WordPress Web Hosting  Suggestions

At the most basic level WordPress requires PHP 7.4+ and MySQL, with Apache or nginx. Beyond that there are numerous other things you should take into account before choosing a host for your WordPress website. Traffic volume, speed, security and ease of can all vary greatly depending on the host you choose.

I’ve worked with more WordPress sites than I can count, and will be sharing my opinion on hosts that I truly recommend from experience for your next project. Please let me know your experiences with hosting WordPress, or any other suggested companies!

WPEngine

WPEngine WordPress HostingWPEngine provides customized hosting specifically optimized for the needs of WordPress.

WPEngine handles the server optimizations and security for you. I recently grilled Jason, a support tech, with some questions about the optimizations they have made, and to say the least I was very impressed:

Are you running apache or have you used something faster like Lightspeed or NGINX?

We use a variety of techniques and server technology for speed and scalability. We use Varnish in front of nginx in front of Apache. Sounds complex, but Varnish acts as a cache and stampede-protector, nginx does processing (i.e. gzip) and can serve static files directly, and finally Apache is used for dynamic content.

But on top of that we use memcached combined with W3TC (we configure this for you) for database query caches, we cache file content on disk, and finally we use *really* expensive, good hardware for high I/O rates (i.e. SCSI RAID 10) and processing rates.

Is there any estimate for the number of unique hits per month that you believe the setup can handle?

We have individual customers with 20 million pageviews/month and 40 terabytes of bandwidth per month.

Are there any guarantees you provide for security?

Security is never a guarantee, but we certainly go out of our way to do it. We have hardware in front of the servers for things like packet-scanning for known exploits and DoS-attack prevention (2million packets/second), then of course on-disk measures on the servers themselves.

Kinsta

Kinsta WordPress HostingKinsta is a great alternative WordPress option for those that want to avoid WPEngine. It provides many of the same features, and some additional ones. APM and performance monitoring tools are better than WPEngine, and the performance might be better too. Ultimately CloudFlare is what provides the best performance, which sits in front of a web host.

The big drawback to Kinsta when compared to WPEngine is a git deployment process, which they don’t have. It can however be configured if you know what you’re doing.

Page.ly

Pagely LogoSecure WordPress Hosting from Page.ly is a solid mid-priced hosting option.

It’s a new breed of web hosting specifically tuned to handled the needs of WordPress. It’s easy to setup and provides a fully managed, simple experience that can get you started in minutes. If you don’t have an IT staff on hand to manage a host or you don’t want to bother with the intricacies of maintenance I highly recommend going with a specialized WordPress host like Page.ly.

Dreamhost

Dreamhost LogoDreamhost is about $9 per month, and provides reliable hosting for small sized websites with less than 10,000 unique visitors per month. Their one-click installation makes it simple for anyone to install WordPress regardless of technical skill-level.

Adding and hosting domains is a breeze, and they even handled the setup of Google Apps for your domains as well. I recommend Dreamhost for any small business owner looking to host their own WordPress website.

Meet the Author

Kevin Leary, WordPress Consultant

I'm a freelance web developer and WordPress consultant in Boston, MA with 17 years of experience building websites and applications. View a portfolio of my work or request an estimate for your next project.