5 Top WooCommerce Hosting Solutions That You Can't Go Wrong With (Cheapest and Fastest)

Are you looking for the best and fastest WooCommerce hosting to create your online store? Choosing the best hosting provider is one of the most important decision you’ll make for your eCommerce business.

A normal shared hosting solution may not always be a good choice when it comes to WooCommerce. This WordPress eCommerce platform requires more resources, SSL certificate and more PHP workers as compared to a typical blog or static website.

In this guide, we will go through some of the fastest WooCommerce hosting solutions (web host) for your online store.

To make the process easier, we have also hand-picked the best WooCommerce hosting providers.

These are the top eCommerce hosting companies that consistently rank high due to their quality, performance, and excellent customer support.

Yes, these are the fastest WooCommerce hosting solution for 2020 (and beyond).

If you are looking for the fastest hosting for WooCommerce websites, you don't have to look any further.

WP Maven had been an established WordPress agency in Malaysia that had helped 200+ users in Malaysia alone with their websites. With the years of experience with hosting services, we truly understand the importance of choosing the best and fastest WooCommerce hosting for an eCommerce startup. Our goal is to offer insights on things you need to consider when choosing a WooCommerce hosting solution.

What is WooCommerce hosting (and why it matters)?

To host an online store with WooCommerce, you need an optimized hosting solution equipped to handle WooCommerce stores out of the box.

WooCommerce is the world’s most popular eCommerce platform. It is used by millions of small and large businesses all over the world. As it runs on WordPress CMS, so you will obviously need a hosting provider that supports WordPress.

Apart from that, you will also need a domain name (such as wpmaven.net) and an SSL certificate to accept online payment. You will also need the back-end servers to be optimized for WooCommerce for better performance.

As your online store grows, you will need to consider how to handle traffic with no downtime.

Do you know that #WooCommerce powers at least 5 million online stores worldwide in 2020?
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Scalability is the key as migrating to new WooCommerce hosting is tedious and oftentimes challenging.

A reliable and great WooCommerce hosting solution will most likely offer you these that you will not get with a typical shared WordPress hosting account. Using a WooCommerce specific hosting also opens doors to getting professional support from staff trained to deal with WooCommerce websites on a daily basis.

What are the advantages of using a WooCommerce hosting solutions?

  • WooCommerce Ready – WooCommerce hosting companies offer pre-installed WooCommerce with a ready to use design to go with.
  • High Performance – Speed is not just important for user experience but also for SEO. WooCommerce hosting platforms offer faster load times for smoother eCommerce transactions.
  • Hosting Features – Apart from WooCommerce specific features, you get all the usual hosting features like unmetered bandwidth, huge disk space, email accounts, and more.
  • Security – Most WooCommerce hosting plans come with SSL certificate. This adds a security layer around data transferring from customer’s browser to your website.
  • WooCommerce Support – We all need help now and then. With WooCommerce hosting you get help from actual WooCommerce experts via email, live chat, or phone.
  • Dedicated WooCommerce Backup – Nightly backups and offsite backup storage are two powerful reasons to use WooCommerce hosting solutions.

What are the disadvantages of using WooCommerce hosting solutions?

  • Price – Prices for WooCommerce hosting plans are slightly higher than average shared WordPress hosting plans.
  • Pre-Installed Software – Some advanced users may want to install WooCommerce on their own. Pre-installed software may also include WooCommerce ready designs and bonus extensions that some users may not need.
  • Maintenance – Not all WooCommerce hosting plans offer automatic updates. You will still need to set up automated backups and install updates.
Disadvantages Of WooCommerce Hosting
~Disadvantages of using WooCommerce

Now that you have looked at the pros and cons of WooCommerce hosting, you are probably still wondering if its the right solution for you?

Do I really need a WooCommerce hosting solution?

If you are just starting your first online store, you don't require a WooCommerce hosting solution. Instead, you should opt for a cheaper hosting solution, such as shared WordPress hosting.

We recommend using Bluehost, they are one of the officially recommended WordPress hosting companies.

On the other hand, if you are a small business with the intention to open a fully functional online store, then you would be better off with WooCommerce hosting.

This is simply because choosing the right WooCommerce hosting will save you a lot of time especially with the technical side of installing and setting up WordPress and WooCommerce.

Time is money. You will be more productive managing your business (and paying for WooCommerce hosting) instead of trying to figure things out.
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As a business owner, your time is money and there is absolutely no reason for you to 'crack' your mind with website hosting when you should more on growing your business.

When you decide to go through a hassle-free route with a WooCommerce hosting plan, you will have a blazing fast online store ready to go with no technical skills required.

More importantly, there's an army of professional WooCommerce support team on standby and at your service.

If you want to start selling quickly, then the cost of WooCommerce hosting makes more sense and is easily justifiable.

With that being said, the below are the list of the best WooCommerce hosting with speed in mind. These are hosting plans that offer excellent performance, superior infrastructure, and knowledgeable support. We give each of them a perfect 5 out of 5-star rating.

Carry on reading below to discover the fastest WooCommerce hosting providers.

SiteGround

SiteGround is one of the top-rated hosting company in the WooCommerce community. They provide unique in-house performance optimization and security which is why they’re an officially recommended WooCommerce hosting provider.

SiteGround WooCommerce Hosting Solution
~SiteGround Managed WooCommerce hosting plans

How fast is WooCommerce with SiteGround WooCommerce hosting?

The answer is fast ... like really fast. Take a look at the results from our recent SiteGround performance test.

Speed Test WooCommerce Hosting SiteGround Fastest WooCommerce Hosting
~WooCommerce takes 649 ms to complete load on SiteGround server

We tested from a server in Dallas, Texas using Pingdom Tools. The WooCommerce site loads 95% faster than most websites, which is incredible.

How does SiteGround WooCommerce hosting perform with peak traffic?

Next, we tested with Load Impact to test on the server performance under stress. We started with 1 active website visitor and gradually built up to 100 unique visitors at once to see how the server would handle increased requests from multiple connections at once.

Load Impact Test On SiteGround Fastest WooCommerce Hosting
~Siteground WooCommerce hosting performs exceptionally well with Load Impact

In this chart, the blue line indicates the number of active virtual users on the site. On the other hand, the green line is the server load time. SiteGround performed rather consistent until the point where the website hits 50 users. Thanks to the advanced technology in SiteGround, it quickly recovered and page load time remained steadily low even with more users.

How does SiteGround score with the Bitcatcha test?

Bitcatcha is used to test more accurate server response time from various geographical locations.

Server response time is often used to gauge the hosting server performance as it provides more accurate results instead of the complete load of the website.

Bitcatcha Test On SiteGround Fastest WooCommerce Hosting
~SiteGround's response time performs moderately across the globe

Overall, SiteGround performed with flying colours in the United States and all other locations except in Japan. This is because the server location that we have chosen for the test WooCommerce site is located in the US. If your audience is in Asia, then you can ask SiteGround to move you to their Asia-Pacific servers to solve this issue.

Is SiteGround a good WooCommerce hosting solution?

We found SiteGround to be a great option for WooCommerce hosting for startups (beginners with online stores) because their support is incredibly helpful. SiteGround also offers optimized and managed WooCommerce hosting solutions with just a fraction of the price compared to the rest.

Advantages of SiteGround WooCommerce hosting

  • Officially recommended by WordPress and WooCommerce
  • Best WordPress support, good uptime, fast speed, and free SSL certificate
  • Free website migration

Disadvantages of SiteGround WooCommerce hosting

  • SiteGround doesn't offer free domain
  • SiteGround GoGeek plan for WooCommerce hosting is slightly expensive

SiteGround Fully Managed WooCommerce Hosting

If you are looking for a hands-off WooCommerce hosting that doesn't burn a hole in your pocket, SiteGround is definitely the only option you need to consider.

Get SiteGround (for only $3.95/mo)

Bluehost

Bluehost is one of the largest hosting companies in the world and an officially recommended WooCommerce hosting provider.

Bluehost is often considered one of the best WooCommerce hosting in 2020 because it offers multiple perks including free domain and transfer.

Bluehost WooCommerce Hosting Solution
~Bluehost WooCommerce hosting solution

How fast is WooCommerce with Bluehost WooCommerce hosting?

Again, we loaded up a test WooCommerce website on Bluehost and tested on Pingdom Tools. Here is the result:

Speed Test WooCommerce Hosting Bluehost Fastest WooCommerce Hosting
~Bluehost performs moderately well with a full load that takes 1.2 second

As you can see above, Bluehost was able to load the WooCommerce site under 2 seconds. On average, it is 85% faster than most websites. We are very happy with the performance of Bluehost as the test site wasn’t using any caching plugins or performance optimization tips.

How does SiteGround WooCommerce hosting perform with peak traffic?

Next, we tested with Load Impact to test on the server performance under stress. We started with 1 active website visitor and gradually built up to 100 unique visitors at once to see how the server would handle increased requests from multiple connections at once.

Here's how it looks like:

Load Impact Test On Bluehost Fastest WooCommerce Hosting
~Bluehost WooCommer hosting stays stable throughout the website load test

In this chart, the blue line indicates the number of active virtual users on the site, and the green line is the server load time. The result shows that Bluehost servers were able to remain stable throughout the test even at peak traffic.

How does Bluehost score with the Bitcatcha test?

Bitcatcha is used to test more accurate server response time from various geographical locations.

Server response time is often used to gauge the hosting server performance as it provides more accurate results instead of the complete load of the website.

Bitcatcha Test On Bluehost Fastest WooCommerce Hosting
~Bluehost performs well in US region, while average in other regions

Results show that the response time was rather good (35 ms) with traffic generating from the United States. The response time in other locations was a little bit higher but it is still under a second.

If your target customers are in the United States, then using Bluehost would hugely benefit your WooCommerce store.

Is Bluehost great for WooCommerce hosting?

Based on our tests, Bluehost is an excellent choice when it comes to fast WooCommerce hosting solution. A huge plus point is it is very stable even with traffic spikes.

Advantages of Bluehost hosting

  • Bluehost offers 50% off WooCommerce hosting
  • Perks such as free domain name
  • Free 1-click SSL certificate
  • Pre-installed WooCommerce platform

Disadvantages of Bluehost hosting

  • Bluehost support can be slow at times
  • Some servers are slower due to overselling

Bluehost Shared Hosting for WooCommerce

Bluehost is by far one of the most affordable WooCommerce hosting solutions that you can't go wrong with. Free domains, site migration and SSL certificates are excellent perks hosting with Bluehost.

Get Bluehost (for only $6.95/mo)

WP Engine

Make no mistake. WP Engine is one of the leading managed WordPress and managed WooCommerce hosting solution in the industry.

They offer in-house performance optimization, managed updates. 1-click staging environment, and superior live chat support.

WP Engine WooCommerce Hosting Solution
~WP Engine superior WooCommerce hosting solution

How fast is WooCommerce with WP Engine WooCommerce hosting?

