The best web hosting company will help ensure that your website enjoys effective security, loads quickly, and remains online 24 hours a day. But how do you choose the one that’s most ideal for you?
The WordPress hosting market is highly competitive, with thousands of web hosting services fighting for your business. This has helped improve the overall quality of hosting available. However, if you manage a WordPress-powered online shop, you need to pay closer attention to which hosting service you use. After all, WordPress shops tend to use more resources than small blogs and business websites.
In this article, we’d like to show you what to look for in a web hosting company. Then, we’ll recommend some of the best services for hosting a WordPress-powered store.
So let’s get started!
What You Can Expect To Pay The Best Web Hosting Company
The world of website hosting can be daunting. There are thousands of hosting companies online, and each company offers many different packages at different price points. This makes it difficult to know which hosting setup is best for you, particularly if you’ve never hosted a website before.
Generally speaking, the more resources your website needs to function correctly, the more money you need to spend. So while a small online shop may only spend $10 per month on hosting, a large regional shop may spend thousands.
You can get an idea of what you need to spend by reviewing popular managed WordPress hosting plans. However, be prepared to scale your hosting requirements upwards as your traffic and customer base grow.
The Two Main Types Of WordPress Hosting Plans
What factors should you consider when choosing the best web hosting company for your e-commerce store?
First, you must figure out whether or not you require said company to manage your hosting environment for you. Second, you should determine the level of support you need from it every month.
This brings us to the two major types of WordPress hosting plans:
Managed Hosting
In a managed hosting plan, the hosting company takes over most technical aspects of managing a server. This includes security, scaling, maintenance, updates, and performance.
Over the last few years, most WordPress hosting companies have taken this one step further to reduce the time you spend administrating your website, offering WordPress updates, website backups, security scans, and more. Furthermore, they’ll help you resolve any issues you have with your WordPress website.
The level of management varies greatly across the market. At one of the spectrum, you have managed WordPress hosting services that handle everything for you. Typically, these offer a premium service that’s normally associated with hosted website-building platforms such as Squarespace.
At the other end of the market, we have hosting companies that focus solely on managing the server. Thus, they leave you to manage all other aspects of website hosting yourself. These types of hosting services can be considered “Semi-Managed.”
Unmanaged Hosting (Self-Managed Hosting)
In an unmanaged hosting setup, you’re responsible for managing your server and keeping it secure. Additionally, no help is provided for any websites that you own.
As you can imagine, this involves spending more time doing maintenance and other administrative tasks. Nevertheless, unmanaged hosting is a better fit for many online shops. After all, self-managed hosting gives greater control and flexibility over how you operate your shop. Moreover, since you’re handling things yourself, unmanaged hosting tends to be significantly cheaper.
What To Look For In A WordPress Hosting Company
There are many features to look out for when selecting the best web hosting company for your WordPress site. These features may complement, or even replace, other website services you use. For example, instead of relying on your web host, you may choose to monitor uptime using a third-party service such as UptimeRobot.
Be sure to review what features are on offer and evaluate their importance to you.
Website Staging
Website staging lets you make a clone of your website so that you can test critical updates and changes before they go live. This can greatly reduce website downtime (which is incredibly costly to online shops).
Backups
Backups can help get your store back online in the event of an attack or error. Be sure to supplement internal web hosting backups with a reliable third-party backup solution such as BlogVault or UpdraftPlus.
Infrastructure
Pay attention to the architecture a hosting company uses and whether its platform is centralized or distributed across the globe. Some hosting companies also offer their own Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Security
Security is not something to take for granted. Does the hosting company have a strong firewall and protect your website from DDoS attacks? What about uptime monitoring and support for SSL certificates?
Website Migrations
Good hosting companies will help customers migrate their existing websites to their service.
E-commerce Features
Many WordPress hosting companies offer tailored hosting plans specifically for store owners. These e-commerce plans have improved support and integration with e-commerce WordPress plugins such as WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.
Quality of Support
Support varies greatly across hosting companies. Thus, make sure you get the level of support you need, whether it be telephone, email, forum, or chat support.
Host Dashboard
Depending on your technical experience, you may prefer a simplified dashboard or something more complex that gives you access to advanced settings and features.
WordPress Management
Many managed WordPress companies let you make bulk changes and updates to multiple WordPress websites directly from your main dashboard.
Pricing
Make sure your hosting plan meets your requirements with some room for traffic spikes and unexpected CPU loads. Don’t pay extra for features you don’t need. However, remember that selecting a cheaper hosting plan can prove costly in the long run if it causes downtime.
