Welcome to the first step in launching your WordPress site!
If you don’t know what a hosting company is, don’t worry you don’t need to! But if you want to know what it is, it’s basically a company that has a building, or buildings, full of computers. All of those computers are then connected to the internet. A hosting company will rent you space on those computers for your website. Whenever someone searches the internet for your website, the computer at the hosting company will serve it up to that person. That’s it, it’s a computer, connected to the internet, in a room, with your website on it!
Choose the Best WordPress Hosting for Your Website
When it comes to picking the best WordPress hosting company for your website, there are literally hundreds of hosting options for you to consider. Some of these web hosts may seem like they are good choices, because they are inexpensive, but that is not the way to think about this purchase. Take yourself seriously and get a solid foundation for your site; whether it’s an online store, agency website, media site, personal blog, etc., you need to set yourself up for success and you will reap many more rewards from having a GREAT web host than a cheap, featureless one. We have built a lot of WordPress and custom PHP websites (50+) for our clients and ourselves and we want to pass our experiences onto you. So, without further ado, and after many moons of searching, testing, and hosting client sites, and our own sites, we narrowed our hosting recommendations down to three companies: WPEngine, WPLauncher and Dreamhost.
WPEngine – Expensive, high performance and high quality managed WordPress hosting
But WPLauncher dudes, how do I pick the right one?! Great question! WPEngine has some great features and does a great job supporting their platform. However, they are also expensive. The minimum cost of a plan is $35/month regularly OR $28/month if you use our coupon code. The answer comes down to a couple key things that you need to consider. They offer a CDN out of the box and free SSL certificates, along with great customer support, very fast site load times, automatic daily backups of your website, free migration, production, development and staging environments. A CDN is a content delivery network. A CDN speeds up your site by placing your images, videos, javascript files and css files in a distributed network of servers and when a particular user pulls up your site those assets are pulled up by the server closest to it. WPLauncher is developing a CDN but doesn’t have a CDN currently, so you’re paying an extra $8/month (with our coupon code) OR $15/month (without it), for the CDN. Depending on your site, a CDN may not make as much of a speed difference to justify the extra cost.
WPLauncher – Affordable, Super Fast Page Loading Speeds, Best WordPress hosting for the cost
We think of WPLauncher’s WordPress hosting platform as being similar to the Goldilocks and the Three Bears story. It’s not as expensive as WPEngine. It’s not as cheap as Dreamhost. It’s JUST RIGHT (at around $16/month)! WPLauncher hosting is at an affordable price even though it has many of the core features that make WPEngine so great for production WordPress websites; great customer support, very fast page loading times, automatic daily backups, free migration, staging environments, FREE SSL certificates, etc. WPLauncher also makes the launching process much easier than WPEngine, by allowing you to launch a WordPress site with themes and plugins already installed. And, being at a fraction of the cost of WPEngine, this makes it clear which one we would prefer. If you’re skeptical, check out our features for yourself here.
WPLauncher.com is hosted on WPLauncher’s Platform. In fact, the WPLauncher platform uses the same infrastructure as the most highly visited websites on earth, traffic in the millions of users per month. So, you can feel safe that visitors to your site will have a great experience no matter how successful your site becomes! The bottom line for choosing WPLauncher for your hosting is whether or not you want similar features to WPEngine for less money. You may think we’re biased, becauase you’re reading this at WPLauncher, but check out WPLauncher’s features and the pricing, we are strong believers in our hosting platform and think you will benefit from and appreciate the functionality and the support.
Dreamhost – Inexpensive, unlimited sites, best WP hosting for websites in development
Dreamhost offers unlimited bandwidth and storage space; so it’s perfect for hosting an unlimited number of sites with relatively low traffic. However, Dreamhost has substantially slower site load times than WPLauncher and WPEngine and no production level backup and restore capabilities. Typically, we will use WPLauncher in development and production but in the past, we used Dreamhost for developing a WordPress website and then move it from Dreamhost to WPLauncher.
If you’re expecting a low amount of traffic, don’t care about page load speeds and great support but not as high of a level of service, then you’ll want to go with Dreamhost. Think of WPEngine as the Rolls Royce of hosting, WPLauncher as the Mercedes Benz and Dreamhost as the Kia Ultima of hosting. Don’t get us wrong, Dreamhost is great and we have used it in the past for client websites while they are under construction. Dreamhost Shared Hosting typically runs around $3.95/mo to $10.95/month. You can host an unlimited number of WordPress sites on Dreamhost at that price. If you want your website to succeed though, you need to put it on a platform that is faster and has features that are required for modern development teams.
The Decision – Picking the Best Hosting for WordPress Websites
Now the decision is up to you, but you must choose a hosting company to launch your WordPress website. Feel free to use any hosting company that you choose, but we’ve been doing this for a while and these 3 hosting companies are the best at what they do (the best hosting for WordPress websites) and we’ve used them for all of the WordPress client sites that we’ve created. If you’re on the fence about which one to choose, we would unequivocally say to go with WPLauncher. We used to suggest, Dreamhost, when you’re just getting started and then move your site to WPLauncher or WPEngine down the road as your traffic grows. While you may be skeptical of our objectivity, as you’re reading this on WPLauncher, WPLauncher is much more affordable than WPEngine and has similar feature sets, so to us, it seems like the obvious choice. (If you’re going to migrate to WPLauncher, you don’t need any instructions because we make it ridiculously easy for you. If you’re going to migrate to WPEngine, you can follow our Step by Step WPEngine Migration guide. If you’re already on WPEngine and want to migrate to Dreamhost, you can follow our Step by Step Dreamhost Migration Guide).
Get the Best Hosting for Your WordPress Website
Launch your WordPress Website with WPLauncher
If you want more information on these three WordPress hosts before you make a decision, check out WPLauncher and/or our Ultimate Dreamhost Review and/or our Ultimate WPEngine Review.
Mission Control Disclosure:
We want to be totally transparent with you about how we are able to spend our valuable time creating these blazing, amazing, fantastically mind fazing free launch guides. We make money by referring you to services that we use and that we believe in. Our recommended products/services come at NO additional cost to you. In other words, you are buying the products/services at the same cost as any other user but you are supporting us by purchasing products after clicking on our links (because we get a commission). We are always looking to improve on what we suggest in order to give you the best recommendations. You keep the lights on and our bellies full and we are really grateful to you for that. 🙂 We have absolute gratitude, that defies any latitude, for the magnitude of your loyal attitude. Thank you!