WordPress is one of the simplest and most accessible ways to build a website, and, as a result, 63.2% of websites in the entire world are built on this platform. 

Besides being free and user-friendly, it also has hundreds of plugins that allow you to add or modify almost any feature you can imagine to enhance your site’s functionality.

But a great web design on WordPress or any platform needs equally reliable and impressive hosting in order to unleash its full potential. Your website’s hosting impacts your user experience and your SEO.

Choosing the right hosting is critical to your site’s success, which is why you should give serious consideration to cloud hosting. 

What is cloud hosting?

A website host is an online service that essentially makes a website available to the Internet. 

Traditional hosting involved a single server, which could host multiple websites at one time. The problem with that method is that issues with one website would impact another. For example, if one site experienced a flood of traffic due to a big sale or worse, a cyberattack, it would use up the server’s shared resources and cause delays or even outages for the other sites.  

Instead of hosting websites on a single server, cloud hosting services use multiple servers within a virtual environment to provide maximum and consistent uptime.

Cloud hosting servers take the form of interconnected clusters that derive their resources from a central point. Cloud hosting is now the preferred hosting for many WordPress websites, with cloud spending forecasted to exceed $480 billion in total for 2022. 

Here are five points that prove how cloud hosting your WordPress website is beneficial for your business.

5 Benefits of Cloud Hosting Your WordPress Site

1. Speed and Performance

Cloud hosting a WordPress site is typically significantly faster than traditional website hosting services.

Cloud hosting providers can maximize the performance of your website by distributing the load of serving pages between several servers on the network. Moreover, your site does not have to compete with other websites on a single physical server. 

If a third-party site experiences an instant spike in traffic or a severe technical error, your website’s performance won’t be affected as a cloud host can offer higher page load speeds and better uptime guarantees.

Although dedicated hosting and virtual private servers give you greater flexibility in resource use on a web server, they still cannot match a cloud hosting provider’s sheer speed and performance. To even come close, you would have to purchase access to a worldwide Content Delivery Network (CDN), which can be a significant cost depending on your needs.

You can get the best of both worlds if you find a cloud hosting service that includes a CDN.

2. Scalability

Another significant advantage of cloud hosting over other WordPress hosting solutions is its scalability. The ability to scale is vital if your company or organization is a startup or other entity that’s likely to experience constant growth and changes.

As your online traffic grows, your website will require different amounts of virtual resources. For instance, higher traffic requires more virtual storage space from the hosting servers. And when the traffic decreases, the needs will also drop. Likewise, the more SEO-friendly content you publish to keep your audience engaged, the more resources you’ll need.

With cloud hosting you can quickly add or reduce hosting resources like bandwidth and storage based on your organization’s current need, something that’s often more difficult and expensive to do with other hosting types.

3. Reliability and Redundancy

Cloud hosting takes advantage of clusters of connected and dedicated web servers, which means you can expect less downtime. 

With traditional hosting that relies on a single server to ensure uptime for your website, a system or network failure means your site is inaccessible. To make matters worse, downtime in a dedicated server or shared hosting setup often takes longer to resolve. 

Cloud hosting offers better reliability since another server takes over automatically if one server fails.

Another benefit of hosting in the cloud is that a multi-server setup makes regular, automatic data backups. Even if a single server goes down, you do not suffer any loss of information. Additionally, cloud servers make data recovery more straightforward than traditional types of hosting.

4. Improved Security

Statistics show that over 30,000 websites are hacked daily, with 43% of cyberattacks targeting small and mid-sized business websites. If you choose cloud hosting for your website, you lower the chances of becoming a victim of cybercrime.

The improved security of a cloud host all comes down to the architecture. With traditional shared hosting, all accounts assigned to a server share hardware resources, making it possible for an unauthorized user to access your website’s files due to security flaws in someone else’s website.

On the other hand, though several virtual machines may be within the same cloud, they are set up to act as separate servers with segmented data and resources.

5. Customer Support

To host your website in the cloud, you need to sign up for a hosting company or vendor. These companies will provide you with customer service and support that will ensure you spend less time worrying about the technical aspects of website maintenance, and more on your business operations. 

You will typically have access to a specialized and trained staff that helps you whenever you face technical difficulties. This kind of 24/7 support to keep your website online and running smoothly can be the difference between success and failure, especially if your small business cannot afford a dedicated in-house IT crew.

Other Hosting Options for Your WordPress Site

If for any reason cloud hosting isn’t for you, you can run your WordPress site on various other web hosting configurations. Here are the most common hosting services for WordPress besides cloud hosting.

Shared Hosting

A shared hosting plan houses your website alongside several others on a single server. All the sites share the server’s available processing power, bandwidth, and memory. 

Although shared hosting is the cheapest option, there are performance compromises. For instance, if another website hosted on the server has issues with a script or experiences a sudden spike in traffic, it could slow your site down significantly.

Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting

A virtual private server solves some of the challenges you may face with shared hosting. 

Although several websites still share a physical server, each site operates in a virtual environment with dedicated resources. This type of structure limits the impact of any bleed-over issues from other websites. However, this type of control over the hosting server comes at a significantly higher cost than shared hosting.

Dedicated Hosting

If you need a guarantee that other websites will not affect your WordPress installation’s performance, then a dedicated hosting plan gives you exclusive use of an entire web server. 

An in-house tech expert should be able to set up a dedicated server with no problems, but you can also use the help of a professional developer. An experienced developer will typically charge at least $60 an hour for this type of work. 

In Conclusion

There is a good reason why so many startups and mid-sized businesses use WordPress to create their websites. It is one of the most user-friendly, comprehensive website builders available, and has a shallow learning curve. However, to take full advantage of this feature-rich content management system, you must pair it with hosting that is just as strong.

Although you can host your WordPress site on any hosting plan, you can’t ignore the many clear benefits of serving your web pages from the cloud. 

If you can avoid it, don’t let the pitfalls of shared hosting disappoint your users and make you look unprofessional. Instead, use fast, secure, scalable, and redundant cloud hosting with reliable customer support.