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
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10.000 visits/month
10GB storage
1 site included
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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
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25,000 visits/month
10GB storage
50GB bandwidth/month
1 site included
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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.
The amount of RAM (server memory) does not affect the speed of your website.
If your website does not have enough RAM, “out of memory” errors will be logged in the servers error logs and the visitor to a web page will get a 500 error screen. WordPress needs a maximum of 256MB RAM in extreeme configurations, most installs will never come to using one quater of that. Adding more RAM does not have any effect on how fast your webpage loads.
The number of server cores does not affect the speed of your website. As long as there are free threads available to handle requests. If the number of cores is the performance bottleneck, the website will be slower. Most of the websites can not fully utilize even one core.
Yes. The core speed (CPU Ghz) determines how many calculations the processor can do per second. A CPU that can do more computations per second, will deliver your website at a faster speed.
Note that this is not necessarily true across different computers, because the speed of a computer is determined by how fast the computer works as a whole system (mother board, memory, processor and storage).
No. The only exception is if bandwidth of the network connection is the bottleneck. A normal webpage does not need more than 10Mbps to be delivered at maximum speed over the network. To put that in a perspective, mobile 4G speed is 9Mbps and LTE speed is 12Mbps.
No, quite the contrary. If you split and spread your website to run across multiple servers, you can expect your website to run slower. Using this technique of multi server infrastructure will increase your site’s ability to scale and serve more visitors simultaneusly, but it will not make it faster. Not useful and can not justify cost even for high traffic blog sites.
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