Best Website Hosting for WordPress websites

Who provides the best website hosting? Who should I host my website with?

This is one of the first questions my clients ask me when they start a website project with me, so I decided I would share my experiences with you of who I think provides the best website hosting.

Over the years I have been involved in web, which is going on 13 years now, I have tried several web hosting companies. It is only in the last 12 months now that I have got serious with my new Griggworks company that I can now say I am fully satisfied with the web hosting company I’m using.

Although the company we used while in NETswitch offered us fully managed web hosting, time after time I was on the phone with them asking them why our websites were down. Very frustrating for not only me but also my clients who are also trying to run and grow a small business.

Although there will always be unavoidable downtime at some point in your websites lifetime, I am yet to experience it with my current website hosting provider and if it has had downtime, I haven’t noticed. Keep in mind I am online all day everyday!

So why did I choose to host my websites with the current provider? Simple, they took the time to understand my requirements and offer me a solution right for me. This is how it panned out:

I wasn’t happy with my existing website hosting provider, so I started searching online and reading reviews. Coming from a web background I knew I wanted to find a managed WordPress hosting provider. Seeing as I am still working full-time, I simply do not have the time to be worrying about hosting issues.

After reading through what seemed hundreds of reviews on the different options available, I decided to contact the team at WP Engine to confirm a few questions I had. I’m pretty sure they could see I knew what I was after and was a serious customer, so they got me on the phone to discuss my requirements.

By the end of phone call I had a meeting organised with Amanda who is the New Client Success team member. Timing worked out well for us as she was out here visiting Sydney for a conference (WP Engine is a US company). We met up over lunch, I discussed my requirements of trying to find the best website hosting for all of my projects as well as voicing my concerns around certain areas such as bandwidth limitations in the plans and access to the Content Delivery Network (CDN) – 2 important features for my websites. With those sorted, we spoke about a few other things before it was time for me to get back to work.

Getting started with WP Engine is quick and easy, select a plan below.

[button size=”big_large_full_width” target=”_blank” hover_type=”default” text_align=”center” text=”Get Started with 20% off the WP Engine Personal Plan” link=”https://griggworks.com/wpengine-personal/”]
[button size=”big_large_full_width” target=”_blank” hover_type=”default” text_align=”center” text=”Get Started with 20% off the WP Engine Business Plan” link=”https://griggworks.com/wpengine-business/”]

Why did I choose WP Engine?

Having that chat with a real person who could answer all the technical questions is what sealed the deal for me. I signed up and within 24 hours I had transferred all of my websites over. Being new to the system I had a small issue trying to get something set up, so I got straight on to live chat support who got the issue sorted within 5 minutes! I’ve had a few more support requests over the past 12 months, all of which have been sorted straight away. WP Engine support is by far the most impressive I have experienced from any web hosting company.

WP Engine is one of the most popular managed WordPress hosting providers in the world. Here are some of the best features:

  • Super fast and reliable WordPress hosting
  • Superior Support – Your website is covered by a team of rigorously-trained WordPress experts available around the clock to ensure your website is running smoothly.
  • Real-Time security threat detection – Their proprietary, adaptable intrusion detection and prevention system dynamically detects and blocks malicious behaviour.
  • Staging Sites – A staging site is a test environment where you can test your website, track/fix bugs and make modifications without interrupting your production website. Really handy for me to create and test a site before making it live.
  • Daily backup and security system that scans and protects your website against malware and attackers. Plus, if something goes wrong, you can easily restore to previous snapshots with only 1 mouse click.
  • Evercache – a caching technology for maximised speed and scalability that’s designed by WP Engine.

Nothing in life is perfect and there are always going to be some cons of the website hosting packages available. Some people see the bandwidth limitations on WP Engine hosting packages as a downside, but let’s be real here, although we all want thousands of visitors to our small business websites each day, you’re not going to reach that straight away. so the smaller plans are more than enough to get you started online.

WP Engine hosting plans are based on how many monthly visits you are likely to have, so the plans available include:

  • Personal where you get 1 website and 10GB of data storage and 25,000 visits per month on a shared server (starts at $US29/month).
  • Professional – 10 websites and 20GB space and 100,000 visits per month on a shared server ($US99/month).
  • Business – 25 websites and 30GB space and 400,000 visits per month on a shared server ($US249/month).

Which WP Engine Plan should you choose?

Most of you will benefit from the Personal plan, which is the best solution if you compare the price vs performance. The majority of you will also only require the one website. However, if you want to host more than one website, or even dozens of websites you’ll need to get at least the Business plan. These plans are significantly more expensive, but you’ll get some pretty cool additional services like phone support, GeoIP and WordPress Multisites.

As a conclusion to this post, I want to end by saying that I only recommend products I truly believe in and currently use myself. I build websites for a living so I need to find reputable companies to partner with that offer quality services. WP Engine is working out to be the best website hosting for me, so I am confident it will work for you.

[button size=”big_large_full_width” target=”_blank” hover_type=”default” text=”Get Started with 20% off the WP Engine Personal Plan” link=”https://griggworks.com/wpengine-personal/”]
[button size=”big_large_full_width” target=”_blank” hover_type=”default” text=”Get Started with 20% off the WP Engine Business Plan” link=”https://griggworks.com/wpengine-business/”]