Best WordPress Hosting – What Is The Best Choice For Your Website

When it comes to start a website fast, free and easy, WordPress is the best choice. However, what is the best wordpress hosting to place your website and enjoy getting more visitors without worrying about technical issues?

The answer depends on your purpose. If you are a blogger and want to start your blog, a shared hosting plan can easily meet your satisfactions. If you are running a business, you need a faster and more reliable plan like VPS or Dedicated Server. This guarantees that you can always serve your customers and even a spike in traffic can’t take your website down.

Moreover, a good hosting for wordpress must be optimized for this platform. In the past, I once tried to host my website on a powerful server run by my friend. After 4 days, the server crashed eventhough there are only 300 visitors daily. I doubt you are thinking What? A POWERFUL server can’t handle such a small number of vistiors?

Sadly, it is the truth. The reason is quite simple, this server is not optimized for WordPress, so there are some conflicts leading to the crash. It once again emphasized that choosing best wordpress hosting for your site does not only require high speed and bandwidth but also require WordPress optimization as well.

But among thousand of providers out there, what are the best ones? I will focus on features, usability, speed, customer support and price.

Are There Any Reliable Free WordPress Hosting Providers?

The debate between free and paid wordpress hosting has never ended. At first, people, especially new bloggers, prefer free hosts because it seems to save your money. In fact, it doesn’t.

I have never had any good experiences with free hosts. My very first website was suspended because it got about 100 visitors per day. When I moved that website to another free host, Google placed a warning on my website for spreading malware. I had no idea about this problem, I just run a blog and never intended to harm visitors. I posted the question on a hosting forum, people there told me that the reason came from the host, not my site. At the end, free hosts don’t save your money. It’ll cut off your earnings and keep visitors away from your website.

After two big issues, I broke up with free hosts and never used them again.

It’s my best decision ever.

Best WordPress Hosting at Cheap Price

These hosts cost no more than $10 per month. They also provide some extras for customers.

HostGator

I first bought HostGator in Black Friday two years ago. Until now, HostGator has served a lot websites of mine including this site. To be honest, I have never had any technical issues with HostGator. However, if problems arise, you can contact the support team by either email or phone.

With more than 8 million domains hosted and 9-year experience in hosting websites, HostGator is the most well-known, reliable and affordable web hosts. Although Hatchling Plan is the cheapest, I recommend using Baby Plan since it allows you to add as many domains as you want with only 1 buck more each month.

The company also provided unlimited storage, bandwidth, 24/7 technical support and 45-day money back guarantee. However, people in hosting industry will tell you that there is no real unlimited storage. There is a barrier for these factors. If you exceed your bandwidth, you’ll be asked to upgrade to a higher plan. But don’t worry, it’s hard to reach that limit if you are running a normal website or blog. I have more than 10 sites hosted on HostGator and I have never got any problems.

You can use the coupon below to save 25% OFF any plans on HostGator

Dreamhost

The next candidate for best WordPress hosting contest is Dreamhost. Let’s see what they are talking about their service. Dreamhost offers unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, unlimited domains and they only have one plan for shared hosting at $8.97 per month. They also have their own hosting panel where you can manage domains, set up FTP and install WordPress with only 1 click. Sadly, Dreamhost didn’t provide phone support. Everything is done by using emails.

For the price, you have 2-week trial before jumping into this service. Even when you decided to pay, you still have 97-day money back guarantee. One of the longest money back guarantee that I have ever had.

For the traffic, a website of mine hosted on Dreamhost, shared hosting plan of course, got around 9.000 – 10.000 unique visitors everyday. Telling that Dreamhost alone can handle that huge amount of traffic is a lie, I also installed W3 Total Cache and make use of MaxCDN to decrease server loads. But again, handling that much traffic proves that Dreamhost is among the best players in this industry.

You can use the coupon below to save $50 for the first year of Dreamhost.

WestHost

I have to admit that I am not familiar with this provider. The reason why I mentioned it in this review is because Yoast highly recommended it. And I believe that Yoast has a reputation in WordPress community. He’s very transparent and has deep knowledge in WordPress as well as other factors related to WordPress hosting. If you don’t know about Yoast, you can read his blog here where tons of WordPress tutorials are shared for free.

Web hosting plans start from $4 to $12. With $12 package, you’ll get unlimited domains, bandwidth, storage as well as a dedicated IP and free SSL secure. Click here to learn more about WestHost.

BlueHost

BlueHost maybe the oldest candidate, it has 15 years experience in hosting business. Bluehost is now hosting over 2,2 million domains with 20.000 new customers every month. The best thing is that Bluehost served over 850.000 WordPress blogs. They definitely know how to deal with WordPress and make this platform running smoothly.

Like other best hosting for WordPress, Bluehost offers unlimited domains, bandwidth and 24/7 support by both phone and email. The price can be varied depending on what is your landing page. Normal price is $6.95 per month, but you can get 40% discount by click on this link.

In the last year, 2011, there have been some issues with BlueHost due to poor support. It’s because the customer base is growing rapidly causing support team of this hosting service exploded. Thankfully, they have solved the problem and back to normal work again.

Join BlueHost now and get the 40% discount

Okay, so we have finished about Shared Hosting plan which are affordable for about 98% normal bloggers. But how about the rest 2% with millions of people visit their websites everyday or for business owners? For this market segment, we have Managed WordPress Hosting.

