Web hosting is one of the most important things that must be taken care of for any website on the Internet. Therefore, you must choose the appropriate, high-quality hosting that enhances the performance of your site, improves its ranking in search engines, and contributes to increasing the number of its visitors and increasing its sales.
On the other hand, bad hosting will slow down the loading speed of your site, cause it to constantly crash, and leave users with a bad impression of it. It may also affect its security and make it vulnerable to hacking.
In this article, we will explain to you the concept of web hosting, and the difference between web hosting and WordPress hosting, which are considered two different types of hosting and are often confused. We will also show you the criteria for choosing the best hosting for your site, and recommend the best hosting for you.
What is web hosting?
Web hosting is a general term that describes a service through which a person can publish their website and make it available to visitors all the time.
All site files are stored on a server or hosting server, which is a computer with special specifications that is connected to the Internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and where your site lives.
So when someone visits your website they are actually connecting to this server to access the pages of your website.
Since different websites have different needs, different types of web hosting are available, and there are different hosting companies or providers that offer different hosting features and plans.
Therefore, if you are planning to create a website for yourself or your business, the first thing you should think about is determining the type of hosting, the hosting company, and the hosting plan that is most appropriate for this website.
Any type of hosting can host websites built with WordPress, provided that the hosting server has support for the PHP language and supports the MySQL database management system . WordPress recommends that the following hosting requirements be met in order for WordPress to run in the best possible way:
- PHP version 7.4 or later.
- MySQL version 5.7 and above, or MariaDB version 10.2 and above.
- HTTPS support
But if you want more supportive hosting for your WordPress site, you can rely on a special type of hosting known as WordPress hosting , which we will explain in the next paragraph.
Read also: What is hosting? A comprehensive explanation for beginners
What is WordPress Hosting?
Since WordPress is one of the most widely used and famous content management systems , and today it operates more than a third of websites around the world, some hosting providers have created a dedicated type of hosting known as WordPress hosting.
WordPress hosting is a type of web hosting that has been enhanced and supported with additional features and tools in order to run WordPress sites more easily and quickly.
When you use WordPress hosting, you will get several tools and services designed specifically to serve WordPress sites. These services vary from one WordPress hosting provider to another, but in general they provide all or some of the following features:
- One-Click WordPress Installation So you can quickly install WordPress on your site.
- Perform automatic updates to the WordPress core as well as to plugins and themes.
- A high level of security, as the servers are equipped against threats specific to WordPress in particular, rather than general threats to any site.
- The ability to add an SSL certificate to your site in just a few clicks.
- A technical support team expert in the WordPress system and solving its technical problems.
Managed WordPress hosting
There is a dedicated type of WordPress hosting known as Managed WordPress Hosting, and in this type of hosting, more services and features are offered as well. And you have a team of WordPress experts to support and assist you when necessary.
If your site experiences a security breach, for example, the hosting provider that manages your site will help you solve and correct any security problems or vulnerabilities to restore your site. Most of the popular WordPress plugins like security, caching, and performance optimization plugins are pre-installed and update automatically.
Of course, there will be additional costs when using managed WordPress hosting, but investing in managed WordPress hosting can help improve the performance of your site, as you will get a hosting environment that is fully optimized for your site, which will save you time in performing technical tasks related to hosting.
What is the difference between web hosting and WordPress hosting ?
The basic difference between web hosting and WordPress hosting is that web hosting is a comprehensive and general service for any website, regardless of the way in which this website was created, including websites designed using WordPress.
While WordPress hosting is a specific service specifically designed for hosting WordPress websites that provides customized services and support for WordPress performance. Therefore, WordPress hosting is a preferred option for people who have limited experience in running a website and managing a server.
What are the types of hosting ?
As we mentioned previously, any type of hosting solution can host WordPress websites. Once you are able to install the WordPress platform on a host, this host will be able to run a WordPress website.
But there are different types of hosting – whether they are public web hosting, or dedicated WordPress hosting – and the most prominent of these types are:
Shared hosting
Shared hosting is the cheapest form of hosting in which your site shares resources with other websites located on the same hosting server.
This sharing aims to reduce costs, but in reality it negatively affects the performance of your site. Because there is more than one site on the same server using the same resources, this means that when one of these sites consumes a lot of resources, it will cause all the other sites on it to slow down.
Read more: What is shared hosting and why we do not recommend relying on it
VPS hosting
Virtual Private Server hosting is a type of hosting in which hosting resources are shared with other sites. But there is isolation within the shared server, where your site will have its own space, which constitutes a virtual server dedicated to the site.
This type of hosting costs a slightly higher budget than shared hosting, but in return it provides a higher level of control and customization.
Dedicated servers hosting
In dedicated server hosting, there is an entire physical server dedicated with all its resources to host the website.
This type of hosting is financially expensive and is considered one of the most expensive types of hosting, but in return it achieves very high performance for the website and can serve a large number of website visitors at the same time.
You find the reference because the managed WordPress hosting we mentioned earlier is mostly based on dedicated server hosting. But it can also be set up using VPS hosting, cloud hosting, or even shared hosting.
Read more: An explanation of dedicated servers, their uses, advantages and disadvantages
Reseller Hosting
This form of hosting allows you to purchase space on a hosting server, divide it up, and resell it to other customers.
This type of hosting is used by individuals or companies who have technical knowledge of server management as they can make money by reselling space from this server to other customers.
Cloud hosting
In this type of hosting, the website is hosted on a cloud structure consisting of several servers instead of storing it on a physical server.
