WordPess hosting is an important part when it comes to this platform. We always recommend the best WordPress-solutions for our own clients. With new business clients we often hear this particular question –
Does it matter where I’m hosting my website?
Well, yes it does matter! Although there are plenty to choose from out there, the vast majority of which meet the WordPress minimum requirements, we strongly recommend using and working with a quality provider.
API Studios is not offering hosting but we work closely with a selected number of providers that we trust and we’ve been recommending to our clients over the years.
We’re not covering comparisons or Top 10’s here, nor listing the ones starting from $9.99. If you are a professional business and value your customers, you want quality, scalability and long term stability.
As an agency building websites, we care for our clients and always recommend the best hosting solutions to help grow and keep a steady online presence. In our opinion, the providers and type of hosts below represent some of the best and brightest of the WordPress hosting world right now.
As the name tells “managed”, this is exactly the type of WordPress hosting solution that beyond performance and security will give you peace of mind. Here are also some pros and cons of Managed WordPress hosting.
Pros of using Managed WordPress hosting
- Fast and secure platform: Managed WordPress hosting servers are fast and secure because they’re configured specially for WordPress. They specialize in making WordPress better.
- User-friendly option: All business owners aren’t developers. Managed WordPress hosting lets anyone to build a WordPress website and never worry about maintaining it.
- Excellent support: Managed WordPress hosting companies provide an excellent support when needed.
Cons of using Managed WordPress hosting
- Less control: Since the hosting is looking after the technical aspects of your site, you’ll have less control to them.
- Limitations: There are also limitations as to the type of website you can run. The host will most likely only handle WordPress installs which means that other content management systems (or a bespoke one) will require another specialized hosting offer.
In addition to that, managed WordPress hosting providers often prevent you from using certain plugins. This is most often because they are incompatible with the server architecture. A common example here are caching plugins, because many managed hosting providers have their own solutions in place.
Price can also be a factor. If you add on additional benefits and services, you can quickly pay more for managed hosting than unmanaged counterparts.
As mentioned, there are plenty to choose from but based on our experience and testings over the years, these are the best and the ones we recommend.
Kinsta is a hosting provider for WordPress that focuses mainly on optimized managed hosting setups. It is powered exclusively by Google Cloud Platform and utilize Google Cloud’s premium tier global network to ensure your site loads even faster. Kinsta is recommended by Google Cloud as a fully-managed WordPress hosting solution.
The fact that this host is “managed” means that it’s Kinsta who handle every server-management-related task for you. Best performance among managed hosting ($30.00/mo).
Flywheel presents a very enticing offer for people who want to get into managed WordPress hosting but also don’t want to spend too much on it.
Feature-wise, there’s nothing missing with Flywheel, and you can expect great performance as well. The $15.00 /month plan allows you to host one WordPress website, and you can handle up to 5,000 visitors monthly (20GB of bandwidth). You also get 5GB of disk space and free site migration. The servers run on Google Cloud Platform.
This is not the type of managed hosting solution as mentioned above. Instead you have to take care of everything from setup, configuration, optimization, server management and more, but you can always hire an expert to help.
There are a few options here: VPS (Virtual Private Server), Private Cloud or Dedicated Servers. Many businesses rely on these type of hosting solutions. It allows you to scale and configure everything based on your needs, you are not sharing server resources with anyone and you own it.
We at API Studios run our websites and applications on a Dedicated Server to benefit from the latest technological advances. You probably won’t need that much power resource but that’s something based on the type and needs of your business website and application.
What can a dedicated server be used for?
There are many uses for a dedicated server: big data, machine learning, website and application hosting, backups and storage, infrastructure virtualisation, server clusters, business applications (CRM, ERP), and even online game hosting.
Pros of using servers (VPS, Cloud, Dedicated)
- Powerful, secure, and fast: These are the most powerful, most secure, and the fastest hosting solutions available.
- Reliability – A VPS or dedicated server is a consistently more reliable and stable when have higher level of traffic.
- Full control: Since you lease the whole server, you’ve the full control over the server. You can have a fully custom system, resources, as you need.
- Resources – Because more resources are focused on your environment, speed is consistently greater than other platforms.
- Customizable – Offers more precise control and configurable options and customizations to meet your specific needs.
- Managable: Just like managed WordPress hosting, these can also be managed by the provider or your teams that offer managed server wide services for a monthly retainer package.
Cons of using servers (VPS, Cloud, Dedicated)
- More technical: You need some technical skills to use hosting servers because you’re responsible for software updates, security, maintenance, and more.
- Flipside: Being solely responsible for your server and website takes time and if you don’t consider yourself a “tech person”, you may not be thrilled by the prospect of handling technical challenges all on your own.
- Cost: Renting a dedicated, cloud or virtual server can also be pricey but for good reasons.
As an agency partner with some of the selected providers, we offer support to our clients and can help find the right solution and setup your server.