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Once you’ve settled on building your website using the WordPress Content Management System (CMS), you’ll need to find a good hosting service that supports WordPress sites. There are tons of hosting providers who say they support WordPress, but how do you know which one? Let’s talk about where to begin, and answer your most common questions.
While thinking about building a website, people often don’t put a lot of importance on hosting. They either go with an old familiar name or try to search for the cheapest hosting service providers. But unfortunately, these approaches don’t necessarily yield the kind of results you want out of your WordPress host and you may find yourself very unhappy with an underperforming website or poor support, and end up hopping from one provider to another, which makes your business and website suffer.
Nearly every hosting company out there will claim that you can install and run WordPress on their servers, but gradually you will discover that just because you can install WordPress on a web server doesn’t mean that your site will hold up to traffic. You need a web hosting provider who specializes in hosting WordPress websites and who knows how to provide the performance you want at a price you can afford.
Certain web hosts such as Itabix provide managed WordPress hosting at additional expense. That means you can have them take care of any issues with your website such as if your site breaks or is hacked, and securing your site to keep it from being compromised.
Best WordPress hosting for you?
The best WordPress hosting for you will depend on what you need. Everyone’s needs are different. You’ll need to categorize web hosts based on the the importance of the following features to find the best WordPress Hosting for you:
• Price
• Support
• Scale
• Setup
• Security
• Speed
All managed WordPress hosts cannot equally deliver on all of these fronts, so you’ll need to choose the WordPress hosting which best suits your circumstances and your website type. There are some recommendations about the core features that WordPress hosts (like Itabix) offer. They are:
• Outstanding support from people who know WordPress inside and out.
• Repair your site if it has been hacked, rather than telling you that your site will be shut down if you don’t fix it.
• 24*7 security monitoring for malware and hacks.
• Automatic WordPress updates, ensuring that your site is always updated.
• Automatic backups, preferably daily and copied offsite (not just on the server in case it has a massive failure and loss of data).
Expectations you should have from WordPress hosting provider
1. Fast page speeds and performance:
Speed matters a lot when building any website. Page speed affects the engagement of your visitors with your site. Page speed also affects rankings of your site on search engines. The real challenge for all WordPress hosting providers is to ensure the speed of websites at all times. As you can assume, the speed and performance of a website largely depend upon the processing power, RAM and the storage systems of the host, but even the best server will get bogged down if it has too many websites or very high traffic sites.
According to a survey that was conducted, 47% of people surveyed expected a website to load in two seconds or less. 40% said they would abandon a website if it took just three seconds to load. In fact, a one second delay in page load time could result in a 7% reduction in conversions, which is the term used for visitors who actually end up purchasing or signing up.
2. Server Management:
The vast majority of WordPress website owners wish to run their business rather than dealing with website and server maintenance issues, and they don’t know anything about server management. If you don’t want to deal with the hassles of server management, it’s best to work with a hosting solution provider who takes care of the underlying issues and lets you focus on your business.
3. Security and Backup:
Security is where no website owner should compromise, or you risk having your website down or, worse, infecting the computers of your visitors. A website owner should not settle for a second-best hosting provider. Server security involves working with hardware and software components, and thus is a specialist task. The hosting service providers should at least have all the servers behind several layers of firewalls and access control systems.
The backup systems should also be efficient and prompt. A functional offsite backup system is a bare minimum for a hosting provider. You should also be able to restore your site easily and quickly.
4. Server Scalability:
Usually websites “go down”, or stop serving or server the websites hosted on it or serve websites very slowly, because the incoming traffic and requests exceed the available resources. Once the RAM, CPU capacity, and/or bandwidth are exhausted, the website becomes inaccessible. For example, Amazon lost $4.8 million because of a 40-minute downtime. So any website can go down and lose its credibility and traffic.
Consequently, it might be wrong if you think you do not need increased server resources right now. You should definitely look for scalable servers. These servers increase resource allocation for your website automatically so that your website remains operational despite the increased loads.
5. Customer Support:
Last but definitely not the least, customer support is an essential requirement for almost all the WordPress website owners. Customer support ensures that the website owner receives timely and accurate help in case of trouble with their site or email. Always look for customer support that specializes in resolving WordPress issues. Itabix offers 24*7 customer support to its customers.
6. WordPress Management
The vast majority of web hosts supply you with space for your website and, usually, your email on their servers but they are not responsible for the care and feeding of your site. That ends up being the responsibility of your web developer/designer or you, which means if your website goes down it’s down until your developer figures it out if your developer has agreed to manage your site, or you if you don’t have a developer handy. Worse, if you get a malware infection most web hosts will notify you that you have an infection and you need to fix it promptly or they will shut down your account.
Managed WordPress hosting means that your web host takes care of any issues with your website such as malware infections or updates that break your site. We find that approximately 1 in 40 of our customer’s sites break just when updating a site — the WordPress installation and it’s plugins and theme. The problem is, most web hosts that offer managed hosting charge $50-$100 or more per month.
Itabix offers WordPress management starting at only $10 per month. We will secure your site, update it frequently, and fix most website issues for free as well as setting up a staging site where you can test different configurations or do a complete site redesign and then copy that over your existing “live” site. If the problem is more extensive, we charge only $60 per hour to fix it.