Our Top 5 Recommended WordPress Hosting Companies | EP 731

Our Top 5 Recommended WordPress Hosting Companies

1. WP Zone (formerly Divi Space Hosting) 03:23
2. WP Engine 08:46
3. Flywheel 11:36
4. Siteground 12:26
5. Kinsta 13:51

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 David Blackmon: Welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast, my name is David Blackmon.

00:35 Tim Strifler: And i’m Tim Strifler

00:38 David Blackmon: I just wanted to try that something a little different, a little different voice intro. We’ll see how that sounds, i am not in the zen zone you know. “Therapeutic WordPress podcast” coming at you. Today we’ve got our top five recommended WordPress hosting companies, Tim has heard me say this a million times, but guess what? I’m gonna say it again because it’s so important and i cannot stress this enough. If you’re serious about your business you need to be serious about your hosting. Hosting is you think of a house, and its foundation. Is the most important thing of the house, build building process you want to make sure that your underpinnings are there. So that your house doesn’t come crumbling down and cave in hosting is the same thing. It is where your website lives on the internet. So if you’re going after the cheap two dollar hosting, my mom used to say “you get what you pay for”. And you’re definitely going to get what you pay for if you go with one of those cheaper hostings. And the new the good news is that all of these ones that we’re going to list with the exception of one are pretty reasonable. If you’re in business and you can’t afford a few hundred dollars a year, you need to get in a different business. You’re in the wrong business plain and simple because yeah and i don’t know why people look at hosting like oh it’s an expense that i just don’t want to pay because for whatever reason oh 300 a year. That’s insane come on man that this is the most important part of your website get real.

02:35 Tim Strifler: Yeah what i like to say is you shouldn’t pay more for coffee in one day than you do  for hosting for an entire month, right? Right like it’s like you go to Starbucks you’re gonna be paying you know for an average drink you know about five bucks, and people want to pay five dollars a month on hosting. And it’s crazy like that’s, like this is pretty crazy. It is the foundation of your of your business, your website and so it’s like having, a i’m gonna use another analogy, it’s like havinga car, right? It’s the engine of your car. You wouldn’t put a old rundown you know four-cylinder engine in a Ferrari, right? Your Ferrari is you know a fast car that deserves a fast engine, and it’s expensive car. So it’s like you wouldn’t want a really nice looking website running on really crappy hosting.

03:23 David Blackmon:  Right yeah absolutely. Okay so here are Tim and i’s top five recommended hosting companies. I’m gonna take number one, you may think i’m biased for saying it the only reason i’m talking about it is because i know it better than Tim does, and it’s WP Zone Hosting which is formerly known as Divi Space Hosting which is my company. We launched a hosting company about a year and a half ago and we we did it slowly. We didn’t announce it to the world, we just mainly did a lot of stuff. We have our own servers for our own internal use and we decided to just go ahead and build out a platform specifically for page builders and optimize it. Because there were no hosting companies at the time, and still that meet 100 of the criteria of all of the page builders. Some require php this, others require php that, you know. There are so many dang protocols on the hosting servers that these bigger hosting companies aren’t going to dedicate just two page builders well. Guess what? Page builders are all the rage they’re not going anywhere they’re only going to get more popular and bigger because they’re easy to use and a knucklehead like me can build a website with a page builder. Well that’s massive for small businesses, and do it yourself first. So the problem is that page builders tend to be bloated. They tend to be a little bit slower, load times on the website which can affect user experience. It can affect search engine rankings. So we wanted to really dial in page builder hosting. And we did. Guess what, we did it. Is the best page builder hosting on planet earth by far these other companies. I’m telling you i know you think i’m i’m biased but i’m and i’m preaching from the choir and I am, but go talk to our customers who surprisingly to me. I really thought the majority of our customers would be small “mom-and-pop do-it-yourselfers” but it is the agencies that have been flocking to us with 150 100 200 300 websites. And they can’t migrate them fast enough because this this hosting is so good and fast and they realize that. So they’re dealing with multiple sites every single day issues problems and i guess it makes sense. But do-it-yourselfers they only got one site they don’t have nothing to compare it to and they’ve got multiple sites that they’re running. It’s like “oh wow”. Um so you know we’re rebranding Divi Space Hosting to WP Zone. Is going to be the new site, uh we’re we’re rebranding here here this here first folks. We’re rebranding Aspengrovestudios.com to WP Zone, you know. It’s a WordPress company it just makes more sense and stuff so.

