Building websites for clients requires somewhere to host them and wanting to avoid angry customers complaining that their site is down or slow I need to make the right choice.
Having been a Director at Serchen (an online marketplace for some of the biggest software and hosting companies in the world) and an actual hosting company, I probably know a bit more than most about the subject. So I’m going to look a bit silly if I get this one wrong, time to define my criteria.
Who am I Hosting
I’m not going to delude myself I don’t build websites for enterprise size companies and having used Rackspace for many years they would be overkill for my needs now. My focus these days is enabling SMB’s to get the most cost effective solutions from ‘the cloud’ and many of these companies won’t have high traffic or resource hungry sites.
WordPress Only
I just build WordPress sites and therefore I need a hosting provider who specialise in WordPress hosting. I only build sites in WordPress because this is without a doubt the best solution for SMB’s and there are many reasons why:
- WordPress is used by more than 23% of the top 10 million websites on the internet so I’m not alone on this one.
- Thousands of themes are available to give your site a professional look and feel including many flexible themes such as Divi 2.0 to ensure no two sites will look the same.
- The CMS functionality allows businesses to easily update their content themselves without having to wait/pay a ‘developer’ to update the site.
- With over 35,000 plugins available additional functionality is easily added to a site without the need to write code from scratch speeding up development time and keeping costs down.
- eCommerce is catered for by WooCommerce which easily integrates with payment gateways and other cloud based software (inventory management etc).
- SEO is very well supported which is an important factor for any site.
Daily Backups
Daily site backups are a must particularly as I encourage the site owners to regularly add content and update the site themselves. If something does go wrong the peace of mind of being able to restore from a backup just makes my life easier. Also knowing the responsibility of taking a backup is being taken off my hands and just being done also saves me time and money.
Good Support
For problems and queries a responsive support team is important with email support a must and telephone support there for critical issues such as the site being down. Support and backups are items which you only really get to test when there is a problem. If the host offers telephone support its is always worth calling the sales team before purchasing because if they are poor at answering pre sales questions then I can’t image post sales will be any better.
In addition to email and telephone support a good set of online articles in the hosts Knowledge Base is also important. These will give you an insight into the time and effort put into support by the host and how their processes work. Often there are items you just need to look up quickly just once such as the nameservers and its quicker to look this up rather than contacting support. Also any host that does not invest time and money in a good Knowledge Base enabling customers to find solution themselves is increasing the workload of their own in house support team which will result in either slow response times or increased operating costs which ultimately will be passed onto the customer.
Reliable Uptime
If my clients sites is not accessable who are they likely to call the host or me? Therefore good site uptime and speed is important to reduce my workload. I always monitor my sites 24/7 using the UptimeRobot service as I believe its always better to tackle any issues before it starts to impact the client.
Competitive Price
The price of hosting versus the services offered has come down considerable over the last few years. Web hosting has become a utility industry and for the majority of small business they can get stable hosting at very competitive prices, unfortunately many web developers are still charging hosting to their clients with a big markup with no added value from their part. I intend to offer my clients two options which are signing up directly with the host and then they control their domain name (which is an important business asset) and are free to easily move to another provider if they are not happy with my services. Or I am happy to host them through my own account. However I want to offer these options through one hosting provider as it is more efficient for me and therefore me cost effective to the client for me to use a provider I am familiar with and have confidence in their service.
My Chosen Provider
Using the above criteria and after much research I have decided to go with Tsohost. Primarily using their Standard plan as it offers more disk space and will host up to 4 sites for only £2.99 per month or £34.99 per year which appears to be good value for money. Over the next few months I will update the blog to see if they do deserve the title of best UK WordPress hosting.