Budget, Top Tier, and Managed WordPress Hosting Options
There are many hosting services available, including Fully Managed WordPress Hosting options for WordPress website owners. Hosting prices vary, but in general you get what you pay for in terms of services offered, speed, and reliability.
Remember, setup costs vary!
Generally speaking at the time of this article, extreme budget hosting runs $8-10 per month, whereas a quality host will run $30 per month. Also consider the ease and speed of setting up your website on a given host. In our experience, it can take 2-3 times as long to configure a website on some budget services. If you’re paying someone else to configure your website, after setup cost it may cost a lot more for budget hosting than you think.
How much downtime can you tolerate?
Aside from startup cost, the most important thing to consider when opting for a budget hosting option is whether the speed and reliability are acceptable to your business. Even a 99% uptime guarantee can translate into 3-4 days of downtime per year. A quality service will have an SLA, service level agreement, and guarantee 99.95% uptime or better. That amounts to only a few hours per year of downtime on top tier hosting.
3 seconds vs 1/2 second Page Load
When it comes to speed and bandwidth, a top tier service will significantly outperform budget hosts. Pages that load in a fraction of a second on a good hosting service may take multiple seconds to load on a budget host. Additionally budget hosting is often much more susceptible to frequent and prolonged degraded service periods. Degraded service is when your website is not being served as fast as usual. Frequently this is because the server resources are shared among many websites and there are times when their other customers are causing server load that impacts your website.
Search Engine Optimization Considerations
Page load times are an important factor to search engines. Websites that respond quicker and load faster are more likely to rank higher in search results. The reason this matters to Google is the same reason it should matter to you, visitors are far more likely to stay and explore a website that is fast and responsive. This chart from Google’s research demonstrates this point quite clearly.
When load times exceed 3 seconds, visitors are far more likely to leave, aka bounce. Reducing load times is always a high priority for us in our web designs, but hosting is the other side of the equation, even efficient pages are slow to load on slower hosts.
Who do we recommend?
We have had very good experience using InMotion WordPress Hosting as a budget option. They have great tools, but their platform is easier to user for more technically inclined users. For high quality hosting we recommend WPEngine WordPress Hosting and we use them for our hosting needs. WPEngine has a tremendous platform and our load speeds are extremely fast. They offer a great set of hosting tools with an easy to use interface and their technical support is very responsive.
Let us handle it, choose Managed WordPress Hosting
Daniel Sepich Web Development offers Premium Managed WordPress Hosting on WPEngine for $500/year. Let us take care of everything for you, ask us about hosting your website. We will configure your website, maintain backups, perform security updates, provide 24/7 health monitoring, proactive triage and troubleshooting, and handle all website and domain support issues. You get top tier hosting from WPEngine, their speed and reliability and we handle absolutely everything for you. We also offer a scaled back Budget Managed WordPress Hosting for $300/year on InMotion. We strongly encourage our customers to opt for our premium service. We believe the performance difference far outweighs the extra cost.