Web hosting is one of the most important things to take care of for any website. Therefore, you must choose the appropriate high-quality hosting that enhances the performance of your site, improves its rank in search engines, and contributes to increasing the number of its visitors and increasing its sales.
On the other hand, bad hosting will slow down the loading speed of your site, cause it to crash constantly, and leave a bad impression on users about it, and it may also affect its security and make it vulnerable to hacking.
In this article, we will explain to you the concept of web hosting, the difference between web hosting and WordPress hosting, which are two different types of hosting and are often confused, and we will also show you the criteria for choosing the best hosting for your site, and we will recommend the best hosting for you.
What is web hosting?
Web hosting is a general term that describes the service through which a person can publish their website on the internet and make it available to visitors all the time.
All site files are stored on a server or hosting server, which is a computer with special specifications that is connected to the Internet 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and in which your site lives.
So when someone visits your website they are actually connecting to that server to access your website pages.
Because different websites have different needs, different types of web hosting are available, and there are different hosting companies or providers that offer different hosting plans and features.
Therefore, if you are planning to create a website for you or your business, the first thing you should think about is determining the type of hosting, hosting company, and hosting plan that is most suitable for this website.
Any type of hosting can host websites built with the WordPress system, provided that the hosting server has support for the PHP language.
- PHP version 7.4 or later.
- MySQL version 5.7 and above, or MariaDB version 10.2 and above.
- HTTPS support
But if you want a more supportive hosting for your WordPress site, you can rely on a special type of hosting known as WordPress hosting , which we will explain in the next paragraph.
What is WordPress Hosting?
Since the WordPress system is one of the most widely used and popular content management systems , today it occupies more than a third of all websites around the world. Some hosting providers have created a dedicated type of hosting known as WordPress hosting.
WordPress hosting is a type of web hosting that has been enhanced and supported with additional features and tools to run WordPress sites more easily and quickly.
When you use WordPress hosting, you will get several tools and services specifically designed to serve WordPress sites, and these services vary from one WordPress hosting provider to another, but in general they provide all or some of the following features:
- One-click WordPress installation so that you can quickly install WordPress on your site.
- Perform automatic updates for the WordPress core as well as for plugins and themes.
- A high level of security, as the servers are equipped against specific threats to WordPress in particular, rather than general threats to any site.
- Possibility to add an SSL certificate to your site in a few clicks.
- An expert technical support team in the WordPress system and solving its technical problems.
Managed WordPress hosting
There is a dedicated type of WordPress hosting known as Managed WordPress Hosting and in this type of hosting more services and features are offered as well. And have a team of WordPress experts to support and assist you when necessary.
If your site encounters a security breach, for example, the hosting provider who manages your site will help you resolve any security problems or vulnerabilities and correct them to restore your site. Most of the popular WordPress plugins like security, caching, and performance optimization plugins are pre-installed and updated automatically.
Of course, there will be additional costs when using managed WordPress hosting, but investing in managed WordPress hosting can help improve the performance of your site, as you will get a hosting environment that is fully optimized for your site, which will save you time in performing the technical tasks of hosting.
What is the difference between web hosting and WordPress hosting ?
The main difference between web hosting and WordPress hosting is that web hosting is a comprehensive and general service for any website, whatever the method through which this website was created, including websites designed with WordPress.
Whereas, WordPress hosting is a specific service specifically designed for hosting WordPress websites that offers services and support dedicated to WordPress performance. Thus, WordPress hosting is a preferred choice for people who have limited experience in running a website and managing a server.
What are the types of hosting ?
As we mentioned earlier, any type of hosting solution can host WordPress websites. Once you are able to install the WordPress platform on a host, that host will be able to run your WordPress site.
But there are different types of hosting - whether it's public web hosting, or dedicated WordPress hosting - and the most prominent of these types:
Shared hosting
Shared hosting is the cheapest form of hosting in which your site shares resources with other websites on the same hosting server.
This post aims to reduce costs, but in reality it negatively affects the performance of your site, because there are more than one site on the same server using the same resources, which means that when one of these sites consumes a lot of resources, it will slow down all the other sites on it.
Read more: What is shared hosting and why we don't recommend it
VPS hosting _
Virtual Private Server hosting is a type of hosting in which hosting resources are shared with other websites. But there is isolation within the shared server, as your site will have its own space, which forms a virtual server dedicated to the site.
This type of hosting costs a slightly higher budget than shared hosting, but provides a higher level of control and customization.
Dedicated servers hosting
In dedicated server hosting there is an entire physical server dedicated with all its resources to host the website.
This type of hosting is financially expensive and is considered one of the most expensive types of hosting, but in return it achieves very high performance for the website and can serve a large number of website visitors at the same time.
You find the reference because the managed WordPress hosting we mentioned earlier mostly relies on dedicated server hosting. But it can also be set up using VPS hosting, cloud hosting, or even shared hosting.
Read more: Explanation of dedicated servers, their uses, advantages and disadvantages
Reseller hosting
This form of hosting allows you to buy space on the hosting server, divide it up and resell it to other clients.
This type of hosting is used by individuals or companies who have technical knowledge of managing servers as they can earn money by reselling space of that server to other clients.
Cloud hosting
In this type of hosting, the website is hosted on a cloud structure consisting of several servers instead of storing it on a physical server.
