There is a “high cost to cheap hosting” when you are trying to run a business from your site. Shared (read: cheap) hosting is not going to cut it.
The web hosts noted here are my personal recommendations. They are professional level hosting platforms and if you’re serious about your site, WordPress Managed Hosting on a professional level platform is what you need.
Kinsta
Here’s what I like most about Kinsta:
- Their highly optimized servers will give your site a speed boost through sophisticated caching and CDN. Honestly, most people on their own do not know how to properly configure a site cache and a CDN and I run into support issues a lot dealing with improperly configured cache. This feature alone is a big plus.
- Related to the above, they limit the number of sites per server. If you’re on shared hosting, you’re sharing the server with hundreds if not thousands of other sites, all competing for the same system resources. Get a spike in traffic in that situation and the host will throttle you to prevent damage to the other users. Kinsta avoids that by limiting the number of users per unit and using system architecture that supports spikes in needed resources.
- You can spin up a staging environment of your live site with minimal effort. Why is this important? One of the biggest issues I see in support is, “I did something on my live site and it crashed.” Staging is a critical component of running a professional site so you can test software updates and settings.
- You can demo the admin panel before opening an account.
Kinsta has a good pricing model, and if you pay annually, they’ll give you 2 months free.