Page Text: I am a web host. How can I offer BoldGrid to our customers?
What is WordPress Hosting?
WordPress Hosting is web hosting that uses servers specifically optimized for the WordPress software. It’s a combination of “WordPress” and “Web Hosting”.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is the most successful Content Management System (CMS) of all time. A CMS is software that helps to organize content and publish it to the web. Using WordPress you can easily build and manage a website.
Just how popular is WordPress?
If you take a look at the WordPress Showcase , you'll find 100's of examples of companies (such as Rolling Stone and Disney) using WordPress.
What is Hosting?
Web Hosting is a service that enables you to share files on the internet. WordPress helps you build the website, and web hosting is the part that makes your website online so everyone else can see it.
What is a Web Host?
A company that offers web hosting services is a web host, often just referred to as a host. A web host offers web hosting, which serves websites built with WordPress on the internet.
What is a hosting account?
A hosting account is a plan or package that includes hosting offered by a web host. To begin building a site with WordPress, you’ll first need to buy a hosting account from a web host.
It’s often said that you need to “buy” web hosting. Hosting is not a “thing” that you can buy and own, it’s actually renting space on a web server. Even if you buy a fully dedicated server, you don’t actually own the server. You can’t pick it up from the datacenter and take it home. When you buy a dedicated server, you’re buying access to the server, not the physical server itself.
Hosting accounts
DreamHost is a web host. These are just a few of the different types of hosting accounts that they offer.
Will any hosting account work?
WordPress have very minimal server requirements . It’s recommended that your web host runs PHP 7.4 or higher, MySQL 5.6 or higher, and provides HTTPS support. Most hosting providers match and exceed their requirements, and there’s an excellent chance if you have hosting already you can run WordPress on it.
What are the different types of WordPress Hosting?
Most hosting accounts fall under one of the following groups: Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting , Dedicated Hosting, and Managed Hosting . We could go into a lot of detail between each, but for now we’ll offer a quick summary. If we compared these different types of hosting accounts to housing, they would roughly equate to the following:
Shared Hosting – A apartment complex with many units, in which you rent one of them.
VPS Hosting – A set of adjacent townhomes. You have more room than an apartment, but you’re still attached to other homes.
Dedicated Hosting – This is like a ranch style home. You have the entire house to yourself.
Managed Hosting – Most often similar to Shared Hosting, except you have a maintenance crew that goes above and beyond in their support for you.
Which type of hosting should I choose?
For new websites, you should be able to safely start off with hosting your WordPress site on shared hosting. As your traffic grows, you may need to upgrade to a vps or dedicated server. The more visitors to your website, generally the more power you’ll need to serve your website. As you upgrade to a vps or dedicated server, your server will have more memory / ram and more CPU – allowing you to server more users. When you setup an account with your web host, you’re not locked in. WordPress websites can be easily transferred from one server to another.
Upgrading
In addition to being able to transfer your site between hosts , some hosts offer different types of hosting. InMotion Hosting and DreamHost, for example, offer shared, vps, and dedicated hosting. New websites can start off on shared hosting, and as they grow they can be moved to a vps or dedicated server. Upgrading is easier than switching hosts because generally your host can migrate your website to a higher platform for free.
Upgrading from Shared to VPS and Dedicated Hosting
InMotion Hosting is one example of a host that practically offers everything. Finding a reputable host that can grow with you throughout the years can spare a lot of hassle in the long run.
Do I need WordPress Hosting?
You need some kind of web hosting if you want your WordPress website accessible on the internet. Web hosting is a service that stores your website files, including the WordPress software itself, and then delivers the final content to your users when they visit the website. WordPress Hosting is web hosting using servers specifically optimized for the WordPress software, and is strongly recommended over standard web hosting.
Things to consider when looking for a WordPress Host
Not all hosting providers are the same. Some have been around a while and know exactly what their customers need, while others are new and offering new and different features. While most hosting companies meet the basic minimum requirements to host a WordPress site, others some go above and beyond. When you’re comparing hosts, here are a few things you’ll want to pay attention to:
WordPress Backups
Imagine spending days, if not weeks, building and perfecting your WordPress site. How would you feel one day if your web server crashed and you lost all your hard work? If you were using BoldGrid’s WordPress Backup Plugin, Total Upkeep , then you wouldn’t have to worry. You would easily restore your website and get back up and running! If you weren’t, you would be up to the mercy of your hosting provider. Were they backing up your site? Is their latest backup from yesterday or from last month? When looking for a host for your WordPress website, be sure to ask your potential host if they offer backups.
Backup Types
There are several approaches for backing up a website. As you’re looking for WordPress Hosting, be on the lookout for the following two types of backup solutions commonly offered: Full Backups and Incremental Backups.
Backup types vary based upon which files they backup, and how big each backup can be.
Full Backup
A full backup is a copy of all your WordPress Files and your WordPress Database. If you needed to restore your website, a full backup would have all of the files and databases necessary to get your entire site back up.
If your full backup is 150MB, each time you backup you’re going to have another large backup file. If you’re storing multiple archives, this can quickly consume a lot of disk space.
Incremental Backups
Incremental backups store only the files that were changed since your last backup.
Let’s say your full backup had 1,000 files in it. If you edit 5 files and add 5 new files, your next incremental backup will only have 10 files in it (those that have been changed). To restore your website, you would have to restore your full backup and then each additional incremental backup.
