Hosting, Design, Development: Websites Require Planning & Thought (Part 1 of 3)
It’s time for a new website, or a refresh of your current site. There are so many things to consider: cost, hosting, design, development … it can be very overwhelming. Regarding cost: CCLd’s best advice is: if you pay the price of a bicycle and are promised a BMW … it may look like a BMW for a while, but it will always run like a bicycle. Other important aspects to consider are hosting, design, and development. Remember: A successful website requires considerable planning and thought.
This month, let’s talk about hosting: specifically for WordPress sites. There are hundreds of hosting companies. The pricing ranges from $5 per month to hundreds per month. The hosting company we’d like to focus on is WP Engine.*
CCLd utilizes multiple CMS to build websites: Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress (used by approximately 28% of websites.) We also will custom design a website without using a CMS. However, we prefer using CMS as it’s easier for the client to manage their website content (should they opt to). Our specialty is WordPress. When using WordPress, you want to make sure your hosting environment is conducive to properly run all that WordPress requires. For example, WordPress requires PHP version 7 or greater, MySQL version 5.8 or greater, the mod_rewrite Apache module, and HTTPS support. If you are having a custom WordPress site built, more requirements are needed. Most cPanels for hosting accounts do not allow server changes. Why? Because a lot of hosts are shared hosting. Therefore, they can’t let a client allocate something to their hosting account when another client can’t.
WP Engine was BUILT for WordPress sites, and WordPress sites ONLY. Their platform is optimized for WordPress. Using WP Engine, you’ll see a 2x-6x increase in speed from other hosts. They manage the security, backups, caching, and WordPress core updates for their clients AND also have staging environments, clone copy, and tons of other development tools that can be used. They even offer FREE SSL Certificates (yes, FREE!) with every account (which WordPress is now requiring).
Not only does WP Engine have firewalls and malware scanning through Sucuri, but they also have DDoS mitigation, real time threat protection, limit login attempts to protect from brute force attacks, and kernel level security along with enterprise-level best practices. Now this may not make sense to most – but it’s a great thing! These are protocols in place to help protect your WordPress site.
Every plan WP Engine offers includes automatic daily backups of your site, as well as staging for development work. As website designers/developers, this helps CCLd as well. The support WP Engine offers are all WordPress experts: they only focus on WordPress hosting! CCLd can’t stress that enough. WP Engine has 3 employees recognized in the Top 99 WP influencers of 2015, 2 WordPress core contributors on staff, and 13 dedicated Subject Matter Experts on staff.
Presently, WP Engine has over 65K customers and are in over 120 countries. They do not lock you into contracts. They also have a 60 day money back guarantee.
CCLd only uses WP Engine for their WordPress sites. We hope you will, too.
Next month we will talk about designing a website. Stay Tuned!
*PLEASE NOTE: CCLd is NOT an affiliate with WP Engine. We receive zero dollars for clients, or those we refer, who decide to use WP Engine as their hosting environment.
*This 3 part blarticle (blog article) is very simplistic in nature. A lot goes into web design and development.
