The first step in setting up any website is figuring out your hosting. There are countless options for hosting providers, which makes picking the right one a daunting task! In this article, I’m going to provide a number of options that may work for you depending on your situation.  In general, you will find that cheaper options will provide you with more freedom, but also more responsibility. More expensive services tend to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you and provide great support, but will charge a premium. Each of the recommendations on the list are great, but only if they match your use case specifically. So let’s take a look at some options!

WPEngine

I’m going to start this list with WPEngine because I have the most experience managing WordPress sites with them.

 Plans start at $30/mo, which will get you 25,000 visitsmonth, 10gb storage, 50gb bandwidthmonth,  and 1 site. 

 While you will certainly pay a premium with WPEngine, it is one of the most convenient solutions out there. They provide One Click setup for your websites, which will include development, staging, and production environments, to allow you to easily test changes before pushing them live.  

Once your site is live, they also provide automated backups and one click SSL encryption at no additional charge which will auto-renew for you, meaning you won’t have to keep track of that pesky expiration date. 

 They have nearly automated domain transfers for a number of different domain providers including godaddy, which will take much of the headache out of transferring your domain, and their support is incredible. I have never had an issue that WPEngine support could not provide a solution to, or provide me with the relevant information I needed to fix myself.  

WPEngine even offers 37 premium themes for free to all of their users, which can help to cut costs and kickstart a new project if you aren’t looking to build one yourself.

Kinsta

Kinsta offers many of the same benefits as WPEngine, but do provide some of their own perks. You’ll have more options for which PHP version you’d like to run, great auto-scaling infrastructure to handle sudden surges in traffic, SSH, Git, and WP-CLI access on all plans, and global data centers for more reliably fast load times.

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean is what I use to host spark refinery. With droplets starting at just $5/mo, you can’t do much better for an entry level hosting provider. Much like AWS, DigitalOcean provides a number of starting configurations for your droplet, with different operating systems, resource allocations, and server locations. There is even a one click solution for setting up a WordPress environment, so you can skip all the nitty gritty and get to managing your site right away!

 They offer regular backups for a small premium, some monitoring tools, and networking tools to connect your domains and manage DNS records, floating IPs, and more. 

 Much like AWS and other low-level services, they also provide quick and easy scalability for your droplets, so that you can increase space and resources as your website grows. 

Whatever you do, avoid EIG Hosts!

Endurance International Group is a company known for buying up reputable hosting providers and driving them into the ground. These include big, nearly household names such as HostGator and BlueHost. 

For an in-depth read on why you should avoid them and an updated list of their child acquisitions, look to reviewhell’s excellent review on the subject here. 

Of course, these are not your only options! Do your own research, and figure out what’s right for you! And if you’d like some help deciding, leave a comment or a message!