In my experience working with WordPress websites, I have come across all kinds of hosting companies. Some through my clients sites and some that I have tried myself.
These days, I host my sites using Kinsta, a WordPress hosting company I highly recommend. It’s not a cheap hosting starting at $30 a month for one site. Do I think everyone should be on it? Not everyone but I think if your business generates enough income to spare $30 a month, you should.
When you’re starting your business and not sure how things will go, depending on the type of business it might be ok to go with budget hosting, however, if you already have a thriving business and money is not a huge issue, you should most definitely upgrade your hosting. You don’t have to use Kinsta, but you should use a premium hosting . It might seem like a deal to pay $4 a month to host a site, but you might be paying for it in another way – slow site and lack of useful or necessary features.
Reasons to go with premium hosting for your WordPress site
When you sign up for a great hosting you are not just paying more for it, you are getting more. Most premium hosting companies offer a long list of features which will save you time or can save your site.
First of all, premium hosting will include free SSL – the green lock you see on your bank’s site or in fact most of serious sites these days. This green lock indicates that this website has a security certificate and it’s ok to make payments or enter other sensitive personal data if you have an account there. Most of the small cheap hosting companies do not include that and to get it, you will often have to pay additionally. Having SSL security certificate not only reassures your users that you are a legit site, it also gives you brownie points with Google ranking.
Another great reason to upgrade is, daily backups. This is a big one and I noticed lately that more people’s sites are getting hacked, even with anti hacking plugins installed. Daily backups that you don’t have to perform yourself or install additional plugins for, make it easy to restore your website quickly and easily – this is great for you and your designer or web developer.
A big reason to upgrade is speed, site performance and caching. Quality WordPress hosting such as Kinsta or WP Engine offer those services and they greatly improve the speed of your site. If you run an e-commerce site or a site where people have a membership or create some sort of accounts, having a fast site to support the comings and goings of your users is essential.
CDN is also a great feature offered in premium hosting. CDN means, also speeding up your site as the images on you site are stored on servers which are closer to the person browsing your site, therefore they load faster.
And last great reason for me – is a staging site. Whenever you want to make some bigger changes to your site, or even completely redesign it, all your designer has to do is duplicate your site to a staging area and build or update the site there. Then copy it back to live site. This feature saves a lot of trouble of having to create a staging site elsewhere and then moving it over to live site.
Different hosting companies offer slightly different services but most offer the above. Furthermore, they often offer a clean and easy to use interface which allows easier and simple site management.
Reasons to go with cheaper hosting
Your budget is low and you really don’t want to invest too much into starting the business; your site is not going to generate any income and you don’t anticipate too much traffic. It’s ok. Just remember that once you can and your business traffic and site income changes, you should upgrade.
It’s not the end of the world to be on the lower end of hosting in some scenarios, it’s just not ideal and in fact impossible for some businesses if you have a high traffic site.
If you would like to give Kinsta a try, they offer 30 day money back guarantee and will move your site for you.
If you really want to go with lower end hosting, I recommend Web Hosting Hub, they offer some good features.
