If you're planning on creating a new WordPress website -- or are unhappy with your existing hosting provider -- you'll need to choose where to host your site. It's daunting to sift through the hundreds of different hosting options to figure out which best suits your needs. Here's a quick primer to make this choice a bit easier for you.
For the majority of small- and medium-sized businesses, third-party “shared hosting” is a reliable cost-efficient hosting solution ($5 - $15/month). With shared hosting, your site is sharing a server with several other websites. This is what allows hosting companies to keep costs low. The tradeoff is that if another site on the same shared server sees a sudden increase in traffic, then the server could get bottle-necked and temporarily slow your site down. Shared hosting plans typically do not include site backups and back-end WordPress upgrades, so we recommend having your own backup and upgrade strategy in place if you plan to use shared hosting. Examples of shared hosting companies include
ICDSoft,
HostGator and
BlueHost.