Tag: hosting

8 Best WordPress & WooCommerce Hosting Services

Woocommerce-hosting

WordPress with WooCommerce has swiftly invigorated the eCommerce industry. The security and the clarity that is offered by WordPress and WooCommerce are commendable in terms of eCommerce. Now it is easier to set up an eCommerce site with the help of WooCommerce. All you need is an economical and fast hosting service provider. WooCommerce hosting service providers are the best in class and secured ones, which will help you to focus on business growth. You can find numerous WooCommerc hosting providers and plans that suit your needs.

Why choose WordPress WooCommerce hosting services?

The major advantage of choosing WordPress WooCommerce hosting compared to the ones available in the market is that, they are easy to maintain and set up. The security is commendable. So these are what you get with a WordPress WooCommerce hosting service providers:

  • High data security with assured data protection.
  • Excellent backup services of your data.
  • Proactive support system for assistance.
  • Easy to install and manage WordPress and WooCommerce.

Here we have listed a few popular and most trusted Hosting providers that will assist you in setting up an economical WooCommerce set up easily.

SiteGround

siteground

One of the popular WordPress WooCommerce hosting providers. Acclaimed for its reliable, high performance and WooCommerce supportive features. Here are some popular features of Siteground hosting :

  • WooCommerce is pre-installed.
  • Automatic updates are done.
  • Free SSL.
  • One-click staging.
  • Integrated CDN(Cloudflare  Content Delivery Network).
  • Free shopping cart installation.
  • PCI Compliant Servers.

Bluehost

Bluehost || WooCommerce hosting providers

Bluehost has Shared, dedicated and VPS hosting services. It is one of the prominent WooCommerce hosting providers which come with affordable plans. It has pre-installed WooCommerce, which makes it easily configurable. Here are some specific features that make it stand out among the competitors :

  • Preinstalled WooCommerce and WordPress.
  • A free SSL certificate.
  • A complete online free call to set up your store quickly.
  • The completely dedicated IP address.
  • Unmetered Bandwidth.

Cloudways

Cloudways || WooCommerce hosting services

With Cloudways, you can ignore the complexities and other difficulties related to web hosting and focus on the growth of the company. Tighter security and mindblowing performance with 24/7 support service to offer best-in-class services.  Also you will get $15 credit if you sign up via the links here! Here are other features that make Cloudways an ideal choice :

  • Five Cloudways providers like Digital Ocean, Google Cloud, and Amazon.
  • Excellent Caching.
  • Preinstalled MySQL and WP-CLI.
  • Automated backups.

Dreamhost

Dreamhost || Woocommerce hosting services

With Dreamhost WordPress users get exclusive plans to suit their needs at affordable prices and even special care for WooCommerce customers. Here are some basic features of Dreamhost WooCommerce hosting services :

  • It has pre-installed WooCommerce and Storefront.
  • Efficient server-side protection against any internet threats and speed problems.
  • Backups to efficiently manage data.
  • JETPack Professional plugin is free with Dreamhost along with downtime monitoring features.
  • Free SSL.

Liquidweb

Liquidweb || WooCommerce web hosting services

One of the expensive ones offering an inimitable web hosting services. It is a great value-add in terms of WooCommerce web hosting. The prominent features include :

  • Quick WooCommerc e set up with additional themes to support and page builders like Beaver Builder.
  • Also, it has Jilt partnered Abandon cart feature.
  • Mobile optimization of pages.
  • Free SSL.
  • Additional payment gateways is easy to configure.

Kinsta

kinsta

 

Powered by Google Platform, Kinsta is a premium WordPress hosting provider. Kinsta is configured and best suited for WooCommerce with optimized handles to manage traffic surges. The features include:

  • Single click WooCommerce auto-installer from the dashboard.
  • Has 6 different types of backup which include, 24 hours backup, downloadable ones, etc.
  • It is completely scalable.
  • Free SSL Certificate.
  • Fast caching at server level.

Hostinger

Hostinger || WooCommerce hosting services

Hostinger is yet another popular WooCommerce hosting service provider. They focus on shared hosting services that offer daily and weekly backups to improve data security and improved data maintenance. The list of features include :

  • Daily Backups.
  • CloudFare and LetsEncrypth Integration.
  • Server deployments are streamlined.
  • Site management is ideal.
  • Provides secure access to websites.

