Businesses are careful when looking for a web development partner. However, they are not so careful when they hire a web hosting company. As a result, they do not correctly evaluate the potential web hosting or WordPress hosting provider and get in trouble. The root cause behind many issues is poor web hosting. Your website may go slow or even inaccessible. This happens because their update processes are not mature. Updating leads to a more extended period of downtimes.
So, it would be an essential question. ‘How to find the best WordPress hosting company for your business website?’ Well, we have explained all the key points that one must look into while hiring a hosting company for their business website.
Minimum WordPress Requirements
Your WordPress hosting provider should support PHP version 7.4 or greater. It should have an SSL certificate and MySQL version 5.6 or greater. MariaDB version 10.1 or greater would also work.
The Questions To Ask From WordPress Hosting Provider
To find out if some web hosting provider is good or not, ask them these seven questions. Then, if you get satisfactory answers, feel free to go with them.
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Does the company sell hosting plans that are WordPress-specific?
Ask this primary question as soon as possible. WordPress is a full-fledged and complete content management system. So it makes sense to ask if the company offers WordPress-specific plans. If the answer is no, there are high chances that they cannot operate it properly.
Their familiarity with the platform could be zero, making their selection totally out of the question. However, some vendors are experts in hosting WordPress websites. Try to find them. Their servers are secure, perform better, and load your websites with impressive speed.
On the other hand, some vendors do not bother more than throwing WordPress on their homepage for marketing reasons. They do not make any extra effort, so stay away from them. Their services hardly meet the minimum requirements.
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Do They Have WordPress experts on staff?
All websites go through troubles, sometimes. At that time, you turn to the hosting company’s support staff. So, your WordPress hosting company needs to have experts with years of experience handling WordPress. They fix the difficult issues quickly. Convesio, a wordpress hosting provider as reviewed by Adhip Ray, has excellent support staff.
Furthermore, they will help you understand common problems and tell you the best practices for using settings for maximum performance.
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Do They Offer a One-Click Staging Environment?
Well, this is one of the advanced questions. Even if they do not offer a one-click staging environment, you can rely on them. However, updating plugins and testing edits would be much easier if they do. A secure staging environment is a great addition. You can make a clone of your website that users cannot find through search engines.
Now, testing any feature would be a lot easier. Test out the potential changes effectively. It will not disturb the live functionality of your website. Also, you can test the plugin updates. This way, you can be sure the new plugin will not affect the website’s performance in any way. If you figure out that it can, you can think about some way to handle it before you install it.
Also, you can make a couple of changes and apply all of them at one time. Hence, you can avoid downtime. Your customers will not complain about being unable to access the website.
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Is The Support Team Approachable?
Is online chat the only way to reach them out? It is a significant problem if the answer is Yes. Nothing could be more frustrating. Problems you may face will not always be that easy to explain to a robot in the chat. There will be situations where you will need to make a phone call and talk to the human being. Only then can you hope that you can fix the issue with your B2B website.
So, find the provider that provides support via multiple channels. You should be able to both call them and text them. Also, they should ideally have a ticketing system. However, these things could be your personal preference. So when you have more than one option to contact, you can be sure that you can have the required support whenever you need it.
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Which PHP Version Do They Use?
PHP is a scripting language. We use it on the server-side and run web servers through it. In an ideal case, hosting providers are running PHP 7. This version provides much better performance than the older versions. Also, WordPress keeps releasing new versions. Therefore, using the latest PHP versions ensures that you will not have compatibility issues with WordPress.
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What Caching System Do They Use? Is It Garnish?
Caching systems play an essential role in improving website speed. When you reduce PHP and MySQL queries on each page load, you get better speed. Many other good caching systems and Varnish have the exact mechanism. They work better than caching plugins, for example, W3 Total Cache. You can improve the user experience. Users do not have to bear the long waiting time. Hence, your bounce rate will be lower.
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What About One-Click Backup & Restore?
Many situations may make it necessary to revert the website to an older form. For example, you may have to restore to the one-week-old version or even one month older version. There can be many reasons behind it. However, this facility has to be available, whatsoever the cause is.
Ideal web hosting company always provides comprehensive and easily accessible backups.
Security: The Litmus Test of Provider’s Quality
The security landscape in 2022 is horrible. Hundreds of websites are hacked every other day. Any day, it could be the turn of your website. Anyone can get into your network, make your servers down, and steal confidential data. All of this can cause heavy financial losses. So, ensure that security is the top priority of your hosting provider.
