Can Your WordPress Host Do This? | EP 797

Can Your WordPress Host Do This?

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 Tim Strifler: Hey everyone welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast i’m Tim Strifler and today we are talking about hosting, can your WordPress host do this. Now hosting is a hot topic there’s so many hosting companies out there that are spending a fortune on marketing and advertising to help acquire customers and it’s very competitive, and um the reason is once you find a good host that you’re happy with you generally stick with them and you continue paying month after month year after year. Because you need a host to have websites online, and so uh WordPress hosting is big business so uh a couple of things now some people might feel differently but there are some features that i look for as minimum features when i’m choosing a host for my own website’s, product websites, client sites, whatever. It may be and so i wanted to discuss some of those because now, uh because hosting is so competitive, so many of them have copied each other to make sure they all have you know the features that their other other competitors have and that sort of thing so it’s kind of like if they don’t have these minimum features then don’t bother checking them out my opinion at least. So for example the first one is automated backups that should be standard your WordPress host should automatically back up your website daily no matter what without you having to turn it on. It just happens you sign up for account automated daily backups boom that should be like bare minimum right now. I’m not saying you shouldn’t install a backup plug-in and do some things yourself additionally just to have some redundancy when it comes to backups, but your hosts should be backing up your site. So um, so backups is number one. Number two is uh one click restore. So you should be able to restore one of those daily automated backups but then you should also be able to create your own backups. Right, so if you’re going to do some updates do a quick backup something goes wrong, one click restore so that again should be standard. So uh and then the third thing that kind of goes along with those first two is staging you should have a staging site that with one click you can either create a staging site or copy the current live site to the staging environment so that you can do tests and stuff like that so you know for little things i might just do it on the live site but if i’m going to be doing some big things my website gets a lot of traffic. So i don’t want to do those on the live site i’ll do them on the staging site first, and if everything’s good then i’ll i’ll do them on the live site, and then um so you should be able to have one click staging. And uh yeah that should be a standard feature before you even consider a WordPress host in my opinion. So um going over the list again uh automated backups without having to do anything uh one click restore one click staging those should be minimum features beyond that server level caching. Right so uh caching is super important and i still use caching plugins to do things, but um you should have caching at the server level, and and should have the ability to turn on things like object caching and stuff like that. I’m not going to get into the all the complexities of the different types of caching but um you should have server level caching installed at the server level and it should be automatic. You don’t have to do anything um and then you should be able to purge that cache too. So yeah so we have backups we have uh one click restore we have one click staging we have um uh caching and then the next thing is additional security. Right, so a good WordPress host is going out of their way to protect their sites right whether that’s through brute force attacks that’s kind of bare minimum or they’re doing some other things with firewalls and stuff like that. But they should be protecting your site it’s in their best interest to protect their site So a lot of the cheaper hosts they don’t really care they’re going to cram your site on with 100 other websites a few hundred other websites and one of them gets hacked they’re all going to get hacked. But you know whatever you can go and pay to get it unhacked and get it cleaned up all that malware. But a good WordPress host is going to do everything in their power to prevent that from ever happening. I’ve shared my story before where i was using a crappy host and i got my site got hacked i got malware even though i had locked down did everything, right it was using the top security plug-in with everything turned on. I got hacked because uh of the host someone else got hacked basically and so then the malware spread over to to my site and then the same thing happened again, i created an additional account made sure it’s a completely different server different ip address, but it was with the same host and the same thing happened again months later. Different type of malware again. I did everything right and i had i had paid i think site lock. A lot of money for them to clean up and get all the malware off my site.  So once switching to WP Engine my preferred and recommended host, have never got hacked or had malware since then. So security should be done at the website level but should be done at the server level primarily. So um that’s that’s it so in my opinion your hosting company should have those things as a bare minimum. They should be taking care of security for you they should be taking care of cashing for you they should be taking care of uh backups for you they should be taking care of staging and restoring and they should have all those tools built in which is going to save you so much time and so much money, even if you’re spending a little bit more per month on your WordPress host. So it’s super important hopefully you found this helpful let me know leave a comment whether you’re watching on youtube you’re listening to the blog post um and honestly we don’t do this very often but if you could leave us a review five stars if you think we deserve it uh wherever you listen to this podcast, that would be awesome, we would greatly appreciate that thank you so much. Um until tomorrow see you then take care bye