WPEngine

wpengine || woocommerce hosting services

If you want to own a high-traffic store, then WPEngine is the right WooCommerce hosting service to choose from the list. Including data security and easy data management possible with WPEngine, it is one of the smart choice irrespective of the cost. Here are some interesting features :

  • Free SSL to ensure data is secure.
  • Integrated CDN.
  • Staging environment to test the efficiency of the store in an in-built manner.
  • Auto backups to streamline data management.
  • It also has an add-on plugin called WPEngine Ecommerce Toolkit plugin for optimizing store performance.

Conclusion

If you are planning to set up a simple eCommerce store or even setting up a wholesale store or to set up a dropshipping store, you need to be cautious in choosing the right hosting service provider.  Dealing with multiples customers and multiple vendors from a varied location like in the case of a multivendor store, you need to choose the right platform with a feasible and economical web hosting service provider. The above list of WooCommerce web hosting service providers are best suited for your WooCommerce online stores, you can easily choose the one that fits in your budget to build any kind of eCommerce store you need. If you enjoyed this post, why not also check out this article on Building a Woocommerce Store!

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Filed under: eCommerce, WordpressTagged with: , ,

How To Scale Wordpress For High Traffic Sites

wordpress-shortcodes

Get Scale With Your High Traffic Wordpress Site

Scalability is crucial for running a successful WordPress enterprise website. After all, if you experience a sudden surge in traffic (for example, as the result of a viral content post), you’ll want your website to be able to cope. Failing to do so could turn your site’s success into its failure.

Fortunately, ensuring your site is optimally scalable doesn’t have to be a daunting task. It requires testing how your site performs under pressure, identifying the elements that are causing slow load speeds, and choosing a reliable host provider.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through some steps you can take to ensure your site stays speedy under heavy traffic.

Understanding High Traffic

In order to understand why scalability is important for your WordPress enterprise site, it’s important to see exactly how high traffic can slow down performance. This way, the task of implementing measures to increase scalability becomes much easier.

‘Bottlenecking’ Traffic

Most WordPress themes and plugins should function reasonably well under a moderate amount of traffic strain. However, a sudden increase in traffic could cause them to push server resources to their breaking points.

The process of overloading server resources is known as ‘bottlenecking traffic’, and it’s definitely something you want to avoid. In addition to driving visitors away, an underperforming site will create the impression of unprofessionalism and unreliability.

Serving High Traffic

The best approach for scaling WordPress and avoiding bottlenecks is via the “less is more” approach. This means ensuring requests sent to your site require minimal resources, and little effort to render and serve.

Ensuring you have a good caching system in place is important for improving site performance under strain. With cached versions of your site available to users, your server won’t have to take a hit every time a user makes a new request.

It could be the case that your database is causing bottlenecks. Although it’s possible to use a tool such as HyperDB to resolve this issue yourself, they have limited use. Switching to a better hosting plan is an easier (and better) option.

Given the tasks that need to be performed to ensure scalability, you may ask Is WordPress really a viable Content Management System (CMS) for my enterprise site? The answer to this question is an emphatic “Yes”!

Scaling WordPress for Enterprise Sites

WordPress is a great platform for enterprise sites of virtually any size. In addition to being highly secure, it is extremely scalable and able to serve tens of thousands of logged-in users at a time. The wide variety of performance-enhancing plugins available for WordPress, coupled with its elastic architecture, also contribute to its scalability.

Although there are plenty of ways to extend the default platform, it’s strongly recommended to invest in scalable WordPress hosting to enjoy the best results. With enterprise hosting, you won’t need to invest time and resources ensuring your site is scalable. Instead, you’ll benefit from a robust architecture, regularly audited and adjusted, and reliable support.

In short, by choosing managed enterprise hosting WordPress hosting (such as that offered by WP Engine) or the VPS or Dedicated hosting we use, you can rest easy knowing your site will function at peak performance, regardless of the traffic strain.

Keep Your Options Table Under Control

Earlier, we mentioned how your database can give rise to a traffic bottleneck. This is because it stores practically all of your WordPress site’s data within. The Options table is one particular source of potential bottlenecks, which brings us to the next section.

Overloading the Options Table

The Options table (or wp_options for default setups) can be accessed through phpMyAdmin, or your host’s equivalent service. Your table should display in a similar fashion to the following:

scaling wordpress site for high traffic

Tweaking aspects of the database can break your installation, so we recommend backing up your site beforehand).

Within the Options table, the option_value column has the LONGTEXT string type. Knowing why is complex, but essentially, it means each column can store up to 4GB of data in a single row. However, just because it’s possible doesn’t mean you should store that much data.