Here are the results from the WP Engine performance test using Pingdom Tools:

Speed Test WooCommerce Hosting WP Engine Fastest WooCommerce Hosting
~WooCommerce website hosted on WP Engine loads insanely fast

As you can see, the test site loads fairly fast (582 ms) from a server in New York City. That's is 96% faster than most sites. At the same time, it is important to note that there was no performance optimization done to the site during the test.

How does WP Engine score with Load Impact test?

We started with 1 active website visitor and gradually built up to 100 unique visitors at once to see how the server would handle increased requests from multiple connections at once.

Load Impact Test On WP Engine Fastest WooCommerce Hosting
Load Impact Test On WP Engine Fastest WooCommerce Hosting

The green line represents page load time and the blue line represents the number of users on the site. As you can see, our test site performed really well up to 80 users, after that it started to slow down.

Overall, WP Engine server performance remained rather stable throughout the test.

How does WP Engine score with the Bitcatcha test?

Bitcatcha is used to test more accurate server response time from various geographical locations.

Server response time is often used to gauge the hosting server performance as it provides more accurate results instead of the complete load of the website.

Bitcatcha Test On WP Engine Fastest WooCommerce Hosting
~WP Engine server performs exceptionally well and scoring an A on Bitcatcha

Not surprising, WP Engine scores an A with its server performance. As the test server is located in the United States, both the US (W) and US (E) score well under 70 ms while showing decent response time in all other regions around the world.

Is WP Engine the fastest WooCommerce hosting solution?

Based on the tests that we had conducted, the answer is a resounding "yes". We concluded that WP Engine is definitely one of the best options for managed WordPress and WooCommerce hosting.

Advantages using WP Engine WooCommerce hosting

  • Optimized for WordPress and WooCommerce with a stable managed hosting platform
  • 1-click staging environment, free SSL, and integrated support to add CDN service as an addon
  • Excellent customer support and a custom hosting control panel
  • Automatic nightly backups

Disadvantages using WP Engine WooCommerce hosting

  • Hosting plans are slightly higher for a starter WooCommerce store, but totally worth the money (investment) for zero downtime and hassle

WP Engine Fully Managed WooCommerce Hosting

When it comes to superior performance, WP Engine is pretty much unmatchable. It gives you the tools and remote support that you needed to grow your online store to new heights (while keeping it safe from hackers).

Get WP Engine (for only $25/mo)

Liquid Web

Liquid Web has long been in the managed WooCommerce hosting solution. They offer multiple levels of WooCommerce hosting plans including VPS, cloud sites, managed, and dedicated plans with 24/7 support.

Liquid Web is also a household brand when it comes to WooCommerce hosting solutions.

Liquid Web WooCommerce Hosting Plans
~Liquid Web WooCommerce hosting

How fast is WooCommerce with Liquid Web hosting?

Here are the test results from Liquid Web performance test with Pingdom Tools:

Speed Test WooCommerce Hosting Liquid Web Fastest WooCommerce Hosting
~Liquid Web WooCommerce hosting is also blazing fast

Just like most of Liquid Web's alternatives, it performs well under one second from a server in San Jose, California. Based on the stats, it loads 91% faster than any other test sites.

How does Liquid Web score with Load Impact test?

We started with 1 active website visitor and gradually built up to 100 unique visitors at once to see how the server would handle increased requests from multiple connections at once.

Load Impact Test On Liquid Web Fastest WooCommerce Hosting
~Liquid Web remains stable through the website load test

The blue line is the number of active virtual users on the site, and the green line is the server load time. Liquid Web servers remain stable and serving at its top performance even as traffic spikes (which is a good thing).

How does Liquid Web score with the Bitcatcha test?

Bitcatcha is used to test more accurate server response time from various geographical locations.

Server response time is often used to gauge the hosting server performance as it provides more accurate results instead of the complete load of the website.

Bitcatcha Test On Liquid Web Fastest WooCommerce Hosting
~Overall response time for Liquid Web is on a very positive note

In our test, the WooCommerce site hosted on Liquid Web is very responsive, under a second. The response time is the most responsive in the United States.

How good is Liquid Web for a WooCommerce hosting solution?

Liquid Web is no doubt one of the most powerful and reliable WooCommerce hosting companies that offer enormous features, especially when building an online store.

They had been in the business for years and they certainly have the infrastructure to make your WooCommerce store loads amazingly fast.

Advantages using Liquid Web WooCommerce hosting

  • Powerful managed cloud hosting that is incredibly fast
  • Fully managed servers, SSL included, excellent support
  • Easy to scale as your business grows (excellent for enterprises)
  • Automatic daily backups

Disadvantages using Liquid Web WooCommerce hosting

  • Liquid Web hosting plans are not the cheapest in town

Liquid Web Fully Managed WooCommerce Hosting

You can't go wrong with Liquid Web hosting. They are the experts in the field that ensure that your online store is always performing at its peak state.

Get Liquid Web (for only $19/mo)

HostGator

Last but not least, HostGator is one of our first web hosting companies that we had used (that's like over 10 years ago). HostGator is popular and they host over 8 million domains worldwide.

HostGator is not only popular with WooCommerce hosting, but also with shared web hosting, managed hosting, VPS and dedicated hosting for high traffic websites.

HostGator WooCommerce Hosting Plans
~HostGator WooCommerce hosting plans

How fast is WooCommerce with Hostgator hosting?

Here are the results from our test using HostGator (based on Pingdom Tools):

Speed Test WooCommerce Hosting HostGator Fastest WooCommerce Hosting
~Speed test results with Hostgator shows that it's servers are really powerful and high performance

Hosting a WooCommerce online store with HostGator is rather decent. The website was able to load under a second (691 ms to be exact) tested from a server in Dallas, Texas.

According to Pingdom Tools, the stats show that the site is approximately 94% faster than most sites. A plus point is that we did not use any caching plugin or performance optimization plugins during the test—so the results were truly amazing.

How does HostGator score with Load Impact test?

We started with 1 active website visitor and gradually built up to 100 unique visitors at once to see how the server would handle increased requests from multiple connections at once.

Load Impact Test On HostGator Fastest WooCommerce Hosting
~Load Impact test on HostGator hosting

The blue line is the number of active virtual users on the site, and the green line is the server load time. HostGator servers remain stable and serving at its top performance until it hits 80 concurrent users before it starts to slow down.

As we are using HostGator shared hosting plan for this test, it is quite common for shared hosting environments to experience a drop after a given number of visitors. This is because the server resources are shared between other websites that are hosted on the same server.

As your online store grows, you would need to consider upgrading to bigger hosting plans such as VPS or managed hosting solutions.

How does HostGator score with the Bitcatcha test?

Bitcatcha is used to test more accurate server response time from various geographical locations.

Server response time is often used to gauge the hosting server performance as it provides more accurate results instead of the complete load of the website.

Bitcatcha Test On HostGator Fastest WooCommerce Hosting
~Overall, Hostgator performs well when the visitors are located near the datacenter

In our test, WooCommerce site hosted on HostGator is very responsive, under a second. The response time is the most responsive in the United States while the performance drops in other regions further from US.

How good is HostGator for a WooCommerce hosting solution?

HostGator is decently fast for a WooCommerce store setup. It is affordable and more importantly, scaling with HostGator is very easy too.

Advantages of using HostGator hosting

  • Fast and reliable hosting with good support
  • Free WooCommerce migration service
  • Excellent hosting plans for all website sizes
  • HostGator offers free domain for yearly plans

Disadvantages of using HostGator hosting

  • Renewal fees for HostGator are higher than most of its competitors

HostGator Shared Hosting for WooCommerce

Affordability and scalability are two things that HostGator excels in. If you are planning to start your first online store, you can't go wrong with HostGator.

Get HostGator (for only $2.75/mo)

Fastest WooCommerce Hosting 2020 (Quick Recap)

Now that you have compared all the recommended WooComemrce hosting, it is time to decide which is the best and fastest WooCommerce hosting for your online business.

To make it easier, we have created a table with a side-by-side feature list, so you can easily compare the best WooCommerce hosting companies.

HostingHosting TypeSpeed (full Load)PricingFree DomainFree SSL1-Click Install
SiteGroundShared / Semi-Managed649 ms$3.95/moNoYesYes
BluehostShared1.24 s$6.95/moYesYesYes
WP EngineManaged582 ms$25/moNoYesNo
Liquid WebManaged901 ms$19/moNoYesYes
HostGatorShared691 ms$2.75/moYesYesYes

If you are looking to start an online store with the lowest budget possible, Bluehost is your best option. Their WooCommerce hosting plans are affordable, include free domain and free SSL for $6.95 per month. By far, Bluehost offers the best value compared to any WooCommerce hosting in the market.

If you have a mid-to-large eCommerce store, then you should go with WP Engine because they offer a completely hassle-free experience, high performance hosting servers and 24/7 live chat support. While the cost is slightly higher, it’s worth the investment.

Overall, you can’t go wrong with any of the best WooCommerce hosting companies that we have compared above. All of them offer blazing fast servers, great uptime, excellent support, and different hosting plans to cater for different budgets.

Popular WooCommerce Hosting FAQs

Here are answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about WooCommerce hosting:

Do I need WooCommerce hosting to start an online store?

If you are building an online store with WooCommerce, then you’ll need WooCommerce hosting. Hosting is the place where all your website’s files are stored. Every website and online store uses a hosting provider.

Can I install WooCommerce on my shared WordPress hosting account?

Yes, you can. However, most shared WordPress hosting plans are designed to cater to the needs of small business, blog and personal websites.

WooCommerce is a transactional app that needs more resources particularly when you have more than a hundred customers on your website any given time.

This is why we recommend you to get a WooCommerce hosting plan so that you can run your online store without any downtime and at faster speeds.

Are there any free WooCommerce hosting providers?

None that we are aware of. Even if you find a free WooCommerce hosting, we will strongly recommend that you stay away from them.

In most cases, these free hosting providers put advertisements on your website. They may even distribute malware to your customers.

Last but not least, they can shut down your website at any time without any notification. Avoid anyone who offers to give you free hosting, especially if you are serious about your site.

How much does it cost to build an online store with WooCommerce?

The total cost of your WooCommerce store is calculated based on hosting costs, domain name and SSL certificate. The cost of maintaining your online store grows as your business grows.

We had published a comprehensive tutorial on starting a blog using WordPress which we recommend you to take a look at.

I already purchased a domain. Can I use it with my WooCommerce hosting?

Yes, you can. Once you purchase a domain name, you are free to use it with any hosting company. All you need to do is go to your domain settings and point its DNS to your WooCommerce hosting company.

Each of our top WooCommerce hosting companies has step by step instructions on how to do that. If you have challenges,

Do I need to buy domain and WooCommerce hosting from same company?

No, you don’t. You can buy a domain name from one company and WooCommerce hosting from another.

However, it does help to get them from the same company as you will not have to change DNS settings, and you will be able to manage your domain and hosting under the same dashboard.

If you are a beginner, you can get help with DNS settings by contacting your hosting support.

Do I need to buy any addons when signing up for WooCommerce hosting?

During the sign up process, some hosting companies will offer to sell you add-on services. You can safely uncheck them as they would add to the cost of your hosting bill.

