As someone on the sharp end of website development, I interact with a variety of web hosting companies. And over the years I’ve narrowed it down to a few I prefer to work with, and that I recommend to my clients.
The reasons are simple – security, support, and features that save me time – and save my clients money.
Security
Security with a WordPress site is no joke.
Many popular hosting companies are targeted by hackers, and some hosts are less concerned about security than others. While you can always add plugins and third party services for extra security, that also adds overhead to your site in both dollar cost and page loading speed. As well as adding more plugins to manage and keep updated. Having a host who is paranoid about security and knows how to make WordPress work safely within a secure environment is simply easier and safer. And much cheaper than getting hacked.
Support
Support becomes critical when there’s a problem, and when there’s a problem – bad support is worse than no support. Personally I prefer live chat because there’s a record of what was said, embedded links, and I can email it to myself for future reference and send transcripts to clients. And having smart techs on the other end who can answer questions, and know how to solve issues, makes the rare problems go away faster.
Features
Features that are important day to day include page loading speed, site backups and restores, and extra sites for dev and staging.
Site loading speed is now (and has been for a while) directly related to your search engine search results placement. Simply put, Google says faster is better, and some hosts are faster than others.
Backups should be obvious – and the more the better! And being able to take a site with a problem and work “offline” in a dev site is safer for me, and for the client. Nobody wants the live site going offline from a typo or other conflict.
Other features I look for are secure FTP across all sites, free and easy SSL, and limited server cache.
A good hosting company will offer all this and more, and make day to day site management as painless as possible.
Overall – hosting your WordPress site with a company who gets it will result in better performance, better security, and real world cost savings month to month.