How To Choose The Right Hosting For Your WordPress Website? – A Beginner’s Guide
You have numerous options if you are looking for a web host for your new WordPress site. There are hundreds, if not thousands of great providers of web hosting services. This post is aimed at anyone creating a new WordPress site or those who’ve created a new WordPress site and aren’t satisfied with their web host.
With so many options, the question becomes, “how do you pick the one that’s best for you and your website?”.
Many parameters play a role, in the suitability of a web hosting service.
In case, you were wondering we use Kinsta. Our plans currently cost us $1,800 a month, depending on data transferred. We have chosen to go with a month-to-month hosting option for improved flexibility.
With web hosting, one size certainly does not fit all. The ideal web host for Colorlib is probably not the best for you. If you’re starting a website under a new domain name, you’ll find the costs expensive and the hardware unnecessarily powerful.
Every scenario is different, a few pointers to help you find the right host. First, we need to address your requirements.
What Does Your Website Need?
A few questions that arose,
- What is your current website traffic? How much do you expect it to grow in the next few months?
- How scalable a web hosting provider do you want? This would depend on your answer to the previous question.
- Do you require your hosting service to be developer-friendly?
- How much support do you need?
- What is your allocated budget for your hosting solution?
You must answer these questions before identifying the right hosting solution for your WordPress site.
What Features To Look Out For In Your Web Host?
1. Speed & Performance
Good hardware is essential to ensure great quality of service from a web host. The memory (RAM), processing power (CPUs) and disk space (HDDs & SSDs) made available to you play a big role in determining the overall performance of your website.
Now the usage of your RAM and CPU, depends on the type of content on your website and the number of visitors at any one type. For example, if you create viral content the average hosting plan provided to you at minimal cost is insufficient to handle such bursts of traffic. It will cause your website to slow down and occasionally even go offline. And we can’t have that.
It isn’t disk space that is important, seeing as though many hosting companies provide you with unlimited disk space. Rather the ability of your host to get the information quickly to your visitors, in other words the transfer speed that counts. And it is even better, if you have a web host who can keep your site’s data transfer times low, even under high load.
You can check the load on your server’s CPU, RAM and how much disk space you use. You can generally check this from your host’s dashboard. If you are cutting it close, it is time to upgrade your hosting plan.
Generally, the costlier hosting plans can handle larger traffic more effectively.
2. Support
This depends largely on your familiarity with different hosting solutions. You’ll need less support, if you know your way around WordPress installation, migration, security, caching, site backups and restorations.
But even if you know everything, there is always the potential for that one glitch to mess everything up, and it is advisable to have a web host who cares about ensuring that their product functions as advertised. And most providers of web hosting services ensure some degree of support. They provide support via telephone, support forums, live web chats, emails and a support ticket system.
Ideally the best support service is the one that is provided at a moment’s notice and with the quickest turnaround times.
3. UpTime
Most web hosting services have uptimes over 99.5%. There a very few in the sub 99% region. While it doesn’t seem much, if 0.1% significantly impacts your income from your website, it becomes rather important. Otherwise, it is not something you need to concern yourself with.I say this because most web hosting companies of repute have excellent uptimes.
4. What Else Do You Expect From Your Web Host?
- Offsite Backup & Recovery – If your website gets hacked or loses all its data for some reason, you need to be able to restore it to its former glory.
- Caching – Some web hosting companies provide caching to help ensure increased speeds. In-house caching includes caching on the server side and the client’s end. There are few plugins to help with client-side caching, head over to my previous post on the WordPress caching plugins.
- Git version Control – This interests developer.
- Built-In CDNs – Either that or you can opt for, in all likelihood, the best CDN service.
- Security Features – You can check out how many times they’ve been hacked, a good indicator of their security.
- The physical location of the data center – The closer it is to most of your website’s visitors, the better.
The above six are reasonably important criteria, that you’ll need to consider carefully before deciding.
What Are The Different Types Of Hosting? Which One Is Suited To Serve Your Site?
There exist 4 different types of hosting services that anyone who runs a WordPress site or is going to start a new WP site must be aware of before arriving at the right choice.
- Shared Hosting
- Virtual Private Server Hosting
- Dedicated Hosting
- Managed Hosting
Some hosting methods are better than others but they are also equally pricier.
Apart from the previously mentioned four hosting types, there is free WordPress hosting. But normally with such a service, there is a catch. For example, they’ll ask you to include adverts on your website. Free hosting services aren’t remotely as reliable as a paid hosting plan. If you are serious about creating a good website and generating revenue from your site, you shouldn’t consider free hosting plans.
Shared Hosting
The cheapest form of hosting, least configurable and most inflexible among the four hosting types. This works because a website with less traffic doesn’t consume as much of the server’s resources. Knowing that, your website is coupled with another ten or hundred websites and they are all provided for by a single server with shared processing power, memory and disk space.
Now this is acceptable for small websites with less traffic. But should the server your site loads from ever get overloaded, all the websites on it, including yours, will slow down. In other words, you get a good host most of the time but if your site or other sites on the same server get too much traffic, the server will either slow down or crash. Generally, your host provider will ask you to upgrade your hosting plan, when your site is the reason its shared server resources are at its limit.
Do not get fooled by unlimited disk space advertised by shared hosting services; this isn’t at all relevant. You need enough RAM and CPU to enable your server to quickly transfer your site’s data to visitors and with minimal response time. If your server is overloaded with requests from more visitors than it can handle, this will not happen.
Here you can compare the best shared hosting options for WordPress.
Given that this is the cheapest, it is also a good place for beginners with little or no blogging experience to start. This is the best option for low traffic websites which aren’t optimized for monetization. Not an advisable choice, if you are creating a website intended for high traffic and commercial purposes.
VPS Hosting
With a virtual private server, you aren’t given the complete resources of any one server. Instead, the said server is partitioned with your needs in mind. You are given a certain amount of disk space, memory and processing power. You are given root access and can modify the server’s performance-related components to suit your needs. This requires a little technical expertise and isn’t recommended for a newbie.
