Your website hosting is the foundation of everything you do online. Your SEO and Google Rankings, the performance of your Adwords and Facebook ads and the volume of enquiries, calls, emails and sales your site generates are all tied to the quality and performance of your hosting.
On this page you’ll find the hosts I primarily use, trust and recommend on a daily basis. At least two thirds the sites I review are slow because they are on cheap or low quality hosting. Fixing their speed issues is largely a job of moving them to a better hosting provider.
Rank Higher in Google – Google have publicly stated that loading speed is now part of their ranking algorithm…don’t lose out to the competition because of something so simple as site speed.
Stop Bleeding Money on Ad Spend – if you’re paying for traffic and your site is slow you’re probably burning ad spend and losing money. A faster site=better ROI on ad spend, it’s like free money!
Higher Conversions – slow sites are a huge conversion bottleneck. It’s friction in your sales funnel. If your site is slow your conversion rate isn’t as high as it should be and your website, order process and funnels aren’t working as hard for you as they could be.
Most people are concerned about the price, but the price should not be the main concern. After all, your website is (or should) be making money, so it is not a cost but an investment for making more. The main point should be where are the servers located, you should choose the location closest to the region where the majority of your website visitors are coming from.
These are mostly marketing terms these days, as all are more-less the same machines with different setups. You should pay attention primarily to what a hosting plan includes and if that meets your predicted needs and the costs.
Here are some of the important factors to consider when deciding which web hosting plan to choose.
Location – should be as close as possible to the majority of your visitors.
HTTP/2 protocol support – HTTP/2 protocol doubles the speeds of the download of files. It was released in 2015 and believe it or not, many cheap hosting providers still do not support this standard. Some hosts even support the newest HTTP/3 standard.
HTTPS and free SSL certificates – nowdays, an SSL certificate is a must. Users browsing with Chrome browser will get a warning and the website will not open if it does not have an SSL certificate and is served via HTTPS secure protocol. Also, a HTTPS encrypted mode is good for speed, security and website conversion. There are still some hosts who charge for SSL certificates, but any decent hosts have free SSL certificates and some even do auto set up.
PHP version – PHP is the programming language WordPress runs on. It is always best to have latest version. So, choose a host that supports the latest version. Each version is typically faster than the previous one.
Backups – you definitely want backup system. I would recommend you also get off-site backups outside of what the hosting platform provides. This offers extra layer of security in case something happens to the website or the server.
Email hosting – do you need email hosting? Many providers don’t provide email hosting as there are a large number of dedicated cloud email hosting providers that do it much better and cheaper. Best is to use Microsoft Office 365 suite or Google Gsuite (aka business Gmail)
Staging area – it is great to have any easy way to set up a staging environment for WordPress. This way you can test changes and updates before going live. Also any changes to the website can be tested without affecting the live site.
Support – what is your support expectation? 24/7 phone or will business hours live chat support suffice?
Web Hosting Company
Price
Limits
Recommended for
from $5.99/month if paid annually first year
from $12.99/month
10.000 visits/month
10GB storage
1 site included
Best All-Rounder & Fastest Cpanel Host. Not Recommended For High Traffic Sites!
from $10/month
unlimited visits/month
25GB storage
1TB bandwidth/month
no website install limits
Cheapest, Fastest & Best Performance Hosting. A Little More Complex Than A Standard Host.
Servers by DigitalOcean, linode, Vultr/Vultr HF, Amazon AWS, and Google Cloud.
from $30/month
25,000 visits/month
10GB storage
1 site included
Highly Scalable, Managed WordPress Hosting, Great For Mid Size Sites, Several European Locations
from $30/month
use coupon wpe3free for 10% off your first payment!
25,000 visits/month
10GB storage
50GB bandwidth/month
1 site included
World’s Leading Fully Managed WP Host, Fantastic For Complex Sites & Woocommerce, Although A Little More Expensive
from $34.95/month
250,000 visits/month
10GB storage
1000GB bandwidth/month
1 sites included
10GB Email account with unlimited mailboxes
* Please note that the above-listed links are affiliate links. If you use them to buy the product, I do get a small commission from them. It does not affect your price in any way and I recommend only the companies I trust and actively personally test their services.
Need help choosing a hosting company?
Need to migrate your website?
Improve speed and save money in the process!
OR
If you prefer, we can have a consultation. Consultation gets you up to an hour of my time to discuss your project and requirements to get a detailed scope of work together. These consultations are priced at $69.
Please note that I do all of my projects through the Codeable platform.
To learn more about Codeable and how it works, click here.
