If you run a WordPress website, it’s important to have the right type of hosting. You can read more about choosing a reliable Managed WordPress Hosting Company here.
In this article we are going to get a little more geeky into some server difference that often (or at least should) be addressed on a good WordPress hosting plan.
If you have a WordPress website, it’s important to have a hosting plan that is optimized specifically for WordPress performance. There are several Managed WordPress hosting providers out there, so it can be tough to determine who you should trust and rely on for your company’s website. Should you choose a large company with a national marketing presence or do you opt for a local hosting company serving the Charlotte or Raleigh areas?
It is important to note that just because you purchased your domain name from a specific company, it does not mean that you must use their hosting services. In fact, it a common practice for people to buy from one domain provider but choose someone else for web hosting, but most hosting companies can provide both services if you need it.
Most business owners, wear a lot of hats to keep their business up and running. Consequently, things like website content, content management and web hosting management are responsibilities for which most business owners don’t have time for.
As a managed WordPress hosting company, Page Progressive is able to help you boost your local area business (Charlotte, Raleigh or Triangle) to be stronger than ever, while you focus on your business. If you have never heard the phrase “Managed WordPress Hosting,” you may be wondering why it is so important. So, let’s break things down a bit before explaining how a managed WordPress hosting plan could benefit you.
When it comes to your website, there are many things to keep in mind. From having the right balance of search target keywords, link building, blogging or updating pictures, there is always something to be done. However, these various jobs are more easily accomplished when you don’t have to be concerned about the safety and uptime of your website.
Unfortunately, not all web host providers are the same. Not only do they vary in price, but there features and provisions that you need to evaluate when deciding on a web host provider. Adhering to these tips can make a big difference between choosing a winning host or a dud.
When thinking about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), many people immediately think of keywords – using certain designated words frequently throughout a website in order to be picked up in searches for those words. Several years ago, this practice was a primary way to optimize a website – but search has changed (led primarily by Google, the largest and most frequently used search engine). Keywords still play an important role but in a different way.
Staying up-to-date on SEO is essential for increasing, even maintaining, traffic to a website – but it can be a challenge as the “rules of the game” are continuously changing. Here’s a look at 6 current factors for optimizing a site.
When it comes to watching what we spend, corners can be cut in many places. Some of these budget-reducing activities might be clipping coupons for groceries, lowering energy costs by more eco-friendly practices and minimizing entertainment expenses. There are also areas in life that you don’t want to cut costs on- a brain surgeon/surgery, a parachute, a Doberman pinscher leash, bungee cords and your business’ web hosting are just a few.
A Chinese proverb states, “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.” Italians have another expression regarding names, “Who has a bad name is half hanged.” When it comes to choosing a domain for your business, both of these statements can be right. After all, you want a domain name (or URL) that correctly identifies who you are as well as what you do. Anything less and your business is fighting an uphill hike on the road to success.
Although we offer great web hosting ourselves, many of our clients either come to us with their hosting set up elsewhere – some of which many are great, but a lot of the time they are not. Often people look to skimp on cost for their shared web hosting, but going with one of the number of giant bulk web hosting companies out there. In my opinion, that is a mistake and I’m going to explain why I think that, using a few of our experiences as examples.
We have a client that recently moved their web hosting from one crummy web hosting company to another. Right out of the gate, it was obvious that this new host wasn’t going to go any "extra mile" to help. They would not help with the site migration, for starters, but later when the website was hacked in to, they refused to help and simply said that the hack was do to an old script that needed updated. While, it’s possible that was the case, I later found that this particular hack has affected a number of CMS systems out there and not only that, the host’s install of phpmyadmin was also compromised. And up until that client our CMS has never been hacked by an exploit. So, I had a pretty good hunch that the server was compromised outside of our client’s CMS and more that likely a host issue. Although that was most likely the case, they still refused to help and our client paid us to go through each of their files and remove the virus their site was infected with. So even though their hosting company has a cheap monthly charge, they still had to pay in the end…since their hosting company had crummy support and preferred to point the finger rather than take an honest look at the situation and try to help.
Cheap web hosting companies typically host their servers where bandwidth is cheap, as that is the main cost for a web host provider. The bad part for the customer is those servers are often geographically very far away from them (Often California or Canada, which stinks for us southeasterners), meaning every time someone visits their site, the data has to travel a LONG distance to and back from the server for every page load, which means loading time is usually slow and sometimes times out completely, especially if the site uses a database. Going with a smaller, local hosting provider may cost more, but they usually host their servers closer to their clients (not to mention care who you are, as mentioned below), so you get a faster loading site.
It’s not unusual for cheaper hosting companies to be late adopters of technologies. I still run into hosts that have yet to offer PHP or MySQL 5 support…come on, they’ve been out for a couple years now…get with the program! Since many systems out there require new technologies, you may find that the software you want to run may not on your host. Cheap hosts also severely limit the amount of memory and bandwidth that you get – even though they may claim unlimited bandwidth, you’re getting only a trickle at a time, which can hurt your site’s performance if you have a lot of visitors. And if you have a piece of software that requires a special setting on your server or a decent amount of memory (ahem, Magento) – you can forget about them working with you, as they have to macro manage their system since they probably have a bazillion other people on that same server. And it’s easy to overlook a system requirement for something and not find out the host doesn’t support it until you’ve gone to the trouble of moving all your files over and setting up databases, emai accounts, etc.
Let’s assume the host does decide to do an update to their servers. They’ve got hundreds of thousands of customers…do they know what you are running and are they going to let you know that they just changed a setting that is going to cause your website to go down? Nope! You get to figure out that yourself when you notice your website has been down for a week and you didn’t even know. So then you get to put in a help request ticket and wait 24 hours to hear back from your host (many cheap hosts don’t offer phone support) and often you still have to figure out how to fix the problem yourself, as their technical support people aren’t too technical and are just reading a script or you get tired of waiting for them. If you’re lucky enough to have a host that offers phone support, I’ll bet a nickle that the person you talk to knows English as a second language…and I use the term "Know" loosely. If a company wants to outsource their technical support to another country…fine (I guess), but make sure they can speak English coherently if the majority of your customers speak English!
When you are one out of a hundred thousand customers, you better believe that the company won’t know your name when you call, what content management system you’re running, what version it is, or the fact that you are on a different time zone than them. And you’ll rarely ever speak to the same support person twice. So this means you have to "Do the Technical Support Dance" every time you call and answer the same questions and listen to the same suggestions that have already proved not to work again and again.
So if you take your company’s website seriously, don’t skimp on your hosting….you’re going to end up paying for hosting one way or another. But at least with a good hosting company you won’t be paying with your sanity as well as your wallet.