Posted on: Thu Dec 19 2019 05:30:00 GMT+0530 (India Standard Time)
Want to know which WordPress hosting to choose? Check out our ultimate guide on WordPress hosting and make an informed decision!
Time is running faster than you think. With time, WordPress has stood the evolution of the web. As a WordPress user, one of the challenges is to choose the Best WordPress hosting for yourself.
In this article, we will explore a complete guide on WordPress hosting.
This guide will help you to choose the right hosting according to your needs. The reason behind the complication is the different types of hosting currently available.
There are currently multiple types of hosting types, including shared, VPS, managed, and free WordPress hosting. By the end of the guide, you will be able to distinguish between them. We will also go through top WordPress hosting and the things you should look into when choosing a hosting.
Let’s get started.
Before we move forward, let’s look at the things that you need to look into the hosting provider. These factors are essential, and you should always keep these in mind before making a proper WordPress hosting selection.
Apart from the above, it would help if you also looked out for 1-click installation. Almost every good WordPress hosting company has this option available. This will make it easy for you to create and manage a WordPress website.
As we already mentioned, there are plenty of WordPress hosting types. Any WordPress hosting you choose needs to have essential three elements, i.e., security, speed, and reliability. Apart from this, you should always keep your requirements in mind. To let you make the right choice, let’s go through the different types of WordPress hosting below.
WordPress is an open-source project. It is similar to free beer. If you decide to use WordPress, you need to get paid hosting. But, in reality, you can also get access to free web hosting. Many hosting providers give you hosting services free of cost.
But, there is a catch with the service. Most of these services are given by small hosting providers to earn revenue. If you decide to host on their free service, they will use your site to host banners and ads. They might also put a link in the footer of your site.
Free WordPress hosting is generally not reliable. They do go down from time to time. The server speed is also not great, and your site would easily have high latency issues. You will also get no support whatsoever. In short, do not go for free WordPress hosting at any cost.
Best for: Only choose free WordPress hosting if you really have no budget, and need a place for your site before you get a paid hosting service.
One of the most popular WordPress hostings is shared WordPress hosting. In this type, you will get a hosting space on a shared server where resources will be shared among multiple users and sites. This is possibly the best way to get started with WordPress hosting.
Shared hosting is cheap and provides you good enough speed and reliability. Some of the shared hostings do provide unlimited resources. In reality, it is more of a marketing tactic, as you truly do never get unlimited resources. Some restrictions are kept on each account. Until and unless you cross those limitations, you will do just fine. Once you cross those limitations, you will get notifications. The handling of those scenarios entirely depends on the hosting provider.
As a user, you should always confirm the limitations before getting a shared WordPress hosting.
Best for: Shared hosting is best suited for businesses that are in the stage of growth and require cost-effective hosting without compromising too much speed and stability.
In this type of hosting, you will get a dedicated virtual space on the server. This means that the server you are getting is capable of handling more traffic and load. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server.
VPS is kind of similar to Shared hosting where you still share server resources, but the technique here is good enough to improve over it. You can think of it as getting a dedicated server by paying an affordable amount of money. VPS hosting is refined to perform nicely. They load fast and can be configured according to your needs. This means if you need to run specific software or tool, you can do it with VPS and not shared hosting.
VPS WordPress hosting generally requires some technical knowledge to manage. However, you can also take a look at the managed VPS hosting that offers a good amount of tools for better self-management. In managed VPS hosting, the hosting provider also manages different aspects of the hosting.
Best for: VPS hosting is best suited for a mid-sized business that is going through a growth phase or is receiving heavy traffic.
The next type of hosting that we will discuss is the dedicated WordPress Hosting. If you plan to get the best possible hosting service, then you should go for dedicated WordPress hosting.
In dedicated WordPress hosting, you get access to a full server and its resources. This gives you an immense capacity for scaling and configuration.
Dedicated servers require good technical knowledge to manage. Most of the time, businesses require to hire a server administrator to manage their site running on dedicated servers.
Best for: High-traffic sites that require dedicated customization and high scalability.
WordPress is very popular, and this means that hosting services need to refine their hosting services to include WordPress. One of the ways they refine their service is the managed WordPress Hosting. In managed WordPress hosting, most of the heavy lifting is done by the hosting provider itself. The buyer need not worry about anything as hosting keeps everything in control from their side.
