What’s the Best Website Hosting for Bloggers?

Last Updated on 1 year by Francesca Egay

Bloggers initially are only concerned with publishing the best content for their audience and rightfully so. Since the purpose why they set out to create a blog in the first place is to share their ideas and establish themselves as experts in their respective fields, everything else seems secondary.

However, once you get a wind of blogging will you notice how it is so much more than just writing, publishing, and promoting.

When blogging, you seriously need to consider the best website hosting where you plan to carry out your blog.

In this post, you will learn how to find the best website hosting that fits your needs as a blogger by looking at the different factors that make for a fast and high-performing web host.

What constitutes the best website hosting?

What’s in a web hosting?

In layman’s terms, a web hosting is a place where all blogger files are located.  Similar to a storage, you need your web hosting to accommodate all the files you need to make your blog work.

At the same time, a web hosting acts as an intermediary between your blog and audience. Your hosting is responsible for sending over data from your life to the browsers of visitors.

The importance of web hosting for bloggers becomes evident when visitors can’t access your site or when it’s taking too long to load all your files. If you chose a substandard web hosting for your blog, then you will only frustrate your target market for having an unreliable blog that doesn’t load fast enough.

As a result, you won’t be able to build a readership with a blog like that. This reason is why you need to invest in a solid web hosting that answers all your needs as a blogger as early as now.

To help guide you in the process of choosing, below is an infographic that details all the factors you need to know before making an informed decision regarding your web hosting:

How to Decide Which Hosting is the Best for Your WordPress Site

To view the post where the infographic is derived from, click here!

Straight to the question:

What is the best web hosting solution for you?

This is a tricky question, as with most “best” questions simply because there is no one-size-fits-all answer. There are lots of factors that you need to consider with your decision regarding your web hosting. Below are some of the most crucial ones.

Kind of site you have

Not all sites are made equal. Some work under the pretense of disseminating information and ideas (blog) while others are created for the purpose of making lots of money (affiliate sites or e-commerce). Therefore, the purpose why you build your site in the first may dictate the kind of web hosting you should get for your blog.

Unlike e-commerce sites, blogs may not attract as much traffic. Therefore, you may not need a premium web hosting plan for your blog. For starters, a shared hosting should do the trick especially since you’re still building up your readership.

With shared hosting, you install your website on a server along with other sites. From the name itself, you don’t exclusively have the server by yourself. This reason is why this hosting type is the most affordable in the market. At the same time, it also presents problems when it comes to the distribution of resources in the server. For example, if one of the sites in your neighborhood is generating lots of traffic, most of the server’s resources will go work on that site. As a result, the server won’t be able to provide your site with the same resources compared to the better-performing site.

However, when all is said and done, a shared hosting is still a great choice for site owners who are looking for an affordable way to launch a site now.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that you won’t need any other plan to support your blog. For example, your blog may soon blow up and attract more traffic than you’d ever imagine. To support the changes, you may need to upgrade your web hosting plan to accommodate the changes in your blog. Therefore, from shared hosting, you are potentially looking at a VPS hosting upgrade. However, it is ideal to move to this hosting type only if your site is starting to slow down due to the massive amount of traffic to your site.

Budget

Let’s face it – if you have enough resources to spend on a web hosting, then you probably don’t have any use for this guide at all. You can simply choose the best web hosting service provider that money can buy and be done with it.

However, if you are spreading your resources thin to launch your blog, then you need to check out which among the web hosting platforms are the “best” in terms of budget.

If you want the initial list of affordable web hosting services, then feel free to run through this list of the seven web hosting services that matter. Each entry contains a review that will help you determine how each service performs under different factors. The post also discusses the most common problems of cheap web hosting so you know what you’re up against.

WordPress

wordpress stock photo

This platform is one of the most widely used due to the customization features available for site owners. Due to its popularity and ease of use, WordPress has attracted the interest of hosting services by offering a hosting subscription dedicated to this CMS.

If you want to put your best foot forward with WordPress, then you simply cannot go wrong with any one of these WordPress hosting services. Most of the ones on the list offer unique services such as advanced caching, auto updates, and advanced monitoring of vulnerabilities to ensure that your blog loads fast and are safe from harm. Not to mention, if in any case, you experience problems with your blog, then a team of in-house expert will be more than happy to assist you.

What’s the best website hosting for me?

Wow, thanks for asking!

But seriously, whether you did ask or not, I have found what I feel is the best web hosting for me.

Just to be clear, I cannot speak for some of the best hosting companies that I won’t mention below. I’m pretty sure you’ve also done your research as to what some of the most highly-rated web hosts are. However, since I don’t have first-hand experience with any of them, I can’t s

objectively finding the best website hosting in the strictest sense is like squeezing blood from a stone – it’s next to impossible!  What you can determine is what’s the best for you.

Since you are the one who’s manning the ship here, it doesn’t matter what people say is the best web hosting out there. What’s best for them isn’t necessarily what’s best for you. Therefore, to form an opinion about what makes the “best” website host, you need to test out different web hosting companies and see which one works best for you.

