How to Choose the Best WordPress Hosting

One of the most impactful decisions you can make for your WordPress website’s performance, security, and overall user experience is your choice of WordPress hosting. Whether a personal blog or an online store, having a reliable hosting service is the bare minimum. 

But there are way too many options to choose from, so how can you pick the right one for your business needs? That’s what this article is all about. We’ll take you through some crucial factors to consider if you’re trying to choose the best WordPress hosting. Let’s begin.

1. Know your website resource needs

Are you just trying to build a personal blog aiming for a small audience? Or, is it a large-scale online store that’ll (hopefully) get lots of traffic? The former won’t need a big hosting plan, but the latter requires robust infrastructure to support the inflow of customers.

So, before you find the hosting plan for your needs, you need to have a clear idea about what those needs are. The right hosting plan should comfortably handle your site’s requirements with respect to speed, storage, traffic, features, etc. 

Here are a few examples of hosting types you can consider: 

• Shared hosting: This is a small-business web hosting type, suitable for sites that don’t get too much traffic.

• Dedicated hosting: A need for large-scale businesses or sites that get a lot of traffic with greater security and control requirements.

• VPS hosting: Best for businesses with growing traffic or mid-sized blogs.

2. Uptime and reliability 

You need your website’s server to be online consistently, which is what uptime refers to. It’s best to only consider hosting providers that guarantee uptimes of 99.99%, as they ensure that your website will almost never be down. This is essential for avoiding bad user experiences and a potential loss of revenue owing to long and frequent downtimes. 

With that said, relying on a provider’s claims alone isn’t enough. Remember to check their reviews, especially checking for complaints about uptime to make sure the hosting service is reliable. 

You might also check with people you know and trust that is in the industry. These could be website designers or anybody in the digital fields. They hear complaints within the industry and often are willing to share.

3. Speed and performance

The last thing that any user wants to experience is a slow website. It’s frustrating and it’s one of the leading causes behind higher bounce rates—which is the rate of people who leave your website after viewing just one page. So, your hosting service should offer high page load speeds as it’s critical for SEO and user experience.

Make sure the hosting provider you choose offers: 

• Solid State Drives (SSD) for quicker data speeds.
• Server locations that are near your target audience to keep latency rates low. 
• Content Delivery Networks (CDN) to make sure your content reaches your global audiences faster.

If a provider also has features like caching mechanisms or performance-boosting tools like in-built speed optimization, then that’s a cherry on top as those can make a noticeable difference.

4. Security features

With cyber attacks becoming more serious and frequent, having strong security protocols is no longer a luxury but a need. If you don’t want to make any compromises on that front, look for advanced security features in WordPress hosting like: 

• SSL certificates to ensure secure transactions with customers.
• Automatic backup features that protect your data.
• Firewalls to prevent unauthorized access.
• Timely scanning, detection, and removal of malware.

Such features will safeguard your server from malicious attacks, which is becoming increasingly important for businesses that handle sensitive customer information e.g. e-commerce platforms.

Data loss is one of the most detrimental things that can happen to an online business. To avoid that, regularly backing your website up is crucial. 

Choose a hosting provider which handles that for you through automatic periodic backups and quick-restore options. Knowing that your data is backed up and recoverable at any time will give you priceless peace of mind.

5. Customer support 

While most online business owners are quite tech-savvy these days, they still need assistance every once in a while. When that day comes, you’ll wish you had gone with a provider with a customer support team that’s responsive, knowledgeable, and helpful. 

Some key features to look for are live chat functionality, 24/7 availability, email, phone, and of course, check reviews to ensure that the team has sufficient know-how about issues relating to WordPress.

Another thing to look for is location. Is custoer support located in the same country that you are? Do they speak your language natively? When dealing with highly technical issues, language barriers are super frustrating and can deley resolution by days or weeks.

6. Pricing 

The lowest offer is naturally the most tempting, but think twice before you go for it because you often get exactly what you paid for! Cheaper plans are great, but not if they entail performance that’s too slow, and storage that’s too little for your business needs. So, it’s advisable to evaluate the pricing of plans based on the spec-sheet that you actually need. 

It has been my experience that cheap hosting leads to websites that get hacked. Weigh the cost of hosting against the cost of loosing your entire website and having to get it rebuilt.

Also, make sure you calculate and understand the difference between annual and monthly hosting plans. There are often considerable savings to be made there without sacrificing any features. 

7. WordPress-specific features

Hosting providers that offer tools and features specific to WordPress are preferable as they’re often better optimized to make website management easier. Features like automatic updates, one-click WordPress installation, WordPress-optimized servers are some such examples.

If you can get a host that can replace several of your plugins with server-provided features, the health of your website will improve. The more plugins you put on your website the more vulnerable it is to hacking and the slower your website will function.

When I stepped up my hosting, I was able to remove:

• Backup plugin
• Caching plugin
• SSL plugin
• Redirection plugin
• CDN plugin
• Speed Optimization plugin

That is six plugins I deleted because the server performed these fuctions.

Premium Websites offers Managed WordPress Hosting for our clients. It includes all the features mentioned in this article as well as Dotty taking care of all the plugin and theme updates. She will also fix your website if it gets hacked at no additional charge. What a deal!