What criteria should you use to choose WordPress hosting?

Choose WordPress hosting It is not a question of , but of selecting hosting in line with your expectations, your ambitions and your desires.

The most important thing to consider before choose WordPress hosting is your needs.

To do this, cast your net wide and take stock of the following elements:

• your skill level  : are you capable of managing a server alone (and would you like to do so)? Do you only want to focus on your content and delegate all the technical part?
• the type of site you want to create . The more content a site hosts and receives traffic, the more the resource and bandwidth requirements of the host increase. For example, for a large WooCommerce store with hundreds of products and significant daily traffic (several thousand visits), shared hosting risks showing its limits quite quickly;
• the traffic you receive on a daily basis  ;
• your budget  : how much are you willing to pay monthly or annually to host your website? ;
• the features you absolutely need . I am thinking for example of the domain name, the SSL certificate, the storage space, the bandwidth and more advanced tools (cloning, migration, WP-CLI, etc.);
• the type of hosting desired  : shared, VPS, cloud, dedicated or specialized.

When this becomes clearer, you will be able to make an informed choice. Let us take two examples to illustrate my points.

1. If you are a beginner blogger  who wants to launch your site and make yourself known, a good compromise is to opt for shared hosting to get started.
2. If you are an e-retailer  and your activity and sales are largely based on your website (with significant traffic on your pages), it will be more judicious to invest in VPS or specialized hosting, depending on your needs. technical skills.

The essential components of a choose WordPress hosting

In addition to your needs, it is important that you check the presence of certain technical characteristics that any good host must have.

Based on our experience, we recommend that you take the following specificities into account before deciding on this or that service provider:

• the ease of handling the interface , both in the customer area and the administration area (  cPanel type ). Choose an interface offered (or translatable) in French, because many areas are technical;
• the responsiveness and effectiveness of the support . That’s very important. When you encounter a problem (it happens), it is essential that we respond quickly, 24/7. Here again, choose assistance that responds in French (unless you have a perfect command of English);
• the availability of the online server  ( uptime ). In the event of  too frequent downtime  , your site becomes inaccessible. On this side, all the best WordPress hosts display rates around 99.9%;
• the performance (speed) of the hosting server . The faster the server, the faster your pages will load. This is essential to take care of the user experience (a lot) and SEO (a little). Moreover, the power of the hosting (CPU, RAM) also plays a role in this, check this point carefully;
• the location of the data center . The closer the data center is to your visitors’ IP address, the higher the performance will be. If your targets are in France, choose a data center based in France, or even in a border country;
• Security . Your WordPress host must apply good security practices: analysis and detection of vulnerabilities,  regular backups , server updates, etc. It must also offer you a backup and restoration system, or an SSL certificate;
• scalability . Your needs and your site may change along the way. Your host must be able to offer you a superior offer at any time (more resources, more bandwidth, etc.);
• the features offered  : free domain name, SSL certificate, professional email addresses, WordPress tools (themes, plugins), migration service, automated installation tool, etc. ;
• the disk space offered  ;
• resources  to find answers to your questions and blocking points yourself: knowledge base, videos, tutorials, blog, guides.