How to choose a hosting service for wordpress

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How to choose a hosting service for wordpress

Not long ago I was in the position to optimize and also manage a server for a high traffic website running wordpress. Now all of you who knows what wordpress is, knows that it is in the top blogging scripts, if not the best one.However it comes with a downsize, for a high traffic website, wordpress eats a lot of server resources.I want to share a little of what I learned so far and probably will help others too.I will start first by taking about hosting services and then go into what can be done for optimizations. I’ll try to make it as simple as possible so it will be easy to read too.

Choosing a hosting service

I know for sure that a lot of people are thinking “what is the best hosting package for my needs?” and you end up buying something too expensive or something that its not enough.So what you should ask yourself first is:”What is my website about ? How much traffic it has and what are the modifications on my wordpress websiteWeb hosting serversthat I’ve done?”Ok, you now think that you don’t know, right, well not all the answers. Probably you know what your website is about and that you are expecting to have a few hundreds of visits a day. You will also want to have a nice user experience website, so you will install some plugins like related articles or custom highlighting code or even a voting plugin that can give points for each user that is registered and votes.

Having a simple website will allow you to consider a basic package, such as a budget one, about 1-6 USD / month. A simple website can hold at least a few hundreds users easily, adding the fact that you will install a cache plugin like wp-super-cache or w3-total-cache, this will increase the numbers that will allow you to have to a few thousands.

What I said so far is related to shared service, where shared services means that you will be hosting the same website with the same other clients on the server, and believe me that there are at least 200 other users with each of them with at least 1 website.

Normal shared or Business shared?

What’s the difference between normal shared service and Business shared service ?

On a normal shared hosting service the hosting company will usually have around 200-300 hosting accounts, on an average, it is 200. On a Business shared service, the number of clients is limited, allowing the existing clients to use more resources from the server. That’s is the difference in Normal Shared and Business shared account.

By default, wordpress will not use a lot of resources, adding a caching plugins will reduce the load even more, making it really light.

But what if you want to add some user experience functionality, like some plugins that you believe your wServer is busy errorebsite will benefit? Well the number of visitors will vary of course depending on the plugins you install and how these act with the users. There are plugins that are cache-able and some that are not, caching the plugins behaviour will serve the article page as a full static page, which will reduce the load on the server and also speed up your website. This is good, it’s what almost everyone expects.However there are times that you can’t cache these, dynamic content is usually not cache-able, so this will use the server resources more and cause a load on your server. Also a bad coded plugin will also create a lot of problems if not discovered and fixed in time.By the time your hosting providers lets you know that you’re overloading the server, you will probably start to consider a dedicated service. Not always that’s the final action, there are other shared services that you can still use at a more expensive price like 20-30 USD / month where instead of having 200 users on one whole server, the number of clients is limited!This is something good, so the server will serve the requests directly to only those limited users.

However, if the traffic continues to grow a dedicated service like a VPS/VDS server or just a dedicated server will be needed.

Tips for optimizing wordpress

The first and foremost thing you need to consider is installing a plugin that will cache your pages and serve them as static content. This allow you to use only http connections instead of connecting each time to the mysql server to query for each article. Also you are making use of the users browser so this is also something that you should know.

What I’m using and I found it the best so far is wp-super-cache, I also mentioned this a little above. You can also use w3-total-cache which is really good and you can set a lot of options and is compatible with almost all servers out there.

I wrote in another article how to optimize your wordpress blog further, so you can follow that article to optimize your wordpress.

 

Where can I find Business Class shared hosting service ?

As I said before, there are some shared hosting services that are more expensive and allow more resources allocated per each account. This is an alternative for users who do not want to go into a dedicated service or server or believe they will not be able to manage their dedicated service.

What I recommend and used so far without problems is SecureSignup.net Business Class shared service . The premium shared hosting service is also really good.

You can also look at premium class hosting service from Ohio, USA, the service is also really good and haven’t seen any complains.

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