06:31 Tim Strifler: Yeah a couple things i’d like to add to that David. Um David’s right. Most hosting companies are not specifically tuned for page builders. Right like yes you can use paid build, but they didn’t specifically make the hosting for page builders. And if you think about it the engineers the server texts engineers that are building these servers and specking out how they want them to be and stuff. Most of these guys are like hardcore anti-page builder. Right they’re like “WordPress purists” right? And so they it’s like yeah we’ll let a page build a run on here, but it’s like they’re not going to go out of their way to make it an amazing experience and stuff. And so um, i love that. That’s what David and the team have done. Um and regarding i just want a second what David said. Regarding their customers that are are flocking these agencies that are flocking to Divi  Space host…. or i’m sorry WP Zone Hosting. I while, i have not tested it out yet and stuff which i plan to. I just haven’t gotten around to it um several people that i know and respect have and are raving about it. So Eric Dingler, he’s a uh one of my fellow panelists on on Divi Chat. Uh a podcast that that David started in 2016. Eric Dingler is, a he’s a business owner that I respect. He’s just super smart and just he gets it, and so he has been raving about WP Zone hosting. And  he’s someone that it’s like, if he says it’s good then it’s good. Because he doesn’t he’s not someone that’s going to be raving about something that he doesn’t truly love, or if he hasn’t tried other alternatives to really know what’s good. And so, and then several of our students that are in mine and David’s Divi Business Expert Course have moved a bunch of their sites over, and they’re raving about it as well. So it’s people that i know and trust and so again i need myself to set up a site and test it out and play with it and stuff it’s.

08:31 David Blackmon: So much cheaper than number two’s option where you’re at Tim it is way cheaper for you buddy for sure..

08:46 Tim Strifler:  So and that actually brings me to the the second one on our list, which is WP Engine. They were kind of one of the first ones in the managed WordPress hosting space. It used to be that like uh hosting companies would have any type of website and then, yes WordPress is one of the things you can run right, but now i kind of led by WP Engine and um Paigely, they’re they’re the two first manage WordPress hosting where they’re like “no no we only do WordPress hosting”. And so that was a big deal and then as we mentioned David’s taking it one step further. It’s like no no we only do page builder hosting. Well i guess technically that’s not true you could have an on-page builder, yeah we just specialize in it.

09:26 David Blackmon: We specialize in it! Which means, that if you don’t have a page builder and just a standard WordPress website, you’re running insanely lightning fast. Because we are running optimizing for the highest levels of php and stuff like this, which really matters for WordPress. And most hosting companies aren’t. They know that they’ve got backwards compatibility, they’ve got all this issues and they’re they have a lot more customers than we do, and maybe we’ll run into that issue one day. But guess what? Right now we’re not.

09:55 Tim Strifler: Yeah for sure! So yeah, i use WP Engine for my main website Divilife.com but i am on enterprise level dedicated server. I had just had to upgrade again recently i’m paying a fortune on a monthly basis for a very powerful server but i need it. Because it’s a e-commerce site, i get a lot of traffic. All of my customers when they’re activating their license key it’s pinging my database. So there’s a lot going on. I’ve been linking to a lot of third-party stuff and Facebook and Youtube and a lot . So a lot’s happening, so i would definitely not recommend the level of server that i have for most websites. WP Engine does have hosting for you know your average website and stuff. And it’s a lot more affordable than what i’m paying i don’t even want to know what i’m paying it’s disgusting.

10:43 David Blackmon: I know what he used to pay years ago when he moved over to that enterprise server and now he says he’s paying more i’m like man….

10:52 Tim Strifler: Yeah it’s probably. Probably double that what i told you, but they uh it’s very powerful and what i do like about it, is they do a good job on the management aspect. So they’ll reach out and say hey we noticed this like, you know uh you’re getting a large amount of requests from this, you know. Is this is this uh a bot or is this you know fraudulent, you know? Or whatever. So like they do a good job on the actual management aspect, and so it does pay for itself because i don’t have someone in-house that can uh you know manage the server and keep it secure and stuff like that. So it’s like i’m outsourcing that to them which is worth it. So um do you want me to keep talking about  the next?

11:33 David Blackmon: Keep going because you know Flywheel way better than I do.