VPS plans and hardware are extremely flexible and scalable. With most hosting plans for VPS hosting, you pay for the resources your website utilizes.
Your website will never slow down or become unresponsive due to server overload, so long as you ensure it has adequate server resources.
An intermediate level blogger or developer looking to create a website made to measure for a specific purpose is the ideal option.
Dedicated Hosting
A leased out server only serves a website. The server’s full memory, processing power and disk space are available. Your website will rarely slow down.
Here’s the catch, they are generally very expensive. Such hosting is required only if your website receives extremely high traffic, so much so that it needs a server to function effectively.
You do not need a dedicated server, only high traffic sites need dedicated servers.
Managed WordPress Hosting
Probably the best option for non-tech savvy people, your hosting company completely takes care of the technical side. You can focus on making your website popular and creating awesome content.
Even tech savvy VPS users sometimes fail to fully optimize their sites and as a result they aren’t as fast as can be. In this case, you do not have to worry at all. The hosting company regularly caches your website, they run malware scans, fix security loopholes as soon as they’re discovered, update your WordPress plugins/themes, run daily backups. If your site ever goes down they’ll perform a full restoration. They provide excellent support around the clock.
Everything is handled, which isn’t necessarily the best thing about managed hosting plans. They come with the promise of infinite scalability at reasonable added costs.
Another feature about managed hosting services is almost zero down time. And with the best, you’ll have zero down time.
Managed Hosting is the best option, if you do not want to get involved with the technical side of things. It permits you to focus on improving and adding great content to your website. And when it does become bigger, your website can easily be scaled with the additional resources your web hosting company will provide.
I’d recommend you start with Managed WordPress Hosting
It is the best choice for any eCommerce entrepreneur, a blogger creating a commercial website or any other small business. You can grow without worrying about your host’s ability to handle increased server loads. Hosting company will take care of regular backups, WordPress core updates and any other technical challenge your website might face.
Best Managed WordPress Hosting
1. WPEngine
WPEngine probably the best managed WordPress hosting service, they are the ones who introduced the concept of managed WordPress hosting and made it possible for WP newbies to run awesome websites.
They offer excellent service and support, perform daily backups, scan for malware, offer single-click restoration options, easily enable CDNs for fast content loading, and ensure enhanced security with a firewall and SSL enabled on all websites. WPEngine also provides a staging area for you to test things out, which will be useful for a WP newbie.
WPEngine uses EverCache, a proprietary WordPress architecture developed by the engineers at WPEngine. EverCache ensures scaling your website never becomes an issue and can handle traffic spikes without cracking under pressure.
You can also choose between servers in America, London and Tokyo.
The price of $35 per month seems low, considering their services. This is the best deal on offer for anyone genuinely interested in creating a commercial, revenue-generating website with high traffic.
And they always allow for your site’s growth by upgrading its hosting plan. The pricing table as you can see below has many choices, each catering to different levels of website traffic.
As you can see, you’ll have no problem with your host when your site grows to epic proportions. The three plans you should consider seriously come with a 60 day refund policy if things do not work out or you find it rather expensive. Successful viral website results to no extra charges and kept current plan.
Over 1,5 million websites in 120 countries trust WPEngine with their hosting requirements, which is quite an extensive client roster.
More InfoBest Shared WordPress Hosting
1. SiteGround
SiteGround offers free WordPress auto updates, advanced security, in-house caching, free CloudFlare CDN, daily backups, anti hack systems, 24/7 support via phone, chat & tickets, pre-installed Git and a staging area.
While they provide Cloudflare freely, if you want to use MaxCDNor any other CDN service, you’ll need a third party caching plugin like WP Super Cache.
Starting at $3.95/month, it is cheaper than managed WordPress hosting services. And they offer a 30 day money back guarantee.
Other affordable WordPress hosting providers and comparisons can be found here.
More InfoFinal Thoughts
There are other web hosting alternatives for shared and managed hosting. I’ve shared the two I think are the best.
If you want to create a popular commercial revenue generating website, start with WPEngine or an equally good managed WordPress hosting company. If you find out, that it is taking too long to generate sufficient revenue to excuse spending $29/month on hosting, switch to SiteGround’s shared hosting plan.
I’ve not discussed clustered and cloud hosting options because they aren’t necessary for a WP newbie.
The first time I created a website, it was an exhilarating experience. Please do share your thoughts on WP hosting and your first time with web hosting.
Related Posts
I suggest you to Listed Cloudways for WordPress Hosting. You will get best features in their Platform.
Fahad,
Nice try promotion your employer. They must be happy to have so loyal employee 🙂
For advertising options on or website please see this page
Very cool and measured comment from you, when most would have gone for outrage or a cutting put down! colorlib.com is a great site, and I am picking up a lot from all of your articles, and will cite the look, feel, and blistering speed of your site as exemplars to a developer who I hope to work with. All the best.
George,
Thank you for your feedback! I highly appreciate it! Comments like yours are what keeps this project going.
I totally agree with you. I like WordPress.
I have 2 sites and tried different hosting, this one is the best.
Hosgater cheap shared hosting best for WordPress website of any size.
Rehan,
Thank you for your comment!
I am wondering why you are using some Pakistan based hosting for your website while recommending Hostgator to others?
Since you are trying make money with your website I strongly recommend to keep away from Hostgator or any shared hosting provider in general. On shared hostings you share the same physical hardware with hundreds of thousands of other users. It is not necessary a bad thing but if someone gets a huge spike in traffic your website becomes slow as well. While it is a slim chance to get a lot of visitors for a single website try to multiply this by 100,000 or even more users and you will get an idea how often your website will become really slow for no reason at all.
