How To Choose The Best WordPress Hosting in 2019

4 min readNov 13, 2018

Choosing hosting for your WordPress blog or website, is a minefield if you don’t know what you’re looking for. When I started this blog, Simply Hatch, I struck lucky with my hosting company.

I’ve had websites in the past such as a big ecommerce site with a 7 figure turnover. With an unreliable shared host, sleepless nights and ruined holidays taught me that cheap isn’t an option when it comes to hosting. You get what you pay for.

If your blog or website goes down you don’t make any money. If it’s too slow, customers don’t stick around.

Speed, security, and reliability are the three amigos of website hosting.

Choose the Best Website Hosting For Your Needs

The needs of a large established blog or website are going to be totally different to someone blogging for a hobby. I’m assuming you’re here, reading this blog post because you want to make money.

Free WordPress Hosting

Making money rules out free web hosting. It’s unreliable, usually involves running someone else’s banner ads on your site and it’s usually impossible to monetise. Just don’t go there.

Shared WordPress Hosting

Most hosting you’ll see advertised is shared hosting. It’s the most affordable and can be good for new companies starting out. Shared hosting means you share a large server with a lot of other sites. It means hosting providers can offer some really low rates for their hosting services.

But there is a catch. Many shared hosting providers offer unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth. This just isn’t possible. They are relying on most of their clients having small blogs and using small resources. Often hosting companies will oversell server space. This will affect your website loading speed.

Plus, if your blog post goes viral you’ll suddenly be asked to move to a dedicated server. Often not very politely.

Shared hosting is still a good option for your startup blog, especially if it’s a side hustle and you’re testing the waters before committing full time.

WordPress VPS or Cloud Hosting

These types of hosting are similar. Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a way of partitioning a physical server into smaller virtual sections. Each virtual section runs as if it’s a dedicated server.

The upside is you can have a lot of control over how your VPS server is set up. On the downside, they are less reliable. If a physical server fails, every VPS on that server will fail.

You can also have one site hogging resources on the physical server and affecting performance.

I’ve experienced both situations.

A VPS server that failed and left my tech support scrambling to install backups on a new server.
Having a gut feeling that performance wasn’t up to scratch on a VPS server. Eventually found out that another site on the same server had unexpectedly high traffic.

The alternative in this price bracket is Cloud hosting where resources are spread over a network of physical servers. It’s more reliable and flexible but customisation options can be limited.

VPS and Cloud hosting are a good choice for a growing blog or website where you’ve outgrown your shared hosting. BUT you do need some technical skills to set up and run the servers.

Keep reading to find an alternative…

WordPress Dedicated Server Hosting.

This is where you get your own dedicated physical server from the hosting provider. It’s all yours and the amount you pay will depend on the power of the server. For dedicated servers, we’re in the realms of extremely high traffic blogs.

Managed WordPress Hosting

If you’re beginning to think it’s all getting very complicated, don’t despair. Perhaps you just want someone to take care of the technical stuff so you can write your blog.

I totally know where you’re coming from.

Managed WordPress Cloud Hosting means you can start off small, and as you grow, using more resources, you’re just moved onto the next package. Nice easy steps and your WordPress hosting takes care of all the technical stuff. They optimise your site for performance, make sure your site is safe AND take regular backups. I mean who remembers to take backups!!! So pleased someone’s taking care of mine…

Speed

The problem with cheap hosting is that your blog will be hosted on a shared server and these servers become overloaded. Your site speed becomes slower and slower…

One way good hosting companies improve speed is through a Content Delivery Network (CDN), collection of servers located around the World. It caches static content on your website and sends it to the network of servers. When someone visits your site, they’re served content from the nearest server.

For example, if your website is hosted in London, a customer in Washington will view your website from a server in the US rather than waiting for a version from London to load.

If this sounds complicated don’t worry. All you need to know is that CDN makes your blog super fast.