Whether it’s WordPress or not, every website relies on solid web hosting. Hosting is essentially the service that connects your website files to the internet, allowing people to visit and interact with your web pages. Learn more about hosting and WordPress hosting here with WPBeast. Let’s start dissecting WordPress hosting and explain all you need to know about it.
What WordPress Hosting Do You Need?
Unfortunately, the world of hosting, specifically WordPress hosting, is crowded and difficult to understand. There are simply too many companies offering to host, and it’s challenging to guarantee the quality before signing up.
This can often lead to people using the wrong type of host or getting stuck with a host that doesn’t meet their needs. Here we try to dissect the hosting world to break it down into 2 main types.
Shared hosting For starting out
Using a shared hosting provider essentially means that your website files will be stored on the same server on which many other websites are stored. This is fine if your traffic is low, but there are a few potential issues:
- Shared hosting often provides slower loading speeds
- Downtime is usually more frequent
- Your site can have problems because of the traffic of other sites in hosts on the same server
We recommend using shared WordPress hosting if the project is small or you don’t intend for rapid growth. Here are some excellent providers:
There’s nothing wrong with using shared hosting, but make sure it will provide for your needs.
The pricing is reasonable, starting at just a few monthly dollars each. However, ensure you understand the promotion you are in as each service will increase its prices quite dramatically after the promotion ends, usually to over $10 a month.
Managed Cloud Hosting For WordPress For Websites With Higher Needs
Another critical type of hosting is cloud hosting. These services use cloud services such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform. Same for WordPress hosting, we’ll start dissecting it now with the help of WPBeast.
Specifically, how each service works depends on the provider – some still run a shared hosting model but use clever algorithms to spread the load to improve performance compared to traditional cloud hosts. Others provide dedicated virtual machines for each website, virtual spaces within the cloud platform.
What is Included in a Managed Cloud Hosting?
Managed cloud hosting includes the security and reliability of private cloud hosting but is just as cost-effective as public cloud.
The advantages of managed cloud hosting are as follows:
- Consistent Availability: It is based on high availability and private cloud fabric design, using efficient redundancy in its various servers, storage area network (SAN), and protection for reliable failover protection.
- Automatic resource balancing and failover: In the event of a host failure, cloud servers have advantages due to their continuously available infrastructure.
- Failover and resource balancing between hardware hosts are automatically at the virtualization layer, allowing management and upgrade of hardware and software.
- Network Security: Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs), protected firewalls, and Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS)/Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) can be used in cloud servers to provide a highly secure environment.
- Create a mix of virtual and physical servers: Application and database engines can share a private network with cloud servers, creating virtual and physical servers on the same system.
- Affordable: Managed cloud costs are as effective as most public clouds. Resources and services are under billing on a per-use basis.
Managed cloud computing offers businesses the same security and protection as a dedicated private cloud in a better and more affordable way. Companies using managed cloud computing can focus on running their business rather than dealing with server failures and downtime.
Some Great Cloud Hosting Providers
A2 Hosting: Dissecting WordPress Hosting
You can’t beat A2 Hosting when it comes to cloud hosting. It topped our search for features and offered a no-objection money-back guarantee, something no other provider offers. It’s also not too expensive, with cloud plans starting at $4.99 per month; while uptime isn’t the best at 99.95%, you get many great features.
These features include up to 450GB of storage, 8 CPU cores, and 32GB of RAM. Oh, and you can host an unlimited number of websites – something other clouds hosting providers don’t give you.
It’s worth noting that A2 Hosting doesn’t offer traditional cloud hosting plans on its website. Instead, you will be directed to their cloud VPS plan. You can choose between managed and unmanaged plans, but both emphasize speed and performance. If you’re on an unmanaged cloud VPS plan, you have to pay for an SSL certificate, which is a bit annoying – since you don’t have a free domain.
SiteGround
With great help and support (via phone, live chat, and email), a solid 99.98% uptime guarantee, and great features, you can’t go wrong with SiteGround. Our hosting research found this a highly reliable provider with an overall score of 3.7/5.
What could be improved: SiteGround dropped points in a few places. First, its plans don’t offer a free domain name. If you don’t already have a domain name, getting one for free is a convenient bonus offered by many other providers. Second, the $100 starting price is much higher than other providers, which feels like a big step up if you’re coming from a shared plan.
However, SiteGround performed well, combining uptime, great support, and 5TB of bandwidth, making it a standout feature.
WPBeast: Dissecting WordPress Hosting
The advantages of these hosts are that you usually achieve a much higher uptime rate and faster speeds. But you pay for it – the services start at around $30 a month.
In reality, other hosts fall somewhere in between or in a different category. For example, some hosts provide a wholly dedicated server to run your website. We may need it for websites with a vast user base.
When making your decision about WordPress hosting, you should go through three steps:
- Think about your website. What is your project? What are you hoping to achieve? When are you hoping to achieve it?
- With this information, guess how many visitors you’ll have a month. Also, consider whether you need a super-fast loading website or whether that’s less important for you.
- Choose a host that best fits your needs and remembers your longer-term goals.
We here at Visualmodo can ensure that WPBeast works excellently and recommend it! Cloudways also offers an excellent service.
