It can by dizzying trying to look for a good WordPress hosting company, that’s for sure! In order to help clear up some confusion and answer some of the most popular web hosting questions, this page was created!

Before getting started, it’s important to mention that if you purchase hosting from one of the links on this page, or one of the links on a site that’s linked on this page, it’s possible that we may get a commission from one of the hosting companies in the form of an affiliate payment.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s jump into some of the most important things to know about choosing a WordPress host!

The Best WordPress Hosting – What to Look For

When trying to find the best WordPress host, we like to look at 5 main categories to determine how good a host is. Let’s explore those categories!

1) Support

This is literally one of the most important things when trying to find a WordPress host, because when something goes wrong with your site, you need to know that good support is there to help with a situation that could otherwise be very stressful.

Some WordPress hosting companies only have ticket support, which in this day and age isn’t very good. When looking for a great WordPress hosting company, you want to find a host that ideally has all three of the major forms of support—ticket/email, live chat, and telephone support (for times when explaining something by talking is easier).

This is important because if a host only has ticket support (many of the low quality ones only have that), you could be waiting hours to get a response. Bluehost, SiteGround, and WP Engine have all three of these, and they’re some of the best hosts that we know of.

2) Reliability

Most good WordPress hosting companies have an uptime service-level agreement, or SLA. This is typically 99.9% uptime or higher, which means that the hosting (and consequently your website) should by “up” or live that percentage of time over a given month.

Some hosts will guarantee this with some sort of incentive, like money back if your server is down more than that. Others may offer different kinds of incentives for falling below this threshold, but it’s something that any good WordPress hosting company will have.

3) Pricing

If you’re looking for the cheapest host possible, you’re looking at the wrong metric. When it comes to WordPress hosting, you’re going to have to pay more for a good host and that’s just the way it is.

However, this doesn’t mean that you’re going to be paying tons of money, as there are good WordPress hosting companies in the $20, $10, and sub $5 range (at least for the initial term).

4) Security

WordPress, because it interfaces with a SQL database, is a bit more vulnerable to attacks than other types of websites (such as static HTML sites), where not much can be compromised unless the attacker has access to your FTP or account login.

It’s not uncommon to see SQL injection attacks on WordPress sites, brute force attacks, and other types of attacks that can’t be done in the same way on static websites.

That said, the best WordPress hosts will have a lot of measures in place to mitigate these types of attacks, so it’s security is definitely something to be mindful of when hosting a WordPress site.

5) Extra Features

Extra features like backups, staging, and other bells and whistles are certainly nice to have in a WordPress host. When evaluating hosts, it’s often a good idea to compare the bells and whistles to see how they stack up against each other, so you can make your decision about which host is best based on main factors and also extra features.

Choosing a WordPress host isn’t easy, but we hope that it’s a little easier now that you’ve seen some of the most important factors to cons