So you’re ready to build your first company website. Congratulations! You’ve decided you’ll use WordPress, a platform with one of the easiest backends to manage. Definitely a good choice. However, your platform is just one piece of the puzzle. One of the other pieces has to do with hosting; specifically, your hosting company and your hosting package… And my oh my, what a vast, overwhelmingly large piece that can be.

There are hundreds of hosting companies out there, and trying to navigate the waters can be a chore. Let us try to decode the Da Vinci Code of Web hosting and make the aspiring website owner’s life just a little bit easier.

What Kind of Hosting do you Need?

For the purpose of this article, we will break hosting down into three basic types. There are a million and a half other options to add on top of these, but this is the basic choice you’ll need to make based on your requirements. It’s worthwhile to note that many hosting providers have a one-button WordPress installation once you acquire your hosting package.

Shared Hosting

This is very much “Intro to Website 101”. The costs of shared hosting are minimal. They are far less than VPS, which is the next Web Hosting tier.

However, on a shared server, your site shares the space with several other websites. The resources allocated to your site are relatively small, and your site is subject to whatever happens on the server. For example, if there is a security breach on one site, all the sites on the server can be vulnerable through no fault of their own. Shared servers are decent if you’re starting out and don’t expect speedy growth. Otherwise, you may want to look at something a little more robust.

VPS Hosting

A Virtual Private Server is exactly what it says in the name: a virtual server allocated specifically to your site. While multiple VPSs exist on one physical server, they are separated by a hypervisor. For all intents and purposes, your virtual server acts as its own host computer. With a VPS, you have guaranteed resources allocated to you, unlike shared hosting. If you are planning on creating a serious company site or e-commerce store, you may want to take a hard look at a VPS. While monthly costs are higher than Shared Hosting, VPS costs are still reasonable, and it’s hard to put a price on security and peace of mind.

Dedicated Server

The Rolls Royce of server packages, the Dedicated Server gives you access to all the full-power resources on your client. All that storage space, CPU power, and memory are yours to command. Additionally, you have free reign to customize the server’s software how you need it. If you are creating a resource-intensive website and investing a lot of money into its creation, this is probably the way to go.

You are now armed. You know exactly what sort of server you’ll need for your WordPress site. Let’s go about finding it.

How to Find a Good Hosting Company

How do you find any good company? Research! Or you can just read below, where we’ve made life easy for you by listing off some of the contenders.

If you want to go it alone, the first thing you’ll want to look at is reviews. If you look at multiple sources, it will quickly become apparent which Hosting companies offer the best service.

You’ll want to look at several categories: Server uptime, security, and especially after-sales customer support. Eventually, over the course of your investigation, you are certain to find what you’re looking for. However, if you’d like to skip all that, here are some options:

Greengeeks.com

Greengeeks offers all possible server options while also having excellent 24/7 customer support available. They also offer a one-click WordPress installation. The install is updated automatically, keeping your site secure. Greengeeks guarantees 99.9% uptime (actual analysis puts their uptime at about 99.95%). Additionally, they are an eco-friendly hosting company, having a much smaller carbon footprint than most other hosting companies. They offer a 30-day money back guarantee, which is common in the industry, but still quite welcome.

Hostgator

One of the big players in Web hosting and it’s easy to see why. Hostgator has great reviews in terms of their uptime and customer service. Their success is well earned, as they offer every web hosting service under the sun. While eco-friendly web hosting isn’t exactly one of their defining features, one can’t argue with their commitment to excellence. Their money-back guarantee sits at a generous 45 days, offering you a substantial time period to see if their services are right for you.

Godaddy

Again, this is one of the big boys. They offer similar packages to the competition while having comparable pricing. Service and uptime are also on the high-end of the industry standard. In essence, you cannot go wrong with any of these three hosting companies.