Another thing with shared hostings is that most of their hardware and software is outdated. They must maintain 100% (never happens but that’s their goal) uptime meaning there is no time to update hardware and software. That’s why many websites still uses PHP 5.2 which was discontinued 5 years ago making your website vulnerable. Many hosts have switched to PHP 5.4 but it is still outdated as version 5.5 and 5.6 are already out and PHP 7 is right around the corner. On managed hosting things are different and they will take care of software and hardware because that’s already included in price.
WordPress managed hosting is also built specially for WordPress and is built to get the most out of it. Shared hosting on other hand is mean for everything and it is not optimized for WordPress at all. WordPress will work but it will be painfully slow and we are back where we started – why my WordPress site is so slow?
Let me know if you have any question about what hosting and why you should use and I will be happy to help.
I’ve just switched from a Shopify site back to WordPress. Of course my load time is just awful. I’m trying to fix it. Is it a bad idea to use GoDaddy as the host? It seemed to work fine for Shopify but not so much for WordPress. I’m assuming this is because of the layout + extras I’ve added.
Hannah,
WordPress by default is really slow and it doesn’t matter if you use one or 10 different plugins. However, there are some things that you can do about it:
1. Implement a good cache. Right now you have W3 Total Cache plugin enabled but you use only Minify and Page cache. I strongly recommend to also enable database cache and browser cache and it will help to boost your website performance significantly. Also make sure to test your website with JavaScript and CSS Minify settings enabled and disabled because in many cases they tend to break things instead of helps to speed things up.
Using W3 Total Cache there is one major disadvantage – your website will perform much slower for administrators (signed in). The thing is that once you will publish a new article, update existing one, post a comment, approve a comment or do some other things that touches database server now have to clear cache, update database and create new cache file. Regular route would be to just update database but now there are two more things that your hosting have to handle. With cache enabled it is going to be a pain for administrator to work on a website especially if your posts are very long or there are loads of blog posts, pages and products on your website. However, cache will help to boost your website performance to regular visitors and that’s where it counts.
Plugin based caching makes website slow for administrators but it is still a must have solution to make your visitors happy. Other solution is to implement server side caching using nginx + FastCGI + redis or Memcached. This solution will offer 3-5x faster load speed for your website but unless you are sysadmin this is something you can’t get done on your own. It will also require ongoing monitoring and maintenance because VPS (cloud hosting) doesn’t come with tools such as cPanel or other visual tools and everything is done via terminal. If you don’t know how to manage your own server this is definitely not a way to go.
Needless to say that plugin based caching doesn’t offer the same performance as server side performance even when done properly.
2. Powerful managed hosting. The best solution here is managed WordPress hosting. They will take care of server side caching and other server optimization that will offer incredible load speed for both regular visitors and administrators. They will take care of any maintenance such as WordPress core updates, your website monitoring and other things. Managed hosting is slightly more expensive but it is the only solution if you want to get lightning fast website and don’t want to study 4 years to get a bachelor degree in computer science.
Sorry for rather long response.
Let me know if you have any questions about WordPress performance, caching or hosting and I will be happy to help.
Mahalo for the fast response! I will try your suggestions with W3. I think I’ll also have to switch to WordPress hosting at some point. It is currently taking several minutes to open the site on my iPhone so I will monitor that also. Thanks again!
Also make sure to resize your images because there are one 4000px by 3000 px image which is 5.9MB in size and one other that is 15.1MB in size and some other really large images around 1MB – 6MB. Make sure to reduce image size to max 300kB for an individual image or otherwise even managed hosting won’t help you. Image size reduction won’t help with Time To First Byte (TTFB) which is the most important metric but it will help your website load speed to reduce from 20s to around 3s. Which is still not the result you should aim for but still many times better than it’s now.
Let me know if there is anything else I can help you with.
If you are a wordpress blogger and your site runs on wordpress then it’s highly recommended that use a wordpress hosting server not a simple web hosting or linux hosting server. WordPress hosting server help you to enhance your blog/website speed and its also compatible all the wordpress tools and services.
Hi Aigars,
I am also Using shared hosting and fed up with slow response and downtime. I will very grateful if you can advise me reliable hosting.
Jesson,
We recommend WPEngine for every website owner who cares about their customers and SEO. WPEngine is fully managed hosting provider which is built specially for WordPress. It takes care of all WordPress quirks such as slow Time To First Byte (TTFB), heavy load on database and a lot of PHP function execution that are not cached at all. This hosting offers powerful caching which will make your website noticeably faster and much more reliable. Better website performance will boost your ranking in Google because website performance is the main SEO ranking factor.
Shared hosting is great for private blogs and small non-profit websites with no intention to make money or do SEO.
Let me know if you have any other question about WPEngine or any other hosting provider out there.
Thanks Aigars,
Checked WPEngine and its very good,Only problem It’s out of my Pocket .
Jesson,
WPEngine is much more expensive but you get what you pay for.
Here’s how long does it take for your website to load:
And her’s how long does it take for Colorlib:
As you can see Colorlib loads 11 times faster. Yes, 11 (eleven) times faster. You might argue that your website is larger in size. But that still makes Colorlib 3.5 times faster when size is taken into consideration.
The main mistake beginners make is thinking that when I will make enough money I will invest in hosting but the truth is that you will never make any money if your website is 11 times slower than your competitors website. Slow website is not going to just annoy your visitors that will never return but also Website speed is a major ranking factor which means that you will never get those visitors in the first place.
WPEngine is not the only good hosting provider and you might also consider SiteGround and their WordPress hosting packages. Not the same level of caching that WPEngine has but still you should see noticeable speed improvement.
Let me know if you have any other question about WordPress hosting or website performance in general.
You may consider adding rosehosting to your list. They offer fully managed SSD VPS Hosting plans.
William,
Thank you for your suggestion! We will consider adding it on other articles that are on the way. In this case RoseHosting is not relevant because we wanted to showcase different hosting options and it doesn’t fall under any of these. In this case Managed Hosting is exclusively about WordPress managed hosting with all its specific functionality such as object cache, HHVM, CDN, automated updates and security improvements.
Aigars, i can see your point.
