Finding The Right Hosting Company For Your Website

Are You Looking For The Right Hosting Company For Your Website?

The right hosting company for your website can be hard to find, so hopefully this article will provide some tips in finding the right one. I was in the same position you were a few years ago, looking for affordable hosting companies for my brand new company website. The reality is that if I knew then what I know now, I would’ve gone with a managed WordPress hosting solution from the get-go.

What is Managed WordPress Hosting?

If you are currently hosting your WordPress site with a regular shared hosting company, over time you’ll notice a few things that will leave you wanting more out of your hosting experience. One of the recurring themes with regular shared hosting companies like GoDaddy, Hostgator, etc. is speed. I get it, you are starting out and you want to stick to a budget, so you go for the most affordable hosting plan out there and hope that your site will be found quickly by potential customers. Unfortunately, SEO optimization requires that your site speed and performance are up to par, which is not always the case when you are on a shared hosting platform.

Key Differences Between Shared WordPress Hosting and Managed WordPress Hosting

• Shared WordPress hosting is cheap (between $5 and $20/month), which makes it fairly attractive for new businesses trying to keep their operating costs down. How those hosting companies actually make a profit is by up selling all the different elements that are needed to properly run a WordPress site, such as daily backups, a security suite, SSL certificates, charges for site migration, etc.
• Managed WordPress hosting is more expensive (between $25 and $100/month), but you get all the different services and elements that you need to have a WordPress installation running smoothly. For example, in the case of Flywheel, you get a free SSL, nightly backups, security suite built in working behind the scenes for you and a free content delivery network. When you add those services separately, your website-related expenses can quickly surpass the monthly cost of a managed WordPress hosting account.
• Cheap hosting plans also force the provider to share resources between customers, so it is not uncommon to find 500 companies/clients sharing the same server resources. If you get a performance issue with one site, it could potentially affect all other clients in that space.
• The resulting effect of dirt-cheap shared hosting and slow performance is: lower SEO score due to poor performance and the lack of a SSL certificate. Slow support response, which can leave you with a non-functioning website when you need it the most. Uptime issues that might show your website as being offline when clients go looking for your page, etc.
• The right hosting company for your website should provide you with a pain-free experience, where you shouldn’t have to worry about dealing with security, backups and performance all on your own. It is bad enough when you know the ins and outs of WordPress environments, so imagine if your core business has nothing to do with technology and you are trying to figure it all out on your own.

Key Advantages of a managed WordPress hosting solution

Superior Support

A managed WordPress hosting company deals exclusively with WordPress, unlike shared hosting companies that have multiple different installations in their servers (Drupal, Magento, straight HTML, etc.).

Blazing Fast Speeds

I experienced the difference in performance first-hand when I migrated my site to Flywheel. Everything about their platforms is tuned for speed. You can get decent page speed scores by using the platform alone without any caching plugins.

Global Availability

Using a network of Point-of-Presence servers allows Flywheel to move your content as close as possible to the person visiting your site.

Nightly Backups

Never again worry about figuring out your backup strategy and how to execute it in a WordPress environment. Nightly backups are automatically done for you every night, just in case.

Dedicated Security

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems out there, and as such, it is the target of hackers looking to simply break stuff, take control of your site to promote some other service or inject malware. With a managed WordPress hosting solution, that’s taken care of in the background. If your site is still hacked or infected, the support department will fix it for you.

Ready to Grow with You

Start with an entry level plan, but always have the flexibility to move up if your site starts attracting more traffic/sales.