Google “WordPress hosting” and you’ll find more than 100 million results. The truth is that there are hundreds of WordPress hosting companies competing for your business. But at the same time, because WordPress hosting is so popular, it’s become a commodity – a race to the bottom in terms of cost.
Believe it or not, this is bad for your business.
Service takes a hit
WordPress hosting has, in many ways, become a race to the bottom. Hosts promise the world – fast sites, incredible security, and a ton of extra features – all for the “low low price of…”
Here’s the problem: in order to provide those features at bargain-basement prices, they have to rely on volume to get their profits to reasonable levels. The average successful WordPress hosting company has thousands of sites under their service.
What does that mean when you have some kind of problem? It means that you have to reach out to a support email address, talk to someone who has never heard of you, and has no real interest in solving your problem. Your site might be. completely down, but if their shift ends in 10 minutes, you’ll end up completely re-explaining the problem to the next person who takes over for them. That’s not productive – or helpful.
A place whre nobody knows your name
Being one person in a large crowd also means that nobody at the hosting company knows you or your business personally. They can’t – there’s simply too many sites to manage and maintain for any one site to be a priority.
But the same can’t be said of you: your site is your only concern, and your issues are paramount to you. Fixing them is crucial.
For many hosting companies, you’re a statistic – MRR, churn, LTV – and keeping you as a customer boils down to a cost-benefit analysis of whether or not you provide value to the hosting company. If they know your name it’s usually because you’re a problem for them. That’s no way to have a relationship.
Passing the buck
Ever have a website issue where you can’t seem to get clarity or resolution from anyone?
Your website designer says it’s a hosting problem. Your host says it’s a programming problem. Your programmer says it’s a core bug that needs to be resolved by WordPress. WordPress says it’s a design problem. And around you go…
Everyone in the loop has a vested interest in not dealing with your issue – no matter how significantly it impacts you. So the buck gets passed around, and you never get the issue resolved – but you sure waste a lot of time on it!
Your big WordPress hosting company will draw the line at debugging theme or plugin issues as long as they don’t impact your consumption of resources on the host’s servers. They’ll refer you to other professionals (who charge more fees) to solve the issue. And so to solve your problems you have to spend more money – which defeats the purpose of that low-cost “high quality” hosting you bought.
one-size Fits All
Speed matters when we’re talking about WordPress websites. WordPress has a lot of heavy components – and adding plugins can slow down the site even more while increasing requests for files. And if you have a beautifully designed website it can be fairly heavy to download. All of this requires optimization, tuning and a careful attention to how your site is organized, dispatched and delivered.
But popular WordPress hosting companies often take a “one-size fits all” approach to hosting. They’ll offer a CDN with limited configuration options (or, if you’re “lucky”, so many options you need a masters degree just to understand them, which is a whole other problem). The result is a site that loads sub-optimally for your clients, and the all-important search engine who will decide your rank based on page speed and deliverability.
Another area where they apply one-size fits all thinking is often in the deployment of resources. Since compute can be expensive but it’s a race to the bottom on price, they typically sacrifice on quality to get you in the door – and then demand that you pay significantly more for dedicated resources that you may or may not need. There’s little, if any, customization of resource usage.
All of this leads to a sub-optimal experience for you as a WordPress website owner.
Security for them – not for you
When it comes to optimizing security, this is one area where popular WordPress website hosts excel – as long as we’re focused on the security they design for their own protection. When it comes to protecting you and your site, you’re out of luck.
Larger companies are interested in protecting their reputations and their resources – they care less about protecting you and yours. The result? If you end up getting hacked, not only is the available help from your host non-existent, but you may even be suspended or kicked off! Why? Because a hacked website on their network is bad for their reputation, business and overall security.
Popular WordPress hosts will employ things like automatic core and plugin updates – not for your benefit, but for theirs. What happens when an update breaks your site? They’ll gladly refer you to a partner to fix it – at a cost. Meanwhile, your site is broken or doesn’t load at all, leading to lost revenues and angry clients.
Smaller Is Better
The bottom line here is simple: smaller is better when it comes to hosting. Working with a boutique host may cost more up front, but will not only save you time, but money in the long run. Hosts, like WPConcierge, that intentionally stay small, focus on your business, know your name and offer an all-inclusive service will not only prevent headache, but save you from embarrassing conversations with your clients when your website goes down or gets hacked – because they’re focused on your success.
With a boutique host like WPConcierge, our focus is on you and your site. We focus on maintaining your site the same as we would our own. We deploy resources that are necessary – no more, no less – to ensure that your site is always available. We tune your site for the issues your site has – not some generic site profile. And we provide exceptional, fanatical customer service aimed at not only solving your problems but knowing your business and your name.
When we say we take care of everything related to your website, we mean it. If we can’t handle something, we have partners who can – and the process will be managed by us so you’ll always have someone in your corner to answer the tough questions and translate the technical jargon. And when it comes to the services we offer – hosting, maintenance, updates, upgrades, backups and small jobs – we’ll never send you an extra bill. When we say it includes everything, we mean it.
Ready to switch from your popular WordPresss hosting company to one that cares about you, is invested in your website, and knows your name? We can’t wait to welcome you as our client.
