Best Host for Wordpress. WordPress is the most used software for creating websites. If you choose WordPress to edit your site, you will need to start by finding suitable hosting. This is an unavoidable first step. It is only once you have found a web host that you can install WordPress, adjust the settings and edit the content of your website.
How to choose your accommodation? There are a large number of solutions and hosting offers for WordPress sites (shared server, dedicated, VPS, specific WordPress offer like WP Engine). It's easy to get lost when you're not an expert on the subject. To see more clearly, we will begin by presenting 5 possible host families. We will see that the choice of the hosting solution your actual needs in terms of performance (number of visits per month in particular), but also the maintenance mode.
We will end with a zoom on the main solutions currently available on the market in dedicated hosting WordPress or shared hosting. This article is aimed primarily at project owners wishing to create themselves a site in WordPress or at least have the hand on the hosting, without having any technical skills. The objective of this article is to demonstrate that it is now possible to create its website under WordPress without being a computer pro, whatever the chosen (or almost) hosting solution.
Best wordpress hosting company
Let's start by presenting the main solutions of hosting a site in WordPress. There are 5 possible solutions to host a WordPress site: the shared server, the dedicated server, the VPS, the cloud and finally the hosting offers dedicated to Wordpress. But before we start, let's briefly remember what a web host or hosting is. The hosting company is a company that proposes to host your website on its servers. Accommodation is service. The hosting company is the company that offers the service. The websites all need to be hosted on (physical) servers in order to be accessible to Internet users. The server acts as an interface between the content of the website (present in the database) and the user who wishes to access this content from any web browser (Chrome, Internet Explorer).
It could be said, basically, that the server 1 / stores the various files of the website and 2 / puts the content of the site at the disposal of the Internet users who wish to access it. Without hosting (on a server), your site can not be accessible to users. In these circumstances, it is important to understand the decisive importance of finding not only accommodation but also good accommodation. Here are the 5 possible hosting solutions for a site using WordPress software.
Shared server: an inexpensive but with limited solution
Shared hosting offers are the cheapest, but also the most limited, paying offers. A shared server is a server that is used by several sites, which is shared (= shared) between several clients of the host. By choosing a shared server, your WordPress site will be stored in a server compartment. In other words: your site does not have a server on its own. The shared server is a kind of colocation. This has several disadvantages:
- The server can not be configured for small onions. It is the host that configures the server. The same configuration is imposed on all sites hosted on the server in question.
- You also have no control over server maintenance. This is also the host who takes care of A to Z maintenance. Note: this disadvantage can turn into an advantage, if you do not want to take care of the maintenance.
- The performance of hosting on a shared server is very average and very variable . For a simple reason: server resources are shared between several websites. What: 1 / Reduces the amount of server resources allocated to you and 2 / Causes random slowdowns or even bugs when the other "roommates" of the server have peaks of traffic (in particular).
By opting for a shared server, you will quickly be limited if your site wins in audience. Nevertheless, shared hosting is not to be rejected a priority. It may be relevant at the start of the site launch and if you plan a slow enough build. Shared offers are the most attractive price level. OVH, the French leader, offers a shared hosting offer starting at 2.99 euros per month (excluding VAT).
Dedicated Server: The "classic" solution
With a dedicated server, as the name suggests, you have your own server. "Dedicated" is opposed, you will have understood, to "mutualized". To take up the metaphor "real estate", a dedicated server offer is equivalent to a classic individual rental. You get all the resources of the server. The amount of server resources available may vary from one server to another (the apartments do not all have the same area). By choosing a dedicated server offer, you are entirely free to configure the server according to your needs. The hosting provider provides you with access to install software on the server (at your own risk) and to manage the maintenance of the server yourself. As you can imagine, the offers are more expensive (from 5.99 euros / month at OVH) but remain on average reasonable. These offers have the disadvantages of their advantages: it is you who must charge you as a great one of configuration and maintenance. This involves technical skills or the use of a service provider.
Note: Dedicated hosting is ideal for high traffic websites or sites requiring advanced data security.
