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Choosing a web hosting service is one of the very first challenges you’ll face when setting up your own website. The official WordPress.org website is there to help however, by recommending three WordPress hosting companies, namely: Bluehost, DreamHost, and SiteGround. In this video we’ll take a look at each of these: to help you understand their strengths and weaknesses — with a mind to helping you choose the right host for your own WordPress-powered website.
Let’s take a look:
The Three Officially-Recommended WordPress Web Hosting Companies – An Introduction to Each:
Direct link to watch the video over on YouTube.
– (note: video credits to Topher DeRosia – creator of HeroPress)
Video Transcript:
Hi, this is Topher with WinningWP! In this video I’m going to give you an introduction to each of the officially recommended WordPress web hosting companies. But what does that really mean, officially recommended? By whom? Well let me show you. We’re here on WordPress.org, and right here in the main menu is a hosting link. And if we click it we come to this page which has three officially recommended WordPress hosts. We have Bluehost, DreamHost, and SiteGround. I’m going to go over each one of them with you, and at the end you should have a pretty good handle on what each of them is good at and which one might be good for you. Let’s start with Bluehost. Bluehost is owned by the Endurance International Group, which is a very large company. They actually own hundreds of hosting companies. Bluehost was founded in and is currently one of the largest web hosts. They employ over people in their Utah facility and are unique in that almost all employees are in that Utah facility. They’re not spread around the country or the world like other hosting companies. Let’s take a look at their website. We’re specifically going to go to their page that is linked to from this page, because it’s not their homepage. It’s a special page just to be linked to from here. In here we have a special offer for WordPress users. For only $ . a month you can get hosting. Now what’s interesting about this particular deal, this is not their managed WordPress hosting. This is just plain old website hosting. WordPress works great on it, but this is the least expensive path to getting WordPress up. With Bluehost being the largest host in our list, hosting with them is going to be like hosting with any large, polished company. There’s going to be an enormous amount of consistency, support is always there, and it always has the same level of quality. Bluehost has spent an enormous amount of time gathering resources and building a streamlined system for users to get onboarded and get set up. This is probably the host that you want to use if you’re really, truly just getting started. It’s extremely inexpensive and has very smooth onboarding. So if you’re not comfortable with getting set up, it’ll be extra easy for you. Let’s take a look at the next host. DreamHost is independently owned. It was founded in and is based in Los Angeles, California, and they employ over people. Of the three that we’re talking about, this host is the oldest. It’s been around a very long time, and they have an enormous amount of experience. Being in California they even have experience with losing most of their service to an earthquake and recovering. Let’s take a look at their site. Their pricing starts at $ . a month and has a variety of plans. Again, the basic plan is not WordPress specific. It’s regular hosting and WordPress works great there. But it’s not managed WordPress hosting. Whereas these other three blue ones are on DreamPress, which is their managed hosting system. As the prices go up, the resources go up also. So let’s take a look at our next host. SiteGround is also independently owned. It was founded in and is based in Sofia, Bulgaria. They employ over people, and something that’s unique about SiteGround is they have data centers in five different locations. Chicago, London, Amsterdam, Milan, and Singapore. This means your site gets mirrored all over the world, which can make it extra fast. Let’s take a look at their site. Now their link goes directly to their WordPress hosting, but what’s interesting about SiteGround is there isn’t a lot of difference between their regular hosting and their WordPress managed hosting. They both have many of the features of managed WordPress hosting, like automated backups, caching, and things like that. Their prices start at $ . a month and go up to $ . a month. Of these three, SiteGround is where I would go if you’re the most tech savvy. Now you don’t have to be tremendously tech savvy, it’s not very complicated, but there are a lot of tools available and they give you a great deal of flexibility in what you can do. There’s something that’s good to know about all three of these hosts, is they all offer free email accounts with your hosting. Often, more expensive managed WordPress hosts will not offer email. All they offer is WordPress hosting. Another thing that they all offer is domain registration. Often some of the more expensive hosts don’t offer domain registration. You have to register someplace else and get DNS set up ahead of time. Something else to note is that all three of these organizations are aimed at either individuals or small organizations with smaller budgets. The packages linked to from here are all budget hosting plans. Now that said, I need to show you one more thing. If we go to Bluehost and we’re here on their budget hosting, we can go to hosting, WordPress hosting, and here we find that for $ a month you can get managed WordPress hosting. And the price can go up to $ a month, and it can handle a pretty beefy website. If we go back to DreamHost we can do the same thing. We go to WordPress Hosting and it takes us to their performance WordPress hosting. And lastly, with SiteGround, we can go to WordPress Services and learn more, and this only goes to GoGeek. However, they also offer under Web Hosting, Enterprise Hosting. And this is custom made hosting. The cost is much higher, but it allows your site to scale up. So if you started off on a $ . hosting plan, you can scale up to a $ hosting plan because you’re making millions of dollars on your website, and you don’t have to leave your host. SiteGround is unique in this scalability. The other two don’t scale quite that high. So let’s review. The recommended hosts are found at WordPress.org/hosting. They’re all targeted at individuals or small organizations with small budgets, and they’re all fairly similar. They have their own unique options, but they all offer shared hosting, email, domain registration, free SSL, et cetera. Bluehost is a little more smoothly polished for onboarding. So if you’re absolutely new, that might be a good place to start. DreamHost allows more flexibility, it’s a smaller company, and it has excellent support. So that would probably be my choice for somebody who’s been around the block once or twice and knows about hosting but still doesn’t do it every day. SiteGround offers the most flexibility and has the most gadgets and can scale the farthest. So I would pick SiteGround if you really know what you want and you like to fine tune things and you want to have control. That said, all three are fine hosts, they work well, and they’re a great place to start. If you’d like to learn more about WordPress, check out WinningWP.com.
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