Should I Host My Site at WA or Some Place Else?
This question was recently asked by one of the members here and I think I might be able to shed some light. What follows is my "experience influenced" opinion.
The concern of this individual was that WA was not listed in the top 10 places to host WordPress blogs. This is an astute observation especially from a new member.
There's a reason that WA is not in the top 10. It's because their primary goal is not to host your site, although they do give a great deal of priority toward making sure that it is always up.
Their support is good. WA support always seems to be able to overcome the issues as they come at them.
They aren't the fastest hosting provider, they don't give you access to the low-level things (something I don't like, but newbies likely wouldn't even be aware of).
But I would advise you to consider the following...
Minutiae is an Excuse to Procrastinate
Do not get caught up in the hosting minutiae. Until you have a site that has 10,000 visitors a week MINIMUM there's no point in even worrying about it.
What you will get from WA as you learn is a constant reminder in the site manager when you need to focus on more content, or getting more interaction.
The comment tools and site-feedback tools ONLY work if you host at WA.
Since WA is handling your site for you then you don't have to worry about forgetting site passwords. You also don't have to deal with making certain that security is set up correctly. Depending on the host, you're going to have that concern.
You don't have to worry about acquiring an SSL certificate, getting it installed and making sure that the MySQL database that runs WordPress is staying up to date.
In short, WA removes practically ALL concerns and helps to guide you during your initial journey.
Since you can always backup your site and WordPress is pretty much a mainstay in any hosting company's repertoire, my advice is (unless you have an established site getting a lot of traffic)...
Stick to WA hosting and concentrate on your content.
Concentrate on the courses.
Concentrate on engaging visitors and getting comments.
WA is a great hosting platform, especially for the majority of people that join. Once you've become successful and you are getting really serious (meaning you have some good traffic or you need low-level access to things), THEN start shopping around.
We humans often tend to focus on the minutiae as an excuse to steer clear of what actually matters.
On the other hand, if you already have a site somewhere else, especially if it's established, I'd leave it there ...but that gives you no excuse then not to start writing right now! Oh, and get back to those courses you've been avoiding!
Fight Your Nature!
Not only will you thank yourself later for writing the content and learning the lessons you need to succeed, you'll know much, much more about what to look for in a hosting company once you've gotten your "cyber lumps" from the best teacher in the world ...experience.
Hopefully this helps those of you that have been asking this question.
I actually speak briefly about this topic in my Wealthy Affiliate University Review on my site as well for those that are interested.
Recent Comments
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You hit it you hit it!!! Let me quote you first
" Stick to WA hosting and concentrate on your content.
Concentrate on the courses.
Concentrate on engaging visitors and getting comments."
I don't know a lot about who the competition is because I am not really looking for anything else. I know a good thing when I see it and for the price we are getting a great deal.
This is coming from a person who is almost on the First page of google consistently and the only reason why I am not is because I have like 15 sites that I am running at the same time lol .
I have barely digged into all the training here. But I am coming back around to make myself better. And I have learned a lot from the WA and the community .
It works and frankly I think everyone can succeed if I have with such a workload not to count many challenges in life.
Yep, WA is the place to be. Of that I'm convinced. The community alone is tough to measure a value against.
Very well written and explained, I will gladly worried about hosting when I get to ten thousand visitors per week.
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I've moved my websites between WA and other web hosts throughout the years. I would say your advice is spot on.
For me the biggest reason to host your websites at WA is for the SiteComment feature. I've had my websites at a different web host, so I haven't been able to take advantage of it. I've recently moved my websites back to WA just to be able to take advantage of that feature.
Usually you don't have to worry about server level stuff until you get into hosting at place where you're renting a bare-metal server such as Digital Ocean. This does add a lot of overhead to your ongoing efforts and like you said it prevents you from concentrating all your effort and time on building out and marketing your websites.
You do give up quite a bit of control with WA, but I do think the trade-off is worth it in most cases.
We have some significant updates coming, one being the SiteSpeed platform which is going to remove the need for any caching plugins, any security side services (like CloudFare) and CDN.
The sites are going to load incredibly fast, faster than any other network we have seen in the industry and your sites are natively going to be able to handle for dDOS type of attacks.
As well, we are going to be updating our email side of things to allow for MX/CNAME record updates.
Outside of those controls, there is nothing else that you need. You have full FTP access and you also have full database access through WP, the rest of the monitoring and network side stuff is going to be taken care of you, things that you would typically have to pay for and have companies monitoring on your dedicated.
For those that don't know everything that is offered within the hosting platform here at WA, here is a breakdown:
https://www.wealthyaffiliate.com/hosting
First, I'm honored that you added your voice to this thread. :)
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And people, you will NOT get this kind of attention at any other hosting facility (meaning Kyle, an owner, chiming in). Putting a value on that aspect is very hard to do.
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Second, I'm really excited to hear about the caching stuff you are talking about. that's going to be awesome and invalidates some of my statements in my post.
Finally, I would say that for some of the more advanced users, being able to edit certain plumbing-based low level aspects of the sites would be a plus.
And as a developer, having access through SSH to databases would be a welcome addition.
That said, I fall back to what I said before. It's nice not having to worry about these types of things at all for those that don't understand them, as well as for the advanced that tend to get distracted by them (and sometimes cause trouble).
Hi Kyle,
hope you are doing well. In your reply you mention that "You have full FTP access and you also have full database access through WP". Can you please explain briefly how I can have full database access through WP? I need this but I can't find it Thank you very much
FTP credentials can be found underneath the details page of your premium website.
In order to gain database access through WP, you would have to install some sort of database management plugin. You could just search the plugin repository for "database", "database manager", etc and you should find one. You can really screw your site up if you do the wrong thing, so be sure you know what you're doing and why you're doing it.