While removing unnecessary plugins or choosing a more lightweight theme can help reduce table size, some poorly-coded plugins leave behind data after being uninstalled. Working through a good guide on optimizing your database is a sound strategy.

Autoloaded Queries

Some data from your tables is ‘autoloaded’ – usually relating to your themes, plugins, and widgets. However, autoloaded queries can be a silent page speed killer. If you’re having page load speed issues, try identifying how many queries are being autoloaded.

Again, a solid guide will help you, but you’ll essentially need to run MySQL queries on your database. For example, the following assumes a default table prefix of wp_:

mysql> SELECT count(*) FROM wp_options WHERE autoload=’yes’;

A good rule of thumb is to shoot for fewer than 200 autoloaded queries on any given WordPress page (although having more than 200 isn’t necessarily a cause for concern). Usually, an excessive amount of autoloaded queries indicates your site is still carrying weight from old plugins and themes. Getting rid of these can help improve your site speed and scalability.

There are a variety of other methods you can use to clean out unnecessary autoloaded data, and as with the previous step, you should back up your WordPress site before proceeding.

Scalable WordPress Hosting

As we mentioned earlier, a great way to take the guesswork out of keeping your site scalable is to invest in robust WordPress enterprise hosting. WP Engine can create a custom enterprise hosting solution geared to the specific needs of your organization.

WP Engine for Scaling WordPress

WP Engine’s infrastructure is ideal for enterprise websites with high traffic (accommodating spikes ranging from 10,000 to 100 million users effortlessly). We deliver high availability solutions to keep your site uptime protected, and your data backed up in the event of a performance issue.

What’s more, when you choose WP Engine, you can enjoy peace of mind. The support team are able to field your enquiries 24/7.

So get in touch with us for more details on high speed hosting with WP Engine or our own dedicated Wordpress hosting plans. If you enjoyed this post, why not check out this article on the Hidden Costs of Website Hosting!

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Filed under: Strategy, WordpressTagged with: , ,

The Hidden Costs of Website Hosting

The price of web hosting and what to expect as you grow

Creating a website is exciting. In many cases, it means you’re starting or expanding your own business.

But in order for your website to be live on the Internet, it needs to be hosted. In short, web hosting provides storage space and access for websites.

So, you know you need it and you know you’ll need to consider the website hosting costs. Like anything else, the costs associated with hosting your website can influence some of your decisions.

Like nearly every other product and service, there isn’t one set for website hosting. There are even some hidden costs associated with site hosting that you need to be aware of.

Allow me to explain.

If you cut corners initially with site hosting costs, it can end up costing you more money down the road. You could run into issues that are more expensive than you might think.

I developed this guide to help educate you on how much website hosting will really cost. We’ll go through different elements that you need to take into consideration.

Types of Web Hosting

There are three main types of website hosting.

  • shared hosting
  • virtual private server (VPS)
  • dedicated hosting

The costs vary based on which type of web hosting you use.

Types of Website Hosting

Shared hosting is the least expensive option. That’s because your site gets stored in a server that hosts other websites too. Dedicated servers are be the top of the line option — one that comes at a premium price. Just as the name implies, your site gets hosted on a single server you have all to yourself. (If you’re a small business, dedicated is likely way more than you need.) VPS hosting falls in between these two options. It’s less expensive than a dedicated server but has additional features and greater flexibility than shared hosting.

Free Website Hosting

What about free website hosting? Is it good? Do I recommend it?

These are questions that I get asked all of the time. For those of you who are interested in this, you check out this guide on the best free web hosting.

While free hosting is definitely an option you can consider, there is an old saying that you should keep in mind: You get what you pay for.

Now, this isn’t necessarily true all of the time. If you buy a $500 designer shirt, is it really that much better than a cheap $5 shirt? Probably not. But when it comes to web hosting, free or cheap isn’t always better.

So why do so many services offer free hosting packages? They are able to make money in other ways.

Some free hosting services make money from the banner ads displayed on your website, or even banners on your own dashboard. Some get paid with ads on forums that they force you to visit and post on in order to receive your free hosting. You’ll see web hosting plans that are offered free but then entice you to switch and upgrade to paid service.

You might even come across a startup company that’s running a web host for the first time, and offering free hosting before they transition and go after paying clients. This is something you’ll want to avoid for sure.

Website Traffic

It’s natural to try and save some money with a free or inexpensive hosting service. But eventually, your site is going to grow. Obviously, this is a good thing.

