Making a bold and spicy claim like “best wordpress hosting tips ever” really puts the heat on us to deliver, if you have some feedback on how we did, leave it in the comments below…
Now let’s get to those wordpress hosting tips.
When choosing where to host your new WordPress website there are many choices. The benefits to choosing the best hosting company will lead to more visitors, a larger audience, and more customers. Choosing the wrong web host could cause you serious trouble down the road. A hosting company that has specialized experience with WordPress websites will give your visitors the best possible experience browsing your website.
Pssst, no idea what hosting is?
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We’re going to keep it simple. A website consists of files. These files live on a server. The server acts as a filing cabinet for the website. When I type in your domain, it goes and gets the files from the server as provided by your host. The host is the one providing you server space.
Check out Wiki for more info. Your
domain name is the key to your website. You give the domain name a nameserver, which means you tell the domain where you are keeping all the website files. The nameserver is the address of your website files. How does all this happen? Magic.
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Here’s a short list of things to look for in your next hosting company:
Uptime
Websites are not like traditional stores with ‘Buesiness Hours’. The Internet never sleeps and for that reason it’s critical that your website is online when your customers are ready to buy. Traditional ‘shared hosting’ plans will lump hundreds of websites together to share resources. As you can imagine with hundreds of websites fighting for resources, your website can potentially come up short and leave your visitors with errors. And a dirty little secret of shared hosting is they can shut down your site at off peak times to conserve resources for other websites. That’s lame.
Backups
Another important aspect to your hosting plan is important when you least expect it. The world wide web is less than 30 years old and still a ‘wild west’ of sorts. With that, there’s always the possibility that someone out there will want to deface or otherwise disturb your website. The best web hosts will provide regular backups so that in the event that your website is taken offline or any reason a fresh copy is available to restore. And dare we say it, you could break your own site. That’s right, with WordPress power comes great responsibility. All the buttons you can click, all the cool stuff you can do, means every now and then, you could do something pretty crazy, and your site goes haywire. You will be LOVING your backups right about then.
[box type=”alert” size=”large” style=”rounded” border=”full”]A big issue with WordPress is the dreaded database. The warehouse for your website data can become a major vulnerability if you don’t give it a regular scrubbing.[/box]
Updates
While the web can be like the wild west in some aspects there are many ways that the Internet has revolutionized the way we communicate. With relative ease we can keep up to date in a variety of different aspects. Many of the premium web hosting companies will support updates to software such as WordPress. Regular updates are the best way to keep your web site free of known vulnerabilities and secure your content.
Speed
Faster is better, for web visitors and for when search engines send their inspector bots come by to judge your websites loading times. What’s gonna be faster? A high end server carrying a handful of sites or a commercial server carrying a city’s population worth of web sites? And when something goes wrong?
Support
Do not underestimate the value of support. You now what I mean. You have to find a number or send them a ticket and then anxiously await a reply. And when they do reply, it is often a form email or a phone script. If that didn’t work, they “escalate your problem” to the next level of support. Hopefully they speak clearly enough and understand you well enough to not spend most of your time being confused by tech terms and language idioms. Support calls often end with, “it’s your fault”, or it’s gonna cost you some cash or more time to get their “programmer” on the fix.
Access
The user interface. Being able to navigate the screens and tunnels and checkboxes and dropdowns that make up your access to your hosting account. Know how to change an A record? CName? IP address? What about changing permissions, set up emails, blah blah blah. Remember all the different passwords for your account, for hosting, for ftp, etc. You sure you want to manage your own hosting? If you do, I hope it is simple to use.
How Not to Choose
By Price.
When in life have you found cheaper to be better? It’s not all that often. Some hosts offer $4 a month hosting. That’s like a $5 per tooth dentist. Avoid! But wait you say, there are reputable hosts who charge around $10 a month. Yes there are. And they are fine. EXCEPT. In order to justify that cost, you are renting server space with hundreds or even thousands of others. And your website and email could be impacted by the choices of those other websites. Spam, hack, hack, spam, resource hog…And what level of service can you expect at that cost?
By a TV Commercial
TV commercials are expensive. Going with a hosting company that advertises on tv (especially Super Bowls!) means you are footing the bill for those commercials and other expensive marketing. I’m just saying…
Run Daddy
Speaking of TV commercials. I’m going to do it. I’m calling out Go Daddy, the big daddy of domains and hosting. If you have ever purchased a domain from Godaddy, which we do frequently, you’ve experienced the opposite of fast and convenient. You have to go through 7? different windows, not clicking, unclicking, reclicking and dodging special offers. They are not about speed, especially when hosting wordpress sites. The interface is clunky and it seems like they make it more complicated every few months. And support…it always starts out nice, takes too long, and frequently goes no where.
Go Gator
We’re not all negative nelly, our 3 favorite hosts, in order of cost:
HostGator
Cheap and easy – It’s still a shared cesspool of websites, but it’s the best of the least.
MediaTemple
The best middle of the road option in cost and value. Full Disclosure: We have a few sites remaining on MediaTemple servers.
RackSpace
Our “top of the line” choice. Full Disclosure: That’s who we use. We buy virtual space from Rackspace and set up our servers in their cloud.
The bottom line is that while any hosting company can provide a place for your files, it takes WordPress Experts to fully optimize and maximize your business website to attract more customers. With a portfolio of nearly 300 wordpress websites, Webmanna has significant experience hosting and maintaining wordpress websites for clients in a variety of industries.
Why WebManna WordPress Hosting?
