How to Choose a Web Hosting for WordPress | The Definitive Guide (2020)

In this guide, I’m going to show you how to choose a web hosting for WordPress by understanding the type of web hosting solution, web host and its hosting packages. So,

• You know how to choose a web hosting with no mistake and no regret.
• What are the important parameters to look into when choosing a web hosting?

Let’s dive right in.

1. What is Web Hosting? 

At its core, web hosting is a service that allows individuals and organizations to store a personal or corporate website to the Internet. It is one of the important requirements when creating your website.

A web host (or web hosting service provider), is a business that provides the web hosting technology and services needed for any website to be seen on the internet itself.

2. Type of Web Hosting Solution

Websites are hosted, or in other words stored, on specialized computers referred to as servers. Servers are much more powerful than your laptop, which allows them to manage multiple different people accessing the same website at the same time.

This is made with the same components found in an average computer like a CPU, RAM memory, and other parts that just happen to be a bit more powerful than the average personal computer.

Owners of multiple servers rent them out to individuals who own websites in a process called web hosting. Several common web hosting solutions are described below.

2.1 Shared Hosting – Perfect For Beginners, Bloggers & Small Businesses

The best web hosting solution for entry-level website creators is shared hosting. Your website is stored on the same server with several other websites.

If you’re a small business, community group, or individual looking to create your own blog, then shared hosting is probably the best option available for you.

2.2 VPS Hosting – Perfect For Growing Websites (Next Level of Shared Hosting)

Virtual private servers share one physical server while your hosting is partitioned off so that you aren’t sharing resources with anyone else. Each VPS instance is allocated a dedicated slice of a computer’s resources, ensuring that no issues arise between users. A VPS is a stepping-stone between shared hosting solutions and setting up your own dedicated hosting solution.

VPS solutions are great, as they avoid the issues associated with shared hosting that can develop when your hosting neighbors manage to bring down your website by crashing a shared server, while at the same time helping to avoid the steep costs of a dedicated server. If the most advanced shared hosting plan is not enough anymore to run your website smoothly, it’s worth upgrading to a VPS plan.

2.3 Dedicated Hosting – For Big League Websites

When you have your own dedicated server, it means that you are renting out one physical server computer from a hosting company. This means that you have full access and full control to the whole server.

Dedicated servers are generally the highest level of server one would need for running an online business with a sizable amount of web traffic. While the costs associated with dedicated servers are significantly higher than shared hosting options.

3. How To Choose A Web Hosting?

There are two criteria that you should look into when choosing a web hosting which is the web host and its available hosting package.

3.1. Web Host

EIG Company.  Avoid web hosts from EIG such as Bluehost, HostGator, iPage, Site5. These web hosts are all operated by a company named EIG. They are known to pack many hosting on the same servers and might probably degrade your website performance.

Speed. Choose a web host that has a fast server. It can load your website faster. A2 Hosting is well known for its robust and speedy server.

Uptime. Choose a web host with great uptime. It is a percentage of time indicating how well the server is operating throughout a year. When the server is down, it means people can’t access your website. I will choose a web host with at least 99.9% uptime. Both A2 Hosting and Siteground provide a very great uptime which I personally experienced.

Support. Choose a web host with great support. Sometime you may have problems with your website and you need instant support from the web host. Support from Siteground is amazing in which you will get a response typically within 5 minutes.

Datacenter Location. Choose a web host that has datacenter near to your business operating location. This is because it can improve website loading time.

Renewal Cost. Many web hosts offer huge discounts during your first purchase, and they will charge higher renewal costs during the next billing cycle. So, it is recommended to purchase a hosting package with 2 to 3 years since you only have a discount at first purchase. For the long term, if you have a tight budget, you might consider choosing a web hosting with lower renewal cost.

3.2. Hosting Package

Number of websites hosted. The number of websites that can be hosted with this web hosting package. For instance, a single website or unlimited websites. Please take note that although it sounds great to host unlimited websites, they are still sharing the same resources such as CPU. Usually, the package with unlimited websites has more resources than a single website.

