What is WordPress Hosting?
Every website needs a host to store its data and to make sure it’s accessible on the internet regardless of the platform. WordPress hosting services provide an easy solution for managing your WordPress website and several addons like security and optimization.
When it comes to WordPress, there are hundreds of hosting services. Enough to confuse you and make it difficult for you to pick the right one for your website.
Things to consider before buying a web hosting service:
1. Specific needs for your website
There are many types of WordPress hosting services available in the market. Before buying a hosting service, here are some questions that you should ask yourself.
- What type of site will you be creating? For example, will you be working with WordPress or creating a static HTML website?
- Will you be creating more than one site? Some hosts allow you to create multiple sites from the same account.
- How much traffic do you expect to receive each month? Be realistic. This will help determine how much resources you need. If you plan to grow your traffic over time, you may need a host that offers scalability in their package offerings.
- What technical requirements will you require for your site? Most coding languages like HTML and CSS don’t have special requirements, but if you’re working with PHP, for example, you’ll need to find a host who can cater to that language.
- Do you need extra features, such as email hosting or an SSL certificate? Be sure the host you choose offers what you’re looking for (and at a reasonable rate).
- What is your monthly budget? Knowing this can help you weed out certain hosts and packages before you waste time comparing features of hosts outside your range.
2. Performance
Performance is the key. Choosing a WordPress hosting service that provides the necessary tools for helping you to achieve speeds required by your website, is one of the first and most important choices that you should make.
Several factors determine the speed of your website, things like Nginx’s FastCGI caching, SSD storage, and multiple data centers ensure that your WordPress hosting service keeps your website’s speed at par.
Overall, SiteGround hosting reviews ranks near the top of all web hosting companies for both uptime (99.99%) and speed (673ms).
3. Security Features
Your WordPress host should have state of the art security software installed on all servers that regularly scans for threats ranging from malware and viruses to suspicious traffic.
Ensure that they monitor their servers for unusual activity. Your web host needs to provide SSL certificates to ensure that the data sent over your site remains secure and encrypted. Some hosts also offer IP deny services, which allow you to block specific IP addresses, such as those that might come from groups of hackers.
Without an SSL certificate, you cannot encrypt incoming traffic. Without HTTPS encryption, there’s a good chance that Google will mark your site as not being secure, which will immediately lower your traffic.
4. Cost
Buying a cheap hosting service will make you regret almost immediately. Your websites will slow down and take ages to load even basic pages, if at all.
The convenience and savings are attractive at first, but the added features, support, and security you will get by signing up with a reputable hosting provider are well worth the slight increase in the cost.
Your hosting service will be the backbone of your website. It’s better to invest a bit more initially to get a better overall performance in the long term.
5. Customer support
Having reliable customer support makes a huge difference in web hosting providers, especially if you are new and need some guidance to get your site up and running.
Having a dedicated technical support team that’s both fast and knowledgeable is essential. Some hosts offer customer support 24/7, while others are only available during business hours, which can make it difficult to get a hold of when you need urgent support.
So do your research thoroughly and try to get a sense of the support team’s responsiveness and expertise. It’s a good idea to read some reviews and forum posts to get an understanding of the support teams’ quality and response time.