One of the first steps, before starting your blog or site, is choosing your WordPress Hosting. Choosing the right web hosting is a very important step. If you’re not familiar with websites and hosting, it can be very hard and time consuming to choose the WordPress hosting that suits you the best.
If you already looked around for WordPress hosting, you’ll probably have noticed that there are so much companies offering so much different kinds of web hosting. That’s why I wrote this article, to help you choose the right hosting for your site or blog!
Some Web Hosting Basics
As I mentioned before, there are a lot of differences in web hosting. In this part, I’ll tell you something more about the basics of web hosting.
Windows vs Linux
If you want to run PHP / MySQL – based applications (like WordPress), then Linux hosting is the best choice. Windows hosting will also do the job in most cases (with some tweaks), but it’s important to know that WordPress is optimised for Linux hosting.
Shared Hosting, a Dedicated Server, VPS or Cloud Hosting?
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting means that your site or blog is hosted on a server running different sites. This makes shared hosting much cheaper, but also slower. Speed can vary a lot, depending of the power of the server and how much sites are running on that server.
Shared hosting is a great choice for those projects with just a couple of hundred visitors a day:
- a new site or blog
- a site or blog for a little company
Dedicated Server
A dedicated server is a physical server just for your site or blog. Dedicated servers are more secure, can be very powerfull, but also very expensive. Another negative point is that dedicated servers are not scalable, so they can’t grow with your site. If you’re looking for fast web hosting, you better take a look at VPS or Cloud Hosting.
VPS
A Virtual Private Server is a server that runs virtually on a physical server. This makes it possible to run multiple Virtual Private Servers on 1 physical server. The VPS acts like a dedicated server, but it’s easier to scale it to the user’s needs. VPS is cheaper then dedicated hosting, while it offers the same possibilities.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is also a virtual server, but this virtual server runs on different physical servers. In most cases, multiple virtual servers will run on multiple physical servers.
This also makes it very easy to scale the hosting, to create very powerful hosting and it means extra security: when 1 of the physical servers fails, there is always another physical server that keeps running.
WordPress Hosting
Some web hosts offer “WordPress hosting”. In fact, WordPress hosting is just linux hosting that is optimised for WordPress. In most cases, WordPress is already pre-installed, so if you’re not comfortable with installing WordPress yourself, WordPress hosting is a good choice!
Which Hosting Company to Choose?
When searching a web host, it can be very interesting to compare different companies on:
- Support (is there 24/7 support, support through mail / telephone?)
- Backups (do they take a back up every day?)
- Speed (that’s difficult to know in advance, but reviews and forum comments can help)
- WordPress Installation (do they install WordPress, is there a 1-click-install option?)
- Security (some companies offer better security then others)
- Pricing (prices can vary a lot!)
Because there are so many companies, I created a short list of web hosting companies which are known for hosting a WordPress blog or site.
Before you take a look at this list, I also want you to give you 1 advice: write down what YOU need and then compare all the features of the web companies. For example, some companies are cheap if you host 1 domain, but charge a lot if you want to host multiple domains on your hosting. While others offer that option for free…
When doing my research for this article, I was amazed of the extra costs some companies charge. Basically, if it’s cheap, you just get the basics and you pay a lot for extra opions. Just don’t expect to get a Bentley for the price of a Volkswagen 
.
Basic WordPress Hosting
- Starting at $6,95 / month (36 month account)
- .com domain name: 1 free domain the first year, $11,95 / year after that
- Shared web hosting only
- Free 1-Click Script Installs
- 24/7 support through chat, e-mail and telephone
Visit www.bluehost.com for more information or check the full pricing table here.
- Starting at $3,96 / month (3 year contract)
- .com domain name: $15
- Shared web hosting, VPS or dedicated server
- One-click WordPress installer
- 24/7 support through phone, live chat and email
Visit www.hostgator.com for more information.
- Starting at $3,74 / month (3 year contract)
- .com domain name: $11,99
- Shared web hosting, VPS, dedicated server, cloud hosting and managed hosting
- One-click WordPress installer
- 24/7 support through phone and email
Visit GoDaddy for more information.
Professional WordPress Hosting
- 2 week free trial
- Starting at $8,95 / month (2 year contract with prepayment)
- .com domain name: 1 free domain ($ 9,95 for contracts less then a year or additional domain names)
- Shared web hosting, VPS or dedicated server
- One-click software installation
- 24/7 support, depending on your hosting plan (premium support costs extra)
Visit www.dreamhost.com for more information or check the full pricing table here.
- Powerful hosting
- Starting at $20 / month
- .com domain name: no information found
- Shared cloud hosting, cloud servers
- One-click WordPress installer
- 24/7 support through phone, Twitter and email
Visit VPS.NET for more information.
Managed WordPress Hosting
Managed WordPress hosting is an excellent choice if you:
- really don’t have any technical knowledge
- don’t want to care about updates, upgrades, security…
- want to focus on the content of your blog and not on the maintenance
- Fully managed WordPress hosting
- Automatic updates of the WordPress core & plugins
- Enhanced security
- Starting at $19,95 / month
- .com domain name: no information found
- Cloud hosting
- Quick 2 minute setup
- 24/7 support
Visit Page.ly WordPress Hosting for more information.
WordPress hosting: Conclusion
As you can see there are many companies offering WordPress hosting. I can only advise you to compare between the different hosts and the different packages they offer. I know, this is a lot of work, but hosting is a very important issue of your blog or web site! That’s why I already created a small list with companies offering WordPress hosting.