Quick summary
A good web hosting provider gives you fast, reliable performance, strong support, and security without breaking the bank. When choosing one, look at uptime guarantees, server speed, customer support quality, backups and security features, storage and bandwidth limits, and pricing transparency. The right host helps your site load quickly, stay online, and rank better in Google.
If possible, buy your domain name and hosting at the same time
The easiest way for a newcomer is to buy a domain and web hosting with the same company at the same time.
Find a reputable web hosting company in your own country that also allows you to register a domain name. The location of your hosting company is actually really important for future search engine optimisation. So if you’re not in the US, don’t skip this step and register with wordpress.com, bluehost etc. But make an effort and find a good hosting company in your own country and language.
If you need help with your hosting in the future, you want to be able to call someone or email someone who is in your time zone and explains things to you in your own language.
How to find a reputable web hosting company
- Open Google
- Enter “web hosting in the Netherlands” (exchange the country with your own country)
- Check the online reviews
- Look at different companies and check the hosting packages
You can use Google like this: “best web hosting company in the Netherlands” (and preferably you would search in your own language, ie. not in English). Avoid clicking on adverts at the top, but click on blog articles that review different hosting companies, such as “Top 10 best web hosting companies in Germany”.
If you’ve found one you like the look of, open their website.
On their homepage, you should see a big search field that allows you to search for available domain names. That’s an indicator that you can buy the domain name at the same place where you will buy the web hosting. Now check their hosting packages and look specifically for “WordPress hosting”.
Beware of the introductory pricing!
On price comparison sites, they usually show how much it would cost per month. Please don’t be swayed by the cheapest! They are usually cheap for a reason.
Disadvantages of cheap hosting
By “cheap” I mean hosting that costs less than £60 per year.
They might only offer email support and it can happen that you need to wait several days to get a reply. Their servers might be overloaded which results in a slower website. Anything you need additionally, such as SSL (the padlock – you will need that) comes with a hefty price tag.
It really does pay to look around and check out their actual pricing.
Once you’ve gone through the steps of setting up your own website, you don’t want to have to do all this again a year later because your hosting company is bad for business.
Web hosting packages can seem totally confusing, especially when you start out.
Must have elements of your web hosting package
As with anything, there are different types of hosting but you don’t need to know too much to know what to look for.
The thing to look out for is shared web hosting. This is super cheap – less than £50 (<70 USD, <€60) per year. However, as the name suggests, you are likely to share a web server (this is like a computer) with many other websites. If one or more of other websites on the same server as yours and have a lot of website traffic (ie. they get a lot of visitors), the other websites will suffer with their website speed.
If your website speed is slow (this means your pages are loading really slowly), Google will not rank your website very highly. Google knows about all sorts of stuff, including your website speed.
The thing to look for is web hosting that says SSD as part of the hosting package.
An SSD is a special type of hard drive which delivers information quicker than normal hard drives. Check that the package mentions the word “speed” but also “WordPress”. Better still – you look for WordPress hosting, as these servers are optimised for WordPress websites and make the installation of WordPress super quick and super easy.
There are other hosting options that are meant for bigger businesses or companies who require super fast websites, such as large e-commerce websites. In this case, look for business hosting or VPS hosting.
Most cheaper WordPress hosting packages start at around £50 per year.
Web space and memory for WordPress hosting
Unless you’re a photographer with thousands of images, a WordPress website doesn’t need much web space. You will generally be fine with 10GB and either 256 or 512 MB RAM.
Many hosting companies offer different WordPress hosting packages. Compare the packages and make sure they include the following:
- SSL (Let’s encrypt)
- WordPress should be mentioned (e.g. WordPress Hosting, or One-Click WordPress Install)
- Linux
- PHP, MySQL
- Anything up to 50GB web space
- SSD Hard Drive
- Check the server location (which country?) (I will show you in the video below how to find this)
- Minimum 10GB Webspace
- Minimum 256 MB RAM
- Minimum 10GB (10000 MB) Web traffic per month, but unlimited traffic is better
- 10 (or unlimited) Email addresses
- 10 (or unlimited) Email forwarders
Why you should find a hosting company in the UK for your UK business
Here’s a list of bullet points you can use to explain why a UK-based business should ideally have its website hosted in the UK (or at least as close to its target audience as possible):
- Faster loading times for UK users, which improves user experience and SEO
- Better compliance with UK data protection laws and GDPR
- Hosting in the UK signals to search engines that your website is relevant to UK searches
- Reduced risk of performance issues caused by time zone differences in support
- Easier to get customer service in your local business hours
- Hosting locally helps build trust with UK customers who care about data privacy
- If your audience is mainly in the UK, there’s no need for US-based servers
- Supporting local businesses can align with your brand’s values
