The quality of a website hosting service plays a vital role in the performance of the WordPress website. If your website is having performance issues, you need to change your hosting provider. To make things easy for you, here are the things to consider when selecting a WordPress hosting provider.
- Scalability
Every entrepreneur expects their business to grow. Hence, you need to ensure the infrastructure supporting your business grows with your business. Scalability in website hosting refers to adding memory, storage, CPUs (processing power), and bandwidth when needed.
According to leading experts like Darrell Wilson, the hosting service should offer flexible plans to suit all business sizes. The service provider should allow the upgrading of resources to accommodate the growing needs of your business.
- Security
Anyone who surfs the Internet knows how important security is. A business website is a lucrative target for hackers. Hence, the safety of the website hosting platform matters when selecting a service provider. According to WordPress experts like darrell wilson, most website hosting service providers employ robust security measures. Here are some of the best hosting security practices used by service providers:
- Network monitoring
- DDoS prevention
- Access restriction
- SSL and firewall
- Malware detection and removal
When selecting any hosting plan, pay attention to the security measures that are part of the plan to ensure your website is well-protected.
- Reputation
Any web hosting company that has been in the business for a long will have some kind of reputation – good or bad. You need to take a look at the reviews of the web hosting service before making a decision. Partnering with a misfit (hosting service) would lead to performance and security issues that can mar your business opportunities.
It would help if you found out how satisfied the customers are. It will give an idea about the service level and professionalism of the service provider. The best reviews will discuss what the service provider is doing right, the uptime, performance, and different services.
Don’t get swayed by the testimonials presented on the website. Perform some research to find reviews on reliable sources on the Internet. It is always a good idea to look at recent reviews of the service provider.
- Customer Support
Website hosting is a technically challenging task. You can come across several errors or issues when setting up your website. 24×7 customer support makes a massive difference in the overall user experience. The service provider should offer round the clock customer support to handle technical or other issues related to your website hosting.
If the customer support offers substantial WordPress website installation help to its clients, you have chosen the right service provider.
Additional Services
- Caching
The primary purpose of cache is to improve data retrieval performance. Managed hosting has a caching system that reduces the need to access the underlying storage that is often slower. The caching system provided by the service providers is faster than most WordPress plugins used for caching. It reduces computation between the page loading elements and improves page loading time.
- Backups
You will not understand the importance of backups until your hard drive fails, and you lose critical business data. Irrespective of the build quality and the superior components, no hardware is 100% fail-proof. Hard drives are known to fail, and they take all data along with them.
If your hard drive in the website hosting setup fails, you will lose all website data, configuration, and business data. Data recovery is expensive and takes a long time. Backup is the best protection against unpredictable HDD failures.
To sum up, selecting a WordPress website hosting service provider can be a difficult task. However, when you are armed with information and know which things matter, you are better positioned to make an informed decision.