Learning how to choose the best WordPress host is hard.
Today’s WordPress Hosting market is chock full of mediocre companies that underserve their customers in ways which I’ll explain to you later in the article.
Speaking from experience, I found that most of the “regulars” (ie. small business owners, people running their own website, etc) just don’t quite understand the differences they’ll get (or miss out on) when they choose a host for their WordPress site.
And while choosing a subpar host might not make a difference when you first start out, it opens up vulnerabilities to you and your business or blog when you start to grow and get more traffic.
In today’s article, I’m going to explain what to look for when you are trying to choose the best WordPress host, and then I’m going to provide my top 3 favorite WordPress Hosting Companies that I’ve used in the past or am currently using.
Lastly, I structured this article in a way that I can provide you everything you need to know in a condensed article, because let’s be honest… Ain’t nobody got time fo’ dat.
Ready to go? Let’s hop in!
What Is A WordPress Host?
As far as WordPress hosting goes, or hosting in general, think of a hosting platform the house for your website.
All your files (images, code, etc.) go inside the house, or “hosting” account.
The hosting account is then connected to your domain name (www.) which enables the files from your host to show online.
In a nutshell, a host + domain equals the ability to get online.
Simple, right?
While that is a simple concept to grasp, there’s a lot of things that differ from hosting company to hosting company that can make or break your traffic’s user experience, or even worse, the security of your brand and business.
Let’s look a little deeper at what you need to pay attention to when choosing the host for your WordPress website.
With the amount of digital threats in today’s landscape, there’s never been a more important time to choose a WordPress host that provides the proper security setup from day one.
The best WordPress host providers that I’m going to recommend below will tick all these boxes (and more), so you don’t have to worry about any vulnerabilities when it comes to your websites, your users,and most importantly, the information of those users.
Because, keep in mind, I’m sure you’re going to be collecting some sort of information from your traffic, and you want to make sure that information stays safe and away from the black group of internet thieves.
Another security feature that the best WordPress host of your choice should have is that they should provide you with free SSL certificates. SSL, AKA, “Secure Sockets Layer”, is that little padlock icon next to the website address.
The benefit of an SSL is that it provides a security layer for payment transactions and much more.
In today’s world, it’s mandatory for websites to have, especially if you are taking any form of payments due to strict regulations for all payment gateway providers.
Lastly, another important security feature your WordPress host should have is the ability to take daily automatic back-ups of your website.
The reason for this is because a lot of times (on WordPress) your website could “break” or in easy terms “get messed up” by updating plugins, or any other thing you change on the site files.
WordPress is really finicky and it’s absolutely mandatory (in my opinion) that your WordPress host takes daily automatic backups, so that if something bad happens to your site, you can simply restore the files along with the database in a single click.
This is something that all the best WordPress host companies do on auto-pilot, so you don’t have to worry about it.
I’m not going to explain too much about uptime because it’s pretty self-explanatory.
When it comes to the best WordPress host on the market today, maximum uptime should be a given.
But, you want to make sure the host you choose for your WordPress website has nearly 100% uptime which means that your site is practically always up from any server maintenance or any other issue on the hosting platform’s side.
Once again, the WordPress hosts that I am going to recommend to you will always guarantee 99.9999% uptime which means you’ll never experience any kind of lapse that could be crippling to your business.
If you are serious about your website and your marketing strategy then choosing a WordPress hosting company that has lower than ideal uptime can literally cost you thousands of dollars.
I’ve heard horror stories of people that were spending thousands upon thousands of dollars on PPC (pay-per click) Google ads only to check their analytics to find no sales.
Upon their investigation, they realized the site had been down most of the night which meant they spent over 5 figures in advertising, while sending people to a site that was not working.
What a nightmare!
Luckily, when you choose a top-tier WordPress hosting company, you can rest assured that you will not have any lapse in uptime.
Customer Support
Once again, customer support is pretty self-explanatory. I’ll make sure that my experience here enables you to never make the same mistake, because it’s beyond frustrating.
When I first started building websites when I was 14 years old, I had no idea what a hosting platform was.
It was literally a trial and error approach to find out how to get all this stuff working.
