The web hosting industry is no stranger to a variety of hosting variations and if you’ve been researching web hosting, you may find yourself overwhelmed and unsure what to go with for your new website. Let’s assume you’ve done some research and you’re familiar with what is web hosting and you have settled on using WordPress for your website, which is a great choice. For readers new to web hosting, WordPress is a content management system that allows you to create and publish content for your website. WordPress famously has an easy-to-use user interface with Blocks (think mini widgets where each widget does one thing) you can drag and drop on a page to create your own website with ease. It’s no wonder WordPress is the number one CMS out there!
While it’s true you can run WordPress on your everyday Shared Hosting, there is also a dedicated form of WordPress Hosting offered by many web hosts. If you’ve been trying to determine what the key differences between WordPress Hosting and traditional Shared Hosting are, you’re in the right place.
There are some important differences between the two hosting types you should be aware of so you can know which one is right for you.
Let’s begin!
Shared Hosting vs WordPress Hosting: Which One is Right for Me?
When it comes to choosing between Shared Hosting and WordPress hosting, the choice comes down to a few key points.
Point One: With Shared Hosting, you typically receive a control panel (like cPanel) which you can use to perform tasks, such as creating email addresses, managing databases, creating subdomains, and installing other applications, if you wish. Your Web Hosting account can support more applications than WordPress. This means you can install other applications in your web hosting account, such as a photo gallery app or NextCloud to store your files.
Depending on your hosting provider of choice, their WordPress Hosting may only let you install WordPress and you may not have the option to manage other things, such as email addresses using a central control panel. This really limits what you can do with your web hosting and really leaves you with only being able to work with WordPress.
Point Two: if your host of choice limits you to only being able to run WordPress, they may also limit which plugins you can install. This can be really frustrating, especially as your site grows and you find you need a specific plugin to do something like advanced SEO, and they won’t let you install it because it’s not approved. There are thousands of WordPress plugins, some of them much better than others of course, but there is a lot of choices regardless.
Before making the choice of a host for your new WordPress site, be sure you can run the plugins you need.
What are the Advantages of Using WordPress Hosting?
WordPress Hosting definitely has a couple of advantages compared to regular Shared Hosting.
For starters, most of the hosting companies offering WordPress Hosting offer the service on highly optimized and performant servers. This tuning gives your WordPress website a huge advantage compared to regular servers which are often tuned for the best performance from the widest variety of supported applications. Depending on the host and their server-side setup, the results are sometimes hard to argue with and it may be the deciding factor on which your decision is made.
In addition, hosts who specialize in WordPress Hosting also tend to pay more attention to things specific to WordPress, like keeping your site updated automatically and having services running behind the scenes to keep your website safe from attacks and hackers. Compared to traditional Web Hosting, where if you were running WordPress you would need to manually install these plugins and configure them, having your host do these things is very advantageous, especially if you are a beginner.
How to Choose the Right WordPress Hosting Provider
We’ve covered the basic differences between hosts who offer regular Shared Hosting and hosts who offer only WordPress Hosting, but what are other factors you should consider when making your choice?
WordPress Hosting Features
As you can imagine, this writer is a fairly technical individual. I’ve been in the hosting industry for over 15 years and have a lot of experience, so you can be sure someone like me is going to want their web hosting plan to have a lot of features.
Some of the must-have features on my hosting plan include:
- 1-Click WordPress Installers – I love being able to click a button, fill out a field or two, push install, and just like that, WordPress is up and running. And when I want to install a dedicated photo gallery app like Coppermine, or NextCloud to save my files online, I can with little time required. Welcome to the future folks. Can your WordPress Hosting do that? Ours can.
- LiteSpeed Caching – LiteSpeed Web Server is the definitive web server for running WordPress and other web apps. With better performance than Apache and NGINX, it’s why we choose to run LiteSpeed at ChemiCloud. And while yes, there is a LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress, without the LiteSpeed Web Server component behind the scenes, you won’t be taking full advantage of the plugin.
- WordPress Staging – Remember the days of having to make major changes to your website in the middle of the night so most people wouldn’t see an error message or a maintenance message? Those days are long gone with WordPress Staging from ChemiCloud. With our Staging features, you can duplicate your WordPress site, edit the code, content, design, and more to your heart’s content, and when you’re ready to publish, do it in one fell swoop without interrupting your current site.
Website Performance
No one likes a slow website. While you may not mind waiting 5 seconds or so for your website to load, your customers and readers probably will. Did you know approximately 47% of all shoppers want your website to load in two seconds? And if a page takes more than three seconds to load, over 40% of users will bounce. If you’re launching your WordPress site as an online business, you should be very concerned about these numbers. The e-commerce world already has a 2.35% conversion rate. Don’t make it harder on yourself by choosing WordPress hosting from a slow web host.
At ChemiCloud, we use LiteSpeed Web Server which gives your WordPress website access to cutting-edge caching technology that outperforms both Apache and NGINX web servers. Paired with the LiteSpeed Caching plugin for WordPress, your site is powered by some of the fastest hosting on Earth. When paired with QUIC.Cloud CDN, this high-performance solution helps boost your SEO scores by ensuring sites like Google and more can quickly index your content and help you get to the front page!
Final Thoughts
Whether you’re launching a website for your online gaming guild or you’re starting an online business, choosing what type of web hosting and where you want to host are the most important decisions you’ll make for the success of your site. WordPress Hosting is a great option for many people, however, be sure you aren’t limiting yourself by selecting a platform that only lets you run WordPress. The other important thing to consider is expandability. When your site grows, it’ll inevitably need more plugins. Are the plugins you want to use on an approved plugins list with your host?
Eliminate the worry of being locked in and enjoy the freedom and happiness that comes with a WordPress Hosting solution from ChemiCloud. Check out our WordPress Hosting plans today and see why we’re the right choice for your new WordPress site!
Do you have any questions about Shared hosting vs WordPress hosting? Chat with us today! We’re always happy to help.
