The Best WordPress Hosting

What you ought to know to find the best WordPress hosting

I have proudly hosted yoast.com on a VPS.net Cloud Server for over 2 years now. It is fast, affordable & has been rock solid - even as my traffic increased 20-fold over that period, growing to almost a million pageviews per month. Some sites will review services of inferior quality and tell you it's the best WordPress hosting just to make a quick buck, but I recommend what I use. Trust me, I have tested many hosting solutions & anytime the upfront sticker price is low hidden costs sneak in, like unresponsive support, poor uptime & some hosts even sneak putting advertisements on your site without your permission!

So let me tell you why I love VPS.net and why I also use WestHost and Page.ly a lot and how this WordPress hosting business really works. In my case, I make money by promoting a specific company whose services I've been using for years, in other cases, people do "comparisons" or "listings of good companies". Bloggers with a lot of reach are being offered $100-$150 per sale. I'd like to know how you feel about those payola recommendations now.

A warning: what to look out for

Hostgator has been accused more than once by clients of adding links to their sites pointing back to Hostgator without asking their customers, yet some of the review sites make them number one on their list, just because they pay affiliates so much money (click for full image):

If it's not clear to you yet, I'll tell you now: this is a very aggressive (and thus lucrative) market. I've been offered $150+ per signup myself to promote other WordPress hosting companies. On packages of $5-7 a month, that's pretty ridiculous... In truth, WordPress hosting is usually pretty easy: you don't need much, and most WordPress sites won't ever get more than a 1,000 visitors a day, so you can host dozens if not hundreds of them on one server. The only difference WordPress hosting companies can make is in speed and in customer support. And if they're spending twice the annual revenue on paying off their affiliates, how much money do you think is left for support employees?

I encounter WordPress hosting issues all the time when I do my site reviews; certain plugins won't work because they need more memory, servers are down often causing a loss in Google rankings, the plugin installer in the WordPress backend won't work due to a poor setup; I've seen it all. So maybe offering the best WordPress hosting isn't that easy after all and you should pick a host that knows what it's doing and has shown that for a while already.

WestHost WordPress Hosting reviews

For quite a while now I've been working with and promoting WestHosts WordPress Hosting services, because they're simply the best "simple" hosting party I know. If you want to set up a simple WordPress site, do it without a hassle and have someone you can call who actually knows what he's talking about: WestHost is the best WordPress hosting for you. I've referred literally hundreds of people to them over the last 3 years and I wanted to share a couple of reviews on this WordPress hosting solution from those people, randomly taken from emails I got:

"I made the move this week. Everything Yoast says is accurate. So far WestHost has been awesome!" - Les Lynch

"P.S. I switched to Westhost for my WordPress hosting needs based on your recommendation.... after several 'bad' hosts it was the smartest move I ever made. The technical specs are great, the price is good... but its the customer service/support that makes all the difference. Thanks for the tip!!!" - Robbert Faber

That's a simple 5 out of 5 star rating as far as WordPress hosting is concerned, usually there's always something to complain over. Now why aren't you hosted there yourself then, you'll ask. The answer is simple: I do get more than a thousand visitors a day, a lot more, in fact. I used to be on WestHost, and when I outgrew it, I moved to VPS.net, a sister company of theirs that allows for more control and stronger servers:

VPS.net - Yoast Style - WordPress Hosting

So Yoast.com is hosted on a VPS.net Cloud Server. As said, they're a sister company to WestHost, both being part of the UK2Group. VPS.net allows you to basically build your own server based on a template of your choosing. Because I know you want your site to be as fast this one, I'll tell you what you should be doing to your VPS.net server to get the best WordPress hosting solution:

• get a cloud server at VPS.net, (Yoast.com is using 6 nodes at the moment, though 4 would probably be sufficient if I weren't hosting 5 other sites on the same VPS);
• start of with a clean CPanel image, and pick the location that is closest to the majority of your readers, in my case, Chicago;
• replace Apache with LiteSpeed (this adds a fee to your monthly bill, be aware of that);
• install APC so you can do object, database and output caching with the help of W3 Total Cache;
• set up a CDN, using MaxCDN's WordPress CDN solution, again with the help of W3 Total Cache and a so called "origin pull" set up.

That might look like a lot of work to get the best WordPress hosting solution going. As I said, this is not needed for most blogs. Most bloggers will seriously be fine with WestHost, possibly combined with a CDN for WordPress. If you need a setup like this though, the best thing is this: VPS.net will help you set it up, and they'll even migrate your site from your old install to the new one!

If you want to make use of that offer, email Rus Foster, he's the Managing Director of VPS.net and he'd love to help you out, both in getting set up and in determining how many nodes you'll need to start with.

A question I often get asked is why I didn't use a dedicated server? Well, that's pretty easy to answer: I can not scale a dedicated server, it's either too big, or too small, and hardly ever perfectly right. Scaling this VPS.net server though is as easy as going into my control panel, and adding a couple of nodes. Either for eternity, or just for a couple of days, it's all possible, and you won't even have to reboot the server.

Let me also tell you this: I was on another "cloud based" WordPress hosting solution before I started working with the VPS.net / WestHost guys, and I didn't like it one bit, when my site got too big, they moved me off to what they call a Dedicated Virtual Rage, and that was even more painful, resulting in lots of downtime. The experience over the last few years with VPS.net and WestHost has been entirely different, with the only downtime I've seen in the last 6 months being caused by my own mistake of developing one of my own plugins on the live site.

Managed WordPress Hosting

Now, sometimes, there are sites where you just don't want the plugins to get too far out of date and can't risk being late on a security update. For my own sites I'm on that quite quickly but for my clients that can be a different case, as I usually don't manager their sites, I just optimize them. For those of them who have a hard time updating their plugins I recommend (and use) Page.ly.

Page.ly is the best managed WordPress hosting solution, taking care of critical updates immediately when there's a need, no downtime and automated plugin updates as well. Of course it's a bit pricier than WestHost, so you'll have to decide for yourself which of these three fits you best!

Go read more about Page.ly here on Yoast or check out their plans.

Conclusion: pick a WordPress host you can trust

So, to conclude all this: I know WordPress hosting can be painful, when it shouldn't be. I've been with my own fair share of bad WordPress hosts, and I'm done with them. I've chosen to ignore the offers and stop thinking about the larger amounts of money I could make by sending people to other WordPress hosting companies that are willing to pay higher affiliate fees. You see, my reputation is worth more than that. If I refer you somewhere, I want it to be good, so I'd rather make less money and receive more e-mails like the ones I've shown you above.

My own VPS.net set up is as I put it down above, and yours could be that way too. If you only have to host a small WordPress blog, I'd recommend you go with WestHost, and if you click on either of those links, yes, I make some money, and you support me in blogging about WordPress SEO, the best WordPress hosting and WordPress optimization and in building WordPress plugins for everyone out there to use.

Good luck with choosing the best WordPress hosting solution that works for you, and if you follow my advice, please do let me know about your experiences by sending me a message through my contact form!