Once you’ve crafted a WordPress design that you’re proud of, you’ll want to show off your creation in all its glory with the rest of the world. While there are other ways of displaying and sharing your newly created themes and plugins, nothing quite matches having a fully functioning website to demonstrate what you’ve developed. Here are some things you should consider when choosing where to host your WordPress powered website.

The basics

Before you start shopping around for the best website host, consider the size of the project you’re taking on. Web hosting services offer a wide range of plans based on two factors. The first is how many people you expect to be accessing your website every month. The second is how much data you’ll need to store every image, movie, font, and text files you’ve used to create your website. The latter is easy to measure as you just need to check the size of the folder you’ve been creating your project in. Predicting how many people will visit your website can be much trickier.

Reliability

Your creation can only be admired if your website host is doing a good job of keeping your files online. While deals regarding visitor numbers and data may look similar, the reliability of each provider can differ massively. The best way to assess the reliability of a provider is to simply search the brand name on Twitter, Google, or on a developer forum. Whether it’s good or bad, it’s important to read up on other people’s experiences with a company.

There are also expert reviews online which judge each provider on a number of different factors. If several reviews agree that a provider is worth the money that you’re paying them, you can be assured you’re investing wisely. The most recent site ground hosting review found that the provider had just three minor outages in the whole of the last six months. To put that reliability in a percentage, the host performed perfectly 99.99% of the time. It’s unlikely you’ll find anybody closer to 100 percent than that.

Speed

You may have included several impressive features or plugins in your latest design. Unfortunately, it’s often the case that the more complex your design, the longer it’ll take for the feature to load. The main factor when it comes to deciding how fast your website will load is normally the speed of the internet provider of the person accessing your website. The bad news is there is nothing you can do to change that.

Another factor you can control is the speed it takes the hosting provider’s server to generate the page. The more powerful and reliable the server is, the quicker the page is ready to be accessed. Make sure the hosting provider you choose offers a quick load time. While on paper, the difference between some providers may be less than a second, it can make a big difference if you’re hosting large files like videos or games.