Saturday, August 27, 2011

Not All WordPress Hosting Plans Are Created Equal

WordPress hosting plans are not all created equal. There are a few ways to find out what hosting provider is worth your time and money. Choosing the wrong plan can lead to your website loading slowly, unresponsive and susceptible to long down times.

What to look For in a good WordPress Hosting Provider

Look for the ability to manage your own databases, scripts and installs. if a hosting service does not allow this, it means they are using hardware that is either close to capacity or limited in CPU power and storage.

Most service providers use what are called virtual environments. they are simply small spaces on one physical server that is rented out to one or hundreds of clients. It is like owning a large piece of land, cutting it up in pieces and renting out small pieces to individual land owners. The owners may own the individual pieces of land, yet still share the same water resources and electricity resources. if one owner uses up too much of the resources, a cap prevents them from impacting other land owners. this is the same idea for when you use a shared hosting environment.

There is nothing wrong with using a shared hosting environment. Many people use them including myself. they are inexpensive and if configured correctly provide the right resources to power many sites from the smallest to the largest.

Sites that load slow or unresponsive are a sure sign the resources allocated to the client are not appropriate to run a website. Resources should be able to easily handle two to seven processes running in parallel. a process is something that is dedicated to a task.

For instance let’s say the website may be running a widget that shows different products in a moving carousel fashion. That animated widget may take up three processes. if there are not enough resources, the site will run very slow when the carousel is in use. The website could also crash or be shut down by the provider for using up too much resources. this is something that happened to me long ago when I first started to build websites. I signed up for a very cheap hosting plan that did not support much.

WordPress Hosting Resources

Almost all hosting providers will boast unlimited bandwidth. this means nothing to the client. what the client should be looking for is how much storage, memory and CPU power is allocated to each individual client on the shared resource.

Some WordPress hosting providers may give the client the run around and state it is all shared. this can never be the case and the client should press the admin or sales rep to state the true allocation. if the answer is not available, then it is best to move on to another company. all virtual environments are managed and have a set amount of resources for a section of the server in use. To state the information is unknown, usually means it is not adequate to support your needs.

If you are not sure about the kind of support a hosting provider may have, it is better to ask up front then to test out a new site on an unstable server environment.

One last thing to look for is interface support. a WordPress hosting provider should never charge for something like a cPanel. It should always come with your hosting plan, as should 24/7 support. these are a few things to look out for when looking for a good hosting provider. a solid provider is worth their weight in gold.

read interesting immigration news opinions

No comments:

Post a Comment

Illegal Alien News CNN

Immigration News Daily

Blog Archive