Launching your WordPress website is thrilling, filled with endless possibilities and potential. But amidst the excitement of selecting themes and crafting captivating content, there’s a crucial decision that often determines your website’s fate: choosing the right web host.
With countless options flooding the market, navigating this decision can feel like venturing into uncharted territory. But fear not! In this comprehensive guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know for selecting the ideal web host for your WordPress website. From speed and reliability to security and support, we’ll explore the key factors to consider. So, let’s dive in and discover the top factors to consider when choosing a web host that’s tailor-made for your WordPress website’s needs.
How to Choose a Web Host for your WordPress Website?
Uptime
Downtime can not only reduce your chances of sales but also tarnish your brand reputation and customer loyalty. This is because your audience may never return to your site if it is consistently down. Look for a hosting plan that guarantees 99.99% uptime or more.
Speed
Choose a web host with a fast web server with an advanced cache engine. Secondly, it must specifically allocate resources to optimize website speed to prevent bounce rates. Faster-loading websites boost search engine rankings, customer retention, and loyalty, eventually leading to higher conversions.
In some way, server locations also affect the website’s speed. Proximity to the host’s server increases loading time. Regardless, it is a great idea to look for a web host with multiple server locations.
Look for a host that supports the latest versions of PHP and MySQL, and offers features like a free CDN (Content Delivery Network), object caching, etc. A CDN is a network of data centers spread across the globe to deliver content faster to the audience, regardless of their location.
Apart from a good hosting service, the number of WordPress plugins and the quality of the WordPress theme in your site also affect its speed and performance.
Security
Hosting providers must offer robust security tools to protect your website from cyber-attacks, or malware. This is specifically important for businesses storing medical information or financial details of their visitors.
Look for a host that offers multiple layers of Firewalls, free SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates, DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) Protection, malware scanning, regular backups, network monitoring, automatic software upgrades, and the ability to restore your website, when needed. These factors play a major role in securing your website from malicious hackers.
Access management is another important factor to consider. The web host must allow configuring user privileges, restrict admin roles, and limit back-end access to authorized IP addresses only.
Your Unique Business Needs
As listed above, there are a variety of hosting services available such as shared, managed, VPS, dedicated, cloud, and colocation WordPress hosting.
WordPress is widely used across the globe, both by amateurs as well as pro users, making it a highly versatile CMS. So, when choosing a web host for your site, make sure to consider the scope and size of your site.
- Does your website feature large-sized videos, images, or files?
- Do you have a high traffic volume?
- What is the level of security you need?
- What is the scope of your site? Is it a business page or a personal portfolio?
- What are your storage and bandwidth needs?
- What is your budget?
Knowing the answers to these questions will greatly help you have a clear picture of what you want and which website hosting provider is offering it.
Scalability
When choosing a hosting provider, keep your future growth and business objectives in mind. Choose a web host that will allow your WordPress site to scale as per your business needs without potential downtime or crashes. A good host will offer unlimited bandwidth, data storage, and email accounts.
Technical support
Best hosting providers will provide robust technical support via email, call, or live chat to resolve any issues as soon as possible. Moreover, they also provide a strong self-help desk featuring FAQs, Knowledge Base articles, forums, blogs, tutorials, etc. where you can quickly find answers to common questions.
Not just your hosting account, but a good host will also provide consultation related to your WordPress themes, plugins, updates, settings, etc.
Determine the Kind of Web Host You Need
When to Choose Shared Hosting?
Shared hosting allocates you a domain on the same server as other WordPress sites, thus sharing the resources with them.
Ideal for
This is one of the cheapest hosting options, ideal for beginners who want to lift their business to the ground. It is a good option if you have low traffic and do not expect high performance, but still want your website to stay online.
The Downside
Shared hosting comes with usage restrictions, not allowing you to take up ample server space.
When to Choose Managed WordPress Hosting?
This is the most popular type of WordPress hosting where the service provider leverages cutting-edge technologies to run and manage your site with security and high performance. The host will take care of various technicalities including plug-in upgrades, backups, security checks, patches, maintenance, configuration, hardware replacement, monitoring, etc.
Ideal for
Such a hosting plan is great for established site owners with no time or skills to technically fine-tune the systems.
The Downside
The price may be very expensive, based on the resources you use.
When to Choose VPS WordPress Hosting?
VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting involves VMs (virtual machines). It uses a shared server, but offers a dedicated space to isolate your WordPress site from others, providing better control. Furthermore, it offers privacy of an individual physical machine which can be configured to run your unique server software.
Ideal for
It is perfect for SMEs, and intermediate developers looking for optimal scalability, separation, and security.
The Downside
This hosting may not be able to handle peak traffic demands. Hence, it is perfect for SMEs, and intermediate developers looking for optimal scalability.
When To Choose Dedicated WP Hosting?
Site owners get a dedicated physical server with maximum control over the site’s operations, hardware, and security. Hence, such hosting requires knowledge of OS and hardware and may be more expensive than others.
Ideal for
This setup will give you more bandwidth and freedom of customization, perfect for huge websites with high traffic volumes and specific needs. You may even opt for managed dedicated hosting, where the hosting provider’s system admins will take care of maintaining your servers.
The Downside
The downside is that you must have expertise in managing everything or be ready to hire a good sysadmin.
When to Choose Cloud WordPress Hosting?
It leverages a network of servers to distribute resources whenever needed for your website without having to own a computing stack. Such setup reduces the risk of downtime as load is distributed across different servers and visitors can access content much faster. Cloud hosting offers great scalability, unlimited resources, faster speeds, and excellent uptime due to automatic failover protection.
Cloud Hosting offers excellent scalability as your site is hosted on a cloud architecture, and not on a physical server. It is scalable, affordable and high-performing.
Ideal for
It perfectly aligns with all types of users, as you can easily scale the resources.
The Downside
If you opt for unmanaged cloud WordPress hosting, you will have to manage the server, optimize its performance and use of resources.
Find Your Perfect WordPress Hosting Match Today!
Confused about which web host is right for your WordPress site? Let us simplify the process for you. Reach out now for expert guidance!
Final Thoughts
With this, we come to the end of a detailed guide on choosing a web host for your WordPress website. There are a plethora of options in the market you could choose from. The final decision comes down to your website size, budget, requirements, and scope.
MyWebMate is an excellent WordPress Website Hosting provider with premium malware clean-up services and an impressive bunch of features such as caching, solid support, scalable hosting, and much more. Check it out now!