Later on, if you feel you need one of these add-on services, then you can simply add them to your hosting plan from your account dashboard.

It is always important to understand what the upsells are and how they could possibly assist in your online store. Most of the time, you do not require the 'full package' unless you are running a high traffic online store.

How many customers can these WooCommerce hosting companies handle?

All hosting companies in our best WooCommerce hosting list handle millions of pageviews every day. They are all equipped to handle smaller stores as well as large online stores even during peak holiday shopping traffic.

The traffic your site can handle largely depends on the plan you choose. With shared WooCommerce hosting solutions such as Bluehost, SiteGround, and HostGator, your website will be able to handle 1,000 – 5,000 visitors a day with proper speed optimization.

With managed hosting providers, you should be able to handle as much traffic as you need because their team would automatically scale your account as needed.

Do WooCommerce hosting companies keep backups of my site?

When it comes to backup, most of them do. However, the number and the frequency of backup varies depending on the hosting package that you are subscribing to.

For example, managed WooCommerce hosting often offers nightly backups while shared hosting would often times be either weekly or monthly.

We don’t recommend relying on your hosting company’s backups. Instead, it is always recommended to create your own backups by using a WordPress backup plugin.

Can I change my WooCommerce hosting later?

Yes, you can totally change your WooCommerce hosting company at any time if you are unhappy with them.

Some WooCommerce hosting companies offer free migration services that you can utilize with minimum downtime. You can also move your website on your own, see our guide on how to move a WordPress site to a new host.

What are the fastest WooCommerce hosting companies in your opinion?

All the above are great WooCommerce hosting solutions. For us, our top three choices for the fastest WooCommerce hosting are:

We hope that this guide helped you find the best and fastest WooCommerce hosting for your online store.

If you have a WooCommerce hosting question that we didn’t cover, then please reach out to us using our contact form. One of our team members will respond back within 24 hours.

12 Powerful Signs You Are Not Ready To Upgrade​ Your Hosting Plan

Should I upgrade my hosting plan? When is the best time to upgrade my hosting plan?

As website owners, these are some of the common questions we asked ourselves. In this article, we will discuss the signs that you are NOT ready to upgrade your hosting plan.

Why?

These signs will help you remove all the guesswork — and getting you ready to upgrade to new hosting plans or save money altogether. We hope you find this article useful and do share this article with your peers!

12 powerful signs that you are NOT ready to upgrade your web hosting plan.
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1. Low web traffic

If your website is not generating enough traffic, there is absolutely no point to upgrade to the next hosting plan. Sure, subscribing to a powerful web hosting plan is definitely an ego boost, but it is really not worth the money.

Plus, low website traffic means that you will underutilize the web hosting servers. While most web hosting companies would be happy, your wallet (and financials) wouldn't!

Low Web Traffic Signs Not To Upgrade Web Hosting Plan
~Do not upgrade hosting plan if you have low web traffic

How do determine if my website has a low web traffic?

The term "low website traffic" varies depending on the website owners and personal preferences. For us, a website generating under 50,000 traffic a month is considered low traffic.

2. Website loads under 1.5 seconds

Website Loading Speed Signs Not To Upgrade Web Hosting Plan

A slow-loading website typically takes more than 1.5 seconds to load. If your website is taking a long time to load, it might be a sign to upgrade your hosting plan.

We are speed geeks — and we know that you are probably one of us too. Most of the time, we see our clients decide to upgrade their hosting plan for faster speed (more CPU and memory).

However, do you know that you don't need a website that loads fast? The definition of website loading speed varies from person to person. Some consider TTFB (time to first byte) and others consider full website loading speed as the core reason.

If you are are confused on this, the best way is to determine your overall website loading speed. You do not need an upgrade if your website is loading under 1.5 seconds.

How to make my WordPress loads faster?

3. Unable to afford a higher hosting plan

Expensive Hosting Services Signs Not To Upgrade Web Hosting Plan
~If you cannot afford a new web host, it is best to stick to the current one (or find for alternatives)

This may sound 'dumb' for many, but unable to afford a higher hosting plan is exactly the reason why you shouldn't upgrade your web hosting.

There is no point having an expensive web hosting plan only when you have to work extra hard to reach the break even point (your website overhead = website earning).

Let's say you hit the threshold and you need to upgrade (no matter what). Here are some tips to help you find the best web hosting for your money:

  • Use only reliable web hosting solution (to cut cost in migration fees and downtime)
  • Look out for web hosting solutions that offer an all-in-one solution (such as SiteGround offering inbuilt cache—so no premium cache plugin required)
  • Look for other hosting alternatives if you are unable to afford the desired option
  • Consider quarterly, annual and bi-annual plans for more discounts

You don't need a better hosting plan (seriously)

For some WordPress owners, upgrading to a new hosting plan would means breaking the bank. Lucky for you, you probably don't need an upgrade, at least for now.

Based on personal experience, most website owners underutilize the hosting plan (hey, this is proof that hosting companies oversell their servers). The best way to overcome this is to check your current hosting plan and go into details such as the number of domains allowed, bandwidth and server space.

You don't need to go into the details such as the number of cores and RAM because these are only useful for heavy traffic websites.

4. Problems with hosting downtimes?

Are you experiencing downtimes with your current web host? If the answer is "no", you shouldn't worry much about getting a hosting upgrade.

A website down can caused by several issues, including:

  • Limited PHP workers
  • Limited bandwidth
  • Weak or under performing web hosting servers
  • Traffic spikes
  • DDoS attacks or hacking attempts
  • Incompatibility caused by themes or plugins
No Hosting Downtime Signs Not To Upgrade Web Hosting Plan
~A good web host with keep downtime to the minimum

One thing to remember is that every web hosting solutions will experience downtime ... at least once a year. This is absolutely normal and no one is perfect.

When your website is down, speak to the hosting support and try to get a solution from it. Most of the time, they wouldn't recommend upgrading your hosting plan unless you had hit the limits one too many times.

How to effectively manage your downtime?

Downtime happens and there's nothing much we can do about it. If you are worried of downtime, you might want to consider using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Cloudflare to manage your website.

For example, Cloudflare Always Online feature that caches a static version of your pages in case your server goes offline. Of course, Cloudflare will not server the entire website details but a limited copy of it. At the very least, the basic are there and this will not impact your Google rankings or your visitor's user experience.

5. Server-level security patches

Website Security Signs Not To Upgrade Web Hosting Plan
~Reliable web host with perform countless security patching to keep your site safe

Most web hosting solutions that we come across and use offer security patches when a vulnerability is discovered. If your web hosting company is doing the security patches on the back to keep your website safe, you know that you are in good hands.

And you don't require a hosting upgrade.

How to keep your WordPress website safe?

We hate to break this to you, but the responsibility of your website security lies on your shoulders (along with the web hosting company). As you determine what is installed on your site, you need to make sure that you stay on top of things.

If you are using a shared hosting and thinking of upgrading your hosting plan, you might want to hold that idea off for a little.

Instead, installing security plugins such as iThemes Security would help you harden your WordPress site. Here is our standard WordPress security checklist that we use at WP Maven.

6. Managing hosting disk space allowance

Hosting Space Is Sufficient Signs Not To Upgrade My Hosting Plan
~If your hosting space is sufficient, upgrading to a new web host is not a need

How much space does your web hosting offers? In most cases, it is more than enough for your website to load and run on a daily basis without any hiccups.

Most WordPress websites can run on the lowest hosting space ... unless you are having a photography block or you are not optimizing your images before uploading to WordPress.

How to keep your web hosting disk space usage under control?

We use WP Rocket to clean our database on a daily basis. There are also tools such as Advanced Database Cleaner plugin which you can use to further clean your database. However, make sure that you keep a copy of the files just in case you accidentally deleted the wrong files.

Also, don't forget to optimize images before uploading to WordPress. This step helps you to reduce the image size, as well as keeping your hosting space within the given allowance.

7. Overboard in the hosting bandwidth

Hosting Bandwidth Is Sufficient Signs Not To Upgrade My Hosting Plan
~Does your current web host offers you sufficient hosting bandwidth?

Visitors viewing your content or downloading files isn’t the only thing that can eat up website bandwidth. Today, a lot of organizations will build and promote web-based apps and other online programs.

Are you constantly hitting the bandwidth limit on your WordPress hosting?

If the answer is "yes", that's the sign that you need a hosting plan upgrade. If not, you probably don't need a web hosting upgrade (at least for now).

How to keep web hosting bandwidth low?

This happened to us more than once. We are using a managed hosting solution from Kinsta with a rather decent amount of bandwidth. However, it does happen when we hit our max and are billed for additional usages.

The easiest way to keep your web hosting bandwidth low (and not upgrading your hosting plan) is to use server files over a CDN. Here's an example of one of the clients' websites that we manage.

Save Bandwidth With Cloudflare Signs Not To Upgrade Your Hosting Plan
~Cloudflare had help that particular website in saving over 32GB of bandwidth in a month

8. Are you paying for hosting addons?

If you are using a managed WordPress hosting like us, it is quite common that these hosting plans come with some level of addons, including overhead traffic.

For example, you might be required to pay $1 for every 1,000 web traffic once you had hit your traffic quota for the month.

Paying a couple of bucks each month on top of your web hosting plan is absolutely fine especially when the traffic is merely temporary (as upgrading hosting is not a priority).
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In this case, you might see a big jump in traffic if you are amp-ing up your marketing efforts with paid advertisement or being visible on the front page of Reddit.

How to reduce hosting overheads and avoid upgrading to bigger hosting plans?

  • Use CDN to reduce usages
  • Avoid purchasing addons (such as SSL certificate) and replace with Let's Encrypt which offers free SSL
  • Maximize the number of domains allowed within a hosting account (assuming that all of these are low traffic websites)
Affordable web hosting with a fraction of the price

Affordable web hosting with a fraction of the price

We don't believe in charging you an arm and leg for excellent WordPress hosting.
CHECK OUR PRICING (AND COMPARE)

9. Hosting companies that give you room for growth

Room For Growing Website Signs Not To Upgrade My Hosting Plan
~Flexibility and growth is hosting environment is crucial for website success

We said this a dozen times now. The web hosting company that you choose should be there for you, during both thick and thin moments. In other words, the ability to upgrade or downgrade should be available for you during the times that you truly needs.

Again, most large web hosting companies do allow upgrades and downgrades when you are fulfilling certain criteria. For example, you will not get a refund if you pay upfront a year. However, the balance money from the downgrade will be converted into credits for you to use at a later time.

Learn how to ask nicely for free hosting perks

Web hosting business is a super competitive and challenging one. On one hand, we have a massive, truckload of hosting competitors that are breathing down our neck. On another corner, we have hosting customers that we need to make them happy (so they stay longer).

Customer Service Signs You Don't Need To Upgrade Hosting Plan
~Treat people right and others will treat you right too

At WP Maven, we don't mind going overboard with our services (for free when others charge) because we understand that if the request comes in nicely, we felt good about helping out.

If you are thinking of upgrading your hosting plan just to get help, try these.

Learn how to ask nicely and speak to the customer support team. They are human just like us—and if you catch them on a good mood day, you are going to get a lot of help without paying a single cent!

