WordPress Hosting Meaning

Introduction

Blogging is a very popular term in internet now. A blog, during its initial days was something like an online diary, which people used to update on a day to day basis to express their ideas, views, share their thoughts, passions etc. It just used to be an online medium for reading. However as internet advanced, expression of views are commonly done through social media like facebook and twitter now. Blogs are also used for the same, however it also advanced to new forms. Now people use it for various means – to share thoughts, to promote their business and they even earn their living from blogs. The most popular blogging software in uses these days is WordPress.

WordPress.com Vs WordPress.org

WordPress is present in two forms – WordPress.org and WordPress.com

WordPress.com is more into normal blogging, where as WordPress.org provides the same software in a full fledged website format. WordPress.com provides you a website, in the form of a subdomain which is not under your control. Say for example george.wordpress.com, where George can write about his passion, his views on politics or anything and everything he wants to say. However he cannot modify the blog beyond a limit, or change it to a form he wish to use. Also, whether he likes or not, wordpress will add ads on his site.

WordPress.org, on the other hand, requires a domain name to be registered, hosting package to be selected, and then whatever you wish to do with the website can be done at your wish. You can modify the website as you wish, add plugins/themes as you desire, submit your site for adwords and earn revenue. All these when given to you together along with perfect management of your website, by the experts of the industry, is termed as WordPress Hosting.

WordPress Hosting

WordPress is an open source Content Management System, created in PHP and mysql. It is used by millions of websites worldwide. What makes it so popular is its simple design, easy to use interface and themes which helps in building websites easily, even by newbies. One do not have to be technically knowledgeable to build a website with wordpress.WordPress Hosting

 

WordPress can easily run on any normal shared hosting platform. WordPress by itself is simple and sleek and do not cause any resource issues in the server. Hence all shared hosting providers allow wordpress to be installed on their server. They even provide software to install wordpress on a single click, without having to manually download and install them. It shows how every hosting provider promotes the use of wordpress and other CMS. WordPress websites are well suitable for normal shared hosting environment, provided they are simple, small websites like a personal blog with a few visitors. However, if your website is huge and drives a lot of traffic, then it is recommended that you find a wordpress host.

 

What Is WordPress Hosting?

 

A WordPress host is nothing but a shared host who has tweaked their servers to match all the technical requirements of running a wordpress website. This includes wordpress installation, website speed, website security, plugins, backups, updates, caching and anything and everything required by wordpress to run perfectly. So if your website is huge with a lot of traffic, it is recommended to get a WordPress Hosting, where your host will take care of technical side, and you can be relieved and concentrate on building your website. Cost wise, wordpress hosting will cost more than normal shared hosting, because of the extra features provided.

Features of WordPress Hosting

 

  1. Auto-Backup
  2. Auto-update
  3. Server side caching
  4. speed
  5. CDN, etc.

WordPress – Being Simple to Horrible

WordPress, by its default nature is very simple and user friendly. You can easily create and manage your website, create posts or anything you like with wordpress. However, as your business grows, or WordPress Being Simple To Horribleas your traffic increases, the requirements increases. Your site may require more advancements, and wordpress may now start eating your resources like anything. Your website starts loading really slow and it is such a horrible experience. Mostly, it is not a server problem, but checking a few things in your wordpress installation itself can correct the slow loading of your site. Let us see what all factors causes this and how can they be corrected. This is where the presence of a WordPress Host comes for your rescue.

Plugins – WordPress is abundant with plugins. Whatever options you require in websites, just search in google and you will find n number of plugins created for that use. I have never been disappointed searching for a wordpress plugin. For anything and everything you wish to see in your website, you will find a wordpress plugin. However not all plugins are well optimized. Some plugins may be poorly coded and once used in your website will cause heavy usage WordPress Hosting Pluginsof sever resources and cause your website to load slow. Some other plugins will display a white screen on your website, leaving you clueless as to what happened to the site all of a sudden. You will have to identify such plugins and disable them to correct the problem. If there are a lot of plugins and you do not know which is the problematic one, then the easiest way to find it is by disabling all plugins at once, and then re-enable them one by one. Then enable the plugins one by one, and with utmost attention, check which plugin, when enabled, is causing the site to load slow again. As soon as you find the culprit, disable it. Too many plugins can also cause slow loading of your website.

Themes – WordPress has many built in themes which are indeed beautiful. However more beautiful themes are available from third party sources which can be bought either for free or for a fixed price. Themes will always give a nice look and feel to your website, however if not managed properly, will cause too much troubles to your website. Utmost care should be given while choosing a theme. Some themes are poorly coded, and will be easily hacked.

Attacks – Attacks comes in various forms towards wordpress websites. Mostly they are in the form of malicious activities like spamming, hacking, phishing etc. Once an attacker gains access to your wordpress, he can easily install anything in your website. Sometimes they install scripts which will send out spam emails from your website causing your IP address to be blacklisted. Sometimes they just hack and damage your website, breaking your business.WordPress Hosting Attacks

 

There are various other forms of attacks as well. Most of them are brute force attacks towards wordpress login pages. Some intend to just flood the wordpress login page with traffic, leading to slow loading or not loading the site at all. Some intend to gain access to wordpress admin area by trying with random usernames and passwords. There are some other types of attacks called xmlrpc attacks, which are very common these days, intended towards the xmlrpc.php page in your wordpress. Such distributed attacks when gets severe, will raise heavy load on the server and will affect all websites hosted in that server, and not just the single wordpress installation.

