of what any of the hosting companies offer, the voices of users are the best recommendation for them. Read blogs that reviewed hosting companies and explained their quality, and advantages and disadvantages of certain services. Connect your new WordPress blog to some hosting provider by accepting their trial period and test its reliability.

Hosting expenses go from 5 or 10 dollars a month to hundreds of dollars a month. Knowing that hosting has a simple rule – you get who you pay – don’t be tempted to buy a hosting for one dollar a month. They won’t be able to provide you with the support that you need. Your work and time spent in creating a WordPress website worth more than a couple of bucks per month for hosting service.