The good news is that I, not knowing anything about WP hosting companies or how they were different, signed up for some absolutely awful companies in terms of both their service and their support.
Here’s the thing:
When you don’t really know what you’re doing, having a strong support team that’s responsive and that you can talk to immediately, is really something that should be non-negotiable.
What would happen if your website suddenly broke and you didn’t know how to restore a back-up?
If the customer support is lacking and it takes them two days to get back to you, then you just lost out on two days of income, traffic, leads, etc.
The point is, you need the ability to hop on chat with somebody that speaks English (no offense to anybody), and knows the platform.
Because even if you can get a hold of somebody, if they don’t get what you need or the language barrier is too great, then you still don’t solve the problem.
It’s such a blessing to have a team that can help you any time and literally solve any one of your problems. That’s something the best WordPress host companies have down to a “t”.
My Picks For The Best WordPress Host Companies
Before I give you my top three picks for the best WordPress hosting companies, I just want to say that with any of these three platforms, you’re going to get security, uptime, customer support, and much much more.
And remember, I have honestly tried each and every one of these, and have stayed with them for months on end.
I am speaking from experience and I will not lead you wrong.
WPengine – My Overall Winner
WPengine, or “WordPress Engine”, is my current go-to WordPress hosting platform.
All my sites (including this one) are hosted with WPengine. The company is the best hosting platform that I’ve come across (as of right now) and I am completely satisfied and happy with their service.
Some things that stand out to me with WPengine are:
I could go on and on about WPengine and why it’s the best, but why don’t you just scope it out yourself.
WPengine FAQ
Q: How much does WPengine cost?
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A: WPengine has multiple price points and plan options, but the three most common are their managed hosting packages that start at $30 per month.
Q: Does WPengine offer any money-back guarantee?
A: WPEngine offers a 60-day money back guarantee on all Startup, Growth, and Scale plans. It’s completely risk free. If you aren’t satisfied for any reason, you can get a full refund within 60 days.
Q: How can I get more information about WPengine?
A: You can check out their website by clicking this link.
WPX Hosting – 2nd Place Winner
Before I found WPengine, I used WPX hosting for about two years.
I was very impressed with their support team because, before I found them, I had a hellish nightmare time with the previous WordPress hosting companies that I used.
Their team is always on top of it, but in recent times I’ve noticed that the support team is now directing you to help articles instead of trying to walk you through it.
I’m sure they are trying to keep lean, but when I first signed up with them I noticed that their support team was definitely better.
If you want to find out more information regarding WPX hosting then simply click here to head over to their website.
Kinsta – 3nd Place And Still Great
I used Kinsta for a few months, once again, before I found WPengine. They are also a great company for any WordPress hosting needs.
Things are easy to understand and their support is pretty good.
The reason that I changed from Kinsta is because I felt that the speed of the website was not as good as it should (or could) be.
Just remember that page and site speed is extremely important when it comes to user experience as well as SEO.
Google won’t want to serve up websites that are slow because it gives their users a bad experience.
Nonetheless, I did enjoy my time with Kinsta, and I would use them again, albeit for a site that doesn’t get a ton of traffic or have a heavy bandwidth load.
Check out Kinsta by clicking here.
While there’s a lot more you can learn about WordPress hosting in general, I promised to keep it to the bare minimum to save you time.
Long story short, any one of these companies are 100% a top tier WordPress hosting company.
Completely (in my opinion, the best WordPress host companies on the market.
I have no doubt in my mind that your website will be safe, secure, and extremely fast with an uptime of nearly 100% with all of these guys.
That being said, I still think that WPengine is the way to go based on my trial and error over the years when it comes to WordPress hosting.
Not only that, it’s roughly the same price as the other companies, so there’s no reason to go elsewhere.
Last but not least, if you already have a WordPress site and you want to switch your hosting to WPengine, then all you have to do is contact their chat support and ask for a migration from your old host to WPengine.
They’ll help you move over all your files and make it easy for you to pull everything from the old host to WPengine.
And if you have any questions for me, I’d love to hear it in the comments. I will respond and make sure to help in any way, shape, or form that I can.
Thanks for reading!
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