WordPress Hosting
If you’ve decided to set up a blog or website using the WordPress CMS there are two things you need to figure out to get online. You need a domain and you need hosting. There are a number of points to consider when shopping for both.
- It’s a good idea to use separate companies for registering domains and hosting.
GoDaddy is probably the most well known for both, however we don’t recommend them for either. Our experience with GoDaddy hosting has been one of slow server performance and regular (but mostly short) downtime. For domain registrations they are cheap and ok but since the Elephant incident we’ve been switching over gradually to NameCheap.
At WPDesigned we love things designed for WP, ironic that hey. While searching for a host you will probably come across a few who claim to specialize in WordPress hosting. The reality is probably the biggest tailoring for wordpress a host can do is making installation so simple you don’t even realise you are doing it. Most hosts though, WordPress specialists or not, have a very simple install process for it.
Our recommendation is Site5 who offer both cheap quality shared hosting and excellent cloud hosting, you can even choose what data center your site is hosted on, very useful if you want or need to geotarget your SEO.
If you want WordPress Specialisation Page.ly is good but not exactly cheap.
Bluehost covers green credentials is cheap and widely used wordpress bloggers.
When you choose a hosting plan make sure you get one that allows you to host more than one domain, even if you only plan on having one site. Having to open a new account for each site you start just makes for a headache. With that said on shared hosting plans it is a good idea not have too many sites hosted in the one account, how many is too many? Well how long is a piece of string? It depends on a number of factors, shared hosting means shared server resources, too many sites on the same server means there is less to go around. An easy insurance policy is to choose cloud hosting so the load is shared between a number of servers. Ultimately if you end up with a very successful site a dedicated server is the answer.
While we can’t say exactly how many is too many we can probably set an upper limit. Some hosts advertise unlimited domains can be hosted under one account, many of them though have other limitations that limit your hosting abilities. Things like the number of MySQL databases you are allowed and concurrent server processes, both often limited to 25. So 25 is an upperlimit in the eyes of many “unlimited” hosts. It’s probably a better idea to think about limiting it to around 10 per hosting account. There are also SEO factors to consider when you host so many sites on one server, let alone the fact that you don’t know what other people are hosting on your server.
In summary we think if you register your domain with NameCheap, host with Site5 and limit the number of WordPress sites you host with a shared hosting account to 10, you’ll have a solid foundation to build your internet empire from.
