You have decided to build a stunning WordPress website and are now looking for a reliable and robust hosting provider. Or you are frustrated with the issues on your current hosts and looking for fail-proof server infrastructure.
Or you have felt that you are paying too much for managed WordPress hosting service, and you are wondering to reduce your monthly hosting expenses.
Whether you are trying to subscribe to a new hosting account or plan to migrate away from your current host, you will have hundreds of questions. You may find it challenging to migrate your website if your host is not delivering the website performance as you expected or promised.
There are so many WordPress hosting companies in India and operating internationally. And if you are getting started, you will feel confused about your requirements and needs. And then find the service provider that will match your requirements and budget.
Disclaimer: I am the CEO of Rovity, and in each section, I will show you how the service that my team and I are providing will solve your problems. This can be not very objective, but you have the option to test everything yourself, and then you can take the decision.
So I encourage you to believe in yourself instead of just reading review articles and going through the recommendations of any YouTube channel.
The hosting infrastructure is one of the backbones of the success of your website. And it is one of the necessary and crucial parts of your website presence. So no matter what type of website you host, you must have an active hosting subscription to store the website files and serve them to your visitors.
If the website host of your choice cannot fulfill your requirements, you will be limited no matter what you do to make your website a great success.
Based on the above reasons, a website hosting server is one of the crucial investments you make. But most of the time, the real question is how you can find the best hosting service company worth your money and efforts.
So like I said earlier, we are going to test it. All you have to do is read this blog post I have specifically written for you, and based on the test, you decide.
Here, I will explain the top 11 tips for selecting an effective WordPress hosting company so your decision-making will be faster and more accurate. You can then stop worrying about the hosting challenges, and instead, you can focus on your business.
This guide will also help you save a massive amount of money from your monthly hosting expenses.
What to Look For in a Best WordPress Hosting Plan
There are so many essential features you must have when hosting any website. And your service provider should provide them as an integral part of their offering. And then, there are a few good-to-have features to enhance the experience of your WordPress hosting.
And sometimes, there are so many features that you will never use for your website.
So we always need to look for basic features and those extra premium features to help you better manage your WordPress website. Especially if the additional features are part of the subscription plan and you don’t need to pay extra for those excellent additions.
Tip 1 – Uptime and Stability of Servers
Uptime is the most fundamental quality determining the server’s stability and associated infrastructure network. Suppose your hosting service provider offers tons of features, but it lacks uptime and stability. In that case, those features are useless to you and your website visitors.
Uptime equals how long your website or web server was available online in an elementary term. So the less uptime, the more frequent downtime you and your visitors experience. The higher the uptime, your website visitors will be happy, and your SEO and other metrics will be amused.
So if your web hosting server is not available and is going down frequently, it can cost you a lot of money and many sleepless nights ahead. Lower uptime will affect your existing visitors and risk your chance of gaining a new customer via Google search or other channels.
And there’s a higher chance that you will receive a negative comment about your website and its downtime through word of mouth.
When Google search bot tries to access your website, and unfortunately it is down, that will leave you a wrong impression in Google’s eye. And frequent downtime will give a clear indication to Google that this website is not reliable. So Google and other search engine companies will stop showing your website on the search result page. And that will directly impact your business and website growth.
Rovity’s Solution: Rovity guarantees you 99.99% uptime. We use UptimeRobot, a powerful and trusted third party, to monitor and publicly show the uptime data on our status page. This is real-time data that you can verify yourself and measure the quality of our uptime and stability that we offer to you.
The data shows that our web server is reachable all the time, and the average uptime is 100%, which is very impressive.
Tip 2 – Web Server and Website Speed
Website speed is must be one of the critical aspects of your focus area when you are looking for a robust hosting service provider. Speed is a vital ingredient for the success of your website and your business. If your website is slow, no matter how good your product is, your conversion rate will be much less than it must have.
Many studies show that your visitors will abandon the website if your website doesn’t load in less than 2 seconds. They will go back to your competitor’s website. Do you want that to happen?
Conversion is the whole reason you are putting your website live, and what if people are unable to access it or it is not loading fast enough?
Most of the time, the hosting service will decide how fast your website will load. Besides that, how fast your website loads will depend on the WordPress theme, plugins, media files, JavaScript, and CSS files that you use.
If you have a superfast server and your WordPress theme and plugins are not well optimized, then you won’t see any benefit in that. So as a website owner, you are equally responsible for the speed of your website.
