Words on WordPress

If you’re using WordPress for a website, you need to have what’s called a web host. A web host is a company that supplies the necessary Web server space, file storage, and Internet bandwidth so people can actually get to your WordPress website. If you’re using WordPress.com, you’ve got a web host, and that’s WordPress.com, and it’s free. But if you are self hosting WordPress – for a number of reasons, such as needing plug-ins for WordPress.com doesn’t support, or you want to use a theme or design that WordPress.com doesn’t support – you need a web host.

A web host is different from your domain registrar. A domain registrar is the company do you pay to register your actual domain, such as markratledge.com. The company you get Web hosting from can be the domain registrar, but doesn’t have to be. Almost every web hosting company out there offers domain services, while some domain registrar services don’t get into web hosting.

So web hosting is just that: you are hosting your domain registration. And when you get a web host, you go to your domain registrar and point the name servers at that web host. And that’s how your domain name becomes a real website accessible to the public with web hosting.

There are many, many web hosts out there, and some are better than others. You can read reviews and ask your friends, but you can be overwhelmed with the number of choices. What you are looking for in web hosting is security, reliability, business experience and cost.

Security is very important. Some WordPress security you need to take care of yourself, as in making sure your WordPress site is updated regularly, not sharing your passwords, and other common sense security. But much website security comes from the web hosting company itself, because they are actually running the Web server hardware and software, so you need to find a web hosting company that has a good reputation for security. Almost every web host out there gets hacked at some point, but some hosts are much better than others. Take a look at Web hosting reviews for notes on security; you’ll find that some web hosts have a lot fewer problems than others.

Reliability is also important. You want a web host that is up 99% of the time. This is much less of an issue now than back in the Bad Old Days™. Way back in the early days of the internet, web hosting was more of a science than it is now. These days, any good, national web host is going to be up 99% of the time, outside of big failures that impact everyone.

You need to consider business experience in the sense of how long the web host is been in business. There are some good web hosts out there that just started up last year, but for me, web hosts need to have a good track record. In some cases I might go with a web host that has just started up, but it would be more of a gut feeling, and I doubt I would recommend the host to anybody else until I knew they were reliable. I have known some small, local web hosts, but without exception, their service got flaky and they were eventually bought out or went out of business. It’s almost always a good idea to go with a big company for web hosting rather than a small, local company. Big companies have server space and bandwidth to make your site reliable and fast. A small local company may have personalized service, but they not may not be able to stay up 24/7/365 days. I like to support local businesses in Montana, but unfortunately, web hosting is one of those businesses where you’re better off with a national company.

The last important consideration is cost. Web hosting is dirt cheap anymore, so this is really the last consideration. But on the other hand, don’t go with the web host that’s only going to charge you two were three dollars a month. That’s just way too cheap, and I doubt they will be reliable, secure or helpful when problems arise. It’s simple economics; they have to make enough to be able to pay for bandwidth and for employees. On the other hand, you really don’t need to pay 15 or $20 a month for good hosting. Right around $6 to $10 a month is a good benchmark for what to pay.

Now, who do I recommend for web hosting? I don’t recommend GoDaddy. Sorry, but they’re just not a good web host. GoDaddy is constantly hacked, from my experience from working on the WordPress.org forums. You can do much better than GoDaddy. Now, GoDaddy is cheap for domain registrations, and many people I know use them for domain registrations and not hosting.

I used to recommend Media Temple, but not anymore. Over the last year I dealt with some of their Grid Servers and VPS’s, and their speed and reliability were low. And then last fall I read that GoDaddy bought Media Temple, and that won’t be good for their VPS service. See GoDaddy Buys Media Temple To Build Up Its Business With Web Professionals | TechCrunch

So, who do I really recommend? I’ve always recommended Bluehost. Granted, I’ve had a few problems with them over the years, but nothing that would chase me away. Most of their online tech support people are very helpful, although I run across one or two that are not over the years. Once I had a customer get an account with Bluehost that turned out to be inordinately slow, and it took a day or two, but we were able to get their account moved to another server and after that, everything was okay. Bluehost tends to be pretty secure, too. And if you pay for two years in advance, you can get web hosting for six dollars a month. Bluehost uses the very popular Cpanel for a control panel, so setting up your website, e-mail services, domain services and others is very easy. Blue hose also acts as a domain registrar, so you can register your domain and keep everything in one place.

If your site grows and your traffic gets heavy, you can upgrade to one of Bluehost’s Pro servers, which can handle tens of thousands of hits a day. Bluehost has also started a line of dedicated servers, but I’ve never used them.

One other web host I can recommend is WP Engine. They are more of a managed WordPress hosting service rather than a general web host service. At WP engine, you can start your own WordPress site or import from a current WordPress site into their dedicated hosting system. You get your own control panel for WP engine, and from there you can add WordPress sites, clone a site for testing, and rollback the site to a previous version if you have problems.

WP engine restricts a few plug-ins, and you can’t do anything in .htaccess files in terms of redirects and other mod_rewrite rules. But if you need a good turnkey managed hosting system for WordPress, WP engine is a good way to go. They have very fast servers, with their own caching set up, and they are very secure. Their tech support is helpful and fast. Check out WordPress Hosting, Perfected. WP Engine®.

