Best Wordpress Hosting of 2019
My Journey Towards Finding The Best Web Hosting of 2019
Learn how I speed up Wordpress site and reduced server response time with the help of one of the fastest Wordpress hosting companies around.
In a hurry? Tired of reading the whole long article? Try the best Wordpress hosting for free by clicking below.
If you don't have time to go through all the details, you can, of course, skip it and go straight to the best host that will speed up your website without doing much work from your end, it's actually a set and forget host that takes a few hours from your end to setup everything.
What's great about Cloudways is they aren't a typical web hosting company. They only manage barebone servers from server providers like Digital Ocean, Linode, Amazon AWS, Google cloud and VULTR. If you wanted to get yourself a cloud, dedicated or VPS server but don't want to go through the pain maintaining it, Cloudways is your answer.
I was tired of shared hosting providers and wanted a server of my own.
They are probably the cheapest managed cloud server providers out there, the closest one I figured was $30+ per month.
Click at the button below to Check out Cloudways. You can also try it for free to see how good it is before you start transferring your sites.
What you get with Cloudways:
- Best Wordpress hosting
- Your own managed cloud server not shared with anyone else, no CPU, RAM and disk space is shared with anyone else
- Peace of Mind
- Super fast site load time and high GTmetrix, PageSpeed and Pingdom scores.
- Reduced server response time
- Free SSL certificate
- Pay as you go (you only have to pay for the hours you have used their servers so say you've signed up at 25th of April, you'll only pay for 5 days. You won't have to pay for the whole month)
- NO CPU SECONDS LIMITATION!
- 1GB server is good for startups and mid-range sites (up to 25k visitors, I mean visitors, not CPU seconds)
- plenty of room to grow
- Clean interface
- Choose any cloud barebone server from: Digital Ocean, Linode, Amazon AWS, VULTR, Google Cloud
- Cloudways is a managed barebone cloud server platform which means they manage the server for you, you won't have to manage the server yourself
If you want to have your own Linode or Digital Ocean server up and running but don't want all the hassle of managing a barebone server, Cloudways is what you should look for.
If you have time and patience, I would recommend you to go through the whole post so you can see what I had to go through to find the best web hosting for my Wordpress sites.
NOTE
My Frustrating Story
Continue reading if you find yourself asking, why is my Wordpress site so slow? How to reduce server response time? Why is Wordpress backend so slow? Wordpress admin so slow? If you need Wordpress performance optimization or Wordpress speed optimization, you should get the fastest Wordpress hosting, a fast web hosting will solve all the problems mentioned above.
Continue reading if you want to find out how to speed up Wordpress site.
I have been with a few popular web hosting companies including Bluehost, Hawkhost, Siteground, Knownhost and a few other web hosting services. In this post I am going to share my experience during my stay with some of the famous web hosting sites.
Why did I share my experience here?
I see people in forums, question and answer sites and in Facebook groups keep asking "which one is the best Wordpress hosting", "which cheap web hosting should I go with", "Should I go with a dedicated server hosting", "Which one is the best web hosting", "which web hosting services should best fit my site", "how to speed up my Wordpress site", "how to speed up Wordpress", "how to lower CPU usage" "how to reduce server response time"?
I could see all the pain and frustration, as I relate. I thought I would be better off creating an all in one web resource so anyone who’s looking for the best web hosting and speed up Wordpress site can benefit from my experience.
Hostgator
I have signed up with Hostgator as I thought they are the best. I was wrong in so many ways, I don’t even know where to begin! I was hosting a few Wordpress sites with their shared and dedicated servers and it has been disaster after disaster since then. My Hostgator was running so slow.
Issues after issues like: one day my site wasn’t loading because of their PHP downtime, the other day the site was loading real slow, contacted customer support only to have them reply me: ‘you need to disable some of your plugins’!
My site only has 9 plugins, none of them are CPU/Ram hungry. I don’t understand how running basic plugins like Yoast SEO, WP Statistics, Akismet, Smush, WP-optimize, W3 Total Cache can max out CPU, Ram or PHP limits!
Figured I wasn’t the only one! Here’s a screenshot from another customer complaining,
I was done with them then and there!
Moved to Bluehost
Moved from Hostgator to Bluehost. My sites were loading anywhere from 4.5 seconds to 7.8 seconds within the US. Ranking fell from 1st page to 3rd! Tried so many optimization techniques and plugins but no use!
Figured Bluehost and Hostgator are run by the same ‘EIG’ company! They are sister concerns!
So my search for a new host begun once again. Heard good stuffs about Knownhost and decided to move all my sites there.
Moved to Knownhost
Knownhost had given me some peace of mind for the time being. Started with their SSD vps package, everything looked good until the first downtime. Support told me my site was reaching the PHP connection limits and needed an upgraded package! I was so determined to make Knownhost work for me that I have bumped up the ram/cpu limits only to find out the site went down again because of exceeding ram usage!
I had to keep upgrading RAM/CPU and once I ran out of allocated ram for that package I had to bump up the package to a higher one. I was paying $70 a month and then the dreaded CPU/memory limit exceeded message happened again for a simple site that had 50–70 visitors a day with no complicated plugins or scripts running whatsoever!
Siteground
I was out researching for the best, cheap web host again for my sites. After almost a week of research and going through the user experiences on different forums, I came to decide in between Siteground and Cloudways.
