WordPress is one of the most widely used CMS apps out there today. Naturally, everyone needs web hosting for their WordPress site. Although, WordPress by itself may be beginner-friendly, choosing the right hosting provider requires experience and a lot of research. Luckily, others have already done the research, so you can just follow the guidelines below and choose the right WordPress hosting provider for you.

What kind of hosting do you need

Before you can start choosing an actual hosting provider, you must first know what kind of hosting you need. Basically, there are 3 kinds of hosting types. Here’s each one explained in short:

• Shared web hosting – this type of hosting is great for simple WordPress sites with a fewer amount of visitors.
• VPS/Cloud web hosting – great for users that want the benefits of a dedicated environment, but still want the pricing to be low, or the ability to seamlessly scale. With a VPS, your WordPress site will be much faster and can serve a lot more visitors. When you’re near the limits or want a more powerful hosting plan, you can always seamlessly upgrade to a higher one.
• Dedicated server hosting – a whole server box dedicated to you. This is recommended for extremely huge WordPress sites that get millions of visitors on a daily basis. Although, upgrading a dedicated server is not really seamless and you may experience some downtime during the upgrading process.

If you don’t know what kind of hosting to choose, it’s always safe to go with VPS hosting as it gives you the most control over your WordPress site and it gives you maximum performance. If you don’t know how to configure and run a VPS, you can get a Managed VPS from a provider like RoseHosting, where the provider will do all the server work for you, including the installation and configuration of WordPress.

Check the reviews

You can always tell a lot about a hosting provider by reading the reviews they get. There’s no better indicator of the quality of services they provide than the reviews they get. The first thing you need to do after finding a potential hosting provider for you is to check what kind of reviews they get.

See if they provide 24/7 support

An experienced 24/7 support team can always come in handy. Having a dedicated team to respond to your requests in a timely manner can really help you run your WordPress site. Even if you’re an experienced WordPress developer and know how to run a server, it’s still good to have a support team that’s ready to help anytime.

Some hosting providers may advertise that they do have 24/7 support, but there may be a hidden fee, where you’d need to pay a monthly fee to get that support. You should go with a hosting provider that offers 24/7 support for free. Again, checking the reviews can tell you how good the support team actually is.

Stay away from “unlimited”

There’s no such thing as “unlimited” disk space or “unlimited” bandwidth. There’s usually a small footprint or a hidden clause in their ToS/Privacy Policy if a hosting provider advertises “unlimited” disk space or bandwidth. They probably will overcharge you for the bandwidth you overuse or immediately terminate your account once they see you use more bandwidth than their “allowed amount” out of the “unlimited” amount.

However, you can get “unmetered” bandwidth. This just means that the hosting provider won’t even track how much bandwidth you spend. Even in cases like this, you’ll still pay a lot more than a couple of bucks a month to get unmetered bandwidth.

For WordPress, Linux is better than Windows

Other than the security and speed advantages of Linux over Windows, you won’t have to pay more for a license for Linux. Windows hosting is more expensive than Linux hosting because you essentially are paying extra for the Windows license, where Linux is free.

WordPress has simple requirements, it needs PHP, MySQL, and a web server. Any Linux hosting provider can offer you this. You can run WordPress on Windows too, but there’s no reason for paying extra when you can do the same (and even better) on a Linux host.

SSD is better and faster than HDD

We’re not sure if there’s even a need of mentioning this, but there are still some hosts out there that offer HDD hosting. SSD gives much better performances and it’s a lot more reliable compared to HDD. So never go for HDD hosting. The only reason why you shouldn’t mind an HDD-powered host is if you’re only using it for testing purposes. But even then, you still would want the ultimate performance out of your testing environment, so you can properly get results and improve your WordPress from the testing.

There are more things to consider when choosing a hosting provider, but these are enough to get you started. Now, you can start looking for a different and better hosting provider. Do your own research and get as much information as you can before deciding to purchase hosting from a provider. Always contact the hosting provider and ask them anything you need to know about their hosting environment.