Hosting often plays an important, if not crucial, role for any website. Sometimes the entire business depends on whether your website is online or down. Your website performance, your Google ranking, and consequently the amount of traffic, i.e. your potential customers depend on where and how your website is hosted. That is why we want to cover the main types of hosting and their basic criteria which must be considered when choosing a hosting provider. We hope today's information will clear things up.
Shared Hosting
The most widespread WordPress hosting is shared hosting. "Shared" means you share your website server capacities and resources with other websites hosted on the same server. And this seems to be the most considerable drawback of this hosting type. If something happened on someone else's website, your website can greatly suffer and experience downtime or slow response time. On the other hand, as all the space is shared among other accounts, the cost for it is low and affordable compared to other hosting options. It varies from $3 to $20 per month.
Other pros of shared hosting are:
- cPanel access, which allows you or your technical support to easily manage your website, domain, and emails
- Email accounts option is usually included for free with your hosting plan and you can create email boxes for your business easily.
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Best Shared Hosting Providers:
1. SiteGround
2. Hostgator
3. Dreamhost
4. A2 Hosting
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Shared Hosting will work for a small-sized real estate website with up to 100-500 listings and not great traffic. If you're going to create a WordPress real estate website with MLS listings, the next hosting plan will be better solution for you.
VPS or Virtual Private Server
VPS hosting is a step forward. Compared to Shared Hosting, VPS is more expensive ($20-$150 per month) but it is more flexible, secure, and extensive in features as well. The virtual environment of VPS imitates a dedicated server as in this case you don't share your server with others. The entire piece of the server belongs to you. Your website will have more security features, higher performance, more flexibility in settings and management. It also allows you to scale and grow your website smoothly adjusting the resources and pricing accordingly.
On the other hand, VPS hosting requires at least some basic knowledge about security and server settings as now everything is under your control.
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Best VPS Hosting Providers:
1. WP Engine
2. A2 Hosting
3. Host Gator
4. DreamHost
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VPS hosting is the best solution for MLS listings real estate websites and big-sized portals. Estatik customers who built real estate websites on WordPress using our Estatik Premium that imports in average 1-5k listings are hosted on VPS and not Shared Hosting.
Managed WordPress Hosting
The main difference of Managed WP Hosting from the two above is that this type of hosting provider specialize only in WordPress and hosts only websites built on WordPress CMS. As they do not mess with any other platforms but only with WordPress, you can be sure you get the most knowledgeable and helpful technical support. This is the best option for website owners who don't want to worry about any technical part of their website maintenance and want to have top-notch support, security, and an up-to-date website. Managed WP Hosting companies will take care of backups, updates, security checks, and much more.
However, the price differs considerably. It costs a lot more than Shared Hosting. Managed WP Hosting is also limited in management and settings that you might want to change. For example, you can't install everything you want on your WordPress website because it may affect security and speed. You must be allowed to install and activate WordPress themes and plugins. You don't have also cPanel or FTP access to all of your website folders and files.
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Best WordPress Managed Hosting Providers:
1. Kinsta
2. WP Engine
3. Pantheon
4. DreamPress
5. Cloudways
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Even though WordPress Managed Hosting is rather expensive, it is a reliable hosting choice for a WordPress real estate agency website.
We would recommend to study the issue thoroughly and deeply before making the final choice. Posts and examples from other sources like this one>> https://wpglob.com/the-5-fastest-and-cheapest-wordpress-hosting-services-compared-2021/ can also be helpful.
The infographics below illustrate all pros and cons of shared, VPS, and managed WordPress hosting. We hope this post will help you to make the right choice.
The post Best Hosting for a Real Estate Website: Shared, VPS or Managed WordPress? appeared first on Estatik.