Virtual Server (VPS): Interesting for medium sized sites
The Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a kind of shared server and dedicated server. The virtual server moves closer to the shared server because you rent only part of a physical server. You do not have a server all by yourself. But in the VPS, physical server resources are distributed among multiple individually configurable virtual servers. In short, it's "as if" you had a server all by yourself. In this, VPS hosting is getting closer to dedicated hosting: you have control over the configuration of your virtual server and modules. This assumes a little more technical skills than for shared hosting.
Note that some hosts offer preconfigured virtual servers, which make things easier for novices.
Note: With a VPS server, you can modulate the amount of resources allocated to you to match your actual needs. The VPS hosting offers flexibility.
The VPS server is recommended for sites that are (too) large to be hosted on a shared server, but the size of which does not justify the use of the dedicated server.
Cloud hosting: The "agile" solution, but not always relevant to WordPress site
The cloud hosting offerings multiply: Amazon, Google or even Azure have invested the market in recent years. Cloud hosting offers great margins of freedom: you have full access to the cloud server, you can configure it according to your needs, install the software you want, load in a very flexible way (in case of increased traffic of your site). However, cloud hosting has two major disadvantages:
- Cloud hosting offers are generally quite expensive.
- Cloud hosting involves technical skills and is not easy to handle.
Cloud hosting is rarely an attractive option for small or medium sized WordPress sites.
WordPress Special Offers
Last option: opt for an offer specifically designed for sites under WordPress. Concretely, you rent everything (dedicated server) or part (shared server) of a physical server fully configured for WordPress sites. This is the case, for example, with the ikoula WordPress hosting package. It can also be, and is most common, cloud servers with an environment completely thought out for WordPress sites. The specific hosting for WordPress sites is generally very qualitative and very flexible if you want to support (Example: WPEngine )
With the specific offers, you usually have nothing to do: it is the host that takes care of the management of the server and the maintenance. It is therefore an ideal solution for those who do not have computer skills. On the other hand, the price is considerably higher than the conventional solutions on dedicated server. Count at least thirty euros a month at least to have a qualitative accommodation.
Here are the 5 possible solutions for hosting a WordPress site. We did not mention free hosting, which may be a sixth solution, but a solution to be frankly avoided. Nothing is ever free: if you choose a free hosting, your web host can pollute your site of inadvertent advertisements. Besides, the quality of the accommodation is often very limited. In all respects, free offers are to be avoided. To help you choose the best hosting solution for you, here are two questions you should ask yourself.
2 questions to ask before choosing its WordPress hosting
A "good" hosting is above all a hosting that meets your needs. Here are two questions you should ask yourself before choosing your accommodation.
Who will take care of the maintenance of the WordPress site?
We have seen that some offers required technical skills and others did not. To summarize:
- You must have technical skills if you opt for a dedicated server or cloud server.
- You do not need technical skills with a shared server and, to a lesser extent, with a VPS server. Even if a good web culture is often useful in case of worries (change of DNS, backup of the database, etc.).
The answer to the question of who is responsible for maintenance already makes it possible to discard certain solutions. If you are interested, learn how to anticipate the maintenance costs of your e-commerce site. This article, in spite of its title, does not only concern e-commerce sites but addresses the question of maintenance in general.
What are your (real) performance / scaling needs?
The more efficient the hosting, the higher the price. That makes sense. Of course, everyone would like to have a site optimized for small onions, with a server response time of less than 0.1 seconds and the ability to increase from 1,000 to 100,000 visitors in a day. But is it really worth having a high-performance hosting to host a small blog or a 15-page shopfront site? In choosing accommodation, it is not about finding the best hosting with the best value for money. The main thing is to find the hosting that corresponds most to your site and its medium-term forecast development, and of course with the best value for money.
For a WordPress site such as "showcase site" or for a blog of small / medium size, the two most adapted solutions in terms of hosting are the dedicated Wordpress servers on the one hand, and the shared servers on the other hand. As this article is primarily aimed at those who have a small or medium size site, here is a zoom on these two types of solutions.
Focus on WordPress Dedicated Hosting
Hosting packages designed specifically for WordPress sites have several undeniable advantages: generally higher performance, practical WordPress-specific features, automatic updates, quality helpdesk, and more. The main disadvantage is the price. Dedicated WordPress hosting costs more than a typical hosting. There are several dedicated WordPress hosting solutions. The world reference is WP Engine . In our opinion, this is the most qualitative offer (this is the one used to host La Fabrique du Net!). But there are others, such as WP Server.