Siteground looked good, Siteground reviews were ok. Some of their users are happy with them. Customer support is good, answered all my questions fast. I have almost signed up with Siteground but, what set me off was their CPU limits. I have a bad history of CPU limits so I didn’t want to go that route again.
There were some real scary reviews as well. Check this Yelp page for example: https://www.yelp.com/biz/siteground-com-alexandria
Siteground CPU seconds limit user complaints
I was desperately in need of some peace of mind
So since I was only left with Cloudways, I had spent a day learning everything about Cloudways. Since I have suffered a lot already, didn’t want to make any more mistakes. No one likes to spend a day moving the sites from one host to another only to find out you need to move to another host again.
Running with Cloudways
So I signed up a free trial account. I was confused between DigitalOcean and Linode VPS servers and wanted to try out before settling down with either one. Since my idol site is running with Linode, I figured why not?
I have chosen Linode 1GB cloud VPS server. they had the server up and running within a few hours. Spent some time transferring my site from the old host to Cloudways. The transfer was easy, installed Wordpress in the server from their control panel which took only a few clicks. Installed Cloudways Wordpress migration plugin in my site and migrated the files to the new installation in Cloudways server.
You can also check out the other features of Cloudways here.
Pointed DNS to Cloudways and my site was up and running. Since I’m not a Wordpress expert, I had contacted the chat support to do the optimization for me. That took a few more hours. Once everything was up and running I did the first thing everyone else would do. Checked my stats with Pingdom, GTMetrix, and Pagespeed Insights.
Here are my results:
I saw immediate rank increase from position 33 to position 12 for my main keyword within a day without doing any SEO! Amazing!
All this without doing any optimization on my site, just with the help of Breeze cache plugin provided by Cloudways. With some more optimization of my theme and some javascript/image optimization, I can score a perfect 100 for mobile as well but I don’t think I need to. These are very good scores. My site is already doing better than 99% of the sites worldwide.
Besides, tons of the giant sites score far blow than this. Let’s check CNN.com for an example:
Update: Cloudways server statistics after two weeks of continuous use:
Here are the server stats, screenshots taken after two weeks of continuous server run time.
Note: no server downtime experienced meanwhile.
Cloudways web hosting Linode server CPU, RAM and Disk usage stats:
Update: April, 2019
Note: No server downtime experienced so far. My Linode server is performing the same super fast. Life with Cloudways is so much better! No issue occurred running from day1. The sites always load the same fast whenever I check.
I didn't need to increase CPU ram or anything, I'm running the same 1GB Linode server from day 1 and I can see I have plenty of room to grow!
I love Cloudways so much that I have ordered a second 1GB ram Linode server for another site. That server is running superbly as well.
I wanted to add the screenshots but that would make the article way bigger so I have only decided to add the newest screenshots. Please check out the current shots below.
PageSpeed Score increased without me doing anything!
GTMetrix Looks great
Pingdom Scores
Server Stats
Cloudways user reviews
Some of the user reviews on different sites
Here are the things I like about Cloudways:
- Super fast loading time. My site loads blazing fast. Below 1 minute load time anywhere in the US, under 2 seconds of load time worldwide.
- Very easy and clean server interface.
- Freedom to choose from different server provider’s, the list includes DigitalOcean, Linode, Amazon Web Services, Vultr and Google Cloud. This is my most favourite feature of Cloudways.
- If you know how to manage a server you can purchase directly from the providers but most of us aren’t that tech savvy. Cloudways manages the server for me while I focus on managing my sites.
- No downtime in the middle of the night because you have no clue what went wrong!
- Support is good, although a bit slow sometimes but they are usually quick to respond and solves problems real quick.
- Low server resources needed than the competition. My sites get about 500-800 visitors a day and I am with the 1GB Linode server. My RAM usage are around 50 to 60%, I have 14 GB free out of 20 GB. And CPU usage does not go more than 60 %. Plenty of room for my sites to grow in their server.
- No excessive RAM usage or CPU limitations detected.
- One of my high performing servers with Cloudways only costs $12 a month.
- The peace I have in my mind being with Cloudways is priceless for me.
- Cloudways has built-in server backup
- You can get a free trial account, get a server running and see the speed foryourself
What I don’t like about Cloudways:
Like everything, Cloudways have their drawbacks but the drawbacks are so small compared to the other providers and the speed improvement your site gets with Cloudways is priceless.
- No C panel. Previously it was a deal breaker for me but I thought I would give Cloudways a try since I wanted that Linode server so bad. Yes there was a learning curve but it only took me a few hours to figure out. I do not regret a second since I have taken the decision. I no longer Crave for C panel because, well I can do everything with Cloudways control panel.
- Support is slow at times but they make sure the problems are fixed. I haven't needed any major server problems fixed, my queries were random questions related to Wordpress.
- Hosting emails cost $0.89/email per month. But since I have a few emails, that’s no issue for me. Cloudways addon handles my emails just fine, no issue to be noted yet.
My experience with Cloudways is superb so far, no downtime issue. Cloudways is performing better than any other web host I’ve been with previously. I’ve moved all my sites to Cloudways. All the sites are performing superb, noticed rank increase already. There’s plenty of headroom for my sites to grow.
I finally have my peace of mind I always looked for. Yay! :’D
Don't wait, get a free trial account and see for yourself. You can cancel anytime if you don't like it. I'd suggest you stick with them, the pros far outweigh the cons.