However, I think that I understand why William mentioned Rosehosting. I read several posts on reddit about Rosehosting’s famous support. One user wrote that even though RH migrated his WordPress websites for free, they configured the server with some caching mechanism, i think it was called OpCache, offered him to install HHVM instead of PHP and suggested him to install some necessary WP security plugins such as WordFence etc… So I think that goes under WordPress managed hosting.
You are sharing great post. Nice post. I have ever tried WPEngine, they have good control panel. But, if you able to manage your own wordpress, you dont need to register with them. As their price is really costly. I have now migrated my blog to hostforlife.eu. I just use their windows shared hosting and I save a lot.
Jorge,
Thank you for your comment!
It is not about managing your own WordPress installation but about performance, support and backups. Their servers are optimized to run WordPress with their unique caching. I don’t know what technique they use but it should be something we use for Colorlib – HHVM + FastCGI Caching in combination with Redis or Memcached. That’s something you can implement on your own using VPS but if you are not sysadmin then there is zero chance doing it on your own. Without my above mentioned software it doesn’t matter if your hosting uses SSD, fast Intel Xeon processors and fast network infrastructure. WordPress is still going to load slow because of lack of caching. Caching is they key here but it is hard to get done and it requires a lot of tweaking and monitoring and that’s why shared hostings does not offer this kind of caching. WPEngine have done WordPress caching right and their service is worth it if you are looking for outstanding performance under any load. It can be active bbPress forum, BuddyPress community or WooCommerce website and WPEngine will take care of it.
I have done server setup and performance optimization for countless WordPress websites and I know how hard is to get caching right that’s why I recommend WPEngine or other WordPress managed hosting to my clients because it will save theme a lot of time and help to earn more money. You can read studies on how website performance affects conversion rate for eCommerce websites to get an idea how important is performance.
WordPress can be run on any hosting including free web hosts but the main thing here is speed. For example I can run marathon (42.195km) in 4:08:16 and it sounds cool but the world record is 2:02:57. I am practicing a lot and I eat healthy but somehow I managed to lose more than 2 hours. I can run but I am nowhere near the top athletes. The same with hosting, all hostings can run WordPress but we are here talking about the best players in the business and not the ones losing 2 hours on the same race. If you don’t care about speed then WPEngine or managed WordPress hosting is not the right one for you as you can get cheaper deals elsewhere.
Hi Aigars,
thanks for the explanation long and so detailed. I admit WPEngine it is good and I have tried it. However, I cant hold with the cost to be paid. In my opinion, it is better to buy VPS and manage the server itself. The cost we spend will be much more efficient. If we do not have the ability to manage our own wordpress, indeed WPEngine is a good choice. However, I am comfortable using hostforlife as my hosting provider. They are more cost-effective, and I also know how to manage my own wordpress. My hosting provider also provide backup feature.
Thank you Aigars for this great discussion. 🙂
Yes VPS is very good which is what Aigars pointed out to me as well. But the thing is not everyone can handle VPS like you do. And this was intended for beginners who are new to WP. I think they would have found VPS pretty difficult to handle. Which is why I didn’t recommend it.
But if you know your way around programming and web development languages, VPS may be a better choice. The costs aren’t as high and when they do go up because of increased traffic your revenue should justify a higher price too. And like you say since you can handle the technicality of a VPS and can’t handle the costs of WPEngine, a VPS is probably for the best!
Cheers mate! All the best with your site 🙂
Hi Vishnu,
I agree with you. I believe that we do not need to use a VPS to host wordpress, just buy shared hosting and we can learn wordpress itself. WordPress very user friendly. For backup, shared hosting providers also provide backup. So, if there is a problem, we can ask for shared hosting to recover our work. In my opinion, we dont need to host our site with wpengine that quite costly. We can just use shared hosting to host our wordpress site. Thank you Vishnu. 🙂
Jorge,
VPS allows for finer tuning of your WP and is definitely better than shared hosting. But for that technical adeptness is important.
But you can always use shared hosting and when your revenues are good enough you can switch to WPEngine to help scale your business further. Even if you are able to tinker with VPS, it will be difficult to pull off better results than a managed WordPress hosting solution.
As for backup please make sure that it is independent of your site’s servers. Having your backup and your site on the same host’s servers is not advisable. Always ensure they are completely independent of each other. Or you could use a plugin like UpdraftPlus.
I’ll be writing a post on WP backup solutions and plugins, be sure to check it out!
Thanks for dropping by 🙂
Hi Vishnu,
Thank you for suggesstion.. I’m really appreciate it and thanks for sharing many idea to me. 🙂
Hlw
Those are very good suggestion to build a new web site. It’s very helpful for beginner. Thank you for your kind suggestion.
Partha,
Glad you found it useful!
If you have any questions about WordPress hosting, website performance or any other basic technical things around WordPress please don’t hesitate to ask.
I have been working with WordPress for 6 years and I know all it’s quirks and I love to share my experience with others.
I would like to recommend A2hosting from US which I’m using for my website. The Lite package is good enough for small and medium site.
Ngoc Tan Nguyen,
Thank you for your comment!
I really like to research websites and I proceeded to do some research about your website and I hope you don’t mind 🙂
I see that you are serious about creating website similar to Colorlib as you have paid $1,525 to get your domain name. Domain name is worth it because it is PR6 domain and was registered back in 1995 and have never been dropped. That’s impressive! The only drawback is that it is not really that relevant to your niche but it is brandable and that’s great. I believe that were inspired mainly by OnWPThemes which was sold on Flippa last year for $120,000 but one thing you probably didn’t know is that sale never happened and seller turned out to be a scammer. He did made some profit from his website but apparently he had multiple WordPress theme related website and not all his claimed revenue came from this website. To make things worse his website got hit by Google for low quality content and backlinks and this site today is completely worthless. Maybe you were inspired by other website but your website structure is exactly the same. One thing that you have learned is to avoid duplicate content and that’s great. However, content is written for search engines and not real people. But most likely this website will end up on Flippa some day so it is not built to be a sustainable business in the first place.