As you can see, there are many factors to consider when selecting the best web hosting company for your online search. Should you be unsure about what a provider offers, send them an email and ask them to clarify their features and services to you.
Recommended Hosting Companies
Do you want your online store to be secure and remain online 24 hours a day? Then you need to select a professional website hosting service that has the architecture to host your shop reliably.
So let’s take a quick look at some of the best WordPress hosting companies on the market today.
1. Kinsta
Kinsta is a managed WordPress hosting company that uses the Google Cloud Platform. Plans start from only $30 per month and include website staging, backups, performance monitoring, and use of the KeyCDN content delivery network.
We’re very familiar with Kinsta as it’s the hosting company that hosts WC Vendors. We’ve always been happy with uptime, performance, and their quality of support. For this reason, it may be the best web hosting company for your store.
2. Pagely
Instead of targeting those who are new to WordPress, Pagely focuses mainly on Enterprise customers. Its lowest plan starts at $199 per month. All plans include premium support, caching, CDN, website staging, and automatic backups to Amazon S3.
3. WP Engine
WP Engine is a hugely popular managed WordPress solution that offers premium support, automated updates, website backups, and website staging. Its dedicated e-commerce hosting plans start from only $30 per month and come packaged with store themes.
The company also owns the managed WordPress hosting company Flywheel. Consider WP Engine if you’re looking for the best web hosting company for your website.
4. Pressable
Pressable is a managed WordPress hosting company that has plans starting from $17.50 per month. As it’s under Automattic ownership, you gain access to WordPress.com’s impressive global CDN and architecture. Each plan also comes packaged with Jetpack Security features such as malware scanning, threat monitoring, and web application firewall.
5. Pantheon
Pantheon is a SaaS Platform that sells dedicated hosting plans to WordPress and WooCommerce users for $50 and up per month. It offers website monitoring, a global content delivery network, automated backups, and security features.
Looking for the best web hosting company for your e-commerce shop? Then try out Pantheon!
6. Nexcess
Nexcess is a managed hosting company run by the same people behind Liquid Web and iThemes. Managed WooCommerce hosting plans are available from $19 per month. All plans include automatic updates, website backups, website staging, and a host of performance features such as image optimization.
7. Siteground
Siteground has gained a large fan base by offering generous managed WordPress hosting packages at low prices. Its WooCommerce hosting plans start from only $4.99 per month. All customers get access to WordPress support, website backups, website staging, caching, automatic updates, and more.
While Kinsta hosts the main WC Vendors website, SiteGround reliably hosts the WC Vendors documentation area. Check it out; it could be the best web hosting company for you.
8. Digital Ocean
If you’re looking for unmanaged hosting, the cloud hosting company Digital Ocean is a service you should consider. With servers worldwide, you can create Droplets for only $5 per month and scale them easily using their simple user interface.
9. Vultr
Like Digital Ocean, Vultr is a popular cloud hosting service with data centers around the world. A simple SSD cloud instance starts from only $2.50 per month and can be easily scaled up.
10. Cloudways
Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting solution that lets you deploy hosting environments using Google, Amazon, DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr. For many shop owners, this will be a more practical solution than hosting with these services directly, since Cloudways provides support, backups, monitoring, and more. Pricing starts from $10 per month.
11. RunCloud
To reduce administration time and make your life easier, you can also use a cloud server management service such as RunCloud. This complements a deployment from Amazon S3, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, or Vultr, possibly making it the best web hosting company for your webstore.
RunCloud’s basic plan only costs $6.67 per month and includes website staging and other useful features. To get a better understanding of how it all works, check out Colin Newcomer’s experience of using RunCloud to manage his server.
Conclusion
We hope you now have a better understanding of what to look for when choosing the best web hosting company for your online shop.
Whether you’re new to hosting or not, you should reach out to several good hosting companies and speak to them directly about your shop, your traffic levels, and your long-term goals. By doing so, you can evaluate what level of resources you need and open up a dialogue with the companies too.
This should help you make an informed decision as to who you should host with, though you should not be afraid to migrate to another hosting service if you aren’t happy.
To help you choose the best web hosting company for your e-commerce store, here is our list of excellent providers:
- Kinsta
- Pagely
- WP Engine
- Pressable
- Pantheon
- Nexcess
- Siteground
- Digital Ocean
- Vultr
- Cloudways
- RunCloud
Do you have any questions about how to pick the best web hosting company for your e-commerce store? Don’t hesitate to reach out to us; we’d be happy to hear from you!