Another choice for webhosting is Amazon Web services (AWS). If you use Amazon, you have to be very technically adept. You’re going to need to know how to set up a Linux server, configure DNS, and more. But, for high-traffic site, and for server you have a lot of control over it, Amazon Web services may be the way to go. You’ll need to find one of many tutorials out there on the web to learn how to set up WordPress on Linux instance at Amazon Web services. I’ve done it before, and it was interesting, and I even thought more about using Amazon for other websites. See Amazon Web Services, Cloud Computing: Compute, Storage, Database. Amazon is especially good if you need to run sites with complex database back ends, need very high reliability and redundancy coordinate with a lot of other IT people for the site.

Now, if you’re running a huge and busy site, like the LA Times, or Time Magazine, you need serious and secure hosting. Take a look at VIP Cloud Hosting from WordPress.com. They start at $5000 a month, so it ain’t cheap. But I’m sure it’s worth it. But I’m sure if you’re running a site that requires such hosting, you’re probably not here, reading this post, looking for recommendations for web hosting service.

I have a certain collection of WordPress plugins I always use with my own sites and sites for customers. These plugins increase security, add functions to WordPress and generally make WordPress a little but better and more useful for myself and the end user. Some of these plugins are very popular, some little known, and a few I developed myself (which I’ll cover in a future post on basic utility plugins).

Some WordPress users shy away from using plugins because they don’t want to slow down their site or make it overly complex. But plugins really don’t do either. If your site is slow, there are other problems with it. (Yes, if you are running 40+ plugins on an inexpensive shared host, your site may be slow). Plugins can add very necessary functions for SEO and other aspects that are not included – for various reasons – in the core of WordPress.

It’s easy to search for and install plugins from the plugin directory at WordPress › WordPress Plugins, or from your dashboard (see the image at right). But if you install a plugin from elsewhere the web, be very careful; there are stories of malicious plugins being distributed from sites other than the official WordPress plugin site.

That said, here are some of the plugins I use most:

One plugin I use for security is called Block Bad Queries. This plugin protects against malicious URL requests, which are constructed URLs that don’t attempt to find a page or post at your site, but try to break into it. Depending on your web host and its security settings, these exploits can work against you, so this plugin is a good blocker for those hack attacks. Even when the hackers can’t break in, this plugin will help stop all the wasted bandwidth that they use up. If you have seen lots of strange 404’s in your site logs, this will stop a lot of them. (And checking your site logs is a good thing to do on a regular basis; maybe that’s a good subject for a future post).

When I develop a new site and want to keep search engines out of it – as well as any other visitors – until it’s ready, I use Absolute Privacy which will lock down a site so only those with logins allowed in. You can also control the level of access to those logged in, too, allowing some to see the admin backend, while others can just view the site. And you can put up a custom front page to let people know the site will soon be live.

A very good contact form is Contact Form 7, which is advertised as “Just Another Contact Form Plugin for WordPress.” But it’s not just another plugin – not with more than 14 million downloads. It’s very popular and works very well and has lots of options. I seldom use any other contact form plugins, and have made some nice, multi-page forms that collect lots of data. There are even plugins for Contact Form 7 that will dump data to the database, and more.

Do you want to display 20 search results on the search page but only 2 blog posts on the front page? This can be a basic problem with WordPress, because the setting for the number of posts used on the front page is a global, and also sets the number of results for search and for category archives. You need Custom Post Limits, a plugin that lets you easily modify the queries that produce the post count results. Custom Post Limits lets you independently control the number of posts listed on the front page, in author, category and tag archives, in search results, etc. It doesn’t work very well with Genesis themes, since Genesis has their own loop structure, but that’s the only case I’ve found where the plugin doesn’t work.

One long running issue with WordPress is its built in site search engine; it shows search results by date, not by relevance, and that’s a problem. So a very good plugin to fix that and also provide many other options is called Relevanssi. It’s got a whole lot of options you may not use, but the simplest default settings will get your search results to sort by relevance and not date. The Pro version is even better, but the free version is way ahead of the WordPress default site search capabilities.

Everyone needs a good backup plugin. The free version of BackWPup works very well, and will backup your database, uploads folder, themes and anything else, as well as make copies of wp-config.php and make lists of all your plugins, too. It runs by itself in the background, and can be set to run anytime, once a day or once a week. You don’t miss your data until it’s gone, so use a backup plugin. I always use it, even if the webhost advertises their own backups of your files and database.

For Search Engine Optimization (SEO), I always use All in One SEO Pack. It’s very popular, with more than 17 million downloads. And with it you can work with all your meta descriptions and keywords, social networking metadata, no indexing for certain pages, and more. It can run on “auto-pilot” if you set it to automatically generate page meta descriptions; that’s an advantage for your user and cuts down on their work load.

And an XML sitemap is important for SEO. I use the plugin Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. It also runs by itself in the background. XML sitemaps are a bit geeky to use, but are necessary for good SEO. Follow the docs for that plugin and link your sitemap in Google’s and/or Bing’s Webmaster’s Tools.

For social networking, I usually use a service called AddThis for clients and place the code manually rather than use their WordPress plugin, but you can use the plugin. I don’t use AddThis for my own sites, but do for clients since it is easier for them to use than the methods I use.

If you allow comments on your site, you already know you need to prevent comment spam; so there is always Akismet, produced by Automattic themselves, the parent company of WordPress. For very high traffic sites, you may need to supplement Akismet with other plugins, but all alone, it’s pretty good. Akismet is free for non-commercial sites.

And for site performance, WP Super Cache is the standard, with millions of downloads, too. It’s easy to setup and the easiest, non-technical settings work very well. But WP Super Cache can also work with a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for very high performance, it works well with commenting systems, and allows for the disallowing of file types so your advertisements work, too.