As a developer I always suggest specific hosting to you as a client. I am going to mention some real-life cases without mentioning any personal information of each client just, so you can get an insight to the way I think when making suggestions.

Looking at the thought process I use to make my suggestion will hopefully help you understand why selecting good hosting is so important. Just as a bit of background first, I live in Cyprus and most of my clients are people that have local mom & pop businesses in this country. I do have a client that has a UK-based e-shop that does live in Cyprus but most if not all his clients are in the UK.

So how do I decide what hosting to suggest?

Clients usually just say something like “I want my site to load quickly”. This depends on a lot of factors which I always try and explain to clients. I am going to simply mention these points briefly. I don’t want to make this article too technical or too long to read but if you need a more in-depth explanation you are welcome to e-mail me at info@georgenicolaou.me

1. Do you want it to load fast for a) you from your location e.g. Cyprus? Or b) the location of your clients which may be specific or worldwide? Depending on the answer you give there are a few things one can look at in terms of the hosting company you select. Does the hosting company have a server closest to your client-base e.g. Cyprus or the UK? If so, choose the server closest to your client-base. If your client-base is worldwide always make sure your hosting company provides some kind of Content Delivery Network (CDN) which in layman’s terms means your host has servers around the world which contain exact duplicates of your site and depending on where your visitor lives a copy of the site is pulled from the closets server in proximity to that user which means it will load faster. There are a lot of other things you need to check that may allow your site to load faster for example:

1. Does your hosting company use SSD Hard-Drives or Mechanical Hard-Drives?
2. Does the hosting company use any caching technologies to make your site load faster on the server-side?
3. Does the hosting company provide or allow for CDNs?
4. Does the hosting company provide managed solutions for the specific platform you use e.g. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc.? If so then you can avoid platform specific issues or even receive custom optimizations the company has crafted for that platform.

2. How much money is a client willing to spend to get the speed they want/need? It’s simple how much cash are you willing to dish out for speed. I usually suggest Siteground to clients of lower budgets. As for people that have extremely high traffic and an absolute need for speed I may suggest a much more expensive solution like WP-Engine.
3. It’s important for me as a developer to determine what the site is about and what kind of things are important to the client. If you are a small company that just needs a site that tells people about your company and your services and you need a few email accounts like info@whatever.com Or support@whatever.com then Siteground will be okay for what you need. In the case that you are a Wedding Photographer for example that need a site where you will be uploading 100 photos per event and you do about 50 events a year maybe you need to pay for a much more expensive solution because of the space and bandwidth requirement you may need.

So how do I decide

The simplest answer is: Do your own research. Also trust your developer but even if you are a sceptic request that the developer explain why his/her suggestion is a better one than your suggestion assuming you have one. They should have the ability to explain their choice. If they don’t I give you the green light to start worrying.

This is a very basic article on the topic. There are a thousand more things I could suggest you considering but in my eyes this article is already to long.

Feel free to ask me questions at info@georgenicolaou.me

Note: The article does contain an affiliate link to Siteground for which I receive a kickback on my hosting if you sign up