How to Choose the Best Hosting for Your WordPress Website?

Often overlooked, web hosting is one of the key component of every successful

website. Choosing the best web hosting for your needs can improve your SEO

and increase sales. But finding decent WordPress hosting can be a painful

process. You need a solution that will do justice to your content, offer rock-solid

reliability and hopefully not break the bank. The good news is that the hosting

market has never been more competitive, there are various different types of

WordPress hosting options available such as Free, Shared, VPS, Dedicated, and

managed WordPress hosting. The bad news is that it’s still tricky wading

through the forest of features and packages in order to work out what’s right for

your site. In this comprehensive guide, I will help you choose the very best

hosting for your WordPress website.

What are the WordPress Hosting Requirements?

WordPress hosting has very simple requirements. That’s because WordPress is

an extremely lightweight script. WordPress is perfectly compatible for this

reason, with all web hosting companies. The WordPress hosting requirements

are very easy…

PHP version 5.2.4 or greater

MySQL version 5.0 or greater

The mod_rewrite Apache module (Required for Multi-Site)

Since WordPress is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) in the

world, which accounts for close to 20% of all the websites on the World Wide

Web, most web hosting companies offer a simple 1-click installation for

WordPress. All web hosting providers reviewed here offer complete and

comprehensive support for running WordPress websites and blogs.

Best WordPress Web Hosting Providers

BLUEHOST

One of the oldest web hosts started in 1996, Bluehost has become the largest

brand name when it comes to WordPress hosting. They are an official

"WordPress" recommended hosting provider. You never have to worry about

your website being slow even when there is alot of traffic. They also offer a Free

Domain and a Free Site Builder with templates. Not to mention that they have a

special offer for WPBeginner users.

INMOTION HOSTING

InMotion hosting has been a well-known industry brand with reliable

performance for business class hosting. With award winning technical support

and 99.9% uptime, they are a user favorite. Their unmatched U.S. based

support is always there to help. InMotion Hosting's WordPress Hosting is

optimized for active bloggers, and offers great scalability for your blog's growth.

WEB HOSTING HUB

Web Hosting Hub is the easiest way to get online presence for small businesses.

Easy control panel, website builder, and WordPress combined with their amazing

support, it is hard to beat their price and value. Having earned numerous best

value awards, Web Hosting Hub also offers special discounts for WPBeginner

users.

HOSTGATOR

HostGator hosts over 8 million domains and is known as one of the well-reputed

web host in the industry. With 1-click WordPress installation, 99.9% up time

gurantee, and 24/7 support, it's a smart and easy choice. Even WPBeginner is

hosted on HostGator dedicated servers.

SITEGROUND

SiteGround is one of the most popular WordPress hosts and are very well

recognized in the WordPress community. They provide unique in-house

WordPress speed and security solutions to make your site as fast and secure as

possible. They have one of the best 24/7 support in the industry. They also offer

automatic upgrades, built-in WP caching, CDN, one-click staging and GIT

version control. They are one of the few companies offering location specific

hosting with 3 data centers in USA, Europe, and Singapore. On top of all this,

they have а special 50% discount for WPBeginner readers and a free domain

name.

Evaluating Your WordPress Hosting Needs

There are several different types of web hosting options out there, such as Free,

VPS, Shared, Dedicated, and Managed. We look at each of these options and so

that you can come to an informed decision about the type of web hosting you

really need.

Free WordPress Hosting

Now, there are several free web hosting services out there, but most have at

least one drawback or another. It’s easy to find free WordPress hosting – there

are many that are offered in online groups or forums and are managed by

individuals who are basically reselling a tiny part of their server space to provide

for their web hosting charges, and maybe earn some extra money.

While you can get web hosting for free this way, there’s a catch – you will have

to display their banner ads on your website. They may even ask you to put a

text link in the footer. So by selling the banner ad and the text link, these

providers of free web hosting try to make up for the cost of the free space that

they are offering you and even make a small profit on it.

I don’t recommend free web hosting. The reason for that is that such

services are highly unreliable. You can never tell when the person offering the

service will stop doing so – he can withdraw the service all of a sudden, without

any prior notice. And when this happens, this can come as a rude shock to you

as your website will be left hanging on its own. So if you’re really serious about

making money from your website or blog, avoid free web hosting at any cost.

