15 Jan Things to Keep in Mind When Choosing a Hosting Type for Your WordPress Website

Are you looking to improve the performance of your existing WordPress site? If so, you likely want the best WordPress hosting company for your current needs.

A cursory search online shows that there are scores of WordPress hosting companies. Selecting the right one will improve your search engine optimization results and your sales. Selecting the wrong one will negatively affect your ranking on Google, and you may become frustrated with slow loading speeds and start to look elsewhere.

In this post, we will discuss what to look for when choosing the best WordPress hosting service. However, before we do this let’s take a few minutes to discuss the basics of WordPress hosting, which will help you make an informed decision.

What Is WordPress Hosting?

WordPress hosting is the physical location online where your web files, content, and images are stored. WordPress hosting has been optimized to work effectively with WordPress sites. This means that it helps your site load quickly. It will often include tools and features designed to make it easier for you to manage your WordPress site.

Do you need hosting for your WordPress site? If you make your WordPress site using WordPress.org, a hosting site will be needed. With WordPress.com, on the other hand, you are given a free domain name and hosting. However, WordPress.com is usually not the best option for most people. If you are using WordPress.org, you need to do your due diligence and find the best hosting for your needs.

Speed and security are two main factors to keep in mind when choosing a hosting provider for your WordPress website. Hosting Data’s Alex Williams mentioned in a recent Forbes interview that choosing a cheap web host makes your website vulnerable to both internal and external attacks, along with having performance issues.

What Will the Best WordPress Hosting Offer?

When you are selecting your website hosting, you want to focus on four key factors. These are:

• Your needs
• Customer service
• Speed
• Uptime

Understanding Your Company’s Hosting Needs

If you understand your company’s needs, you will be able to choose the right WordPress hosting provider for you.

• Shared hosting is affordable and popular. You have limited server resources and limited site features. You can find hosting for as little as one dollar a month. This is a good option if you are a small business or an individual blogger.
• Dedicated hosting is a secure yet powerful hosting option. It is expensive and will require you to have access to technical skills to set up the server and manage it. Decent dedicated hosting can be found for between $80 and $600 a month. Dedicated hosting is best for enterprises that have websites that require a lot of customization.

• Cloud hosting is a hybrid form of hosting that’s between dedicated hosting and shared hosting. The good thing about cloud hosting is that it is scalable. You pay only for the resources that you need. You need advanced tech skills to set it up and to manage it. You should expect to pay between $20 and $300 a month. This is great for companies that have growing websites and resources that need to scale up or down.

What You Want from WordPress Hosting Customer Service

You may not value customer service until you find yourself needing it. When your WordPress site is down, you are losing customers, you are losing ranking, and you are losing a good reputation. You need customer service that is available 24 hours a day seven days a week.

You need your customer service reps to be knowledgeable. You should be able to pose complex questions and get clear answers that help you resolve your problems quickly. Some of the best WordPress hosting companies have 24 hour a day seven day a week live chats. Live chats are great because you can type your question in and get an answer almost immediately from a human professional.

You want customer service that has a number of avenues for contact. This means that you should be able to contact them by phone, email, live chat, social media, and other methods of communication.

What to Expect from WordPress Hosting Speed and Uptime

As a rule of thumb, the faster, the better. If your WordPress site loads slower than one second, you may want to change your current host. If your host has an average speed of 340 ms or less, you are doing really good.

Uptime is the amount of time that your server is up and continues to run. Uptime is listed as a percentage, like 99.8 percent uptime. Uptime is a good marker for determining how well a WordPress hosting provider keeps their system up and running.

When you are looking at uptime percentages, you have to know what you are looking at a percentage of. For example, if a web hosting site has 99 percent uptime, it means that they have one percent downtime rate. This sounds great. However, this means that over the course of the week, their site will be down approximately one hour, 40 minutes, and 48 seconds. Over a year, one percent downtime means more than three days of your website not working.

You might think that one percent downtime is no big deal until you consider that it means three days of no sales, no emails, and no VoIP calls. It’s good to think about uptime and how much it is going to cost you for your server to go down.

Think of it like this. Your website brings in $3,000 a month. A host that has 98 percent uptime lowers your profit by $60 every month and more than $700 a year. And here we are only talking about lost sales. What happens if the your search engine or customers think that your site is unreliable? Customers stop coming back and that $3,000 a month profit starts to dwindle.

These are just a few things to consider when selecting your WordPress host. You want hosting that’s going to meet your company’s needs now and going forward. You want a host that is going to be running 99.99999 percent of the time. You want hosting that is fast and reliable. And you want a WordPress host that has good customer service and will be available when you need them.