Top 10 Tips To Help You Choose The Best Hosting for WordPress Blogs
One of the important aspects to learn when you are interested on how to start a blog is web hosting. However there can be different types of web hosting such as free hosting, shared, dedicated and managed web hosting services. Furthermore, there can be more than hundreds of sites offering these services. It can be ‘overwhelming’.
Before you dive into these services, you must be able to evaluate what you want out of your blog or site. From there, you can derive the specific requirements of what you will be needing in order to achieve the output that you want. Going through these steps first will save you time and resources because you have clearly mapped out your goal.
I have come up with these 10 tips that you need to consider when looking for the best hosting for WordPress.
It is important to carefully select whom you go to for these services because it can greatly affect the performance and even the future revenues of your website.
1. Hosting Price
Free Hosting
Practically speaking, price hits the top spot of the very important things to consider when it comes to almost any matter, even for web hosting services. There are services offered by free blog platforms such as WordPress.com, Blogger and Tumblr at zero cost. You just sign up with them and you can start your own blog in an instant. WordPress.com is considered to be the best free blog platform and continuously attracts many startup bloggers. Free services often have a catch however like very lengthy domain names because you cannot get rid of their extension. If you have no budget capital however, you can stick with free hosts.
Paid/Premium Hosting
Aside from free blog hosts, you can also consider some premium (paid) blogging platforms such as Squarespace or Self-hosted blog. Read about Squarespace vs Self-hosted WordPress, and decide which is perfect for you.
For self-hosted WordPress blog, on the other hand, there are companies or individuals who offer their services for a price. Popular best hosting for WordPress are Bluehost, Hostgator and GoDaddy. Premiums will cost you at least around $2 to $10 per month for basic hosting.
2. Value For Money
As important as the cost of the services, you must also be mindful of the value that you are getting for the premiums you are paying. Just because one company offers its services cheaper than others, does not mean it is then the best web host. Check its availability, performance, even read reviews about it.
There are companies that give package deals, go over them and compare. Read about some technical details such as RAM, technical support and email accounts. Watch out for hosts that have high-end, high-speed drives, offer round the clock technical support, maximum storage and bandwidth. If the offer is too cheap for way too much services, do a background check of the integrity of the web host site.
3. Server Storage Space
The amount of storage space or disk space is the maximum size that you can store on the host server. A 500MB disk space is usually enough to start with for a newbie WordPress blog. Basic plans allow 500MB to 1GB of storage and you can already use it to your advantage.
A basic WordPress installation with customized themes takes around 20MB up to 30MB, leaving you around 470MB worth of space for your posts. Let’s say each blog post would be 2MB, you would have 235 posts before you consume your entire storage space. By then, you would most likely to have upgraded your hosting plan.
There are plans that have unlimited storage and you can choose these hosts if your blog or website requires a lot of disk space.
4. Server Speed
The booming technology has caused people to require almost everything to be instant and loading your website or blog page is definitely no exception. When your page takes more than a few seconds to load, your visitors would most likely to close it. Perhaps you have even done this before when visiting some poorly hosted websites. It is important to know also that Google uses site speed as one of its basis for your page ranking. Because of these reasons, you must carefully consider the server speed that the host can provide your webpage.
If you wish to increase your site’s speed you may want to avail an extra solid state drive (SSD) since its read/write speed is three times more than the normal drives. This will incur additional payment however but will be worth the performance.
5. Data Transfer/Bandwidth Limitations
Bandwidth is another factor that affects the performance of a website. It is the volume of data that can be transmitted from a site in a fixed time. The higher your bandwidth limit, the more people can access your page at the same time. When you have high data transfer limitations, the quicker the visitors can see the information from your personal page or business site.
If you are just a start-up and do not expect much traffic, you can settle for basic plans. When you are starting to experience a significant amount of page traffic, then you can choose to upgrade to a higher bandwidth limit.
6. Uptime and Server Reliability
Have you ever tried visiting a site and it was not just accessible or it prompted an error message about something? You turn away from the page and would often forget about it because of the bad experience, right? If you happen to be the owner of that web page, you just lost a potential sale because your site crashed. Whenever your blog is down or inaccessible to your visitors, you are losing revenue and it can even hurt your brand reputation. No entrepreneur would ever want that to happen to him or her.
