So, you have designed a beautiful, highly response, and fully functional WordPress website and all you need now is a place to host it. There are services that are specifically for WordPress websites, meaning that you won’t find any other kind of site hosted there. Then there are standard web hosting providers that make it easier for WordPress based blogs and websites to be hosted and accessed via a control panel. Prior to making a choice, there are five simple yet key WordPress hosting considerations that have to be addressed so that you can make the best selection. Here are the questions you should ask, search, and enquire about before hosting any WordPress based site.
- How Much Web Traffic Do You Expect to Have?
WordPress based websites are generally easy to navigate and are accessible by most digital devices, so they are among the most heavily visited places on the web. When you are first getting started with a brand new WordPress site, your traffic will likely be minimal. As long as you don’t bog down your site with dozens of videos on each page, your website will load fast. With each new page that you add, your sitemap will increase in size and more results will end up in search engine results. In short, unless you are looking for a new web host for an existing WordPress website you won’t have to worry too much about traffic until later on.
- What Kind of Content Will Be Present on Your WordPress Website?
The best way to determine which WordPress hosting service you should go with is based completely on the type of content you will be featuring. Blogs and sites that mainly consist of text and maybe a few accompanying photos won’t use much bandwidth, but if your site suddenly gains popularity, you risk having it temporarily shut down. Basically, web hosting services give users access to small parts of their servers. Based on your estimated traffic you can choose a plan that enables you to maintain a high performence WordPress site that is available 24/7 while visitors can navigate your website quickly.
- How Good Are You with WordPress?
Can you get a new WordPress website up and running in less than an hour no matter what the control panel looks like? People who are already familiar with WordPress hosting know how to get to the admin login page and make changes like the back of their hand. Novices on the other hand might need to go through an interactive tutorial that explains how to download WordPress for the first time, unzip and add themes, and add content. If you know what you’re doing, you can choose almost any WordPress hosting service and feel right at home.
- What Kind of Security Features Are Available?
Following a widespread attack on millions of vulnerable WordPress websites, owners and administrators have to be diligent about preventing their WordPress based sites from being hacked by bots that are constentlly attempting “man in the middle attacks” or Brute force login attacks, although this of course assumes that you will choose a good hosting service to work with in the first place will might even make the use of a CDN redundant.
There are loads of widgets that can be downloaded and used to keep your WordPress site from being hacked but hosting is also important. More advanced WordPress users can make changes to the main directory that restricts permissions based on IP address. In other words, you can prevent hackers from getting into your WordPress website by making your IP address the only one that can access the backend. Look at security when you are comparing WordPress hosting services.
- How Much Do You Want to Pay for WordPress Hosting?
Whether you found a WordPress theme that you really like for free, created your own, or paid big bucks for a premium theme, continued web hosting fees have to be considered into your budget. For anywhere between $5 to $10 a month you can host perhaps 1 to 10 WordPress websites on the same account safely. People who are only going to have a single WordPress site might be okay with free hosting services, but they need to think about the address that they have to type in to get to their websites. Paid web hosting services allow you to host your own domains for a small monthly charge. Free WordPress hosting services might only allow you to put your website up via a subdomain, so you won’t ever really own your own traffic. Bigger WordPress sites that have lots of videos or archived content might need to pay for dedicated servers, which can bring the monthly bill for hosting up to $100 or more a month.
Have an idea of how big your WordPress is going to end up before you select a hosting service. Ask yourself if you are planning to add new content daily or just as you see fit. If your WordPress site is eventually going to become an ecommerce store, you might need a lot of bandwidth. On the other hand, if you’re just hosting a personal blog that you add new posts to a few times a month, a free WordPress hosting service might be just right for your needs.