Frequently ignored, web hosting is one of the key parts of every successful WordPress site. Picking up the best WordPress hosting for your requirements can enhance your SEO efforts at gaining the best of audience traffic. The web hosting you employ, determines your page speed, downtime, and data transmission variables. If you are utilizing a free or cheap web host, you might have to face several unfortunate instances where opportunities are lost.
There are a large number of greatly popular web hosts that make your choice harder. In the event when you are unable to list down the best web hosting essentials, you might face a great deal of web host issues later on. A very basic requirement for a WordPress web host are PHP version 5.2.4 or greater or MySQL version 5.0 or greater.
Before you pick a web host, it's essential that you invest some time to firstly figure out what you require out of your web hosting bundle. In this article, we will help you pick the best WordPress hosting for your site by drawing a checklist of the best practices to follow while choosing your WordPress hosting service.
Security and speed of the Server
This is the primary requirement for any of the WordPress web hosting services. A fast and secure server always ensures that your users rely on the services offered while carrying out any information sensitive operations such as an online transaction. Safety and security are also integral because that will also mean less threat to data.
When we talk of a speedy server, that will imply that your website loads faster. This factor is a key component towards deciding how your viewers like your site. Faster the server, faster will be the loading speed of your web pages. Also, your SERP rankings matter.
Pricing Suitability
The costing factor is something that you just cannot skip. We aren’t telling you that cheap web hosts are good. All we wish to convey here is that a suitable web hosting service that you chose for your website, should justify its pricing. Excessively costly, yet useless host providers can cause a huge harm to the site of your dreams. You will need to be picky when you chose one because a lot of them skip premium features just for incremental sale purposes.
Dreamhost, WPEngine, Bluehost, HostGator, are some of the best web hosting services available in the market.
Server logs are important in cases where you need to find the whereabouts of your site’s vital audience statistics. With this feature, you can have all the access to the site activity such as the time spent by a visitor on the site, the amount of traffic driven in for a particular period of time, sources of traffic to your site’s webpages among other stats. Other options that might be provided by the host of your site may include private server logs or log reading software, with an aim to provide the site admin an easy peep through into the private site information.
Storage capacity
The storage capacity of your site host is directly proportional to the bandwidth that is being made available to the site visitor for downloading information that you offer. This is something that will stay very important in the web hosting realm, forever. We will tell you why. You might have a small setup now, since your business website is new and so is your business.
But, when you plan to grow your site’s dynamics, you might want to modernize your website with new trends. This will definitely require more space because when a site expands with new addition to the content, the space requirement increases too. So, make sure that your web host choice can be stretched accordingly as and when the need arises.
Technical support 24*7
We specifically mentioned the phrase ‘24*7’ here because that is what accounts for a great customer support wing of a product/service. Issues can rise at any hour of the day and considering the audience size of your site, you cannot risk the profitability lost in the process of seeking help.
Hence, it gets imperative that the web hosting services are well compared before making a final choice. To make an informed choice, you can shoot out a mail to the technical support and see how quick are they when it comes to the support service. Asking some customers for authentic reviews can be a great help too but always make sure to go through personal testing.
Server Backups
Daily backups of a site on server ensure that the data is preserved, in case of an emergency situation. No matter what the instance maybe, power backups help keep the data intact in an event of hardware failure or some other similar misfortune.
Downtime
Being aware of the downtime probability of the site host will help you plan events accordingly so that you are not left with no choices, in case the site goes down. You are definitely not aware of the moment your site traffic goes up; except for the times when you are purposefully drawing in traffic through some campaign. And if at this very moment, the site goes down - that can be a huge loss. So, make sure that the server host is up for the maximum part of the time.
Other Important Pointers:
- Try to avoid seeking free WordPress hosting services.
- If you are looking for an affordable solution, shared hosting is the answer for you. But that might only be suitable if you are an independent blogger or a small-scale business website.
- You can search for web host coupons that you can use in order to go for a convenient site hosting service of your choice.
- If you have already made it big in the market and are ready to make the leap, Virtual Private Server or Dedicated Server Hosting can be the choices. This dedicated server will help your high traffic site by providing the much-needed privacy.
- Always look for a host that offers multiple domain hosting without asking you to pay more for it. There are many players in the market that already offer this feature.
- Look for an easy one click installation web hosting i.e. complete support for your WordPress site.
- You can check for yourself to see how a particular web host has performed in a certain time period so that you are sure of the choice you make.
- A good WordPress web host will always offer a free trial period to new users and will guarantee money back in case the user isn’t satisfied with the offered services.
If you need a swift and secure web hosting for your WordPress sites, make a point to utilize the above web hosting checklist. Offering a detailed clarification on the factors that influence your sites’ choice of web hosting, you can completely rely on this one. In case you're setting up WordPress for your site, surprisingly the entire scope of choices and design settings can be bit difficult. It's simple for even the most prepared WordPress designer to miss an important configuration in route. That is the motive for a setup check-list to proves useful.
