Don’t know how to choose the best WordPress hosting for your website? You’re in the right place.
Getting web hosting is one of the first things you need to do before creating a WordPress website.
Web hosting determines the overall performance of your site. Hence, it’s one of the key components of your site’s success. Therefore, one must choose WordPress hosting wisely.
So, if you are wondering how to choose WordPress hosting, we’ve got you covered.
Let’s start by learning why WordPress is used to create a website.
What is WordPress and Why is it a Top Choice for Creating a Website?
WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems (CMS) for creating, managing, and publishing content online without any coding skills. It’s open-source software that is completely free to use, which means you can use it freely and modify it according to your needs.
It’s important to know that there are two versions of WordPress, i.e., WordPress.org and WordPress.com.
WordPress.org is a self-hosted platform where you get full ownership and control over your site.
Conversely, WordPress.com is a fully hosted platform that provides web hosting. However, this platform is limited and doesn’t give you full control over your site.
You can read our article on WordPress.org vs WordPress.com for a more detailed comparison.
Since we’re discussing ‘How to Choose the Best WordPress Hosting,’ we’re referring to the former platform, WordPress.org.
The reasons why WordPress is a top choice for creating a website are as follows:
- A high degree of customization and flexibility
- Availability of tons of free and premium WordPress themes for a great-looking website
- Availability of an ocean of free and paid plugins to extend your website’s functionality
- Accessibility of all admin functions from a single dashboard (including reports and analytics)
- Fully scalable (works great for any company from startup to enterprise)
These are the top reasons why massive users use WordPress to create a website.
With that said, let’s take a brief insight into WordPress hosting.
What is Secure WordPress Hosting?
As we’ve discussed earlier, WordPress.org is a self-hosted platform. That means you need to purchase a web hosting service to start a website.
Web hosting is a space where you can store all your website files. Once you sign up for a web host, visitors can access your website via the World Wide Web (WWW).
Hence, WordPress hosting is a web hosting solution specially built for running WordPress websites.
Basically, WordPress-specific hosting plans allow you to install WordPress automatically or with a single click. Also, it provides servers and resources exclusively optimized for the WordPress site.
How to Choose the Best WordPress Hosting? (16 Key Criteria)
Now, it’s time to go into the details of our main topic of interest, i.e., how to choose the best WordPress hosting for your site. So, let’s dive in!
1. Know Your Website Niche
The kind of website you’re building determines all the other considerations when choosing WordPress hosting. So, first, you need to be clear about the type of website you want to build.
You might want to build a business website (either small or large), an eCommerce site, a blogging site, and so on.
Usually, if you want to create a blog website, you can go with a low-cost hosting platform. Yet, it should be able to provide resources to handle images and videos if you plan to have them on your site.
Likewise, business websites like restaurants, travel booking, and others need tighter security, blazing-fast speed, and more room to grow.
If you want to build a robust eCommerce site, you should choose a WooCommerce hosting provider, and it should offer WooCommerce-specific features to scale it up.
Thus, determining your website niche is a base for building other frameworks for choosing the best WordPress hosting.
2. Choose the Suitable WordPress Hosting Type
Once you are confident about the type of website you want to build, you should also determine the type of WordPress hosting that is suitable for you.
Different types of WordPress hosting are available: Shared hosting, Managed hosting, VPS hosting, and Dedicated hosting.
a. Shared WordPress Hosting
Shared hosting is the most budget-friendly hosting option for getting your website online. In this case, multiple websites have to share the same IP address and server resources (hard disk space, bandwidth, and memory).
However, other users cannot access your files, private information, and vital data. Shared hosting is best for bloggers, hobbyists, and small business websites.
b. Managed Hosting
Managed hosting is a convenient solution. It allows your hosting company to take care of every aspect of your hosting, including setup, management, security, backup, updates, and so on.
With Managed hosting, you don’t need to worry about the fundamentals of your hosting. Thus, you can solely focus on improving your business.
A managed hosting solution is comparatively more expensive than other normal hosting plans.
However, if you are willing to pay extra so that the hosting company will handle very hosting-relevant tasks, then this type of hosting is for you.
c. VPS Hosting
VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server hosting. This hosting type uses the virtualization technique to partition a single server into multiple segments. So, you’ll be provided with a portion of the server that you don’t have to share with other clients.
VPS hosting allows you to scale up your website as it grows. Also, it has a faster loading time and higher uptime rates compared to Shared hosting.
This hosting is perfect for small to medium businesses and tech-savvy users interested in configuring the server to meet their specific needs. It’s also perfect for Shared hosting users who have outgrown their resources.
d. Dedicated WordPress Hosting
Like its name suggests, Dedicated hosting provides a dedicated server to a single user. It offers unlimited resources, full storage, bandwidth, and more.
