Hosting Recommendations

I always recommend you use some form of WordPress managed hosting. These are hosts that cater specifically to WordPress websites.

Their servers are usually better configured, caching is already set up for you, and their support is more knowledgeable about WordPress issues. They typically offer functionality that non-WordPress hosts don’t, like one-click backups and restores, a staging server, and security monitoring.

WPEngine – My Top Recommendation

WPEngine is priced reasonably, starting at $35/month, and leads the market in quality and features. They are fast with built-in caching, have a great backup solution, staging environments, security monitoring and remediation (they fix hacked websites). Their support is fast and knowledgeable.

WPEngine customers have access to all Genesis themes for free. These are some of the highest quality WordPress themes available, and are great for setting up your website.

If you’re migrating from another host, you can use their free, automated migration tool to quickly and easily move your site to WPEngine. I use this to migrate client sites to my WPEngine development server.

As a developer they offer wp cli and git push. You can create unlimited password-protected, transferrable installs, which I use for developing client sites. When a client is ready to go live, you type in their email and the install gets transferred to them – no migration necessary.

High Traffic Websites

If you have a high traffic site or have enterprise-level requirements, I recommend you consider BigScoots. Most of my large clients are hosted there and we’ve been blown away by the speed and quality of support. They are significantly more affordable than other hosts at this level.

One of our food blogger clients receives over 12 million pageviews a month and has over 110,000 registered users saving recipes. Big Scoots keeps our websites running fast and quickly solves any issues that come up.

Lower Priced Host

If WPEngine is outside your budget, consider SiteGround which starts at $3.95/month.  If you do choose a lower priced host, I recommend also using BackupBuddy for backups and Sucuri for security monitoring/remediation.