WordPress is becoming a very popular content management system (CMS) not only for blogs but also for websites. This is mainly due to its ease of use, flexible customization, and robust security. To a large extent, WordPress is used for blogs, although there has been intensive development of templates that fit regular websites. The application is more of a content management system backed by a database and with a wide variety of web application extensions called plugins. Consequently, hosting a WordPress site requires more than static page sites require. Here are things to consider when choosing a WordPress hosting plan.
Disk space and bandwidth
WordPress comes with its template already designed, which takes up a considerable amount of space on a web server. More importantly, the system must be fed with content in the form of text, images, video, and sometimes audio, depending on the type of site the owner is installing. Therefore, WordPress requires sufficient disk space and bandwidth.
server platform
WordPress is backed by a MYSQL database, style sheets, and numerous PHP scripts. Therefore, for a WordPress-based blog or site to work, the server must support at least MYSQL and PHP databases. WordPress systems work well on Linux-based server platforms as compared to Windows-based ones. These are some of the things to consider before paying for WordPress hosting. Other things you can ask include emails and ftp accounts.
Online backup facility,
WordPress requires a regular update. Sometimes things can go wrong during content system update or even server update. This may result in loss of website files. To avoid such situations, your WordPress hosting should provide an online backup feature so that you can constantly backup your website or blog when you update the server system or applications.
Server uptime
Another aspect that is quite important when it comes to choosing a good WordPress hosting plan is server uptime. Server uptime is a way of showing how effective the server is in terms of speed and availability. This is apparently one of the things web hosting companies or resellers will lie about. While server uptime should be at least 99%, many companies claim to offer 99.9%, but very few actually do. You don’t want your WordPress blog or site to be offline at any time, so you need to be very firm about it.
24/7 customer service
You should also make sure that the hosting company offers customer support at all times. This is to help you in case you run into problems installing, maintaining, or updating your WordPress site. This is something that is commonly forgotten by people looking for a web host. With WordPress, you can easily get caught up with technicalities that may be outside of your knowledge, leading to the disruption of your online website or blog. Therefore, you should be able to contact customer support at any time to resolve your issues.