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If you’re thinking of launching your first WordPress website or blog for your new business or startup then doing some research in the kingdom of best WordPress hosting is something you can’t ignore.
WordPress Hosting Solution Providers are not always the amazing thing to pick from. There are lots of hosting companies available to host your business website or blog, throwing plans at you at various different prices, and quite honestly it can become very overwhelming to anyone.
I would recommend you to read through this article in which I’ll list down the best hosting providers available in the market for your first WordPress site.
Today, Let’s have a look at the different hosting types you have to choose from, what are the factors to look from in a good hosting provider, and some of the top hosting solutions in the market so that you can run the most efficient website possible.
Must-Have Features for a Hosting Provider
I have listed out some of the most essential features that you must expect to have it in your hosting provider irrespective of the hosting type you decide to go with.
WordPress Optimised: Since WordPress has its recommended requirements, it is very much essential to have a hosting provider who has hired technical WordPress experts to future-proof your website with security glitches and downtime due to broken features in real-time when you need it anytime, anywhere.
Speed: It is one of the most important ranking factors affecting your website’s traffic. Your visitors want your web pages loading in 2 seconds or less. That means you need to optimize your website in the best way possible.
Luckily, a good hosting provider who is running your site on WordPress optimized servers can help you with that.
Support: Even being a technical WordPress Developer, I personally don’t like running into server issues. However, If you run into server issues with your website. Then, you must be able to contact your hosting provider’s support team. If there is a serious issue, you need to know someone is on hand to help you out right away. And a good hosting provider is expert in solving server issues to help you with its amazing 24/7 support.
Security: You can lose a lot of hard work, time, and money if a hacker sneaks into your website. Your hosting provider should have solid security measures in place and ways to restore your website back to normal if your website does come under attack.
Account Access: Being able to access the admin side of your hosting account is crucial. You should be able to control email accounts, domains, files, databases, and more in a user-friendly way.
Price: Making sure your hosting provider services fall within your budget is a big deal. Do your homework, compare plans, and choose something reasonable so you don’t break the budget.
WordPress Hosting Types
Now, that you have got a great idea for what to look for in a good hosting provider. Let’s take a look at the different types of hosting solutions that are available.
1. Shared WordPress Hosting
This is the cheapest and most popular solution for many WordPress users, especially when just starting out.
With shared hosting, you and other customers will share the resources, such as memory, of one server. This aspect of sharing is what keeps costs down for the hosting provider. One downfall to shared hosting is the limited resources that are available and the lack of server control. Although this type of hosting is great for those with smaller websites, as your site begins to grow you may need to upgrade.
2. DIY VPS WordPress Hosting
This solution was designed to be an in-between solution for websites that are too large to use smaller hosting providers, but are not in need of an expensive dedicated server.
Unlike a shared hosting solution, a VPS does not have users fighting over resources from the same server. Instead, a VPS will allot you a virtual reserve of memory and power on a server that no one else can access. You will also have root success to the server and more control to make changes.
3. Managed WordPress Hosting
Though a relatively new concept in the WordPress world, managed to host is quickly becoming a popular hosting solution, especially for those with larger websites.
Managed hosting does exactly what its name implies; it manages your website installation for you so you don’t have to deal with headaches of optimizing your own site. Things such as updates, regular backups, and security scans, daily monitoring, website restoration, and optimization services like built-in caching, are just some of the things managed to host services will provide you.
4. Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is the latest form of hosting that has become extremely popular over the past few years. The main concept of cloud hosting is “Divide and Rule” – the resources required for maintaining your website are spread across more than one web server, and are rendered as per need basis.
This greatly reduces the chances of any downtimes in case of a server malfunction.
Another noteworthy aspect is that cloud hosting allows you to manage peak loads easily, without facing any bandwidth issues, since another server can provide additional resources in such a case.
Hence, your website doesn’t rely on just one server, and rather a cluster of servers that work together and are termed as “the cloud”.
