7 Features You Must Understand Before Purchasing WordPress Hosting Plan
Among the biggest issue new WordPress bloggers are facing is a complex technical terms used by web hosting companies. The “fear” or of the unknown turns many users away and have be the excuses of many to settle to the second best i.e. Blogger which is such a huge loss.
To help you to understand the web hosting for WordPress blog terms, I have written 7 Features You Must Understand Before Purchasing WordPress Hosting Plan in the way that any person will definitely have idea what are the web hosting plan is all about.
Most importantly, with this article, I hope you will able to make a good decision in getting the best web hosting plan for your WordPress blog.
Quick tips: Pay only for the features that you need. Other than that, it is simply waste of your money and makes you another victim of marketing “tricks”.
cPanel
You find complicated to set up new WordPress blog? Then, you have to get hosting plan that comes with cPanel.
Having a web hosting with cPanel will make your life easier as cPanel is known for turning standalone servers into fully automated point-and-click hosting platforms
You can quickly manage different aspects of your web host account with cPanel user-friendly interface. It let you upload files, add email accounts, change contact information, set up shopping carts or databases, view usage statistics, buy domains, review website traffic, etc.
Fantastico
Fantastico is definitely a must-have feature when you want to buy web hosting plan if you still new with WordPress and web hosting as it cuts a lot of confusing steps to set up WordPress blog.
With Fantastico, you can install WordPress in your hosting account from an intuitive user panel rather than having to manually upload and extract files.
Disk Space
This shows the amount of disk space that will be available on the hosting server to hold your WordPress blog files. Normally because HTML files are small, a WordPress blog’s need for disk pace (unless you stuff it with lots of graphics) will be small.
Even for the entire Kissing Crust’s blog files which are full with graphics, it only takes about 50MB of disk space.
Now, I hope you have realized that you don’t have to pay premium to the top notched plan that offers unlimited disk space. You simply don’t have to.
Bandwidth/Data Transfer
Bandwidth means the amount of data that has been transferred from your hosting server to the computers of your visitors. Simple example of such data are your WordPress blog itself and what comes with it i.e articles, videos, graphics and audios. So, each time those data load for your readers, it will consume your hosting bandwidth.
The importance of bandwidth for your WordPress blog is once it has reached its limit, your WordPress blog will not able to load for others to view or read. Basically, bandwidth is the gas for your car. Without it, your car can’t move.
My advice is to find affordable website hosting plans that allow unlimited bandwidth. You can never know when one of your postings get viral and received insane traffic spikes which your hosting plan cannot cope with.
It will make matter worse if the article contains videos and graphics as these are the main bandwidth eaters!
Sub Domains/Parked Domains/Add-on Domains
To make it easier to understand, I illustrate below 3 different scenarios for the above 3 terms.
Sub domain
- Your WordPress blog’s domain name is first.com.
- You want to have a Gallery page. So, you create a Gallery folder which can be reached through first.com/gallery.
- You can also turn the Gallery folder into a sub-domain through your Control Panel.
- Now you can reach your Gallery page as either first.com/gallery OR gallery/first.com.
- This costs you nothing!
Parked Domain
- You have two domains first.com and second.com.
- first.com is the domain name of your current WordPress blog.
- You want first.com to go to the same place as second.com.
- For the parked domains, you have to purchase them from domain registry such as GoDaddy.com.
Add-On Domains
- You have two domains first.com and second.com.
- You want the two domains for 2 different WordPress blogs.
- For the additional add-on domains you need to purchase them from a registry such as GoDaddy.com.
- The process to create WordPress blogs for second domain will be exactly the same with the first.
Uptime
You definitely want your WordPress blog to be accessible and available all the time don’t you for your readers? A good web host must have uptimes of at least greater than 99% which most of web hosting companies claim nowadays.
Remember, every moment that your blog is offline, you are losing out on potential income and readers.
The easiest way to get quick background of any hosting company that you are interested is by reading its unbiased user reviews on web hosting for WordPress blog before making the purchase.
FTP
FTP (File Transfer Protocols) allows your WordPress blog’s files to be transferred from your computer to hosting servers and vice versa.
You can access FTP features from within your hosting account’s cPanel through its File Manager or else you can download FTP software directly to your computer to save time.
Recommendations: Web Hosting Plan for WordPress Blog
Hostgator: Among the most popular and well-reviewed web hosting provider. It has web hosting plans that suit WordPress bloggers; for newbie, novice and even professional. Personally, I love their service the most.
Reason?
Check out my personal review on their web hosting plan for WordPress blog - Reasons Why You Have to Move Your WordPress Blog to HostGator Hosting Today.
And here are the coupons from Kissing Crust which you can use:
- kissingcrustdotcom994 – you will get a discount of $9.94 off the package price
- kissingcrustdotcom25 – you will a discount of 25% off the total package price
So, you can choose either one of the above coupons depending which suits you best. Plus, do share those coupons with your friends. I am sure they will love you more!
WPWebHost: Another web hosting provider that offer great web hosting plan for WordPress bloggers.
The best part is all the web hosting plans offered are to cater WordPress bloggers; not anything else. So, you can expect any issue related to WordPress faced by you, can be settled in instant.
Some of the plan do comes with WordPress CDN Bundle which will help to speed up your WordPress blog.
What web hosting provider and hosting plan for WordPress blog that you get? How your experience with the current service so far?
Feel free to share with the readers in Kissing Crust on your experience and the best hosting plan for WordPress blog you can think off. I am eager to know more about it.