We could go on all day about how awesome our hosting is…but that would be too time consuming for all of us. The key benefits that matter to you are:
- High End Equipment
- 24/7 Full Service Availability
- Custom Dedicated Hosting Environments
- Built for WordPress
- Daily Backups
- Regular WordPress Updates done for you
Got a hosting question, give us a holler. Use the form in the sidebar above on the right, hit up our contact page, or give us a call. 877-WebManna
Best WordPress Hosting Tips EVER!
Making a bold and spicy claim like “best wordpress hosting tips ever” really puts the heat on us to deliver, if you have some feedback on how we did, leave it in the comments below…
Now let’s get to those wordpress hosting tips.
When choosing where to host your new WordPress website there are many choices. The benefits to choosing the best hosting company will lead to more visitors, a larger audience, and more customers. Choosing the wrong web host could cause you serious trouble down the road. A hosting company that has specialized experience with WordPress websites will give your visitors the best possible experience browsing your website.
Pssst, no idea what hosting is?
[toggle_container keep_open=”false” initial_open=”0″]Here’s a short list of things to look for in your next hosting company:
Uptime
Websites are not like traditional stores with ‘Buesiness Hours’. The Internet never sleeps and for that reason it’s critical that your website is online when your customers are ready to buy. Traditional ‘shared hosting’ plans will lump hundreds of websites together to share resources. As you can imagine with hundreds of websites fighting for resources, your website can potentially come up short and leave your visitors with errors. And a dirty little secret of shared hosting is they can shut down your site at off peak times to conserve resources for other websites. That’s lame.
Backups
Another important aspect to your hosting plan is important when you least expect it. The world wide web is less than 30 years old and still a ‘wild west’ of sorts. With that, there’s always the possibility that someone out there will want to deface or otherwise disturb your website. The best web hosts will provide regular backups so that in the event that your website is taken offline or any reason a fresh copy is available to restore. And dare we say it, you could break your own site. That’s right, with WordPress power comes great responsibility. All the buttons you can click, all the cool stuff you can do, means every now and then, you could do something pretty crazy, and your site goes haywire. You will be LOVING your backups right about then.
[box type=”alert” size=”large” style=”rounded” border=”full”]A big issue with WordPress is the dreaded database. The warehouse for your website data can become a major vulnerability if you don’t give it a regular scrubbing.[/box]Updates
While the web can be like the wild west in some aspects there are many ways that the Internet has revolutionized the way we communicate. With relative ease we can keep up to date in a variety of different aspects. Many of the premium web hosting companies will support updates to software such as WordPress. Regular updates are the best way to keep your web site free of known vulnerabilities and secure your content.
Speed
Faster is better, for web visitors and for when search engines send their inspector bots come by to judge your websites loading times. What’s gonna be faster? A high end server carrying a handful of sites or a commercial server carrying a city’s population worth of web sites? And when something goes wrong?
Support
Do not underestimate the value of support. You now what I mean. You have to find a number or send them a ticket and then anxiously await a reply. And when they do reply, it is often a form email or a phone script. If that didn’t work, they “escalate your problem” to the next level of support. Hopefully they speak clearly enough and understand you well enough to not spend most of your time being confused by tech terms and language idioms. Support calls often end with, “it’s your fault”, or it’s gonna cost you some cash or more time to get their “programmer” on the fix.
Access
The user interface. Being able to navigate the screens and tunnels and checkboxes and dropdowns that make up your access to your hosting account. Know how to change an A record? CName? IP address? What about changing permissions, set up emails, blah blah blah. Remember all the different passwords for your account, for hosting, for ftp, etc. You sure you want to manage your own hosting? If you do, I hope it is simple to use.
How Not to Choose
By Price.
When in life have you found cheaper to be better? It’s not all that often. Some hosts offer $4 a month hosting. That’s like a $5 per tooth dentist. Avoid! But wait you say, there are reputable hosts who charge around $10 a month. Yes there are. And they are fine. EXCEPT. In order to justify that cost, you are renting server space with hundreds or even thousands of others. And your website and email could be impacted by the choices of those other websites. Spam, hack, hack, spam, resource hog…And what level of service can you expect at that cost?
By a TV Commercial
TV commercials are expensive. Going with a hosting company that advertises on tv (especially Super Bowls!) means you are footing the bill for those commercials and other expensive marketing. I’m just saying…
Run Daddy
Speaking of TV commercials. I’m going to do it. I’m calling out Go Daddy, the big daddy of domains and hosting. If you have ever purchased a domain from Godaddy, which we do frequently, you’ve experienced the opposite of fast and convenient. You have to go through 7? different windows, not clicking, unclicking, reclicking and dodging special offers. They are not about speed, especially when hosting wordpress sites. The interface is clunky and it seems like they make it more complicated every few months. And support…it always starts out nice, takes too long, and frequently goes no where.
Go Gator
We’re not all negative nelly, our 3 favorite hosts, in order of cost:
HostGator
Cheap and easy – It’s still a shared cesspool of websites, but it’s the best of the least.
MediaTemple
The best middle of the road option in cost and value. Full Disclosure: We have a few sites remaining on MediaTemple servers.
RackSpace
Our “top of the line” choice. Full Disclosure: That’s who we use. We buy virtual space from Rackspace and set up our servers in their cloud.
The bottom line is that while any hosting company can provide a place for your files, it takes WordPress Experts to fully optimize and maximize your business website to attract more customers. With a portfolio of nearly 300 wordpress websites, Webmanna has significant experience hosting and maintaining wordpress websites for clients in a variety of industries.
Why WebManna WordPress Hosting?
We could go on all day about how awesome our hosting is…but that would be too time consuming for all of us. The key benefits that matter to you are:
Got a hosting question, give us a holler. Use the form in the sidebar above on the right, hit up our contact page, or give us a call. 877-WebManna
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