Solid WordPress hosting

I’ll start this off letting you know what I have an affiliate link to the hosting company[/LINK] that I recommend. I didn’t have affiliate link when I started using them, and I really don’t get a ton of money from it, but I am always asked about hosting when I speak at Meetups and WordCamps and I finally decided to blog about why I use WP Engine.

Security

Why would a someone continue to install a plugins to deal with different parts of security when this should be resolved by the hosting company? Security is something that your average Joe shouldn’t have to worry about, mainly because your average Joe is going to assume that your hosting company is got this covered. Unfortunately, that is often not the case.

At Sideways8, we help a lot of agencies with hosting. In December, we had one of those agencies sites get hacked while on Flywheel’s hosting, so the reached out to us. I told them they have two options, we can clean it for them or they can just move to WP Engine. I’m by no means saying Flywheel has bad hosting, I’m saying that in three years of using WP Engine I have not had to deal with a single hacked site.

Backups

Load time / Site speed

I can could give you a slew of screenshots like this. I understand if this is your personal blog there might not be a need for speed, but if you are selling a product or service, and the load time could be cut in half, why wouldn’t you do it?

Imagine your product is $30 and your site load slowly.  People start dropping off the site if the load time is slower than 3 seconds.  If you lose one customer a month because the load time, you have shot yourself in the foot.

In short, find good hosting.  But be careful.  Not all “WordPress Hosting” is good.  The best I have found truly is WP Engine (affiliate link)[/LINK].  I’m sure there are other good ones out there, and I’m all ears.  Comment below if you have some suggestions.