In today’s episode we are going to talk about which type of hosting is best for your WordPress website, right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast, Episode No. 287.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. I’m coming to you live, or live in podcast recording, from Spain. I am in Valencia. This is my second week here, and I’m really enjoying the city, and just enjoying the ability to walk everywhere, fine food, and just enjoying the culture of living somewhere else. I am tracking lots and lots of steps, and doing a lot of walking since we have no vehicle over here.

Okay, now let’s get into the announcements for today. There’s three announcements that I want to share with you – actually four announcements that I want to share with you. The first one is that WordCamp Europe will be streamed live. WordCamp Europe has sold out again. There’s more than 2200 people have signed up for WordCamp Europe. I am excited that I will be there as part of a volunteer team.

So if you are coming to WordCamp Europe, be sure to look me up or send me a message on Twitter at Dustin Hartzler, or just contact me via my contact form on Your Website Engineer.com – love to meet up and just hang out. I will be there Thursday through Sunday in Vienna, Austria.

But if you can’t make it, there will be – there’s only going to be share notes on how you can sign up and register for live streaming. So you can watch all the presentations live. I know that they did this for WordCamp U.S. and it worked really well. It was really, really seamless. It was great that I was able to tune in to a couple sessions from wherever I was at the time, instead of being at WordCamp U.S. So that is that.

Another thing in video news is WooComf; all those sessions are now available and online. And so if you need to watch those, or you wanted to watch those and weren’t able to come to WooComf, definitely want to check those out as well. That’s over at WooConf.com/videos, and there’s only going to be share notes for Episode No. 287.

One last thing, or next thing, is WordPress turned 13. Not really much to say there, other than to say WordPress is 13 years old. And Matt made a kind of humorous comment on his blog post that says, “We now have five to seven years of awkwardness and incredible growth to look forward to.” So that’s something that’s nice as well.

Then lastly in the news, Jetpack updated to Jetpack 4.0.3 and patches a critical XSS vulnerability. So you want to make sure that you’re updating it and you’ve got your site updated to that latest version of Jetpack.

All right, in the “Is there a plugin for that?” section today, I want to talk about a plugin called Sticky Menu (Or Anything) else On Scroll. This is a really unique plugin and it’s one that I wish I would have found many, many months ago when I was looking to redesign my website. I mean, I’m very happy with my website redesign, but the one thing that I was looking for was that menu that stayed in one place. That was kind of my limiting thing because I didn’t know how to do that. But this plugin will allow you to choose any element on your page that will be sticky at the top once you scroll down.

So basically how this works is, you can use this for navigation menus or a widget or pretty much anything. You just have to specify the class this element is in. Then it will stick it right to the top as it scrolls up. So it works really well. You can enable it for certain screen sizes only, if you only want to it to enable on desktop. So that’s nice as well. Lots of neat features – it’s a free plugin. It’s got more than 10,000 downloads and got 56 five-star reviews. It was rated 4.9 out of 5. So if you’re interested in that, search for Sticky Menu (Or Anything) else On Scroll, in the WordPress plugin directory.

Today we are going to talk about which type of hosting is best for my WordPress website. I know that my views have changed a little bit over the past couple years. I know that I did a post about this many, many, many months ago, probably even years and years ago of different types of hosting for a WordPress website.

But today I am going to try to tackle shared hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated hosting. So those are the three kind of main types, and then there’s obviously different tiers of each of those, and there’s so many different options. But there’s so many options that you can choose the perfect fit for your website. So let’s go ahead and dive in. We’ll explore each of the four of these, or each of the three of these, and then I’ll share some advantages, some disadvantages, and maybe who this type of site is geared for.

So, the first one is shared hosting. Shared hosting is like sharing a house with your college buddies where you all have to share the same amenities and space. It’s affordable, which is great while you’re studying and only have a part-time job. But at some point you may outgrow it and you need your own space. So that’s kind of, in thinking terms, what shared hosting is.

