Web Hosting is one of the most important things to take care of for any website on the internet.
So you should choose the right high-quality hosting that enhances the performance of your site, improves its rank in search engines, and contributes to increasing the number of visitors and increase sales.
On the other hand, bad hosting will slow down the loading speed of your site, cause it to crash constantly, leave a bad impression on users about it, and may also affect its security and make it vulnerable to hacking.
In this article, we will explain to you the concept of web hosting, and the difference between web hosting and WordPress hosting, which are two different types of hosting and are often confused, we will also show you the criteria for choosing the best hosting for your site, and we will nominate the best hosting for you.
What is Web Hosting?
Web Hosting is a general term that describes a service through which a person can publish his website on the internet and make it available to visitors all the time.
All site files are stored on a server or hosting server, which is a computer with special specifications that is connected to the internet 24 hours a week and where your site lives.
Thus, when someone visits your website, they actually connect to this server to access the pages of your website.
Because different websites have different needs, different types of web hosting are available, and there are different hosting companies or providers that offer different hosting features and plans.
Thus, if you are planning to create your own website or business, the first thing you should think about is determining the type of hosting, hosting company, and hosting plan that is most suitable for this site.
Any type of hosting can host sites built with the WordPress system, provided that the hosting server has support for the PHP language, and it has support for the MySQL database management system. WordPress recommends that the following hosting requirements be met in order for WordPress to run in the best possible way:
PHP version 7.4 or later.
MySQL version 5.7 and above, or MariaDB version 10.2 and above.
HTTPS support
But in case you want more supportive hosting for your WordPress site, you can rely on a special type of hosting known as WordPress hosting which we will explain in the next paragraph.
What is WordPress hosting?
Since WordPress is one of the most widely used and well-known content management systems, today it occupies more than a third of sites around the world, some hosting providers have created a custom type of hosting known as WordPress hosting.
WordPress hosting is a type of web hosting that has been enhanced and supported with additional features and tools in order to operate WordPress sites more easily and quickly.
When you use WordPress hosting, you will get several tools and services specifically designed to serve WordPress sites, and these services vary from one WordPress hosting provider to another, but in general, they provide all or some of the following features:
- Install WordPress with one click so that you can quickly install WordPress on your site.
- Perform automatic updates for the WordPress kernel as well as for plugins and templates.
- A high level of security, where the servers are equipped against WordPress-specific threats in particular, rather than general threats to any site.
- The ability to add an SSL certificate to your site in a few clicks.
- An expert technical support team in the WordPress system and solving its technical problems.
Managed WordPress hosting.
There is a dedicated type of WordPress hosting known as Managed WordPress Hosting and in this type of hosting more services and features are offered as well. And have a team of WordPress experts to support you and help you when necessary.
For example, if your site has experienced a security breach, the hosting provider that manages your site will help you solve and correct any problems or vulnerabilities to restore your site.
Most of the popular WordPress plugins such as security, caching and performance optimization plugins are preinstalled and updated automatically.
Of course, there will be additional costs when using Managed WordPress hosting, but investing in Managed WordPress hosting can help improve the performance of your site, as you will get a fully optimized hosting environment for your site, which will save you time in performing technical hosting tasks.
What is the difference between web hosting and WordPress hosting?
The main difference between web hosting and WordPress hosting is that web hosting is a comprehensive and general service for any website, regardless of the method by which this site was created, including sites designed using WordPress.
While WordPress hosting is a specific service designed specifically for hosting WordPress sites that offers customized services and support for WordPress performance.
Thus, WordPress hosting is a preferred option for people with limited experience in running a website and managing a server.
What are the types of hosting?
As mentioned earlier, any type of hosting solution can host WordPress sites. Once you are able to install the WordPress platform on a hosting, this hosting will be able to run the WordPress site.
But there are different types of hosting - be it public web hosting, or custom WordPress hosting - and the most prominent of these types:
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is the cheapest form of hosting and in it your site shares resources with other websites located on the same hosting server.
This sharing aims to reduce costs, but in fact, it negatively affects the performance of your site, because there is more than one site on the same server using the same resources, it means that when one of these sites consumes a lot of resources, it will slow down all the other sites on it.
Hosting dedicated VPS virtual servers
Shared virtual Private Server hosting is a type of hosting in which hosting resources are shared with other sites. But there is isolation within the shared server where your site will have its own space that forms a virtual server dedicated to the site.
This type of hosting costs a slightly higher budget than shared hosting, but in return provides a higher level of control and customization.
Dedicated server hosting (Dedicated servers)
In dedicated server hosting, there is an entire dedicated physical server with all its resources for hosting the website.
This type of hosting is financially expensive and is considered one of the most expensive types of hosting, but in return, it achieves very high website performance and can serve a large number of site visitors at the same time.
You find the reference because the Managed WordPress hosting we mentioned earlier is mostly based on dedicated server hosting. But they can also be set up using VPS virtual server hosting, cloud hosting, or even shared hosting.
Reseller reseller
This form of hosting allows you to purchase space on the hosting server, divide it and resell it to other customers.
This type of hosting is used by individuals or companies who have technical knowledge of server management as they can earn money by reselling space from this server to other customers.
Cloud hosting
In this type of hosting, the Website is hosted on a cloud structure made up of several servers instead of being stored on a physical server.
