Hosting

The most important thing you need to get your website online

Hosting your website is essential to get your website online. There are many hosting companies, you can host your website anywhere. But some hosting companies specialize in hosting a WordPress website. They optimized their servers for WordPress. Because there is so much to choose from, we will only concentrate on the basics for WordPress hosting.

Hosting companies offer different account consoles like cPanel, DirectAdmin or something else. This is your account page, where you can manage all your settings and install WordPress (if your host did not already do that for you).

Costs

Hosting is not free. You will need to sign up with a hosting company and pay a monthly or annual fee to them to use the server space where your website will be published. You hire a piece of their server to host your website. Prices can vary from very cheap to very expensive, also depending on your requirements, budget and wishes to host your website. You can get hosting from about € 5,- a month and prices can go up to € 80,- a month or more. Having that said, most WordPress hosting is not that expensive but getting hosting is vital to have your website online.

Domain name registration

Next to hosting, register your domain name is also an essential part of setting up your website. You can either do this with a specialized domain name registrar or when signing up for a hosting account. We advise to register your domain name when signing up for hosting.

With almost all hosting companies you will get your domain name the first year for free. After that you are likely to pay an annual extra fee for your domain name to keep it registered. More information on domain names and how to register them without hosting will follow soon.

In most cases registering your domain name is an event that will occur when signing op for your first hosting account.

Managed or do-it-yourself hosting

In the world of hosting, there are many differences. We focus on WordPress hosting. You can go for a managed WordPress hosting or do-it-yourself hosting (like we do). A managed WordPress hosting does a lot for you: install WordPress, make back-ups daily, security and updates, etc. With this kind of services you will pay a little more subscription fee.

A do-it-yourself hosting will most likely be less expensive, but as it states: you have to do everything yourself. This makes that you will pay less for hosting but it also gives you more to look after and take care of.

Quality hosting

What to look for when getting WordPress hosting? You want a hosting company that has excellent support for if you get stuck with something. Preferable support provided by phone, chat and e-mail. Not all hosting companies have all these possibilities to get in contact with their support department as for example: our own hosting company only provides support through e-mail.

What to look for:

• You want to be sure that the server uptime is sufficient so that your website never goes down when there is  problem at the hosting side that makes a server go down.
• You want a host to provide you free SSL security for your website, either so that you can activate it yourself or that it comes automatically installed with your hosting account and domain name.
• You want your website to load quickly and a hosting that provides this speed
• Excellent support options

Hosting companies

We have created an overview of specialized WordPress hosting companies that get good customer ratings and reviews. We have divided the hosting companies in languages as Blogging Rebels is a community for Dutch and English speaking people. Price ranges for the hosting companies listed here are wide from very cheap to very expensive. Also, it is possible to register with a hosting company that is outside your country. For example, you live in The Netherlands but you want to sign up with Siteground, that is not a problem at all. Just be aware that Siteground in this example only offers English language support. Some companies like xel.nl only offer native language support, in this case it is Dutch. For all hosting we advise starting with their cheapest subscription as a beginner to WordPress and making your first blog website. But of course you are free to choose what you want.

You can also go with hosting that is not on our list. It is really up to you to choose a hosting company that suits your needs and budget. However, we do advice to look for hosting that specializes in WordPress hosting.

Since ever we from Blogging Rebels have a website online, we are with a small Dutch hosting company. This hosting company offers great support but you will have to manage everything, like installation, back-ups and updates yourself. This is a typical do-it-yourself hosting company. More info on this company will be added soon.