Picking Your WordPress Hosting Partner

Every year I help friends, family, and a few clients launch WordPress sites. It's partly because I know WordPress and partly because I work at a hosting company. So it's no surprise that the same question comes up every time. Where should someone host their site? And contrary to what you might think – I have a lot of different answers. So today I thought I would jot down a few options for you as you choose a WordPress hosting partner.

The Core of the Question

The most important factor to consider is you. The person who is looking for a WordPress hosting partner. You make all the different in the world, because it's your skills and your time, energy and knowledge that will impact how you answer the question.

Of course the answer is “it depends.” But the core of the question is, what does it depend on?

You Have Skills & Want Control

Let's say you have all the skills in the world and you have time available to really make things happen for your next WordPress site. You're looking for a solution that lets you do what you want, because you have tweaks you want to make. But you don't want to burn a lot of cash. So if you can keep it inexpensive (I didn't say cheap) until the site really grows, that's what you want.

If that's the case, you may want to try Digital Ocean. It starts at $5 / month.

You Have Clients & Want Scale

I'm not going to call you a reseller, because maybe you're running a small shop that focuses more on development. But the point is, you have a lot of sites under management. And so you want economies of scale. But you also have a pretty strong technical team to help you manage these sites. So you're not looking for expensive per-site solutions that cost you $20/site/month. But you still want the “managed” solutions that give you security, database backups, firewalls and the rest.

Managed hosting could be right for you. And I think you might like what you find at Liquid Web. 8 GB RAM boxes with 150GB of storage for $35/month? Yes, please.

You Have a Business & Want Less Worries

Let's say you have just one site. It's for your business. And your business requires your site. In fact, you might say your business is your site. Without it, there's no business. If you're running a membership site, an online course, or an online store – you need more than just a Managed WordPress host, you need a WordPress hosting partner who understands high concurrency, tons of traffic, and a performance-oriented solution because your customers won't wait.

If that's the case, and I may be biased, but that's why we created the Nexcess platform, starting at $19/month. I've already told you how it stands out for WooCommerce stores.

Your WordPress Hosting Partner

When you're looking for your next WordPress hosting partner, let me wrap up by giving you the five questions I would ask any of them. That way you can judge on your own.

1. If I have a technical question, can I reach out at midnight and will someone be able to answer me (or will they just take a message)?
2. How much does each site cost (when I take your total and divide it by the number of production sites I have running on my account)?
3. Are there any additional charges you'll calculate if I am wildly successful and bring a lot of traffic to my site?
4. If I am wildly successful and have a ton of concurrent traffic, will everything hold up, or will you pitch me on upgrading to a new plan?
5. If I am wildly successful and have a ton of concurrent traffic, do you have any auto-scaling features that will help me navigate the traffic without any worry? Or do I have to reboot, schedule a migration, or any other silliness?

I hope that helps.