Are you ready to publicly debut your newly developed WordPress website or blog but are wondering about the best hosting solution for your website? You have heard a lot about shared WordPress hosting and you know that your website is more complex than a simple WordPress.org blog and you need a more robust hosting solution, but an expensive, dedicated server solution isn’t in your budget at this time. A shared hosting solution using WordPress could be the perfect solution, but you need to understand the advantages and disadvantages before you ultimately decide.
The following information will help to point out the advantages and disadvantages of using shared WordPress hosting.
Shared Web Hosting Cost
The cost of shared web hosting is very low, with monthly rates at reputable web hosting companies starting at $3.95. Shared hosting can be very cost-effective if you do not need a lot of customization. These days, shared hosting includes many features and benefits in addition to WordPress support, probably much more than you need. Check the features and benefits thoroughly to ensure you have access to all programs you will need, such as e-commerce tools, e-mail, databases, website statistics, control panels and more.
WordPress is built on open source code, which means that it was designed to be made available to the general public to use and/or modify. While this has helped to enhance and improve the software and create a truly global community, it can also be a point of contention, as each WordPress custom theme and plugin is designed by different people and groups, each having different complexities. If you come across a bug in one of the plugins, you will have to go back to the people or group who created it in order to find a fix, if there is one. Luckily, most of the popular plugins have been through rigorous testing and solutions are readily available.
If you have not created your website yet, you could end up spending more money than anticipated in creating a unique WordPress website that will resonate with readers. Because of its popularity, using WordPress to create your site can become a double-edged sword because there are so many sites out there, over 60 million currently that will look similar to yours in design and content. A website designer well-versed in WordPress can command thousands of dollars to setup and administrate a WordPress website. If you are on a tight budget, it’s best to start out simply using one of the millions of themes available and grow from there.
Technology Enhancements
It is a shared hosting provider’s job to keep their features as up-to-date as possible, which works as an advantage to the end-user customer. It is a time-consuming job to keep blog or website content fresh and active, let alone worry about all of the inner workings of a server. Are you ready to update your website on a continual basis? Do you have the technical skills necessary to keep up with the updates?
One of the main advantages of using a reputable shared hosting company is that they have talented technical support personnel on hand to help you with any issue that comes up. Chances are, they will have had experience with your issue, know the answer and how to correct it quickly. If you are not technically skilled, tech support is invaluable.
As your website grows, you will need to rely more on skilled technology professionals who will be able to handle security issues, software updates, your site’s speed and uptime and more. If you anticipate a heavy increase in traffic to your website, you may need a hosting solution that could cope with this traffic such as WP Engine or a dedicated server solution may need to be reviewed, as shared hosting providers are limited in how much bandwidth each customer can use. Because you are sharing resources with other customers, if you use more than your allotted share, this can cause response time issues, as well as server downtime. Even though some shared hosting companies like SiteGround offer 99% uptime:
If you do go cover your package this would cause problems. If you think you might be over from time to time it might be worth speaking to your host to see if they are automatically upgrade you once you’re close to using up your resources so it won’t cause problems. This might be a more expensive way to do this but if you only expect this to happen a few times a year, this might be the way to go.
WordPress Plugins and Themes
One disadvantage to installing and using WordPress plugins and themes is that they are continually being updated by their developers, which could potentially cause compatibility issues and problems with your website when you install or run updates.
You must make sure that your service provider can handle the plugins you could end up utilizing for your website. The provider must meet or exceed WordPress minimum requirements, as well as have most current versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP, in order to run the custom themes and plugins. Plugins can take up a lot of server resources, more than an HTML website. Shared hosting plans usually allocate a certain amount of server space and throughput per account. Because you are sharing the server’s resources with other customers, you have to be aware of your website statistics. Depending on how the shared hosting provider handles overages, you could end up spending extra money.
Upgrading is Easy
If you are looking for a quick and easy blog or website setup, shared hosting providers such as Web Hosting Hub and SiteGround provide WordPress automatic one-click installation setup, which is nice for inexperienced users or if you are pressed for time. They can even take a current WordPress website and import it for you. Automatic WordPress updates are made available to customers quickly. Shared hosting providers all provide basically the same setup, depending on what you need. Unlimited monthly data transfer, unlimited domains, network monitoring and 100% uptime, disk space, bandwidth, MySQL databases and email are standard offerings.
Slow Response Times a Possibility, as well as Site Downtime and Website Lag
As referenced earlier, if you do not do thorough research on shared hosting providers, you may end up with a provider that does not manage customer usage very well or oversells, which could lead to unresponsiveness and slowness on your own site. A cheaper company may sound good, but if you don’t have access to your site, it can cost you money. Site downtime is what you want to avoid if at all possible.
Shared WordPress hosting has its own unique advantages and disadvantages. After this review, you should have the knowledge needed to either go forward with shared hosting or utilize a different website hosting solution.