Web hosting is a critical component for a successful website, and if anything, having the best WP hosting for your website needs is beneficial in numerous ways, including improving your sales as well as SEO.
However, the market has an awful lot of options for hosting and so many are the options that it’s easy to get lost. Fortunately, we shall with you some of the tips of choosing a WP hosting for your needs.
1. Types of Hosting
First things first, you need to determine the type of web servers right for you. The four common servers of web hosting include;
Shared WordPress Hosting
This is the most popular type of WordPress host, and this plan is ideal for beginners with small to medium size businesses.
This type of host provides all the necessary features needed at a budget, bur because this service hosts your website on the same server along with other clients, it can go down, especially when there’re high traffic spikes.
Managed WordPress Hosting
This is a premium type of hosting, similar to the shared hosting, but it comes with an added level of support.
On this server, providers typically manage your operating systems, hardware, and all the applications. Generally, it offers extensive features and website builder options and is therefore ideal for bloggers who aren’t tech-savvy and can justify the not so large enough expenses.
WordPress VPS Hosting
This is essentially a server within a bigger server, where each website is hosted like a dedicated server while still sharing a server with other websites.
This option is popular with the users who don’t want to share all server resources with others but aren’t big enough to pay for a dedicated server.
Dedicated Server
On this hosting plan, the server space is entirely yours, and your website is the only one that occupies the machine with absolutely no one else sharing your resources.
2. Server Reliability
There’re numerous aspects to the hosting reliability, but in our opinion, or rather with regards to WordPress hosting, reliability is primarily concerned with the uptime/downtime of your website.
In most cases, this factor is affected by a variety of factors, including the level of technology to the management of bandwidth.
Sure, no hosting service is capable of holding 100% uptime record, but some of the companies are notoriously worse than others, while others, such as Bluehost, are known for their reliability.
You must consider the speed of the server, and ideally, the server load time should be under 300 ms to avoid running into problems in case more traffic is directed to your site.
3. Support
I can’t stress the importance of having a WP company that provides a dedicated support staff that is knowledgeable and swift at expediting your concerns.
Here’s the thing; for a majority of the people, the whole idea of hosting and stuff and completely foreign, and this’s why most of the time, you’ll assuredly resort the support of the hosting team.
So, before choosing your next hosting provider, do thorough research, and try to get a sense of the support’s team expertise and responsiveness.
A good way to find that is checking on some of the online reviews regarding the company’s support team. Alternatively, you can do it the old DIY way by sending them a question or two and assessing their responsiveness.
4. Security
Security should be a priority on your list, and this is particularly true given that an increasing number of businesses are getting targeted by cybercriminals.
Normally, your web hosting company is usually the first line of defense, and so, it should have the proper mitigation and recovery in place.
Ideally, when determining the overall safety aspect of a hosting company, the two essential features to be on the lookout for are SSLs and Sitelocks.
5. Cost
There’s not much to dispute here as you’ll always get what you pay for. Cheap out on your hosting, and you’ll almost regret why you made a move.
However, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you go for the most expensive option; ideally, you should strike a balance between performance/needs and your budget.
6. Additional Services
To top up the icing on the cake, some of the providers normally provide users with extra services.
While they may not necessarily be mandatory features, but they’re convenient features and will improve your overall experience. Some of these include WordPress backups, caching solutions, staging website, and more.