Internet users need webpages to load in a jiffy. Visitors who land on your website are not going to wait forever to access the content. In fact, according to Kissmetrics, 47% of people expect your website to load within two seconds or less. And, if your pages don’t load in a snap, they will simply move away to a competitor’s site. This is where hosting services can make a difference.
Slow loading pages can harm your website in two ways – the bounce rate on your site increases, and you begin to lose traffic. What’s worse is that Google interprets these clicks away from the page as content that’s not so great. This can hurt your site’s SEO. So, you see, speed is indeed a big deal on the internet.
Pages that freeze, be it on desktops or mobiles, offer poor user experience. As early as 2010, Google included website loading speed as one of the ranking factors. If you are serious about attracting, converting, and retaining customers, you really should pay attention to the speed of your website.
One of the most important factors that influence your site’s speed is hosting services. A reliable host with a wide network of servers, content delivery networks and latest technologies can do wonders to perk up the speed of your website.
Although there are many types of hosting, the one most commonly used by beginners is shared hosting services. In a shared hosting format, thousands of websites share space on common servers. In this scenario, it’s important that the server resources are adequate to service the needs of all these websites, without any downtime. Otherwise, a spike in traffic to anyone website can impact the accessibility of the other websites sharing the same server.
Let’s look at a few hosting options that you can try,
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Bluehost
You can host your website on Bluehost in many different ways – shared, dedicated, VPS hosting, WordPress or cloud sites. What’s common to all of them is that they are fast, secure and well supported. Bluehost comes recommended by WordPress and includes hosting that’s completely optimized for WordPress. Their packages are designed very thoughtfully, and most offer unlimited disk storage, domain hosting, email addresses, and bandwidth. Besides, they take care of your backups and security, as well as optimization for eCommerce websites.
You’ll have all the tools you need to get a start on your websites such as a free domain, free site builder and one-click WordPress auto-install. From a single user-friendly cPanel, you can control all your websites, domains, emails and files.
Bluehost takes care to isolate any website that overdraws on server resources. This way the remaining websites do not face a crunch in resources. The Advanced packages have Cloudflare, a content delivery network, built directly into the account. You can enable it without having to use code, and this greatly enhances the performance of your website.
The Basic package starts at a mere $2.95 per month (promotional price). You can check out the services at each price point and start with just the package you need. And when your website grows, you can keep up with the traffic by upgrading with just a few clicks.
Kinsta
Kinsta is a premium WordPress hosting with Google cloud platform facility. You can concentrate on the business of your website without worrying about the performance of the site as Kinsta provides fully Managed Hosting service. Kinsta system automatically checks the uptime of your site for every two minutes to make sure your site is up and running. Even if your site is crashed, Don’t Worry, you can reinstate the copy of your entire website in a click because the backup is taken at least once in a day.
With Kinsta, you don’t need to worry about WordPress updates and security patches. It automatically updates your WordPress version of your site. You can control all your sites with a cup of coffee and MyKinsta, a control centre for all your sites. It is a one-point solution from tracking bandwidth to visitor stats. You should know your strengths and weakness to equip yourself and for this purpose, MyKinsta has a wide range of analytics to analyse all aspects of the web site’s performance and architecture performance.
The starter package at Kinsta starts at $30 for lightweight web applications and business packages up to $600 is best fit for large applications might find suitable to at When comes to security, Kinsta checks every minute for DDoS attacks to resolve them and have all necessary measures to stop malicious code to access the network. Kinsta treats every site as an isolated entity to make sure no infected site could affect another site.
Linode
Linode is a solid web host that offers Linux-only hosting solutions that are simple, fast, and reliable. It has multiple data centres at different locations around the globe and users can pick the one closest to them for best speeds. This cloud-based hosting service relies on high-performance SSD servers, 40Gbps network and Intel E5 processors (the fastest servers in the market today), to give you super-fast website speeds.
The prices you see are for unmanaged hosting, with separate add-ons available for automatic backups, managed hosting and more. Backups are hassle-free, and you can choose from daily, weekly or fortnightly automatic backups that you can set and forget about. With the basic packages, you can work from an in-house control panel (Linode Manager), while the more popular cPanel is a paid add-on. Free site migrations and dashboard metrics are bundled with the managed hosting add-on.
To host your website on Linode, you do need to be a little tech-savvy. Or else, you can purchase the managed hosting add-on. If you’re not sure which plan you should go with, we suggest that you pick the smallest. Linode allows you to upgrade or downsize at any time.
