What small business needs to know about wordpress web hosting

The more I see wordpress webhosting the more I can’t believe how poor the industry treats clients and their websites.

This is a guide, to try to help small business owners navigate quotes for wordpress hosting.

Shared web hosting accounts for almost all website quotes. If they don’t say it’s shared hosting, it still probably is.

Quotes come from either of these to sources:

Hosting Companies

These guys are big, and well branded as hosting companies.

Pro’s

• they are big
• they’ll have good procedures
• you’ll get consistent results (whether its what you want or not)
• you’ll get what you paid for
• their best techos (3rd level support) are excellent

Con’s

• often slow – but it’s difficult for the business owner to know or measure
• they are big – so they’ll stretch servers to the limit, putting many thousands of customers on servers
• they’ll minimise support
• they don’t care about you, you are 1 of 100,000 sites they have sold
• if your site becomes too much trouble, like from a hack, you’ll just get deleted
• security is up to you (even if they don’t tell you that).
• backups are up to you (even if they tell you they do backups, they don’t).
• their 3rd level support guys are spread across so many clients, you’ll never get access to them. Everyone else in support is just to answer standard questions, and give canned answers.
• It’s likely to be in the USA, as it’s cheaper there. But your performance suffers, and your SEO and google searches suffer
• rarely utilize CDNs for you (these makes your site a lot faster)
• rarely utilize memory caching (again, making your site faster)

Marketing companies, website designers, web developers

These guys are micro, they have up to 200 sites, they rent a portion of a server from someone else, they don’t have a background in IT or long experience in hosting.

Pro’s

• they are small, so you’ll get a bit more personal response from them
• you spoke to them on facebook or the phone

Con’s

• often slow – but it’s difficult for the business owner to know or measure
• they’ll have poor or no procedures
• you’ll get inconsistent results
• they are guessing at what to do, how to run a server. Mostly facilitated by googling
• they have no technical support staff beyond the guy that built the website
• hosting websites is ‘extra income’ for them – it’s not their main business, and that’s how they treat it.
• they have little experience in IT, servers, operating systems, real web security
• their knowledge is often limited to installing wordpress plugins, like firewall plugins
• It’s likely to be in the USA, as it’s cheaper there. But your performance suffers, and your SEO and google searches suffer
• rarely utilize CDNs for you (these makes your site a lot faster)
• rarely utilize memory caching (again, making your site faster)

 

Now you might get a ‘good deal’ with either type of company. It may seem cheap. And it may go well for a while, a year , or more. Until it doesn’t go well.

Specialist WordPress hosting, like wpdone.com.au

We only work with WordPress hosting, nuff said.

Pro’s

• We only work with WordPress, so we know WordPress hosting really really well
• Our business is focussed on 1 thing, WordPress hosting. Do you think we are lazy about anything ?
• We tune performance, just to make WordPress fast
• We tune security just to keep WordPress secure

Con’s

• We don’t host other applications
• We won’t offer to make changes to your web site
• We are more expensive

By Scott Farrell on January 24th, 2016 , Follow @scott_WordPress Tweet to @scott_WordPress