Recently, we have received a lot of questions from our readers, asking how to create their own blog. It’s flattering to know that our website has been so inspiring, that our frequent readers want to start their own blog themselves, so we decided to write a small post about it and introduce you to WordPress, and how to find the most suitable hosting platform for it. WordPress is such a flexible blogging platform and content management system. It is so flexible that it can be hosted on almost every hosting option you can think of – with practically any provider. However, certain hosting option work better with WordPress for certain reasons. Which one suits you best? That is what we are going to find out in this article.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is very suitable for those who are just getting started blogging using WordPress. Many shared hosting plans are available at highly affordable prices; some are even available for less than £1 a month. Of course you do get what you pay for but virtually any package is more than adequate for hosting a single blog.
Shared hosting offers a number of advantages. For starters, it is still the most affordable WordPress hosting solution out there, as mentioned previously. There are even free shared hosting plans available from select service providers, albeit with limited features and resources.
Shared hosting services are also built on Linux, with PHP and MySQL natively supported. These are the things you need to host a WordPress site. If you are relatively new to web hosting and server configurations, you can easily pick a good shared hosting plan and be fairly certain that it will run your WordPress site perfectly.
The only downside to using shared hosting is performance. Your WordPress blog can still run smoothly and perform very well even under heavy traffic, but the server is still shared with hundreds of other websites. Possibly thousands. If you want to squeeze more performance or handle a higher traffic load, then you might want to consider upgrading to a…
Virtual Private Server
Virtual Private Servers (VPS) bridge the gap between shared hosting and a dedicated server. It is still very affordable, but you get a set of dedicated server resources at your disposal. Honestly it amazes me people still opt for a fully dedicated solution when a VPS is perfectly adequate. If you are running a WordPress blog with a lot of traffic, or you want to run a lot of blogs at the same time, VPS hosting may be the WordPress hosting option but of course it comes with its advantages and disadvantages.
There are two types of VPS hosting setups to choose from: managed and unmanaged. The later is usually more affordable, but you have to do everything from setting up the server to maintaining it in the long run yourself. Although with that said, the setup is the difficult part. Once it’s running, it’s pretty much running. You also need to know how to secure the server properly to prevent problems in the future. Some hosts will be quick to blame you for security lapses so it really pays to know what you’re doing.
Managed VPS solutions, on the other hand, work very similarly to a shared hosting account. You can access the server using WHM or cPanel or other administrative panels of your choice. You can also set up websites and run your WordPress blogs easily. A team of server administrators from the hosting company behind the service will take care of setting up and maintaining the virtual server for you.
In terms of performance, a VPS is much better than shared hosting. You get a predetermined amount of RAM and processor cores to work with. How well the server runs WordPress and handles heavy traffic depends entirely on how you set it up.
A VPS also allows the server to be fully optimized for WordPress sites. You can use caching technologies such as Varnish and Nginx to speed things up. You can even change the type of database used by WordPress entirely and skip MySQL altogether if you need to. Bottom line is, you can create more of a tailor made solution as opposed to being stuck working with what you have.
Reseller Hosting
This last option is more suitable for those of you who are running a network of WordPress websites. I’ve been using reseller hosting to run my WordPress blogs; I find the hosting option to be more flexible than shared hosting, but without the extra complications of using a VPS. But of course it all depends on your own situation and requirements.
Reseller hosting allows you to set up an account for every WordPress blog. This means you can have multiple administrators working on different sites at the same time. It is also useful for sandboxing one WordPress site from the other; should a site get infected, for example, the rest of the sites on the server remains protected.
Reseller hosting is also better than shared hosting when it comes to overall performance. You can customize more aspects of the hosting account too, allowing you to configure a private nameservers, change the PHP version used, configure caching and perform many other tasks that would otherwise be impossible when you use shared hosting.
What about the downsides of using a reseller hosting account? You may not be able to enjoy some of the perks of shared hosting. For example, it is easier to find an unlimited shared hosting plan than an unlimited reseller plan; even when you do get unlimited hosting space or monthly bandwidth, there may be more restrictions attached to the service.
Naturally, reseller hosting is also more expensive than shared hosting. When you run a huge number of WordPress websites, however, the extra cost is definitely worth spending. You can manage your WordPress sites much more efficiently, have more administrators working on them and still get the enhanced performance level on every site you run.
