WordPress has grown from a blogging platform to one of the most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) on the internet.
In fact almost 35% of websites run on WordPress nowadays – which is certainly significant.
If you’re thinking of launching your own WordPress site, the first thing you need to do is find a service to host it.
At first that may seem a bit complicated, but it is actually fairly easy if you know how to go about it.
Identify Your Needs
Before you actually start looking at WordPress hosting services, there’s one question you need to ask yourself: What is it that you need?
The best way to answer that is to first look at the type of website that you want to build. Is it going to be a personal website or blog? Are you going to run a business or ecommerce website?
Based on the type of website you want to create, you should be able to identify its scale, the rough amount of resources that you’ll require, and any specific features that you may need.
Be sure to list down all these requirements, as they will definitely come in handy as you start to look at various web hosts.
Decide on the Type of WordPress Hosting
To be perfectly honest you can install WordPress on many different types of hosting services. The most common are:
- Shared hosting that is budget-friendly but requires you to share the resources of a single server with many other users. Its performance is generally very low.
- VPS or dedicated servers that provide you with full access to the available resources based on your package. Both offer much better performance, but the cost is higher.
- Managed WordPress hosting that is optimized for WordPress and has good overall performance. It tends to have many other limitations however, and may restrict some scripts and plugins.
Aside from these options you could technically choose to use a free web host. However if you do go down that route you should expect poor performance, 3rd party advertisements, and many limitations.
Factors to Consider
In order to narrow down the WordPress hosting options that are available, you should look at each one and weigh several different factors. The main factors that warrant your consideration are the:
- Storage and bandwidth
Needless to say the WordPress hosting service you choose must supply you with sufficient storage and bandwidth. Ideally it should be scalable, so that you can cope with any traffic spikes and growth that your website may go through.
- Cost
The cost of web hosting can vary quite a bit depending on the type of web hosting, the package you choose, and many other factors. At the end of the day your goal should be to choose a web host that meets your requirements and fits within your budget.
- Features
Technically the only requirements to run WordPress are PHP 7.3+, MySQL 5.6+ and HTTPS support. However there may be other features that you want the web host to provide such as SSD storage, unlimited additional domains or subdomains, backup services, scripts, and so on.
- Location
If the majority of your visitors hail from a specific location, hosting your website on a server that is nearby can improve its speed. However if your traffic is spread out globally, it isn’t as important.
- Reliability and uptime
Undoubtedly you’d like it if your WordPress site doesn’t go down periodically, which is why you should look into how reliable the web host is and whether it guarantees its uptime. Going over user reviews, recent complains, and other sources of information can help you learn more.
- Customer support
Although it would be nice if you never have to get in touch with customer support – what if you do? Taking a moment to gauge the quality of customer support and how responsive they are could help you to solve any issues that you face at a critical moment.
As you go over each of these factors, you should think back to the needs that you identified previously. Using that approach will let you sieve through the various WordPress hosting services much more easily and narrow down your search.
Conclusion
It is understandable if you feel like quickly choosing a web host so that you can start to develop your website and get it off the ground. That being said it is important that you do not rush your decision, or it could come back to bite you later on.
Always remember to take your time, do your research, and carefully look into the options that are available to you. If you choose a good WordPress hosting service right from the get go, you’ll end up saving a lot of time (and possibly money) in the future.
