WordPress Cloud Hosting – Host your site in the Cloud
WordPress Cloud Hosting has seen a surge of popularity in recent months, with numerous cloud hosting providers who specialise in managed WordPress cloud hosting solutions entering the market. The reasons for the popularity of hosting WordPress on a cloud host are many:
- WordPress is the most popular CMS on the market
- Many WordPress website users have limited technical background, and thus are looking for an easy solution
- Many WordPress users have come from WordPress.com which is cloud hosted, thus it is fast and there is no fiddling around with server settings
- WordPress is a dynamic CMS: to generate a page requires executing 100s of lines of code, which is much more resource intensive than a traditional HTML page.
- WordPress makes it super-easy to add advanced functionality to your site with a few clicks, often for free or with minimal cost. As a result there are hundreds of thousands of WordPress users running blogs with substantial performance requirements, which exceed the capacity of shared hosting.
- Many WordPress users start on very cheap hosting, attracted by the claims of “unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth”. As soon as the site starts getting popular however their budget shared web host just cannot deliver.
- WordPress has high PHP memory requirements and other technical needs which are not supported by many shared hosts, especially as the website grows in size or popularity
- Many web hosts don’t support many modern performance standards required by WordPress, resulting in bugs and errors when running WordPress.
- Once WordPress sites have outgrown shared hosting, the next steps up are into VPS and dedicated servers, which are much more expensive and require substantial technical expertise and time to manage. This isn’t what WordPress users signed up for: they wanted a cheap, fast, easy and non-technical website platform. They don’t want to spend their time stressing about their web server.
WordPress Cloud Hosting specialists – better than a VPS or dedicated server?
WordPress web hosting solutions have typically begun with shared hosting, moving up to a VPS or dedicated hosting as the size and popularity of your WordPress site grows. The problem with this is that a VPS or dedicated hosting isn’t just a “better shared hosting”. With shared hosting while your resources are greatly restricted (in spite of the claims of “unlimited everything” by major web hosting companies) you are benefiting from highly experienced and efficient server management by a team of web hosting experts. This is affordable because you are sharing this service with hundreds or thousands of people using the same server. For more information, read a comparison of Cloud web Hosting vs VPS web hosting.
The problem with shared hosting for WordPress
WordPress runs well on most of the better shared web hosting providers, until you have decent amounts of traffic or your site gets to a decent size. Shared hosting simply doesn’t offer the resources to run a highly popular or large website. It’s an easy and cheap way to get started with running a website, but inevitably you will need to improve your hosting as you get more serious or successful with your website. Once your site has significant traffic, it’s well worth paying more than $10 a month for hosting (which is peanuts in the scheme of things).
The standard suggestion when WordPress users outgrow their shared hosting is to move to a VPS or dedicated server, however there are significant challenges with these systems which make them unsuitable for most WordPress users.
Problems with VPS and Dedicated Server WordPress Hosting
While VPS and dedicated servers give you heaps more resources to get the most out of your site, they require significant technical skill and time to manage. These are taken care of by the hosting company with shared hosting, but when when you move to a VPS or dedicated server, these aren’t included, or you pay dearly for the privilege. Also, if you have a VPS or dedicated server and you grow bigger, guess what: you may need to move to a new server, with significant cost and downtime.
If only there was a solution that offered the benefits of each: the economy and ease of shared hosting and the power and performance of a VPS or dedicated server.
Host your WordPress site in the cloud
WordPress cloud hosting providers offer a specialised hosting service tailored to the needs of WordPress sites, often with full server management. In many cases these are effectively shared hosting on cloud servers, but with enhanced performance and resources designed to meet the needs of WordPress web sites.
Because these hosts specialise in WordPress web hosting, they are often much more helpful when it comes to troubleshooting issues with WordPress sites and plugins and the server settings: most of the time you will avoid these issues because the hosting server has been tailored to the needs of WordPress sites, and issues with common plugins and configurations have already been resolved.
Check out some of our WordPress Cloud Hosting Companies to find some that meet your needs on your budget. You can expect to pay a fair bit more for wordpress cloud hosting than you do for generic shared hosting (often $20-$50+ compared with $5-$20) but you can expect a higher level of service, improved performance, and often additional services like improved security, backups and other essentials.
If you’d like to know the minimum requirements we suggest for WordPress cloud hosting servers to help you choose the best hosting provider for your needs, then read our article on Wordpress cloud hosting essentials
