Best Web Hosting Provider for WordPress and eBusiness

Best Web Hosting Provider for WordPress and Ebusiness

In this article I’m simply going to state my methods and findings from when I was looking for web hosting provider for this web site. I will provide details of the best hosting providers I could find for those, like me, wanting their own WordPress web site and those wanting to start their own ebusiness.

• I started with no knowledge of web site construction and no ebusiness knowledge other than a little selling on ebay and certainly no knowledge of content management systems (CMS) at all.

Prior to choosing WordPress I played with several other content management systems such as Blogger, Joomla and Drupal before finally choosing WordPress because of its easy setup, good documentation and friendly user base. Strangely enough, I found the WordPress user base is one of the few groups not complaining about everything, they have a nice, friendly, positive attitude. Sorry, I’m wandering off topic (again).

In the Beginning

My first task was to find answers to all the usual questions a newbie has. Questions such as; Which is the best web hosting provider for my website? Which will give me the best hosting deal? Who provides the best web design? Who provides the best domain hosting deal? What is the best server? How easy is it to setup? Remember, the cheapest is not always the best!

The first task was to create a list of my requirements, so each of the web hosting providers had to satisfy the following criteria to be considered:

1. Web hosting affordable price, but not tacky.
2. Reliable service with at least 99% uptime.
3. Easy to implement and use.
4. Lots of help available online.
5. Good after sales and support service.
6. Easy setup for WordPress.
7. Easy setup for a shopping cart.
8. Simple and intuitive control panel.
9. Easy to use backup system.
10. Secure system.
11. Dedicated servers (would like – but not a requirement)
12. Reseller (would like – but not a requirement)

About Web Hosting

Whatever you do, don’t make the common mistake when looking for web site hosting and simply select the cheapest or even FREE web hosting company. The prices charged by a good web hosting company is so low these days as to make the alternatives unnecessary. You will only end up with a poor service, poor support and paying more in the long run. Make the right hosting choice for the long term. All the hosting companies in this review are low cost, most less than a £1/$1 per week, but these are respected hosts with proven reliability and support. If you don’t believe me, search the web.

• All the web hosting companies listed here are constantly winning user awards.

Okay, there are compromises. For such a low initial fee you’re getting a shared server, but who cares, at this stage we don’t know what we’re doing anyway, right! The important thing is to get online and learn everything we need to know as quickly and easily as possible. For that we need a good hosting provider with a really good knowledge base, lots of FAQs and preferably lots of video tutorials on how to do everything.

WordPress Web Hosting Requirements

WordPress web hosting comes in two different flavours. WordPress offer a FREE blog hosting service at wordpress.com and a user-hosted platform at wordpress.org. As the wordpress.com platform is only suitable for blogging and not really suited to business usage (it’s against the rules to place paid advertising on a wordpress.com site) I will be concentrating on the wordpress.org platform as this is definitely suitable for business usage, advertising, affiliate marketing and of course blogging.

From WordPress – A Little History

“WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. WordPress is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. We hope by focusing on user experience and web standards we can create a tool different from anything else out there.”

• At the time of writing, WordPress has 7,968 plugins, (69,873,370 downloads) and 1,108 themes (11,065,434 downloads), all FREE.

WordPress.org

If you don’t have WordPress already it can be downloaded and installed from wordpress.org FREE of charge.

• Signing up for WordPress.org is best done after ensuring that you have a host that runs PHP 5.0 or greater, MySQL 5.0 or greater and Apache. The WordPress specs. are far less stringent than this but this should really be your minimum requirement. All the hosting providers I’ve given in my recommendations have better specs. than this anyway.
• The web hosting providers recommended here will all allow you to register and install WordPress from their (your) own control panel (I would recommend cPanel) with no need for a separate download from WordPress.

With 99.9% uptime, what’s the downtime?

With your business running 24/7 or 8766 hours per year a 0.1% downtime is equivalent to 8 hours 46 minutes. For those interested, the calculation is (24*365.25) * (100%-99.9%).

My Recommendation

From the business owner to the individual who desires full functionality on a small budget. If you are looking for a fast, reliable, easy-to-use web host then JustHost are the one to choose. They provide your complete web hosting solution. You would expect JustHost to demand a higher price for such an excellent service, but they are one of the cheapest hosts around.

They offer a great service at such a low price it’s hard to look elsewhere. KingSolutions web sites are hosted by JustHost. From my point of view, with my requirements, hosting this web site with JustHost was the obvious choice.

To be fair all the web hosting services reviewed here are of comparable quality and all give a quality service so you won’t go wrong by choosing any of them. But, each service has qualities which may or may not be what you require so review each web hosting service and make your choice based on your requirements. I required a web site that could be up and running in less then a day with very little prior knowledge.

• There are web hosting services which are far beyond my capabilities and understanding so I have not even attempted to review such services.

I needed something where the web hosting experts provided most of the background work so I could concentrate on my web site.

• Also, the offers made by each hosting provider change weekly, so please check prior to making a commitment.

Although each web hosting provider has many offers which vary over time I have tried to be specific to the requirements above and ignored items such as FREE Photo Albums etc. as these can be added to most sites by downloading and installing the appropriate scripts.

Best Web Hosting Provider for WordPress and Ebusiness Conclusion

As stated above, you can research your domain name choices and hosting providers at any of my recommended domain name registers. Most of these registrars provide domain name registration, domain name hosting, free domain name search facilities and some even provide your domain name for free when you register for a domain name hosting package. All are reliable and really good value for money.

If you need a web-page design software solution then see my article, website design software solutions for my recommendations. Some of the design solutions presented are free, others, for a price. There should be an application to solve every problem you’re likely to encounter.

Should you require more information on email marketing services (autoresponders), then you will find my article, top recommended email marketing service providers valuable. If you’re an affiliate creating an email list (the monies in the list) these are the services you need most.

If you’re trying to get an online business started and need a fast-track solution, I would recommend you take a look at Chris Farrell Membership.

Well, I hope you found something useful and enjoyed this article, Best Web Hosting Provider for WordPress and Ebusiness.