In one form another we’ve been hosting websites now for many years, and we’ve also supported clients on many different hosting platforms.

Each platform tends to have its own idiosyncrasies and peculiarities that sometimes have to be accommodated when launching or moving a website, although that’s less the case today than it was 10 years ago.

When it comes to hosting for a wordpress website, it’s hard to beat the performance and value offered by some of the cloud WordPress hosting providers, where the speed and performance is tuned specifically for WordPress.

If you’re looking for the best WordPress hosting for your website, here’s some of the services we really like (we use some of these ourselves, depending on the site requirements) and what we like about them.

You really can’t go wrong with any of these services, they are all solid offer solid WP hosting. 

Test them out and see which one feels more comfortable and meets your requirements.

• Kinsta has a 30 day money back guarantee.  Prices start at $35/month USD
• Flywheel offers 14 day demo sites.  Prices start at $13/month USD
• WPEngine has a 60 day money back gurantee.  Prices start at $20/month USD
• Siteground offers a 30 day money back guarantee.  Prices start at $14.99/month USD

* Updated fall 2022

What we like about dedicated WordPress hosting

• the systems are tuned to wordpress, so from performance to security the platform has been built to really power your website
• the support staff is generally very familiar with wordpress, so when you’re describing an issue they often know exactly – or close to exactly what you’re talking about
• you can generally get rid of caching and security plugins, as their platform will look after that for you – there are still things you can do to optimize speed an performance (WPEngine has a great article with website speed optimization tips), but the basics – and more – are covered
• they backup the website nightly – automatically, and really easy to do a custom backup or restore
• they have built in, 1 button staging areas, so if you want to test or or explore new options for your site, its really easy to set something up
• they usually have 24 hour support

Cost

Granted, dedicated wordpress hosting can be more costly that traditional shared server hosting, the lowest price is about $15/month USD, but you really do get what you pay for.

Email

They don’t include email hosting either – though these days we highly recommend looking at GSuite (Google) or Office 365 (Microsoft) for email.  Apart from coming with many additional services, these are dedicated email services tuned up to really power and support your email.

So while you could go with wordpress hosting and email on a shared web server, if you go with dedicated wordpress hosting and dedicated a email service you are getting the best products and leveraging the resources of these large companies/teams focussed on providing singular services very well.

These days, many hosting providers (like Kinsta, Flywheel, or Canadian Web Hosting) provide security certificates at no charge, and there is little more to do than to click a button, but still there are many other providers that do not.

1. You’ll need to purchase a certificate from a site that sells them.  Your own hosting provider might sell them, and if so it might be easiest to buy directly from them, but if not one that we use is NameCheap, or if you google you can find plenty of sites selling ssl certificates.
2. Once purchased, log into your hosting account and create a CSR (certificate signing request).  There’s  usually a place in the control panel where this can be created, if not your hosting support can likely help.
3. Once created, apply the csr to the certificate where you purchased it (it’s basically a copy/paste from one site to the other)
4. The certificate site will then send out an approval request to the contacts on the domain record. This can sometimes be a bit tricky particularly if whomever registered the domain is no longer available, sometimes there are alternate ways to approve the request available as well.
5. Once the request has been approved, the certificate is made available.  At this point it is essentially copied and pasted into your hosting account through the control panel.