You are sure that your theme is lightweight and well optimized; you have installed highly optimized WordPress plugins. Yet your website is still loading slow. In that case, we can safely assume that your website host is not as fast as you think. And then this is the right time to move to a superfast WordPress host like Rovity.
Rovity’s Solution: Rovity has hosted our premium cloud-based infrastructure on AWS. It is configured with a superfast NVMe SSD storage disk and hosted in their Mumbai data center. Our web server is a fine-tuned Nginx server stack, and we offer robust server-level caching and CDN-level caching.
These custom-built infrastructures will surely increase your WordPress website’s performance and speed it up. I have written an article, and you can read it to know How to Turbocharge Your WordPress Site in 4 Easy Steps. This alone will tempt you to transfer your WordPress sites to our network like hundreds of our new customers did.
Tip 3 – Regular and Automated Website Backups
For any digital property having a healthier backup solution is a must-have feature. Backup is undoubtedly not an optional feature. There are so many situations where you require to restore your WordPress website.
Suppose you have upgraded your WordPress core or messed with a plugin. Then restoring from a backup will be the easiest and most effective solution.
Sure, as a website owner, you can manage your backup. Having just a backup in place is not enough. The backup must be healthy; it must be easy to restore. If there is any chance, you must be able to restore a single file from thousands of files, so you don’t need to repair the whole website for just a silly mistake you made.
Rovity’s Solution: We have deployed a continuous backup solution no matter which plans you subscribed to. We take backups every day, every week, and every month.
We can even restore a single file from the whole backup directory, so you don’t need to worry about restoring the entire website. Instead, we can only retrieve the necessary file from your file system and recover that file.
Tip 4 – One-Click WordPress Installer
You can install WordPress in 2 ways. One is manually, and another uses an easy-to-apply one-click installer.
When you choose the manual method, you need to download the installer file and upload it to your web server. Then create a database and database username and then assign and give privileges to the database. And then initiate the installation process.
Suppose you don’t have any idea about the database and other configurations. In that case, you can use a one-click WordPress installer.
Most of the hosting service providers offer a one-click WordPress installing method. This will help anyone who is just getting started with WordPress experience the power of WordPress as quickly as possible.
Rovity’s Solution: We also offer a one-click WordPress installer with more advanced features. Our WordPress installer is always up to date with the latest WordPress versions. So, whenever there is a newer version of WordPress, you can install or upgrade it.
In addition to the WordPress installer, we also offer a staging feature. So you can test your websites and new updates without affecting your live website.
Tip 5 – Friendly and Knowledgeable Technical Support Staff
Service providers who provide good post-sale support always stand out from the competition. A conversation with the pre-sales team will always be more joyful and delightful. But you can only experience the proper skill set of the company and the product when you start using it.
This is when you truly experience the product or service you subscribed to and the company’s ability to maintain the service you subscribed to.
So, a knowledgeable and friendly support team is a must-have feature for the WordPress hosting experience. This is especially true if you are just getting started. Because sometimes, you may not know most of the hosting-related terminology, and you will be wondering the meaning of SSL over the concept of SSH.
Currently, in the hosting industry, if you contact your service provider for technical support, it will take a couple of hours or days to get a reply from them. And sometimes, the response will be just a template that will not be relevant to your question or problem.
This is, unfortunately, a standard treatment if you go with a large service provider with millions of customers in their hands. If you opt for a small-scale or medium-scale service provider, there is a chance that you will get much better quality support from them.
And sometimes, when you ask for an answer, you will get an external document link which you may not be able to apply the solution yourself.
Rovity’s Solution: We know the pain of getting answers and solutions to our problems because we are customers of other SaaS tools. We believe that not everyone has the skill sets to manage a website, especially when getting started.
So instead of assuming that they know everything that we have learned, it is always a good idea to be kind to them and help them achieve their goals. Sometimes they might be stuck somewhere, and they couldn’t understand why/how/when/where they are stuck. And for experienced people like us, it may be a few minutes’ tasks to identify the root cause and provide a solution.
Our customers are more valuable than our time, so we should fix the issues ourselves instead of keeping them in the hitch. So our customers can quickly get back to work. So we are always ready to help you by fixing the solution ourselves instead of letting you do that. Because if we allow you to resolve the issue yourself, it might take a couple of hours, and it will take a few minutes if we do it.
