…there are gazillions search results. Are you scratching your head and wondering what are the differences between Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, and Dedicated Server Hosting? In this guide, we will help you to figure out the best Web Hosting for your WordPress website.
A Great CMS Deserves An Awesome Web Hosting
Welcome to the world of WordPress. You have chosen one of the best website Content Management Systems (CMS) in the market today.
With a great CMS, you will need an awesome Web Hosting to pair with it, and we highly recommend SiteGround.
You’ll understand why in this article.
By the way, have you seen our simple guide on “5 Reasons You Should Use WordPress To Build Your Website”?
If not, we highly recommend that you sign up your email in the box BELOW so that we can email you right away.
5 reasons you should
Use WordPress To Build Your Website
Now, the reason you have found this article is because you are researching on the best WordPress Web Hosting company in the market for Website Starters.
You might have Googled the following keywords, and here is what you may see…
…there are gazillions search results.
Are you scratching your head and wondering where to begin?
What are the differences between Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, and Dedicated Server Hosting?
In this guide, we will help you to figure out which Web Hosting is the best for Website Starters.
Firstly, let us list down some Web Hosting companies you might have come across:
SiteGround
GoDaddy
WPengine
BlueHost
DreamHost
HostGator
InMotion
A2Hosting
Liquid Web
FlyWheel
The list above is by no means exhaustive.
As you would have guessed, all these Web Hosting companies offer similar yet different functionality for people looking to host their WordPress website.
Thus, we strongly suggest you to take some time to review each of the Web Host offerings.
Undeniably, pricing matters, but we all know the devil is in the details.
So dive deep into the feature sets in their websites to avoid regret.
Types of Web Hosting
Let’s take a look about the categories of Web Hosting before we dive into the benefits of SiteGround.
Broadly speaking, most companies offer 3 categories of Web Hosting services.
However, depending on which option you go for, the plan will offer different performance, scalability, security, management capabilities.
So, which one is suitable for you? Let us find out below:
Compare Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, Dedicated Server Hosting/ Cloud Hosting
It is important to look beyond the monthly price of the Web Hosting.
Furthermore, understanding the difference between the types of Web Hosting will greatly help you to categorize and differentiate the solutions available.
Comparison: Types Of Web Hosting
Why Choose SiteGround?
Since this article is targeted for Website Starters, we will look only at the Shared Hosting category.
Here are 4 reasons why we recommend SiteGround Shared Hosting to Website Starters:
1. SiteGround has a good Price-Performance ratio
SiteGround was founded in 2004 in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Today, they have over 2 million domains on their Web Hosting platform.
With 4 offices and 6 data centres around the world, SiteGround provides Shared Hosting, Cloud Hosting and Enterprise Hosting solutions.
Currently, SiteGround Shared Hosting has the following 3 plans:
Below are 5 areas to look out for when evaluating a Web Hosting plan.
In the case of SiteGround’s Shared Hosting, we recommend the GrowBig Plan. Here is why:
Pricing
- SiteGround has one of the lowest starting price points in the market, starting from $6.95/month. However, do note that this is a promotional price on the first sign up for StartUp Plan. As such, you can choose to enjoy this monthly rate for the first 12, 24, or 36 months. After which, the subscription will be back to regular price at $14.95/month. Therefore, if you are serious about building your website for the long term, choose the longest duration available upon first purchase to enjoy better discounts.
- GrowBig Plan is what we will recommend, because at an addition of $3/month to StartUp Plan, you are getting a lot more features!
Features
Next, look under the essential features and you will find:
- You can host Unlimited Websites with 1 account with the GrowBig plan. This means the multiple websites can be either subdomains of your purchased domains (e.g. blog.yourdomain.com), or even different domain names hosted in the same account. Thus, you should definitely leverage this feature to develop your websites.
- You get Unmetered Data Transfer. As you may know, some Web Hosting limits the amount of data transfer in and out (e.g. 50 GB per month). However, with SiteGround‘s unmetered data transfer, you have one less concern while your number of websites and visitors grow.
- You get Unlimited FREE Email Accounts. This means you can basically create unlimited mailboxes at maximum 4 GB per user, up to the total cap of your web space (in the case of GrowBig will be 20 GB). What’s more, your email account can be created using your domain name (e.g. [email protected]), no longer @hotmail.com or @gmail.com. Most importantly, when you need extra email accounts for testing purposes, you would definitely appreciate this convenience on top of your paid email account per seat with Microsoft 365.
Performance
- Your website is hosted on a shared server with SSDs, which means the files and databases are placed on high performance storage.
- Free Cloudflare CDN is provided for you. It makes your website run faster by caching your website data over multiple datacentres. In other words, if your readers are in a foreign country, the nearest datacentre will help distribute the contents faster to them.
Reliability
- Unlimited FREE SSL Certificate. You will want every of your website to have an SSL certificate, powered by Let’s Encrypt. With a secured connection, it gives a padlock sign on your readers’ browser when browsing your website.
- Multiple redundancies are incorporated in the Web Host infrastructure design, including Power and Hardware.
- Individual hosting account is Containerized, which means that even if there is a vulnerability for an account, it will not affect rest of the accounts on the same server. So, this makes shared hosting more secure.
- 30 daily automated backups are available. In the unfortunate event that all your files are removed accidentally, you can count on the daily backup at the account level for restoration to a previous known good state.
Support
24×7 support is a must that is handled using chat, call, and email.
So, if you are developing your website and face certain issues that might be related to Web Hosting, you can contact SiteGround support using any of these 3 channels to receive support immediately.
2. SiteGround is Optimized for WordPress workload
Are you aware of the pre-requisite components for your WordPress to run?
If not, let me quote from WordPress website on the Requirements:
We recommend servers running version 7.3 or greater of PHP and MySQL version 5.6 OR MariaDB version 10.1 or greater.
We also recommend either Apache or Nginx as the most robust options for running WordPress, but neither is required.
Sounds complex right?
To illustrate the complexity of the infrastructure and software needed to host WordPress application, let us put all of them in ONE physical computer.
Here is a simplified stack that you need to prepare before loading WordPress application:
We hope the illustration above helps you appreciate what Web Hosting companies like SiteGround are doing for us, to make our life easier.
As you can see, they ensure every software components in this stack works seamlessly with each other.
This is crucial because the foundation needs to be a proven and stable platform, so that you can entrust the Web Hosting company to host your WordPress website.
3. SiteGround made their Site Tools simple to use
Since September 2019, SiteGround began rolling out their new in-house built Site Tools, replacing the legacy cPanel.
We are so glad, because the new interface makes building and managing websites hosted in SiteGround much cleaner and easier than before.
Here is a screenshot of the Site Tool dashboard (we think it is incredibly simple and clean!):
4. SiteGround is recommended by WordPress.org
Just imagine how many Web Hosts WordPress have worked with, to get their platform running and compatible.
Through their experience, WordPress has now featured SiteGround as one of their official recommended Web Hosting companies.
This strong endorsement by WordPress should put many website owners at ease, because SiteGround has earned their trust over 16 years in the WordPress market by providing top notch hosting service.
In fact, one of the top WordPress blogs— wpbeginner blog, is actually using SiteGround’s web hosting solution!
Conclusion
We hope this guide has provided some insight for you to the ecosystems of Web Hosting, and above all, what you should look out for before choosing your web hosting.
In addition, we have written a guide to help you navigate your web hosting purchase from SiteGround, check out our post on “How to Buy Web Hosting at SiteGround in 4 Easy Steps“.
If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to email or chat with us.
We are always ready to read and listen.