Elastic Hosting
Elastic hosting is a concept synonymous with Cloud hosting. It’s the ability to dynamically add and remove capacity as your needs change.
This can often be like an end to a bell curve of traffic over a specified time: As the curve ramps up so do your capacity and service delivery to your customers remains constant. The benefits are numerous, it allows you to tie your spend closer to your revenue; You don’t need to build a large infrastructure capable of handling the spikes only to sit idle for the majority of the time.
There are drawbacks, systems are usually ephemeral and it takes very talented development work to handle the problems of large scale.
As for the best provider I cannot say, as it highly depends on your business and technical goals. There are lots of hosting providers available that offer cloud services, but there is also Amazon and Google who are generally regarded as the industry standard, other than that Pantheon, Rackspace, Data Pipe, and Softlayer.
Typically most people consuming public cloud tend not to lock themselves into a single provider for redundancy purposes, and many use 3rd party management tools such as RightScale to handle this well.
Best WordPress Hosting Providers
I’ve hand-curated a list of best WordPress Optimized Hosting Providers in the hosting space that can help you relax and concentrate on your business.
1. FlyWheel (Managed)
FlyWheel is the delightful Managed WordPress Hosting which they have reimagined and reinvented for the customers.
They claim that their hosting is for everyone who builds or owns a beautiful website and they proved themselves true at it.
They provide unique features like No overage charges, No downtime, even if your site see a sudden spike in traffic due to marketing efforts or viral content.
I personally appreciate that FlyWheel Team listens to customers. You can check my site (currently on FlyWheel Classic Platform) for performance and reliability as it is hosted on FlyWheel.
Big News: Recently, FlyWheel partnered with Google Cloud Platform for better performance and reliability with adding Free CDN and Staging sites even in the Tiny Plans. The upgrade from the FlyWheel Classic Platform to Cloud Platform will be free for existing as well as new users with the same old prices.
2. Kinsta (Managed)
Kinsta is one of the fastest-growing WordPress Managed Hosting Provider in the Hosting Sphere. Also, they make sure that the customers get what they want for their website.
Kinsta team always keep their servers updated irrespective of whether it is the PHP version or the technical server stacks. They run hosting on latest PHP version (and change it based on customer’s site need) as well as partnered with Google Cloud Platform for better performance and reliability.
They provide unique features like Hack-proof security like Fort Knox, No upgrade – downgrade penalty, Pro-rated refunds, and much more.
3. WPEngine (Managed)
WPEngine is one of the top-notch WordPress Managed Hosting providers specially designed for mission-critical and enterprise-level sites.
WP Engine ensures the best and latest technology including one-click WordPress staging and restores, built-in CDN, enhanced security, and much more.
It is backed by a full-time professional engineering team and dedicated lab team.
4. WPX Hosting (Managed)
WPX Hosting is one of the affordable and emerging managed WordPress hosting which is well-known for the easy-to-use custom dashboard, speed, and reliability.
They provide dedicated resources to all the websites hosted on their server so that any of the customer sites are not affected with slow speed or downtime which is a plus point. Signup for WPX Hosting
5. SiteGround (Shared)
6. Bluehost (Shared, VPS, Managed)
Conclusion
Now, choosing the best hosting provider and solution to your business site built on top of WordPress will not be that tough.
If you are in the beginning stages of launching a business website, I would recommend starting out with any of the managed hosting providers. They are the most affordable, reliable, and scalable in the future as the traffic increases.
Personally, I use FlyWheel as a hosting for my site and I’m very much satisfied with every feature they provide. However, the unique features from FlyWheel which I like most are No Overage Charges and No Downtime since I moved to it ( i.e. around 10 months )
What is your favorite WordPress hosting variant and why do you like it?
Do you use another hosting service variant that I’ve not mentioned?
Let me know about your favorite hosting variants via the comments section below!