Most web hosting support provides help with petty server stuff including installing subdomain and trying to help you install SSL certificate.

10. Leverage the additional domains quota

One of the main reasons to upgrade a hosting plan is because you had used up all the domain quota. If you have not, this is a sign that you doesn't need an upgrade, at least for now.

11. Do I really need server access?

Server Access Signs Not To Upgrade My Hosting Plan
~Most website owners do not need advanced access to the hosting server

One of the reasons to upgrade the hosting plan is to gain certain server access. Some cheap web hosting solutions do not include this feature and if you are running a reseller hosting service, you probably need an upgrade!

Here's the thing.

Unless you really need server access, most basic web hosting solution offers SSH, FTP and SFTP which are rather sufficient for every day usage. So, no upgrading of hosting plan is required.

12. Unsure the type of hosting required

What Type Of Hosting Plans I Need Signs Not To Upgrade My Hosting Plan
~Knowing the type of hosting solution you need is an important step for every website owner

Last but not least, this is really scary. Take a look around in Facebook Groups pertaining to web hosting. There is a huge majority of website owners who do not understand the usage of web hosting. To be exact, they have no idea which web hosting solution that they should go for.

Instead of upgrading to the next hosting plan, we suggest you to sit down and decide on the exact needs for a web hosting solution. This will help you understand more on web hosting and the type of web hosting solutions you should be getting.

How many types of web hosting services are out there?

Some golden rules for web hosting are (we love preaching these):

  • Shared web hosting. Best for small websites, blogs and low traffic sites. We recommend starting with Bluehost (+/- $4 per month) or SiteGround (+/- $11 per month).
  • WooCommerce hosting. Best for websites running WooCommerce. Here are our recommended WooCommerce hosting solutions (more than one).
  • Managed WordPress hosting. Best for WordPress sites that are generating over 50,000 traffic a month. This solution also comes with better server performance, improved security features and CDN services. We recommend Kinsta hosting because they are just so awesome (seriously).
  • Virtual Private Server (VPS). Best for sites that require heavy resources, heavy traffic and burst performance. GridPane + Vultr High Frequency are our favorite option here.

Summary: More reasons not to upgrade your web hosting plans?

Don't get us wrong. We love upgrading hosting plans because it shows that we are doing right with our website—more traffic, more sales and more resources. However, not everyone requires an upgrade for their web hosting.

Before you decide to upgrade your web hosting plan, we recommend you to follow the above steps to determine if the upgrade is necessary. After all, you might be able to save hundreds if not thousands of dollars by not upgrading, especially when you are using good web hosting services!

5 Shocking Factors That Make A Web Hosting Company Great

We strongly believe that a web hosting company should be your partner-in-crime. Without a reliable web hosting solution, your website will always be down and inaccessible to the public. A reliable web hosting solution will be there for you, during low periods and during those traffic spikes.

So, what makes a web hosting great? What makes a web hosting reliable?

Table Of Contents

GridPane vs RunCloud vs Closte vs Kinsta

Which is the most reliable and best web hosting solution for YOU?
COMPARE THEM HERE
great web hosting

Speed Performance

When it comes to finding a great web host, speed and performance play huge roles — the differences between 1 and 200 ms is huge. What makes a web hosting great is that it is able to perform at its peak during both low and high times.

As a WordPress site owner, you had heard many 'horror' stories of how their website tanked right after a massive traffic spike. Not only you bound to lose traffic, you are losing money for every second the website is down.

Yes, that is bad.

For us, a speed difference of 0.5 seconds means a lot for our website visitors. They don't get paid visiting our website, but they are looking for information to solve their problems with WordPress.

With a fast web host, we can ensure that our website is loading at its peak 24/7.

Amazon found that for every 100ms of latency, it costs them 1% in sales.
Click to Tweet
What Makes A Web Hosting Solution Great
~We work hard to ensure that our website loads blazing fast

This is why we run at least three speed tests each day to ensure that our site is loading at a speed that we are truly pleased.

Great Support Team

What makes a web hosting great? A support team that is always smiling 'virtually'!

Web hosting support is critical. Creating and offering one or more means of communication channels will ensure that the client (that's you) have almost instant access to help when needed.

This is important because the Internet is a mean place. There is no place for inaccessible websites.

Let's take Kinsta support (screenshot on the right) as an example.

From time to time, we will reach out to them for some advice (okay, no one is perfect) and each time they will respond in an awesome way. This time, Nikola ended the conversion with a GIF.

~A snapshot of our conversion with Kinsta support

Let's be honest. How often do you see things like this?

If you want to know more about Kinsta, here's our review on Kinsta Hosting or you can head over directly to their website to learn more (Kinsta.com).

Excellent customer support goes a long way. Never underestimate the power of support, especially when in dear times when you needed them the most.

Editorial Team @ WP Maven

The Type Of Web Hosting Solution

Shared hosting, managed WordPress hosting or VPS. The type of web hosting solution that you choose will indirectly determine how good the web hosting company really is.

For example, one of the most common mistakes that we often see in the WordPress hosting space is "paying for beer pricing but expecting hosting performance of a wine pricing".

Sure, web hosting companies have responsibilities to ensure that we pay what we get but through numerous cases, we know exactly how many times that truly happen.

Web Hosting Uptime

Do you know that there are differences between a 99.9% SLA to 99% SLA? (SLA = Service Level Agreement).

Comparison99.9% SLA99% SLA
'Acceptable' downtime per year8.76 hours87.6 hours (3.65 days)
'Acceptable' downtime per month43.8 minutes7.3 hours
~Number of hours of downtime allowed before compensation

Based on the table above, a 99.9% SLA represents 8.76 hours of downtime (at most) per year (approx. 43.8 minutes per month) while a 99% SLA represents 87.6 hours of downtime (at most) per year (approx. 7.3 hours per month).

While this is at the worst case scenario, large eCommerce websites or high traffic websites are going to experience massive loss in revenue during a downtime.

What makes a web host great? High uptime with proven track record, plus having a SLA is a bonus!

Scalability (With A Human Touch)

Our 5th ranking on how to determine if a web host is a great one is scalability. As a WordPress agency, we engage with a large group of entrepreneurs and startups using WordPress CMS. They come to us for a wide range of WordPress solutions and one of the most common ones are having issues being 'shutdown' by their web hosting partners.

Now, why would any web hosting partners want to shutdown a WordPress site?

Honestly, one of the main reason is because the WordPress site is taking up too much resources (especially in a shared hosting environment) and that is affecting others.

Sure, the problem lies within the website owner (yup, our clients) but there are quite a few cases where we found out that it is not entirely their issue.

Human Touch In Customer Service Makes Web Hosting Great
~A warm customer service makes big problems felt small

Here's why.

Most website owners are not website savvy people. They are average Joe's or Jane's who are busy running their day to day business. Oftentimes, they install a whole lot of WordPress themes and plugins without actually checking the scripts and the codes. This leads to the website is taking up more resources in running PHP codes (for example) than they actually do.

Therefore, here are 3 things a great web hosting company will do.

In the web hosting business, it is not about how good the hosting product is ... it is all about the customer support that the company can render to the end users.

Yes, there are some things that are just too time-consuming but if the web hosting company can overcome that, they are going to get multiple long term clients without doing any marketing efforts.

Summary: How To Determine If The Web Hosting Is Great?

The 5 steps above are simple things you can do today to determine if the web hosting is great.

Always remember that the best web hosting providers will go all-out to help you while the subpar ones will do that (too) but with a fee.

At the same time, we recommend you to try yourself and decide because reviews on the Internet could be slightly biased!

3 Steps To Install A Subdomain In Another Server [Beginner Friendly Guide]

How do you install a subdomain on another server without affecting your primary domain and hosting? This was one of the smartest questions that were thrown at us during our last WordPress meetup. In today's WordPress tutorial, we are going to show you exactly on how to install a subdomain in another server (how to install a WordPress subdomain in another web hosting).

Why Do I Need To Install A Subdomain In Another Server?

How To Setup A Subdomain And Install WordPress
Easy steps to setup a subdomain and install WordPress

There are several reasons you want to do this. For example, it may be a staging area or a non-productive WordPress site. You don't want to increase the load in your current hosting server or simply, you want to try out new configuration. Or maybe, your current web hosting had hit the limits and you can no longer add new domains into your account.

Either way, installing a subdomain in another web hosting account is a good move if you want to keep it separate from your primary account.

How To Install A WordPress Subdomain In Another Hosting Server?

Lucky for you, installing a subdomain in another hosting server is easy. There are 3 steps that you need to take.

  • Create a new account in your hosting server
  • Add / modify the A record on your primary server
  • Install WordPress CMS for your subdomain

Step 1: Create a new account in your hosting server

Create A New Account In WHM How To Install Subdomain In Another Hosting Server
Create a new account in WHM

For this example, we are creating a demo install for easier understanding. We use HostWithLove reseller cPanel shared web hosting solution. The process of adding a new subdomain to your account wouldn't take more than 30 seconds.

The domain name should be {subdomain}.{domainname}. For example, we are working on our WordPress membership site, members.wpmaven.net.

Step 2: Install WordPress To The New Subdomain

Install WordPress In Subdomain How To Install Subdomain In Another Hosting Server
Using 1-click WordPress installer to install WordPress CMS

Next, head over to 1-click installer option to install WordPress. Some web hosting solutions such as HostWithLove and BlueHost offers 1-click WordPress solution which is time-saving.

Step 3: Add / modify A record

Now, go back to your primary hosting server. Search for the DNS Manager and add the A record to point to the subdomain hosting server.

Not sure what is your server IP address? Contact your web host and they will be happy to provide it to you (make sure you don't share it with the world, thou).

We use Kinsta DNS and this is how it looks like. Other web hosting solutions have DNS Manager but it may look different.

  • Kinsta DNS
  • DNS editor in cPanel hosting

DNS propagation would take anywhere from an hour to 48 hours to propagate properly. If you are seeing an add looking landing page such as the below, it means that you had not install WordPress CMS properly.

WordPress Not Installed Properly DNS How To Install Subdomain In Another Hosting Server
Reinstall WordPress CMS if you see this

Summary: Creating A New Subdomain In Another Hosting

The process of creating a new subdomain in another hosting server and with WordPress installed is rather easy. We hope that you find this tutorial useful and please share this with your friends!

Need help? Reach out to us today by clicking here.

How To Handle Heavy Traffic On WordPress Website (And Save $1k+ Per Month)?

Whether you are running your WordPress website on a shared hosting system or a managed WordPress hosting solution, you (website owners) know that there can be issues with load times when your site gets a spike in traffic. Getting too many visitors to your website may sound great, but it can actually be detrimental to your website’s overall success. If you are using a shared hosting or a low powered web host, a spike in traffic can lead to massive 5xx errors and as a result, you will lose traffic and revenue.

Lucky for you, there's a checklist to help you determine if your WordPress site is up to the task of meeting your traffic needs.

We hope you are ready to dig in deeper, because we do!

How Does Web Traffic Hurt?