Home Page – Your site home page is what the visitors sees first, and you try to show maximum content on it. This will cause the site to load slow as all these data and widgets takes time to be loaded. Something which you did to impress your visitors might now cause a bad impression on them as the site takes ages to load.

Images & Videos – Images and videos in your websites always give a stunning look and entertainment to your website. However, when you try to load all these from the server it will take a lot of time to load depending on the size of the images – result being a slow site again.

How to choose a good WordPress Host?

Factors mentioned above are to be taken care of by anyone who uses a wordpress website. WordPress Hosts give utmost importance to all the above factors. Given below are the factors, which you should consider while choosing a WordPress Host.

Pros & Cons of Managed WordPress Hosting

Managed wordpress hosting is one in which all aspects of WordPress administration is taken care of by the host, giving ample time for the website owner to concentrate on their website and business. Like any other hosting, this also has a lot of prons and cons, a few of which are discussed below.

Prons :- Pros

Cons :-Cons

Tips to keep your WordPress website fast and secure

Above, we discussed some factors which might affect the loading time of your website, and certain other factors that cause huge damage to your website. In this section, we will see what all can be done to speed up your website and also keep it secure from malicious activities. All good wordpress hosting companies will employ many such techniques to provide a good hosting experience to their customers.

Use reliable themes – The word ‘Free' always have a magical attraction. You tend to grab anything you get for free. Same applies in the case of wordpress themes as well. Many are not ready to spend a penny for getting good themes. Most are satisfied with the free themes that are available. Though not all, most free themes are not well maintained and no proper updates to threats are covered in it. Hence, website using such themes will get attacked at the first place. To avoid that, it is always better to use a theme from the official wordpress theme repository. If you are able to spend a few dollars on third party commercial themes, then go for a good theme with proper support and updates.

Disable unnecessary plugins – As I mentioned above, wordpress plugins are available for anything and everything, and once you start using it, you tend to install plugins for all purposes. A lot of plugins will slow down your site badly. Hence disable the unnecessary plugins always. Use plugins only based on your requirements, and also identify resource consuming plugins and replace them with good ones. Install plugins from trustworthy sources only. This practice will not only fasten your websites, but will also minimize security risks.

Keep your home page simple – You might be tempted to showcase all your talents, design and data as soon as a visitor lands on your website. You will push all contents, images and widgets into the home page. This will load up your home page like anything and will lead to a very slow loading site. You should understand that a simple and nice design can be more impressive and appealing than a heavy loaded one. Just create a simple home page with necessary links to relevant information, this will load your website much faster than earlier.

Updates – Your wordpress installation, plugins and themes should always be upgraded to the latest stable version. Updates are released frequently and you should not miss or delay updating them. Old versions of any software are prone to attacks and this is a major requirement towards keeping your website secure.WordPress Hosting Updates

 

Images and Videos – High quality images, and huge sized images and videos will slow down your website when accessed from the same shared server as your website is. Most shared hosts do not allow streaming, and hence videos cannot be played from their server. The best method to overcome this problem and reduce the slowness caused thus is to embed the images and videos from other links. For example, videos can be embedded from youtube so that when a visitor plays the video it is played from youtube. This also gives an added advantage that your bandwidth is not being used for playing your video.

Preventing attacks – You can disable xmlrpc.php file in your website's .htaccess to prevent access to the file causing attacks. There are also plugins available in wordpress which disables xmlrpc and prevents attacks. Other distributed attacks cannot be fully controlled, if you do not have a DDOS protection enabled host.

Caching Mechanisms – WordPress being built in php is served dynamically. Each time a request is received, the page needs to be served from the webserver. Caching mechanisms, when employed, caches the web pages for faster delivery, there by improving speed and performance. There are a lot of cache plugins available for wordpress, out of which the plugin named W3 Total Cache has high popularity.

Using CDN – CDN or Content Delivery Network is a technology, when enabled, helps in speeding up your website drastically. The idea behind it is to use a large fleet of servers distributed across the world, and when a page is requested it delivers the page from the visitor's closest server. For example, a visitor from Europe visits a website which is hosted in US. All the images and static contents hosted in that website will be delivered to him from a server in Europe which is closest to his geographical location.

Malware Scans – Whichever CMS you use, malware scans are a very important part of security. Most hosts will help you with it, and such scans will help to identify if any malicious scripts are injected into your website. For shared hosting customers, you will have to seek the help of your support team. Many wordpress plugins are also available which can be installed and used to scan the files.

WordPress Admin Security – A common target area for majority of wordpress attacks is the wordpress admin panel. The login.php script will be hitting a lot of traffic causing issues. To prevent this, it is recommended to IP restrict the admin area. You configure it in such a way that only those IP Addresses which belong to the admin users are allowed to access the wordpress admin area. All other access will be restricted. This can be done with the help of .htaccess file in your website. Another option is to setup two way authentication to admin area. That is, password protect the admin area, so that any attacker will have to crack the password protection first before playing with the actual admin logins. It is also recommended to use very strong admin passwords, avoid dictionary words and also keep the passwords confidential. Another security option is to change the admin username from the default “admin” to something else.

Strict Permissions – It is a common practice seen where by people set very loose or full permissions to all files and folders in the website. This makes the website very insecure and lets anyone play with it. This should not be done, and permission should be set strictly as said by the host.

Recommended WordPress Hosts

Based on our personal experience, and based on our customers' experience, we have a list of WordPress hosts whom we recommend. The list is given below. You can also read reviews on them in our Reviews Section. If you are searching for a discount, you can check for discount coupons, if any, offered by the hosts at our ‘Discount Coupons' section.WordPress Hosting Recommended

 

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