What kind of hosting do you need for your website?

“My website is so slow!” I hear it frequently from people who are looking for a new website. While it’s easy to look at things like too many plugins or too large images, sometimes the problem can run deeper. After all, a smooth website starts with choosing the right hosting package. In this blog, I explain what to look for when choosing your hosting.

Ideally, you want to be as unconcerned with your hosting as possible because that means your website is doing well and you don’t have to worry about it. But it’s nice to have a good hosting partner so that when you do need to ring the bell, you are helped quickly and competently.

But not only does the hosting partner matter, which package you choose can have a big impact on the experience of your website. Depending on which package you choose, you not only get more or less support, but also things like storage, backups and working memory. Things that can make the difference between a smooth and slow website.

Choose hosting that matches your CMS

The first important step to consider when choosing your hosting is the CMS you use – or plan to use. While there are plenty of parties offering generic hosting packages, it is wise to look for a hosting package that matches the system you plan to use.

The easiest example, of course, is a hosting package specifically for WordPress, but there are also packages for Joomla and Drupal, for example, if that better suits your requirements. Or choose a hosting package that fits well with your e-commerce solution if you mainly plan to run an online store.

Don’t share a server but go for VPS

Cheap is expensive, even for web hosting. What seems to be a nice offer at first glance can quickly turn into a slow server, resulting in many frustrations. A common cause of this is shared servers, where your website has to share technical resources with another website.

So my advice is always to choose hosting with dedicated servers or a package with a VPS: a virtual private server. In both cases, your specific installation is assigned its own processor cores and working memory, so you can be sure you don’t have to share resources with anyone.

Go for reliability, uptime and support

Regardless of whether you get five or five hundred thousand visitors a month to your website: you just want it to be online when people land on your page. Therefore, I recommend finding a party with high uptime and good customer support. The latter is especially for when something does happen with your website, that you know you have a service number that you can call and someone will speak to you.

But what is the best way to find out? The easiest step, of course, is to read reviews on the website. The opinions of other customers can often give you a good idea. In addition, it is smart to see if your potential partner also has uptime and response time figures on the website. In my opinion, a public dashboard with server statuses is always a positive sign.

Make the visitor experience better with good caching

It seems like a small effort, but every time someone visits a page on your website, it has to be rebuilt to serve it to your visitor. The simplest way to reduce that burden on the server is through caching. This stores a version of your page ready to go, and then it can be served to different visitors.

This not only relieves pressure on the server, but also makes the user experience much nicer for the visitor. Pages load faster and your website feels more responsive when you click through it. Something Google also notices when they crawl and rate websites for in the search engine. Good caching therefore contributes to better positioning in the results.

When it comes to caching, there is no one right answer: the server architecture of your potential hosting partner has a lot of impact on which caching method you can use. For example, there are Nginx, Apache and LiteSpeed servers, each with its own solutions for caching. In many cases with WordPress-focused hosting packages, you will encounter the LiteSpeed server architecture, with the WordPress LiteSpeed Caching plugin being a popular solution.

A good partner makes all the difference

Whether you’re looking for hosting for your start-up, or want to bring a fleet of dozens of websites under one roof, a good hosting partner will take the burden off your shoulders. At Brendly, we work with the team at WP Provider for practically all of our projects. Through their Managed WordPress Hosting, they manage the servers and we manage the websites from large to small.

Wondering how I can help you choose a suitable hosting partner? Or would you like to know more about what it takes to manage your website? Together with my colleagues, I am ready to answer your questions!