As you’ll soon discover in this guide, there really is no such thing as the absolute best WordPress hosting, only the best hosting that suits your individual needs.
For example, if you’re a web agency with multiple clients who trust you to host their sites safely, then your requirements will be very different from someone running a small eCommerce store or setting up a blog for the first time.
Below, we’ll talk you through 6 critical factors you need to consider to pick the one web hosting company out of the millions in existence, along with recommending not only the best type of WordPress web hosting for your site but five companies that should fit the bill no matter what type of site you’re planning to build.
Choosing the Best WordPress Hosting: 6 Things to Consider
1. Hosting Type
The first thing you need to know is that not all website hosting is created equally.
Many hosting providers typically offer various services to meet the needs of different types of customers. So, before you go any further, it’s worth considering which of the following is the right hosting type for your new web project.
A. Free WordPress Hosting
We really wouldn’t recommend taking advantage of free hosting offers unless you’ve never used WordPress before and want to give it a spin before opening your wallet.
Most free hosting plans come with the caveat that you have to display banners or text ads on your site, usually ones that promote the hosting company itself.
Not only can this negatively affect the layout and design of your site, but it can also distract your customers.
Imagine working hard to build a WordPress site that promotes your business, only for your customers to be drawn away by advertising for an entirely different company.
What’s more, free hosting plans have very few features and severely restricted bandwidth and storage allocations,all of which can hinder your site’s performance and overall functionality, leading to a poor user experience and potentially turning away potential customers.
B. Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is the most common type of WordPress hosting you’re likely to find. It’s called such because, if you choose this option, you’ll literally be sharing space on a web server with lots of other websites.
Each of these sections is kept separate and isolated from one another to ensure security and privacy, though they will ultimately share their main server’s resources such as CPU, RAM, storage, and bandwidth.
It’s for this reason that you’ll generally find shared hosting to be your most affordable option. Since hosting companies can sell space on one server many times over, they’re able to keep costs low.
This makes it a great option if you plan to launch your new website on a budget.
What’s more, shared hosting providers usually offer user-friendly control panels, such as cPanel or Plesk, which simplify most day-to-day website admin tasks, making it a great option for novices and first-time website owners.
On the downside, however, hosting your site on a shared plan may limit your ability to scale your site.
If you outgrow your shared hosting environment by attracting more visitors than your bandwidth allocation can handle or uploading so much content that you run out of storage, you’ll need to upgrade.
C. VPS and Dedicated Server Hosting
If you do need to upgrade from a shared plan, VPS (Virtual Private Server) and Dedicated Server hosting are the next two options to consider.
With the latter, you’re effectively leasing an entire physical server dedicated solely to your business and its website properties. Unlike with shared hosting, all server resources, including CPU, RAM, storage, and bandwidth, are exclusively yours and yours alone.
Although by far the most expensive type of WordPress hosting, using a dedicated server is still the best option for websites with high traffic volumes, resource-intensive applications, and those that require maximum performance, security, and control.
Meanwhile, VPS hosting is a type of hosting that uses virtualization technology to create multiple virtual servers on a single physical server, with each virtual server operating independently using its own operating system and resources.
VPS hosting plans are normally cheaper than dedicated hosting, which means you get the best of both worlds:
All the benefits of having higher CPU, RAM, bandwidth, and storage allocations are dedicated solely to your websites without the high price tag of a dedicated server.
2. WordPress Hosting Requirements
Once you’ve chosen the type of hosting best suited to your website, your next task is to find a hosting plan that meets the minimal technical requirements to run WordPress.
These requirements are:
| PHP VERSION | 7.4 or higher* |
| DATABASE: | MySQL 5.7 and up**, or MariaDB 10.4 and up |
| RECOMMENDED SERVER: | Apache or Nginx |
Your host should also support HTTPS encryption to help keep WordPress secure.
If you read our recent guide to updating WordPress PHP, you’ll recall that all active support (including security fixes) for PHP 7.4 ended in November 2022, while the next iteration after that, PHP 8.0, is also set to reach the End of Life this coming November 2023.
As such, it’s better to look for a hosting plan that supports at least PHP 8.1, though 8.2 support is better, as this will still receive security updates all the way to December 2025.
So, by the time you read this, you should be actively looking for web hosting that supports MySQL 8.0, as this will still be supported for a good few years, all the way through to December 2026.
3. Managed vs. Unmanaged Hosting
Next, you’ll need to choose between managed and unmanaged WordPress hosting.
The difference is pretty straightforward.
Managed hosting is a specific type of service in which your hosting provider takes care of all the technical aspects involved in managing your server and WordPress platform for you.
Unmanaged hosting is where you do everything yourself.
Although many companies do managed WordPress hosting slightly differently from one another, most services generally include:
- Server configuration
- Performance optimization
- Security updates
- Automated site backups.
Some of our favorite managed WordPress hosting companies, like WPEngine, for example, even come with plugin management features that automate WordPress updates for you.
If you’re new to WordPress, or you simply want the convenience of having your provider do all the technical stuff for you, this may be the way to go.
However, it’s important to consider that managed hosting often comes with a higher price tag compared to unmanaged hosting since you’re paying for additional services on top of the cost of running your server.
As such, if you’re an advanced user who prefers more control over server management or you’re simply on a tight budget, unmanaged hosting might be a more suitable and cost-effective option.
4. Speed and Performance Features
Few factors make a bigger difference to the success of your website than speed.
You could have the best content and the most user-friendly design in the world, but if your site takes too long to load, visitors will quickly grow frustrated and leave, probably never to return.
Although there are many steps you can take to improve your WordPress performance, the first is picking a hosting plan that’s well-optimized to deliver maximum page load speeds at all times.
This means looking for features such as:
- Multiple Server Locations
- Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Solid State Drives (SSDs)
- Adequate bandwidth and storage Allocation
5. Security Features
It’s said that as many as 94% of businesses that experience a severe data loss never recover, with 51% closing within two years and 43% never reopening at all.
So you can see why choosing a web host that provides you with top-notch security features is of paramount importance.
Even if you don’t collect any personal data, the last thing you want is for a malicious hacker to break into your site and inject it with malware which then spreads to your users, causing untold harm to both them and you.
To keep your site, your visitors, and your reputation safe, look for a WordPress hosting provider that offers the following:
- SSL Certificates
- Malware Scanning and Removal
- DDoS Protection
- Server Security
How to Pick the Best WordPress Web Hosting: Key Takeaways
If you started this guide with no clue as to how you were going to find the best WordPress hosting for your new site, we hope you’ve ended up with a much clearer idea of not only what to look for but where to look for it.
For example, you now know that the key factors to consider when picking a web host include:
- Hosting type
- Resources and technical requirements
- Security and performance features
What’s more, you’ve learned how each of these factors will ultimately influence your purchasing decision based on your unique requirements.
Whichever hosting provider you ultimately pick, use it to launch your new WordPress site as efficiently and effectively as possible with these essential WordPress AI tools.
