Choosing WordPress hosting solution, is a big decision that will have an impact on your WordPress site’s performance, functionality, reliability, as well as your day-to-day maintenance activities. Selecting the best hosting provider for your goals can be an intimidating and a confusing process but it does not have to be.

In this guide we will go over :

For a lot of you, as you begin reading this article, the first question you will have will be the following:

If you are like me, when you got serious about your website, you probably got exited and rushed in to buy a domain name from one of many provider. 

You also decided that you wanted to use WordPress to help you meet your goals. If that is the case, then you most likely will want to purchase your hosting from a different company, it probably is not likely that you also purchased your domain name from one of the leading WordPress Hosting Providers.

What you will need to do if you want to point your domain name to a different hosting provider, You will need to change your name-servers. is quite simple and easy. The process may look a little different to you depending on your domain name registrar, but the steps are pretty much the same across all registrars.

There are four types of WordPress hosting available; for the majority of users, the type is irrelevant; however, for sensitive websites or those with a high volume of traffic, the kind of WordPress hosting is critical.The 4 types are the following:

Shared – this is the most affordable type of WordPress hosting. You “share” server resources with other websites/accounts on the server, which explains the affordable costs.

Clouds – While cloud hosting is a relatively new technology, it has grown in popularity as a solution to host your website. In essence, your website is hosted “in the cloud,” rather than on a dedicated physical server. On the plus side, cloud hosting is typically quite simple to “scale up” or “scale down” in response to your site’s resource requirements.

VPS – you obtain a dedicated virtual piece of a server. It falls somewhere between shared and dedicated hosting

Dedicated – you receive your own dedicated physical server. You may do anything you want with it and completely modify it to your specifications. Cloud hosting certainly makes more sense than dedicated hosting for the majority of users nowadays.

Contrary to what is usually presented in online references managed WordPress hosting is not its own “kind” of hosting. It does not fall under the list of “VPS” or “Dedicated” hosting.

Instead, managed WordPress hosting is more about adding a set of hands off maintenance, optimizations and concierge features on top of whatever the type of hosting you purchase.

You will come across a broad range of Managed WordPress solutions some might be leveraging cloud platforms, while other might be using dedicated or a VPS solution.

Managed WordPress hosting is not a needed feature but a nice to have. Managed WordPress hosting will provide you with a variety of maintenance tasks such as:

Your decision to purchase the managed hosting add-on is determined by your ability to spend a couple of extra dollars a month, if you are trying to save a little bit of money and don’t mind manually doing the above maintenance tasks yourself, than you should not go with a Managed WordPress add-on.

However, if you don’t like worrying about these things and have a couple of extra dollars a month to spare, then I would highly recommend you purchase the Managed WordPress add-on.

The way I look at it, we should be concerned with creating our site and dedicating the most time possible to producing great content. A great way to have even more time to focus on our site, is by having is someone else take care of the administration tasks on your behalf.

Beyond the “type” of WordPress hosting itself, here are some other things to consider when you choose WordPress hosting.

Going with the cheaper plans, many hosting providers show you that you will get unlimited bandwidth/traffic (meaning the ability of your site to handle unlimited visitors on a monthly basis), however the reality of life is there is no such thing as host providing unlimited or bandwidth/traffic

Don’t get me wrong, these plans are wonderful, if you are first getting started and when you are on a limited budget the cheaper plans make sense.

However, you will need to be aware that as your site grows and becomes very popular, you will need to upgrade your plan to something that can handle the traffic.

While if opting for the Managed WordPress Add-on, those plans are pretty straight-forward and they will indicate how monthly visitors your plan will be able to handle.

The technology that powers your website critical to its performance. Some hosting providers provide free services such as caching without the need of installing additional plugins. Caching allows your website to handle 100 times more hits than a regular website without any caching.

Others hosting providers, might provide even provide native image optimization and Gzip compression without the need of additional plug-ins ,which saves you money in long term.

