We offer WordPress hosting so we can deliver the best possible hosting solution to our customers at the best cost. We provide reliable, fast, and secure hosting for your very important websites. Sure you can find cheaper hosting, but what happens when you need support?
A Little Bit of History
When we first started building websites, there was no such thing as WordPress. If you wanted a website, you created it manually either by hand in HTML, or by using custom programming tech such as PHP or ASP. Out of frustration, we created our own Content Management System (CMS). That got us through a few years and quite a few customers. Then WordPress came along and eventually we decided to scrap our internal CMS because it could no longer compete.
As our list of WordPress powered sites grew, we experimented with many different hosting platforms. At first we tried hosting on Windows. Then we tried various shared platforms, including most of the ones you’ve heard of.
No matter how promising each platform seemed, they all had major shortcomings. Those cheap plans come with very tight restrictions and very lousy support, but you won’t find that out until your site goes down and it’s too late.
Meanwhile, a startup came to us looking for help hosting their website. We placed their site in a famous brand shared hosting environment. You know, one of those that cost $8/month. The startup made a savvy social media push. Within three weeks, their site was crashing due to the hosting limits on the account. Three more upgrades were made and three more limits were reached within another month.
After upgrading to a dedicated server plan for that single website on the same hosting provider, we found out it still wasn’t enough. The costs were getting out of hand and the next upgrade was going to triple our already crazy hosting costs, while the support was still terrible.
Taking Matters Into Our Own Hands
It was obvious that relying on other hosting companies was NOT going to provide the level of service or performance our customers needed. So we took matters into our own hands.
The “high performance” platforms hosted by 3rd party providers were slow and expensive. Support was terrible, if you could even get support. Systems would go down with no explanation. We tried many of the major/respected hosting companies and our experience was the same with each. We had server outages, DNS outages, failed benchmarks…you name it.
In exasperation, we spun up our first cloud-based dedicated WordPress server. Because we weren’t sharing processors and memory with 8,000 other customers, it was FAST. And we could upgrade it any time we wanted to, with a simple reboot.
We migrated the startup’s website to the new server, and it was like a commercial airliner reaching cruising altitude: smooth, clear skies all the way! And we haven’t looked back.
Drawback to WordPress Hosting: Hacked Sites
The biggest challenge to hosting WordPress is security. WordPress is a MAJOR target for hackers because it is so prolific. Many of our customers have experienced hacked sites at previous hosting companies. If you work any at all with WordPress, you’ve probably either been hacked yourself, or you know somebody who has.
In order for us to successfully host WordPress sites, we had to take precautionary measures to protect us, our hosted sites, and our customers. No hosting company we ever worked with took these measures.
What Steps Do You Take For Safe WordPress Hosting?
The steps we take are relatively simple. Our hosting services:
- Require a Wordfence license.
- Include frequent automatic backups to the cloud spanning multiple weeks.
- Keep your software and plugins up-to-date.
- Isolate your site.
Those four things will protect any WordPress site 99% of the time. As an extra measure to thwart attacks, we also encourage our high-traffic customers to use a service such as Cloudflare or Sucuri Firewall.
Wordfence actively keeps the hackers out and it alerts you immediately if your site is compromised. It works like virus detection on your desktop PC, actively monitoring threats or suspicious activity.
Frequent backups ensure that should your site fall victim to a hacker, you’ll have the resources available to quickly get back up and running. Instead of fighting to clean the site, you just trash the hacked site and start over from a backup in minutes. It is important to have backups spanning a couple weeks to guarantee availability of a clean copy.
When you keep your software up-to-date, it ensures that any security holes are patched as soon as the fixes are released. We frequently login and update your software.
We isolate your site from other sites. Your site won’t get hacked even if your neighbor’s does.
Cloudfare and Sucuri are both designed to hide the server from hackers. When a hacker targets your site, they are actually targeting Cloudflare or Sucuri, and their attempts never reach your website. These services also offer attack mitigation, such as blocking denial of service attacks.
We keep using WordPress because it is unparalleled in the content management arena. Your website won’t get hacked if you take the proper precautions.
You Just Scared Me.
Don’t worry. You can rest easy with our hosting solutions. Remember we got into WordPress hosting because we had to. We got tired of spending all our time fighting slow servers and hackers, or sites randomly going offline. Now, our time has been freed up so we can do…anything else! And your site stays safe and secure.
Rest Easy
You can rest easy when you host with us. We can scale up, we keep your site safe and protected, and we make sure your site runs as fast as it can. And if something DOES happen, we will get you back online quickly. Nobody else is going to do that for you.
