How Should You Choose A Web Hosting Company In 2025?

A great web hosting service could be one of the most important elements in the success of any modern, functional website. But, which web hosting company should you choose to host your website in 2024 and beyond? Well, the answer to this question may not be as straightforward as one may think. Let us dig a little deeper so that you are ready to take your website to the next level in the year 2024 and beyond.

The best web hosting providers offer you a mix of speed, security, customer support, and functionality. A great web hosting service could help you improve your website SEO rankings and thus improve your sales significantly. You will find various options available out there to host your WordPress site. These include Free, Shared, VPS, Dedicated, and, Managed WordPress Hosting. Which option should you go for largely depends on the size of your website, budget considerations, and, of course, your short and long-term goals for the site.?

Choosing the best web hosting provider for the success of your website could be challenging especially if you are just starting with a brand new site and have no experience with what options are out there in the market. In this blog post, we plan to give you a detailed introduction to how you should choose a great web hosting company for your WordPress site.

Having worked in the high-end web hosting and data center industry for more than 25 years now, we know full well how important it is to choose a good web hosting company to host your site. Our goal is to share with you our deep understanding of the hosting industry and the considerations you should have while choosing a great web hosting service.

How should you choose a web hosting company when you are just starting an online business?  That is one of the most important questions you should be asking yourself. Most first-time buyers of hosting providers tend to choose the one that looks the cheapest. Believe it or not, we made the same mistake in the good old days. However, this approach is dangerous for the long-term health of your website. It may harm your online business in more than one way. So, what should you check before you decide on which company to choose as your web hosting provider?

We will restrict the following discussion to WordPress as almost 64% of today`s websites are built on this platform. We hope to discuss web hosting companies for other CMSs at a later date.

How Should You Choose A Web Hosting Company In 2024?

Technical Requirements For WordPress Hosting

Some of you may be surprised to know that WordPress is a very lightweight content management system (CMS). It does not have stringent technical requirements.  Almost all good web hosting companies would be able to meet these basic requirements.  However, meeting these simple technical requirements is only the first step in becoming a great web hosting company for WordPress websites.

• PHP version 7 or greater
• MySQL version 5.6 or greater OR
• MariaDB version 10.1 or greater
• HTTPS support (SSL)

As the WordPress CMS has become an extremely popular choice for over 64% of websites in the world, most hosting companies offer a one-click install of the CMS for their customers.

Many websites seem to discuss the issue of choosing a great web hosting company just by copying opinions from here and there. However, we, as one of the pioneering professionals in the website hosting industry who started our journey in this industry in 1995, have a different take on this issue. In the following lines, we discuss the most important factors you should keep in mind while choosing a great hosting provider for your WordPress-based website.

Factors You Should Consider While Choosing A Web Hosting Provider

How good is their customer support? Based on the 25 years of our experience working and dealing with various web hosting companies of all sizes and genres, we strongly believe that having excellent customer support is the most important asset a web hosting company could offer you.  Why? No matter how great they claim to be in terms of their server quality, speed, and functionality, no customer will be satisfied unless they get a timely response to any issues they may have with their website.

Believe it or not, issues do arise now and then once you start hosting a functional website with a hosting provider. Unfortunately, most of the hosting companies in the world score pretty low on this issue.  For them, the customer is unfortunately not that important. The profit comes first. Once an issue arises, most of these so-called big-mouthed web hosting providers will take a lot of time to reply to your inquiry. Even when they do respond, they will try to blame your developer or configuration issues instead of solving these issues on their own. But, how do you know the quality of their customer service unless you become their customer? Pretty easy to check.

Find their contact number and try to talk to their customer support staff. Do not try to talk to their sales staff.  It is important as sales staff are, generally, good at talking and convincing new customers. How quickly their customer support people pick up your calls will almost always determine how good their customer service is. You will be surprised to know that most of the web hosting companies you call will be difficult to reach via telephone chat or email support. Please try to call their support people at different times of the day to determine the quality of their service. If they take your calls quickly, it means they are good at providing support to their customers. They are serious about solving customers’ problems on time.  Otherwise, forget the company and look for another provider who offers better customer support.

Does Your Hosting Provider Offer Good Site Security As A Default?

In today`s complex world, site security is extremely important. You MUST never compromise your website security. Ask your potential web hosting provider whether they provide an SSL certificate for all the websites they host or you will have to purchase it separately. SSL certificates guarantee to encrypt your customer data and website content. The certificates make sure that nobody can penetrate your website systems illegally.  A secure website helps you improve your visitors’ trust in your site, and get better search rankings with all the major search engines of the day.

What Type Of Data Center They Are Hosting Your Site In?

Although it is not appropriate for us to mention the name of a web hosting company with which we have worked for a long time, I wanted to mention a story related to their customer support system. In my opinion, most of their customer support staff members were sincere in providing good support to their customers, unfortunately, they were using legacy hardware and performed very low in terms of security, speed, and functionality. I believe these support staff members wanted to help us resolve issues arising due to their poor server hardware. But, they were helpless as there was no way they could provide us with good support unless their company got rid of these legacy servers.

Which Web Hosting Provider Should You Choose?

Before we set out to name a web hosting company that could provide you excellent customer support while also offering state-of-the-art center facilities for your site,  we would like to mention that we will get a small share of their income if you decide to choose them as your web hosting provider. But, please remember that is not the reason we are recommending them as a viable choice for a great web hosting experience.

We have become their affiliate partners because they provide excellent customer support. They do not only reply to all your customer support requests almost within no time but, they also start working on the issues you point out to them. They do not waste your time as well as theirs trying to prove that the issue at hand is not their problem.

In most cases, they will inform you about issue resolution once they have fixed the problem. Generally speaking, they fix issues within 15 minutes after the matter was raised by you or any other customer.

Based on our experience, we can safely say that Siteground is the best hosting company for small and medium-sized businesses operating in all types of industries around the globe.  They have started hosting all their sites with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

They pick up customer calls almost immediately and then try to resolve whatever your issue may be within minutes.  That is the reason they are my favorite web hosting company for small to medium businesses anywhere in the world. I have dealt with dozens of web hosting companies. But no one provides customer service better than Siteground does. But, please let us know your opinion on this issue.

How did you choose a web hosting company to host your site on their servers? What problems did you face while choosing a web hosting company? We would love to hear your story.