The following is a list of the minimum technologies you should look for when you choose WordPress hosting:

The location of where you server is located dictates things such as latency, which have a direct impact on the speed of your website. In selecting a Data Center location, users must consider where their target markets reside. For example if you are targeting a European audience, you will want a data center located in of the European countries.

When it comes to WordPress Customer support, I can tell you based on experience that they are not all created equal. The fact is most of us at some point will require customer support.

Most reputable WordPress hosting companies will offer you 24/7 customer support using multiple methods such as: 

I will share with you a quick story about WordPress customer service provider by hosting companies. When I was first getting started in using WordPress over a decade ago, I ran into several issues that required customer support.

On multiple occasions and with different hosting companies, I experienced horrible service where I was told things such as “The problem is with your theme” only to come find out that the error was on their end.

Another time I was told “You need to use a plug-in for the feature you are looking for” again only to find out after repeated calls that their servers where misconfigured and I had to wait 3 weeks for them to update vital software pieces.

Over 14 years, I have tried 9 different hosting companies, based on my experience and the general consensus of the general WordPress community, the hosting providers listed in this article are the best, most knowledgeable, patient and friendly WordPress customer support you will find. As a matter of fact 3 out of the 3 recommend hosting providers are recommend by WordPress.org

Email consideration my surprise  some you, however for some people it is extremely important to use either Microsoft Office 365 or Google’s G-Suit for their email address at their domain.

Because of the nature of their word, these users will want to take advantage of the entire suits of the respective products to run their day to day operations.

Some hosting providers will give you a very quick way to configure and get up and running with either of the Microsoft 365 package or the G-Suite for an additional fee of about $ 5 dollars a month.

While other Hosting providers might just offer a simple email solution but will give you unlimited email accounts at your website domain name.

While some hosting providers might not offer these additional add-ons, However, if you really wanted to use lets say Outlook or Gmail for your email needs, you can still configure those changes to utilize the email clients you want, but keep in mind, there will be some additional work on your part to make it happen.

SiteGround is a very popular WordPress web hosting provider and my favorite. They are always in the lead of leveraging technology by constantly updating both their hardware and software for speed, security and reliability. 

In addition, they are among 2 other WordPress hosting companies that are recommend by WordPress.org.

They are my favorite because, they offer unique optimization methods without they need of a plugin. They offer And they provide unique in-house WordPress speed and security solutions to make your site as fast and secure as possible.

In addition, SiteGround offers location-specific hosting with 4 different data centers in the USA, Europe, and Asia so you can choose the one closest to you and make sure your site is lightning-fast. Additionally, they offer WordPress daily backups, daily caching, plus unlimited databases and email accounts.

Founded in 1996, Bluehost is one of the largest and most popular web hosts on this list. They are an official WordPress.org recommended hosting solution and have some of the best pricing offers.

Bluehost is optimized for WordPress, they have an extremely easy to use 1-click install for WordPress. In addition, they offer a free domain name, free ssl certificates, automated backups, 24/7 support and a 30-day money back guarantee.

If you are looking for a professional, dependable, affordable, WordPress hosting, than Bluehost is the right solution for your needs.

DreamHost is another WordPress.org-recommended hosting service. This is one of the top WordPress hosting alternatives available. The firm is independently owned. Additionally, they’ve powered millions of websites since 1997. Their most popular shared hosting bundle is the basic shared hosting package.

DreamHost is the only hosting company that also allows the hosting of adult content. I need to be clear, adult content does not only mean porn. It also includes things such as weapons, taboo topics, sex toys, gambling, pharmaceuticals such as medical marijuana and even some women’s clothing sites. As long as the material is legal under the laws of the United States than DreamHost will allow you to host it.

Additionally, DreamHost customers receive a custom dashboard, one-click WordPress installation, automatic upgrades, unlimited storage and bandwidth, and complimentary SSL certificates. Thus, if you’re looking for an exceptional WordPress server that combines ease of site creation with lightning-fast SSD storage, DreamHost may be the right fit..