Further, dedicated hosting offers full privacy and complete control. Best of all, you can customize your server according to your needs without affecting other users.
In a nutshell, Dedicated WordPress hosting is an expensive hosting service that is suitable for large enterprises only.
3. WordPress Pre-Installed or One-Click Installation
The one-click WordPress installation feature enables you to get started with your website easily and quickly.
It’s even better if your hosting company has WordPress pre-installed or possesses an automatic installation feature so that you can log in to your WordPress website immediately and focus on other required setups.
Thus, when you choose the hosting provider, make sure that it has WordPress pre-installed for you. If not pre-installed, it should have at least an automatic or one-click WordPress installation feature for your ease.
For instance, Bluehost is a great WordPress hosting provider with an automatic WordPress installation feature. Likewise, WordPress comes pre-installed in A2 Hosting.
4. Easy-to-Use Hosting Dashboard/Control Panel
The hosting service you choose should have a simple, user-friendly dashboard. Otherwise, managing web hosting can be an uphill task.
Hence, a hosting service with an easy-to-use dashboard/control panel is required. This panel enables you to manage domains, databases, backups, monitor emails, and more without any headaches.
A good example is the MyKinsta dashboard. It’s a built-in dashboard of Kinsta for powerful website management. Its dashboard has quick access to the sites, staging environment, reports & analytics, billing, and more.
5. Fast Loading Speed
Fast page loading speed is one key factor in ranking higher on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
But for your website to run swiftly, it’s essential that your hosting companies are also optimized for fast web hosting.
A slow host affects the page loading speed, makes your users go away, and makes your admin panel slow. As a result, organizing and managing your website will also be time-consuming.
Thus, it’s important to choose a high-speed WordPress hosting service. Now, with so many hosting providers boasting fast speed, how to choose the best WordPress hosting that is actually fast?
So, here is a list of the factors to consider while choosing fast WordPress hosting.
I. High-Speed SSD Storages
SSD stands for Solid State Drive. Unlike web hosting solutions using Hard Disk Drive (HDD), SSD-based hosting is fast. It’s because SSD stores data and files on flash memory chips that can be retrieved quickly.
II. Higher/Unmetered Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of data a website can transfer to its users at a given time. So, it determines the amount of traffic that your website can handle.
Your site can slow down and even collapse if insufficient bandwidth is allocated. Therefore, you need to make sure to choose to host services with higher or unmetered bandwidth.
III. Caching Capabilities
If you don’t know what caching is, it’s simply the process of storing copies of files in a temporary location for quick access.
Are you wondering how it benefits site speed? Each time a user loads a webpage, the browser must get lots of data to display that page.
Caching saves a copy of a web page’s content on the hard drive. Thus, whenever the user opens that page, it loads quickly.
Different technical terms are used to refer to cache. For example, a CDN (Content Delivery Network) server caches content to prevent latency (delaying data transfer). DNS (Domain Name System) server caches DNS records, and so on.
Many caching plugins, such as W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed Cache, etc., are available for your WordPress website. However, choosing a WordPress host with great caching abilities is wise.
For instance, Cloudways hosting solution has built-in caches like Memcached, Varnish, Nginx, and Redis. Likewise, InMotion hosting supports W3 Total cache as well as other advanced caching options.
IV. Global Data Centers
If you want to achieve the maximum page loading speed, then your website should be hosted geographically closest to your target audience.
So, you need to choose a WordPress host with global data centers. This means that your hosting company should have multiple server locations distributed globally.
One good hosting service with global data centers is Kinsta. This WordPress hosting solution has over 35 data centers located in different geographic locations, such as India, the USA, Australia, California, etc.
6. Backup
Backing up is essential for any WordPress website. Imagine accidentally losing all your files or crashing your site for any reason. Scary, right?
You never know what may go wrong with your site, but you can always be prepared by backing it up. After all, you don’t want your devotion and hard work to go in vain.
That’s why, while choosing the host for your WordPress site, always check what kind of backup facilities it provides.
Depending upon the host you choose, the frequency of backup can also vary. Some companies might keep the backups daily, some might run weekly backups, and some on a monthly basis. But the best option is to go for hosting with daily backup.
Along with keeping backups, your hosting provider should also let you restore them without fuss. Otherwise, what’s the use of backing up your site?
So, make sure to investigate the backup and restoration process in detail before signing up for a hosting company. One of the perks of using a WordPress website is that it also has several backup and restore plugins.
So, if you’re not sure about the backups from your web host providers, you can find the best WordPress backup plugins, such as Jetpack, UpdraftPlus, BlogVault, etc.
7. Security
You should know that a WordPress website isn’t free from malware attacks, hacks, and other such security threats.
