9 Things to Consider when Choosing a WordPress Hosting Provider

There are thousands of WordPress hosting providers in the market. But how do you choose the right hosting from all these options?

— Technically, hosting manages a particular location on a web server for your website. Meaning, all the resources of your website will be stored in this location. So, getting hosting is like hiring such a location.

There are different kinds of hosting along with various facts. Without proper hosting, you will have a headache running your online business. The same goes for WordPress hosting.

We would like to add that, there are benefits of running a WordPress hosting service. Thinking of new entrepreneurs or small business owners, we have discussed some of the benefits of WordPress hosting, this article may be useful to many.

These are the 9 things that you need to consider before choosing a WordPress hosting provider:

Okay!
You may get an idea about the considerations after looking at the infographics, you can’t understand each of the terms without going through each of them.

So, stick with us till the end –

1) Security:

The first and foremost thing to consider is the security of the — WordPress hosting provider. Whether you are running a website for occasional blogging or running a large-scale business, security for your website is crucial.

Believe it or not, almost 30,000 websites are being targeted and attacked by hackers. No one wants to be a part of that.

Without adequate security, you may become one of their targets. Unfortunately, you never know who may turn into your enemy. And because of jealousy or personal grudges, they preserve evil intentions to harm you.

In terms of security, —  a good hosting provider should focus on some major factors. We will break it down for you –

DDoS Protection or Firewall: — WordPress hosting providers that guarantee absolute securities can save your website from any cyber attack. Superior WordPress hosting providers offer securities with the latest cybersecurity software or offer Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection.

Automated and Adequate Backup Solution: On top of that, they offer adequate backup plans to recover your data. Even if you lost your resources for some reason, this will back you up. These backup plans partially support the overall security.

Free SSL Certificate: Better WordPress hosting providers offer SSL certificates (HTTPS) so that the payments and transitions become secure. —  However, you may need to move your WordPress website from HTTP to HTTPS when your hosting providers don’t configure it for you.

Protect Customer Privacy: Being a renowned web host, it is their prime responsibility to follow the law of customer privacy protection. While doing a security breach, they should ensure no customer information is exposed.

Talking about security, you can get DMCA protection for free. It will include a stunning badge inside your website and you can request a takedown service through it when someone copies any content from your website.

Move your WordPress site from HTTP to HTTPS:

Getting an SSL certificate and moving your site from HTTP to HTTPS is the wisest decision to make. If you get this pre-configured by your hosting provider, then it’s great. —  However, if you haven’t got an SSL certificate, then you need to purchase one immediately.

Do you know?

Starting from July 2018, the Chrome browser marks websites insecure that don’t have SSL certificates or that are not HTTPS.

HTTPS (Secure HTTP) is an encryption protocol that maintains security while transferring data among users, browsers, and servers.

Websites without HTTPS will display a “Not Secure” warning in the Chrome browser. Furthermore, you need to have a secure connection to make payments through PayPal Pro, Stripe, Authorize.net, and etc.

The simplest and recommended method of getting HTTPS is to use a plugin called Really Simple SSL.

Once you install and activate this plugin, you will get an SSL certificate for your website. Then, you need to go to —  Settings >> SSL page under your dashboard to set up your site.

Watch the video to become crystal clear about this –

After installing and activating the Really Simple SSL plugin, you can rest assured of the followings –

• Getting the SSL certificate
• Moving your site URLs to HTTPS
• Redirecting HTTP to HTTPS
• Fixing URLs that haven’t yet returned from insecure HTTP

2) Price:

Some customers may get WordPress hosting from the providers that offer the cheapest solutions.

Getting hosting plans costing around $3 to $30 per month would do the job for you when you are running a small-scale business or blog website. On the contrary, a hosting plan costing $100 a month might be needed to run a large-scale business or eCommerce website.

However, we don’t suggest you get the cheapest WordPress hosting even when your business is small. Rather get hosting service from the reputed and reliable hosting providers. WordPress hosting providers like ExonHost, Eicra, Alpha Net, XeonBD, ARNHOST are honorable mentions in Bangladesh.

“You get what you have paid for”

Yes, it’s also true for web hosting services. WordPress hosting providers determine the prices of their packages upon a number of factors. On top of that, it will cost a fortune to maintain a resourceful work environment. So, spending a little on WordPress hosting won’t bite.

Each WordPress hosting provider maintains a certain quality of customer service, regardless of what features are offered in the packages. The prices of hosting may fluctuate based on customer service.

3) Server Uptime:

Even for a fraction of seconds, you don’t want to see your website is down, right?

