When looking at hosting, the number of companies, types, and plans can be overwhelming. We mentioned before that there are all kinds of hosting options. Cloud, VPS, dedicated, shared, managed, etc. And there are even more companies to consider. So to simplify things, below we cover two main categories of WordPress hosting:

• Managed WordPress Hosting
• Shared WordPress Hosting

After deciding the type, you need to consider these factors.

Speed

Optimizing a website is vital for your search engine rankings, and you can only do that if your hosts allow you to do so and are fast enough to start with. In simple words, you cannot optimize the site’s speed even after spending countless hours if you are using weak hosting.

Hence, when selecting a WordPress hosting service provider, you need to ensure it offers sufficient speed and loads well on desktop as well as on mobile devices.

Besides, it would help if you considered hosting’s uptime and page load speed. For search engines, site speed is a direct ranking factor!

Server Location

When selecting a hosting provider, it’s essential to choose the one with the closest server options in order for your site visitors and users to have an enjoyable experience. This will lead them back, which means increased traffic on our sites.

If you have a lot of international visitors, make sure that your hosting provider offers CDN (content delivery network) as it will help all those from around the world. With CDN website’s images and other resources will load from their nearest servers and much quicker.

Price

Do you know how much data is stored on your computer? Think about that for a second. Even though it’s tempting to buy the cheapest WordPress hosting available but you will not be sure if it will work, don’t make this mistake. Your website’s data is stored on the hosting server.

You’ll regret investing in something cheap when all of a sudden things start crashing or freezing up time after time again without warning (or even during use). For most high traffic websites and blogs, the following features are a must and should be provided by their hosts:

• Look for a one-click install feature for WordPress. The feature is handy, and installing and managing WordPress will be much easier.
• Available web space (sufficient storage space will be vital over time).
• Look for the one that comes with SSD drives, as it has a faster site loading time.
• Backup and Restore features.
• Security options (preventing viruses, malware or hacks is a crucial point)
• Free SSL certificate as it enhances users’ trust in your website.
• CDN (content delivery network for rapid loading time)
• Site Migration Options (it comes in handy when you are changing hosting plan or moving to another host)

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• Customer Support

• The first misconception about the customer service that we would like to cover is that sales and technical representatives or support teams are entirely different. Thus their response times are not the same and vary.

  Usually, sales representatives often reply in minutes or seconds. However, technical support’s team response times are not that quick because they are based on the volume and also on the duration to resolve the client’s issues. Some problems take a minute or two, but some can take hours or days to get resolved. Similarly, finding and diagnosing the issues can also be time-consuming.

  In this regard, we advise you to check these things:

  You should check their live chat for response times. Apart from it, check if their service covers your time zone and their availability as per your time zone. See how quickly they attend to you and what kind of assistance they offer. Check the ways to contact the support such as email, chat, ticketing system, etc.

  Ask for a recommendation by the hosting’s representative online before finalizing your picks. At the same time, check what others experienced when using the host’s technical support. If you see more negative feedback, discuss the same with their customer service to determine it is real or fake.

  Furthermore, check whether the hosting provider is a public or private firm along with their working history? Initially, it looks tempting to go with the popular hosting brands, but the fact is slightly smaller independent, private hosting service providers offer appealing hosting plans and faster support.

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• Website Traffic

• Do you have an extensive web presence that needs to be maintained? Or are you just getting started and would like the best bang for your bucks. This should factor into your hosting provider choice, too. If you are just starting a new business venture, you will have lower traffic. In this case, you can go with the shared WordPress hosting plans but only for the first 6 to 12 months.

  However, if you have a working business or established brand or your site receives a considerable amount of traffic, you cannot use the shared WordPress hosting plan. In this case, go with the Managed WordPress hosting plan.

  We also suggest you use Google Analytics to determine the site’s traffic and progress. This will also help you to decide when to upgrade or change the hosting provider.