Shared WordPress Hosting

Shared WordPress Hosting is the most popular option for WordPress hosting

for those who are just starting out in the world of online business. Shared

hosting is cheap and perfect for newbies. Essentially, in Shared Hosting, you

share a large server with many other websites, which is why it is affordable. So

what’s the catch?

Well, one major drawback with shared hosting is that you get access to only

limited resources from the web hosting company. Sure, many claim to offer

unlimited resources, but that is really untrue. There are many usage restrictions

on your website.

So, suppose a video on your website become viral on the social media all of a

sudden, and more people start visiting it, the web hosting provider will ask you

to upgrade your account to provide for the increased server load. If you don’t

upgrade, the other sites hosted on the same server will suffer as a result.

But you shouldn’t complain about it as it is only natural that your expenses will

grow as your internet assets become more popular. We believe that Shared

WordPress hosting is the best hosting solution for most small businesses and

new bloggers.

WordPress VPS Hosting

VPS or Virtual Private Server refers to a virtual machine. WordPress VPS

hosting is an innovative way of partitioning a physical server into multiple

servers, suitable for each customer’s needs. So, while you would be sharing the

server with others, WordPress VPS hosting gives you complete control of your

resources – it is as though you are using a dedicated server. WordPress VPS

hosting gives you the same privacy as you would get from a separate dedicated

physical computer, which is configured to run the specific server software. VPS

hosting is the preferred option for web developers, reasonably popular bloggers

and intermediate users as it makes it easy for them to scale their websites.

However, there’s a caveat, you need to have some technical knowledge to

operate a WordPress VPS server and otherwise you may want to go for

managed VPS. When it comes to managed VPS, everything, including system

upgrades, is managed by the WordPress hosting service. And there is a

dedicated customer support to offer assistance should you seek it.

I recommend VPS WordPress hosting to small and medium-sized businesses,

reasonably high traffic blogs, and to aspiring web designers/developers.

WordPress Dedicated Server Hosting

A dedicated server is basically a physical server which you can lease from a web

hosting provider. WordPress Dedicated Server Hosting allows you complete

control over the server. You can choose the operating system it runs on, as well

as the hardware. However, dedicated servers are expensive and you should ask

for one only if you have a very high traffic website or blog. You certainly don’t

need it if you are a newbie to online business. But operating dedicated servers

does require you to have extensive technical skills. Most businesses hire

full-time system administrators to manage their dedicated servers. If you

cannot afford to hire one, you can go for managed dedicated servers, where the

web hosting company takes care of its operations, does regular software

updates, server monitoring and offers phone support as well. Many high-traffic

websites use dedicated server clusters, to manage the high server load.

Managed WordPress Hosting

Because of the huge popularity of WordPress, many web hosting companies

offer managed WordPress hosting. Basically, you can only host WordPress

based sites with these companies – this is a must. The advantage of Managed

WordPress Hosting is that the hosting company takes care of every minor detail,

so you don’t have to do anything at all. They take care of the security of your

website, optimize it for better performance and maintain regular backups. If you

happen to install a plugin that can have a damaging impact on your website, the

web hosting company lets you know that almost immediately.

Managed WordPress hosting is the best WordPress hosting you can get. It is

very easy to manage, offers secure and fast web hosting and is extremely

reliable. The only issue with Managed WordPress Hosting is that the plans cost

quite a lot. To give you an example, just a personal account with Managed Web

Hosting can cost you $35/month, although you have just once website on it.

Upgrading to higher levels cost more – for example, a Managed Web Hosting

account with multiple domains can cost $100/month or more. Certainly, if you

only have a low or medium traffic blog, you should look elsewhere as Managed

WordPress Hosting would be too expensive for you.

You can choose Managed WordPress Hosting only if you earn a lot of money

from your blog. Some extremely popular bloggers who earn six-figure incomes

from their blog use this type of web hosting. It’s also perfect for people who

have no technical skills whatsoever. One Managed WordPress Hosting provider

we recommend very highly is BlueHost.

So these are the various options for WordPress hosting. Next, we discuss

the Best WordPress Hosting companies you may choose from. These

companies have been selected by us after a lot of research backed up by our

personal experience with them. Each of the companies reviewed here offers

excellent customer support, security, speed and reliability – and meet our high

expectations in every respect. Here are the best WordPress web hosting

companies to choose from.