If you want to know if your WordPress site can handle heavy traffic, it is paramount for you to understand the basics of how traffic works (and how it can negatively impact your online business).

Imagine this.

Your WordPress website is an actual brick and mortar store. If you have people visiting, they may walk around the store and then leave without buying something. There will also be some visitors who may browse and then come back later to pick up an item or items that they like.

And then come Black Friday (the once a year massive sales).

Your store becomes so crowded that the “browsers” are outnumbering the paying customers, you can run into problems. You may be too backed up to take care of the ones who want to buy something. If this happens, your paying customers may leave and go to your competitors.

That’s exactly what can happen with a WordPress website. You want as many people as possible to come in and browse because they could convert into sales.

via GIPHY

But if the website can’t handle all the traffic, it could slow down to a crawl or, worse yet, crash. This leaves your paying customers with nowhere to spend their money except with your competition.

In today’s technology-heavy market, a customer expects a page to load in just a few seconds. To be exact, under 2 seconds. If heavy web traffic slows down your load time, they will move on to the next website—when this happens, your bounce rate will skyrocket and you will send the wrong signals to Google.

The Best Hosting For High Traffic WP Sites

It comes down to only 4 — GridPane vs RunCloud vs Closte vs Kinsta. Which is the ultimate winner?
DISCOVER THE WINNER HERE
wordpress hosting for high traffic websites

Three Powerful Methods To Handle Heavy Traffic On WordPress Sites

Here are some of the best ways to handle heavy traffic on websites:

  • Choose a high traffic web hosting solution
  • Divert and control traffic to your WordPress using CDN
  • Setup cache plugin to minimize website load

1. Which Hosting Plan Is Best For High Traffic Websites?

If you are just starting a blog or eCommerce store, you will most probably be using a shared hosting (which is fine). Most startup hosting solutions are great for low to medium traffic with little to no sudden peaks.

With shared hosting, your website will be placed on a server that carries hundreds of other websites on it. All of the resources, including server memory and processing speed, are shared by the various websites. If one of those sites gets a lot of web traffic, then it will cause a drain on the resources that the other sites can pull from.

Using unsuitable hosting for your high traffic website will impact your overall website performance, including slow loading speed.
Click to Tweet

When you are having bad neighbours, your WordPress website will slow down significantly and won’t be able to handle much traffic.

One way to ensure that your website can handle the traffic is with a high-performance web hosting solution. This type of hosting won’t break your bank as it is generally just one step up from a shared server.

The difference between a high-performance web hosting and a shared server is that a high-performance web hosting solution is geared towards performance, stability and scalability. It can include managed hosting, Virtual Private Server (VPS) or dedicated hosting.

Choosing the right web hosting solution that fits your website's need is critical because your site will be allocated a fair amount of server resources and probably in a dedicated environment.

In a dedicated hosting environment or in a well-optimized hosting solution, a sudden spike in web traffic will not slow down your website loading speed. You can be getting 10 or 10,000 visitors simultaneously and your site will still perform at its best.

The Best And Reliable Heavy Traffic Web Hosting Solution?

There are many reliable web hosting in the market but for us, we are in love with Kinsta hosting.

Kinsta is powered by Google Cloud Platform and it offers superior performance over its peers. This hosting solution is created to not only for heavy traffic WordPress sites, but it is also suitable for small and medium-sized ones.

If you looking for a reliable web hosting solution for high traffic websites, Kinsta is your answer.

Kinsta hosting is a great heavy traffic web hosting solution.

Get Better Speed

See the differences that Google Cloud Platform could provide.
TRY KINSTA NOW

2. Enable CDN To Manage And Control Traffic Spikes

Content Delivery Network or CDN is known for its ability to control unexpected traffic spikes. Traffic spikes can come from organic methods such as being on the front page of Reddit or simply experiencing a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) or other malicious attempts.

If you are running a large website and want to handle heavy traffic effectively, using CDN services such as Cloudflare goes a long way. Now, there are 3 parts to Cloudflare in handling a high traffic WordPress site.

Web Performance Services For High Traffic WordPress Sites
Web Performance Services For High Traffic WordPress Sites

Load Balancing. With Cloudflare Load Balancing, you can improve application performance and availability by steering traffic away from unhealthy origin servers and dynamically distributing it to the most available and responsive server pools.

CDN service. Cloudflare comes with built-in unmetered DDoS protection and ultra-fast static and dynamic content delivery to ensure that everyone enjoys a faster loading speed.

Argo Smart Routing. The Cloudflare network is different. It routes over 10 trillion global requests per month — providing Argo Smart Routing with a unique vantage point to detect real-time congestion and route web traffic across the fastest and most reliable network paths. On average, web assets perform 30% faster when Argo is activated.

3. Setting Up A WordPress Cache Plugin Properly

It’s also possible to optimize your WordPress site so that it loads faster with heavy traffic. One way to do this is to use a WordPress cache to improve the delivery speed.

The results of using a cache plugin is often noticeable under heavy traffic as content is served based on 'earlier cache'—this helps to reduce your server load.

Best WordPress Cache For High Traffic Websites

A WordPress cache plugin is a two-edged sword. When configured correctly, the cache will be preserved correctly and your WordPress site will load faster. However, if a cache plugin is set up wrongly, you are in a whole load of trouble—from wrongly displayed images to a broken site.

We will not go in deep into setting up a cache plugin (because there are so many different plugins out there) but if you are looking for one or more WordPress plugins that perform very well under heavy traffic load, you are in luck!

Here are our top WordPress cache plugins you should be using:

Yes, you couldn't go wrong with any of these plugins especially if you are looking for ways to handle a high traffic WordPress site.

Can My WordPress Website Handle Heavy Traffic?

This is a great question but sadly, we are unable to give a definite answer. One of the cool methods you can try right now is to head over to Google Analytics » Behavior » Site Speed » Overview.

This report will give you an idea on how fast your posts (inner content) is loading and optimizations you can perform such as lazy loading. We recommend you to set benchmarks to keep track of the changes such as cache setting tweaking, enabling/disabling CDN services and changing of web hosting providers.

Ultimately, WordPress is build to sustain heavy traffic even with multiple spikes. THe ability for your WordPress site to handle these traffic relies heavily on your backend setup.

If you need any help, feel free to reach out to our support team!

GridPane vs RunCloud vs Closte vs Kinsta—A Comparison No One Wants To Talk About

WP Maven Logo

WP Maven is a WordPress agency located in Malaysia. We work with clients from various industries with small and large WordPress projects.

Just like you, we are WordPress fanatics and we do WordPress for a living. This comparison post is created as we find it 'troubling' especially when it comes to choosing (all these are great options) a hosting solution. Ultimately, we hope you find some gems in this post.

We heard about GridPane, Closte and RunCloud for ages. We even use Kinsta hosting for most of our WordPress projects. As speed geeks, we are always finding the best WordPress hosting solution for faster loading speed.

When it comes to WordPress hosting, there are just so many options. As we decided rounded up four of the best solutions, we found out that there isn't any real comparisons between these four (GridPane vs Closte vs RunCloud vs Kinsta). Sure, we understand that no two websites are the same and the overall experience varies from one to another.

We hope that this post will give you some insights on all of them—and ultimately helping you to make the right decision.

We thrive hard to ensure that this comparison post is not going to be like "is A better than B" type of thing. Instead, we publish this 3,579 words post to give you a better understanding of what each of these services is and how they perform for your website. GridPane vs RunCloud vs Closte vs Kinsta.

You will get zero cover-ups and comparison based on our personal experience. For realistic measurements, we use a single fresh install and a productive site for this review.

GridPane vs RunCloud vs Closte vs Kinsta comparison
Sit back and relax

GridPane.com—An Introduction To WordPress Hosting Panel

What is GridPane

GridPane is not a WordPress hosting solution. It is a WordPress hosting control panel that allows you to manage Virtual Private Servers (VPS) running WordPress.

GridPane is not your average WordPress tool. It is used by WordPress professionals, agencies and developers in managing WordPress VPS smartly and efficiently. This WordPress control panel allows you to build servers in minutes and sites in seconds, all of them fast, secure, and ruthlessly efficient.

(i) Advantages Using GridPane

GridPane allows you to launch any managed WordPress services in just a few clicks—from VPS to WordPress security.

GridPane comes with several core advantages including:

GridPane And Vultr give WordPress website the speed boot for faster loading speed

A WordPress Setup For Speed

The GridPane server stack (NGINX only) is incredibly performant and optimized for whatever you can throw at it. Your visitors won’t waste a single second waiting for pages to load.

During our test, we used Vultr High Frequency as our VPS backbone. Our productive WordPress website with under 2mb in size (homepage) loads under 1 second during all our tests.

That's blazing fast!

Stronger Than Fort Knox

All paid GridPane accounts get access to the highly performant 6G firewall. Developer accounts also get access to a ModSec 3+ compatible WAF with the OWASP 10 ruleset already in place. Tons of customization options like country blocking, paranoia settings, individual IP white/blacklisting, and more. 

Hardening WordPress sites on automation doesn't go easier than this.

GridPane is highly secure

New WordPress sites in just three clicks

GridPane is build for beginners. You don't need to have server management experience to launch your first WordPress site on GridPane. The GridPane knowledge base is rather updated and 24/7 live chat support provide great support experience.

Unlimited Servers, Unlimited Sites

GridPane is really easy on the wallet with 3 different pricing structures that start from $30 per month. A single GridPane account can host unlimited servers and unlimited WordPress sites. Therefore, you don't have to worry about forking out extra money.

Automatic WSOD resolution

With tools like Monit tracking your microservices, and GridPane automatic WSOD resolution, your sites will stay up, even if your plugins aren’t playing nice with one another. This is extremely useful when it comes to (updating) themes and plugins compatibility.

(ii) Disadvantages Using GridPane

Thankfully, we didn't encounter any challenges when using GridPane. However, we discovered that there are things that GridPane can do better in the future (which some of these are already in the roadmap).

Here's a tiny little list:

  • Pricing structure ($30 to $100 is a big bump)
  • GridPane dashboard doesn't play well with Firefox
  • Some support tends to refer end users to knowledge base (this leads to lack of personal touch)
By far, GridPane is one of the most intuitive hosting panels that focuses in making your WordPress load faster (and more secure).
Click to Tweet

(iii) GridPane Pricing

How much does GridPane costs? GridPane comes with 3 plans (including 1 hidden plan).

Pro @ $67 $30 per month. This is the most basic GridPane plan. This is a decent plan for smal to medium sized WordPress sites.

Developer @ $299 $100 per month. This is a slightly 'advanced' version with better server scurity and performance. This plan comes with automatic malware scanner, snapshot failover and high availability optional make this an excellent choice for WordPress agencies.

Enterprise @ Starts from $1,000 per month. This plan is best especially for high volume WordPress website management and of yes, white-labelling. There are also other perks such as private mastermind group and optional managed DNS for better website management experience.