11:36 Tim Strifler: So Flywheel is now owned by WP Engine, but they didn’t used to be. Um but they’re they’re run as a separate company and Flywheel WP Engine kind of caters more towards enterprise level. And that’s kind of where they’re focusing. Flywheel is focusing on the freelancer and the small agencies and so they have some really good plans, that are great for that. And like WP Engine they have a lot of the great hosting tools built in: automatic backups, one-click staging, additional security. They have caching built in. So they have a lot of stuff like that that’s built in. That’s great for WordPress sites and stuff. I’ve gotten some really great speeds out of both WP Engine and Flywheel so really fast. Reliable hosting um and good overall both of them have great uh support as well. So i definitely do recommend both of those and i’ll let you talk about the next one David.

12:26 David Blackmon:  Yeah and i think um one of the things you did that i you said something that jarred. You know all of those things we absolutely have with WP Zone as well. Um you know the caching and the one one click staging and all of that stuff is is built in to WP Zone Hosting as well. Next on our list is a Siteground. And it offers managed and unmanaged WordPress hosting. It’s probably more on the lower budget end of WordPress hosts but for a long time they got really really good reviews and stuff. And a lot of the WordPress community loves Siteground. It’s not as extensive as Flywheel, WP Engine, WP Zone it’s more of a traditional um host. Where yeah it’s more of a traditional host and stuff as opposed to a managed toast. Which means you’re going to be mostly managing and if you have a technical issue you’ll reach out to their support and stuff and they’ll help you and whatnot. 

13:27 Tim Strifler: Yeah and uh i i have psycho, and i have a bulk plan where we add all of our child themes. And it’s we had to transition over to their cloud hosting which will auto scale based off of bandwidth and traffic and stuff like that. So it is good but yeah as David mentioned it’s it’s more of a budget friendly, and so that’s why we put all of our child themed demos. Because we have a lot of child names right? And we don’t want to be paying per site on Flywheel or WP Engine. So the last one on our list is Kinsta. Kinsta is a more high-end agency level or even potentially enterprise level uh WordPress managed hosting. And it is expensive. It’s definitely pricey uh they are on the Google Cloud platform uh similar to Flywheel. And they they boast that they’re faster than Flywheel and faster than you know 95 of other hosting companies out there. I have not personally used them but the reason i recommend them is i have people that i know and trust that that do use them and recommend them. And so i feel comfortable talking about them in this regard. And i’ve been really impressed with their content that i do uh i’ll do a lot of you know searches for different things and they have a lot of really great blog articles answering those questions. Technical questions about hosting and performance and stuff like that. So they’re definitely uh know what they’re doing and they’ve earned my trust uh just from that alone. So while i haven’t used their hosting uh directly um i i do think they deserve to be on this list if you’re in the the mood for paying a lot for managed hosting. But again check out WP Zone, and i think you’ll get the absolute most for your money and the fastest hosting as well.

14:56 David Blackmon: Yeah awesome. And i do want to say this. I’m going to end this episode with this. There are a few names that you may notice that aren’t on this list that you may listen to this podcast. And you may be using and one of them may be Bluehost it may be Hostgator it may be Godaddy which are very large companies. Bluehost Hostgator are actually the same company. There is a big conglomerate called EIG and they go around buying up small awesome hosting companies and then turn them into crap. And they’re typically your super budget cheap hosting and most people gravitate towards this because they pay out the most highest affiliate commissions. So all of the internet marketers of how they make their money through affiliates are pushing these guys saying they’re the best they’re the best they’re the best.. and guess what? Take it from me the guy that started on Bluehost, they are not the best. Not even Hostgator. They are terrible and i mean twice. Yeah it’s it’s a hacker’s paradise and it’s just a terrible terrible platform. So um yeah they make our list because guess what? They suck. Uh Godaddy we still love you. They’re a great registrar and i think Godaddy has come a long ways. They just have a very proprietary platform that is very hard for a lot of non-developers and even developers to use. So that’s kind of why they’re not on our list. Um but you know they have people that are on it, that really like Godaddy and stuff. But they’re just, it’s a totally different animal than cpanel and which is traditional WordPress stuff. And they just have their own proprietary platform. And i’m gonna say it again, they all suck. So here we go. All right tomorrow we’ve got another great episode, the best ways to learn wordpress in 2022. Tim until tomorrow we’ll see you then.

17:10 Tim Strifler: Take care, bye.