So when choosing the best hosting for WordPress blogs and sites, you must take into account also what they call the uptime rate. A good hosting site’s uptime rate should be 99% to 100% . If a hosting company is offering cheap services but poor uptime rate, simply don’t bother yourself.
7. Dependable Security Features
Another factor that should affect your decision making when choosing the best hosting for WordPress is with regards to the level of security they can provide. We all know how the world wide web is a very open place and full of hackers trying to steal viable information. Be it may running a blog or a business site or an educational blog, you as an owner must see to it that your web host is capable of rendering tight security measures. Your service provider is responsible for firewalls, early problem detection systems, file backups and other extra security features.
8. Customer Technical Support
The rise of the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry has led to accessible round-the-clock customer support for a lot of companies all over the world. Most web hosts provide 24/7 customer support with different media. Sometimes you would have questions from basic details to even the most technical aspects of your web hosting and it is critical that you could get competent customer service. Do a background check and read customer reviews about your chosen host company to see if they could be a good fit to you.
9. Control Panel Accessibility
If you are not armed with technical expertise, then you must choose the best hosting for WordPress that has a user-friendly control panel or interface. You can even take a look at their video tours of their site if they have any. It would be highly advisable to go for hosting companies that offer cPanel especially if you are a beginner in setting up your own WordPress blog or eCommerce site. It is the most popular control panel being used in the market and you can get easily familiar with it.
10. Extra Features
Auto WordPress Installers
If you would use WordPress without auto-installers, it could take you like forever. Not really forever, but significantly a long time, especially if you are new to WordPress. It would then be nice to verify if your WordPress hosting company allows auto-installers in order to save plenty of time and hassle.
Free Backups
It would save you a lot of worries if you know that your blog or your website is regularly being backed up. When there’s an unexpected crash or problem, it would lessen the damages to your page since you are certain that you will get to retrieve the previous files thru the back up. Some hosts offer this service for free and would do scheduled backups for you. Others would provide an easy backup tool that you can click whenever you do some changes.
Backup options will have its pros and cons but it always pays to be more diligent and just follow the simple steps being required.
Customized Email Address
Web hosting companies provide email hosting also, although not all. Some would have it for free, others would charge for an additional cost. If you are a webpage owner, it would be totally convenient if you have a customized email address solely for that site. This allows you to interact faster with your visitors and even adds up to your credibility.
Blog Transfers
When you already have a blog somewhere and would want to transfer to a different platform, you should better ask your hosting company if they are providing free blog transfers. If you do it manually, a lot of things could go wrong such as altered permalinks and faulty image links. You could benefit so much if your host will do all the work of transferring your blog from your old platform to your new one, especially if it is for free or already included in the package plan that you prefer.
Additional Domains
There are hosting plans that will allow a customer to have 2 or even more domains in the same account. These other domains are considered addon domains. This is convenient if you have more than one site or thinking of expanding your web pages. If you need more addon domains in your account, then it would follow that it would be more expensive than the basic hosting plans.
Refund Options
As a customer you would want a 100% satisfaction for the services that you paid. One way to test a company’s confidence and integrity in what they do, not just as the best hosting for WordPress but for almost anything out there, is to check if they offer a money-back warranty. Some hosts offer 15 days no questions asked money-back guarantee, while there are those who give up to 30 days and even 90 days money-back guarantee. The longer the money-back period, the higher the confidence of the company to deliver its promises so watch out for these service providers.
Conclusion
There are a lot of hosting sites and each company are offering unique services and different packages. The tips listed above are just there to help you identify some key points to look for when deciding on the best hosting for WordPress pages. It is not necessary to hit all those items as you might not need everything for your blog.
Again, go back to identifying what are the needs of your blog and how much you can spare to avail the services required. You can narrow down the list of the best blog hosting sites and then compare by price, performance and features included. Read some reviews, ask other bloggers for recommendation or research more on the Internet. I hope this article helps you find the best hosting for WordPress and service for your blog.
Are you using a free or paid hosting? If you are self-hosting your WordPress blog, what hosting plan and service are you using? Share us your story by commenting below.
Originally published at easyblogthemes.com on December 15, 2017.
