What’s your favorite hosting service for a high-traffic WordPress site and why?
The following answers are provided by members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched BusinessCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
1. WPEngine
We have tested six or seven different hosting companies for WordPress sites and WPEngine is absolutely the best. Their customer service is amazingly responsive and helpful with experts on-call, and your site will be noticeably faster because the company was built specifically to host WP sites. That’s their bread and butter — not many specialize in that one area! – Alex Miller, PosiRank LLC
2. Pagely
Without a doubt, Pagely provides the best support we’ve ever received from a hosting company. The greatest feature that I value is their dedication to security. WordPress is notoriously vulnerable to exploits and we’ve had incidents in the past where client sites got hacked despite having security measures in place. Having the peace of mind knowing we have a secure hostingsolution is invaluable. –Guillermo Ortiz, Geek Powered Studios
3. Bluehost
I’ve had my site for six years and have used a dozen different hosts, trying to find the right one, until I found Bluehost. Not only does my site just work and never crashes, in the rare instances I’ve had any issues, their customer support system has been top notch. It really makes me rest easier knowing that I have a hosting service that isn’t going to crash on my high traffic days. – Sean Ogle, Location 180, LLC
4. Pantheon.io
Once a Drupal-focused hosting platform, Pantheon recently introduced WordPress hosting, with features like Git integration and one button workflows. If you’re running a dev shop, handing over a site hosted on Pantheon gives site owners powerful tools they otherwise wouldn’t get from a normal provider. If you’re running your own site, your technical team will appreciate the robust feature-set. – Blair Thomas, EMerchantBroker
5. Rackspace
At Company Folders, we run several high-traffic WordPress sites on Rackspace, which is the best hostingservice we’ve used. It’s highly customizable with very little down time, and it comes at a fair price. We’re very pleased with Rackspace. – Vladimir Gendelman, Company Folders, Inc
6. Media Temple
Media Temple would be our favorite. It has the capabilities to handle very high traffic volumes, and offers one-click WordPress installations. The company has several starting price points for VPS services. – Justin Beegel, Infographic World, Inc.
7. Amazon Web Services (AWS)
In my opinion, there is no question that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is winning the game — by virtue of having superior services and low costs — of cloud computing and web hosting. In addition, AWS web hosting is affordable and already works with some of the most trafficked websites online, such as Netflix, Expedia and Yelp. The way I look at it is to follow the leaders and carefully consider the cost. –Obinna Ekezie, Wakanow.com
8. GoDaddy
I recommend and use GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress tool for two reasons. First, it’s super easy to use. The interface is intuitive and perfect for any non-techie bloggers who just wants to publish content and not worry about technical jargon. Second, GoDaddy has free and responsive customer support over the phone, a feature unmatched by niche hosting solutions, which only offer a ticketing system. –Matthew Capala, Search Decoder
9. DigitalOcean
We switched to DigitalOcean‘s SSD Cloud Hosting 10 months ago after trying GoDaddy and BlueHost. We experienced lots of outages with GoDaddy, and BlueHost wasn’t as scalable as we’d like. DigitalOcean has so far provided us with 100 percent uptime, and lightening fast page load speeds averaging at 300ms per page, that we were not able to achieve with other hosts. Our dev team is much happier with its UI and infrastructure. – Reuben Yonatan, GetVoIP
