Best WordPress Hosting Solutions for Security in 2021
WordPress is one of the most popular CMS platforms available today. This is because WordPress can be used by literally everyone, from content creators without website building knowledge to web developers who wish to customize and tweak their websites manually using code.
Once you pick WordPress for your site building, the next step needs to be taken. WordPress needs to run somewhere, and that’s where hosting solutions come into play. In this article, we’ll analyze many solutions to host your WordPress so you can pick the best solution fitting your needs.
Picked evaluation metrics:
- WordPress minimum requirements fitting
- Backup
- Ease of setup/use
- Speed
- Security
- Pricing
Strattic
Strattic is a service literally meant for WordPress and strongly oriented towards security with their static and headless WordPress hosting. If you don’t know what a Headless CMS is, it’s a way to use WordPress as a back-end for content and building interface statically — Strattic does the “talking” to the WordPress back-end via API. This allows you to improve performance and security because a static version of a website is much faster than a website render. Using a static website also means that the user never makes direct contact with the database.
This obviously doesn’t mean that you won’t have a database or developers can’t host stuff like e-commerce websites on it. It means that if you need to host this kind of service, your site will use specialized APIs created for that function, which Strattic integrates into their ecosystem. For each plan they offer, you’ll have access to very important integrated services likeWPML for multi-language support, Contact Form 7 and Gravity Forms, Algolia Search (that’s blazingly fast), and AMP support, which may give a boost to your SEO.
The prices are the other side of the coin: the basic service (intended for small businesses) starts from $45/month, which becomes $37.5/month if you bill it annually. In the basic service, they also include a CDN, which is available only in certain countries, a staging area, and AWS SSL (reaffirming their focus on security). If you want to add more WordPress users, you have to pay more. The basic service only includes 1 user. So, if you have a small organization with copywriters, designers, and other employees, and you want to provide different access to each user, you have to upgrade to the Business Plan ($250/month or $208/month if you bill annually).
In conclusion, this service is highly recommended if you have a strong focus on speed and security and you have a big budget for your online presence.
Bluehost
Trusted and recommended by WordPress.org, BlueHost offers special prices for WordPress users — starting from €2.41/month and up to €4.05/month (VAT Excluded). So, for example, you’re going to open a business, and you want the best package. They start from €4.05/month, and you have to pay in advance for 36 months (30-day money-back guarantee). This means you’ll pay €145.71, and after 36 months, you’ll pay €13.89/month plus domain cost.
They have everything you need to host your WordPress: they give you unlimited disk space, one free domain (for the first year), automatic backup, free SSL, and a WordPress installation tool. This package also holds some gems that WordPress lovers and power users will probably know: SSH access, WP-CLI, and a staging environment. Other mention-worthy features are website caching, free CDN, spam protection, analytics dashboard, and automatic updates.
For novice users, features like cache management, CDN, or analytics may seem appealing. But I think power users prefer having full control over these aspects. Concentrating caching and CDN into one package may help because then you know where to look if you’re having caching problems. On WordPress, you may cache at so many levels that handling it by yourself will significantly improve it. Similarly, auto-updates aren’t always good: if you use custom plugins relying on a specific feature that gets deprecated or removed, your site will immediately die.
BlueHost simplifies WordPress management greatly, meaning that an inexperienced user can just jump in, pay, and use the service without worrying about anything except the content and aesthetics.
GoDaddy
GoDaddy is another well-known hosting provider that offers lots of services and plans for the web, including WordPress custom plans. Their WordPress custom plans are four. We will analyze the Ultimate and the eCommerce plans, that start at €9.75/month and €21.95/month, respectively (if you pay in advance for two years), or cost €18.29/month and €28.05/month, respectively.
Their price strategy is really engaging. You’ll notice that after two years of service on the ultimate tier, your price almost doubles. Comparing the Ultimate and the eCommerce tier, they both have the following features in common: they both offer a free SSL certificate, a free domain, and business emails (only for the first year, you have to pay for it after that).
These tiers also offer free backup every 90 days and daily malware scanning (they’ll install Sucuri for scanning, this is a huge plus). But backups need to be manually enabled and configured. You can also avail of their SEO Optimization feature by installing Yoast on your WordPress. I don’t consider this an added value; there are lots of SEO plugins for WordPress, so you probably manage this by yourself. Like BlueHost, they offer a staging area that is a convenient place to test your WordPress privately. You may also notice that they’re strongly focused on security: as I said before, they’ll scan your website daily using Sucuri, and they will also clean malware for free if an attacker gets into your website.
The real difference between the Ultimate and the eCommerce plans is that, on the eCommerce plan, you can get WooCommerce installed (really not a plus for someone who knows the WordPress environment) and access to WooCommerce Premium Extensions. The latter is the real value addition of this package, in my opinion.
In conclusion, GoDaddy offers good service for their price. Their price strategy aims to get you in and then go high after the initial promotion period. Their service strongly focuses on security, meaning that you won’t need to worry about malicious attacks on your website — they’ll handle it for you (but please, remember to use strong passwords). The cons of GoDaddy are that every service needs to be configured, and not every user knows how to do that. But they provide adequate help for that.
Contabo
Contabo is a hosting provider that offers a variety of services for low, competitive prices. Their services aren’t focused on or strictly optimized for WordPress, but they offer services at a price you cannot ignore. I threw them in as a DIY service because, due to their low-price VPS, you can build yourself a solution optimized for WordPress while saving money and getting great performances.
So, consider setting up a custom VPS, which is priced at €4.99/month and includes a 4 cores vCPU, 8GB of RAM, and 200GB of SSD with 1 snapshot. You can add Plesk Web Admin Edition for just €6.99/month and 100GB of FTP Storage for backup at €3.99/month. If you aren’t familiar with Plesk, you should know that it’s strongly focused on security and also has a WordPress Toolkit that provides you an optimized environment for WordPress with literally zero setup time.
You can also enable periodic scans for malware using the Watchdog integration that interacts with Rootkit Hunter and other Plesk integrated services. This way, you can get a high-performance environment and a web panel to manage all the services around your WordPress. But if you face any problem related to your VPS OS, like some service is stuck on execution or something similar, you should manually fix it using tools like SSH. So this solution should be intended for advanced users.
Verdict: Which Should I Choose?
Well, every service analyzed before is really powerful and a use case scenario was considered for each service, they perform amazingly well, they’re all secure, in different ways and gives you a lot of add-ins.
If I have to pick just two as “best-case scenario” I would pick GoDaddy for newbie users who are just starting WordPress or who don’t want to lose time on optimization or configurations, and Strattic for power users who care strongly about performance, security, and optimization.
Making these choices, you will always have great performance, a big security focus and your WordPress will always be optimized to give your users the best experience!
