We’ve been hosting web sites for clients for almost 20 years. In that time, we’ve used dedicated, shared, cloud and managed WordPress hosting from companies such as Rackspace, Liquid Web, WP Engine, GoDaddy, Media Temple, SiteGround, 1and1, WinHost, Discount ASP and a few that aren’t around anymore.
We’ve almost exclusively been a WordPress shop for the last five years so I’m going to focus my thoughts on WordPress hosting.
I can say with 100% certainty that managed WordPress hosting provided by GoDaddy and WPEngine are not the same. On several occasions, we’ve had clients initially want to host at GoDaddy to save money, but the hosting couldn’t handle the site for whatever reason. We spent several days with support without any resolution. We would move the site to WPEngine and never had an issue from day one.
We also tried shared hosting from the companies like Media Temple (their Grid package) and they can’t handle the demands of WordPress beyond simple sites either. We have had success with PHP/MySQL sites there, so I think it is the demands of WordPress and not the hosting.
Media Temple is owned by GoDaddy so maybe this isn’t a valid example. Maybe we could achieve similar uptime and speed results with a ton of tweaking but those are band-aids and you still don’t have all the features and functionality of top-tier managed WordPress hosting like that from WPEngine and Liquid Web.
We used WPEngine for almost 3 years before recently switching to Liquid Web. We didn’t switch because we had issues. Their service, support and administrative tools are great. We switched because their pricing model and upgrade path are pricey once you reach a certain level. After some testing (about 3-4 months worth), we decided to make the switch. The features, speed and uptime are very similar, but the pricing is almost half that of WPEngine. It is still 3-4 times per site what you would pay at shared hosting and some managed hosting providers.
In the end, your web site is one of the most valuable employees you have. It works 24/7/365. It rarely complains, doesn’t need health insurance or a 401K. If you’re serious about your business, be serious about your web site hosting. If you’re paying more for a cup of coffee at Starbucks than you’re paying monthly to host your web site…
Give your WordPress web site and business the love is deserves, host it at a quality provider. You’ll not only have a web site that goes down a maybe an hour a year, it will have automatic daily backups, built-in caching, free SSL, staging/development environments and many other things that are worth the extra money and piece-of-mind.
Photo by Fikret tozak on Unsplash