How to Buy Hosting

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Getting started

So by now you have bought your domain name (you have haven’t you? If not, read our How to buy a domain article) and your ready to get your hosting sorted so you can move on, but your not sure how. No fear, read on to learn how to buy hosting.

Considerations

There are some considerations you need to check before buying hosting, the main two things are in relation to WordPress.

Your hosting company needs to have:

  • PHP 5.2.4 or higher
  • MySQL 5.0 or higher

Now, most hosting nowadays has this as standard, but its advisable to check this especially if your not using one of the “big guns” in the hosting world, the likes of Hostgator and Godaddy.

Other than those considerations you’re pretty much able to pick any host you want, worldwide!

Locality

However, there are some minor points you may wish to consider if you pick a host outside of your own country:

SEO: If you have a host in the USA but are actually targeting the UK market, your SEO may not be as good, but with the right SEO and marketing methods, this is negligible.

Maintenance: Having a server in a country 12 hours time difference may not seem OK, but dont forget their maintenance is done in the middle of the night, their night, or the middle of your day.

Often people ask, what is the best WordPress hosting? Well, there isn’t a “best” one, its all down to the individual company’s customer service.

However, I would personally recommend Hostgator, I have found their customer service to be excellent and their prices just right.

Getting Pointed At

When you have purchased the hosting that best matches your needs and budget, you need to find in their documentation the nameserver details. These will be something like – ns1.hostcompany.com ns2.hostcompany.com.

You need to take this information and go to your domain name company website and enter these details under the DNS area in your domain settings.

What this does is point your domain name to the hosting so that when someone goes to your site, they see the website that you will/have put on your server.

So now you have a good idea how to buy hosting, so if your ready to move on and set your site up, check out the Installing WordPress article.