- What’s the most important aspect of a WordPress hosting plan?
- Recommended Hosts
- How to choose a good host for your WordPress site?
- What are the different kinds of hosting available?
(Updated Dec 2022)
// What’s the most important aspect of a WordPress hosting plan?
A website can be made for many a purpose but most WordPress users are running relatively simple sites and are generally not technically minded with respect to server admin, web development etc. For this reason many hosts offer ‘managed’ hosting plans in which you pay more for the host to provide some technical services like maintenance of code and the various plugins which WordPress inevitably needs. These things require monthly updates as do some of the server software. A managed plan does this for you automatically. Of course if you want to learn how to do this yourself or are interested in savings a little coin then there are plenty of un-managed hosts which you can use which will charge you less.
So, the real question is, ‘how much can you afford ?‘and ‘do you like the idea of doing some server level admin tasks?‘ like creating email addresses in cPanel, possible editing some server settings if your site has a lot of traffic or traffic spikes, etc.
// Recommended Hosts:
Instead of recommending one hosting company I like to choose based on the various plans (accounts) that they offer as plans from various companies can differ largely and can become complex. To fix this, we built a ‘WordPress Host Plan’ Selector tool which allows you to easily sift through the various hosting plans offered by the various companies.
// How to choose a good host for your WordPress site?
Technical Requirements (storage etc):
I wouldn’t worry too much about the technical specs of your server and your WordPress sites. From a technical perspective most hosts these days (and especially the recommended ones below) have all the technical requirements you need with regards to versions of software (PHP, MYSQL etc etc) and useful WordPress related software (Softaculous for eg for 1 click install) which will allow you to install WordPress Site(s) with all the trimmings with ease.
There are some technical aspects to pay attention to for example which are important.
- You should make sure that the storage is appropriate for your site. ‘Storage’ is the amount of memory on the server with which your site can take up without being maxed out and requiring a larger more expensive plan. For example you might have 10GB for a small site, 30-50GB for medium sized sites and 120+ for large sites. Some hosting plans provide unlimited amounts of storage also so if this is an important aspect for you then you may favor a plan with this characteristic.
- Some plans will also offer plans with various RAM capacity which is the ability of the server computer to multi-task without experiencing ‘slowness’ in serving your website to users. The higher the better but your site’s performance is not significantly based on this so don’t worry about it much. More speed gains come from optimizing the site itself outside of the server. You can read more about WordPress Speed Optimizations if that is of interest to you.
Other technical requirements:
Hosting accounts will have other options for you to choose from for eg
- the number of email accounts you can have,
- how many websites are allowed to create on the plan,
- the inclusion of a CDN,
- free SSL certificates,
- caching,
- renewable energy matching,
- faster PHP,
- money back guarantees etc etc
Use the WordPress Host plan Selector to sift through the above options which are filters on this page you can toggle on and off and reviews the plans by these mertics and more.
// What are the different kinds of hosting available?
Shared Hosting
For eg, if your site less than 10,000 people per month (approx.) and those users are more or less just reading content or purchasing products then your site will more than likely be fine (ie not slow) with ‘shared hosting‘ plans because your site does not require enough computer resources and space to warrant a more expensive dedicated hosting plan.
Shared hosting is when you share a certain amount of resources with other websites because you all have relatively low users on it each day. As such you can make some cost savings by multiple websites sharing one server computer.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud Hosting is a relatively new method of hosting but is quickly becoming very prevalent in the industry. It is when some of the hardware of a server computer is replaced by software which has some advantages in terms of maintenance, uptime and speed that these computers perform at. these benefits trickle down to you as a website owner because your site is more accessible and faster for your users. It also solves for the issue of not having enough resources to power your site which shared hosting can have because in a network of servers that is the cloud multiple computers can handle various aspects of your site at the same time. Very handy. Dedicated servers are somewhat outdated at this point but still a viable option in some cases.
Virtual Private Servers
Virtual Private Servers are similar to cloud computing but you have even more resources at your disposal because there are less websites on this particular cloud network of servers. These plans are usually more expensive than other plans described here. VOS’s have largely replaced dedicated servers described below because of the advantages they have. Dedicated servers are somewhat outdated at this point but still a viable option in some cases.
Dedicated Hosting (a little outdated now):
However, when or if your site gets over a certain amount of resources, let’s say over 10,000 people per month, then your site speed (ie when users are browsing your site and loading pages) of your site can start to be effected. As such you can spend a little more and get a dedicated hosting plan all to yourself. This is actually a great sign as you’re having success and have managed your costs well up til this point because you didn’t splurge on the more costly dedicated server from the beginning when you didn’t really need it. Well done:)
// Should you use wordpress.org or wordpress.com hosting?
Confusingly, wordpress.org does not refer to hosting but to the software itself which you install on a server. wordpress.com is both the WordPress software and a paid hosting service.
When you install WordPress on a third party hosting service (like Bluehost for eg) you are using wordpress.org software which is free. You will however pay for the hosting service to ‘house’ your site.
Stay away from wordpress.com. wordpress.com offers limited functionality and charges too much for its hosting. They charge based on the size of the website. As soon as you hit 3GB you will be charged. This is not a large amount of space given that this will be measured against your database, the website files (including all plugins) and (most importantly!) your images which will easily exceed this limit. You are then charged (at least) $48 USD per year when with Bluehost you could pay less for unlimited space. wordpress.com business model is for those who don’t know enough.