WP Engine
WP Engine, launched in 2010, is a high-end WordPress hosting company. Full of positive points for this reference solution:
- Very high uptime. In other words, it is extremely rare that the server is unavailable due to maintenance (eg failure).
- A very efficient CDN (cache system). CDN is a technique that reduces the loading time of pages on your site.
- Powerful servers that allow you to host large traffic on your site without bugs (HTTP 503 error type) and without slowdowns AND to adapt to large traffic variations.
- Daily backups of your site.
- Optimum security of your data.
- Reactive support 24/24 and 7/7.
WP Engine is not flawless. There are some oddities in SEO (very easily repaired), some unauthorized plugins (often for security reasons), some cache bugs when using front-end cookies (for example with WooCommerce ). WP Engine makes available to its users a "Staging Area" which allows to test updates of the plugin before deploying them. Ideal to avoid misfires!
WP Engine offers 5 different offers :
- Personal, $ 29 per month: 1 site, 25,000 visits per month, 10GB storage.
- Professional, $ 99 per month: 10 sites, 100,000 visits per month, 20GB storage.
- Business, $ 249 per month: 25 sites, 400,000 visits per month, 30GB storage.
- Premium (custom price): 150 sites, more than one million visits per month, between 100 and 300 GB of storage.
- Enterprise Grade: 150 sites, more than 5 million visits, 400 - 1000 GB storage.
For a showcase site or a small / medium size blog, the Personal offering is largely sufficient.
Comparison
The WP Engine is not the only dedicated hosting solution for WordPress. There are a few others. Here is a table comparing WP Engine, SiteGround and Pagely (two other WordPress hosting solutions): Clearly, WP Engine is not the cheapest solution, but it is also not the most expensive. On the other hand, WP Engine clearly dominates its competitors, notably in terms of loading times and DNS. This is true if we extend the comparison to other solutions (painting by Tom Ewer of DesignBombs): One detail: this level of performance is achieved only in the "Professional" pack of Synthesis (at 97 dollars per month). The very good performance of WP Engine is verified from the "Personal" formula at 29 dollars per month.
Let us now turn to shared offers, proposed by all the actors of the accommodation. For a showcase site or blog of small or medium size, the option "shared server" should also be considered. This basic solution may be sufficient if you have a small site and you do not expect rapid traffic growth.
Pro and Cons of choosing a specific web host for WordPress
The specific WordPress offers - type WP Engine - are the most qualitative, whether in terms of performance or technical assistance. These are in addition to offers specially designed for the niche "WordPress" and intended for WordPress sites. Despite this, the disadvantages of this type of solution do exist: a relatively high price and the need to have some technical skills (even if you can count on reactive technical assistance). If you have no technical skills, a small budget and a site that is not destined to cross the 100 000 visits / months soon, shared hosting can largely do the trick. On this niche, OVH is the leader.
OVH
OVH is the French leader in web hosting. Its positioning is clearly low-cost. The overall quality / price ratio is satisfactory (this is especially true for dedicated server offers). On the other hand, the level of service is overall very low. Technical assistance is not the strength of OVH and OVH does not offer a service management service. This, in absolute terms, is not a crippling problem. If you opt for shared hosting, or even for a VPS, you will not really need outsourcing. Everything is supposed to roll on wheels! Finally, in theory. In practice, you will probably encounter small problems from time to time. The interface offers much less useful functionality than WP Engine.
Comparison OVH vs 1 & 1 vs Amen vs Phpnet, Etc.
Compare them with OVH or 1 & 1 hosts is both a very large subject and a complicated undertaking. Customer feedback is very mixed, and sometimes contradictor. Some customers are very satisfied with OVH, others have been disappointed and have changed their solution. Same for 1 & 1, Amen, Phpnet, etc. Difficult to see clearly. Nevertheless, you will find several resources on the internet to get an idea for yourself. The Socialcompare website offers a comparative table in this article. The article compares a good thirty offers based on ten criteria (price, storage space, number of sites, domain name included or not, unlimited or unlimited traffic, maximum traffic, language of base of Data, etc.) In this other article you will find a very detailed comparison between OVH, 1 & 1 and Amen. You are left to make your choice, knowing that the differences from one offer to another are generally quite low.
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