I like to see your dedication with WordPress themes as you have multiple old domains bought on action and filled with similar content. And so far you are doing great as you have referred several thousands users to Themeforest. Great job with that!
Another good thing is that you know how to use caching for WordPress and you have managed to implement a proper settings for W3 Total Cache. Of course shared hosting accounts holds you back noticeably but you have done a far better job than 90% other W3 Total Cache users out there.
Will keep an eye on your website to see when it ends up on Flippa because otherwise you will end up with a dead domain which was worth over $1,500 last year because Google will pick up your scheme eventually.
That’s it for now and I hope you enjoy reading it! 🙂 Good luck with your WordPress affiliate website because luck is definitely what you need to make these domains live for many years to come unless you Flippa is your exit strategy.
Let me know if you have any questions about Colorlib, WordPress hosting or anything about SEO and internet marketing in general.
Hi Aigars,
Appreciate your professional advices for my website. I’m trying to remove other duplicated structure websites as well as replacing unnatural content by writing real articles. I will pay more attention to your useful suggestions on ColorLib. Thanks.
Ngoc,
I am glad you found these suggestions useful.
What is your goal with these websites? Are you going to sell them on Flippa or hold them until disaster strikes?
Hi Aigars,
I’m working on these domains for SEO practices. I have tried with both fresh domains as well as old domains to compare the results. Of course they generate some incomes but the lesson learns are more important.
Hope to see more your sharing ideas on ColorLib.
Thanks and Regards.
I thought SiteGround was a bad choice but when I read your reviews I changed my mind. Thanks for the article!
Leonard,
Thank you for your feedback!
SiteGround is my favorite shared hosting provider. Even tho I am not a fan of shared hosting because you share the same infrastructure without thousands of others. The good thing about SiteGround is that they have their own cache implements. Earlier they were using Varnish and, while great, it proved to not be the best solution for everyone. Therefore they decided to switch to nginx based cache. It shows how much they care about their customers and that they want to offer the best possible service. Meanwhile other shared hosting providers have no caching at all and sometimes you have to even ask to enable gzip which must be enabled by default everywhere without exceptions.
Another great thing about SiteGround is that they keep other software up to date as well and recently sent an email saying that they have upgraded to PHP 5.6 and that’s huge for a shared hosting. Most of the shared hostings use PHP 5.4 and some even as outdated as 5.2. It is hard to upgrade the entire infrastructure to the latest version of PHP because many users might host some legacy code. Probably some SiteGround servers still happen to run PHP 5.2 because of this reason but at least new customers get the most out of their servers.
On thing that I don’t like about SiteGround is their limited options for large website. There is no hosting plan I could use for my website and that’s slightly disappointing and I believe that many other webmasters feel the same. That’s why most of my new websites are hosted on WPEngine or Digital Ocean where sky’s the limit. But we are talking about millions of pageviews a month and any other small website owners can get the most out of SiteGround and for really affordable price.
Let me know if you have any other questions about WordPress hosting or SiteGround in particular.
hello i am new to wordpress and i am considering using DreamPress 2: Optimized for WordPress Sites & Blogs (Managed WordPress Hosting Now with SSDs), would my website be fast using this.
Hello Ife!
We haven’t tested and reviewed DreamPress 2 hosting. However, from technical standpoint it should be really good. It uses PHP 5.5, OPcache, HHVM and Memcached. These are the technologies that are know to deliver and outstanding performance for WordPress based websites. Colorlib is running on a similar setup – PHP 5.6, OPcache, HHVM and Redis which offers even better results but also requires tight monitoring and that’s why hosting providers doesn’t offer it as an service. We have to take care of monitoring, performance tweaking, cache cleaning and other tasks. Managed WordPress hosting provider will take care of all of these things while keeping high uptime rates that are very close to 100% percent.
So far I haven’t heard any bad reviews about DreamPress 2 and it should be fairly safe to use by just looking to technologies they use.
Other hosting providers that offers similar setup are Kinsta, Pagely and WPEngine but first two are better suited for slightly larger websites but all of them have a similar setup.
If you have any questions about WordPress hosting or performance feel free to ask. These are two of my favorite topics 🙂
thanks for the reply, one more question i am considering getting the divi theme from elegant themes, the question is would the divi theme work perfectly on DreamPress 2 managed hosting and SiteGround shared hosting.
Absolutely! DreamPress 2 managed hosting and SiteGround offers a really great hosting for WordPress and Divi theme will run smoothly without any extra optimizations.
Hi Aigars,
Many thanks for your contributions so far.
I am running a jobsites with jobify theme, going by jobify documentation which i have always being my guide, I have found it difficult to edit candidate. Each time I input the code [candidates] it comes with disorganised page so I eventually removed it.
Also, I found it difficult to edit the home page to my taste like having a motion image at the background.
Can I say its my hot issues? or what? I ma using justhost.
Your profesionalism contribution shall be appreciated.
Haastrup
This doesn’t sound like an issue with your hosting unless you are with them for many years therefore using some very outdated version of PHP.
You might also want to check your server error logs to see if there aren’t any PHP or MySQL related errors. WordPress doesn’t allow to display errors on your site for security reasons but stores on your server log. You might want to check that.
It would be a good idea to test theme on a local install using MAMP, WAMP or some other free tool to see if the same behavior is present there. I think that switching hosting before checking everything else is not a good idea and it is going to be a costly switch unless you take some free or cheap first month trial package.
Also you might want to contact Jobity theme developers to see what they have to say about that.
Hello Aigars,
You are extremely knowledgeable and experienced. I would like to ask you a few things. First I have devoured many articles and much information from yourself and elsewhere. I am looking to start a blog site, so I researched web hosts. As I live in the UK I looked for hosts there. Site ground is a possibility, though expensive for a small site which no-one will read. The other options were Green Hippo and UK2.
