This is the first Episode on our series ( Build professional WordPress site in just 2 hours ) and we will talk today about hosting companies, how to choose you fitting one and why do we recommend Hostgator?
What do we mean with hosting company? and why do we need one?
Think of hosting company like you need to rent a computer to put your site on it and when someone opens the browser trying to reach your site, he will go to this computer and load your site from it.
So you pay money monthly/yearly to the hosting provider company for the followings:-
- Rent server or part of it to put your site on it.
- Maintain and secure this server itself.
- Get also database, emails, analytics, …etc. and many other tools that help your site being better.
- Make your site available 24/7.
- Support you when you need help.
– How to choose Hosting company for your WordPress site?
As you may know we have tons of hosting companies that can provide you with hosting services.
Therefore, choosing one of them is very difficult process so we don’t need the extremely cheap servers so we get unstable/slow servers.
On the other hand, we don’t want to by the expensive servers and we can take the same service in a moderate price.
In the following points I will tell you what is the criteria being used to choose your hosting company that matches your requirements:-
1. Specify you needs in numbers
So you need to put a plan regarding/answering the following questions:-
- Who is your target audience?
- How many visitor you expect to get daily/monthly?
- What is the number of pages do you expect to have in your site?
- How much media will you go to upload?
- How many sites will you operate?,
This will help you to choose the right plan of disk space, bandwidth, number of sites, …etc.
2. How old is the hosting company you choose?
Please don’t start with a new hosting company so in most cases you will be like laboratory rat and at least search for a company with good rating and enough rating stars from 4 to above.
3. What is their backup plan?
Every hosting company (good ones) should have backup plan for the whole site so please check that if this is optional or they already do that without any request.
Having a daily backup is not an option for your business, we don’t need any down time and let’s learn from OVH incident.
So at any time if we found the hosting isn’t good or any incident happened, get your last backup and install it at any other hosting company.
4. Managed WordPress hosting or general purpose hosting?
You are the one that will take this decision to choose managed WordPress hosting or general hosting package based on the following details:-
Managed WordPress hosting: it’s a normal hosting with a specific options for WordPress like:-
- Enabling object caching.
- Some security rules.
- Some performance optimizations on the server itself.
- Backup your full WordPress site.
- On some hosts they provide you with some premium themes and plugins that you can use.
- Automatic updates.
This package mainly targets non-developers so you can manage your WordPress easily without any development skills.
For me I prefer the general purpose because:-
- I can manage all things I need, not just specific ones.
- Cheaper.
- Use other services like emails.
- No problems while migrating to another hosting.
4. Support channels
The most important thing you need to check is how will you communicate with your hosting company when you need help or sudden incident happened?
Most of web hosting providers, provide phone number for support faster and other ordinary ways for support like live chat, tickets, online documentation articles, emails, …etc.
Why do we recommend Hostgator as hosting provider?
If you tried to apply the above points on Hostgator, you will find all of them are there.
- I have an account on Hostgator from about 5 years and it still works without any problems.
- I can reach their support at anytime and all of my issues are resolved in no time.
- Above all, it will save your money as they have many many discounts allover the year.
Today’s Secret: If you decided to deal with Hostgator, make long term purchase so for example purchase for 3 years in advance this is because their good promotions are on first payment but with renewal you will get small discount.