What you need is a web host that can guarantee as much uptime as possible so that any operation regarding your business doesn’t halt and your business can avoid costly disruptions. It is very important to check if the web host is running on a powerful server before finally getting a hosting plan from them. On top of that, check whether they are using a reliable network and rigid hardware.

Arguably, it is true that no WordPress hosting provider can guarantee 100% uptime. However, the best ones can offer up to 99.99% uptime.

Therefore, don’t consider a WordPress hosting provider offering lower than 99.99% uptime. A hosting plan with standard uptime is obvious to avoid crippling situations and costly interruptions.

Facts like server uptime, we have discussed WordPress hosting advantages that might be unknown to you. We urge you to look at the benefits of WordPress hosting from the end user’s perspective.

4) Site Loading Speed:

Do you know?

It takes only half a second for Google to load

Which indicates that your website should load in the blink of an eye. It is said that the ideal loading time for a website is usually 1 to 2 seconds, gathering all the content on the page.

If your site takes a whole lot of time to load, you will eventually start to lose your precious visitors and customers. Slow page loading speed also has a negative impact on Google’s ranking.

It also affects your website’s bounce rate. We have prepared a relationship chart between page loading time and bounce rate, take a look –

On top of that, the abandonment rate may also increase due to slow website loading speed. Perhaps, this may give you some hint –

2 seconds delay on website loading speed → 87% abandonment rate ↑ Page loading speed < 3 seconds → 53% mobile site visit ↓

After considering all these facts, you should consider a reliable WordPress hosting provider in Bangladesh or anywhere in the world. Judging these following facts may offer satisfying results –

• Register’s Data Center Locations
• Site’s Traffic
• External Scripts
• Shared or Dedicated Web Hosting
• AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) Encryption for Mobile Devices

5) Types of WordPress Hosting:

Every web host may claim themselves as the best and their features, plans, etc may seem to be overwhelming. We have already discussed what you need to do for choosing the right WordPress hosting provider.

However, we are talking about the types of WordPress hosting. Since there are many types of hosting like VPS, Cloud, Shared, Managed and etc; you should choose the most appropriate one.

Are you confused about which one to take?

Don’t be, since two major types of WordPress hosting can be considered, which are Shared and Managed WordPress hosting. Any of them is absolute for WordPress hosting solutions.

Managed WordPress Hosting: It is the ultimate option for WordPress hosting. This type of hosting is dedicated to WordPress-powered websites. And we know that the more concentrated efforts mean the more satisfaction.

Shared WordPress Hosting: Traditional and cheaper solution for WordPress hosting. This type of hosting is mainly planned for beginners who just started a new website. However, such a type of hosting doesn’t come with all the features that are provided in a managed WordPress hosting.

6) Customer Support:

Judging by the quality of the customer support, you can get an idea about the reputation of a web hosting company. You can’t trust a company if it fails to provide customer service to a certain extent.

Now, how would you judge a company’s customer service?

We believe there are 2 things to consider. One is the time of feedback and the other one is the medium of contact for support.

• Time of Feedback: Suppose, your site is down for some reason and you have already contacted customer support. Sadly, there is no response even after a few days. When you need instant support, there is no trace of feedback. It can be really frustrating.The web hosting companies with good customer support usually have good reviews about their customer service and they always provide 24/7 customer support. Meaning, you will hear from the customer support team immediately.
• Medium of Contact: Only submitting for assistance via ticket can’t be enough and this process is kind of common. Having only one way to submit support can make it difficult to handle multiple clients simultaneously. The support team must have one or more means of communication in addition to a moderate number of members to provide services. A good hosting company maintains multiple ways to contact them when a client needs assistance. They don’t rely only on the traditional ticket system, they come up with email, emergency call service, and live chat support.

With that being said, you should also examine whether the person engaged in support has enough skill to solve a particular problem. Because some companies contain a lot of team members in their support team but many of them are inexperienced.

7) Subscription Upgrade Flexibility:

Users who just started their businesses usually go for shared web hosting plans as this can save money at the beginning of businesses.

However, everyone wants to expand their businesses. Therefore as an online business owner, you will need to upgrade your hosting plan as well. So, choose a hosting provider that ensures flexibility in upgrading your subscription.

For instance, if someone wants to upgrade to a dedicated or VPS server, he should go for a hosting provider that ensures such upgrade options. Upgrading the server is crucial for strengthening the website’s security and storage.

So, choose a WordPress hosting provider that can grow with your business growth.

8) WordPress Specific Features:

Choose a WordPress hosting provider that offers services tailor-made for your business. When there are so many general options available, you need to select the one that comes with the features that meet your business requirements to the maximum.