Then there was the question of which features in a theme I would like. I will be managing a website for a small company soon and will learn how to administer, so I thought I could run my own little website alongside to learn with. I like the work of Anders Noren very much. Ideally, I would like a free theme to begin with, though an example like Lasseter has features I want e.g. Image, script, video, quotes and audio and my interests are varied.I have a beautiful family or two of fonts (Director’s Cut) I bought some time back and would like to incorporate those onto my site. Do you have any ideas which would suit my needs. I like the sites on this page though feel I may be overwhelmed with the amount of options…Thank you
When it comes to hosting companies, saying “you get what you pay for” applies. If you pay peanuts, you will get monkeys. Most hosting companies have a similar margins for their business. If one hosting company offers hosting for $10/month and another for $2/month, difference will be noticeable in service, hardware and support quality. Cheap hosting will be much slower which means that your website will not be user friendly and Google will rank it below much faster websites. If you are thinking on saving on hosting I would strongly recommend to think about it again.
Free themes generally are very simple and you can switch between themes on daily bases. It is not like you are locked to one theme and you can keep like 20 themes on your dashboard and test one by one. That’s the best thing about WordPress. Here is a huge list of the best free WordPress themes.
Hi,
Nice informative article. I was a long time Blue host user but I moved onto WP Engine and I think it is the best WordPress hosting currently available.
I hope this helps the users of your blog.
Thanks,
Hi,
Thanks for the informative article, and for being so active in the comments.
I am considering changing the current theme I use to a new one in the hopes that my website will run faster (or run at all).
Im currently using x theme, which was actually listed in your blog post of the top fastest themes to use so Im a bit confused as to why my website is incredibly slow at times and today the site has actually failed to load sometimes. The speed checks at pingdom have actually timed out because it has taken too long to check my site.
So I am wondering if maybe my web host (hostmonster) could be to blame? If you take a look at my site you will see that it is not a big site and I have implemented the caching plugin and also use an image optimiser so it really shouldnt be taking so long.
Do you have any suggestions of why this may be happening please?
Thanks in advance
Nyle
Nyle,
It is combination between your hosting unable to handle compression that you are using and your caching plugin not working properly. You have minification enabled but don’t have database caching and object caching and page caching. Which means that each time page is generated again and all files are combined again each time your website is loaded. Which means that you case some 30% on bandwidth but you lose around one minute while resource are minified. And it happens on every single page load. That’s not a way to do caching.
I would strongly recommend to configure caching properly or disable it completely. If you don’t know how to configure cache I would recommend using SiteGround or WP Engine as they will take care of proper caching configuration for you. And they are going to use server side caching therefore you won’t need separate caching plugin that slows down admin dashboard. For your website I think it would be enough with SiteGround as WP Engine is better suited for more trafficked websites.
Thanks for your fast reply. I am currently speaking to siteground to get my website transferred. Ill update you again on how it all works out. Thanks
Any opinion on Inmotion Hosting?
It is a good hosting at its price range. Our full Inmotion Hosting review can be found here.
Thanks Vishnu, for elaborating this topic nicely. i think each website owner need to look at their business hosting needs instead of whatever the hosting companies offers etc. this way helps to find the perfect match for your hosting needs.
I currently have an ecommerce website hosted on volusion and want to migrate it to a WordPress based site. Any insights or guidance?
thanks
Conor,
You need to look for a plugin that helps with Volusion to WooCommerce migration. I know at least one free plugin on WordPress.org plugin repository but probably there are some others as well.
One of the deciding factors when I was choosing the right hosting company was the level of customer support. After reading numerous reviews i decided to go with WP Engine and so far I think I made the right decision.
Hey Aigars,
I have a recipes website that I started about a month ago, and it is hosted with hostgator……. and I have to say, hostgator is HELL to deal with sometimes. I am thinking of switching to mediatemple.net, especially to their managed wordpress hosting plans.
Do you think it would be a good move? I have also considered both siteground and wpengine, but mediatemple seems to also be good choice. I know you say we get what we pay for, but mediatemple seems to be a very good alternative to both WPENGINE and SITEGROUND.
What is your honest opinion?
Wayne,
Personally I haven’t tried Media Temple’s WordPress Managed Hosting but it sounds like a good deal. Personally I have mixed feelings about MT. They do offer an incredible support but I used their shared hosting plans (even more expensive than WordPress Managed Hosting) and the performance of their servers were the worst I have seen. I was especially disappointed about the fact that I had to pay 5 times more for the same service I get from other shared hosting providers. It was some time ago, so maybe a lot has been changed but personally I will never use them again and I don’t care what special deal they will offer. I have just lust trust in their server performance because that’s the most important thing for me. I almost never contact support unless it’s their fault and performance is all what I need.
In case MT has improved their servers it might be a good and viable option but I would try to get some trial from them before proceed with payment.
If performance is crucial for you then Pagely currently offers the fastest setup but their prices are really high but your website will fly. For a serious business it is for sure the best option but otherwise you can go with WP Engine or even SiteGround.
Thanks for the great info dear! In my opinion WP Engine is the gold standard in WordPress hosting. They are quite a bit more expensive than standard shared hosting but their service and support is superb. So, I would recommend this.
Mark,
We really like WP Engine as well. However, Colorlib have outgrown their infrastructure but that’s because we receive millions of pageviews a month. We still have similar setup like WP Engine but we built it an maintain it ourselves. It takes a lot of time for maintenance and we would love using WP Engine but growing bigger is the best problem to have 🙂
Hi Aigars,
Thx for the tips on choosing hosting. However i am still confused with questions like does it really matter that my hosting is located out of the country while most of the visitors r from the country , or is it only an issue of speed?
Since I dont have a fat pocket, i really prefer those cheap hostings but the thing is I cannot tell which one is much more reliable.
can you give some suggestions? Thx.
Yeah, There are lots of good web hosts that provides good web hosting at very cheap price. This guide is really good to select the best web host. I liked it!
