WordPress is doubtless the best web application script that is used by more than 16.5 million websites on the internet. It has a very active community of users who are always searching for WordPress hosting services to make their website better and increase the visibility of the site with online marketing strategies. A large number of hosting providers come up every day offering various service plans.
Choosing the right hosting plan for your WordPress website is not an easy task for a beginner who is unaware of the technical jargon used by hosting companies. Most webmasters make mistakes when choosing their hosting plan, and they end up paying more than what they should have paid for or get less than what was promised in the contract.
To choose a better hosting service for your WordPress website, you need to consider various factors before finalizing the deal. This article will guide you on choosing the hosting service for your WordPress website and help you make a better decision about it.
How Does Hosting Work?
Website hosting is the process of storing and making your website accessible over the internet. When you create a website, you need to store its files and data somewhere so that people can access it from anywhere in the world.
Web hosting involves leasing space on a web server from a web hosting company. Once you have signed up for a hosting service, you can upload your website files to the server using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) or a web-based interface provided by the hosting company.
Once your website files are uploaded, the hosting company's server will respond to requests from people trying to access your website. When someone types your website's domain name into their browser, their computer sends a request to the web server, which then sends the website files back to the user's browser, allowing them to view the website.
Hosting companies offer different types of hosting services, including shared hosting, dedicated hosting, and cloud hosting, each with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. It's important to choose a hosting service that meets your website's needs and provides reliable and secure hosting.
There are various types of hosting services provided by hosting companies. They mainly include shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS and dedicated server plan. In the shared hosting package, you pay a certain amount to host your WordPress website on a web server that is already in use by other websites. The bill for this service is cheap because you have to share the bandwidth with others who are already hosted on that plan.
While using a VPS is more expensive, however, you will have full access to your server and can do pretty much anything you want it.
A dedicated server on the other hand provides you with the highest speed as there is no other website hosted on the same server. However, it comes with an additional cost and you will have less control of your hosting package.
Cloud hosting services are in fashion these days. You can rent a server or use the processing power of a server at any time without having to install and maintain it. This also comes with an additional cost.
Factors to consider while buying a Web Hosting Plan
Speed/Performance:
It is always better to test the speed of hosting companies before you buy a plan. You can use free tools like Pingdom Tools, Loadimpact or GTMetrix that provide you with a detailed report on the performance and speed of any Web page.
There are also online tools such as Blitz or YSlow which give you general impressions about the speed.
Bandwidth:
It is the second most important factor when you host your website. If the bandwidth is unlimited, you do not have to worry about it at all. However, if there is a limited amount of bandwidth available on your hosting plan, then you need to check how much web traffic you are likely to get on your site and measure that with the bandwidth limit provided by the hosting
Space:
Storage space is equally important to consider. Keep in mind that the longer you host your website, there will be more items to upload like audio files, video files, image files, etc. And if you are planning to run an e-commerce store on your site then space can be a significant factor for you to consider.
Scalability:
You should keep in mind that your site's traffic would never be constant. It is advisable to select a hosting plan that provides you with the option of scaling up your server resources if your site starts getting heavy traffic. Otherwise, your web pages may load too slowly for the visitors and it could potentially harm the reputation of your business.
Computing Power:
Computing power is very much related to the performance of your website, the more computing power greater will be the uptime of your site. SSD or hard Drive Space and RAM are two significant factors that determine how much time it takes to load your website on a visitor's computer / mobile device. So hosting with a higher value for both these factors can help you speed up your website.
Uptime:
You should also give importance to uptime when buying hosting for WordPress sites. Server uptime means how much of the time your website remains online, so it's an important factor to consider when you are buying hosting.
So these are some of the important factors that you should consider when buying hosting for your WordPress website.
Below are some of the popular hosting services trusted by many webmasters:
- Interserver
- Upcloud
- Skysilk
- Linode
- DigitalOcean
- Vultr
- Bluehost
- Contabo
Hosting providers like Inmotion and Siteground is famous among the users of WordPress to provide quality hosting services at a reasonable price. Sites having thousands of visits per day still run smoothly on these providers' servers.