We are friendly people to interact with, and you can ask almost anything. Suppose you are already subscribed to our service. In that case, I’m sure that you have already experienced our support team’s different levels of efficiency and expertise.
I invite you to engage our Technical Support team if you haven’t already subscribed to our service and haven’t experienced its capabilities.
Tip 6 – Location of the Origin Server
This is one vital signal that will influence so many technical aspects of your website hosting experience. Consider the origin server is as your hometown; let’s take Mumbai as an example. Within a couple of hours, you can reach your aunt living in Bengaluru. Your Delhi-settled parents can quickly come and visit your Mumbai residence. But it is costly and resource-hungry for you to see your cousin that settled in the United States of America.
The location of the origin server is as vital as this. If most of your website visitors and customers are within India, hosting your server or website in the United States will be a horrible idea. Instead, if you host it in Singapore or inside India, visitors will experience much lower latency. So your WordPress website will load much faster for them.
So, it is always a better idea to host as close as your customers reside.
Rovity’s Solution: Our origin server is hosted on the AWS Mumbai region. And suppose your website visitors are mainly inside India or around India. In that case, our service will be a reliable network for you and your customers. Your customers will reach your website within a few milliseconds. Since they experience and enjoy the lower latency, TTFB will also be the lowest.
Time to First Byte (TTFB) is one of the speed ranking signals; the lower the TTFB, the better your website’s response.
This will help you deliver your business to your customers faster than other solutions. Thus the happier your customers are, the more sales you will generate. The faster your website, the more love you will receive from Google.
Whether you will subscribe to Rovity’s premium service or not, I advise you to always choose a service provider with a server closest to your target audience.
Tip 7 – Global CDN
CDN or Content Delivery Network is a group of servers strategically deployed globally. CDN will complement the origin server. If you configure CDN, then all the static assets like JavaScript, CSS, images, and fonts will deliver through these CDN. So your static files will load much faster than all those files pulling from the single server that is centrally located.
In short, this is a decentralized way to deliver your website to a global audience where they will enjoy the least possible latency to those static assets.
Rovity’s Solution: We offer a robust CDN to all of our hosting subscription plans. That will help you deliver your static assets in less than 30 milliseconds anywhere in the world. In India, we have Point of Presence (PoPs) in major cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi, and Chennai.
Tip 8 – Free SSL
SSL certificates are now not a luxury and a must-have feature for any website. In the past, SSL certificates were very costly and considered only required for banking websites and other similar websites with transactions involved. But now, even if your website is a static site that only shows a couple of text and a few images, you must have an SSL certificate deployed.
Still, many famous and established brands sell certificates for a high price. Sadly, people are unaware of this and continue to purchase them.
Rovity’s Solution: We offer fully automated SSL certificates for every domain hosted with us. All major web browsers trust this free yet extremely powerful SSL certificate.
Compared to the paid SSL certificates, ours are A+ rated. You don’t really need to pay for SSL.
Tip 9 – Free Website Builder
The beauty of WordPress is that it is very user-friendly, and anyone can easily create a beautiful website. There are many getting started guides, video tutorials, and a helpful volunteer community you can use if you are stuck somewhere. If you have an Internet connection and a computer, you can create your own website; you can customize it the way you want it.
Moreover, easy-to-use drag and drop page builders will allow you to quickly launch your website within a couple of clicks. You have to update the content and customize it further as per your business requirement.
Rovity’s Solution: We are offering such an excellent and robust drag and drop page builder, along with all of the subscription plans. It comes with thousands of premade layouts and covers almost any industry.
You just need to import the premade layout and update the content as per your business and website requirements. In fact, within a few hours, you can create a stunning website, including an e-commerce store. And start to launch it faster, like booking movie tickets. With us, you have the power to be the boss of yourself, and you are not dependent on anyone and anything.
Tip 10 – Innovative and Flexible Host
The shared hosting industry won’t embrace innovations as fast as other hosting types like managed VPS and managed WordPress services. One of the main reasons is scaling and being flexible with the systems and domains hosted on the same server. So even some of the prominent service providers in the shared hosting industry are still using outdated cPanel as their control panel.
Because of these limitations, they have put you aside from the most innovative and modern technologies currently available. Because these service providers cannot scale and adapt to the new technologies, you miss out on premium and breathtaking technologies to enhance the WordPress hosting experience.
Rovity’s Solution: We are always welcome and ready to adapt to the newest technologies and innovations. We are very flexible; our infrastructure is very scalable and prepared to adapt to any changes to help you enjoy the latest technologies as they arise.