However, when your site reaches a certain size, the host may begin to throttle your website if you’re on a shared server.

A couple of things can happen from here. None are good news for your website.

It’s possible that website visitors will have trouble accessing your pages and content. They might even see error messages when attempting to connect to your site.

Even if an error message doesn’t appear, the increased load time will cause people to bounce. That’s a major problem. As loading times increase, page abandonment increases as well.

Load Time Adandonment Chart

Slow loading times are extremely costly. 40% of people abandon websites that take more than three seconds to load. 80% of people who leave your site because of slow speed say that they won’t return.

This is extremely costly for your website, so make sure you understand the basic principles that boost your website loading time. Upgrading and paying more for your web hosting can save you thousands of dollars in lead generation, customer acquisition costs, and sales.

Security

Reliable websites need to be secure. Safety always needs to be a top priority for your business.

This is especially true if you’re processing payments. Think about all of the sensitive information that your website has on it. It’s your responsibility to protect your site visitors and customers from cybercriminals and malicious attacks.

Here are just some of the minimum security measures that you need to keep in mind.

  • spam filtering
  • security audits
  • firewall configuring
  • network protocols
  • scans for malware and viruses
  • passwords
  • multi-level authentication
  • user permissions

A popular security option is a secured cloud where you can store all of your documents and manage files. However, all of this costs money.

But if you pay for a reliable web hosting service, you can get all of these features included as part of your subscription. This is much better than having to pay for them individually, or even worse, pay the costs of your website getting compromised or having security problems.

Servers

You need to make sure that your site hosting servers are reliable as well. Read reviews and do your research before you sign up for any hosting service based on attractive pricing alone.

The best servers have updated software, 24/7 monitoring, regular maintenance, and automatic updates.

Earlier we talked about the different types of web hosting. Your server will depend on which option you choose.

It’s worth mentioning that the size of the dedicated hosting market across the world is growing each year.

Dedicated Server Use Chart

Does this mean you need to have a dedicated server? Not necessarily.

Your website will perform better if you do, but depending on the size of your site right now, it’s not completely necessary.

But if you decide to upgrade or change your server at some point in the future, there will be additional costs associated with that transition, including some possible down time on your site.

Operational Costs

I consult with lots of business owners who just want to host their website on their own. They have a technical background and don’t think it will be a problem.

But just because you have the ability to self-host, doesn’t mean that you should. I’m not saying this to discourage you, but I don’t want to see you have to deal with hidden or unexpected costs.

You’ve got a business to run. Hosting your own website shouldn’t take away from your daily business tasks.

If you pay for a web hosting service, you’ll benefit from things like servers, bandwidth, storage, automatic updates, maintenance, and data migrations. Do you really want to have to worry about all of this?

Let a hosting provider do all of the heavy lifting for you. Hosting a site on your own can increase your operational costs. It will take time out of your day, and you may even need to hire more people. This is an inefficient use of your resources.

Instead, I’d recommend just finding the right hosting provider from the beginning. Then you can focus your efforts on running your business and avoid unexpected costs.

Renewal and Setup Fees

When you first purchase web hosting, the price might seem great. But that is likely just your initial cost for signing up.

The promotional rates aren’t usually the final price and probably won’t last forever.

Make sure you read the fine print to see what your renewal costs will be. Whether that’s next month, next year, or three years down the road. In most cases, there is no way around the price jump, but you should be ready for it.

Eventually, you should be expecting to pay full price. This will likely come when you renew.

Some services will also charge you for a setup fee.

Web Hosting Setup Fees

In the example above, the setup fee is free. But this isn’t always be the case.

For those of you who are paying for dedicated servers, the setup cost is definitely justifiable. That’s because your provider may need to physically add hardware components and set up software that you requested.

Conclusion

Hosting is a requirement for every website. There are lots of different options for you to consider.

The costs vary depending on which route you choose. Some options are more expensive than others. You may even decide to look for free website hosting.

Regardless of your decision, there will be some hidden costs that you need to be prepared for. A plan that saves you money up front could cost you extra down the road with your website traffic, operational costs, and security. Be prepared for additional fees associated with renewals and setups as well.

It’s important to make sure that you’re always using a reputable host. WP Engine currently have a special promotion which includes ALL their StudioPress themes FREE, and you can Grab That Here!

If you still have questions about the costs associated with website hosting, you can ask me about it in the comments section, and I’ll be happy to help you out. If you enjoyed this post, why not check out this article on
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