Choosing a proper hosting provider is an important decision and will ensure a smooth-running website without any hosting-related issues.
Recommended Hosting Providers
Often asked by our clients, we try to determine most appropriate hosting providers for them. Here is the list of hosting companies we generally recommend to our clients:
Please note, that while we receive a small commission if you choose one of the companies above, our recommendation is based solely on the quality of their services and not on the compensation itself.
What We Use Ourselves
Some clients ask us, what we use on our demo servers. This is a more advanced setup, as we are using a server management panel on top of a cloud VPS instead of a managed shared host.
We’re using the following stack:
- DigitalOcean (receive $10 by registering with this link) or Linode for virtual machines.
- RunCloud for a server management panel. Receive 1 month and 20 days of usage for $10 (Monthly Pro Plan) by registering with this link.
- Cloudflare for DNS management.
- KeyCDN for CDN. Receive $10 by registering with this link.
Resource Limited Hosting
On the other hand, based on our experience with customers that have had issues with their hosting environment (demo content import or image upload failure) we suggest you to avoid “starting/basic/shared hosting” packages from these companies, as they give you too little control and are very limited:
- GoDaddy
- HostGator
- 1&1
- iPage
If you use basic plans of those companies you can experience issues as demo content import failure, image upload errors, endless loading, incomplete page rendering, etc. All these problems are caused by the fact that the base host plans of these hosting providers do not meet the minimum Server Requirements to work with a modern WordPress theme.
Before You Choose
There are some specific hosting companies we do not recommend, however, any shared hosting plan can be a disaster for you regardless of the company you choose.
Before you pay for a hosting plan of a hosting provider, make sure that:
- You can increase memory limit.
- You can edit PHP configuration.
- Your server complies with theme requirements.
Memory Limit
Memory limit is an important factor when it comes to importing theme demo content and image upload but also when editing posts/pages and using your website on daily basis. Deficient memory limit will lead to various problems in your site, such as data processing and other related memory demanding tasks.
Restricted External URL Access
Some rare hosting providers do not allow external URL access (cURL) and thus it makes API servers unavailable to access. This will disable a few theme features and demo content import for Spotlight.
This is a rare case but asking your hosting provider if it allows external requests will help you with your decision.