Where to host your WordPress Website: 7 Best Hosting Services
Having a good hosting service is important because you want your website to be up all time, but it often goes further than storing data since you can have a bunch of different services when hiring a host platform.
Internet works basically with your device sending the message to a big computer that finds the data (website) you’re looking for and sends it back to you. A hosting service is where the data of your site is stored so it can be accessed by other internet users.
Types of WordPress Hosting Provider
Free WordPress Hosting
There are some free options out there, but you’ll find them linked to conditions such as having someone else’s banner on your website or having no control of when your website is up.
Free website hosting isn’t something you’ll want to stick to if you’re serious about building your online presence. They’re not reliable and surely don’t worth the risk of your entire website vanishing from the internet all of sudden because of a change of mind of the hosting provider.
Shared WordPress Hosting
This is the perfect starting point for a small firm. You’ll share a server with a lot of other websites, which makes the service more affordable.
However, you’ll probably feel that you need to change to another type of hosting as soon as you start to overload your server. If your site requires too much from the server, the performance of other sites can be affected and you may be politely invited to upgrade your account.
WordPress VPS Hosting
This type of hosting is also based on a shared server, the difference is that every site is hosted on a virtual server. This gives you privacy and a lot more control. If you don’t have any technical knowledge, you may need to purchase a managed VPS. In this case, the hosting provider will manage all systems upgrades.
WordPress Dedicated Server Hosting
This type of hosting is when you lease a physical server from the hosting provider. You’ll have full control over the server. This type of hosting is especially recommended if you already have a lot of traffic.
Managed WordPress Hosting
Only WordPress-based sites can be hosted on this type of hosting. After hosting a website there, there’s no need to worry about anything else. They’ll take care of your site performance, secure, and keep regular backups.
Essential WordPress Hosting Features
The answer for this isn’t simple, since it depends on what you want your site to be. For the sake of this post, we’ll consider that most of our readers are attorneys or law firms who want a website to be where their clients are — online — and help prospective clients turn into paying clients.
If your choice is a simple website such as a one-page site (all the information is displayed on one single page and have a contact form or other call to action at the end), your biggest worries should be about how many people access your website and the uptime of your hosting service.
For sure it’s also important to choose a service that has great support and that’s easy to use if you’re not hiring a specialist.
The Best WordPress Hosting Options
There are many different options for WordPress hosting services out there. We have chosen the 7 that stand out the most and assembled them on this list.
Bluehost
Bluehost is one of the oldest options of hosting, they’re also the official WordPress hosting recommendation. They have excellent 24/7 support either by phone, live chat, or email.
Their price range goes from $3.95/month to 6.95/month. All plans include automatic WordPress installation, free domain name, and automatic WordPress updates.
GoDaddy
GoDaddy is one of the most popular services for WordPress hosting. However, it doesn’t offer as many features as other options and the support is mainly by phone. They offer a guarantee that your website will be up at least 99.9% of the time, this will probably make you feel better and less worried about not having your website up and running but is nothing that other good services won’t get to you either.
Hostinger
Hostinger is known as an option for beginners and small businesses for its cheap plans that are composed of easy-to-use features. One of these features is the option to click install WordPress and all the support they offer.
Hostinger offers low-cost plans for shared hosting. You can choose between single, premium, and business plans. They also offer free domain registration.
You’ll have access to features like daily backups, SSL certificates, and practically unlimited bandwidth. They also offer support 24/7 in 20+ languages.
Uptime guarantees are important because you don’t want a prospective client to access your site and face an error page. Hostinger guarantees that this won’t happen to your site with their 99,9% uptime guarantee.
Flywheel
Flywheel is a WordPress managed hosting service that is known for having different features that can help to grow your website. On this hosting service, you’ll find a dashboard optimized for WordPress that makes it easy to manage your website, daily backups, protection from malware and attacks, and won’t need to do any manual installation.
Flywheel has many support options you can choose from. There’s a huge library with many topics, but if something is not there there’s also 27/7 support.
Performance is something to worry about when hosting your website, Flywheel has optimized performance for WordPress sites. You’ll also find that they made key partnerships to enhance performance, such as with Google cloud and MaxCDN.
WP Engine
This is another managed hosting service that is dedicated to WordPress. There’s no need to install WordPress and they provide daily backup.
The downside is that they don’t register domain names or offer an email service. On the other hand, they offer free SSL certificates, which isn’t common for hosting servers to do. They also have a firewall that’s updated daily to block the latest threats, and have a great iptime.
WP Engine’s support is very good, however, you just get support 24/7 on some plans, the more basic ones only offer support from 7 am to 7 pm CST. Even with this range of support time, they answer fast and are very helpful.
AWS
AWS is the cloud hosting provider by Amazon. Being a cloud hosting service makes it different from the other services we’ve discussed so far. The installation process and the personalization options you’ll find on this service are also different from the other services.
Some of the biggest tech companies trust AWS services for their web services, such as Netflix and Apple.
Differently from the other services we presented, AWS charges by the hours you use it and not monthly. This is good because you pay for what you use and can be a lot cheaper if you have a simple website, since you know exactly what you need.
Even though Google’s focus is on Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS), they offer a robust option on their hosting services. However, this may not be the cheapest option, the billing is by minute and their starter package costs $6092 per year. Not having an IT background can make it tough to use this option.
Conclusion
Most WordPress web hosting providers we researched have options for different sizes of firms and needs. Of course, there are some different characteristics on each of them that you should consider and decide either if it’s important for you or not.
We recommend that you consider the number of visitors your website receives on a daily basis to make sure that you’re not paying too much or that your website won’t break and let you down.
Also, consider if the service that suits best your needs is a shared, managed, or any other type of hosting. Don’t overestimate your IT abilities if you’re not used to getting your hands dirty and make sure you’ll have the help you need from the service you hire if you need it.
The most important thing is to understand what you need and accept that maybe it worth paying a little more money to have your site running smoothly. Your website is your visit card, make sure people have a good first impression.