Neil asks:

Why Should Hosting Be Optimized For WordPress Websites?

Hey Neil,

WordPress.com does not do standard hosting: http://vip.wordpress.com/our-services/#hosting they are very expensive.

You should also never use their free service, as those things are deleted regularly.

Self hosted wordpress sites are usually hosted on one of the big shared hosting companies – hostgator, bluehost, godaddy, etc…

Some of those do a better job than others, but for best performance you need cloud, vps or dedicated. Most cloud is not true cloud, true cloud performance costs big $$. So, VPS is usually the best option, I run one with hostgator, so I can monitor resource usage, and not have a server that binds up several times a day from overload during peak traffic. Many AZ Web Designers employ similar strategies to keep clients sites fast, it is no fun to design a site and then get questioned about the site speed because the server they are on slows to a crawl at peak time.

You can actually host it on any hosting, but Godaddy for instance has a terrible DB access with an old phpmyadmin interface, and their Cpanel is terrible compared to a tradtitional cpanel, everything takes longer. they also have odd security parameters that may mess with some of your plugins, such as contact form 7. I recommend, for a good experience, to get a server specialized toward wordpress, your site will run faster and with less bugs.

I’ll also throw in this tip – for faster performance seek out servers that have keep alive enabled, and support compression. Shared hosting is always less reliable, but if you must go shared go Bluehost or Hostgator. If there is another hosting company out there that can compare, I have not met them, and I have been through a lot. Good hosting is important to any Arizona SEO Company who knows the correlation between site speed and conversion!

Thanks,
Josh