(iv) Real Testimonials From Real GridPane Clients

My site never falters, it’s always fast. It just works, so all I have to do is take great pictures.
Katie Wind
Photographer
I'm really glad I found you guys. I've been concerned with speed & management... not anymore. GridPane is the perfect solution.
Ken Henderson
Digital Marketing
It’s like you’ve rounded up all the things that piss me off about WordPress and fixed them.
Emily Ottaviano
Designer, Artist, Educator

(v) Is GridPane Worth The Money?

The answer is "Yes" if you are looking to get your hands dirty with advanced WordPress hosting. GridPane is a WordPress control panel solution—so it is common that you get tons of advanced features not usually found in common shared hosting and managed WordPress hosting.

Performance, Speed & Security

The world's first hosting control panel built exclusively for serious WordPress professionals.

Try GridPane for 30 days free

RunCloud.io—Hosting Panel For WordPress & More

An Introduction To RunCloud.io

RunCloud.io is a PHP cloud server management panel. Just like GridPane, RunCloud is a control panel that allows you to manage servers with and without any server management experience.

More importantly, Runcloud is a very fine and cost-effective platform for managing virtual private servers (VPSes).

In short, RunCloud can be installed on your server. Subsequently, you can manage your server from their control panel. RunCloud will take care of all technicalities, such as the installation of software and packages on the server. Essentially, it makes server management a breeze.

(i) Advantages Using RunCloud.io

Just like GridPane, RunCloud is an application hosting control panel (yes, WordPress is an application). RunCloud offers all the necessary features to run a performant WordPress website. However, it is more aimed at managing applications in general.

Here are some of the best features of RunCloud:

RunCloud WordPress Control Panel

RunCloud.io allows you to easily automate server configurations and security updates in just a few clicks. It is beginner-friendly and you certainly don't need to be a Linux expert to execute command (even though knowing coding skills is an added advantage).

Creating backups on RunCloud is a walk in the park.

Easy to use backup system allows you to backup your instances quickly and safely. Plus, it can be done in just a few clicks.

Instantaneous deployment

Renowned for One-Click Installers, while still letting you be in full control. RunCloud runs your cloud servers in optimal configurations.

Performance-driven dashboard

Our optimized dashboard allows for quick tweaks from a single interface. Pioneering user experience at its forefront.

Powerful virtual PHP machines

Alternate and run simultaneous PHP versions at your ease & convenience.

(ii) Disadvantages Using RunCloud

Personally, one of the biggest disadvantages of RunCloud is it is compatible with a wide range of applications, not only WordPress. While this is absolutely fine, this also shows that RunCloud is not geared towards an optimized WordPress 'experience'.

However, it is also important to understand that you can have an optimized WordPress instance running on RunCloud and any given VPS options with some tweakings.

(iii) RunCloud.io Pricing

How much does RunCloud costs? RunCloud offers three different pricing structures which are Basic, Pro and Business.

Basic @ $6.67 per month. The most basic plan and best for beginners and small websites.

Pro @ $12.50 per month. This option is a good one, especially with unlimited servers and ability to close servers.

Business @ $37.50 per month. Last but not least, this plan comes with Atomic Deployment (zero downtime deployment) and integration between RunCloud Hub plugin and WordPress panel is a nice final touch.

(iv) Real Testimonials From Real RunCloud.io Clients

I'm a system administrator veteran with years of hosting experience. What RunCloud has managed to create is essentially the perfect managed solution with the cloud as the backend. You're no longer need cPanel and learn Linux at all. Support is always there to help.
Wajid Hussain
Co-Founder & Partner at TechFyii
These guys are putting a lot of effort into making a super duper control panel to make my sysadmin life way easier. And the best is that it all comes with a beautifully designed interface.
Lucas Rabello Simões
Senior Graphic Designer, Hyperbridge
I'm extremely impressed with RunCloud's product. After trying a few other tools, I came across RunCloud, which has everything that I was needing and then some. I've already transferred three of my servers and plan on transitioning several more. Great work!
Nick Routsong
Lead Software Developer, Futuramic Media

(v) Is RunCloud.io Worth The Money?

RunCloud.io is pretty decent. Plus, they are made in Malaysia (we are fellow Malaysian too!). On the serious note, RunCloud pricing is probably the best in town.

If you want to have a bull run for your buck, RunCloud is a nice option to go with.

Ready to get started with RunCloud?

Get in touch, or start your free trial today.

Start my free trial

Closte.com—A Managed WordPress Hosting With Pay-As-You-Go Model

WordPress Managed Hosting With Closte

Next step is Closte. Closte is a WordPress cloud hosting solution that is powered by Google Cloud Platform. It is a managed WordPress hosting and takes a different approach as compared to WordPress control panels such as GridPane or RunCloud.

If you had done some digging, you will discover that Closte has both positive and negative feedbacks. Let's dive deep into what Closte is all about (and if the reviews are true).

Closte.com takes WordPress hosting to whole new levels with Google Cloud Platform and Litespeed servers.
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(i) Advantages Using Closte

Closte is the tip when it comes to offering a unique proposition to end-users (yes, that's you). For starters, it has a pay-as-you-go model which is odd but works like charm. Secondly, it comes packing with Litespeed enterprise and easy integration with third-party CDN such as Google CDN and BunnyCDN.

Here's a list of advantages using Closte:

Closte WordPress Hosting Review GridPane vs Runcloud vs Closte vs Kinsta

Litespeed Cache. The fastest WordPress caching plugin and it is improved on our platform. The fastest and most reliable way to serve PHP pages, powered by Litespeed.

Managed OPcache & Object-Cache. Dramatically improves the PHP execution time and reduces the MySQL queries.

Google Cloud CDN. World fastest content delivery using Google’s global network with 90+ POP locations.

Google Premium Network. With Premium Tier, you use the same network that delivers Google’s Search, Gmail or YouTube.

Closte.com website is self-hosted in the us-central region but powered by our distributed cache. Accessing from New York, London or Sydney, the load time is the ~same.

Closte gives you a wide range of development tools, including SSH/SFTP, Database, WP-CLI, Multiple & Custom PHP, GIT/COMPOSER and logs.

This is one reason why developers love using Closte for their WordPress projects.

Closte WordPress Development Tools

Staging

Multiple staging sites. You can have multiple staging sites and push from one to another staging site.

Email. When working on the staging site, the emails sent from WordPress are delivered to your private email address.

Backups

Clone a live website. Clone WordPress with your new domain in the same or another region.

Clone from a backup. Live preview of a backup point or check how something was configured.

WP ULTIMO

Auto-configuration. Works automatically – no additional set-up required.

AutoSSL. Once your client updates the DNS records, our system will install an SSL certificate automatically.

(ii) Disadvantages Using Closte

Horror stories on Closte WordPress hosting. It is a real fact and sadly, one that is affecting the company dearly. If there is one improvement Closte could do, then it would be having a better team of customer service.

Personally, we felt that Closte support team are either very small or being carried out by the management team (they felt like being overworked, in some ways). Closte support do answers to questions and inquiries but the patience level could be improved dramatically.

Rude staffs is one of Closte issues

The support team has a way to answer the question directly and not putting basic customer service 101 to the practise. This had lead to repeated complains on their Facebook Page and even overall review as a company.

The second weakness or disadvantages of Closte is the pricing structure. Let's discuss this below.

(iii) Closte pricing

From Closte pricing page, their tagline is "even better than nowadays cloud services" and we find it confusing, to be honest.

What you will find below are Closte vs 5 different WordPress setup pricing, namely entry level, mid tier, enterprise, Cloudways and DIY servers.

Take a look at the images below (they are comparison in pricing).

    • Closte pricing is charged based on many factors, including:

    • Number of CPU
    • CDN usage
    • Disk space
    • Bandwidth
    • Number of websites

    Closte bought the pay-as-you-go model to whole new levels. On the right side, you are only paying for services you are using and you will never be billed for things you are not using/utilizing.

    The downside of this payment model is that there is no fixed hosting fee per month = there is no budgeting or estimation. How much you are charged is based on how much you utilize for the month. Ouch.

    (iv) Real Testimonials From Real Closte Clients

    We used almost any type of hosting service, but as we go viral, our site was offline and spending money on expensive upgrades. Closte is something different to any other hosting providers!
    VEJGLOBAL ITS
    LLC
    Once we increase our internet marketing, our site was either down or very slow, losing clients as well wasting money for internet marketing. Thnaks to Closte, we can fully focus on our business and pay as we grow.
    Margaret Cheung
    CEO
    Coming from a shared hosting, all I can say is that Closte is insane fast to the point that you won't believe your eyes. No wonder when my WordPress is fully hosted on Google infrastructure.
    Jimmy Austin
    Developer

    (v) Is Closte Worth The Money?

    If you are looking for a WordPress hosting solution that speeds up your website dramatically, Closte is definitely right for you. Google infrastructure, Google CDN and Litespeed are just too good for a past—and this combination had proven to paid off well.

    However, Close is not worth your money if you want to have a peace of mind knowing that you prefer a fixed overhead a.k.a. hosting fee every month. As Closte is a pay-as-you-go model, you will be charged more when you utilize staging features (for example) at any given month. Plus, you will be billed even more if your traffic picks up.

    Overall, Closte is a great option to go with if you have a bigger budget to spend on a monthly basis for web hosting related.

    Kinsta.com—A High Performance Managed WordPress Hosting With Top Notch Support

    Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting Solution

    Last but not least, Kinsta is one hell of a competitor which we truly love (and for the record, this site is hosted on Kinsta Business 1 plan). Kinsta is a managed WordPress hosting solution that uses Google Cloud Platform and KeyCDN.

    As of today, Kinsta is used by some of the biggest names in the industry including Matt Diggy (SEO expert), Buffer, TripAdvisor and Flippa.

    So, how does Kinsta lives up to the GridPane vs RunCloud vs Closte vs Kinsta?

    Let's dive in to learn more.

    (i) Advantages Using Kinsta

    Kinsta is built for everyone—from beginners to large enterprises. Kinsta uses one of the best cutting-edge technologies to ensure that WordPress websites load faster and stay at their peaks even when traffic skyrockets.

    Here is a list of Kinsta features:

    Kinsta Powerful Infrastructures
    Kinsta powerful infrastructures

    Powerful infrastructure for WordPress

    Kinsta uses state-of-the-art technology like Nginx, PHP 7.4, LXD software containers, MariaDB, and compute-optimized VMs to make sure your website loads in the blink of an eye. Featuring complete resource isolation, automatic scalability, and high availability.

    • NGINX
    • LXD containers
    • PHP 7.4
    • MariaDB

    Bulletproof security features

    Active and passive measures to stop attacks and malicious intent in its tracks. Continuous monitoring for uptime, DDoS attack detection, software-based restrictions, SSL support, and hardware firewalls. Bottom line: your site is monitored and secured 24/7.

    • DDoS protection
    • Hardware firewall
    • Uptime monitoring
    • Unlimited SSL support
    Kinsta WordPress Security
    Kinsta WordPress security features

    Next generation infrastructure

    Kinsta employs only the best technology at Kinsta, from server hardware to the software they run. No matter what development stack you use, Kinsta always have the latest framework versions installed and up to date.