This type of hosting is characterized by scalability and it charges you for consumption, prices are not fixed.
You can start with a limited plan at a cheap price and if your site experiences an increase in traffic, hosting resources and costs are raised, so it is ideal for small to medium-sized websites that require more resources than shared hosting.
How to choose the best WordPress hosting?
There are thousands of web hosting companies around the world from which you can choose whatever you want to host your WordPress site.
You are also free to choose a public web hosting or WordPress hosting and choose a managed or unmanaged hosting for your site, but there are a set of basic things that we advise you to look for when choosing your website hosting in general, the most important of which are:
Fast loading of the site and navigation between its pages. Look for companies that use SSD drives and a content delivery network (CDN) and have servers in several geographical locations, these factors contribute significantly to improving the speed of the site.
Provide basic security and protection of the website and protect it from any malicious software, codes or security breaches.
Ensuring the availability of the site around the clock, all days of the week. (Uptime is the percentage of time your site stays online and it must be 99 % or 100% for hosting to be good)
Providing customer service and having a knowledgeable support team available at any time to help you in case of any problems on the site or in the hosting server via phone, chat or email.
Scalability many hosting providers offer several types of hosting to enable you to upgrade your site from shared hosting to VPS hosting or dedicated server hosting.
Some types of hosting, such as cloud hosting, allow sites to increase resources when needed.
The file storage size should be large and able to accommodate the size of your site's files, and the bandwidth should be appropriate for the number of visitors to your site.
Providing a domain name registration service, many hosting service providers offer domain name registration for the site as part of their hosting packages, and this may save you from buying a domain name
Secure custom email accounts on your domain name some hosting companies offer multiple email accounts for each website and this contributes to giving more confidence to your site and your brand.
The five best WordPress hosting sites
The hosting you choose for your website depends on your budget, the number of visitors to your site and the amount of help you want from your host in running your site.
We can consider that Cloud Hosting is the best option for hosting WordPress sites because it balances performance and price, and it saves you from changing the hosting plan after expanding your site and increasing the number of visitors.
Here is a list of the best companies that provide cloud hosting services that you can adopt to host your WordPress site:
Digital Ocean
Digital Ocean provides a great cloud hosting platform for WordPress, it provides you with an SSD-type cloud and provides all the functions you need to host your site and program your applications.
They include several hosting plans with a starting price of $ 5 per month, you can start with them and guarantee that you will never run out of space for your site, they are flexible, expandable and provide you with multiple volumes of up to 16 TB in size.
This platform was developed and designed primarily for developers, hosting helps you collect metrics, monitor performance and send you notifications in case something needs to be improved.
Cloudways
Cloudwiz is a premium managed cloud hosting platform that allows you to choose from several hosting infrastructures for Amazon, Digital Ocean, Google Cloud, etc. and install and manage the WordPress site very easily...
It enables you to create your site using any of the CMS content management systems, including WordPress, where you can install WordPress on cloudwise and start your site in just a few minutes. It is also ready for WooCommerce and is also optimized for speed.
You can also choose different server resources according to your needs, select the appropriate CPU or RAM and storage space for you, and provide outstanding support around the clock, all days of the week.
Amazon Cloud
Amazon Web Services hosting services is one of the most popular cloud hosting providers, it is famous for its high reliability and almost 100 per cent uptime, and it owns many of its data centre sites, which means that sites hosted on Amazon will not crash.
The problem with this hosting is that configuring it, setting it up, installing WordPress on it, performing backups, etc. requires experience in cloud computing and knowledge of working with command line screens.
Amazon has launched a service called LightSail that can be relied upon to facilitate the process of managing servers and installing applications.
Some also resort to using cloudwise Cloudways hosting, relying on the infrastructure of Amazon cloud servers provided by it, getting rid of server management difficulties, solving its problems, and focusing on your own site.
Google Cloud
The Google Cloud Platform Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is one of the most popular cloud computing service providers that you can rely on to publish your WordPress site.
Google Cloud Hosting guarantees you a high-performance WordPress site, it offers a variety of cloud products Compute Engine, which is a virtual machine (VM) similar to the concept of a physical server, but it is virtual and the resources in it are expandable in addition to DNS services, CDN, RAM and SSD disks
Linode
Linode is a premium cloud hosting company that provides reliable virtual private servers at affordable prices and outstanding customer service
Linode is focused on providing developer-friendly platforms as it provides many customized products and services to developers and companies and enables them to create, deploy and scale applications more easily and cost-effectively in the cloud.
It also provides a 99.99% uptime guarantee and if your server crashes on it for more than 0.01%, you can request a credit for the downtime.
In today's article, we got acquainted with the concept of web hosting and WordPress hosting, which is hosting optimized for the operation of WordPress, and we showed that WordPress hosting is not a condition for the operation of WordPress sites that can work on almost any hosting.
Finally, in order to determine the best hosting for your website, let me tell you that there is no right or wrong choice.
Rather, the choice depends on the type of hosting plan you want, your budget and the amount of support and assistance you need from the hosting company while running your site.
But the general trend in hosting is towards relying on cloud hosting to publish websites because it is more secure, as well as suitable for all types of websites, it is scalable and maintains the performance and stability of the site.