Who Do Professionals Use for WordPress Hosting?

Researching WordPress Hosting companies can be an overwhelming task. There are dozens of national and local options available, each boasting their superiority. But who can you trust?

Instead of relying only on the marketing claims of each company, you may want to consider asking professionals in the industry what they think. We asked Marc from Commonwealth Creative Marketing about his experience with clients and WordPress Hosting.

What type of hosting plan do you have? Are you happy with your hosting plan?

We actually use a few different hosting platforms for different types of clients with WordPress sites. For smaller sites, your typical small business service industry or restaurant, lawyer, plumber, type sites we use IONOS. For bigger sites with a higher need for speed we use Flywheel or RunCloud. We’re pretty happy with our hosting providers.

Sometimes factors include whether they need @yourdomain email hosting included, speed / loadtime factors for sites that get higher traffic or run more extensive ad campaigns, and so on.

Do you have tips for people shopping for hosting? What do you wish someone had told you?

The most important thing for us as an agency is to have all of our clients on individual cpanels or hosting packages so that there’s no “shared hosting”. This keeps all sites safer from potential malware intrusions. When we were a couple years into our business and starting to build up a number of hosted web clients, we were putting them in one of a few shared hosting plans. We didn’t do enough research, and also at the time there were not as many great reseller options around for agencies. All it took was one bad malware intrusion (on a site we hosted but didn’t build) and the malware code infiltrated pretty much all of the sites in that hosting package. That was a nightmare of clean-up. We said never-again after that.

So, I’d say if you’re planning on hosting multiple sites, do yourself a favor and put them on individual hosting plans or cPanels.

Who is your web host of choice for new clients?

I’ve gotta go with IONOS. The bulk of our clients fit the bill of “small business” and IONOS gives us very reliable performance, ease of packaging and admin and an attractive price tag. It’s an easy product to use and resell. Their reputation has them as one of the more “cheaper” hosting options, but we’ve found that the hosting is SUPER reliable and WordPress sites perform essentially just as fast on IONOS as they do on more “speed conscious” providers.

9 times out of 10, the speed of a site has more to do with how the site is built rather than the hosting it’s on.

What’s your worst “web hosting” horror story?

We get a lot of clients with similar stories about using a “web guy” for hosting and the constant issue is that they never respond or they’re just too slow, so they end up coming to us by word of mouth because we’re very responsive… One client had a similar story but their “web guy” moved overseas and essentially fell off the map completely. The client could not contact him, call, email.. nothing was returned. But this person kept paying for the domain each year and hosting their site for them. It was a restaurant site with a menu on it that was now almost 8 years old and outdated with old pricing and old items. We had built them a nice new site, but the old site was still ranking well on Google just from being around so long. We needed to get the old site off the web, but could not contact the guy, and the host could not confirm anyone to the account. I believe they tried sending the domain registrar a copy of their drivers license, business license, etc and still to no avail in the end. In fact, the site still exists.. no one has ever been able to contact the site-owner, but we did successfully push the old site off the 1st page of Google thankfully through some really aggressive SEO efforts.

They were in complete limbo with this old site stuck prominently on the web saying they had $6 meals on the menu when in reality they were now $11.

You can follow Commonwealth Creative Marketing on Facebook. We hope these insights will help you find your perfect WordPress web host!