WPEngine
WPEngine is a leading Managed WordPress Hosting provider with a large and secure infrastructure that’s geared towards hosting WordPress websites. They totally take care of your entire WordPress hosting needs, allowing you to focus on your business.
WPEngine offers unlimited data transfer, one-click restore points, one-click staging area, curated themes and plugins, assistance with moving your website and great scalability. Moreover, the firewall and malware scanning features largely take care of website security. And just in case your website is hacked, they’ll help you fix it for free. With WPEngine, you’ll not have to worry about WordPress updates and backups. All routine WordPress maintenance tasks are taken care of.
The one feature that makes WPEngine a standout hosting solution is the importance they give to the speed of the website. Their servers team up with content delivery networks and rely on inbuilt EverCache technology to make sure that websites load in the blink of an eye. Global data centres and cloud coverage ensure that site is fast loading, no matter which geography your visitors come from. WPEngine relies on PHP 7 and HTTP /2, so it can handle three times the requests per second. They claim that visitors generally report 27% faster loading time on switching to WPEngine.
WPEngine has packages to suit every kind of website. A smaller website or a blog will find the Personal package at $29 to be a good fit. Larger websites may find the Professional ($99) and Business ($241) to be better options. Those rates are applicable on a monthly basis. Though they appear steep, the hosting is fine-tuned for WordPress and worth every penny. They have customized hosting solutions as well for high traffic websites or large businesses.
Site Ground
Siteground is also one of the leading hosting service provider and a strong player in the market since 2004. Site ground has a separate managed hosting service for WordPress. Siteground’s managed WordPress hosting is taken care of by a team of experts with abundant expertise in WordPress. A dedicated support team in site ground is working 24/7 to cater to your needs and queries. Site ground also claims to have a better customer satisfaction rate.
With SiteGround’s Migrator plugin, you can transfer even a larger WordPress site into site ground with a few clicks. Security is provided for your site at all levels from network to application. This Managed WordPress hosting is built over Google Cloud platform so you can reap the benefits of its and best hardware and software. For powerful caching, Image optimizations and better performance, Siteground has SG Optimizer plugin. You can give white label access to clients to their site’s tools with an add-on cost.
Site ground’s pricing starts at $6.99 and goes up to $14.99 per month. You wouldn’t regret selecting site ground because you will be getting Free WordPress Installation, Free WP migrator plugin, Free SSL certificates, Auto-update feature for WordPress, Daily backup, Free CDN tool, Free email, Unlimited space in the database, and all these are included in all the packages of Site ground. Another nice thing about site ground is it uses 100% renewable energy to power its servers.
Cloudways
Cloudways gives you a complete hosting experience with its managed WordPress hosting with 5 major cloud server options, Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform to choose from. To give your site a faster data accessing speed cloudways is giving you SSD storage facility. With in-built varnish, Memcached, and Redis, the cache is optimized for better performance. Cloud CDN is also employed here to reduce the latency rate and increase speed. With all the features combined your site will have a faster loading page. As long as your site is faster, your SEO will be in a safe mode.
The dashboard of cloudways is very crisp and powerful. You can control all your sites with ease and comfort with cloudways. You can pick your pick cloud provider among the best cloud providers in the industry. Cloudways follow pay per use concept so you can decide the server size and its location on your own. Hosting an eCommerce site is not a big deal when you are feature-rich platform like cloudways. Migration to cloudways from a different hosting platform is a hassle-free process.
Cloudways have a variety of pricing packages and differ for each cloud providers. You can pick your best plan to your site. A pre-sale team will give the best plan suggestion for your site after analysing nature of your site. Auto-healing services, 1 click server cloning, 1 click advanced server management, 15+ server and application monitoring and smart assistant are the unique features you will be getting in cloudways. An interesting fact about cloudways is, It is loved particularly by Small and Midsize business.
Winding Up
Choosing a hosting solution will be one of the most crucial decisions you’ll make for your website. Moving to a new host is surely possible, but very messy and can affect SEO. When you’re starting out, shared hosting may be the best fit as it’s cheap and allows you to become familiar with your website functions.
When it comes to hosting, you’ll only get what you pay for. It’s important to pick a host whose features support the nature of your project. If you’re serious about website performance, but looking to focus on the business end of your website, opt for managed hosting. Technical specifications are particularly important when you’re running a site that’s rich in media content or an eCommerce site. The RAM, disk space and processing power must meet your needs. A beginner may prefer an interface that’s user-friendly such as cPanel or Plesk to make admin tasks easy. But what’s a common requirement for all hosting is speed, reliability, security, no downtime and good support.
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