How to Choose a Cost-Effective WordPress Hosting Solution?

When you are looking for a WordPress hosting solution for your blog or website, getting confused is obvious but it’s a normal thing and there is no need to worry about. With so many options available, it is quite easy for a newbie to lose track in the hosting jungle.

Thus this post will help you to choose a cost effective WordPress Hosting solution.

To choose one hosting provider among many, here are some basic points that you need to take into consideration:

• Price: As we are looking out for a ‘cost effective’ solution, price obviously tops the list of priorities. To decide on this factor you need to be sure about your budget first. But generally you’ll get a good hosting service in the price range of $3/month to $6/month. If the price is unbelievably low, be a bit cautious there. If the company is offering the service in such a lost cost there is high possibility that the quality of the service will suffer.
• Features: Of course you’ll have to compare the features; after all that’s what you are paying for. The basic features that you need to look for are at least one free domain, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, FTP account, Emails and add-on domains. Also most good hosting services offers a bunch of freebies such as free advertising credit, free backup service free WordPress installer etc. Do thorough research; go through the reviews to get the most of the services at the best price.
• Speed and uptime: Most of the leading hosting providers today claims to provide uptime somewhere around 99%. But it may not be the case in reality. If you want to check the uptime or speed of a special web hosting, you can find the real monitoring data from some reliable review sites like LinkedHosts. However it is good to have a realistic expectation. No serious downtime is mostly enough for your website. The page loading speed is another feature you need to pay close attention to. A sluggish page loading speed can drive away many customers and damage the reputation of your website pretty badly. Thus it is advisable to be a little cautious here. I have found a great online tool that allows to test the server response time of your web hosting provider.
• Technical support: When you are running a website, technical support is very important. This is especially true if you are a novice and have little technical knowledge. So, before you sign up for the service make sure the provider offers professional technical support 24/7.
• Look for money back policy: Almost all good service providers offer a 30 days money back policy in case of dissatisfaction on the customers’ part. Make sure the company you are availing the services from offers the same facilities. This way in case you do not feel okay with services you can immediately switch to any other provider without any monetary loss.
• Look for an easy to use control panel: Control panel is vital in managing your site. A complex control panel with innumerable options can make navigating quite difficult, especially when you do not have any prior experience. Thus look for a service provider that offers a neat and clean control panel that you are comfortable to use.
• Give attention to technical requirement: In case the hosting service is not 100% compatible with WordPress, hosting your website with them would be quiet difficult. Thus look for basic PHP, MYSQL features. WordPress is highly compatible with PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0; make sure you host is using the latest version of PHP and MYSQL.
• Check the reputation: Finally talk to other bloggers, check out reviews and find out the kind of reputation the service provider enjoys, it can tell you a lot about the services you are about to receive.

To sum it up

Once you have considered all these basic points you’ll be able to take the decision on which hosting services to go ahead with.

If you are still confused of choosing among dozens of options, these top 3 recommendations can narrow down your choices greatly.

Over to you

Which hosting service you are using? Would you recommend it to a new blogger? Would you like to add any other points to our checklist? Do let us know your opinion.