How to choose between WordPress Hosting and Regular Hosting for WordPress websites?

As you know there are many options when it comes to choosing your web hosting. But how many of you have experienced poor page load speed, bad SEO rankings and losing sales just because people can’t get to your website at the right time. This is why I’ve come up with a post that will help you guys buy or even recommend only the right type of WordPress hosting to your clients. So in this post we’re going to cover differences between a regular hosting and the WordPress hosting. Let’s get started…

What is Hosting?

Hosting also referred to as web hosting or website hosting is a service that provides businesses or individuals who aim to go online. It is provided by hosting service providers, who rent disk and storage space to website hosted on their servers. Simply put, websites are stored on the server so that they are accessible via the www i.e internet.

Different types of Hosting

In general there are two types of hosting for WordPress Websites viz. Regular hosting and WordPress hosting. Let’s look at each of them in detail starting with Regular hosting.

Regular hosting is one of the most common type of hosting. There are three categories to it;

Dedicated hosting
Shared Hosting
Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting

Each of these hosting services provide different features depending on what the business needs. Let’s discuss each of these in detail:

Dedicated Hosting:

In dedicated hosting, you rent a complete physical server that is dedicated to just your website. You get full root access that is, you have complete administrative control of the server. It is much faster as resources like bandwidth and storage are not shared.
You can install the latest versions of PHP, MySQL and other softwares to support the WordPress plugins, themes and widgets of your website. Although the performance is good, one of the setbacks of using Dedicated hosting for WordPress is the need to hire a System administrator who is an expert in server management.

Shared Hosting:

In shared hosting, multiple websites share the same server space thereby, reducing cost of hosting. This is one of the most popular plans that many new website owners opt for.
Now the environment your WordPress website is hosted on is, PHP 5.2.4+ and MySQL 5.0+ versions you may face some security vulnerabilities. This happens because WordPress strongly recommends using latest software versions to avoid such vulnerability issues.

Virtual Private Server:

VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting is one of the most popular hosting services. It offers more flexibility around your website, high traffic and better security. It is costlier than shared hosting but cheaper than dedicated hosting.
As the environment of VPS is flexible, it can be set up to support your WordPress website it may not necessarily be custom made with WordPress feature. Additionally, it might happen that the system administrator running the VPS infrastructure might not be well versed in WordPress.

What is WordPress hosting?

WordPress hosting is a service where all the administrative aspects of running a WordPress website is managed by the host. It is specifically designed to cater to WordPress websites.

WordPress hosting requirements

WordPress recommends the following for a seamless performance-

PHP version 7 or greater
MySQL version 5.6 or greater OR MariaDB version 10.0 or greater
Apache or Nginx server

HTTPS support

Features of WordPress hosting

Some of the features of WordPress hosting are;

Premium WordPress themes and one click Installation.

Faster Speed
- WordPress hosting servers are configured for WordPress websites. Even with a lot of traffic the speed is not affected.
Scalability
- Easily scalable.
Daily Backup
WordPress – CLI Enabled (controlling WordPress from command line)

Faster Uptime and page load
- WordPress Uptime is usually 99.9%
WordPress Updates
- Since the website is hosted on WordPress servers, the updates are automatic, frequent and integration is seamless. This also enhances the security.

Conclusion

If you are looking for overall good performance, resource availability and utilization as well as security for your WordPress website, then WordPress hosting is the plan you should choose. At the end as a business owner, if you have a WordPress website you have two options to choose from. Either you can employ a system administrator to manage your website and go for Regular hosting. Or since you have a WordPress website you can go for WordPress hosting. Overall WordPress hosting clearly outweighs all other hosting services in terms of hosting your WordPress website in terms of scalability security and performance.