We start by looking at some of the common criteria that people base their hosting package choice on then take a look at different types of hosting packages you can use to host your WordPress site on covering pros and cons for each. Presented at WordPress Sydney meetup July 2016

2. Let’s look at four common criteria's that people
base their hosting package choice on.
COST
SUPPORT & RELIABILITY
TECHNOLOGY
CONTINGENCY

3. Is low cost a major factor for you?
This will limit your choice of hosting packages, the
support you receive and reliability of services.
Do you factor in hosting costs as another business
expense against ROI?
This mentality sets you up to chose the best
hosting package that your online business needs.
You’re not ignoring cost, just evaluating it.

4. When something goes wrong how soon do you
need somebody to look into the issue?
24/7 or 9-5 AEST – think about where your hosting
company is based and what support hours they
offer.
Do you need to talk directly to a support person or
are you OK with emails or a support forum?

5. Does your online business need a 99.9% uptime?
How much does your business lose for every
minute or hour it is offline?
Do you need to recoup offline costs against an SLA
(Service Level Agreement)?

6. What does your business need to run online?
Basic setup: web server, database server and PHP?
Advanced: multiple web & database servers,
reverse proxy, load balancers, CDN, Amazon
services (S3, SES)?

7. How will you deal with disaster recovery?
Data Recovery – File Backups
Server Recovery – Image Backups
How often are backups taken, how long are they
held for and how easy is it to restore from them?
Hosting Company Outage
How quickly can you transfer your online business
setup elsewhere?

8. Let’s look at some common hosting
package types

9. • It’s free for mydomain.wordpress.com
• Lots of features
– Social media, statistics, 200+ themes, mobile
compatible, fast and secure
• Premium upgrades
– Custom design editor (CSS only – no code)
– Domain mapping (mydomain.com)
– No adverts
• Automattic may run “discreet” ads on your site
– Premium themes

10. • Great for starting out and testing the water
• Can’t take make code changes to themes
• Can’t upload your own theme
• Can’t upload plugins from wordpress.org
• Bad code in themes & plugins affect
environment
• Boxed environments are more stable

11. Regardless of hosting type, you’ll likely be asked to
choose between Windows or Linux at some point
when choosing a hosting package.
Which one should you choose?

12. Websites run on a server. A server has an
operating system (OS) at it’s core.
WordPress can run on either Windows or Linux so
which one should you choose?
Depends on your or your support person/teams
competency in a particular OS.

13. Developers tend towards the flexibility and open
source nature of Linux.
Windows is entrenched in fortune 500 businesses.
Actual % of OS hosting WordPress: July 2016 top
10 million Alexa ranked websites
Ref: https://w3techs.com/technologies/comparison/os-linux,os-windows

14. Lowest cost option
One physical machine
– 100+ individual websites
“Local Authority Housing Scheme”
– Build it cheap & ram them in
Performance issues from rogue sites
Increased risk of..
– IP ban (dodgy site on same server as you)
– Being compromised (100+ possible incursion points)

15. Infrastructure limitations
– Boxed environment like wordpress.com
– HTTP loopback disabled
– PHP memory restrictions
– Lowest priority in support queue
Great to start out with if new to hosting
– No thinking, no doing, everything is managed for you
If you/your client are on a very tight budget

16. Software Server
– Can be made up of multiple physical
machines
– Dedicated RAM and disk space
– Virtual CPU
• Virtualisation software aims to deliver “close to” actual
physical server specifications
– You control the hosting environment
• Configure PHP, Apache, MySQL
• Root access

17. Costs more than shared hosting
Gives you more control, therefore
more time consuming to manage
Greater environment flexibility
Easy and quick to upgrade machine specs
– Adjust virtual settings (pay more) then restart for
instant upgrade
– No need to change existing website code or location
Option to pay extra for managed VPS

18. Same underlying virtualisation tech
Uses software to monitor demand
Expands/upgrades your VPS to
meet traffic demand
e.g. your site gets mentioned on 7 News
– From 1000 visits per week to +1 million per hour
– “Click Frenzy Fail” is an example of when elastic VPS
should have been used to meet demand
You pay for what you use so be careful

19. One physical box
You get all the RAM, CPU and disks
Technically the fastest single server option
Configure it how you like
Highest cost option
Slow and costly to upgrade – has upper limitation
– Box is switched off, components replaced then
switched back on
– Can you afford downtime?

20. Become your own ISP – white label
Quickly set up hosting packages for clients
Charge premium and make a % profit
Repeat business
Brand your hosting environment
Ability to setup and create testing environments
– Essential for developers
Usually get % off packages & domain name
purchases

21. Servers configured specifically for running
WordPress
– e.g. Pagely, WP Engine, Pressable, …
Varying costs depending on expected traffic,
bandwidth and multisites. Usually more than
entry level VPS.
You don’t worry about server environment – just
manage your WordPress online business.

22. [Front Cover] zeropointdevelopment.com
[13] W3Techs.com
[Back Cover] zeropointdevelopment.com

23.  20+ years in IT: Dev & SysOps
 WordPress Developer since 2008
 Plugins, APIs, Security & Systems Integrations
 Organiser WPSyd & WordCamp Sydney
zeropointdevelopment.com
@DeveloperWil
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