You should take the hosting for your website very seriously. In fact, this is the most important decision you will ever make for your website. A reputable hosting solution for your website will definitely lower the page load time for your website.
There are way too many hosting providers to choose from. Some are very cheap and you may think that they are providing a very lucrative offer with their unlimited bandwidth, unlimited email accounts, unlimited domains etc for just under USD 30
My recommendation is to stay far away from such hosts, and instead, search for hosts that provide optimized WordPress Hosting. These hosting providers are not cheap, usually cost more and have several usage related restrictions. However, their customer support is exceptional when it comes to solving WordPress speed related issues and their servers are optimized to handle spikes in traffic on WordPress websites.
To further complicate matters, WordPress hosting providers can be categorized into following categories.
- Shared WordPress Hosting Providers
- Dedicated WordPress Hosting Providers
- VPS WordPress Hosting Providers
- Cloud WordPress Hosting Providers
- Managed WordPress Hosting Providers
Shared hosting providers often offer cheap deals that look very good. However, remember that in return for the low prices, you will be sharing your server (IP address) with other websites and the quality of services is not that great. Bluehost, NameCheap and Godaddy are three well known shared hosting providers.
Dedicated hosting plans are expensive and require you to have an expert system administrator on your staff to optimize the servers for WordPress. These hosting solutions are hard to maintain but can usually deliver exceptional performance (if optimized perfectly). Siteground, Godaddy, Nexcess are a few popular dedicated hosting providers.
These days, VPS hosting has become very popular, with DigitalOcean being the most popular. These hosting solutions have high performance, reliability, and scalability. But, you will need an expert to optimize your VPS hosting solution for WordPress.
Cloud hosting offers very high performance and is usually expensive. In fact, many experts consider this to be the most reliable hosting solution of all types of websites. Amazon EC2, Linode, Google Compute Engine are some popular cloud hosting solution providers.
Managed WordPress Hosting – Due to the large number of users using WordPress, several web hosting providers have chosen to offer managed WordPress hosting. An account with one of these providers only allows you to host WordPress based sites and nothing else. The benefit of managed WordPress hosting is that you do not have to worry about ANYTHING. They optimize your site for performance, make sure that your site is secure, and keep regular backups. On top of that they advise you if a specific plugin is having a negative impact.