Selecting a WordPress Host & Domain Name

Revised June 2019.

This is part 2 of the Start a Website series, where we’re going to go through piece-by-piece how to start your first website. The first two items you’ll need are:

Web Hosting and
Domain Names

This article will help you select a provider(called a host) for your web hosting; and provider for your domain name(called a registrar).

WordPress Hosting

Look for a host that supports WordPress hosting.
Ask if PHP and MySQL are the most recent stable versions. You’re looking for a simple “yes” here.
Ask if they use NGINX or Apache software? You’re looking for NGINX. This is not a requirement, but is nice to have.
Do they look after backups and how often?
Do they provide round the clock support – by phone? or chat? or email?

Which Hosting Account to Choose

For a simple website that is brand new and doesn’t expect a huge amount of visitors, you can expect to pay $4-$8/month for a ‘shared hosting’ account. As soon as your site gets too full of content, or you get too many visitors you’ll notice the site getting sluggish.

At that point, you’ll need to upgrade to a higher quality account with more resources. These usually start around $20/mo and go up.

When it’s time to get your own dedicated server, you’re looking at $175/mo and up.

The company that I recommend without a doubt is WPB Hosting!

We offer hosting for $15 – $29 per account for those with 25k hits or less. We also develop packages unique to those with larger sites – up to 1.3mil hits per month.

All packages include our brand of Customer Service – you’ll always speak to or email a real person, from Canada or the US who understands WordPress, hosting and most likely can solve your issues immediately.

Also included:

Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificate, automatic renewal
initial migration service (up to $250 value)
Genesis Framework & Child Theme of your choice
CDN through Cloudflare, or custom for larger sites
Malware removal, if requested
daily backups off site
Geeky Stats: running NGINX, PHP 7.3

Selecting a Domain Name

Behind the scenes domain names are tricky! In any language, on any computer, anywhere in the world, there can be only one of any domain name! The regulating body of all of this is known as ICANN – Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. You need to know this for this very important legal tidbit:

There are three contacts on each registration: Registrant(this is you), Administrative and Technical. You have to have YOUR name in the Registrant contact or the domain is not legally yours. It is a good idea to be sure that you have the ability to check and edit the contact information and “Name Servers”. You’ll learn about that later in this series.