Addon domain. It allows an addon domain which is the name of the second website such as anotherdomain.com. This number is the same as the number of websites hosted.

Subdomain. It allows a subdomain for a new website. Subdomain adds another name before your primary domain such as shop.yourdomain.com.

Free domain. Some web hosting packages provide free domain as long as you are still hosting your website with them, but will sell you with the high renewal price once you are not hosting with them. If you decide to transfer the domain name, the process is very annoying, time-consuming, and confusing. My advice is to buy a domain name from a domain registrar.

Storage size. It refers to the amount of space that the web host allocates for your hosting package. It generally stores all text files, images, scripts, databases, emails and other files related to your website. If you having a lot of photos, perhaps you need to consider a package with greater storage.

SSD Storage. Ensure that the hosting is using SSD hard drive because it is faster and reliable. It can speed up the website loading time.

Bandwidth / Data Transfer. Bandwidth is the amount of data (site content and visitor traffic) that a server can transfer in a certain amount of time. The higher the bandwidth, the more people can view your site at the same time. And you can download or upload as much data as you want in a given period of time.

Cloudflare CDN. Most packages nowadays come with free Cloudflare CDN. It can help deliver your website files faster to the destination (browser), it will drastically improve website loading time.

SSL. Ensure that the package also comes with at least Let’s Encrypt certification. So that your website will be more secure in HTTPS. It improves your website’s credibility and also SEO.

Email account.  If you are building for a business website, you probably need an email account with your own domain name, for instance, [email protected]

cPanel. It is using the user-friendly cPanel control panel.

4. Recommended Hosting Service Providers

For those of you in the market looking for a web hosting service provider, there are several well-known and robust service providers which I like, for instance, A2 Hosting and Siteground.

If you are looking for a great uptime and fast support, you won’t go wrong with Siteground. Siteground is well known for its uptime (99.99%) and customer support. I personally have a great support experience from Siteground, their live chat support usually will reply within 2-5 minutes.

It is currently hosting more than 1,000,000 websites in the world and achieved 97% customer satisfaction. However, please take note that the renewal cost of Siteground is very high, it is about 3 times more expensive than the price during your first purchase, so it is encouraged to go with 2-3 years package for your first purchase.

For this personal WordPress blog, I personally prefer A2 Hosting because of its speedy and robust infrastructure. This is because A2 Hosting is the fastest hosting for WordPress and having great support as well (average < 10mins from live chat).

It is one of the most reliable web hosting service providers available in today’s marketplace, serving more than 300,000 websites in the world. For over a decade, they have delivered numerous high-performance benefits to their clients, including high-speed performance, top-quality developer tools, reliable uptime guarantees, and unsurpassed customer satisfaction.

This company is known to be reputable and customer-center, which makes me confident to suggest their services to you. However, the renewal price for A2 Hosting is 2 times more expensive than the first purchase.

The data below show why I like A2 Hosting so much.

Overall, it has incredible fully loaded time, the fast server response time (or synonym to TTFB), and high uptime. Time To First Byte (TTFB) is the time spent for the first response from the hosting. Google suggests all website’s TTFB should be less than 300ms.

With the speed optimization implemented, the speed result I obtained from GTMetrix is fast, it can fully load the page in 0.5s and the TTFB is only 155ms.

Whereas, my page’s fully loaded time tested with Pingdom is only 485ms.

110ms TTFB from Google PageSpeed Insight.

152ms TTFB and 99.98% uptime for my hosting from the analysis of Freshping 24/7 server monitor.

Want to learn more about A2 Hosting and how to host it, please read my article here.

**Have great news here, A2Hosting is now having a promotion, where its web hosting package starts from only $2.96/month compared to the past $3.92/month. Act fast to grab the opportunity before it changes the price back.

Now Is Your Turn

Choose a hosting that fits right to your business / blog.

And once you have done, remember to point the nameserver of your hosting to your domain name.

Already have your web hosting purchased? You probably can read how to install a WordPress in your web hosting next.