Finding The Best Hosting.

What You Must Know!

If you ever just googled ‘WordPress hosting’ you have probably seen that there is an almost infinite supply of companies offering WordPress hosting. Some charge just a few dollars per month and others may charge $10 or more. But is more expensive also better?

The short answer: no
I have tried many different hosting companies and have found that the more expensive ones are actually not the best by far!

But before I give my opinion, let’s take a look at what WordPress.org itself says:

Powering over 2 million websites, Bluehost offers the ultimate WordPress platform. Tuned for WordPress, we offer WordPress-centric dashboards and tools along with 1-click installation, a FREE domain name, email, FTP, and more. Easily scalable and backed by legendary 24/7 support by in-house WordPress experts.

Alright, so WordPress is telling us to go to Bluehost, and to be honest, I 100% agree for several reasons:

First of all: yes one-click install is something basically every proper provider has these days, but the difference here is that you don’t have to wait. You immediately get a temporary domain on which you can start building your website. This may seem like a small thing, but to me saving time and being able to start straight away is just a very nice thing to have.

Secondly Bluehost has the best support if you ask me. They have a chat with people who actually know what they are talking about and trust me, that is not the standard in this industry. I have been in contact with the chat for numerous times, whether is it for setting A-records (a technical thing needed in order to make sure your URL actually ends up at your website) or helping me fix a bug, they are knowledgeable and you are chatting with someone within seconds.

Important when signing up – Don’t make this mistake

Every hosting company will start offering you some ‘useful’ options you can select for a small additional price. However these small amounts start adding up quite fast and a lot of them are absolutely not needed for 99% of the websites.
As we have chosen to go for Bluehost, let’s take a look at the options they give us. First of all, which package do we need?

Even though Bluehost tells us the ‘Choice Plus’ if the recommended option, the ‘Basic’ should be enough for you unless you want to be building multiple websites (and even then I would go for ‘Plus’ rather then ‘Choice Plus’. And yes they seem to be just as expensive, but after the first contract is over you will pay the full price!).

After selecting our option we will be taken to a page where they ask us whether or not we already have a domain. The cool thing about Bluehost is that you actually get a domain for free for 1 year when you sign up, so in case you don’t have your domain yet, simply type in the domain you want and click next (and make sure you read my post on ‘domain names’ before choosing your domain!).

On the next page we fill out our contact details and then they take us to the ‘Package Extras’ which has a lot of things you don’t need:

The ‘Domain Privacy Protection’ is the only thing in my opinion which you should be taking. If you do not select this option anyone can see your private details (your registration name + address). By selecting this option if someone does a so called ‘whois’ on your domain, they will see the contact details of BlueHost, so you can avoid being spammed.

The ‘Codeguard Basic’ (which is automatically selected for you) makes daily backups, but there are also free plugins which can do this for you.

The ‘SiteLock Security Essentia’ – which is also already selected for you – provides additional security to your website. And yes: security is very important, but there are a lot of free plugins which will do the same to you as well as a trick you can use – which will only take you 1 minute – to make sure hackers cannot easily enter your site anymore.
I made a 40 second video on how to do this and you can simply follow along.

All in all I do believe this is the best hosting provider out there, allowing you to start building your websites in a few minutes after signing up.
You can use the tool below to check whether or not your domain is still free and sign up straight away.

Full disclosure: BlueHost is giving me a little fee if you use my link to sign up, but so does every single other hosting provider out there. I have decided to highlight them because they simply are the best option in both my and WordPress’s opinion.