If you have chosen to build your website using WordPress then you’ve made a wise choice. This is a very powerful content management system that is fully customizable and free to use.
The next step is choosing the right hosting service for your website, and this is where many beginners get baffled by the countless providers and plans to choose from.
There are several factors that should be taken into consideration depending on the type of website you have and the type of service you’re interested in.
How to Choose The Right WordPress Host?
The following are some basic guidelines and tips to keep in mind in order to make an educated decision when selecting a WordPress hosting provider.
1. Determine The Type of Hosting You Need
In most cases, the main two types of hosting you’ll likely be considering are regular shared hosting and managed WordPress hosting. A more advanced option for a heavy website is VPS hosting.
Shared web hosting is the most affordable option and normally comes with enough resources for a small WordPress site or a personal blog.
Managed WordPress hosting comes with features that are commonly requested by users of this CMS. These include more server resources for increased performance, dynamic caching, a staging tool, hardened server security, and more involved technical support.
And the third type of hosting is VPS hosting, which comes with dedicated resources and more stable performance compared to shared hosting. This option may offer the best value for money when looking to host multiple websites that receive high amounts of traffic.
2. Choose a Plan With Enough SSD or NVMe Storage
Each web hosting plan comes with a limited amount of disk space that may or may not be scalable.
Yes, even “unlimited” disk space is in fact limited; usually by limiting the number of inodes for each account.
It’s important to choose a plan that provides more storage space than you estimate your site will need throughout the term of the plan.
The type of the storage devices utilized by the host can play a significant role in the performance of your website.
Very few old companies still use slow HDDs, which you should definitely stay away from. You get much higher speeds with SSD storage, and even better when it is NVMe SSD.
3. Look For an Optimal Uptime Guarantee
The question of how reliable a web hosting provider is ultimately comes down to their ability to maintain a perfect uptime record and keep downtime as close to zero as possible.
You should pick a provider that has an uptime guarantee of 99.9% or more. For a small business website, the minimum I’d settle for is 99.95% uptime.
Take some time to read the uptime SLA to learn about the terms of the guarantee and how you will be compensated in case your website’s uptime falls short of the promised value.
4. Pay Attention to Resource Usage Limits
All shared WordPress hosting plans come with certain limits, including those that are advertised as “unlimited”.
There is no such thing as unlimited hosting. There will always be hidden restrictions and a fair usage policy that will determine how much of each server resource your account is allowed to use.
Some of the most important resource limits to take into account are: inodes (server file count), disk I/O limit, entry processes, PHP workers, database connections, memory and CPU limits.
5. Make Sure Backups Are Included
Managed WordPress hosting normally comes with automatic backups as a standard feature, but not all shared hosting plans include backups.
It is very important to have an automated tool that generates full daily backup copies of your site(s). Locally stored backups are good, but off-site backups are even better.
WordPress websites get hacked all the time while simple actions like updating a plugin can sometimes break the whole website. The best way to be prepared for such situations is by having recent backups of your site that you can roll back to.
6. Make Sure The Service is Secure
While backups can come in handy after a security incident, different measures and tools can save you from having to deal with such a scenario.
The most essential security features to seek in any WordPress hosting plan include a web application firewall and a malware scanner.
You’ll also need an SSL certificate for your website to be able to use secure URLs, which is a must-have these days. An SSL certificate should be included for free, but some hosts may charge you extra for it.
7. Give The Support Service a Test
Almost every web hosting provider promises the best 24/7 support service, but not many of them make good on it.
Don’t just trust the reviews, which can be easily manipulated, and give it a test yourself. Contact the support team at an inconvenient timing and ask a few technical questions about their plans, server software, hardware, etc.
The more technically advanced questions you ask, the better idea you’ll get about the level of experience and competence of their support staff.
What Are The Best WordPress Hosting Providers in 2024?
This is a tough question to answer without knowing your website’s technical requirements and the price you’re looking to pay. That said, let me suggest a few reliable providers to check out.
Pressable and Kinsta are two great options to consider if you are looking for managed WordPress hosting for your small business. They both have very powerful and stable servers as well as skilled support agents.
Among the top WordPress hosting recommendations on Reddit, Cloudways stands out as a more cost-effective choice than shared web hosting. They offer managed cloud servers at a reasonable price for those who don’t have the skills to configure and manage their own server.
And if you are interested in managed VPS hosting for WordPress, ScalaHosting is a good choice with affordable pricing. This provider allows you to build your own custom VPS plan that can later be upgraded by scaling up any of its main resources (CPU cores, memory and disk space).
Conclusion
To summarize the points discussed above, a good web hosting service for WordPress comes with fast SSD/NVMe storage, an uptime guarantee, plenty of server resources, automated backups, server security systems, and a competent support team.
On a final note, you have to keep your expectations reasonable for the price you’re looking to pay. You can’t expect the highest performance and the best support service if you are only paying around $10 a month, although you can still find pretty decent services at such a price.