To choose a good WordPress host among the various options, the customer support parameter is a differentiating parameter for a list of good WordPress hosts. So, I would recommend the host seekers to opt for the WP Engine.
The best WordPress host I know……
Rehan Kohli
Yes I have experience with VPS hosting – I switched from the general shared hosting of my provider. So results were encouraging – within 40 days, my site ranked higher for a couple of my main keywords.
For a beginner in WordPress shared hosting is the best way to start. Gradually moving to VPS when the site is getting popularity is the best option. Thanks for sharing such a worthy content.
Jack,
For most users I would recommend moving from shared hosting to managed hosting. Managed hosting is more expensive than VPS but since we are talking about growing your website it might be very difficult to find time to setup and maintain your own VPS. It it going to be way too difficult for most users as well because basic server administration experience is must have. If you have a technical guy in your team then VPS might be an option but otherwise I would recommend managed WordPress hosting to grow your business and website the easy way.
Hello Aigars,
Amazing articles as always. We are planning to launch a general wordpress based online magazine website covering topics spanning from fashion, sports, entertainment to news and politics. We expect to receive around 5000 visitors per month soon after launch to reach tens of thousands of visitors by end of first year…
Would the personal managed wordpress hosting of wp engine be enough as a start to handle this kind of traffic without any lagging or slow loading? Then we expand later to a professional or a business plan… Btw we are atill considering whether to opt for Newspaper 7 or Sahifa,
But i heard that wp engine personal , business etc. Packages are shared hosting so besides the management aspect of them do they also differ in terms of hardware infrastructure on much less expensive options you see on other shared hosting providers?
Thanks
Ziad,
Smallest WP Engine plan is designed to handle 25k visitors a month without any bandwidth restrictions which is a really nice concept. From there you can always upgrade to largest plan as your website grows. Upgrade takes seconds and there won’t be any downtime. Upgrade can be done via user portal via few clicks therefore you don’t need to contact support in case you are looking to upgrade.
There are other good managed hosting providers as well such as Pagely and Kinsta but their pricing starts at $100 and that might be too much for your first website without revenue. WP Engine does offer much better hardware than shared hostings as well. Also their servers are not that oversold as they are for regular shared hosting. For example you aren’t sharing the same server with 10,000 websites but rather 50 to 100 also leaving a lot of space for traffic spikes. In cheap shared hosting space there are absolutely no place for traffic spikes and if one of those 10k websites goes viral then all websites will be down right away.
When it comes to theme I would recommend Newspaper 7 as it looks much more modern. Both your mentioned themes are great but Newspaper 7 looks much more recent and is also more flexible.
I have read and reviewed the Newspaper theme from TagDiv, i think it’s a good theme overall, but my question is if i purchase the theme from ThemeForest, can i install it on more than 1 website? Also how good is their support and response time to issues, this is because i need to have efficient support, also about WPEngine how do you justify the costs against business sense, especially for a new site with no revenues.
Then what ad services are better positioned for localization and targeted ads for Nigeria
Aigars, i am looking to build a financial services website, looking for the best option. the site will by inbound marketing heavy so want to make sure we chose wisely. i’ve read some of you posts. the site will have insurance and wealth management. we are looking for something that is professional and business oriented but more edgy and fresh. thanks
Eric,
I think that the best place to start your research will be here and here.
hi Aigar, thanks for your tips. I want to shift to using VPS, do you have a recommendation?
Brian,
I highly recommend Linode and Digital Ocean as I am using these services for Colorlib and other projects of mine. The one hosting provider I would recommend to keep away from is IDwebhost as they are doing comment spam on Colorlib and other popular websites without adding any value to readers.
For beginners, Shared hosting is more than enough. They don’t need to think about too much for choosing a plan. And for shared hosting i think bluehost and siteground is good.
Robin,
While resources for shared hosting such as Bluehost and SiteGround are enough for most users the problem is elsewhere. These hosting providers are very slow and unreliable because servers are oversold and are not optimized for WordPress. Managed hostings and even their smaller plans are specially built for WordPress and nothing else therefore all optimizations are in place. Setups is the same as for shared hosting and some even offers setup service to make things even easier. The main drawback is price which might be hard to swallow for most but if you are looking to grow your website/business there is no reason to go with shared hosting because it will drag down your entire business.
Hi, Aigars!
It’s really nice to find people trying to help others like you do. Please, keep doing so.
I want to know your opinion about Godaddy (managed WP hosting) nowadays.
Thanks a lot!
At that price range I would recommend Kinsta or WP Engine. They have similar offerings but client support is so much better.
Really liked your article 🙂 I’ll add this tutorial to my favorite list of tutorials on my site.
As a web developer, I’ve used Siteground in the past for one of my clients website and had no complain about their hosting. I liked the fact that they called me right after I’ve registered and throughout my time with I didn’t have any server downtime.
In terms of WPEngine, I didn’t have a change to try it but heard good things about it on hosting forums.
Another free alternative for WordPress hosting is to set up an AWS EC2 Instance and install WordPress on it through Bitnami. If you’d signup for their free tier you’d have a cloud hosted WordPress site for free (for one year).
Hi,
I have a wp e-commerce site, which used to have about 1000+ visitors till two months back, then it got screwed up by godaddy and I lost more than 80% customer base/site visitors, then I shifted to hostgator 2 weeks back and it is even worse, two days back they jammed the site as it took 22 seconds to load (which used to take about 10 seconds on godaddy, despite being optimized and just 9.5mb with over 500 products listed.
Please suggest a hosting, I am based in India.
Also should I consider WPEngine as suggested on this blog?
Thanks in advance
Rohit,
9,5MB for a single page is way too much. 500 products is not much for a WooCommerce/ecommerce website but 9.5MB page is a complete overkill. Your website and its database can be several gigabytes or terabytes in size but never a single page can be 9,5MB in size.
