WordPress hosting is something that can cause great consternation among users of the open-source CMS. There are plenty of horror stories of WordPress websites that cannot cope with traffic surges or run up huge bandwidth charges for their owners.
But it needn’t be like that. WordPress is actually easy to host if a few basics are in place at the outset. Let’s look at some of the factors that can ensure you get a WordPress hosting setup that’s best-suited to the job.
More so even than the type of server being used, the correct implementation of a cache is perhaps the biggest single factor in successfully hosting a WordPress website. We have seen WordPress run like lightning on even a very small, basic Linux server as long as the caching plugins are installed and correctly implemented. That’s why W3 Total Cache made our list of recommended WordPress plugins.
We would recommend opting for Nginx over Apache when hosting WordPress. That is just down to the performance benefits we see when a WordPress site is hosted on Nginx in comparison to Apache sites.
Finding the best WordPress hosting for your requirements means identifying the scale required by the site. If the caching plugins are correctly implemented, as discussed above, a lot of WordPress sites will work well with just a single server.
In the cases of busier, high traffic WordPress sites, we recommend multi-server replicated clusters, with multiple web and database servers, and a load balancer to share the strain across the various servers. For websites that cannot be afford to be offline, this allows individual servers to be down or updated without bringing the whole site down.
As we mentioned, if the basics and particularly that all-important cache are in place, WordPress can be hosted on most servers and deliver good performance. From a security point of view, we would suggest avoiding shared servers. This just minimises the risk of your website falling prey to a cyberattack due to a vulnerability in another website hosted on the same server and helps to ensure your Wordpress site is securely hosted.