This type of hosting is characterized by the ability to expand, and it charges you for consumption, as prices are not fixed. You can start with a limited plan for a cheap price and if your site experiences an increase in traffic, hosting resources and costs are raised, so it is ideal for small to medium sized websites that require more resources than shared hosting.
How to choose the best hosting for WordPress
There are thousands of companies that provide web hosting service around the world from which you can choose whatever you want to host your WordPress site.
You are also free to choose public web hosting or WordPress hosting, and choose managed or unmanaged hosting for your site, but there are a set of basic things that we recommend looking for when choosing to host your website in general, the most important of which are:
- Speed in loading the site and navigating between its pages. Look for companies that use SSDs and a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and have servers in multiple geographic locations as these factors contribute greatly to improving site speed.
- Provide basic security and protection for the website and protect it from any software, malicious codes or security breaches.
- Ensure site availability 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. (Uptime is the percentage of time your site stays online and it has to be 99% or 100% for the hosting to be good)
- Providing customer service and having a knowledgeable support team available at any time to assist you in the event of any problems on the site or in the hosting server via phone, chat or e-mail.
- Scalability Many hosting service providers offer several types of hosting to enable you to upgrade your site from shared hosting to VPS hosting or dedicated server hosting. Some types of hosting, such as cloud hosting, allow websites to increase resources when needed.
- The size of the file storage must be large and able to accommodate the size of your site's files, and the bandwidth must be suitable for the number of visitors to your site.
- Providing a domain name registration service. Many hosting service providers provide domain name registration for the site as part of their hosting packages, and this may save you from buying a domain name.
- Securing dedicated email accounts on your domain name, as some hosting companies offer several email accounts for each website, and this contributes to giving greater confidence to your site and your brand.
Top five hosting for WordPress
The hosting you choose for your website depends on your budget, the number of visitors to your site, and the amount of help you want from your host in running your site.
We can consider that cloud hosting is the best option for hosting WordPress sites because it balances performance and price, and it saves you from changing the hosting plan after your site is modernized and the number of visitors has increased.
Here is a list of the best cloud hosting companies that you can adopt to host your WordPress site:
DigitalOcean _
Digital Ocean provides a great WordPress cloud hosting platform that provides you with an SSD cloud and secures all the functions you need to host your website and program your applications.
It includes several hosting plans starting at $ 5 per month that you can start with and ensure that you will never run out of space allocated to your site, as it is flexible, expandable, and provides you with multiple storage units of up to 16 terabytes.
Developed and designed primarily for developers, the hosting helps you collect metrics, monitor performance, and send you notifications if something needs improvement.
Steps to create and activate an account on Digital Ocean hosting
Steps to install WordPress on Digital Ocean hosting
Cloudways _
CloudWaze is a unique managed cloud hosting platform that allows you to choose from several hosting infrastructures for Amazon, Digital Ocean, Google Cloud, etc. and install and manage your WordPress site with great ease..
It enables you to create your site using any CMS, including WordPress, where you can install WordPress on CloudWiz and start running your site in a few minutes. It is also WooCommerce ready and optimized for speed as well.
You can also choose different server resources according to your needs, select the appropriate CPU or RAM and storage space for you, and provide excellent support 24/7.
Read more : What is Cloudways hosting, and how to install WordPress on it
Amazon Cloud
Amazon Web Services is one of the most popular cloud hosting providers. It is famous for its high reliability and almost 100 percent uptime. It owns many of its data center sites, and this means that sites hosted on Amazon will not be down.
The problem with this hosting is that configuring it, setting it up, installing WordPress on it, making backups, etc. requires experience in cloud computing and knowledge of dealing with command line screens. Amazon has launched a service called lightsail that can be relied upon to facilitate the process of managing servers and installing applications.
Some also resort to using Cloudways hosting, relying on the infrastructure of Amazon cloud servers that it provides, eliminating the difficulties of managing the server, solving its problems, and focusing on your own site.
Google Cloud GCP
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is one of the most popular cloud computing service providers that you can rely on to deploy your WordPress website.
Google Cloud hosting guarantees you a high-performance WordPress site, as it offers a variety of cloud products Compute Engine, which is a virtual machine (VM) similar to the concept of an actual server, but it is virtual and the resources in it are expandable in addition to DNS, CDN, RAM and SSD services.
Linode
Linode is a premium cloud hosting company that provides reliable VPS at reasonable prices and outstanding customer service
Focused on providing developer-friendly platforms, Linode provides several products and services tailored to developers and businesses, enabling them to build, deploy, and scale applications more easily and cost-effectively in the cloud.
They also offer a 99.99% uptime guarantee and if your server goes down on them for more than 0.01%, you can request a credit for the downtime.
Read more: The best reliable hosting company and 12 criteria for choosing the best hosting
Conclusion
In today's article, we got to know the concept of web hosting and WordPress hosting, which is a hosting that is optimized to run WordPress, and we showed that hosting WordPress is not a condition for running WordPress sites that can work on almost any hosting.
Finally, to decide the best hosting for your website, let me tell you that there is no right or wrong choice. Rather, the choice depends on the type of hosting plan you want, your budget, and the amount of support and assistance you need from the hosting company while running your site.
But the general trend in hosting tends to rely on cloud hosting to publish websites because it is more secure, as well as being suitable for all types of websites, and it is scalable and maintains the performance and stability of the site.
Comments
Post a Comment