This type of hosting is characterized by scalability, and it charges you for consumption , as prices are not fixed. You can start with a limited plan at a cheap price and if your site experiences increased traffic, hosting resources and costs are increased, so it is ideal for small to medium sized websites that require more resources than shared hosting.
Read more: What is Web Hosting? And what are its types?
How to choose the best hosting for a WordPress website
There are thousands of companies that provide web hosting services around the world from which you can choose whatever you want to host your WordPress site.
You are also free to choose general web hosting or WordPress hosting, and choose managed or unmanaged hosting for your site, but there are a set of basic things that we recommend looking for when choosing hosting for your website in general, the most important of which are:
- Speed in loading the website and navigating between its pages. Look for companies that use SSD drives and a content delivery network (CDN) and have servers in multiple geographical locations, as these factors contribute greatly to improving site speed.
- Providing basic security and protection for the website and protecting it from any malicious software, codes, or security breaches.
- Ensuring site availability 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. (Uptime is the percentage of time that your site remains online and it must be 99% or 100% for the hosting to be good)
- Providing customer service and having a knowledgeable support team available at any time to assist you in the event of any problems with the site or the hosting server via phone, chat, or email.
- Scalability: Many hosting providers offer several types of hosting to enable you to upgrade your site from shared hosting to VPS hosting or dedicated server hosting. Some types of hosting, such as cloud hosting, allow sites to increase resources when needed.
- The file storage size must be large and able to accommodate the size of your site’s files, and the bandwidth must be appropriate for the number of visitors to your site.
- Providing domain name registration service. Many hosting service providers offer domain name registration for the site as part of their hosting packages, and this may save you from purchasing a domain name.
- Secure dedicated email accounts for your domain name. Some hosting companies provide several email accounts for each website, and this contributes to giving greater trust to your site and brand.
The five best WordPress hosting
The hosting you choose for your website depends on your budget, the number of visitors to your site, and the amount of help you want from your host in running your site.
We can consider that cloud hosting is the best option for hosting WordPress sites because it balances performance and price and saves you from changing the hosting plan after expanding your site and increasing the number of its visitors.
Here is a list of the best companies that provide cloud hosting services that you can adopt to host your WordPress website:
DigitalOcean
Digital Ocean provides a wonderful cloud hosting platform for WordPress. It provides you with an SSD cloud and provides all the functions you need to host your site and program your applications.
It includes several hosting plans at a price starting from $5 per month. You can start with it and ensure that you will never run out of space allocated to your site. It is flexible and expandable and provides you with multiple storage units up to 16 terabytes in size.
Developed and designed primarily for developers, the hosting helps you collect metrics, monitor performance, and sends you notifications if something needs improvement.
Read more:
Steps to create and activate an account on Digital Ocean hosting
Steps to install WordPress on Digital Ocean hosting
Cloudways
CloudWiz is a distinguished managed cloud hosting platform that allows you to choose from several hosting infrastructures for Amazon, Digital Ocean, Google Cloud, and others, and install and manage a WordPress site with great ease.
It enables you to create your website using any CMS, including WordPress. You can install WordPress on Cloudwise and start running your website in a few minutes. It is also WooCommerce ready and optimized for speed as well.
You can also choose different server resources according to your needs, select the appropriate CPU, RAM, and storage space for you, and provide distinguished support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Read more : What is Cloudways hosting, and how to install WordPress on it
Amazon Cloud Amazon Cloud
Amazon Web Services is considered one of the most famous cloud hosting providers. It is famous for its high reliability and almost 100 percent uptime. It owns many of its data center locations, and this means that sites hosted on Amazon will not be disrupted.
The problem with this hosting is that configuring it, setting it up, installing WordPress on it, performing backups, etc. requires experience in cloud computing and knowledge of dealing with command line screens. Amazon has launched a reliable service called Lightsail to facilitate the process of managing servers and installing applications.
Read also: Installing WordPress on Amazon servers using the Lightsail application
Some also resort to using Cloudways hosting and rely on the infrastructure of Amazon cloud servers that it provides, eliminating the difficulties of managing the server and solving its problems, and focusing on your own site.
Google Cloud GCP
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is one of the most popular cloud computing providers that you can rely on to deploy your WordPress site.
Google Cloud hosting guarantees you a high-performance WordPress site, as it offers a variety of cloud products. Compute Engine, which is a virtual machine (VM) similar to the concept of a physical server, but it is virtual, and the resources in it are expandable, in addition to DNS services, CDN, RAM, and SSD disks.
Linode
Linode is a premium cloud hosting company that provides reliable virtual private servers at affordable prices and outstanding customer service
Lynode focuses on providing developer-friendly platforms, providing various customized products and services for developers and businesses that enable them to more easily and cost-effectively build, deploy, and scale applications in the cloud.
It also provides a 99.99% uptime guarantee. If your server is down for more than 0.01%, you can request a credit for the downtime.
Read more: The best reliable hosting company and 12 criteria for choosing the best hosting
Conclusion
In today’s article, we learned about the concept of web hosting and WordPress hosting, which is hosting that has been optimized to run WordPress. We have shown that WordPress hosting is not a requirement for running WordPress sites that can run on almost any hosting.
Finally, in order to determine the best hosting for your website, let me tell you that there is no right or wrong choice. Rather, the choice depends on the type of hosting plan you want, your budget, and the amount of support and assistance you need from the hosting company while running your site.
But the general trend in hosting is towards relying on cloud hosting to publish websites because they are more secure, in addition to being suitable for all types of websites, and they are scalable and maintain the site’s performance and stability.
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