How to Separate the Good WordPress Hosts from the Bad

Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/separate-the-good-wordpress-hosts-from-the-bad/

WordPress hosts are a dime a dozen, and unfortunately even for a technically savvy person, it can be difficult to differentiate between a reputable host which is attentive to their customers, and a reseller who doesn’t own the servers and is simply marking up existing services. Additionally when it comes to pricing and support, it can be difficult figuring out who can provide the best service for you.

Rather than focusing on the basics of web hosting as this article from SitePoint discusses, in this guide we are going to focus on how to ensure that you are choosing a quality host over a fly by night company.

Most of this article applies to any type of web hosting, even if you’re not using WordPress. I’m also keeping the advice very general, however it still applies to growing number of WordPress specialized hosting services.

You Get What You Pay For

While pricing varies greatly from host to host, you should always be wary of any host promising “unlimited” storage or bandwidth on budget plans, especially when using a shared server. While the packages might sound great on the surface, hosting companies aren’t offering these rock bottom prices to be charitable. In fact, the “unlimited” claims come with caveats which are only found in the fine print of the hosting agreement. Typically hosts will use ambiguous language such as “unlimited usage as long as it is reasonable,” or they will limit you to a certain number of files on the server. Other common caps include suspending your site after using a certain number of CPU cycles or only letting you upload website components.

Continue reading this article on SitePoint

my web host company is i page but it so expensive , am paying £24 for a VPS of 40 GB, but when i check the market prices, the Host Gadder offer the same offer on £11 per month, one of my friend host already in host gadder , some companies charger more then market prices by offering the same services, they only earn money from customer.

Anybody that is looking for “WordPress hosting” probably doesn’t know enough about web servers to make a decision about who to host with. Although you did mention “optimized environments, developer tools and staging environments”, choosing a “WordPress hosting” host is probably just putting your site in a box. When I look at hosts, I consider things like PHP version, MySQL version, server type (Apache or Litespeed), if they allow SSH access, if they allow for FTPeS connections, what type of control panel the hosting plan comes with (cPanel, etc.), if they allow cron jobs, and other factors that are actually important.

To make the article better, you should have told us more about the “optimized environments, developer tools and staging environments”. For instance, even if you would have mentioned a single WordPress hosting type optimization that a host is offering, it would have added some substance to the article.

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Hi @skunkbad - we’ve got a few more pieces on hosting in the pipeline, building on this one. We’re definitely going to be covering the topics you mention. Thanks for the suggestions and feedback! :slight_smile:

@skunkbad Thanks for the feedback. This article really was meant to be a high level overview due to space constraints and because I wanted to make it applicable to a larger audience.

I agree with your points however. If you would like, feel free to shoot me a note via the contact form at CharlesCosta.net and I’ll see if I can do some content around your suggestions.

As @ChrisBurgess mentioned - Sitepoint has a bit more content in the pipe on a variety of technical topics also so definitely stay tuned!

@shahmnd As strange as it sounds, iPage is owned by the same parent company as Hostgator - Endurance International Group (EIG). If you Google EIG you’ll see that they don’t necessarily have a stellar reputation in their space.

Going back to your point about market prices, in the hosting space it’s quite common for a large parent company to spin off smaller brands to capture more of the market and make it so that when customers switch hosts due to satisfaction issues, they end up going with another property of the parent company.

As far as VPS service goes - I personally have been using KnownHost for around two years now and they are amazing. Namecheap also offers excellent hosting at affordable prices.

Keep in mind that pricing should not be the only factor in your decision to choose a host. You need to evaluate the quality of service also. Unfortunately this can involve some legwork and trial and error.

This article is pretty funny in the face of SitePoint’s email from this morning, but two days later:

"Hey there,

This is not an April Fool’s joke!

We’ve organized a year’s worth of premium hosting for you at a never-before-seen price of $3.50/month with Bluehost.

This SitePoint-only offer also comes with a year’s membership to Learnable, where you can access all of our books and web development courses for free.

We think that’s pretty cool. All you have to do is sign up with Bluehost on our exclusive page to get started."

It reminds me of this: http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2015/03/31/drupal-and-wordpress-have-sold-us-out/

We know articles on SitePoint are written by third parties and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of SitePoint itself, but it’s hard to ignore the similarities between WordPress.org’s recommended hosts and the monies SP would have received to send an email on BlueHost’s behalf. In the Advanced WordPress circle of groups BH is generally regarded as an inferior host to many, many others in the same space.

Cheers,

Ansel Taft

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