Best Hosting for WordPress

We’re a group of WordPress developers in San Francisco. Over the years, we’ve built more than 300 websites and blogs using self-hosted WordPress installations. We noticed that not all hosting is created equally, not even close. Some WordPress hosts are slow and unreliable, others are fast, reliable, cheap and work great. This site is all about helping you avoid the mistakes we’ve seen over the years. We’re going to help you choose the best hosting for WordPress.

 

We’ve used all of the major hosting services: GoDaddy, HostGator, Bluehost, Surpass, Sonic.net, page.ly, 1and1, MediaTemple, Rackspace, DreamHost, HostMonster, and many others. We noticed a pattern as time went on. Some of our clients would contact us letting us know that their sites were slow, or their sites were down. We started to see that some WordPress hosting services were clearly better than others.

 

WordPress Hosting Requirements

To use a self-hosted WordPress installation, you must choose a host which meets the minimum requirements for WordPress hosting. Luckily WordPress will run on most hosts.

 

The minimum requirements are:

• PHP 5.2.4 or greater
• MySQL 5.0 or greater
• The mod_rewrite Apache module

 

If you don’t know what all that means, don’t worry. The three hosting services we recommend all meet the minimum requirements for hosting WordPress.

 

How We Rank the Best Hosting for WordPress

It’s hard to categorically say that any given hosting company is always the best choice for your WordPress site. The truth is that some sites only need a basic hosting plan while other sites need a more robust managed hosting package. The goal of this website is to help you choose the right WordPress hosting provider for your unique needs.

 

These are the criteria we analyzed when making our rankings:

 

Speed

What can we say about speed? Faster is better. It’s better for SEO, better for users, better for conversions. Just like our clients, you want your site to load as fast as possible. We’ve used the latest testing tools and guess what…some WordPress hosting companies are significantly faster than others.

 

Reliability

As a web developer, one of my biggest frustrations is when a client’s website goes down because of hosting problems. Most sites will experience an occasional hiccup or outage, but they’re usually short and painless. Still, experiencing hosting downtime is easy to avoid.

 

We using a pinging service that checks all of our clients’ websites every five minutes and reports outages immediately. We also look at monthly statistics to see how much “uptime” or “downtime” each site has. Over the years, we started to notice trends. Some hosting companies were down all the time, while others rarely had a problem. HostGator, Bluehost and Page.ly consistently saw 99.99% up-time (or better). To put that in English, 99.99% up-time means that, over the course of a month, your site will be down less than 5 minutes.

 

We’ve seen terrible things with other hosting companies. One of the big-name hosts recently lost an entire website, permanently. Just POOF, gone. Other hosts experience hours of downtime per month. No one likes that. I’ll spare you the rest of the gory details. If you stick with one of the three hosts we recommend, you’ll be in good shape.

 

Support

This is one of the most important issues for many people. If you ever have a problem, how easy is it to get things fixed. Sadly, many hosting companies don’t enough resources into their support department. I’ve spent hours waiting on hold, only to talk to someone who couldn’t fix my problem. Some hosts only have email support! The three hosts we recommend are the exceptions to the rule.

 

HostGator has a fantastic support department, with both phone, chat and email support. The people are friendly and helpful, and they really know what they’re doing. The same goes for Bluehost and Page.ly. I’ve even gotten late-night email help from the founder of Page.ly. He was super helpful and friendly. That made a lasting impression on me and that’s why I’m so confident about their service.

 

Price

Some hosting companies really talk themselves up to try to justify a high price. The truth is that great hosting doesn’t have to be expensive, and some of the pricey hosting isn’t all it’s cracked up to be (unless your site is getting millions of visitors per month). We personally host all of our own sites on HostGator. We host about a hundred client websites on HostGator too. A big part of the appeal is the price. They can afford to be the cheapest game in town because they host a staggering 7,000,000 domains. HostGator also always ranks at or near the top when it comes to speed and up-time, so there’s no reason to pay more. That value is why we think they are the best WordPress hosting company for almost every situation.

 

Disk Space

Some hosting companies like to charge you extra for extra storage space. HostGator and Bluehost offer unlimited storage space, so you never have to worry about your website outgrowing your hosting.

 

Easy Setup

All three of our recommended hosting companies make it super simple to install WordPress with just one click, and Page.ly will even do it for you. It’s hard to beat that simplicity.

 

How To Choose

We put this site together to help people avoid the mistakes we’ve seen over the years, so we’ll make this as simple as we can.
• If you want fast and reliable hosting for WordPress at the lowest price, sign up for HostGator today.
• If you want extra support, automatic WordPress upgrades and don’t mind paying a little more for it, go with Page.ly.
• If neither of those sound like you, and you want another great option, Bluehost is for you.

 

How To Set Up Hosting & WordPress In 10 Minutes

We created a step-by-step video to show you how to set up your WordPress hosting & how to install WordPress.

 
The first 6 minutes of the video show you how to set up your hosting account, and get the best deal with our exclusive coupon code.

 
Ready? Click play.