Also, your customers’ private and sensitive information can be breached. If that happens, it won’t be good for your site’s health, reputation, or revenue.
Thus, security should be yet another top priority when choosing a WordPress hosting provider.
Your hosting service should have top-notch security features, such as two-factor authentication, login attempt limitations, and dedicated firewalls.
Furthermore, complete DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) protection and other such added securities are crucial.
Besides, you can utilize the power of the best WordPress security plugins to keep your site safe and secure. Some examples of such powerful security plugins are Solid Security, Wordfence Security, Sucuri Security, etc.
8. Up-to-Date Server Technologies
WordPress requires various pieces of software on the server for it to work. Its installation requires PHP – a popular scripting language for creating dynamic websites.
Likewise, it requires the database to store its configuration data and the content that you upload to your website.
Finally, WordPress runs on a web server. A web server is software that receives clients’ requests via the World Wide Web (WWW), processes them, and delivers content to its users.
So, to run WordPress, your hosting should have the following latest requirements:
- PHP version 7.4 or greater
- MySQL 8.0 or greater; MariaDB Database 10.4 or greater
- HTTPS support
WordPress also works on PHP 7.0+ and MySQL 5.5.5+. However, we recommend using the latest versions because these outdated versions can expose your WordPress site to various security risks.
9. SSL Certificate Provision
Google prefers SSL-certified websites for users to have secure web browsing experiences. SSL is the acronym for Secure Socket Layer.
It’s a form of security in which the communication between your web browser and the web server is encrypted. That means it converts data to code to prevent unwanted access to your data.
You might have noticed the padlock-like signs in the URL bar while browsing in Google, Firefox, etc. It denotes that a website is SSL-certified and secured.
On the contrary, Google marks non-SSL-certified websites as not secure.
You can easily add the SSL certificate to your site from Certificate Authorities like Let’s Encrypt and so on. However, it’s better if your hosting company handles it for you.
Nowadays, many hosting solutions like Bluehost, Dreamhost, SiteGround, etc., provide free SSL certificates for a year or more in their hosting package. So you can choose which companies to host your WordPress site.
10. Maximum Uptime Guarantee
As the name suggests, uptime is a measure of the time that your hosting server is up and performing. It’s expressed in percentage. Your website should promise a maximum uptime (99.9–100%) to make it highly available to users.
If your website remains frequently down, there is no chance that you will gain new customers. Instead, it’ll chase away the existing customers as well.
So, if you want your site to be up and running without any interruption, choosing hosting that guarantees high uptime is a must.
For instance, according to its server status page, the uptime of Hostinger’s Shared and Cloud hosting is 99.99% (as of the date of the article’s publication).
11. Scalability
As time passes, your website’s needs will also change. At some point, your business may flourish and grow well. In that case, your website’s demand will increase, and it will require more resources, including memory, hard disk space, bandwidth, etc.
Conversely, if your business isn’t performing well, you might need to reduce the available resources.
Therefore, you should choose a flexible hosting provider that can scale your server up or down, depending on your website’s needs.
12. Site Migration
If you already own a WordPress site and want to transfer it to another hosting platform, the process is known as site migration.
Migrating a whole WordPress website to a new host is a daunting task. If your important files and data are lost while transferring, your website may experience chaos.
Therefore, if you’re confused about how to choose the best WordPress hosting, ensure that you choose a web host that offers hassle-free website migration.
One such example is Cloudways hosting service.
It helps you migrate your site without any difficulty. Moreover, your first site migration is absolutely free with Cloudways.
13. Staging Option
A WordPress staging site is a test site where you can test and try the necessary changes you want to implement before it goes live.
Occasionally, when you install new themes and plugins or update them, you might face some unexpected technical errors on your site. These unexpected errors can hamper your site in many ways or even lead to data loss.
Thus, creating a staging site can help prevent the breakdown of your live site. You can also experiment with several configurations and push them to your live site without fuss.
Some popular hostings with staging environments are GoDaddy, Bluehost, InMotion, and WP Engine.
Hence, we recommend choosing hosting platforms that offer staging sites.
14. Hosting Plans and Pricing
Hosting plans and pricing options are also important considerations before you sign up. After all, you should know what type of pricing works best with your budget.
It may be tempting to try a free web hosting service, but those often come with hidden costs that include:
- Limited bandwidth and storage
- Poor security
- Limited functionality
- Extra cost for advanced features
- Slow speeds and lots of downtime
So, why get substandard service for free when you can get unlimited bandwidth, speed, security, and a host of other features for as little as $2.95 per month?
However, the price can greatly vary depending on the duration of the contract you want to be locked into. The longer you’re willing to commit, the cheaper the price.
Hosting providers offer different types of hosting contracts, such as monthly, yearly, three-yearly, and so on.