Full Backup vs. Incremental Backup
Incremental backups are favored by some because they’re much faster to make and take up less space. Others prefer full backups only because they’re easier to manage – it’s one file with everything you need.
Full Backups
In the event of an emergency, a full backup contains each file and database needed to restore your WordPress site from scratch
Incremental Backup
To keep backup files as small as possible, incremental backups only have what was changed, not the whole site.
HTTPS / SSL
HTTPS, such as the “https” in https://www.boldgrid.com, stands for hypertext transfer protocol secure. It means that the data sent between your WordPress site and your user is encrypted and secured. In order to get https you’ll need an SSL Certificate. Some hosts will include a basic SSL Certificate, while others will allow you to buy one. Whether it’s included with your hosting account or you pay extra, your hosting provider will need to take care of the technical setup for you behind the scenes. After that, you can configure your WordPress site to use https .
How does a SSL Certificate secure your site?
SSL Certificates encrypt data as it’s transmitted to and from your website. If you have a customer submitting their Credit Card over an http connection (without SSL), their credit card will be submitted in plaintext. This means that if they enter their Visa credit card number 1234-5678-1234-5678, if a hacker can intercept the data they will actually see, “1234-5678-1234-5678” and would be able to use this card! If your WordPress site is secured and accessed over https (a connection secured with SSL), the card number will be encrypted and sent as something like, “912EC803B2CE49E4A541068D495AB570”. If a hacker is able to intercept this data, they won’t know it’s encrypted information and won’t be able to use it in any way.
HTTPS vs. HTTP
HTTP sends data unencrypted as Cleartext. HTTPS encrypts data that only the send and receiver can decode (safe for transmitting secure info, like a credit card number).
Do I need an SSL Certificate?
The vast majority of websites need an SSL certificate. Any information that a user submits on your site, even a simple contact or comment form, should be encrypted.
Even if your website is strictly informational in nature, and you’re not collecting any user input, you should still consider an SSL certificate. Most modern web browsers have some sort of warning to new visitors that your site is “Not Secure” if no SSL certificate is present, and Google has even said that they may begin penalizing search rankings for sites without a certificate.
Security
WordPress is generally secure software. The power of WordPress is its flexibility, specifically the 1000’s of WordPress themes and plugins that you can find anywhere online and install. One problem with this is that you don’t always know who wrote the code that you’re installing. It could be a new developer and you’re installing one of their first projects, or the plugin could have been programmed by a team of developers. And just because a team of developers worked on something, doesn’t mean that the software is free from security issues.
Because of the overwhelming number of themes and plugins available and the uncertainty of how secure they are, some hosting providers have taken extra steps to help secure their clients (that’s you!). Some of these extra precautionary steps may include:
Keeping PHP versions up to date
Certain Apache configurations with suExec
Intrusion Detection Systems / Intrusion Prevention Systems to block malicious activity
Running ModSecurity and keeping security rules up to date
Speed
If you’re looking for a fast WordPress site, regardless of who you host with, you should definitely install a caching plugin, such as W3 Total Cache . Caching plugins save copies of your pages and can return those cached pages much faster than if WordPress was to build the page from scratch each time a user accesses it. In addition to caching, your WordPress Host may take some additional steps to help your site run fast, including:
Running the latest version of php. Newer php versions are generally faster and more secure than previous ones.
Using SSD drives. They’re much faster than traditional spinning disks.
Using a reverse proxy server, such as Nginx.
Partnering with a CDN provider for easier integration.
PHP Versions
Almost 80% of all websites are running php (source: w3techs.com ). Because WordPress runs on php, it’s safe to say they have a big role to play in the popularity of php.
When WordPress was initially released in 2007, php was at version 4.4.7. Today, the latest version of php is 8.0.5. While it is hard to tell what has changed by comparing the version numbers (php 4 vs php 8), it is easy to see that php has been in active development for the last 14 years.
Like all good software, improvements to php over the years includes:
Security – security vulnerabilities are regularly patched.
Speed – ongoing optimizations make php faster.
Functionality – developers like to use the latest and greatest features.
Make sure your WordPress host offers the latest versions of php. In addition to the security updates, benchmarks prove php is faster with each newer release .
InMotion Hosting offers php 7 and php 8
Many WordPress hosts offer multiple versions of php, and allow you to choose.
A2 Hosting offers php 7
php 8 is still relatively new, and is not yet available everywhere.
Pricing
When you do decide to finally purchase WordPress Hosting, you’ll find that there are various plans and pricing options available.
Term Lengths
Plans range from paying monthly, to paying several years in advance. You’re going to pay more with the shorter / monthly plans. If you can go with a longer term, such as yearly, you can find significant savings.
In our research, we found hosting plans generally range from monthly plans all the way to paying 3 years in advance. KnownHost also offers a 6 month plan, which is unique in the term lengths we’ve seen.
1 Month to 3 Year Plans
If you want to try before you buy, many hosts offer a month to month plan. If you have an established website and want to save some money, a 3 year hosting plan will be your best option.
Monthly vs. Yearly
At the time of this writing, we checked out several of DreamPress’ WordPress Hosting plans. The WordPress Basic plan was listed as starting at $2.59 / month. As we clicked around, we were able to find the following basic plans being offered:
Plan name