website hosting

Recommended Website Hosting

I recommend Website Hosting providers based on 4 main factors:

Reliability & Uptime, WordPress Compatibility, Speed, and Customer Care

Since there are so many hosting options available out there, here’s a number of things and features you should take into consideration when choosing a Website hosting provider.

How To Choose The Right Website Hosting

Before going for a cheap, random service, consider how your choice will influence your website. Hosting is the foundation of your website and affects:

• The way your website works
• The speed of your site. The website build stack also affects the speed but slow hosting = slow website guaranteed
• Your SEO and how your site ranks Google.
• Site Security – Server-side security helps prevent hacks, malware, bots and other security issues you don’t want to deal with
• Site Downtime. If your website goes offline, it can be a costly loss of revenue.

Since there are so many options available out there, here’s a number of things and features you should take into consideration when choosing a hosting provider.

Speed

I am obsessed with Site Speed and spend way too many hours playing with hosting and site optimation. Google index mobile fist so the speed is important for SEO. A slow site is bad for mobile UX & Core Vitals Googles Core Web Vitals

The 2 main types of hosting you will see on most companies are VPS (Virtual Private Server) or Shared Hosting. VPS is much faster but technically more difficult to work with. Shared is what most low traffic websites use because it’s the cheapest and easiest.

A study was done on Amazon a few years ago on the cost in revenue if they lost 1s in site speed. The results were astounding:

Article by FastCompany – How One Second Could Cost Amazon $1.6 Billion In Sales

Read the full article

Data Centre Location

Companies always list their data centre locations. Always pick the location that is closest to your audience. The closer the servers are to your audience, the better the loading times. 

Slow websites lose business and may have higher bounce rates, which harmfully impact your SEO.

Price

Spend as your budget allows. For many businesses, a website is their virtual shopfront and you want the best option to power your business.

Better hosting improves SEO, site speed and customer satisfaction, which brings more traffic and leads to business. 

The best value providers are Siteground & Hostinger.  WPengine has a higher price tag but it’s warranted as their customer support is the best we have tried  We have created hundreds of websites and used many services. Cloudways is my personal favourite and what we use for staging and maintenance plans

Customer Support

• Always check reviews online of what people are saying about your hosting provider.
• Do they have good comments?
• What is their uptime? Usually, it’s a percentage showing when sites are likely to be online.
• And do they respond to their customers promptly? 
• Check their locations to make sure that they work well with your time zone.
• Check if customer support and to what level is included with your plan.

Cloudways support is not great for beginners. They mostly just give you server logs and links to pages to read to fix things yourself. If you decide to use Cloudways, be prepared to research and learn a lot about servers.

Site Traffic

Do you have huge amounts of traffic coming in or are you only starting out? This needs to be taken into consideration.

If you’re a new business, you’re likely to have lower traffic, a shared plan will work fine for you for the first 6 -12 months.

If you have an established blog or site and can see a considerable amount of traffic coming in shared may not be enough.

By using Google Analytics you can track your site’s number of monthly visitors. You will also have server stats in your hosting dashboard.

If you are considering changing hosting many services offer migration plans for 1 website. If you have multiple, you generally need to migrate those yourself. I also offer migrations if you need them.

Your Website and Hosting is a business investment

Spend wisely of course but a great website has great ROI. The experience your customers receive when they visit your site is crucial in today’s marketplace.

If you are unsure of how to create a website, host it or maintain, we offer web development, migrations and maintenance plan. We will take great care of your online business and website updates, so you can focus on running and expanding your business.

Website Hosting FAQ

I hope you found this blog of Website Hosting helpful

Until next time