Nowadays, most web hosting providers offer a free trial and a money-back guarantee. So, you can leverage the benefits of a free trial and sign up for a suitable hosting plan offering the best value.
15. Customer Reviews and Ratings
Ratings and customer reviews can also help you analyze whether the particular WordPress hosting is right for you.
Reviews from other users can give you a rough idea of the quality of the service that the web hosting provides, and it helps you make a better choice.
Several hosting websites display product reviews on their respective pages. Here’s an example taken from the SiteGround review page.
However, if you doubt the review on their official pages, you can also check it on review platforms.
One such trustworthy review platform for hosting reviews and ratings is Trustpilot. For instance, here’s a Trustpilot review for the Hostinger.
From here, you can get honest reviews and ratings of hosting companies from several users.
By the way, you can also read the full review of SiteGround Hosting from us.
16. Customer Support
Yet another important criterion to consider when choosing the best WordPress hosting for your site is customer support.
Unfortunately, if something goes wrong with your site, you need help from experts to solve it quickly. It’s because you cannot afford to leave your site down for a long time, as it’s bad for your site’s reputation and traffic.
Hence, knowing the different communication sources and the hosting provider’s average response time is essential.
Generally, hosting companies provide support via live chat, email, tickets, and direct phone calls. They boast of providing assistance 24/7.
However, the best support is defined as the one provided instantaneously.
So, before you sign up for WordPress hosting, ensure it provides reliable, friendly, and fast customer service.
These are the key criteria that you should consider when choosing the best WordPress hosting for your site.
Some of the Best Managed WordPress Hosting Services to Host a WordPress Website
Now that you know how to choose the best WordPress hosting,. Let’s look at some of the top recommendations for WordPress hosting:
1. SiteGround
SiteGround is one of the most powerful and ultrafast WordPress hosting solutions, trusted by over two million domains worldwide.
Moreover, this WordPress hosting provider is officially recommended by WordPress.org itself.
Major Feature Highlights of SiteGround:
- Unmetered traffic
- Daily backups
- Free SSL certificate and WordPress migrator
- Managed security and updates
- Awesome customer support
Pricing: Starts from $3.99/month for the StartUp Plan
Check out our blog on SiteGround alternatives.
2. Kinsta
If you want managed WordPress hosting for your site, Kinsta is one of the best options.
This web hosting comes with top-notch hosting features tailored for a high-performing website. It’s scalable, blazing fast, and easy to use with a built-in MyKinsta dashboard.
Major Features Highlights of Kinsta:
- Free unlimited site migration from any host
- 35 data centers
- Firewall and DDoS protection
- Multilingual customer support
- Based on the latest server technology (PHP 8.1, MariaDB, etc.),
Pricing: Starts from $30/month for Starter Plan
You can also read our article on Kinsta vs SiteGround.
3. DreamHost
DreamHost is another reliable WordPress hosting provider that guarantees an uptime of 100%. This means that your site will be highly available to your users.
Furthermore, it offers unlimited bandwidth and storage, a free SSL certificate, automated backups, and many more.
Major Feature Highlights of DreamHost:
- WordPress is pre-installed for you
- Uses solid-state State Storage
- Easy-to-use control panel
- Optimized web servers
- Live chat support and phone support callbacks
Pricing: Starts from $2.59/month for WordPress Basic Plan
4. Bluehost
Bluehost is a popular WordPress hosting solution that is tailored to your success.
All Bluehost plans include automatic WordPress installations, secure login credentials setup, automatic WordPress updates, and more.
Major Feature Highlights of Bluehost:
- Standard performance
- Free Domain and SSL certificate for a year
- Integrated with amazing WordPress themes and plugins
- Unmetered bandwidth
- 24/7 customer support
Pricing: Starts from $2.95/month for a Basic Plan
5. WP Engine
WP Engine is a fully managed WordPress hosting solution with maximum speed and performance.
Further, powerful hosting features like daily backup, automatic updates, one-click staging, and more make site management effortless.
Major Feature Highlights of WP Engine:
- 99.99% uptime guarantee
- Threat blocking and security
- Highly scalable
- Offers customizable themes and workflow tools
- 60-day money-back guarantee
Pricing: Starts from $20/month for StartUp Plan
Check our article for a detailed comparison of the best WordPress hostings.
Summing It Up!
This is pretty much it for our article on how to choose the best WordPress hosting.
Hopefully, after reading the key criteria mentioned above, you’ll be able to choose suitable hosting for your site.
Before choosing any service, find one that fits your needs and your budget. Also, make sure to carefully read the agreement and terms of service before signing any contract.
After choosing WordPress hosting, you might want to know how to change the login page URL for your WordPress website. You can also check our blog page for more articles on web hosting themes.
Lastly, you can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook for the latest WordPress articles and news.