The Developer's Guide to WordPress/Optimal Hosting
Hosting for speed
[edit | edit source]Not all hosts are created equal, and this can impact page load times. Page load times greatly impact the user experience. In general look for the following in a host:
- Good bandwidth
- Close to your users
- Serves content from fast storage, such as an SSD instead of an HDD.
Hosting for reliability and resiliance
[edit | edit source]Reliability is a key, and often overlooked attribute. Some services allow you to take advantage of features which help improve reliabiliy or at least help improve resiliance to failure.
- Automatic backups (Not a replacement for doing your own manual backups, but can be useful in a pinch)
- Geographically distributed
Take the load off with a cache
[edit | edit source]Wordpress is a dynamic CMS, which means it does significant backend processing. For pages which are commonly accessed but do not change, a common practice is to use a cache to speed retrieval. One common solution is to use the open source varnish cache, which has a numbler of existing plugings.[1]