Once you make the decision to start your affiliate marketing business, you’re going to be in the same position that I was. In the beginning, you’ll be nearly paralyzed by the all the different things you’re expected to know, or need to learn along the way. It gets to be very overwhelming.
WordPress is one of the most robust, versatile and user friendly platforms around for those who want to start a website or blog for the first time. I use WordPress for ALL of my sites now, and so do many other online businesses from new entrepreneurs to big companies. But using WordPress to create your website is only part of the battle. You’ll have to find a WordPress friendly hosting service to put your website one.
Finding the right WordPress friendly hosting can be a very time-consuming process, but I’ve got three suggestions for you to consider, or at least, put on your shortlist. All of them have some important fundamentals in common, but also some different strengths. It’s up to you decide which one works for you!
WPengine
Admittedly, this is a biased opinion, but WPengine is the only service I use now for ALL of my WordPress sites (more than 20 of them!). It’s the WordPress friendly hosting service that I recommend to everyone including my closest friends and family. WPengine is based in Austin, Texas and has been around for years, has garnered a lot of customers, and has both the professional reviews and the customer testimonials to prove it. So it’s a legitimate company, with no questionable legal situations going on. It also manages to rate very high in the uptime department and has some of the fastest loading sites in the world.
However, where I think WPengine really differs from the competitors is in the choices and support you get. They give you a lot of different plans, and have a very thorough network of technology designed to optimize your WordPress friendly hosting experience. Their pricing is also very competitive, giving you this optimized WordPress experience while also providing an extremely high level of security. Regardless of which tier of service you go with, WPengine gives all users the same high level of security protection. Best of all, in the event that something bad should happen, like you get hacked, they’ll even restore control of your website to you for free. I love the fact that this particular WordPress friendly hosting supports their customers so much.
DreamHost
One WordPress friendly hosting service that I think bears looking at is DreamHost. They’re quite reputable, and they’ve got the history going for them. This isn’t some fly-by-night operation that’s trying scam people, only to disappear into the Internet with customers’ hard earned cash. DreamHost got its start in Silicon Valley, in 1997, so they’ve been around pretty much since the beginning of the Internet era. That’s led to many reviews over their 20 year history, and a long legacy of professional conduct. So, for people worried about pedigree, there’s no concern at all with DreamHost, they’re one of the oldest, legitimate WordPress friendly hosting services around.
Over that time, they’ve provided a good range of services, included shared, VPN and dedicated server hosting, depending on the needs of their customers. But perhaps one of their most impressive accomplishments is their uptime promise. Uptime is an important aspect of WordPress friendly hosting. If the server your website is hosted on frequently goes down, then customers trying to find your website simply won’t be able to.
DreamHost has a very impressive guarantee on their WordPress friendly hosting services. For every confirmed hour of downtime that your website experiences, DreamHost will give a free day of server hosting. Fortunately for DreamHost, and unfortunately for people looking for a deal, this guarantee is something they almost never have to reimburse for. On average, their uptime is 99+% up, one of the highest reliability rates in the industry. Of course, you get what you pay for, so this kind of technical support isn’t cheap, and DreamHost, while being a very WordPress friendly hosting service, is also one of the more expensive services out there.
BlueHost
BlueHost is another solid WordPress friendly hosting service that I think people should look at. They’re not quite as old as DreamHost. They started up in 2003, and they’re based in Utah, but it’s another large, established company that’s 100% American, employing 700 people in their company. Once again, this is a WordPress friendly hosting with a very large, traceable footprint. Go looking and you’ll find years of legitimate operations with the customer reviews to go with it. So they’re definitely not a scam, but a completely legal business that’s looking to help their customers.
BlueHost manages to compete with DreamHost in the uptime reliability department. While they don’t have the same guarantee with a refund on people who’ve experienced downtime, they’ve still got a very impressive system in place. Reviewers have had websites running on their systems for years with perhaps only an hour or more of downtime during that entire period. That’s a very impressive rate of uptime, and it seems like the only factors that actually make a dent in this host’s uptime are very serious, large scale, targeted attacks such DDOS intrusions that give just about anyone trouble if the scale of the attack is sufficiently large enough.
It’s also, unlike DreamHost, a bit cheaper as far as WordPress friendly hosting services go. Where DreamHost is definitely more on the premium side, BlueHost is a bit easier on the pocket book. It does have a few things you need to be aware of though. Even though the cheapest plan with BlueHost is just $2.95 a month, which sounds like a steal, it’s locked behind a three year contract. Also, unlike many other WordPress friendly hosting services, if you’ve already got a website and you want to migrate it to their service, that’s not free. It’ll cost you an additional $149.99 to do this.
