If you are building or rebuilding a WordPress website, your hosting is one of the first decisions to get right.
Your host stores your website’s files and database and delivers them to every visitor. Good hosting is fast and quietly reliable. Poor hosting brings slow pages, downtime and a lot of stress.
There are hundreds of hosting companies and plans, and the marketing can make them hard to compare. These are the things worth looking at.
The main types of WordPress hosting
Most plans fall into one of four groups:
- Shared hosting. Your site shares a server with many others. It is cheap and fine for small, low-traffic sites, but a busy neighbour on the same server can slow you down.
- Managed WordPress hosting. Set up specifically for WordPress, usually with automatic backups, caching, staging sites and support staff who know WordPress well. It costs more but saves time.
- VPS or cloud hosting. You get dedicated resources on a virtual server. It suits larger or busier sites, but needs technical skills to manage unless a management service is included.
- Dedicated servers. A whole physical server for one business. Most small businesses don’t need this.
For most small and medium businesses, good-quality shared or managed WordPress hosting is enough.
Match the plan to your website
Think about what your site does now and what it may need over the next couple of years. A five-page brochure site has very different needs from an online shop with hundreds of products, a booking system or a busy blog.
Online shops and membership sites need more server resources, because many of their pages can’t be cached. If you plan to grow, check how easily you can upgrade without moving to a new host.
Server location
If most of your customers are in Australia, choose a host with servers in Australia. Pages load faster for local visitors when the data doesn’t have to travel overseas.
Ask where your data is stored, particularly if your website collects customer information. A content delivery network (CDN) can help if you also have visitors from overseas, and many hosts include one or make it easy to add.
Speed
Website speed affects customer experience and search rankings. Google measures real-world page experience through its Core Web Vitals, which look at loading speed, responsiveness and how stable the layout is while the page loads.
Hosting is only part of the picture. Large images, too many plugins and heavy themes slow a site down on any server. But a slow host puts a ceiling on how fast your site can ever be.
Look for hosts that offer:
- modern servers with fast storage
- server-level caching built for WordPress
- a current, supported version of PHP
- support for HTTP/2 or HTTP/3
Security
WordPress powers a large share of the web, which makes it a common target for attacks. A good host helps protect your site with:
- free SSL certificates, so your site loads over HTTPS
- firewalls and malware scanning
- separation between accounts on shared servers
- help with cleaning up if a site is hacked
Hosting security is only half the job. WordPress itself, your theme and your plugins also need regular updates and monitoring. Our WordPress Care Package looks after that ongoing maintenance.
Backups
Ask how often backups are taken, how long they are kept and how easy they are to restore. Daily backups are a sensible minimum for most business sites.
Ideally, keep a second copy somewhere separate from your hosting account. If the host has a serious problem, you still have your site.
Reliability and support
Hosts often quote an uptime guarantee. Read the fine print to see what happens if they miss it. Usually it is a small credit on your bill, not compensation for lost business.
Support quality matters more. Before you sign up, find out:
- whether support is available by phone, live chat or tickets only
- what hours it runs in Perth time
- whether the support staff understand WordPress
- how long it typically takes to get a real answer
Staging sites
A staging site is a private copy of your website where updates and changes can be tested before they go live. It lowers the risk of a plugin update breaking your site on a busy day. Many managed WordPress hosts include one.
Keep your email separate
Many hosting plans include email accounts. For most businesses, a dedicated email service such as Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 is the better option. If your website server has a problem, your email keeps working, and moving hosts later is much simpler.
Look past the introductory price
Cheap hosting is often cheap only in the first year. Check the renewal price, what is included and what costs extra, such as backups, SSL certificates or site migrations. Read the cancellation terms too.
Make sure the hosting account is in your business’s name, or that you have full access to it. If a developer or agency sets it up for you, ask for the login details and keep them somewhere safe.
Moving to a new host
If your site is slow or your current host is unreliable, moving is usually straightforward with some planning. Some hosts offer free migration.
Choose a quiet time for the move and take a full backup first. Afterwards, test your contact forms, email delivery and tracking to make sure nothing was missed.
If you are not sure your current hosting suits your website, or you are planning a new site, we can help.
SLINKY provides WordPress hosting on Australian servers for the websites we build and look after. It sits alongside our web design and WordPress care services, so your site, updates and hosting are handled in one place. You deal directly with senior people. Get in touch for a chat.
