As the web has grown over the last decade and more and more business have come to depend on their site as a point of contact for their clients, the dependability of their website has become of paramount importance.

In the last 4 years more and more small business have chosen WordPress as their platform to build their websites on and it has become apparent that a good host is very important. WordPress while being an easy platform to use and is both visitor friendly and admin friendly is not all that server friendly.

By this I mean that WordPress can be intensive in its resource usage at times depending on what plugins are used and what the website purpose is for. A great example is that if your site is strictly an online brochure or information website then it will almost always perform lightning fast no matter what web host you choose. But if you start adding to it by publishing posts, offering audio, video or even adding an estore you will quickly find you need more resources.

This need for resources is very evident when you hit the sometimes low limits on many providers. Read that contract about what they really mean by unlimited hosting. It is limited in many ways by resource usage i.e., CPU cycles, ram what is called inode usage often referring to files, processes started ect.

The other problem is becoming a victim of your own success, if you actually grow an email list or RSS list of followers, (and every time you make a post you get hit with hundreds or thousands of visits on a poor server that is improperly configured or even overloaded as most shared hosting providers are you will quickly wish for a better host).

So let’s discuss some hosting providers I have dealt with in the past 12 months and what I have found with them.

WPEngine

Here are a couple interesting articles on their service

Why Your Webhost Cannot Be Trusted – How WP Engine Hijacked My Business —

How @WPEngine Is Failboating Your SEO and Leaking Your Information

What I found when dealing with them was that their service did not live up to the hype they promise. They are so restrictive on the plugins you can install some things simply cannot be done and from my experience getting a large site moved to them is not an easy task. Once we did get it moved the testing went poorly and their performance was not all that great.

GoDaddy

Well what can I say here but avoid it even small sites have had issues when I have been working on their servers. They have gotten better in the past year but they are definitely not a first choice.

GreenGeeks

While I still send people to this hosting provider more and more I am seeing issues arise from their service. They do offer great customer support

BlueHost

I still recommend these guys but I think they may be having some growing pains as I have a site or two that just have issues from time to time and a monitor of server loads shows that often the servers are under a pretty good load much of the time so they might be over loading them.

Recommendation For Hosting JohnOverall.com WordPress Hosting

So what do I recommend well many years ago I ran a small hosting business and due to the number of issues I have been encountering in the past few months I have decided to bring it back with a twist this time. A focus on WordPress where you can get great web hosting at JohnOverall.com/wphost and what I offer is high performance servers with a limit on how many accounts I place on each server.

I offer generous storage and bandwidth allocations for each account and pretty much all the resources a small to medium size business with up to 15,000 visitors a day needs to keep performance of the site at its peak.

You get full cPanel controls on your site and email service, you can even run your email list from the site if you want but not recommended since that is one area I do limit outgoing mail per account to help keep spam under control (best to use a service like mailchimp).