Shared Hosting for WordPress

WordPress get its popularity among bloggers for its easy to use platform. Besides as a blogging platform, WordPress is also a great website creation tool or content management system for millions of sites.

At WordPress you can choose one from thousands of themes, most are free and can be completely customized and installed quickly. Not counting there are thousands of plugins to improve your WordPress’s capabilities to choose from. Most of these are free and can be used to, amongst other things, add a gallery, contact form or Google sitemap to your site.

The Pros of shared hosting

Shared hosting is an average hosting service where many websites exist in on one web server. It is an acceptable solution for many small to medium sized websites and is definitely the cheapest hosting solution.

The Cons of shared hosting

A possible difficulty with shared hosting is if the host places too many sites on one server. When this occurs the sites on that server will be slow. Fortunately, a good host will not do this.

Another trouble you may get from shared hosting is the possibility of getting your email blacklisted. As you’re sharing the server with hundreds of people, it will only take one bad penny who sending out spam to tar everyone sending mail from that server with the same brush. The solution to this is to route the mail through Google Apps for Business.

How to select a good shared hosting for WordPress

Initially you have to find a host that offers the minimum requirements for WordPress. These are PHP 5.2.4 or greater and MySQL 5.0 or greater. Also it is recommended that you use a Linux host running the mod_rewrite Apache module (which is needed for SEO-friendly URLs).

The best way to choose a good shared hosting is choose a host that is recommended by other WordPressers out there.

There are some more standards to base them on:

• Reliability: choose a host with good track records of uptimes. This information might be hard to get but you really don’t want to be dealing with downtimes on a server on a regular basis
• Responsive 24/7 Tech Support: make sure you would  able to contact support by phone immediately or online support
• Server software: you may want a host that offers dotnetPanel and a one-click WordPress install service like Fantastico
• Space/CPU/Bandwidth: you will get what you pay for as far as these issues are concerned but it’s good to watch out for these
• Price: make sure that you are informed of the exact monthly or yearly price you are paying. You may like to look for coupons or offers to get some money off to start with.

Deciding a shared hosting for your WordPress website is a necessary decision to make. But if you select a steadfast company with lots of expertise with WordPress you won’t go far wrong.