Ah, WordPress. Back in 2005-2006, the infamous 5 minute installation made it’s mark on the world wide web. No more did we have to edit the wp-config.php in order for us just to type in our database and other hosting parameters.
Now we could just upload the all the installation files along with any WordPress theme that we so wished to use, and the on-screen installer process would take care of the rest. How things have changed since then. These days, 5 minutes to install WordPress seems like overkill.
Any decent hosting company runs with “One-click” application installers, that even type in your database and server configurations for you, basically all you have to do is log on to your hosting provider, click a button or two, and now you are running WordPress!
If you’re just looking for a list of cheap web hosting, check out this site that does a great job at maintaining an active list of cheap hosts. If you wish to learn more, read on!
WordPress Hosting: What types are there?
This article will compare some of the market’s most famous and widely used shared wordpress hosting providers. If you are looking for other types of hosting, you might want to use the index below. For an explanation of each of these types, read below the list.
- Hosting For WordPress
- Shared WordPress Hosting
- WordPress VPN Hosting
- Managed Hosting for WordPress
- WordPress Cloud Hosting
- Self Hosted WordPress
- Cheapest WordPress hosting
- Fastest WordPress hosting
Hosting for WordPress: What to consider?
First of all, you might want to make sure your website is going to run on WordPress at all. Some web developers still develop ASP pages, which basically means a Windows Server, compared to the Linux servers that is most common for WP servers.
Also, if you are just going to have a few pages, you might want to consider just using static HTML files, since these will load near instantaneously, and thus provide a much better experience for your users. However, they are tedious to update, and if you have more than just a handful of pages, you will soon find yourself looking for WordPress or another similar CMS for managing your content.
If you wish to create something like a tech blog, you will want a scripting language more dynamic than HTML.
When considering how to proceed with the hosting, you want to make sure you are focusing on the right things. First and foremost, you get what you pay for in most scenarios. Meaning that if you buy $1/month hosting, you can’t reasonably expect the site to run smoothly at all levels of traffic load.
Since the cheapest WordPress hosting is almost always Shared Hosting, then you can experience poor performance and slow load times even when your own pages are not receiving much traffic, because someone else on the same server as you is using all the juice.
Just like sharing an internet connection with someone else, you can make that comparison with relative ease.
Shared WordPress Hosting: The Cheapest Option
Still, even though it is among the slowest of the web-hosting out there, it is one of the most popular choices. Why? Well because most sites in the upstart phase don’t need that much performance.
If you are building up your site from scratch, chances are you won’t be receiving more than 10,000 pageviews a month, meaning you can deliver your site within 1.5-4 seconds on average, and while you won’t win any prices for having the fastest WordPress hosting, and you might lose a few visitors due to load times, most of your visitors will be using your site regardless, and you can therefore save on costs while starting up.
Some web hosts include several levels of shared hosting, meaning that you can upgrade performance slightly, while still keeping costs minimal, but as long as your content is hosted in any shared environment, your clients or visitors will never get that blazing fast experience.
VPN Hosting for WP: A good choice for medium sized sites
VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. This means that you get access to their servers via remote control, and thus have far more options than standard shared hosting provides.
This requires a bit more technical knowledge, since you can easily make mistakes that will send your visitors 403 or similar error messages. VPN’s are usually shared as well, but the number of websites competing over CPU and Memory power are much lower, where shared hosts sometimes have 100’s of sites on 1 computer, with a VPN you might be sharing it with 5-10 websites, and often have the possibility of completely renting one for just yourself.
Managed WordPress Hosting: What is it, and why choose it?
One of the newer types of WP hosting is called managed hosting, and as the name suggests, the web host will take care of many of the technical aspects of running a WordPress website. Not everybody needs this level of care and compassion, but for the inexperienced, having a contact person whom you can ask any type of WP or Server question will greatly benefit your own learning experience, and keep frustrations at a minimum.
Apart from that, you get their experts setting up Security Rules and Firewalls, Cache and Performance enhancements, some managers will also take care of any type of update coming your way. And most of them take scheduled backups as well. There are no hard rules as to what type of server your website will eventually be hosted on when choosing a managed WordPress hosting company, that all depends on the individual order you set up.
So that means you could end up on a shared server, paying 2-4 times more for just basic plugin installations if you don’t do your due diligence and read up on the exact specifications. There are other companies out there that provide VPN hosting as well as Cloud hosting for virtually the same cost as those who sell shared hosting packages.
WordPress Cloud Hosting: A short introduction
We’ve all heard the term cloud, when dealing with tech terms, but what exactly is it, and why would you combine it with WordPress? Roughly speaking, “the cloud” is simply a bunch of computers connected, and sharing the load between them.
So unlike traditional shared hosting, where you are allocated X percent of the total capacity of a single, specified computer – with Cloud hosting your WordPress installation will be fluctuating between servers around the world.
That means improved speed, since often times they work like CDN’s (content delivery networks) and display the resources requested based off of location to the user. This is a great choice if you are planning on upgrading your existing installation due to performance issues.
Self Hosted WordPress: For the true techies
The holy grail of any true nerd must be the ultimate server configuration. We won’t discuss this in much detail, since anyone wanting to get into hosting their own servers, should already know plenty about the subject, or else be prepared to fail a lot.
Cheapest WordPress Hosts: Best for small/new websites
It is important that you choose your hosting account based on your needs. In the article above you will find the most relevant information about the most popular web hosting services for WordPress.
It is of course important to make your choice based on what your goal is with the website – and what your needs are regarding performance. The types of hosting provided in this article are all great packages, but still with room for improvement. If you have special requirements for your hosting however, you should examine whether those web spaces can accommodate your needs.
For all providers of cheap web hosting is possible to upgrade so that you can get more space on your web space. This could be that you have a special need for large quantities of high quality images or video, and therefore it is of course essential that the web can be upgraded – without – having to change providers.
Fastest WordPress hosting: When performance matters
The most important parameters for any experienced WordPress webmaster when choosing a provider of hosting, is stability and up-time as well as performance. Of course it is very important that the up-time is as close as possible to 100%. As a rule of thumb, it is unacceptable that your hosting account has an uptime of less than 99.9%.
However, it can be extremely difficult to control and measure the uptime of the provider – and especially before you invest in your new web space. Should you measure a hosting you about already have in advance so that the tool can Pingdom clearly highlighted. Is it with a new provider, the best thing you can do to read others’ experiences.
Google for reviews about specific hosting companies – and if you know someone who uses the provider – ask them.
