With the popularity of WordPress, the number of myths has expanded. You’ve probably heard that any WP site needs the most significant host, a dozen caching plugins, and a personal sysadmin to stay away. It’s not like that at all. Hosting requirements are minimal, and even the free plan is suitable for travel bloggers.
Hosting types and their differences
To understand which hosting is right for your project, you need to understand the types of hosts and the differences between them. If you are new to this, please skip this chapter and read on.
Hosting is the home page of your website and it should have everything you need. You can rent dorms – virtual or shared hosting, studio apartments – VPS/VDS, or large country houses – dedicated servers.
Shared Hosting
The easiest option is available to both beginners and experienced webmasters. From the panel, you can add domains, create folders for new sites, install any CMS, change PHP versions, expand the limit for uploading files, create or upload backups, and more.
Shared hosting is suitable for informational websites, business cards, and online stores with a small number of products. After optimization, the average ticket price can easily pull 2-5,000 passengers per day.
VPS or VDS
A virtual server operates on a physical server.
Benefits of Best VPS Hosting Providers: Dedicated IP, independent of “neighbors”, prevents network attacks.
VPS is suitable for medium-sized projects with 7-10k unique users. Webmasters with dozens or hundreds of projects need it because the number of site/database/FTP users is limited only by server resources.
Dedicated or dedicated server
It is a physical computer located in a data center. The client leases its power and can use system resources remotely. Full control, comparable to super administrator privileges on an Android smartphone.
Dedicated servers are the best option for demanding web resources: a wide variety of visited online stores, and popular information portals with 30-50,000 visits per day.
Hosting requirements for a WordPress site
Minimum WordPress hosting requirements:
- PHP 7.3+.
- MySQL 5.6+.
- The server on Nginx or Apache with mod_rewrite module to generate the permalink.
- HTTP.
Any host has all of the above characteristics and can install a CMS “out of the box” via a special module.
The best hosting for a WordPress site
A longer list of user requirements for hosting providers:
- Handy and practical panels: cPanel, ISPmanager or self-written.
- Flexible and inexpensive tariffs with the ability to add/remove services.
- Responsive technical support.
- Good uptime is server uptime. Ideally, this metric should equal 100%.
- High performance – request processing time.
- Unlimited Traffic – The number of visits to the website.
- Permanent backups – daily or every 2-3 days. Alternatively, upload to Dropbox or Google Drive.
Which hosting to choose?
There are many good hosts. Before making your final selection, make sure to:
- The company is well known online and has not started work yesterday.
- Clients respond positively and recommend hosting.
- The selected tariff is suitable for your project.
- It’s a good idea to reserve accounts on multiple hosts so you can quickly change “homes” and minimize traffic loss if difficulties arise. Key criteria: uptime, performance, flexibility.
Is it better to choose paid hosting or free hosting?
For beginners, free hosting is best. Check out WordPress – among its niche competitors, it can give you the most benefit. In other cases, it’s better to spend 2-3 thousand per year on minimally paid hosting.
Free hosting is like a video game demo, it gives you minimal control. After paying, you will feel comfortable and completely free.