If you're hosting a Wordpress based website, web hosting will play a major role in your business eco-system. A good web hosting goes a long way, in terms of performance, security and much more. These pillars result into better user experience and faster load-times for your customers.
Finding the best web hosting company for your business, sounds easy but it gets challenging due to the fact that there are so many. So many web hosting companies that claim to be the best, but really are not.
In this article we'll provide you the necessary information and knowledge you can use to choose the right hosting partner for your Wordpress website.
The two ways to choose the best web hosting for your Wordpress website
1. Consult with your web developer
Consult with the web developer or designer or the web design agency who is working on your website. Chances are they've worked with 100 other websites before and they can suggest you the best solution. But that's not always the case. At times, under-experienced web design agencies would recommend you the world web hosting companies (such as GoDaddy).
There could also be a possibility that you're building the website yourself, and want to choose the web hosting provider yourself. For that, get to the second way.
2. Choosing a web hosting company yourself
For the scenario where you'll need to choose the web hosting company by yourself, we'll look at the best web hosting companies that will not be cheap but will be reliable.
What to look for when choosing the best web hosting company
A few things to look out for are:
Performance
Read the online reviews. What are the current customers saying. Do they have a good performance. Do they use the latest hardware, NVME SSDs, and top-quality servers and all those things.
Having CDN (Content delivery network) is quite important if you want to deliver content to users across the globe. Most good web hosting companies also give you CDN (included in price), so look for that. However if you're serving customers only in a specific region or country, choose a hosting provider that has server / service in that country. (During checkout you should be able to choose which data centre you'd like to use)
Customer service
Again, read the reviews, are they good at customer service? Try to reach out to their support even before signing up, see how quickly you get a response. If it takes days, it's a red-flag.
Stay away from mass-sellers
A lot of web hosting companies have packaged a feature of 'Unlimited websites'. That's not always a good sign. Unlimited means a lot of their users are abusing a small account to host multiple sites. If you'll be sharing a hosting server (Read more about Shared hosting vs Dedicated hosting) with those unlimited website accounts, chances are the performance and security both will be of a lower grade.
Security
Ensure that the hosting provider you choose, mentions on their website to what kind of security measures do they take to protect their customers' websites. Read in the reviews, have there been hacks in past that affected websites hosted with this particular provider.
Decide which kind of hosting do you require
There are many kinds of hosting. Shared, VPS/Cloud, Dedicated, etc. Shared hosting is most common and cheapest. But not always a good option, especially if you're a business or running a medium to large scale website. Shared hosting is good when you want to start a small hobby website and do not require top-class performance. But for businesses, it's recommended to not used shared resources.
For medium to large scale websites and business websites at least VPS or Dedicated hosting are required. Of course those come with you knowing basics about running a VPS (virtual private server) or Dedicated server too. If you're a business owner, ideally you can rely on your web development company to help you out there.
The best web hosting companies for hosting Wordpress
This list is based on what we have tried and tested as well as general customer reviews.
1. Rocket
Rocket.net claims and proves to be one of the fastest web hosting provider for Wordpress websites. It comes with enterprise tools, some of these tools include
- Free SSL, CDN, WAF
- Free Malware Protection
- Enterprise level CDN (Powered by Cloudflare)
- Free Migrations
- Backups
- and much more.
Overall, Rocket is pricier than many off the shelf hosts but it's totally worth it. Once your website is ready, you'll need Caching solution that will create cached copies of your website and deploy it on Rocket's global CDN. For that, Rocket also has a plugin called WP-Rocket.
Pricing starts from $30/month for 1 website, 250K visits per month and 10GB storage
2. Kinsta
Kinsta is a large hosting platform, that has various pricing plans. Kinsta has great performance, multiple features such as:
- Global CDN
- Free Migrations
- Backups
- Great support
- Site cloning
- Bulit-in Edge Caching (Data is stored on global servers for fast website load times)
Kinsta also has static hosting (if you have a static website that doesn't rely on Wordpress)
Pricing starts from $30/month for 1 website, 25K visits per month and 10GB storage.
3. WP Engine
To start with WP Engine. It's not as good as the first two. But it's better than many others out there. WP Engine started managed hosting many years ago and has been in the market for longer than Kinsta and Rocket. Still, the other two have better performance and less complicated service offering.
WP Engine offers almost similar features such as :
- Edge Caching (Data is stored on global servers for fast website load times)
- CDN (Cloudflare)
- Backups
- Migration plugin (Not a big deal)
- Caching (with EverCache)
There have been mixed reviews about WP Engine by a lot of pros. Still, it's a great hosting platform for businesses that have multiple sites.
Pricing starts from £16GBP/mo for 1 website, 25K visits per month and 10GB storage.
4. Siteground
Many years ago we used Siteground for our own website too. It's a great platform, good support. The only con is the renewal prices are much higher than the first purchase price. What siteground does is gets the customers in with extremely low price point, but increases the renewal price. It can be surprising for some customers.
In terms of features, it's quite similar to WP Enginer but performance wise it might even be better than WP Engine. Again no comparasion with Rocket and Kinsta
Some of these features include:
- Caching (with SG Plugin)
- CDN
- Migration Plugin
- Backups
- Clone your website
Price (First time $2.99 and renews at $17.99) for 1 website, 10K visits per month and 10GB storage.
5. A2 Hosting
This is the only one that we haven't tried but have had a look at many times. A2 runs on Litespeed server technology (one we use for all our client sites) which is supposedly much faster than other server types. The pricing of A2 is much cheaper than others and comes with a big bundle of features too. Overall there have been good reviews about A2 but since we havn't tried it ourselves, we cannot comment further. Might be worth trying it out for a small site for a month?
Which hosting provider do we use at Sundeck Studio?
While all the above mentioned hosting providers are great. They are made for everyday consumer, small business and personal use. These are great to host 1 or 10 sites with medium sized traffic. However, at Sundeck studio we host multiple client sites. Some of these see a large number more traffic, which could be close to half a million or a million users.
Platforms like Kinsta or Rocket have solutions to host such traffic too. But those come at a huge price tag. That's a challenge. Because we wanted to offer same or better performance, multiple backup layers, premium CDNs to our clients but at a more affordable price.
Since we host large number of sites for our clients, we have partnered with large scale cloud hosting providers such as Google cloud, AWS, Vultr and others.
This way, we get more granular control on servers, specs, performance and customization. We also offer different tiers of hosting to different clients and by using a "self-hosting" solution we are able to create bespoke environments for our clients.
From tech-stack point of view, when we rent these servers, we use them with Litespeed on them which providers extremely fast performance, caching solutions and much more. Resulting most of our client sites scoring 99 to 100 on Google page speed score.
If you're interested in getting a high-performance website for your business, Get in touch today.
