When it comes to WordPress hosting, there are several different hosting options to suit all performance, traffic and budget requirements.
These are:
Shared hosting – cheap and cheerful
Virtual Private Server (VPS) – more powerful than shared hosting but still cost-effective
Cloud hosting – flexible, scaleable and powerful. but can require technical knowledge
Dedicated server – for high-performance, high-traffic websites but with the price tag to match
Read my post entitled What type of WordPress hosting should I choose? for more information regarding hosting options.
My preference is to use a load hosting solution called DigitalOcean and build the server using a control panel called SpinupWP
What is DigitalOcean?
DigitalOcean is a cloud-based hosting provider founded with developers in mind. They offer simple and affordable Linux application hosting available across a number of data centres throughout the globe. All their hosting options are easily scaleable, allowing you to upgrade a server in minutes.
Why use DigitalOcean?
DigitalOcean offers affordable and robust cloud hosting with simple pricing, starting from around $7 per month for a premium AMD processor, 1CPU, 1GB RAM and 20GB hard drive storage.
Although they are based in New York, they have data centres in New York, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Singapore, Toronto, Bangalore and Sydney, ensuring excellent global coverage.
DigitalOcean offers cost-effective backups charged at 20% of the monthly droplet cost and excellent flexibility when scaling up or down the spec of your droplet. They also offer a free DigitalOcean and UFW (uncomplicated Firewall) included in the monthly cost. Plus, unlike shared hosting, which shares the same IP with multiple websites, all instances come with a reserved/static IP.
What is SpinupWP?
Developed by Delicious Brains, the developer behind, amongst others, the Advanced Custom Fields plugin, SpinupWP allows you to spin up a Digital Ocean server instance, install WordPress, add an SSL certificate and enable SSH access within minutes. SpinupWP comes with an intuitive control panel and offers extremely fast caching of your WordPress site as part of the cost.
Why use SpinupWP?
Building a WordPress server from scratch can take hours. SpinupWP takes the hard work out of it by automating multiple command line scripts to configure the server.
Simply connect SpinupWP to your DigitalOcaen, select the droplet configuration of choice and let SpinupWP do the majority of the work. This includes installing WordPress, configuring the FireWall, installing a Lets Encrypt SSL certificate and automatically performing security updates.
SpinupWP also makes hosting WordPress multisite installs a breeze with a simple, one-click upgrade option.
Limitations
While the combination of SpinupWP and DigitalOcean simplifies the process of hosting WordPress on a cloud server, maintaining the server still requires some technical knowledge. Server updates are performed using Linux command line scripts and, therefore, accessing the server via SSH.
Conclusion
For a relatively small monthly cost, SpinupWP and DigitalOcean offer a fast, high-performance and straightforward cloud hosting solution which includes excellent, pre-configured browser caching, page caching and object caching for a super-fast website.
Click here to sign up for SpinupWP and get $50 free credit.
Please get in touch if you would like to discuss the best solution for hosting a WordPress site.
Let’s chat.
