You'll find several articles written about “How to choose the best WordPress hosting” or “Best hosting for WordPress website” and come to the conclusion that they are all over the place! The opinions vary! What matters most in my opinion is hosting your WordPress website with confidence so you can focus on your business at hand. Having that piece of mind to know that if you need help… you have a strong customer service team available to help you through any related issues to hosting.
When looking for the best WordPress hosting, recommendations you may come across are based upon whom is going to pay the writer/site owner the most affiliate commissions if you choose to click their link and sign up for services recommended. Let's be truthful here… that is most of the posts on the interwebz these days.
Not So Good Customer Service Situation
About 4 years ago I experienced a situation where my hosting provider made a big change on their servers that severally disabled a few of my sites. I went into full panic mode after not being able to find the issue. After a long stretch on the phone, they were able to take care of me which provided relief but only after they pointed the finger at me for the problem. That didn't make me feel so great. The feeling of “omg, I really don't want to help this guy” vibe from the support agent was getting a bit old.
Since they fixed my hosting account it made me wonder if I did want to move to a new hosting company. After a little thought… I decided I didn't want to because of all the sites I had to move. The work was going to be super tedious. After a few more years I finally made the move away because enough was enough. My reality and needs of my online business needed to evolve. It was the best decision I have made for my online business and clients.
Questions to ask on WordPress Hosting
There are 2 main factors that have been important to me over the years outside of “Trust”.
- Will customer service be willing to help me if I have an issue?
- Will the hosting environment support and provide the latest technologies to help me succeed?
What features do you want?
Within your hosting environment if you are using a well coded WordPress theme and plugins, your site should be zippy right out of the gate with minimal lag time. There are a few ways you can enhance this to make it even faster but this will be the first thing once you've commenced the deal on signup.
- Free Auto SSL (also ability to pay for upgraded SSL's)
- Library of Scripts to install at your finger tips IE: WordPress
- Nightly Backups
- The latest database & cloud technologies
- Plenty storage space (and scalable on demand)
- Unmetered bandwidth
- Ease of use control panel (cPanel)
- Ease of integration for CloudFlare/ Railgun
- Malware scanning
- Optimal MariaDB and LiteSpeed Server technology (makes things faster)
- Latest releases of PHP (should be using PHP 7.0+)
- etc…
What Website Hosting Do I Use?
I use Q4 Cloud Hosting. They are a small boutique cloud hosting company in Kansas City focusing on small business websites and applications. The ease of use and customer service has been pretty awesome. They offer nightly backups (they only keep the 1 day's worth of backups rolling).
Thoughts & Suggestions
Make sure to pick a strong reliable theme framework along with reputable plugins when putting together your website within WordPress. The majority of issues can be tackled at this level for better site performance in conjunction with a well coded theme and plugins. I would suggest using PHP 7.0+ (set in cPanel) which has shown to decrease strain on your server substantially and can execute twice as many requests per second as the same platform running PHP 5.6 if using WordPress 4.1.1.
If you are using a hosting service like Q4 Cloud Hosting, they operate on LiteSpeed & MariaDB which is an optimal setup. You can use the LiteSpeed Cache Plugin within this environment to help increase site loading speed in conjunction with Cloud Flare. The Short Pixel Image Optimizer is a nice little plugin to help reduce the strain on your site when uploading image files by compressing without losing quality. This by default will help optimize your hosting environment.
Hope you found this informational.
Dynamic, high-energy executive with history of performance-oriented leadership to e-commerce sales and marketing within the online marketing and advertising industry. MichaelStults.com is where I share my thoughts on different marketing methods, wordpress, leadership, and various topics that I feel inspired to write about. Please take time to learn more about Rare Disease at www.BriParDun.com