Tuesday , 19 March 2024

4 Part Guide To Choosing The Best WordPress Hosting

Having a good WordPress Hosting provider behind your WordPress site can, more often than not be the most important factor for ensuring smooth site functioning. Sure, you can use traditional hosting such as Shared Hosting, but when you leverage WordPress Hosting, you essentially take care of WordPress specific site requirements. These needs include, effective management of WordPress updates, establishing hardware and software specifications which are most compatible for WordPress and specialized WordPress security. In this post, we will discuss essential factors that you should definitely consider for choosing the Best WordPress Hosting for your site.

I will try to make this guide holistic enough to cover 4 major aspects – Utilities & Maintenance, Performance, Security, and Support. These 4 aspects form the backbone of any effective hosting service and when we talk about WordPress Hosting, there are certain aspects that you should be aware of so that you know what to look for. That being said, let’s get started!

Utilities and Maintenance

To judge the effectiveness of any WordPress Hosting plan, start with the basics.

The plan should ensure that it provides all necessary backend to run WordPress smoothly and integrates the must-have plugins within the hosting package itself. Check if the WordPress Hosting provider gives you fully installed WordPress with automatic updates. Sure, you can always install and update WordPress at your end, but why waste your time on backend setup when you and your team can be concentrating on the core business.

You may want to market your website using digital media mediums such as Search and Social. Check if the WordPress Hosting plan makes this job easier by offering pre-installed instances of plugins such as Jetpack. This will take away the need for you to find, install and maintain such plugins at a later stage. There is a great post on how to install WordPress plugins the right way, it is worth checking out.

System backups is another important utility. The first point of any disaster recovery always starts with a stable restore point. You need to understand if your WP Hosting Provider takes periodic backups of your website and resources and if yes, how frequently and to what capacity.

Maintaining your WP-Database is another aspect that your WordPress Hosting Provider should help with. WP-Database is where all your website data like posts, pages, form entries, plugin settings, theme settings etc. are stored. As your website grows, the WP-Database bloats, and thus bogs down the system. It is essential that you keep the WP-Database in good shape and if your WP Hosting provider includes this in their plan, these is definitely a plus point.

Performance

Apart from running and maintaining your WordPress website, you also need to understand how compatible and effective the WordPress Hosting configuration is to support your website’s needs.

Look at the basics such as how many websites you can host on a single plan and how many visits would the plan support. It’s always a good idea to benchmark your website traffic levels and based on your marketing initiatives or growth rate, estimate traffic growth and pick a plan that accommodates the delta. Another aspect to look at in terms of performance is to see if the CPU, RAM and storage allocation of the WordPress Hosting Plan mathematically adds up to being capable enough to handle the specified traffic. Website uptime is undoubtedly important, too. This majorly depends on the kind of network hardware and the quality of the WordPress Hosting Provider’s data centre. Do not accept anything less than a 95% website uptime guarantee. And if the WP Hosting provider claims to provide that, check with him on what measures they take to ensure this.

Security

All websites face the threat of hacks and security breaches. WordPress based sites are no different. In fact, with the reliance on 3rd party themes and plugins, the number of vulnerabilities for WordPress websites can be higher. This calls for sharper and smarter security measures. WordPress website security should always start with the WordPress Hosting Provider. Having regular backups is one thing but you would agree when I say that prevention is better than cure.

You should definitely have an extensive discussion with your WP Hosting Provider on what kind of security measures they will provide to keep your website safe. To give you a benchmark, I will talk to you about ResellerClub, my WordPress Hosting Provider with whom I am exceptionally happy. When it comes to WordPress security, they offer two proprietary tools; SiteLock and CodeGuard. SiteLock identifies threats, automatically fixes them and continuously works in the background. Secondly, CodeGuard monitors your website and debase, notifiying you of any potential threats. It also allows you to restore your website and database to a previous version quickly. Such aspects are definitely plus points and encourage a long and healthy relationship with your WordPress Hosting Provider.

Support

The first thing you should check is if you have an option to have Dedicated account managers for Managed WordPress Hosting. This gives you a single point of contact to turn to for every WordPress Hosting related need or query. They will handle all the technical details while you can focus on your core business. Apart from that, verify if they have a big enough call center to accommodate your support request at the earliest. Discuss WordPress qualification and expertise of the support staff so that they know what hardware, software and networking services they are dealing with. Having chat based support is definitely a plus point because at times, copy pasting code or screenshots is much easier over chat than over a call and at times leads to quicker resolutions as compared to calls.

So there you have it, essential points that cover the 4 fundamental pillars of effective WordPress Hosting service. At times you will get overwhelmed with the choice of hosting providers out there but knowing what you are looking for, helps you narrow them down drastically. I hope this gives you a good start to effectively begin your hunt to find the Best WordPress Hosting for your website and if you have follow-up questions, be sure to mention them in the comments section below and I would love to address them!

Image from https://wpdean.com/unique-features-to-have-in-wordpress-hosting-setup/

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