Its advantages are: it’s the most affordable option, usually around $5.00 per month. Sometimes Bluehost has deals where it’s $2.99 per month when you buy a year at a time. The security and maintenance are managed for you. There’s really no server anything that you need to know or learn. WordPress usually has a one-click install, so you don’t even really have to technically know how to do anything code-wise. And you can do multiple WordPress sites which is really nice. So if you buy one account, you can actually put ten WordPress sites on there if you want. They do have technical support which will help you with trouble-shooting, and you do not need to be proficient in admin tasks. I know that this is something that was a great starting point for me. I’d just have a question; had no idea what to do; jumped on their live chat or their email support and they could pretty much fix whatever you needed them to do.

Some disadvantages are: security isn’t guaranteed. If the site is on the same server as a hack site, your site may be prone to attack. You also are sharing resources and so bandwidth, memory, all of that is being shared with all of the other websites on the site. And it is not truly unlimited even though they advertise, “unlimited,” and you can put unlimited sites and unlimited resources, and unlimited anything. It’s not really like that. And if a host sees that you’re abusing those privileges, they could shut you down.

Another thing that I’ve thought about that wasn’t on my list is that you won’t have probably direct access to your site. So you won’t be able to, like, SSH-in. You won’t be able to run WP-CLI commands and stuff like that. So shared hosting is best for small sites, sites that don’t get a lot of traffic.

It’s also best for sites that don’t run their business and really have to make sure that your site is online 24/7. Not to say that your site goes down more often with shared hosting, but I have seen the error in establishing database connection. Sometimes it just takes longer for the pages to load and things like that.

So if you’re trying to sell things, if you want people to be able to quickly move about your site and whatnot, probably the best option for those types of people or those folks are using VPS. A VPS is a hosting. It’s called Virtual Private Server. It’s more like renting your own apartment instead of living in a house with all your friends. You have private parts of the building with resources allocated to you. But there are some things that you have to share.

So there’s two types of VPS as well. There’s managed and unmanaged. Managed means that your hosting takes care of all the work: goes in maintaining the server, updates security, all that good stuff. And unmanaged means that you’re responsible for everything and you won’t get much help from your hosting’s technical support if you run into trouble. So I’ve never used an unmanaged VPS server because I have no idea how to do that and how to secure all of those things. So that is something if you’re really into server technicalities and whatnot.

Advantages would be with VPS is: they’re more scalable; there are more resources, access to more settings; your website will be much, much faster. A lot of times they have specific WordPress VPS installations, so everything is geared towards WordPress. You don’t even have to install WordPress. They handle WordPress updates for you, all that kind of stuff.

It’s one of those sites that come minus Flywheel. The company that I use is really great with keeping WordPress core updated and they lock down things. They manage stats. They do a lot of things. They do back-ups. They do a lot of WordPress-specific things if you go with the WordPress-specific VPS.

Some disadvantages: you still have to share server space with other sites. They are less complex, so some VPS’s may not have any WordPress support. If you’re not on a WordPress VPS – I guess this is a disadvantage for shared hosting as well. Sometimes they don’t do any support whatsoever when it comes to WordPress. They just help your website run, and if it’s a WordPress question they’ll normally turn you to the WordPress forums unless you’re on a shared WordPress account.

Let’s see. It’s more expensive per month. Whereas a shared hosting account starts at $2.50 to $5.00 per month, this can go somewhere between $15.00 to $30.00 to $100.00 per month for VPS. I know Flywheel has a couple plans – 15, 30, and then it goes up from there. It works better for larger amounts of traffic. So if you’re trying to – if you have like ten thousand, twenty thousand, page views per month, then VPS is probably a little bit better for those types of sites. It’s nice, too, that VPS’s are more scalable. Since they’re virtual, they can just automatically kind of expand and allow for more bandwidth and more space which is really nice as well.

So I think I’ve changed my thought process on what type of sites. I think every site should be using a VPS. You’re gonna get so much better performance. Your website’s gonna load faster. Your dashboard’s gonna load better. It’s just gonna be a better user experience for both you – when you’re trying to customize things – and your customers when they are coming to your website. So my recommendation in 2016 is VPS all the way. Even if you have a very low site, or a small site, the differences that you’ll see from a $5.00 Bluehost plan and a $15.00 Flywheel introductory plan is going to be tremendous. You’re gonna see better WordPress-specific support, and you’ll be able to just see the speed differences which will be really, really nice.

