We are often asked what WordPress hosting requirements we recommend for multi-vendor marketplaces.
There are a lot of variables that go into answering this question. Thus, we thought it best to outline the criteria that we use when selecting WordPress hosting. Any great hosting company should meet these conditions as a standard feature of their plans.
So, if you’d like to learn more about key WordPress hosting requirements for your online shopping hub, read on!
WordPress Hosting VS. Traditional Web Hosting
Before we discuss WordPress hosting requirements, we want to outline the main differences between WordPress hosting and traditional web hosting.
Basically, WordPress hosting is hosting that is specifically tailored to WordPress. Typically, this means that the service provider has configured the hosting stack to be performance-tuned for WordPress and sometimes WooCommerce.
Dedicated managed WordPress hosting companies have been around for quite a while now. Usually, they’re on the higher end of the monthly charges compared to normal hosting.
The other major difference is that WordPress hosting usually isolates each site and allocates dedicated resources.
You can acquire cheap yet effective shared hosting for $6.95 a month. On the other hand, big hosting companies will cram hundreds of sites onto a single host and squeeze as much value out of you as possible – all while providing no useful services beyond a barely usable hosting solution.
7 WordPress Hosting Requirements To Consider
Here are 7 WordPress hosting requirements that a hosting provider must meet to ensure that your marketplace runs smoothly.
1. Easy Of Use
The first might be obvious but it has to be said: the WordPress hosting solution should be easy to use.
Far too many affordable hosts will use a default cPanel or Plesk control panel and leave you to your own devices. In contrast, a great WordPress host will usually create their own custom dashboard experience. This is a tell-tale sign that you’re dealing with WordPress experts.
These dashboards make it easy to add new sites or migrate your existing site. They provide clear statistics about your site’s health, traffic, and more.
The key difference between a custom dashboard and a generic web hosting dashboard is that the former only includes the features that you need. In short, it doesn’t offer you hundreds of unnecessary options that can just lead to confusion.
2. Staging Sites
We’ve mentioned staging sites in a couple of our previous articles. This is because we believe that they are key to any decent WordPress hosting setup.
You need staging sites to test all updates to your plugins and themes. In addition, they ensure that any new features you plan on introducing to your marketplace have been rigorously tested.
Great WordPress hosts will include staging sites for free. Furthermore, they’ll make said sites extremely easy to create or destroy. Thus, if your hosting company doesn’t provide staging sites, you should look for another host.
3. Backups
Everyone should be backing up their data. For instance, you should find secure storage for the data on your personal devices, computers, servers, websites, and everything that you need to run your business.
Data can be compromised by all sorts of issues, including malware, hacking, user error resulting in accidental website damage or data deletion. At any rate, if you ever experience any problems with your website, you need to be able to quickly recover your data and continue working.
The best WordPress hosting companies will always provide backups for your sites. While they usually do this onsite, some will also provide a way for you to get a copy of your backups in your own storage systems. This ensures that if there is a critical issue with your hosting company, you always have a copy of your site.
Any hosting company can fall victim to critical issues. Thus, the best companies test backups from time to time. Furthermore, they retrieve stored data for free, so if your hosting company charges you to recover their “free backup,” move along.
4. Security Scanning And Fixes
Security is paramount when running your multi-vendor marketplace.
To prevent hacking attempts, the propagation of malware, and other concerns, you must ensure that your site is secure at all times. Thankfully, you can do this by sourcing your plugins from their original developers, keeping your site updated, and conducting regular performance checks.
Almost all good WordPress hosting companies provide free security scanning to ensure that your site is clean. If there are any issues, they are reported to you in a timely fashion. Some newer WordPress hosting companies now provide free fixes if your site gets hacked or infected with malware. This is a great addition and something you should seriously consider.
5. Great Support
Great customer support can be the difference between a passable host and an amazing one. Technical support is critical for keeping your business going and your multi-vendor marketplace operating. In addition, support should be available 24/7 and have great response times.
Depending on the level of assistance that you require, you should be able to contact someone quickly and have your issue resolved in a satisfying manner.
In addition, make sure you have an easy-to-use dashboard so that you can obtain extra metrics. A lot of the time, the problem might actually be on your end, so it’s a good idea to have monitoring systems in place.
6. Monitoring Systems
If you’re considering a WordPress hosting company, make sure that it comes with great monitoring systems. You should be able to use a dahsboard and external status pages to easily access relevant data. This allows you to quickly determine if your hosting company is having an issue or if the problem is local.
Moreover, it’s a good idea to activate some of your own monitoring systems. You can achieve this by using free services like Uptime Robot, which provides you with basic information about your site. In its simplest form, uptime monitoring will tell you if your site is up or not.
Other services, such as Robot Ninja, can monitor your checkout process and ensure that it’s working at al times.
7. Performance
Site performance is key to providing a great experience for your customers and vendors. If your site is slow, you’ll suffer in search, conversions, and all other aspects of your site.
Thus, you should ask the host that you’re considering for sample sites that they’re hosting. This will allow you to judge the kind of response and load times you get when navigating the sites.
It’s well known that a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load will have serious issues retaining customers, making sales, and more. Thus, you should look at WordPress hosting companies that use big cloud providers as their main infrastructure.
The larger cloud providers include Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, Vultr, and Digital Ocean. These are currently the world’s most popular hosting providers for the world. However, there are more regional systems that can also work exceptionally well for you.
Conclusion
Before we start recommending specific WordPress hosting companies, we wanted to provide a solid set of criteria you can use to select your host. It’s important that you pick the host that best meets your particular WordPress hosting requirements.
To recap, the following 7 criteria should help make that decision a little easier:
- Ease of use
- Staging sites
- Backups
- Security scanning and fixes
- Great support
- Monitoring systems
- Performance
We always recommend only considering dedicated WordPress hosting companies. They may be costly, but by preventing a ton of problems, you end up saving more, overall.
Would you like to know more about WordPress hosting requirements that you should look into? Reach out to us and let us know; we’d be happy to hear from you!