Best ISP for WordPress and eBusiness

In this article I’m simply going to state my methods and findings from when I was looking for an ISP (Internet Service Provider) to host this web site.

I will provide details of the best ISP’s I could find for those, like me, wanting their own WordPress web site and those wanting to start their own ebusiness. I started with no knowledge other than doing a little selling on eBay and no knowledge of Web CMS‘s (Content Management System) at all. Prior to choosing WordPress I played with several other Web CMS’s such as Blogger, Joomla and Drupal before finally choosing WordPress because of its easy setup, good documentation and friendly user base. Strangely enough, I found the WordPress user base is one of the few groups not complaining about everything, they have a nice, friendly, positive attitude. Sorry, I’m wandering off topic (again).

In the Beginning

Which is the best Internet Service Provider (ISP) for your website? Which will give you the best hosting deal? Which provides the best web design? Who provides the best domain hosting deal? Which is the best server? Remember, the cheapest is not always the best!

The first task was to create a list of my requirements, so each of the ISP’s had to satisfy the following criteria to be considered:

1. Web hosting affordable price, but not tacky.
2. Reliable service with at least 99% uptime.
3. Easy to implement and use.
4. Lots of help available online.
5. Good after sales and support service.
6. Easy setup for WordPress.
7. Easy setup for a shopping cart.
8. Simple and intuitive control panel.
9. Easy to use backup system.
10. Secure system.
11. Dedicated servers (would like – but not a requirement)
12. Reseller (would like – but not a requirement)

About Web Hosting

Whatever you do, don’t make the common mistake when looking for web site hosting is to simply select the cheapest or even FREE web hosting company. The prices charged by a good web hosting company is so low these days as to make the alternative unnecessary. You will only end up with a poor service, poor support and paying more in the long run. Make the right hosting choice for you. All the hosting companies in this review are low cost, most less than a $1 per week, but these are respected hosts with proven reliability and support. If you don’t believe me, search the web. All the web hosting companies listed here are constantly winning user awards.

WordPress Web Hosting Requirements

WordPress web hosting comes in two different flavours. WordPress offer a FREE blog hosting service at wordpress.com and a user-hosted platform at wordpress.org. As the wordpress.com platform is only suitable for blogging and not really suited to business usage (it’s against the rules to place paid advertising on a wordpress.com site) I will be concentrating on the wordpress.org platform as this is definitely suitable for business usage, advertising and of course blogging.

From WordPress – A Little History

"WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. WordPress is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. We hope by focusing on user experience and web standards we can create a tool different from anything else out there."

• At the time of writing, WordPress has 7,968 plugins, (69,873,370 downloads) and 1,108 themes (11,065,434 downloads), all FREE.

WordPress.org

If you don’t have WordPress already it can be downloaded and installed from wordpress.org FREE of charge.

• Signing up for WordPress.org is best done after ensuring that you have a host that runs PHP 5.0 or greater, MySQL 5.0 or greater and Apache. The WordPress specs. are far less stringent than this but this should really be your minimum requirement. All the ISPs I chosen here have better specs. than this anyway.

• The web hosting services (ISPs) recommended here will all allow you to register and install WordPress from their (your) own control panel with no need for a separate download from WordPress.

With 99.9% uptime, what’s the downtime?

With your business running 24/7 or 8766 hours per year a 0.1% downtime is equivalent to 8 hours 46 minutes. For those interested, the calculation is (24*365.25) * (100%-99.9%).

My Recommendation

From the business owner to the individual who desires full functionality on a small budget. If you are looking for a fast, reliable, easy-to-use web host then JustHost are the one to choose. They provide your complete web hosting solution. You would expect JustHost to demand a higher price for such an excellent service, but they are one of the cheapest hosts around.

They offer a great service at such a low price it’s hard to look elsewhere. KingSolutions web sites are hosted by JustHost. Hosting your web site with Just Host is the obvious choice.

To be fair all the web hosting services reviewed here are of comparable quality and all give a quality service so you won’t go wrong by choosing any of them. But, each service has qualities which may or may not be what you require so review each web hosting service and make your choice based on your requirements. I required a web site that could be up and running in less then a day with very little prior knowledge.

• There are web hosting services which are far beyond my capabilities and understanding so I have not even attempted to review such services.

I needed something where the web hosting experts provided most of the background work so I could concentrate on my web site.

• Also, the offers made by each ISP change weekly, so please check each ISP prior to making a commitment.

Although each ISP has many offers which vary over time I have tried to be specific to the requirements above and ignored items such as FREE Photo Albums etc. as these can be added to most sites by downloading and installing the appropriate scripts.

If you have any comment, corrections or items you think should be added to the listings please do not hesitate to let me know.