Yes – we spot them everywhere: “We are WordPress-friendly… we are WordPress-savvy… We are 100% compatible with WordPress.” How important is it anyway to host your WordPress-powered site on WordPress hosting?
My short answer would be: Very important. Why?
I run dozens of WordPress-powered sites, including blogs, and host them on some web hosting providers. I’m hosting them on green hosting, WordPress blog hosting, cloud hosting, and those that are somewhere in the middle.
Now, green hosting, cloud hosting and such are great in their own way. But in order to run your WordPress-powered sites, you need more than just fast, reliable and stable web hosting that seems to be offered by almost all web hosting providers; you need web hosting provider, which web servers’ environment is WordPress-friendly.
Some issues when hosting your site on “general” web hosting that doesn’t claim to be a WordPress hosting:
Memory allocation problems
This is a common error for a WordPress-powered site that uses lots of plugins. Some WP plugins developers are simply don’t care about efficient and effective coding, in such a way that they eat so much memory.
Some web hosting providers have a default memory limit of 32M. Some WordPress sites can’t run well for less than 64M, no matter how much optimization applied to the sites (such as using WP SuperCache, activate caching in wp-config.php, etc.) The remedies are not obscure, but this is a hassle, somehow.
White screen of death
Just like in Microsoft Windows products, iPods, MacOS, etc., WordPress also has this scary sign of something wrong happening to a blog or site: A blank, white screen called White Screen of Death (or popularly known as WSoD.)
The cause is probably plugins conflict, but did you know that host your WP-powered site on a wrong web hosting means your site is not run on a 100% WP compatible web hosting?
Non-WordPress-savvy support
The Live Chat and support email are great (especially those of HostGator – the best of all, IMO) but some are offering support based on their expertise on PHP/mySQL. Depending on the Support Staff, getting your WP-related issues across well to the staff is a challenge, simply because he/she is not WordPress-savvy.
WP WebHost is probably having the most WP-proficient web hosting servers and support team, but the drawback is their limited hosting space and bandwidth.
A conclusion: Host your WordPress-powered site with WordPress hosting provider
I want to emphasize that I strongly suggest you to host your WordPress-powered site with WordPress-savvy web hosting, especially if you don’t want to meddle with php.ini, .htaccess, wp-config.php or wp-settings.php, even reinstalling your WordPress script in order to get your WordPress site works normal.
The choice is yours, really. But if you asked me, my top choice is still HostGator – I’ve been with them since the beginning, and they have delivered a stellar all-around web hosting services – including those that WordPress-specific requirements – on regular basis.
