Best WordPress Hosting (Compared) - 🔥 Expert Interview + Detailed Speed Tests 🚀

Key Takeaways

in this video you'll learn about the top WordPress hosting companies on the market we know it's a big decision so we want to get you the information to you so you can get started today and with that we're going to invite somebody on here who has a ton of experience with this process syed balky he is the co-founder of several popular wordpress plugins out there including WP forms monster insights optinmonster and several others he is also the chief blogger and founder of wpbeginner the largest free or press resource site for beginners syed thanks for joining us today thank you for having me Christina yeah awesome so you know wpbeginner has turned 10 years old which congratulations on that in in internet terms that's like a century but during that time how many times have you been asked this question of what's the best wordpress hosting company out there this is a this is a question that gets asked pretty much every day you you know we just recently started our Facebook group and since then this question has been asked a lot of times in a lot of different ways so sometimes people just want to know which is the best WordPress hosting but then sometimes like what do you think about host X when really they're asking that question and then you know some part somebody might have heard more technical terms like VPS are managed and then the question gets a little bit more elaborate and but this is a big decision and there's just so much to know about it that people just don't know because nobody has the time to go and test every single hosting company in the market right and you want to feel comfortable making that decision because it's such a big one yeah and so with that what do you usually tell them first I mean like how do you they even get started with that well when I'm thinking about hosting it's all based on your needs right there's there's no right or wrong answer like there's no generic answer that this is a host that one size fits all it depends on number one what kind of website are you running are you running a small blog or a small business website or is it an e-commerce store where you're gonna have to process a lot of orders and things like that that's that's a very big distinction in my eyes then second is how big is your website right if you're just starting out I wouldn't recommend you know overspending I would say you start small and you grow you know so you can use that money elsewhere because when you're starting out you don't have a huge budget anyways but if you are a larger website then you would probably want to choose a different provider than what you would choose when you're first starting out some providers have a lot of options so you can scale up but if there's no right or wrong insert in this it just depends that so my answer is it depends what are your needs and everybody's favorite answer yeah so with that we know that there are several different types of hosting so we've got like shared WP hosting we've got VPS dedicated and managed and so like that kind of goes along with what you're saying whether you're a beginner blogger or e-commerce site or if you're a huge website needing to get a managed hosting is that kind of how that goes yeah exactly so it's really scale when you're starting out shared is the best way and for those of you who don't know what shared hosting is all it means is that there's one like giant server or a cluster of servers meaning many servers and you're just renting a small space in it because your website doesn't really need all the resources and if the hosting company was trying to sell you you know the whole server it would be a lot more expensive so what they've done is they've used law of numbers to bring the cost down for everybody to start a website I mean now hosting cost as little as like two bucks a month right so that's the only reason why that's possible is because they're sharing that resources across many websites and of course if your website kind of outgrows that and your hosting company will reach out and say hey you need to upgrade to the next next plan so yeah you start out with which shared of course it a lot of them will say unlimited space and unlimited being there's no such thing as unlimited it's basically that if they if they have put like 1gb you don't like as a non techie user at the beginner you don't know what when how many space you need so it's just easier to say unlimited and then you know as you start growing you would want to look at the options and the three options you have available is the BPS which is a virtual private server all what it means is let's say if there was 100 websites on a dedicated server that you were crudely sharing with now you might be sharing it with 10 right so you have a lot more resources a lot more options on a VPS and a dedicated server is exactly what it sounds like it's a full on this dedicated server just to your website but both VPS and dedicated servers require a little bit more technical knowledge and technical know-how and that's when this new category of managed wordpress hosting that was introduced about a decade ago now spin around forever that gate but now it's really big market where hosting companies have decided to create a specialized hosting platform that scales with you you know so if you were using let's say WP engine or Paisley you would have your site can grow and you never have to switch which is awesome yeah but it costs a little more yeah so in thinking about this what are the four factors we we always tell people to consider when they're looking at hosting well for me the most important thing of any hoax is uptime right reliability is my website gonna stay up 24/7 because you know the best websites are global anybody can access it from anywhere at any time so uptime is very very important the second most important thing for me is load time the speed of your website because number one nobody likes slow websites so your users you want to make sure they have a great experience and they're visiting you it's also search engines like Google give speed a very big role in the SEO rankings so the faster your website the better your odds of our ranking higher after that I look at support and features now when you think about features like there's a there's a feature parity like across the board like everybody has the same features now you know they have backups but they may say they have backup what kind of backups do they have that's the