WordPress Web Hosting
OK, so you may be wondering why I am talking about web hosts. After all, isn’t
this supposed to be a book about WordPress SEO?
Yes, it is. However, the speed at which your site loads (and even the uptime of
your site), are factors that are taken into account by search engines. Slow
loading websites, or those which are unavailable for long periods of time
(because the host server is down), suffer poorer rankings because of it. Sites
which go down frequently, negatively impact the reputation you have with your
visitors too.
There are many types of webhost, and lots of different plans that come with each
one. You can get shared hosting, a managed or unmanaged Virtual Private
Server (VPS), or a Dedicated Server. There are even some hosts that specialize
in WordPress site hosting (although not all that advertise 'WordPress hosting' are
setup specifically for it). I also know of one host that specializes in hosting
WordPress sites that is built with the Genesis WordPress theme.
So which should you go for?
Well, that will depend on how much money you have available for your hosting.
If you have a good budget, I would recommend going with a true 'WordPress
optimized' web host. Here are two of the better known options:
1. WPEngine
2. WebSynthesis - This is hosting specifically designed for
StudioPress themes (Genesis Framework), which we will look at in the
next section of this book.
If you visit those hosts, you’ll notice that they are quite pricey, starting at
$27/$29 per month for a single website. I have never used these personally, so
cannot comment on their reliability. I do suggest you read the small print
though, for whatever hosting package you decide to go with. The first host listed
above has a price of $29 per month, but that only allows you 25,000 visitors a
month in traffic. That is less than 850 visits a day, and for big, popular sites
would be a problem.
2.1. Shared Hosting & Dedicated Servers
Most hosts offer a wide range of packages, from simple shared hosting, to
dedicated servers (where you basically are given a computer and told to get on
with it).
Dedicated servers, and unmanaged VPS hosting, both require a certain level of
technical know-how, so I don’t recommend you consider those unless you are
technically capable.
For most people, shared hosting will be the best option because of the lower
costs, especially for new sites. However, shared hosting is generally the most
unreliable in terms of uptime and server response times (how long the server
takes to respond to a request to show your web page).
As you look for a host, if you know of a website that is hosted with a particular
company, I suggest you sign up for a free (or paid), account at Monitis.com and
setup a 'monitor' to check the site every 5 minutes for response time. This will
give you a good idea of how reliable that hosting company actually is.
See http://ezseonews.com/wpseo
Two of the most popular shared hosting companies are Hostgator and Bluehost.
I have tried both, and until recently, Hostgator was the one I would have
recommended. However, they have since 'upgraded' the server I was on, and
uptime and response times plummeted as a result. Here is a screenshot from
Monitis showing the details for one of my Hostgator hosted websites:
Look at all those peaks (these indicate when the server took longer to respond),
and the small circular dots on the baseline (where the server did not respond).
The top graph is the homepage of the site. Over a 24 hour period, the homepage
was down for 58 minutes, and the server response time was over eight seconds!
That means it took eight seconds on average (although there are a lot of peaks
over 40 seconds), to connect to my server, and that's even before the webpage
started to download.
The lower graph is an internal page on the same site. This page gets less traffic
so should have better response times - which it does - at around 2.5 seconds.
However, that page was down for over two hours in the previous 24 hours.
I moved this site from Hostgator to Bluehost, but I found Bluehost to be just as
unreliable. I guess Hostgator and Bluehost (being two of the most popular
shared hosting companies); have suffered because of their own success.
I eventually found a host that I am happy with. They are called StableHost
(http://ezseonews.com/stablehostreview).
StableHost offers free CDN with their hosting (which basically means your site
is served from a network of servers around the globe). My site is hosted on their
'En-Basic' Enterprise hosting package, costing $19.95 per month at the time or
writing. I have enabled CDN on the site (which only takes two minutes to
setup), and here is the data from Monitis for the last 24 hours.
That’s 100% uptime and a response time of around 1.5 seconds.
An inner page:
The inner page was down for one minute, and response time was 0.65 seconds.
You’ll notice that there were far fewer peaks in response times on StableHost,
and when there were peaks, it was a maximum of around 6 seconds, compared to
the 40+ second peaks on Hostgator.
What all of this shows you, I hope, is that not all hosts are equal. If you want
reliable hosting, go for the best that you can afford (and remember price does not
necessarily correlate with quality). My order of choice would be:
1. WPEngine OR WebSynthesis.
2. Enterprise level hosting on StableHost
(http://ezseonews.com/stablehostreview), using CDN.
3. Shared hosting, but buyer-beware!
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