But either way for ecommerce websites managed WordPress hosting is must have because you are making money with your website and performance is crucial to improve conversion rates and drive more sales. You can choose between WP Engine, Kinsta or Pagely as they offer a very similar services.
It might appear to be straightforward yet it is generally neglected. With regards to picking the right Internet hosting supplier for their sites, the larger part of entrepreneurs or organizations know almost no about making the best Internet/Web hosting choices.
Nice article to know what will be the best hosting for your website… I will go with SiteGround as it looks very promising and it appears that they have the best support for WordPress. Thanks for sharing it….
Best hosting plan and trusted hosting website is the common search for any blogger like me.. Your article is really helpful and fully explained.. thanks again..
Do NOT choose Inmotion Hosting. Hosting Nazis! They will shut you down if they notice your site is generating too much activity (CPU) . And If you have more than one website, and only one of them is taxing their delicate servers, they will shut down your entire account. All your sites will be down.
John,
This happens with all cheap shared hosting providers. That’s why we recommend managed WordPress hosting such as one offered by WP Engine, Kinsta or Pagely. Another solution is to get your own VPS and create a custom setup but due to complexity this is not the right solution for most WordPress users. You need to have system administrator knowledge to proceed with with this route. Managed WordPress hosting is the easiest, fastest and most reliable solution.
Great article! I bet it will be useful to many people. But it’s quite important for everybody to be clear about what their website needs and what’s the best hosting solution for it. If it’s a shared hosting, VPS or maybe dedicated server. It’s a good option to start using hosting services step by step, in accordance with your website growth. I did the same thing and it worked perfectly for me. My website was small at first, it didn’t have many visitors, so I chose a shared hosting, which is probably the most affordable hosting solution (of course, it depends on the hosting provider). When my WordPress website grew bigger I saw that I need a VPS, so I choose one again by BGOcloud. Now my website has a lot more visitors, and who knows, maybe one day I’ll purchase even a dedicated server.
Hi there. This is a very good article and the guide is truly helpful for beginners like me who want to start their own website. From what I’ve seen so far, SiteGround is one of the best website hosts and has a lot of good things to offer. I am thinking of choosing them out of the best website hosts in the business, but I’m also curious about one other website, which is BlueHost. I know BlueHost isn’t on your recommendations of the best website hosts but I’ve read it in many reviews. Have you had any experience with this company?
Chard,
For small websites that are not meant to generate online sales Bluehost is going to be fine. If you are looking to build a real business website we highly recommend SiteGround or WP Engine because of their better performance.
Dear Aigars,
I have throughly enjoyed reading your informative articles on Colorlib.
I am starting a directory/listing events business based in West Africa.
I don’t anticipate on making a substantial amount revenue at the beginning. Hence WP Engine’s tiers may become too expensive.
How would you rate the Blue host Managed WordPress Hosting as i think the plan is cheaper than WP Engine?
Bluehost $19.99 plan allows 100million visits/month.
Or would suggest still starting with WP Engine?
Thanks in advance
Try getting 100,000 visitors to your Bluehost website and you will already see how insanely slow it gets and how often it will be down. 100M is never going to happen under any circumstances. Performance of WP Engine, Kinsta or other managed hosting is also way better than any f shared offerings.
Aigars,
Your recommendations are good, particularly WP Engine.
But folk should also consider local providers, that tend not to be covered in articles like these.
I’m in Australia and most of my clients are, so I’ve opted for a local specialist WordPress hosting provider.
I’ve hosted with WP Engine, Site Ground, Site 5, Media Temple and a few more, with mixed results.
But none of these beat WP Hosting in terms of performance and support. When a site is slow I call them up and they will troubleshoot the issue by looking at my plugins, cron jobs, etc… and 9 times out of 10 it’s my fault, lol
The point I’m making here is that, as I said, there are many more options for people when they consider local providers too.
Marco,
It depends what is your target demographics. For example, I live in Latvia by my main market is in US. Which means that hosting a website in Latvia makes absolutely no sense unless Latvian company also happens to have servers in US. The closest your server is to your target audience the better it will perform. That’s why many large hosting providers allow to choose the location for your server. We are hosted with Kinsta. They are registered in UK but our hosting is located in US to be close to our main market.
Thanks for this article, it took way too much time to find a reliable source for information and not a website who’s sole purpose was to earn commissions. I’m glad I found this before I pulled the trigger on Hosting.
Great job. I love the two recommendations you give: WPENGINE and SITEGROUND.
When I first started off our business I started with WPE and loved them as they are newbies friendly with their support. My only issues was their price as you grow.
We eventually got to 20 websites and was paying about $4000 dollars a year and that was just too much.
I love and still recommend them but I believe there are 1 to 2 more hosts with an equal value that are more reasonable price-wise.
We use Siteground now and like their tools and available customer service support.
The only problem I see with Siteground as much as their products are great is that a lot of their support lately has been bad.
They will respond on time but some of them lack the common sense to read your message to understand what you need before responding. So I have resorted to always asking for senior tech or support as they are way better.
Other than that Siteground is a great choice and we love their price and value.
Good job again.
Sitegound is a good value for money. It is reasonably priced and for website that are not eCommerce related or commercial, it works fine. As you said, problems might come up when you need support because prices are so low that they have to save somewhere and support is one of those things. Not that they have the worst support among shared hosting providers since everyone is struggling with it but you start to understand what you get way paying extra for services like WP Engine another. But if you are hosting a small blog or website that doesn’t generate tons of traffic and revenue then Siteground is a much better option because occasional downtimes are not going to cost you a fortune.
All in all, if you can afford you should choose WP Engine, Kinsta or similar hosting providers but you will be just fine with Siteground, to begin with, while you grow your business because it is not that bad to be avoided.
The quality of service offered by a web host depends on the hardware. A website’s overall performance is heavily influenced by the amount of memory (RAM), processing power (CPU), and disk space (HDDs & SSDs) available to you.
Hostinger is good value for money. Easy to use and user-friendly. Easy payment mode, and it works fine