You may have seen the ads for WordPress hosting cost on the web.
$2/mo or $300/mo
WHAT?!
Here’s why there is such confusion and such a wide range of prices around WordPress hosting.There are 3 terms that get used a lot during discussions of WordPress hosting.
- Hosting
- Management
- Maintenance
More...
Hosting
This is the service of giving your website a home. The coded files that make up your website are in a directory on a computer somewhere. It’s quite a bit more technical than that, but that will suffice for this explanation. If you are really interested in a technically detailed explanation of web hosting see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_hosting_service.
You can sign up for "bare-bones" hosting and pay as little as $2 a month!
HOWEVER, you need to understand the "care & feeding" a WordPress site requires or you could end up in a world of hurt! Maleware, hacking, plugin conflicts, theme conflicts, database issues, no back-ups, wrong restorations, (the list is pretty long).
The take-away here is, if you're willing to spend the time and be the one responsible for all the tech stuff that is involved, then you can save some money.
If you're more interested in running your business than monitoring, managing, maintaining and fixing your website, you may want to choose another option.
Management
A WordPress website, with all it’s MANY advantages, needs to be managed differently than a website built with HTML & CSS. A WordPress website needs to be update fairly frequently or it can become susceptible to hacker attacks. There are several separate components which all need to be monitored and updated:
- The core of the WordPress code
- The many plugin software components
- The main theme
Along with all this updating is the monitoring for plugin and theme conflicts after each update. Sometimes the update of one plugin will adversely affect another plugin. Or a theme update may cause a plugin conflict.
So updating and monitoring is a big part of WordPress Management.
Another aspect is backup and recovery. There should be daily backups created, so if the website goes down for any reason, it can be brought back online quickly and successfully.
Maintenance
Maintenance and management are two words which generally mean the same thing. Some web hosts will include content updates (adding text, images, videos, new plugins, etc…) in the management/maintenance plan. Some include content creation, marketing, social media, YouTube channel management, email list management and more.
The more features that are included, of course, the higher the monthly or yearly fee.
Summary
You can pay as little as $5/mo for hosting your WordPress website, but YOU are going to be responsible for all the tech management and maintenance of the site. Or you can agree to pay a lot on a monthly plan.
Just make sure you carefully go over and discuss what is included in the monthly plan.
For an example of what to look for, you can see the features and benefits of our WordPress Hosting & Maintenance plan HERE.