Thanks to our modern infrastructure underlying and powering our server units, we do not have limitations and restrictions that other hosting companies have.
For example, we are one of the rarest gems in the hosting industry that offers native support for the Nginx web server and the presence of .htaccess. We are not just using a proxied version of Nginx with Apache. Instead, we have customized it to act as a robust server cache engine.
That will allow you to host your WordPress website on the same server stack that large companies like Netflix, Adobe, WordPress, and Audi use. By using our service, you are compatible with current technologies. And you will likely get the opportunity to enjoy the newest and upcoming hosting trends.
One such example is our Ghost CMS offering. I don’t know any service providers that can host Ghost CMS and WordPress CMS on the same hosting account. That means you can host a Ghost CMS and a WordPress-powered WooCommerce website on the same hosting account. Remember hosting a Ghost CMS is still very expensive, and only capable and experienced server admins can manage it.
Thanks to our cutting-edge technology, we brought powerful Ghost CMS infrastructure to you at the cost of a shared hosting service.
Tip 11 – Pricing
Pricing is one of the easy-to-measure parameters when you compare similar service providers. You can even measure its impact before you even sign up to your preferred service provider. Because you see the pricing of multiple service providers on their website, you can compare and decide for yourself.
It is a widespread belief that if you pay more for a product or a service, usually it will be of a higher quality than a lower-priced one. Fortunately, this is not true every time. There are service providers like Rovity whose pricing is comparatively cheaper than those expensive hosting service companies. But still outperform those costly services in speed, performance, and customer satisfaction.
Rovity’s Solution: We have priced our service so that even a newbie can quickly start our service and launch their dream website in no time. This is part of our vision to bring more people online and convert them as content creators instead of content consumers.
We don’t want you just to be a buyer of any e-commerce store. Instead, we wish you to launch an e-commerce store, sell your services and products, and be your own boss.
So our pricing is very entry-level. We offer hundreds of premium features to compete with those with a big pocket and lots of cash.
Do You Really Need an Expensive Host?
Let me admit to you that I know there is a misconception about a typical shared hosting service provider that they are not reliable. They will force you to upgrade to their higher plans, or you will experience frequent downtime and poor customer support. All of these will force you to subscribe to a managed VPS service.
Unfortunately, most of the time, the reason is that you haven’t got a chance to experience knowledgeable providers like Rovity. All you did so long was read a couple of paid reviews and decide to host your site with that big brand. And then felt disappointed due to their upsell strategy and ever-increasing cost. Then you started looking for another service provider, found another paid review, and switched to that.
On top of this, so-called speed experts told you to start using a VPS service to get a better speed. And you are living with that because you believe that this is the maximum service quality anyone can offer.
But you did not do one fundamental thing; you did not try yourself.
I have discussed a couple of customers that recently migrated from various managed VPS service providers. I understand from the conversation that they were overpaying for their hosting service.
For example, the lowest-priced VPS charges $5 per month. Most of the time, especially when you are getting started with your website, you will never have traffic and server load requiring the VPS.
Our shared hosting can easily manage that traffic. And you would have saved so much money from the hosting fee every month, which you could divert to something else to grow your business.
So I ask you to evaluate your current hosting expenses and see if you really utilize the service you are paying per month. If you are just getting a couple of 100 page views per month, I’m sure that you are paying for a service that you are not using enough.
This is the time to start saving and migrate to Rovity. Because we have everything that a managed VPS service provider offers you and at the cost of a cheap shared hosting service. All you have to do is subscribe to one of our monthly plans and ask us to make a staging setup by cloning your live website.
You don’t need to change the DNS and move your files to your Rovity server. You keep your live website in the same place where you are currently hosted and compare it with the cloned version hosted on Rovity’s network.
You can then compare both versions side-by-side and easily decide without listening to others but assessing yourself.
Summary
This blog post explained the top 11 tips for selecting an effective WordPress hosting company. I have also shared Rovity’s solutions to your problems. I believe that this will surely give you more insights, and you will decide on your next host with more power in your hands.
I also tried helping you to rethink your current hosting fee if you are unknowingly using a VPS service and overpaying for it.
All you have to do is test Rovity’s premium cloud-based WordPress hosting solutions side-by-side and with your current host. And then evaluate yourself and make a move permanently.
My knowledgeable and friendly staff and I are here to help you with your WordPress websites, and you can feel free to focus on your business.
