It’s hard to find good, fast, reliable hosts today, especially if you’re on a tight budget. For businesses, the VPS (Private Server) option is always the best, rather than the common ‘Shared Server’ hosting. But a VPS can get expensive. Inmotion in the US provide an affordable, managed VPS from just $50/mth.
Sometimes for business reasons, you need a local host. A managed VPS in NZ is expensive, starting at $250/mth if you want support included. It can be cheaper if you have some sysadmin expertise. Sitehost in Auckland are good, with a fast, 2-cpu system starting at $60/mth excluding management, application support and setup costs. (Things like cpanel or plesk are not included as standard). This would be fine if you’ve just a few business sites with relatively modest daily traffic and load. If you lack the needed tech skills yourself to build the VPS configuration, then load WordPress, we can help configure and run it for you at a reduced rate.
But for newcomers starting out with limited cash, just avoid those NZ shared hosting providers. Those wondrous reviews you see mean nothing. They’re too slow, often run old, overloaded servers and support is quite poor. Even big names like Bluehost I’ve found a real disappointment. All that ‘unlimited’ or ‘cloud’ stuff is just sales talk. But, I’ve found a few US companies that are are better in every respect, for similar money.
Here’s my favourite budget option
Siteground is one US/Singapore host on my shortlist. But which plan? Don’t go too cheap, whatever the sales hype says. One option we’ve used successfully for many clients and highly recommend for those starting out, is their US$15/mth GoGeek plan. It’s a bit more than the others, but has great tools and great performance for the money. It can run several sites, is superior in speed, value and support to all the popular hosting packages offered up in NZ.
Check Siteground out. If you need help with the transfer, get in touch. When we do the transfer instead of the host co, we give the site a coding makeover, tweaking the speed, SEO and security, which is vital.
WordPress JetPack just got better.
Another neat add-on this week is Jetpack Personal. For just US$3.50 per month, you get a great backup system as well as all the other Jetpack goodies. But, like hosting, getting Jetpack setup correctly for each site is critical. The default install isn’t good, even slowing the site down! We can sort it out for you.
We purposely don’t provide hosting directly, but help others set up their own web hosting with the best performance and best value provider. This ensures you always get the most appropriate host, for the task in hand. No longer are you working in the dark or relying upon a local IT mate, a biased review site or some sales hype.
This is never a simple question with an easy answer. Like buying a car, you need to select the one with the right size and power that suits your purpose. Most host providers don’t offer just one option, but many, meaning you have two things to decide. The host package and the host company. We often discover that some host companies are great, but only some of their host options are. i.e. In some areas they are great value, in other areas will rip you off. Some have good support with knowledge staff, others outsourcing to kids out of India on $5/hr with a dubious IT degrees, having little real understanding of the net or WordPress. This is one of the ways really cheap hosts (i.e. crazydomains) can offer amazing deals, along with using outdated and grossly overloaded servers.
Most host companies offer ‘unlimited’ or similar shared hosting. These hyped up packages start from US$5/mth and bursting with features. I’ve seldom found these particularly successful or safe for any business site running WordPress. Okay for small blogs or hobby sites, but little else. Some of these host packages are bundled into various fancy ‘reseller’ options, even using nice terms like ‘cloud’ or ‘power’ added, but they’re still shared servers underneath with all the limitations that brings.
Speed testing alone is not enough, since the host is but one link in the chain that affects site speed. One better test we do is a simple site backup using backupbuddy, since this plugin takes a lot of server resources. Some shared hosts ban it, for obvious reasons. On Freeparking a clients big [2.7GB] community site took over an hour to backup and a database-only backup took almost 4 minutes. Yet, the exact same site when moved to our VPS system backed up in 8 minutes and database-only in just 25 seconds. The clear conclusion is the computing resources provided with most common shared plans is really quite abysmal, similar to what you’d get in say a very old PC or a $200 smartphone.