Starting a new WordPress website is supposed to be very easy, and not require an in-debt knowledge of web development skills such as HTML, CSS, or system admin skills. While this is somewhat true, it can be frustrating when your website breaks, and you then need to have an experienced developer or system admin get it back up and running. How this is done, and the overall performance of your WordPress website depends on the type of WordPress Hosting you have in place.
The cheap options
Godaddy, Blue Host, and a long list of other shared hosting providers provide WordPress hosting for as little as $5 a month. They also provide “One Click” installs and managed WordPress hosting with the promise that everything, including security, is taken care of, and there is nothing to worry about. If you have a simple WordPress website with low traffic and a limited number of plug-ins, and you have done zero modifications to the theme, then for the most part this is true. You can configure WordPress Core to auto update and blog away for years. But these types of websites rarely exist in the wild. Custom Themes, plugins, page builders, and speed performance software is a typical business website install.
Premium WordPress Hosting Providers
If you are going to be installing WooCommerce, a directory plugin, or customizing your theme, then you should upgrade your hosting to another option.
For around $30 a month you can use a premium WordPress specific hosting provider. They provide staging servers, and better support than the cheap plans. For high traffic sites these costs can escalate quickly. They also ban some plugins and have other “Rules” on what you can deploy as far as custom in-house plugin-in. We use WP Engine as our premier hosting provider and are a developer agency partner. Pantheon is another excellent option, though they are more known for their Drupal Hosting.
Your own Server
The next option is to run your own Virtual Server. This gives you complete control, but you are then responsible for the maintenance and security of the server. Amazon web services is the most popular solution for this environment. Dream Host has some options for cheap Virtual WordPress servers, though we have run into issues not being able to run root access installs for dependence managers such as symphony.
WordPress.com
This is a cloud system where you can also purchase the domain, and they do have low end plans that can scale easily. It’s not our favorite as we are developers at heart access is limited in this managed system. Other cloud providers including Godaddy also provide managed service. It’s worth noting that managed services means that the linux server is locked down, wordpress updates typically are set to autorun, and that is about it. If your site starts to break when WordPress or PHP are upgraded, it’s going to be up to you to fix it.
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