Question

Not 100% SEO related, more like 20%. or less SEO related, but I know we have a wide breadth of professionals here and I always put performance first. I picked my 1st eComm client. Local company that makes tools (screwdrivers, bits, sockets, etc. ) and they have about 700 total SKUs, including marketing stands and caps for their resellers, but roughly 400 product SKUs. Site will be built using WP+woo+Genesis. My dilemma is hosting. The client purchased this business a number of years ago and the current "brochure" site hasn't been updated since 1874. It's hosted with Network Solutions so this site will just be a fresh build on a new host. What do you guys suggest for a hosting provider for this site? They're a more regional company, but do have a few national resellers who do moderately well selling these products. I've looked at A2, Siteground, LiquidWeb, and WP Engine. It'll obviously have a SSL and I'm looking at Cloudflare as well. (Once I figure out what exactly it does. ) Help me out here folks. This might be the push I need to consider staying in business.  

Answer 1

Move to WPengine and add cloudflare as the cdn. It's a great mix for eComm.  

Answer 2

I'd avoid Siteground. Their service has been going downhill for the past 18 months or so. I think they got too popular too fast. The others in your list are good. I would add KnownHost to the list as well. You are obviously going to want to be on a dedicated account or at least a VPS. Not sure you will need Cloudflare. I think they are kind of overrated. Most sites I have put on Cloudflare have seen worse performance in terms of site speed.  

Answer 3

There's one setting you should also leave unchecked in WPE. 'redirect bots'. Let Google crawl everything.  

Answer 4

WP Engine is great. Fast and importantly for a project like you describe, they offer easy set up for staging servers and back ups. If the dollar amount is high enough, Liquidweb is the best, but they require a higher level of technical know how to handle.  

Answer 5

1and1 is easy to set up and is extremely cheap. No reason to overcomplicate things.  

Answer 6

Shared hosting is shared hosting. It’s all the same crap on a different day. For a site like this it’s time to be in the big leagues and get a dedicated server that can handle the band with if you can increase the traffic the way you think you can.  

Answer 7

I use WPEngine fore everything. Easy site migration, fantastic support, fast servers AND THEY INCLUDE A CDN! Total overall cost is lower than other hosts if you calculate adding a CDN.  

Answer 8

Linode. Digital Ocean. Vultr. Choose one.  

Comments

@hedge8287, then add GridPane.  

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@hedge8287 agree definitely one of those but becuase he said he doesn’t know what cloudflare is i would suggest for him to go for one of those but through cloudways as it will be managed for him as he doesn’t seam to have the technical knowledge to manage his own server

Answer 9

Linode(Philadelphia based) and Digital Ocean.  

Answer 10

I use bluehost for hosting been on it for years

Answer 11

If you want to play safe - wordpress dot com. Though many marketers downgrade it for bluehost commissions, Wp dot com has improved a lot in terms of support and the cost has been reasonable. If you want a much better option, avoid shared hosting. And here are alternatives. 1. Cloudways - If you want to make it work great without issues. 2. Runcloud - If you want efficiency in terms of cost and number of servers you handle. 3. Spinupwp or gridpane for wp specific hosting. My preference would be gridpane. 4. Or closte. Closte is not aggressive in marketing. But, have heard good things about it being an affordable kinsta alternative. If you are referring to servers, Do, vultr, and upcloud are all good. If scalability is a choice, docker + do can also be good! No to shared hosting unless you wanna mess it up later  

Answer 12

I don't usually make recommendations for things like this, but since this post is semi private among your friends and not in an open group or whatever. here you go. I'm a HUGE fan of WPEngine. Costs a few bucks more than most of the others on your list - but the SSL is free (and once installed, it automatically updates when it expires) and installed with a few clicks - no code pasting. CDN is free, too (basically your cloudflare situation is part of it). The best part is the support. I've used them for 25+ clients for the past 5 years or so and have exactly ZERO complaints about support - not something I can so for any other service I've ever had. Staff is knowledgeable and, unlike most support teams, they have NEVER said, "It's the plugin's fault -contact them" or "It's Wordpress's Fault - contact them" or "It's your fault - fix it yoruself". They have always helped me actually find the problem. In the few cases where it actually WAS the plugin's fault (usually, I can diagnose that before I contact hosting support) - they helped me at least get the site working well enough that we could do business while I dealt with the plugin people. They're all just. good. Any client we've had for the 5 years we've been using them has had at least one server hardware upgrade, too. A few have just recently gotten their second one. So you know you're not on an ancient, overtaxed machine. They have TONS of security and server stability things going too. No need for a caching plugin - it's handled much more efficiently at the server level. I've never had a site hacked on there (knock wood) which is something I can't say about most other hosts. So. while, on the surface it looks like you're paying a bit more, you're not really. The things that are added on are good choices too. (Not stupid things to drive the price up, but good common sense things you'd consider adding on yourself). They bought FlyWheel recently, too - which means you can now set up a local install for development and push your changes right to the site. Very cool.  

Answer 13

Ryon, you have a few options, based on your requirements, do avoid shared hosting. You an consider any one of these providers: Crioshavyn (VPS, cloud hosting, or managed WordPress options); Kinsta (managed WordPress); or WPinfy (managed WordPress). Once you have completed designing and setting up the site and store, then you connect it to Cloudflare. Cloudflare is a network of servers used to deliver your website to website visitors using a server closer to them. It isn't able to make changes to your website, but it copies the website and places it on their network. This way, you website files doesn't have to travel around the world to get to your website visitor.  

Answer 14

Kinsta auto scales as needed. My recommendation for seamless management. Personally I run direct hosting servers through AWS and Gcloud but it does require some technical knowledge.  

Answer 15

Ran a site with 10, 000 sku's no problem on wpengine that did 1mil rev a month.  

Comments

@compensatory3489 what’s the hosting costs?  

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Like 1500 a month or something