bigger thing they might say that we have but what kind of caching that's the difference so I'm looking at teachers and most of the hosting companies are pretty good at these things whether it be Bluehost or their psych ground hostgator that level of you know features you're getting it's pretty much the same they all have one-click staging the button you click to create that stating site will look a little different the process is a little bit different but you will have a staging site now staging one W Canyon is a different level so that when you when you start looking at manage like a true managed hosting it will be different but then of course support right I want to make sure that I can get help when I need it and believe it or not you will need help at one point or another I have you know multiple websites like a dozens and dozens of websites and they're all hosted on all different hosting companies just so I can keep trying them and making sure that voice that I'm giving is relevant and I test the support I don't use my name when I'm doing it so that I don't get any special treatment at times they're just like in the you know ghost shop and and test their sports but I want to make sure that the support is talented some of the companies have very good live chat support another stone but then they make up for it in really good phone support like I almost preferred to talk to people on the phone because number one I feel that maybe there's an SOP like a standard procedure manual and housing nobody that they give their phone agents a lot more power than they give to the live chat agent so and most people just go for the communion strap which is live chat so it's sometimes a little bit busier or says phone phone agents I just have like best of luck with them so I like phone support those are the fork you know factors i consider uptime speed features and support yeah that makes sense answer them based on that which ones do we go with for our starter hosting so yeah you know like what what I always want to you know emphasize to people is that you don't need to overspend in the beginning all right you just you can upgrade as you go along almost every hosting company is offering a free website migration service but if they whether they advertise it or not believe me they have it you know they want your business so you like just start small and grow you know as you grow then you decide you're going to stay with the same provider or go with a a mortgage provider for your knees like I don't I don't like me I'm cheap right but I started out I didn't have any money so I wanted to make sure I'm using my money in the right places so I start small I was saved the best start started hosting in the market Bluehost but I would say by far the better ones and they offer you free domain name pretty discounted price SSL Certificates I crown another really solid provide a really good good service like latch add is amazing insight crown one thing I don't like about is that they don't give you a free domain but you know but otherwise they make up for that in their cashing solution the speed of the servers are really really good and then third one in the starter market is Hostgator Hostgator I've been using them since I started wpbeginner and I haven't so I says been hostgator customer for the last 10 years of course now the server said like I have multiple dedicated servers that are running me but when I started I didn't write I had a small shared hosting account there so those three are pretty safe that I mean blue of since I ground are both recommended by wordpress.org so they're officially recommended hosting providers you really can't go wrong with them but and and both of them have come out with new panels like so they're not using cPanel anymore they have a modified version and it looks very big in a friendly much cleaner like it looks modern like you know cPanel all interfaces used to look very clunky and was it built for techy users and now this is built for business owners and and really really nice so Google since I crown or my defacto one and two and then Hostgator because I hope the hostgator makes that same leap with the control panel changes but I really like Hostgator support I've been with them you know for the last 10 years so I can't not add them in a list and and also for the beginner readers they are giving free domain now so they offer is actually better when you start looking at it says I would say Bluehost and Hostgator know the best value for it great molding will link to those in the description below as well for people in the so and then so far your your best managed hosting I think you said WP engine yeah I think WP engine is a solid bet you know that I know the team another founders really really well over there they've done a great job the whole team is really solid the platform is really good right and the pricing is still affordable like you know so WP engine is a great platform for management hosting we also use page Li they you know they've been around for a very long time I know the founding team there as well we use it on some other web sites very expensive ones they host the whole thing on Amazon but it's really really enterprise so if you're a no prize and you're watching this video I think you want Paisley but I don't think their lowest plan cost like $70 a month so it's kind of out of reach for most you know small business owners and I think WP engine is a is a great great company great platform we use them for several of our websites as well I believe number press is using WP engine and and best of all they offering our readers a better deal than what and you get on the on the you know open market so yeah okay awesome yeah great so basically it's just recap we have our three starter sites that we recommend that's Bluehost site ground and Hostgator and then if you're ready to jump up to a higher level or a managed site then we recommend WP engine is that right yeah that's that's pretty much my go-to okay now we've shown you the top hosting companies that we recommend job is in your corner to pick one that works best for you and get started and check that off your to-do list today and then feel free to join our facebook group wpbeginner engage where you can ask questions about WordPress there and thanks for joining Syed thank you for joining us and thank you for watching did you learn something from today's video if so subscribe to our YouTube channel and we'll send more helpful tips to help you manage your WordPress website and thanks for watching