How should I choose website hosting for wordpress? wordpress website hosting EXPOSED

OK , you’ve noticed there are a HUGE amount of people willing to host your wordpress website.

So how do you chose ? on price ? on referral ? ask a mate ?

Here are my top tips:

1. understand what you need
2. understand the market a little better – and understand what you are buying
3. asking for a referral is probably poor

Why I hate referrals for wordpress website hosting ?

• they probably have more experience that you – to the reference is invalid
• they might be in a different situation, like a mature site is different from a growing/changing site
• they still might be in the ‘naive’ stage, and just lucky with their current provider
• its a tad lazy, instead of doing your own homework, you’re relying on others.

what is WordPress support?

• it is help to keep your site running
• it is help with keeping plugins and wordpress core up to date
• it is recovery of a backup if you completely break things
• it does not cover changes or maintenance

What is wordpress maintenance ?

• it is a support level beyond basic support
• it helps you add features/plugins
• it helps you fix broken plugins. plugins break form time to time, with upgrades, or other changes

What is managed wordpress ?

• this is a level of support beyond based support, but excludes maintenance
• they’ll help with optimizing your wordpress for speed and security
• they’ll help you with backups and recovery

Self support

• ahhh, this is the one no-one actually states
• the cheapest support you’ll get is self support
• wondered how someone can do web hosting for $4-$10 / month – they offer NO support
• if something breaks, you are on your own, the provider is most likely just to suspend your account and website
• this is not backyard operates, its the big boys too.
• they wont even help you to create backups, or restore them. if it breaks, it was your fault, bye bye website.
• this is only used by the brave, the wicked, and the naive (like you thought it was a big name, a friend said they were good,and you lost your website).

How much support will you need ?

• is this your first wordpress website ? then you’re likely to need more support , at least your first year
• to you need help making changes ? add features over time ? then you’ll need ‘maintenance’ type support, to avoid small changes requiring quotes all the time
• if you only plan on adding blog entries for the next year, you can perhaps avoid ‘wordpress maintenance’.
• if you have a reasonable business, and use your website for leads, then manage wordpress and/or maintenance is needed.
• do you want to ‘set and forget’ ?

Types of providers

• web designers/developers
  • these guys primary income is from designing/developing.
  • They may or may not have a good grasp of hosting.
  • they have purchased a VPS from somewhere for about $100-$500/month. they can add unlimited extra sites for free. Any money they charge you is good revenue for them.
  • selling/supporting wordpress isn’t really their main focus on life
• the big domain selling operators
  • like netregistry, godaddy
  • these guys are big, they do things ‘by the numbers’, so the limit support to maximise their profit
  • even though they are a big name, if anything goes wrong, they just suspend your account. Your website is gone, and you cant access it to fix it or download it. see here for netregistry suspend terms.
  • same with backups , its ‘do it yourself’ netregistry backups
• maintenance providers
  • the dedicated maintenance providers are great, like wpcopilot.com.au
  • maintenance offered by web developers can be good also
  • if its designer/developers without a real programmer, they are just hacking wordpress, then the value can be marginal
• dedicated managed wordpress providers
  • like us at wpdone.com.au and wpengine.com – off course I am going to say this is the best
  • we’ve dedicated ourselves to wordpress
  • we have deep skills and experience
  • we have modified wordpress to make it faster, more reliable, more secure
  • we take all responsibility for everything
  • we make sure your site is running, was stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you and your website, making sure its running
  • nothing is too much effort for us, to get your site up and running, regardless of what happens.

Questions to ask when you get a quote

• does it include wordpress support ? will you help keep wordpress and plugins updated ?
• will you manage the backups ? how many backups are there ? 30 days is really a minimum, 6-12 months is good.
• if something breaks, will you recover the backup for me ?
• what if I need small changes ? (maintenance), what is the skill level of the staff providing the changes ? are they programmers or wordpress hackers ?
• what if my site is going slow, will you help ?
• what if my website gets attacked, or has other problems ?
• Do I  Access to Cpanel, and SSH console access
• is the server located in Australia ? as Australian servers are faster, and SEO better with google
• How much storage space is there ? (we have unlimited)
• How much internet usage is there ? (we have unlimited)
• What happens if the server breaks ? is there another server to instantly take over ?
• What security is there for my website ? (we have 6 layers)

By Scott Farrell on January 15th, 2016 , Follow @scott_WordPress Tweet to @scott_WordPress