Namecheap

For years, I have been running my site on Namecheap* shared hosting. I use my blog primarily to push for my writing services but I don’t publish as many posts as I want. Therefore, if you see yourself doing the same as I’m doing, then a shared hosting should be up your alley.

I initially chose Namecheap because this is where I purchase my domains. Therefore, it’s easier to manage my domains because they are hosted by the same company. Not to mention, they offer affordable hosting rates especially for beginners who don’t have a lot of cash to spend on!

Namecheap pricing

Some people don’t like Namecheap for a host of reasons, all of which I strongly disagree with. It’s not top-tier hosting when it comes to speed, but I’m all for convenience – you cannot beat having your domain and hosting in the same place. Also, the chat support team has been more than helpful to me whenever I have questions about their services, despite what other sites say.

If there’s a con to the pros I’ve mentioned about Namecheap, it’s probably too simple for site owners looking for more juice from their web hosting provider. It’s not really a knock against Namecheap as there’s beauty in simplicity. But

However, I’ve been testing the waters with my web hosting of choice for my site and I’m currently trying out Siteground* for now.

Siteground

siteground wordpress pricing

I want to deliver my site the best way that I can which prompted me to switch web hosting for the time being. Will I stick around Siteground? It’s hard to say for now because it’s only been a couple of weeks since I last moved my site here. But so far, the transition has been pretty excellent. All the good reviews about Siteground is true – chat support is excellent, its WordPress hosting lives up to its name, and others.

Here’s a comprehensive breakdown of Siteground in this Bluehost vs Siteground post. I suggest you read this first before you proceed with this article.

Below are points that I consider the strengths of Siteground and why you should highly consider it as your web hosting of choice:

  • Dedicated WordPress hostingSiteground even has a plugin that helps you speed up your site by cleaning your cache. It works in conjunction with popular caching plugins as well so you don’t run the risk of having redundant plugins for your site.
  • Easy migration – I think this is the best feature that Siteground offers to its customers who want to migrate their sites here from another hosting provider. The plugin is easy to use as it takes care of migrating all your WordPress files to Siteground painlessly. You can move multiple sites using the plugin in a matter of minutes instead of using an FTP client!
siteground page loading speed

A lot of people claim that it’s one of the fastest web hosting available. According to them, the loading time of a site hosted on Siteground is 1.7 seconds (1.3 seconds using the SG Optimizer plugin) which is almost thrice as fast as the industry standard (4.7 seconds).

siteground support

Also, Siteground prides itself on being one of the most responsive customer support in the web host. They pick up the phone immediately to answer your questions. There is no wait time if you have queries for Siteground which is something that you can’t say about other hosting companies.

Having contacted their customer support multiple times to facilitate the migration, Siteground really does answer the call the moment you open their online chat. Pretty impressive!

Given its features, Siteground costs a bit more than Namecheap. I am currently subscribed to the GrowBig plan ($5.95/month) that includes free SSL certificate, SG Optimizer plugin, and the Siteground SuperCacher, all of which are not available in Namecheap. If you truly want to provide fast loading speed for your site, then Siteground is at least worth a try.

It’s really hard to say in my case because I ran a test on my Siteground-hosted site using GTMetrix and Pingdom and the scores I got are even to when I hosted my site on Namecheap.

To show you what I mean, here’s the Pingdom score of my site hosted on Namecheap:

Pingdom Website speed test

Here’s the GTMetrix score of my Namecheap-hosted site:

GTMetrix

Here’s the Pingdom score of my site on Siteground:

Pingdom CJB

Here’s the GTMetrix score of my Siteground-hosted site:

CJB GTMetrix

To be fair, the scores don’t really say the entire story. The screenshots of the score for my site hosted on Namecheap was from years ago and I’ve undergone a redesign since then. Also, I have been using much more plugins now compared to before. Therefore, I can’t really provide an accurate head-to-head comparison without controlling these variable, especially now that I’ve migrated from Namecheap to Siteground.

However, the results only go to show that there are lots of mitigating factors that affect site speed. It’s not just the web host that is responsible for making your site load faster.

Thankfully for you, I have written a post at BloggingPro that details the things you need to do for your WordPress site to make it load faster!

However, to unlock the link, I would appreciate it if you can share the post by using any of the social buttons below. It’s a very small price that you must pay to make your site much more accessible to your target audience! 🙂

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CLICK HERE TO LEARN HOW TO MAKE YOUR SITE LOAD FASTER!

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Wrapping it up

As seen above, your ideas as a blogger won’t mean anything if you don’t have a great place where you can store them online. By choosing the most appropriate web hosting for your blog, you will be able to communicate your thoughts much better and drive more traffic to your blog. As a result, you will be able to reach your goals as a blogger!

Also, you can’t go wrong with Namecheap* and Siteground* as your website hosting of choice. The former is cheaper and provides the most basic hosting needs to get your site up and running. The latter is a more premium web hosting provider loaded with features to make your site load faster. Either way, your audience wins as you provide them with a cost-effective (Namecheap) or blazing-fast (Siteground) solutions to access your site!

* – The link is an affiliate link. If you click on this link and make a successful transaction by way of signing up for an account or buying a product from the tool, I may receive a commission.