Apart from providing the basics of WordPress hosting, it also has improved security, caching, and takes backup regularly.
The support for managed WordPress hosting is also impressive as you get instant support. When it comes to pricing, managed WordPress hosting can cost a good amount. It can cost anywhere from $30/month to $100/month, depending on the hosting provider.
Best for: The managed WordPress hosting is best suited for businesses or individuals that do not want the best WordPress hosting service possible. It is also ideal for a high-traffic site as it can be scaled according to the site’s needs.
Now that we have a proper understanding of WordPress hosting, it is now time to look at the best WordPress hosting providers out there. To keep things simple, we will only cover five hosting providers in detail.
Let’s get started.
Bluehost is one of the most popular hosting providers out there. Its popularity mainly comes because of its cheap packages. This makes Bluehost ideal for anyone who is starting their online website or blog. It is also beginner-friendly and offers good performance and features for the price that you pay.
The prices start at only $2.75/month. It also has a good track record when it comes to uptime. According to Hostingfacts.com, Bluehost offers an incredible 99.991% uptime in the year 2018. That’s good enough for any site out there.
If you are a mid-sized business, you can choose packages that cost more and provide more features. Apart from the hosting packages, you can also get access to a good WordPress knowledge database and access to 24/7 support.
DigitalOcean offers a unique cloud service experience compared to other hosting providers. They provide high-performance servers at very affordable pricing. The only twist here is that you need to have the technical knowledge to host and manage the WordPress site on DigitalOcean. You can host a plethora of solutions and software on it.
WordPress hosting on DigitalOcean is also easy, as asks you during the setup. Also, you can get tons of guide on how to get started.
But, what makes DigitalOcean so special? It is because of its customizability, pricing, and scalability that it has to offer. Their servers are also very fast, and you can choose service from 12 data centers spread across the world.
If you are a beginner or a mid-size business, you can choose their $5/month package where you get 1 GB of memory, one virtual CPU, 25GB SSD disk, and 1 TB transfer. If your site is growing, then you can choose more resources by paying the agreed-upon amount. This is what makes DigitalOcean a great choice. They also have a high average uptime of 99.989 % according to hostingfacts.com.
Siteground is yet another popular WordPress hosting provider. They offer their own managed hosting services when it comes to WordPress. In fact, they are also WordPress’s official recommended hosting provider.
With an average uptime of more than 99.988%, it is reliable, fast, and secure. It can also handle high traffic. Apart from the uptime, it also offers tons of tools and features for easy website building, transfer, and management.
Their managed WordPress hosting service is extremely affordable, as it starts from $3.95/mo. if you start with them for the first time. After that, the regular price is $11.95/mo., which is also affordable to a great extent. One key feature in their managed service is their updates and security. They offer better security and also ensure that WordPress installations are patched before any exploitation happens.
They also offer free SSL certificates, email services, daily backup, staging tools, and collaboration tools.
If you are looking for a web hosting provider in India, then Hostinger.in can be a great choice. It offers shared, VPS and cloud hosting services.
The plans are pretty cheap to get started. Their plans start from less than 1$/mo. The single web hosting plan gets you one website, WordPress optimization, email account, 100 GB bandwidth, and 1x memory and processing power. They have an uptime of 99.99% and above.
The performance of their servers is also good as they offer custom routing, server optimizations, and data centers spread across multiple continents. For users, they have provided the hPanel, which offers an intuitive and easy-to-use panel. Apart from that, it also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.
The last hosting provider that we are going to discuss is HostGator. They offer powerful WordPress hosting with plans starting from only $2.64/mo. They are also in the top 6 when it comes to average web hosting uptime, with an average uptime of 99.984%.
They offer quite a good amount of features on their WordPress packages. Each of their plans has good features, including 24/7 technical support. They also offer a 45-days money-back guarantee. Their package also includes cPanel, an easy-to-use WordPress hosting control panel.
Apart from that, their package also offers one free domain registration on few plans, 1-click installations, and free SSL certifications.
HostGator is WordPress only hosting provider which means that they have their services refined for the WordPress ecosystem.
This leads us to the end of our guide. Choosing the right hosting service is the first step to start your online journey. So, which hosting type and provider are you choosing?