Are you planning a WordPress site?
When you are looking for WordPress Hosting it is critical to find the right hosting partner as it could be a decision that contributes to the success of your business or personal blog. If you look at WordPress.org it recommends:
- PHP 7.4 or greater
- MySQL 5.6 or greater, OR MariaDB 10.1 or greater
- Nginx or Apache with mod_rewrite module
- HTTPS support
This does not narrow down the options much, you have an endless choice available that meet these basic needs to run a WordPress site. The caution is the challenge in running anything more than a personal blog.
We have worked with lots of hosting providers over the years and don’t insist our customer take our hosting recommendations but we do offer advice on what you should look for in a hosting provider. There are various types of WordPress hosting options available such as Services, Shared, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Dedicated and Managed WordPress hosting and we will take you through some requirements to help you select the best option. Factors you need to consider include your budget, technical expertise, and plans for the future.
WordPress Service Hosting
Price range typically Free – £50 /month
WordPress Service Hosting is where you create a simple site based on pre-loaded templates, one such service is wordpress.com.
These tend to be easy to start up but you can fastly grow out of the basic templates and plugins provided, they also tend to restrict your branding in that you would be a subdomain of the service provider, e.g. mynewbusiness.wordpress.com.
We would not recommend this for anything that needs to be serious about being online due to the restrictions.
Shared WordPress Hosting
Price range typically £5 – £25 /month
Shared hosting is the least expensive option and perfect for small sites with low visitor volumes.
The way it works is many, often 100’s of sites share the same physical resources with no separation between your website and the others on the server. The major negative to Shared Hosting is that if one website on the server has a problem it could and often does impact all others.
This means it is ideal when experimenting with an idea or starting out with a limited budget but is not recommended if a problem that impacts your site will do your business damage.
VPS WordPress Hosting
Price range typically £25 – £200 /month
VPS or by its full name Virtual Private Server Hosting is the next step up from Shared Hosting in that although it is located on a shared server your site is partitioned from the others giving extra protection and also allowing you to be in control of more elements of the hosting.
This means it is ideal for a growing business that wants some assurance around its hosting and also more control although it does come at a higher price than Shared Hosting.
Dedicated Server WordPress Hosting
Price range typically above £100+ / month
A Dedicated Server is where you have all the resources to yourself with no sharing and typically you as a business would have full control of what you install on the server which does mean you need greater in-house skills to run.
In the modern world of hosting providers and the adoption of cloud environments, this is not really needed unless you are a big organisation and regulated so that cloud is not an option.
Managed WordPress Hosting
What do we mean by Managed WordPress Hosting?
In all the options above the hosting company manages the day to day tasks of the actual server but WordPress is not simple and itself needs to be managed. For us Managed WordPress Hosting needs to take into account specific customer needs as not everyone is the same. Some organisations may just want to be able to call if a problem occurs or buy a fixed number of hours a month or just hand over the whole process. Thus managed means matching service to your specific requirements.
If you are happy with technical elements and have the time then buying a Hosting plan is the best option but this does mean you have a responsibility to maintain everything in WordPress itself. If this is uncomfortable for you then you need to speak to a WordPress management specialist to advise you on the issues with maintaining WordPress.
We would recommend unless you have someone working for you that understand WordPress then to take a Managed WordPress Hosting option as this is cheaper than hiring an in-house expert.
Any questions or want a chat about WordPress Hosting then just drop us a message.
We are affiliated with and use Cloudways as our preferred hosting partner as they meet our needs to create scalable performant and resilient WordPress sites.