Managed WordPress Hosting – Your Best Choice For WordPress

The term “managed wordpress hosting” may confuse you. So what actually is this service? Instead of plugging a lot of plugins like CDN, Cache, Speed Up…,   some companies offered exclusive hosting services for WordPress. These packages are optimized for speeding up WordPress and preventing security issues that may arise. Usually, people behind this service are expert in WordPress. They know what works and what doesn’t, so they will guarantee the performance of your website.

WPEngine

If you have ever searched for WordPress hosting, you might hear about WPEngine. Maybe, you visit WPEngine and leave immediately when you find out that the cheapest plan costs $29 per month and the most expensive goes beyond $249.

Why the heck you should care about this service when you can get Dreamhost or HostGator at less than 10 bucks per month?

I once left WPEngine immediately when I saw the pricing plan. It sounds pretty expensive, and I have already bought HostGator, Dreamhost and Bluehost.

However, the fame of this service came to me again when TechCrunch reported that Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, invested 1.2 million dollars to it. When the creators of WordPress put money (actually A LOT of MONEY) in a WordPress service, it means that they find this service potential and the people working behind are really expert in WordPress.

There are a few reasons that made WPEngine one of the best WordPress hosting to host your sites:

• Free support to migrate your website.
• Staging area – where you can upload and try new plugins or themes before applying them to your websites.
• Fast speed. Instead of installing a bunch of speed up plugins, WPEngine handles caching and speed up your website with their service. Art of Blog, a very popular blog on WordPress, reported that its loading time has decreased from 10 to only 4 second switching to WPEngine. Even when your website has a spike in traffic, there is nearly no changes in loading time.
• 100% uptime. It guarantees that if you meet this problem, WPEngine will send you 5% of monthly bill for EVERY HOUR that your site gets problems.
• Daily backup for both files and databases.
• Secure your website with malware scanning.
• Best support in the industry. I once contacted their supports and they replied quickly with detailed information. Even the CEO of WPEngine, Jason Cohen, joins hands to support customers.
• Promise to unhack your website if strangers come and take it down.
• 60-day money back guarantee. If you think it is not for you, cancel and get your money back. It’s as easy as 1 – 2 – 3.

If you are a blogger with a few hundreds visits per day, maybe you don’t have to join this service. Dreamhost or Hostgator is okay for you, they are cheaper and they can handle that amount of visitors easily. However, if you are serious about your website or you are running a business, WPEngine maybe a good choice. You can get free of ridiculous technical stuffs (the service handles them for you) and focus on providing value for your website.

Get WPEngine For A Full Year and Enjoy 2 FREE Months

Synthesis from CopyBlogger Media

Synthesis is a rather new provider in terms of Managed WordPress hosting. The service is powered by CopyBlogger media, the company behind CopyBlogger, Scribe SEO, Premise and of course, Studiopress and Genesis framework.

Despite being new comer, Synthesis has gained a reputation for hosting some really big WordPress sites like GeekBeat.tv, BlogWorld Expo and CopyBlogger itself. It used the same service that serves more than million of pageviews per day, so there’s no doubt about the quality of this service.

How about the price? From $27 to $300 per month. What makes me surprise is that they host at most 12 websites on their shared stacks. For shared hosting, your space and traffic are shared with hundreds of other websites. A nice score for Synthesis.

The bad side is with 2500 visit per day, you can choose the Starter Package at $27. But if your traffic is higher, say 4000 – 5000, you are forced to opt for Professional Package which costs around $97 for 20.000 visits daily. I would say it would be better if Synthesis can add an additional package at around 50 or 70 bucks. It would be more fair for people with medium traffic.

Synthesis also doesn’t guarantee that they will take your website back if someone hacked it like WPEngine, but I am quite sure that they will support and help you if such thing happened. However, adding the claim will make this service more reliable and definitely take it to the top of best WordPress hosting.

Click here to learn more about Synthesis

Other Managed WordPress Hostings

My favorite one is WPEngine and Synthesis, so I can only tell about them. There are a few other providers including:

• Page.ly: The first provider aimed to create hosting plan specializing in WordPress.
• ZippyKid.com: It served Careerbuilder and Reuters.

Other Best WordPress Hosting

If you are not satisfied with these services mentioned above, you can choose a dedicated server or VPS. I don’t have much knowledge about them, so I can’t tell or recommend you anything. According to my research, you should be able to work your own (or hire someone) to make them compatible with WordPress. For example: add Litespeed, install cPanel, ultilize CDN service…

It requires lots of works. If you really love to do these technical things, go for it.

Best WordPress Hosting – Summary and Conclusion

Choosing the best WordPress hosting isn’t an easy task. You should make your decision carefully and wisely, so your business won’t be affected by bad providers. In summary, I would say that:

• If you are a blogger with small or medium traffic and want cheap, reliable shared hosting. You can choose between: Dreamhost, Hostgator, Bluehost and Westhost.
• If you are running a business or your traffic is extremely high, we have: WPEngine, Synthesis as well as other managed WordPress hosting service. I would recommend WPEngine, because they provide awesome support and they are really expert in this industry.

I have finished a very long, detailed review about best hosting for WordPress. This review is based on my experiences as well as recommendations from experts in this platform.

How about you? What is your current wordpress hosting? Are you satisfied with it?

Best WordPress Hosting - What Is The Best Choice For Your Website, 9.3 out of 10 based on 4 ratings