Chapter 3: Basic Things to Consider When Choosing a Host for Your WordPress Website

There are many things that should factor into your decision. Here we list the essential features that basic users need and why they matter:

Making a decision on which WordPress hosting company was right for you used to be much more simple than it is now. It used to be about how much space a host would give you or whether or not they had an automatic installer for WordPress. Nowadays there are so many different features that can make your life easier, different control panels/interfaces that can improve the user experience inside the hosting account and 3rd party integrations that bring outside functionality right to your fingertips inside the account.

In this section we will outline literally everything that could factor into the decision of choosing the right host for your WordPress site.

Uptime/Reliability

As discussed above, the real question is always how much would it cost your business if your site went down for 1 business day? Here at TheSiteEdge, this is simply one of the most essential elements that we stress to our clients when they are deciding on hosting. Do your research and choose a hosting company that does not have hundreds of “downtime complaints.”

Hosting Security Features

Yet another topic that we already touched on — and one that people just do not like to talk about — but sites get hacked. There are WordPress hosting platforms that make this almost impossible — and ones that will literally fix your site for you if your site does get hacked (which is awesome).

WordPress Hosting Speed

There are 2 reasons why your web hosting speed matters: SEO and UX. I believe they are equally important factors. Faster hosting = higher rankings + more interaction on your site. Boom!

Phone/Email/Live Chat Support

This is such a tough one because you never really know what the tech support is going to be like until you sign up with a WordPress hosting provider and you can’t always take customer complaints at face value (because people complain even if they are the ones to blame 😮 ). We will touch on this in the final chapter for each hosting company we have worked with.

Website and Database Backups

Make sure you have automated backups being taken of your website AND your MySQL database. Just about everyone that builds or maintains a website gets burned by this at least once before they learn (It makes it even easier if you just have to click a button to restore your site to an earlier version of itself). If you haven’t yet been burned by not taking backups of your site, I desperately urge you to start getting regular backups of your site and avoid the traumatic moment when you realize, “Holy crap. My website just got hacked into pieces and I have nothing to restore. Looks like I will be spending the next week rebuilding my website.”

Ability to host multiple domains/websites

This is straight-up overrated. In no scenario very few scenarios is it useful or in your best interest to host multiple websites on the same hosting account. Databases get big/slow and down the road you will wish you had set them up on individual accounts with sufficient amounts of resources to handle the load.

If you haven’t already noticed, I am trying to save you the trouble of making every single mistake I have made with hosting in my life.

Storage Space

Just like the last item, this is usually very overrated and just a sales technique of big-box hosting providers. You do not need unlimited storage space on your web server.

I repeat: YOU DO NOT NEED UNLIMITED STORAGE ON YOUR WEB SERVER.

Does it make sense that everyone gets unlimited storage space and everyone pays the same amount? Nope. It gets abused by others and you may very well be the one that suffers because of it.

SSL Certificate Purchase/Installation

If you plan on selling products or services on your website or just want to establish more trust with your audience, it makes things much easier on you if there is a simple process for purchasing and implementing an SSL certificate on your website. It is a pretty complex process if you have not done it before. Some WordPress hosts make this much easier than others.

Awesome Resources on Hosting Uptime, Backups and SSL

Why You Should Ignore Your Host’s Uptime Guarantee — by WhoIsHostingThis.com (contains affiliate links)

The Foolproof Guide to Backing Up WordPress without a Plugin — by Laurence Bradford

Google Starts Giving A Ranking Boost To Secure HTTPS/SSL Sites — by Barry Schwartz

Sites With Most Search Impressions Are Now HTTPS, Google Says — by Matt Southern

Everything SEOs Need to Know About Google’s New Stance on HTTPS — by Neil Patel