Okay, the last bucket that I want to talk about is dedicated servers. Having a dedicated server is a lot like living in a house where you’re the only resident and you can decorate the house in any way you want. You can paint the walls. You can do any upgrades that you want. But you’re also responsible for your repairs. So what this means is that you’re in control of everything.

Think about it as your own box. You have your own computer, your own server somewhere out there in the cloud, and you’re not sharing it with anyone. It’s all yours. You can do everything that you want, and your site is more secure. There’s no other sites on there. Mainly it’s more secure because you don’t have to worry about other sites infecting yours. But it could also be less secure if you’re not keeping updated with server configurations and all that good stuff. You have access to all the things, everything that you need, and you can install your own version of whatever type of server software that you want and whatever version of PHP, whatever, all of those things. You are in complete control.

Some disadvantages to this is it’s not scalable. So you have one box and if you need more resources, like you almost have to move to another box or get more memory, or whatever. So it’s not really scalable. It’s the most expensive option. It could be around the same price point as a VPS, depending on where you go and what type of support and services that you get.

The other thing is that there isn’t a lot of support. If something breaks, you have to fix it.
They may have some technical support to point you in the right direction, or maybe point you to a “how-to” article. But you are doing all the server maintenance yourself. This is one that I don’t recommend for people who are just WordPress enthusiasts, mainly because it is very difficult to know everything about WordPress and keeping that update and site safe and secure; and doing everything with your server, and your configurations, and stuff like that to keep that update, safe and secure.

So those are the three options. We’ve got shared hosting; we’ve got VPS hosting, and we’ve got dedicated server space and dedicated servers. As 2016, my recommended resource is going to be – everyone should be using a VPS. Yes, it costs a little bit more. But I think, overall, the benefits are going to be so much better than using a shared-hosting environment.

I do want to take a few minutes here just to talk about Flywheel. Flywheel’s the company that I use, and they make it super simple to run your website. It’s really, really nice that if you’re running websites for clients you can actually do a – you can spin up a development server that is password protected. And then once you’re all done – you’re ready to give them the site – you can just go ahead and just transfer that to their ownership, and then they can start paying for the website.

The development server doesn’t cost anything and you get rid of all of those headaches of trying to figure out, “Okay, who pays for the server and what,” and all of that setup stuff. You can do all of that without your client having to do it. And then when you’re ready for them to launch the site live, you give access to them and then they start paying, which is really nice. So you’re not in the hosting business. It’s really inexpensive.

I think I pay $30.00 per month for the bandwidth that I need for Your Website Engineer.com and they do a great job. They’ll migrate your site from anywhere for free, which is really awesome. So if you’re interested in – I’m checking that out – you can head over to Your Website Engineer.com/Flywheel. That is an affiliate link and I do make a small commission if you do end up purchasing. It’s not going to cost you any more, and that’s the best rate I could get is over at Your Website Engineer.com/Flywheel.

Today’s call to action is, take a little bit of time and figure out is the hosting environment that you’re using for your website the most effective? Is it the most efficient? Is it the best for you? Explore some of those options that are out there. Maybe and even if you want to stay with the shared hosting option, I know that A2 hosting does hosting on SSD drive. So even those shared hosting environments are a little bit faster, little bit speedier, than some of the regular shared hosting environments.

Maybe if you’re not a fan of Flywheel, there’s WP Engine. There’s a handful of other WordPress VPS’s that you can check out and maybe that will have the perfect price plan for you. So it’s the middle of the summer, or the beginning of the summer, let’s just take a little time and evaluate where we are with our website and with our hosting and if our hosting is working the way it wants to, or how you want it to.

Also think about, when you’re thinking about hosting providers, another thing to always think about is, what methods do they have for support? Do they only have email support? Do they only have phone support? Do they only have text support, or live chat, or whatever, or do they have a combination? If you only like to talk to people on the phone, make sure that their hosting company offers support via the phone. So that’s something to think about as well.

That’s all I’ve got for you this week. I’ve got to wrap it up. I’m almost out of time here. In my co-working space, I only have the little space that I’m recording this – the conference room – for five more minutes, so I’ve got to wrap this thing out and get out of here. But that’s what I want to share with you this week – which type of hosting. Think about that this week, and we’ll talk again soon.