What does ‘Business Grade’ mean? (in terms of website hosting)?
It’s a phrase that I’ve coined (but may be used by others) to distinguish hosting that’s specifically suitable for a business, rather than website hosting you might use for a hobby website or community website. My implication is that the quality of business-grade hosting is that it’s faster, more reliable and more secure than cheaper, lower-quality hosting.
When it comes to WordPress hosting, and website hosting in general, there’s a huge range in the quality of hosting that’s available. Some hosts are fast, some are slow. Some have great support, some have terrible support. Some are secure, some leave security completely to you.
Your website is really important for your business. If it’s not generating sales (e.g. from an online shop) or leads, then at the very least it’s presence needs to have a positive effect on your reputation. Even if you have a brochure website, if it gets hacked and you don’t fix it, you’ll give customers and prospects a very negative opinion of your business.
For business website hosting, you’ll want the following:
- Hosting on really fast servers, on platforms where their software is updated frequently (this helps with security)
- Reliable servers, that don’t go down every few days
- Daily reliable backups, so that your website can be restored if needed
- Excellent support who can help you resolve a problem within hours (not days)
- A few levels of security on their systems (including automatic hack and denial-of-service detection)
- The capability for the servers to cope if you appear on TV or something goes viral
- Performance tools to help your website load quickly (e.g. multi-level caching, CDNs, etc)
All of the hosting companies recommendations we’ve made below fulfil these critiera. We work with all of these hosts for clients or ourselves too.
Our Recommendations
With so many web hosting companies out there, it’s impossible to have an opinion on all of them. These are our recommendations for hosting companies for business-grade WordPress websites.
| Hosting Company | Type | Summary | When to use |
|---|---|---|---|
| FlyWheel | Professional Hosting | Very good affordable hosting for business simple brochure websites. Their platform is not optimised for membership or WooCommerce websites (from experience) Easy to give other people access to your control panel by adding them as a collaborator. | If you want your hosting company to look after you. |
| WPEngine | Professional Hosting | Considered the top-end of WordPress hosting, this is a very professional platform and recommended for businesses who have websites that are critical for their business. This platform handles more complex websites really well too. It's a more expensive platform, but that's due to the quality of technology they have. Easy to give other people access by adding them as a user. | If you want your hosting company to look after you, and you want something you can really rely on. |
| WPX Hosting | Fast Hosting | This hosting is optimised for speed, and works particularly well with brochure websites. We've seen some niggles with membership websites on this platform, so we're doing more testing. | If you have a brochure website and want it to load really quickly. (This is the fastest hosting we've found, but works best on simple websites). |
| Site Ground | General Purpose and Professional Hosting | This hosting is a mixture of capabilities. It has some very powerful speed-enchancing technologies, but it's more advanced. We're using this for websites that are slightly more complex. | If you're slightly technical and want lots of control over performance enhancements. |