While we discuss specific features, we are talking about WordPress site optimization, dedicated firewall for WordPress websites, WordPress patching, and more. Before getting hosting, make sure these features are provided by the web host.

However, getting WordPress hosting service with tons of features doesn’t mean all of them are appropriate for your business. So, thoroughly review the features of the web host that you are going to choose.

Any web host may market themselves as a WordPress hosting provider when they are only offering a shared Linux Hosting server. So you need to be careful about this topic and choose the web host after enough research.

For example, we can look at the features of ARN Host where the starter plan starts only at $1.25/month –

Aside from the essential features, these facts should be considered as well –

Control Panel:

Yes, there were times when you didn’t know anything about CMS like WordPress. Once you become a website owner, you need to learn how to install a CMS like WordPress, its plugins and themes.

However, we are not stopping you from learning. To be honest, we can’t.

We just want to let you know that the web host should come up with a user-friendly control panel through which you can configure website-related features effortlessly.

For instance, great WordPress hosting providers now offer a 1-click installation method where you don’t have to do anything except for clicking the mouse.

Speaking of new users, if you don’t know how to install WordPress in your localhost, then you can read this instruction for installing WordPress in localhost as you need to know about the installation process before purchasing a hosting plan.

Backup Options:

At the very beginning of this article (inside security), we have already discussed how important it is to have an adequate backup for your website

If your web hosting provider comes with multiple backup options that take backup of your website’s resources regularly, then you don’t have to worry about losing your files. You can restore every content of your website again.

Plugin Compatibility:

Plugins are the inevitable component of any WordPress website. No website can’t be properly managed or decorated without using a single plugin.

Plugins are responsible for enhancing the overall functionality of your website. Even, some services are not available without installing and activating a specified plugin. So, it will be a significant loss if some plugins are banned by your hosting provider.

Sadly, many plugins are not compatible with all the WordPress hosting providers. This is a major concern to many users. Make sure your hosting provider sets no limitation for installing and experimenting with as many plugins as you want.

9) Hardware for Hosting:

Hardware that is being used by your hosting company affects a lot on page loading speed and uptime of your website. Hardware used by your web host affects the overall performance of your website.

Surprising, right?

In terms of considering hardware, you should be asking the following questions –

• Does your hosting provider have ample resources to meet your business requirements?
• What kind of hardware is being used by the hosting company?
• Are your hosting providers using the latest technology servers?

When you think you have found the answers to the above questions, then you can decide whether you want to take their hosting services or not.

Questions that are frequently asked by people regarding WordPress hosting:

1) What is WordPress hosting in Bangladesh or any country?

Ans: WordPress hosting is a type of hosting optimized for smoothly running WordPress-powered websites. Therefore, such a type of hosting specializes in improving performance and security, which are needed for a WordPress website.

2) Are there other types of hosting besides WordPress hosting?

Ans: Yes, besides WordPress hosting there are other types of hosting like VPS hosting, cloud hosting, shared hosting, and dedicated hosting. But, these types of hosting are not so suitable for WordPress websites.

3) Do you really need WordPress hosting for WordPress websites?

Ans: The answer to this question depends on whether your blogs are in WordPress rather than other CMSs. You need WordPress hosting if the scenario is like this. But, you can go for shared WordPress hosting when you have a WordPress-powered website but the traffic is low as it is relatively a new website.

4) What are the reliable hosting companies in Bangladesh?

Ans: Well, there are many hosting companies in Bangladesh considering the number, but not all of them can provide quality services. If an agency thoroughly adheres to the 9 considerations regarding WordPress hosting, it is reliable to get hosting services from it. Some of the well-known WordPress hosting providers in Bangladesh are – ExonHost, Hosting Bangladesh, Eicra, Alpha Net, XeonBD, ARNHost.

5) Do I need addons for WordPress hosting?

Ans: Time will tell whether you will need addons or not. There are always chances of buying add-ons in the future. On the other hand, hosting providers will try to upsell a whole lot of services or add-ons to you. You really won’t need all the services that your hosting company provides. It is wise to uncheck all the addons while ordering.

Save your money by ordering what you really need, which is WordPress hosting.

In the end…

Hope you have gathered some knowledge about the facts for choosing the best WordPress hosting. Leave a comment below if you have any thoughts regarding these facts or if we have left out anything that should be included.

Anyways, if you have a WordPress hosting service in mind considering the following 4 things, you will never regret it

• Security
• Scalability or subscription update policy
• Support quality
• The reputation of the web host

— Remember, it is an indispensable step to choose the right WordPress hosting to architect an impressive website.