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Deals on WordPress Hosting

logo-imhIt’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.

slowhostBut 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-gogeekSiteground 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.

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Selecting a Good host – How to get Performance & Value

server_hostingWe 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.

Owning your own hosting account rather than letting your web designer-developer do it for you, can avoid nasty disputes later. (And web designers know very little of hosting and just follow the crowd or latest sales pitch). Your own site under your own hosting account means you’ll retain personal control over your own property at all times. Note we can quickly help you through this process if you’re unsure how to select and set up your own hosting. It’s easy.

Save Money, Get More

Secondly, because you’re no longer going through a web designer or developer host reseller, you’ll eliminate the middle man, saving money. It’s not uncommon for web designers to run a shared hosting reseller account at say $50/mth, then place 5-20 clients on it, charging each $30-70 per month. Having your own hosting account in your name means you could now afford a more powerful private server (VPS), not be dumped on a slower, less secure and less stable shared/reseller configuration.

Website hosting 101 – Our ten minute tutorial

1. The Big Problem – Which host?

webhostThis 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.

Certainly buying on price alone is short-sighted. And contrary to popular belief, your local IT guy is NOT the best person to ask. Host selection is not covered at web design or IT classes or course I know of.

2. Be wary of the ‘unlimited’ shared hosting scams

cheap-unlimited-hostingMost 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.

508-resource-limitFor example, all shared accounts today are in reality very ‘limited’ in several key areas. They will limit your CPU resources, RAM and I/O (input-output) speed for a start. This performance throttling is severe, causing the site to slow down, give server 500 errors or just take your site offline for hours, displaying a plain ‘resource limit is reached’ web page to visitors. Even doing your own site backups can be a problem. Having that ‘unlimited’ disk space, databases, subdomains etc won’t prevent this.

Cheap shared hosting means most WordPress sites are slow, unstable

Did you realise that WordPress websites are typically 50-70% slower than most other websites? We’re told Google ‘prefers’ WordPress over other sites due to the clean SEO structure and frequent content updates. Yet Google will NOT rank slow sites highly, be they WordPress or other technology.

Speed is often overlooked, with all investment going into the site appearance. Yet Google cares nothing for looks. But why are sites slow? An underpowered or unstable host is one reason, followed by the use of unoptimised images, badly coded themes, use of big sliders (e.g. revolution) and power-hungry add-ons like WooCommerce.  Sometimes adding caching or CDN helps, but is often only a partial band-aid, hiding the real problems. I’ve even seen popular WordPress caching plugins make things worse, not better! The guaranteed fix is simply a better host + expert site optimisation work.

Here’s a talk from another developer discussing why you need speed. His talk was on Amazon EC2 hosting service which he found too slow, in the category of ‘fast enough’. Most shared hosts would fair worse. As he said, performance is not a feature, it’s an absolute requirement if you want to stand out on line…

[youtube id=”TPFvR5Ql_LQ” mode=”normal”]

3. The ideal business option – Private, not shared servers

A Virtual Private Server (VPS) and not a Shared Server should be the default choice of any business website, yet if you do a Google search on web hosting, these seldom appear. All you get are shared hosting and the main sales pitch is the low cost.

Yet, Virtual Private Server packages are considerably faster, more configurable and more secure than any shared hosting package ever could be. Comparing a private server to a popular shared server is a bit like comparing using your own private car vs an old, overloaded public transport system.

logo-imhMost hosts can offer Private Servers. But they are often prohibitively expensive, often ten times the cost of shared hosting, especially here in NZ. Fortunately, Inmotion hosting in the US, specialise in affordable, managed, high performance VPS packages starting from approx NZ$60. The performance, features and support offered for the money is incredible, hence have moved many of our own clients onto their systems. Inmotion also offer cheap shared ‘business hosting’ labeled as Pro and Power. We’re not a fan of these, proving that host companies can be good at some things, but not all. Inmotion, like many, also offer an affordable ‘reseller’ package which is a compromise between a VPS and shared hosting. If you have several smaller low traffic websites, these can work out fine, but caution is needed.

The Singapore-based Siteground VPS cloud options are worth a look too if you have multiple or busy sites and can budget a bit more, starting at under NZ$100/mth (being less than the same spec using NZ hosts). Siteground VPS systems are well configured, fully managed, with WHM/cpanel, free SSL certificates, plus nginx software as standard, being a special web server accelerator. Start with 2CPU, 6GB RAM, 40GB disk is fine for most. Add more resources as you grow.

If you prefer local VPS hosting, a good local provider that we have used for specialist projects is VPS City. They have countless options, so you might like to talk to us first about what would suit you. They also provide reasonably affordable shared hosting plans too from $30/mth, but like most, these are resource and space-limited, but we have several small clients using them with no issues.

4. Are there any good shared hosts?

Not many.  If you’re running a higher traffic WooCommerce shopping site, cheap shared hosts are risky, regardless of what they tell you about it being eCommerce-ready, or any cloud, power, pro, business hosting labels etc… This is just sales hype. So, here’s a standout you could consider:

  • Siteground  (Singapore, approx NZ$220/yr*, select gogeek option, fast, SSDs, SSL certificate)

siteground-gogeekThis Siteground Gogeek package has special features like staging, git, caching plus added security for eCommerce. But unlike the Inmotion/Siteground VPS or reseller accounts, it does not generate separate cpanels for each domain, hence may be limiting if you need proper reseller capabilities. But the CPU resources allocated is 5-10x more than other shared hosting plans I’ve used, which means fewer errors or resources timeouts.

But how bad is shared hosting? See our quick performance test

Countdown-clockSpeed 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.

5. Any hosts should you avoid?

slowhostThe general rule is to avoid anything under US$10/mth, regardless of the brand or reviews found, since these reviews only consider features and price, never ever performance, security, uptime or the processing resources allocated. If site performance, stability and search ranking is important to you then avoid the cheap shared accounts from: crazydomains, openhost, hostpapa, 1stdomains, godaddy, net24, ipage, namecheap, hostgator, bluehost, amazon and anything offered by your local telecoms provider or hosts out of Australia.

Conclusions

I hope all this background helps you narrow down the options. After 15 yrs in this business we’ve seem the good and the bad. For me the best value, support and performance for business websites are the Inmotion VPS or the Siteground Cloud options. But for start ups, clubs and most small businesses, the Siteground gogeek is my favourite, with amazing bang per buck, ample processing resources, better security and superb support.

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siteground-gogeek

Still unsure or have heard of other good host options yet need confirmed by an independent, unbiased expert? Just fill in your details below.

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Recommended Host


Recommend their GrowBig plan for home use or startups; GoGeek for business sites. Want even more discount? Just email me

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