    Google Cloud Platform & Infrastructure

    Powered by Google Cloud Platform and its 23 global data centers. Everything is interconnected over their premium tier network, designed to minimize distance and hops, resulting in fast and secure transport of your data.

    Unlimited & free site migrations

    Moving your site to Kinsta won’t incur any downtime. Kinsta expert migration team will take care of everything for you. Plus, they will assign a temporary domain to your migrated site and check everything before going live.

    (ii) Disadvantages Using Kinsta

    Until date, we have not experienced any issues with Kinsta (touch wood) and that's a good thing. If there is one improvement that Kinsta could do, we certainly hope that the pricing scale, especially for higher tiers, can be reduced by a little 🤪.

    (iii) Kinsta pricing

    Kinsta pricing sits nicely between affordability and performance. At this point of writing, Kinsta comes with 10 hosting plans for you to choose from.

    While "10" might be an overkill for many, these plans are tailored to ensure that there is a hosting plan for everyone (or as close as possible).

    Here's how the Kinsta plans look like:

    Plans# WordPress Installs# of VisitsDisk SpaceFree SSL & CDN
    Starter120,00010 GBYes
    Pro240,00020 GBYes
    Business 15100,00030 GBYes
    Business 210250,00040 GBYes
    Business 320400,00050 GBYes
    Business 440600,00060 GBYes
    Enterprise 1601,000,000100 GBYes
    Enterprise 2801,500,000150GBYes
    Enterprise 31202,000,000200 GBYes
    Enterprise 41503,000,000250 GBYes
    Kinsta also offers 2 months free hosting when you go for annual plans

    One cool advantage of using Kinsta is that all plans are on VPS level. This means that you are getting VPS servers even on the lowest tier unlike some other managed WordPress hosting solutions (where VPS is only available on higher tiers).

    (iv) Real Testimonials From Real Kinsta Clients

    Kinsta provides an amazing service, with a simple control panel and top performance. Their support is even more amazing, always available, and fast at fixing any issue.
    Massimo Chieruzzi
    AdEspresso
    With Kinsta's professional support we sleep safely at night. And with blazing fast servers, we serve our customers better than ever before!
    Mikkel Sciegienny
    Proximo
    Our agency has worked with all the major hosting platforms. Kinsta is crazy fast and the support is stellar! We moved all our clients to Kinsta and haven't look back.
    Brent Martel
    Inkline Media

    (v) Is Kinsta Worth The Money?

    Kinsta is an excellent managed WordPress hosting solution that is affordable and performance-focused. More importantly, their support team (live chat) is stellar.

    As a matter of fact, we strongly believe that Kinsta had grown far and wide thanks to the excellent customer support team!

    Verdict: GridPane vs RunCloud vs Closte vs Kinsta

    Finally, our verdict is in. GridPane, RunCloud, Closte and Kinsta are all awesome WordPress hosting solutions and control panels. But, it is also unfair to compare them side by side.

    Here's what we think about each of them, and how they will fit nicely into your WordPress development projects.

    Verdict: GirdPane is the clear winner over RunCloud when it comes to WordPress hosting panel. With unlimited servers and usage even for their lowest tier at $30, GridPane is extremely affordable for WordPress professionals who want to enjoy fast blazing speed.

    Best for: GridPane is best for WordPress professional, web developers and WordPress agencies.

    Try GridPane for 30 days free

    Verdict: RunCloud.io is a great alternative to GridPane when it comes to WordPress hosting panel solution. By far, this is an excellent option if you are looking for affordability. The entry level for RunCloud costs only $6.67 per month and this is the best you probably can get.

    Best for: Startups, entrepreneurs and tiny WordPress websites. It is also a great platform to test out new layout and design works for WordPress.

    Start 14-days free trial

    Verdict: A decent WordPress hosting solution that offers performance and top notch infastructures. However, the pay-as-you-go model is a turn down especially for larger websites because you are unable to forecast the overhead for hosting service.

    Best for: Large websites and corporations (with big pockets) that rely heavily on traffic generation from WordPress websites.

    Try Closte for free

    Verdict: The overall winner for performance, affordability and scaling in managed WordPress hosting. It is also important to note that Kinsta has the best customer support that often goes beyond their job scope to make your day.

    Best for: 10 different pricing tiers make Kinsta suitable for everyone who uses WordPress for their websites.

    Try free Kinsta demo

    Best WordPress WooCommerce Hosting 2020 (Compared For All Budget)

    The combination of WordPress and WooCommerce makes it easy for everyone and anyone with any skill level to set up their own online store. With that being said, it is important for you to pick the best WooCommerce hosting possible—a hosting solution that is affordable and packed with hosting features that help you to grow your online business.

    The truth is, there are hundreds of hosting plans and providers to choose from. Going with a dedicated WooCommerce hosting platform will certainly make easier to setup and manage your day to day operations on your online store.

    This article is all about comparing the best WooCommerce hosting platforms for 2020. More importantly, we do take this review to a whole new level by creating fresh WooCommerce installs in each hosting platform to experience first hand, before creating this WooCommerce hosting comparison.

    Let's the ball rolling with a little a comparison between WooCommerce hosting and generic shared hosting.

    Launching a @WooCommerce store? Here's the best #WooCommerce #hosting to get you started in 2020!
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    WooCommerce hosting vs generic hosting

    One of the biggest mistakes most beginners do is to consider WooCommerce hosting and generic hosting are similar. The truth is, WooCommerce hosting comes optimized servers for WooCommerce, allowing it can handle a lot of basic website maintenance, setup, and security for you. That means you can focus on the fun part – growing your store.

    With the right WooCommerce hosting solution, you’ll typically get:

    Those are just a few of the criteria you should look out for when you’re choosing for the best WooCommerce hosting. In practice, each host brings something unique to the table, which brings us to the next section. Therefore, it is important to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all.

    6 best WooCoomerce hosting providers compared

    After the numerous tests that we had conducted, we decided that these are the best 6 WooCommerce hosting providers that you should be using today. We'll discuss about the features they provide, how intuitive they are to use and the all-important pricing.

    We hope you are ready because we are going to take you for a wild ride. Let's go!

    1. SiteGround (www.siteground.com)

    SiteGround WooCommerce Hosting Platform Review
    SiteGround offers managed WooCommerce hosting solutions

    When it comes to WooCommerce hosting, SiteGround is definitely one of the heavy hitters. As a matter of fact, it is one of our favorite all-around WordPress hosting companies. Great support, performance, competitive pricing and yes, WooCommerce-specific features.

    The company is stable and had been offering managed WooCommerce hosting solutions for ages—so you know that your online store is in great hands.

    SiteGround's WooCommerce-specific features

    From the outer layer, SiteGround’s WooCommerce plans offer all the same features as their basic shared options. However, they do pack in a bit of extra functionality, including:

    What’s more, the higher tiers provide even more features (as you’d expect), such as free backup restores and caching functionality which are very important hosting features.

    SiteGround ease of use

    Getting a WooCommerce store running with SiteGround is simple since they automatically set up the WooCommerce plugin for you, as well as a WooCommerce theme. This means you can hit the ground running and get to work on adding products right away a.k.a. SiteGround offers WooCommerce hosting for serious business owners who are determined to make their business success (instead of spending time on patty stuff).

    However, SiteGround’s hosting control panel is a bit disappointing. While it does offer most of the features you need to manage your store, it is subjectively ‘clunky’. For example, finding the specific options you need can be difficult and time-consuming as compared to other WooCommerce hosting solutions.

    SiteGround pricing and plans

    SiteGround’s WooCommerce plans start at $3.95 for the StartUp option and go up all the way to $11.95. Those prices make it the best WooCommerce hosting option if you’re on a tight budget and a steal for the service overall.

    2. BlueHost (www.bluehost.com)

    BlueHost WooCommerce Hosting Platform Review
    BlueHost is a popular WooCommerce hosting solution for beginners

    If you are looking for a reliable WooCommerce hosting, Bluehost is a popular WordPress host that’s officially recommended by the WordPress.org team. Bluehost offers affordable plans dedicated for WooCommerce that come with pre-installed WooCommerce, a free SSL, and many other powerful features.

    BlueHost's WooCommerce-specific features

    In our test installs, BlueHost certainly beat most of the hosting solutions with these great features:

    You also get tons of general features like unmetered bandwidth, 100 GB SSD storage (unlimited storage on higher plans), and many more.

    Bluehost ease of use

    The process of setting up WordPress and WooCommerce is super simple because Bluehost can pre-install both of those tools for you. That means you can get started building your store and adding products/uploading products right away.

    Apart from that, Bluehost offers its own custom hosting dashboard that makes it easy to manage things like updates and caching/performance. They also still give you access to cPanel, as well, for more advanced tweaks and geeky website owners (yes, that's you).

    Bluehost offers 1-click to everything, from installing WordPress to WooCommerce.

    Bluehost pricing and plans

    Bluehost’s WooCommerce hosting plans are quite affordable (seriously), starting at just $6.95 per month for the cheapest Starter plan. That plan lets you create one store with 100 GB of SSD storage and unmetered bandwidth.

    The next tier up – the $8.95 per month Plus plan – lets you host unlimited stores with unlimited storage and unmetered bandwidth. It also adds the CodeGuard backup system to keep your store’s data safe.

    Bluehost.
    A powerful option for those who are starting a WooCommerce store on a budget.
    Start Free Trial
    Bluehost is a great WooCommerce hosting solution and partner

    3. DreamHost (www.dreamhost.com)

    DreamHost WooCommerce Hosting Platform Review
    DreamHost WooCommerce hosting is powerful and by far, one of the best in the market

    Another great WooCommerce hosting solution is DreamHost. DreamHost is a managed hosting provider that shines when it comes to WordPress and WooCommerce. The company offers plans dedicated to WordPress users, and of course, separate options if you’re running a WooCommerce store.

    DreamHost's WooCommerce-specific features

    Since we’re talking about managed WordPress hosting, DreamHost doesn’t disappoint when it comes to WooCommerce-specific features. Here are some of the best features offered by DreamHost:

    Combine those features, and it all adds up to a well-rounded WooCommerce hosting plan for both small and large online stores.

    DreamHost ease of use

    Just as with SiteGround and BlueHost, all DreamHost plans come with pre-configured WooComemrce system. You can get to work on your store right away after signing up with no wait time.

    We have to be honest here. We were blown away with the DreamHost control panel. It is by far the most unique one that includes a lot of options and is also easy to navigate. If you feel comfortable tinkering with your store’s back end settings, you’ll like DreamHost.

    DreamHost pricing and plans

    Compared to some other hosts, DreamHost is on a higher end. It starts at $16.95 a month for up to ~100k visitors and goes up to $71.95 a month for ~1M+ visitors. While you will pay a little more, DreamHost's infrastructure is more robust and stable, making it a reliable hosting option that can handle practically anything you throw at it in our experience.

    4. Liquid Web (liquidweb.com)

    Liquid Web WooCommerce Hosting Platform Review
    Liquid Web is a popular managed WooCommerce hosting platform

    Liquid Web is a more expensive WooCommerce hosting solution compared to the previous ones, but it offers great features and some value-added plugins and services which make that price a lot more palatable.

