When it comes to running a website, especially a website that’s used actively to generate leads for a business or organization, there’s nothing more important than quality hosting.
While web hosting companies are as plentiful as grains of sand on a beach, finding one with good performance and support at a reasonable price is not easy. But since this is what I do, I’ve spent a fair amount of time researching and experimenting.
The dilemma of shared hosting
For most websites, certainly those starting out, an economical solution means using what is known as shared hosting. Basically, your website lives on a server with dozens or hundreds of other websites. This is all well and good, unless one of these websites is poorly optimized or getting tons of traffic.
When this happens, the CPU resources and memory used by said website spike, the server slows to a crawl and so do all the other websites on the server, including yours.
This is a fundamental problem with shared hosting, and really unavoidable without switching to either a virtual private server (where you get an allocated portion of server resources and memory), a cloud hosting plan (you’re allocated a certain amount of resources across many computers), or a dedicated server (you get an entire server all to yourself).
All of these solutions are generally overkill for a new or low traffic website. When your traffic builds and you start hitting the limits of your shared plan, that’s the time to think about more robust hosting. Until then, your time and resources are best spent creating useful content and converting the traffic you do have.
The best option is to look for a shared host that is committed to speed and excellent tech support. They typically cost a bit more than the cheapest hosts out there, but it’s money well spent. It always amazes me that people will spend thousands of dollars to build a website and then try to save a few bucks a month on hosting.
WPX Hosting
WPX Hosting (formery Traffic Planet Hosting) is a company created by SEO “guru” Terry Kyle. I first heard of Terry back when I used to do affiliate marketing.
If you know anything about that industry, you know it’s rife with grifters and hacks, and I’ve always appreciated Terry as a seemingly decent and honest person committed to delivering quality products and education.
Terry created WPX because of his own need for a fast and reliable host for his money-making sites. Site loading time is an important ranking factor in Google, and typical shared hosts are woefully inadequate in providing it, especially under a significant load.
But I can tell you from personal experience, having moved my websites to WPX, that the performance is outstanding. I get less than 1.5 second load times on this website consistently, the tech support is incredibly responsive, and the price is quite reasonable for what you get.
The Business Plan for $25/month allows five website installations, compared to a similar managed WordPress solution like WP Engine which costs $25/month for just one site.
I also like the simple and intuitive control panel, which replaces the ubiquitous cPanel most hosts use. cPanel is effective, but the interface is less than stellar and it puts quite a load on the servers running it.
All in all, I’ve been very happy with WPX Hosting, and very happy I moved. If you want to invest a little extra in a superior web host that will make your site snappier and thus more enjoyable to use, you can’t go wrong with WPX.
Disclosure: The above link to WPX hosting is an affiliate link, and I’m paid a commission if you sign up and remain a customer past the trial period. Rest assured, it’s a very good company that I use and recommend regularly.