With the whole world jumping into the digital era, WordPress has somewhat become essential for nearly every business or content creator. The need for digital content, advertisement, and marketing has left its traditional counterparts far behind in the race. And, WordPress is one of the key driving forces for the same. At its core, it is a democratized means of building one’s website.
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How ‘democratized’?
Democratizing publishing is the main aim of WordPress. WordPress is an ‘open-sourced’ content management system allowing anyone to operate or modify the WordPress software for free!
No doubt everyone loves this software! It allows everyone to be able to market or showcase their content in an easy, program-free way. However, even here a good hosting provider is necessary too.
What is web hosting?
Web hosting is a service that allows one to post a website on the internet. A website is ‘hosted’ when a ‘hosting provider’ allocates some space on its web server for a website to be able to store its files. If you want people to be able to view/access your content, a hosting setup is essential. There are various types of hosting available such as shared, dedicated, VPS, and reseller. These are usually paid services.
But, what makes WordPress’s hosting setup different?
WordPress hosting comes with pre-existing features to improve a website’s performance on the internet when anyone from around the world tries to access the content. The WordPress hosting is made such that it fulfils the security criteria of a website and updates the software automatically too. Another distinguishing characteristic is that it has a ‘one-click’ WordPress installation feature. This way, an experienced team of developers isn’t needed for a CMS to be installed on a server. The website owner can do it themselves.
WordPress claims that if you choose to go forward with any of their recommended hosts, a portion of your fee may be refunded.
Now, the WordPress hosting process is relatively simple, however, certain features must be present for your hosting set up.
Email accounts
An email account that reflects the domain name is a quintessential component of a business, whether it is a large business or a small one. The more you use and display the domain name, the better. Most web hosting services allow you to create email accounts and assist you in setting it up as well. However, there is a catch regarding the number of email accounts the server will allow you to make. The best move here would be to employ a hosting provider that allows you to have unlimited mailboxes.
Website Statistics
The reason why a business would opt for creating a website is not only to portray their products/content but also to monitor the success rate of the same. How many people have visited your website throughout the month? How many stayed to pay for their products? How many left with things in their cart, without finishing the payment process? Such information is extremely important to gauge audience response and also to improve your business strategy.
In this prospect, the Statistics feature would be a saviour. It would give you important demographics regarding your WordPress website. Information such as disk space usage, number of SQL databases and sub domains you own, etc. are accessible via this feature. The preferred hosting providers would provide this feature for free. However, quite a few do charge a small fee.
Advertisement credits
They are a form of payment for advertisements regarding your brand on famous sites such as Facebook, Google, Instagram, etc. This feature is extremely important and yet usually gets neglected by people when setting up their hosting service. Most hosting providers, nowadays, provide free advertising credit up to a certain amount. These can be used by Google or other search engines, subsequently increasing the traffic that your website will gain. This credit feature is especially appealing as it negates the entire process of setting up a separate budget for the advertisement on your website.
Unlimited disk space
Storage is an issue most businesses deal with as content, records, and much more take up quite a bit of space. Disk space is where all data concerning a website is stored. Therefore, making sure that your host setup has the feature of unlimited disk space that can be accessed from any part of the world is essential. This all comes under your long planning strategies. If you don’t ensure that this feature is present now, in no time as your website grows, you will regret it.
High Traffic
With traffic, usually what happens is that when the traffic reaches a certain level, the hosting providers are designed such that the website would automatically stop responding. For a small business where a lot of traffic isn’t expected, this may not be a concern. However, for a relatively large business where high traffic is expected, the absence of high traffic allowance features from the hosting provider would be quite the bane. Therefore, bandwidth as well as traffic speed allowances need to be considered depending on your website needs.
Website Uptime must be high
Website uptime is defined as the time frame when the user can access the website without any issues. This feature again depends on your website and the business’s needs. You could opt for shared hosting if your website is relatively small. Here, though there is no possibility of getting 100% uptime. The common maximum is 98%. On the other hand, if your website is rather big, then dedicated hosting is your way to go as it can provide you with the maximum uptime which as they claim to be is 99.9999%.
No user or owner of a website would want people to have issues accessing the site. Therefore, this feature needs to be well thought out as per your needs.
Final words
As mentioned above, all the features are essential to your WordPress hosting setup in one way or another. This would help immensely in growing the reach and performance of your website!