    If you are wondering, Liquid Web is the company behind the popular Backup Buddy and iThemes Security plugin. So you know that your eCommerce store is in good hands.

    Liquid Web WooCommerce-specific features

    Liquid Web is a fully managed WooCommerce hosting solution. This means that everything from hosting (server environment) to security to backups are taken cared of. All you need is to focus on your business and make money!

    Here are a few of our favorites:

    If you are looking for a truly powerful and feature-rich WooCommerce hosting solution, you don't have to look any further.

    Liquid Web ease of use

    Getting started on Liquid Web feature-rich WooCommerce hosting can be really challenging. But fret not.

    The Liquid Web team will hold your hand through the entire process of configuring your WooCommerce store, which is a welcome feature. They can help you set up additional payment gateways, add new products, and much more.

    This means the platform is perfect if you need an extra bit of help to get things optimized and ready to roll. Plus, it comes with a pretty streamlined control panel that’s a pleasure to use.

    Liquid Web pricing and plans

    Liquid Web offers plenty of options when it comes to plans (like really huge for all website sizes and budgets).

    The most basic WooCommerce offering starts at $19 per month. The higher up you move along the scale, the more traffic you’ll be able to handle – but plans can (and do) get expensive very fast, topping out at $999 per month.

    5. Kinsta (kinsta.com)

    Kinsta WooCommerce Hosting Platform Review
    Kinsta WooCommerce hosting solution is by far one of the best we had ever used

    Kinsta is known as one of the best managed WordPress hosting providers that are powered by Google Cloud Platform and its premium network. Their infrastructure is heavily optimized for e-commerce solutions such as WooCommerce and is ready to handle traffic surges. Their plans come with an extended set of features and speed-focused architecture.

    Kinsta's WooCommerce-specific features

    Here are a few features that make Kinsta’s WooCommerce hosting solution optimal for this purpose:

    Kinsta ease of use

    MyKinsta is a custom-made site management dashboard, which is easy to handle for beginners. You can easily launch a store in a matter of seconds using the one-click auto installer for WooCommerce in their dashboard.

    If you have an existing WooCommerce site with another provider you want to move from, they include free white-glove migrations. In another word, this means the Kinsta team will handle everything regarding a migration for you. Simply fill out the migration form and they’ll let you know when it’s ready to go live.

    Based on our experience, Kinsta migration takes anywhere between 24 to 48 hours. Once the migration is completed, all you need to do is to update the DNS on your domain registrar and you are all good to go with zero downtime.

    Kinsta eCommerce hosting review
    Migrating yourself?
    Here's how to migrate to Kinsta manually (without any downtime).
    Learn More

    Kinsta pricing and plans

    Kinsta offers many tiers starting from $30/month, going all the way up to their Enterprise tier. However, unless you have a low-traffic WooCommerce site, they recommend starting on their Business 1 plan or higher for optimal performance.

    Optional add-ons are available on all hosting plans. Kinsta offers a no question asked, 30-day money-back guarantee if you are unhappy with their service (which is unlikely). There is no long-term contract and you can get an additional of 2 months free hosting when you sign up for an annual plan.

    6. WP Engine (wpengine.com)

    WPEngine is a popular WooCommerce hosting platform for online stores

    Like Kinsta, WP Engine is a premium managed WordPress host that makes a great option for hosting WooCommerce and WordPress. WP Engine’s infrastructure is able to handle large, high-traffic stores, and it offers tons of features to keep your site and its data safe.

    WPEngine's WooCommerce-specific features

    WP Engine’s plans come packed with helpful features for your WooCommerce store:

    In addition to lots of general WooCommerce features, WP Engine also has its own WP Engine Ecommerce Toolkit plugin that helps optimize your store’s performance and give you access to key performance indicators (KPIs). It also adds other goodies like one-tap payments, auto-logout, and more.

    WP Engine ease of use

    WP Engine uses its own custom hosting dashboard that, while it might not be the most beginner-friendly dashboard in the world, still makes it pretty easy to perform key actions for your store.

    Additionally, WP Engine does a great job of going above and beyond to make your store a success, with features like that WP Engine Ecommerce Toolkit, as well as page performance tools and unlimited usage of Genesis framework.

    Reliable WooCommerce Hosting Solution
    Use Only Reliable WooCommerce Hosting

    A reliable hosting goes a long way when it comes to WooCommerce. Don't go cheap but instead, look for a WooCommerce hosting solution that wants to grow with you.

    Try WP Engine

    WP Engine pricing and plans

    WP Engine’s WooCommerce hosting plans start at $25 per month and go up from there. That entry-level plan supports one store and up to 25,000 visits per month.

    Higher-tier plans raise those limits, and WP Engine also offers custom plans if your needs go beyond what their pre-made plans offer.

    Which WooCommerce hosting provider is right for your online store?

    By now, you will came into terms (we hope!) that there is no single WooCommerce web host that fits the bill for every user. Each of the hosting platform above offers unique features that may and may not be suitable for you.

    If you are having a tough time deciding on the best WooCommerce hosting solution for your store, we hope this summary would give you a little boost.

    How Much Should I Pay For WordPress Hosting?

    Choosing the best WordPress hosting can be a tough nut to crack. There are so many variables and no two WordPress websites are similar in nature. This means that there is absolutely so many choices and variations that you can choose ... when it comes to WordPress hosting.

    So, how much should I pay for WordPress hosting?

    Carry on reading below and we hope that this gives you some insights.

    Types Of WordPress Hosting That You Should Know

    Choosing a WordPress hosting can be a tough nut to crack. Here's a simple guide on how much should I pay for WordPress hosting.
    How much should I pay for WordPress hosting and how to choose the best one?

    There are many types of WordPress hosting. That includes, shared hosting, managed hosting, semi-dedicated and dedicated WordPress hosting. Each of them carries features that are often distinctive that set them apart.

    1. Shared WordPress Hosting

    Best for small WordPress websites under 10,000 monthly traffic
    Limited resources and support
    Usually starts from $3 per month for a single domain

    2. Managed WordPress Hosting

    Best for WordPress owners who want server performance, stability and superior support
    Server resources are dependable to the hosting package
    Usually starts from $15 per month for a single domain

    3. Semi Dedicated WordPress Hosting

    Semi-dedicated hosting offers slightly better server performance compared to a basic tier of managed WordPress hosting
    Server resources are higher in most cases
    Usually starts from $20 per month for a single domain

    4. Dedicated WordPress Hosting

    The most powerful WordPress hosting solution for performance, security and customization
    Best for large websites
    Server resources are high and dedicated only to you
    Usually starts from $80 per month per server

    How Much Should I Pay For WordPress Hosting Solution?

    It is important to understand that there is no one size fits all in WordPress hosting. You would need to define your needs and requirements before you are able to choose the best hosting solution for you.

    We understand that it can be really complicated and challenging when it comes to choosing the best WordPress hosting solution. So if you need anything or any help, contact us for a quick inquiry. We are happy to point you in the right direction!

    SiteGround $0.99 Web Hosting Deal

    We are not going to lie to you. This is one hell of a web hosting deal in the Covid-19 pandemic. By now, you should aware that SiteGround is offering $0.99 web hosting deal to everyone. Is this the best deal in the century?

    Carry on to read this article and learn more about the SiteGround $0.99 web hosting deal.

    SiteGround $0.99 Web Hosting Deal

    You need to understand that the $0.99 web hosting deal is only for their StartUp hosting plan (RPP of $11.95 per month) and the deal is included for three months hosting.

    There is absolutely no gimmick here. You are going to pay $2.97 for three months hosting for a single site.

    You get close to everything that SiteGround has to offer and the keyword here is "close to".

    Any Marketing Gimmicks I Should Know About SiteGround $0.99 Deal?

    Well, the answer is "yes."

    When Covid-19 outbreak started, the world was in shock. It was an unprecedented event that no one had prepared for.

    Businesses around the world are forced to shut down, go into resizing or temporary closure. Either way, businesses are not making as much money as they thought they should (or at least, forecasted).

    SiteGround is no different—and they are impacted as well.

    While the SiteGround $0.99 web hosting deal is a great catch, there are some downsides from this.

    One of the biggest challenges we personally see right here is the level of support.

    Take a look at the image below to understand more.

    What had changed?

    Previously, you hit the support button and you get close to instant support. But now, there are additional 'pop up' that tells you what the support can do and cannot do.

    While we support this idea to avoid unwanted questions bombarding the support team, we personally feel that this is definitely leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.

    Question: Is SiteGround Covid-19 Sale Worth it?

    For us, there is nothing better than to spend only $0.99 for a single website for 3 months. SiteGround is a reputable web hosting company and we are sure that if you continue hosting with SiteGround, you are going to love your time over there!

    Tell us what you think about the SiteGround Covid-19 web hosting deal!

    Two Cheap WordPress Hosting For Absolute Beginners (That You Won't Go Wrong With)

    You are grounded at home and you need to earn some money. You read about starting a blog and how it can help you generate money under 90 days.

    But there's a little problem. You have no idea where to start.

    You came to the right place. In this article, you will find the best cheap WordPress hosting for absolute beginners that you just can't go wrong with.

    Best Cheap WordPress Hosting For Beginners
    BlueHost vs SiteGround

    What Makes A WordPress Hosting Cheap?

    It is important to understand that cheap WordPress hosting helps you to launch a blog quickly and without spending tons of money.

    Going for cheap web hosting allows you to save up money and on top of that, steeping into the blogging world—and potentially earns you hundreds if not thousands of dollars as a side hustle.

    So, carry on reading to discover the top 2 cheap WordPress hosting for absolute beginners.

    Choice #1: BlueHost

    Make no mistake. BlueHost is by far one of the cheapest and most affordable to start with, especially when you are a beginner in blogging.

    BlueHost Cheap WordPress Hosting For Beginners

    What makes BlueHost such as popular choice?

    How much does BlueHost costs?

    Glad you asked this. WPMaven is an ambassador to BlueHost and if you sign up using our special link, you will get a special discounted rate of either $2 or $3 per month!

    You can check out BlueHost pricing right here (plus discount codes).

    Choice #2: SiteGround

    SiteGround is a powerful and great alternative to BlueHost. Compared to BlueHost, SiteGround servers are created specially for WordPress.

    In other words, an optimized server would mean that your website loads faster by default ... even without any optimization.

    SiteGround Cheap WordPress Hosting For Beginners

    SiteGround is an affordable WordPress hosting solution for bloggers because it offers:

    SiteGround is slightly more expensive and its web hosting prices start at $5 per month (with the current Covid-19 pandemic, you can get SiteGround for only $0.33 per month for a limited time only).

    Click here to learn more about SiteGround's special pricing.

    BlueHost vs SiteGround Showdown

    Both BlueHost and SiteGround are great web hosting companies that you cannot go wrong with. Personally, we prefer to go with BueHost because there are less restrictions on using BlueHost compared to SiteGround.

    Nonetheless, both BlueHost and SiteGround are the bets cheap WordPress hosting for beginners.

    If you need any help, tell us in the comments below!