WordPress Hosting

What everybody ought to know about hosting reviews

It's the time of the year for rethinking things, and for being honest. In this quite long post I'm about to tell you why I'm now hosted on a VPS.net Cloud Server, why I still love WestHost and how this WordPress hosting business really works. It's time we, as a community of (WordPress) bloggers, come clean about this: we make money by promoting and/or "reviewing" (WordPress) hosting companies. I do it, wordpress.org does it, more people do it, it's not an issue but we should be open about it.

In my case, I make money by promoting a specific company, in other cases, most notably the list on WordPress.org, by listing a couple of them. They admit it too: "If you do decide to go with one of the hosts below and click through from this page, some will donate a portion of your fee back". I can translate "a portion of your fee" for you: my sources say that they want at least $150-175 per sale to even talk about being listed on that WordPress hosting page... Now I'd like to know how you feel about those recommendations.

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 $100+ 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?

WestHost WordPress Hosting

For a while now I've been 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 place to be. I've referred hundreds of people to them over the year or so I've been with them, and I wanted to share a couple of reactions 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!"

"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!!!"

That's pretty good feedback, isn't it? However, I felt I was cheating it a bit. My site was hosted on a server maintained by the WestHost support people, but it was a "special package" that basically no one else could get, because we'd been optimizing its performance all the time. I didn't feel bad for people who ended up WestHost thanks to me, because I know their service quality and speed is top notch, but decided that we should relocate Yoast to a server and configuration that you actually can replicate. That's more in line with what I've been doing here on Yoast: sharing everything I know to optimize WordPress and websites in general.

VPS.net - Yoast Style - WordPress Hosting

So, Yoast.com is now hosted on a VPS.net Cloud Server (you might remember me posting about playing with VPS.net earlier). They're actually a sister company to WestHost, both part of UK2Group, which has a couple of other awesome labels. Now we have tweaked that VPS a bit, but (and this is a big but for me) in ways you can tweak your server too. Let me run you through it:

• we got ourselves a cloud server at VPS.net, (7 nodes at the moment, though 4 would probably be sufficient);
• we installed a clean CPanel image, and picked the Chicago cloud as the location;
• we replaced Apache with LiteSpeed;
• we installed APC so we could do database and output caching with the help of Frederick's awesome W3 Total Cache plugin;
• we set up our CDN, using VPS.net's Akamai Service, again with the help of W3 Total Cache and a so called "origin pull" set up.

That's it! Looking at it, fast WordPress hosting is easy, due in large part to Frederick's work with W3 Total Cache.

So why didn't we use a dedicated server? Well, that's pretty easy to answer: how easy is it to scale a dedicated server? Scaling this server is as easy as going into my VPS.net control panel, and adding a couple of nodes. Either for eternity, or just for a couple of days, it's all possible. Let me tell you this though: 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. This experience has been entirely different.

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. I'd rather make less money and receive e-mails like the ones 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 still recommend you go with WestHost, and if you click on either of those links, yes, I still make money, and you still support me in blogging about WordPress hosting and WordPress optimization. But at least you know that now, and I feel an awful lot better for it. So, happy holidays, and good luck with choosing a WordPress hosting solution that works for you!

Update: by popular demand, VPS.net now offers a service to set up the exact same setup I use on VPS.net. If you use at least 6 nodes, they'll set it up for you and move you over and set it up for you for free. If you want to use that offer, email Nick Nelson!