Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Best Wordpress Hosting
-
I've had a horrible experience with the security on wordpress hosting with GoDaddy. Someone recommended Blue Host as my next option. Does anyone have any experience with BlueHost and what other hosting companies would you recommend for wordpress hosting?
-
Have been very disappointed with Bluehost. LOTS of downtime in the last 6 months.
-
My vote goes to WPEngine as well. Great people there.
-
I just moved my sites from Hostgator to Media Temple...I saw an increase in search traffic w/ in days of the move for what it's worth.
-
WPengine is by far the best host for Wordpress in 2012
-
HI Christine
Even i have many issue with godaddy and so as with hostgator, lately i am able to find a data center in India named as CTRLS,
these guys are very focused on just one business that's hosting, nowdays i am having 3 VPS with them, its little costly, but definately worth every penny i have spent.
just google for them
** Please note i am not trying to promote them by any means NOR receiving any benefits from them ******
-
What sort of penetration testing? Any suggestions for places to do this?
-
Wordpress and PHP both have inherited vulnerabilities that help intruders. And When you add extensions, it adds. For Security, only Host can not do any thing.
Either, you make a penetration testing from some reasonable security company, and you will get save from 99% of amateur attacks.
Or make your Wordpress installation always updated, and use as less extensions as possible.
Its better to use some backup plugin, and keep on taking daily automatic backups. So In any such case you can instanlty bring your site back to life.
I am using http://me.wisnetsol.com for last 3 years, and never get hacked.
-
Well, I don't believe even Amazon will help much about it. There are certain vulnerabilities inherited with Wordpress, php that helps hackers to intrude. And when you add extensions, it adds.
I suggest you get proper penetration testing, and remove those vulnerabilities. And you can run your blog on any reasonable shared host without any issue.
-
GoDaddy's cheap accounts are hosted on Windows, and you have no access to the server to do 301 redirects, etc. There's also some kind of caching so changes might not "take" immediately. Overall it's a real pain, and not Wordpress-friendly at all.
-
GoDaddy is horrible and they are not as helpful when help is needed for changes, fixes with site.
HostGator is awesome for hosting and customer service. I can be on the road, call in and they fix it immediately for me. Godaddy's response --- "Sorry, we are not allowed to do that for you."
-
I use Bluehost a lot. They're a great value for a basic (shared) hosting package, with good support. No complaints.
I'll second what EGOL says if you have more than a few thousand users per day. In that case you'd probably want to go to a CDN.
-
Wordpress operates on PHP. If someone wants to hack or website, it is the hosting companies job to limit them but its your job to make sure all of your passwords are considered strong passwords
First thing i would recommend is to make sure all passwords to any admin area are changed.
Read the article Gyi suggested http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress
For these reasons I have recently launched my own web hosting company because I want to offer the most secure environment for my customers.
If you need any help or have any questions with your wordpress securing, PM me and I would be happy to assist you.
-
+1 for hostgator, also, not sure if this was in the thread, but worth looking at: http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress
-
Wow! Thank you for all the insight! I am going to look at HostGator as I've heard several good things about them. With regard to udpates, the Wordpress platform has been udpated at every opportunity and, in addition, I've updated with "patches" through GoDaddy as well. Unfortunately, this is the third site that has been hacked. I'm overseeing 150+ sites so I need to consider another option as I've also had bad experiences with GoDaddy in other areas. Thanks again for everyone's input! Very much needed and appreciated!
-
I have a few sites that I have set up using Wordpress - I always use Hostgator - it's cheap - quick - seems reliable and they have that great Fantastico Deluxe thing where you can easily upload Wordpress without using FTP and that kind of thing. Always runs very smoothly and I've never had problems!
-
Hi Christine
I've used Bluehost a couple of times for small WP sites and found it very straightforward to operate and good value. The one-click WP install makes it particularly attractive for beginners. I can't comment on security as I haven't had any issues.
-
You are coorect
they have php5 but after checking, i find that they have dicontinued mysql used by wordpress i believe, I am not famialer with WP much myself.
-
Agreed Godaddy is terrible. I use Bluehost and find them OK, but I do get a better service with Just Host ( bit.ly/iw8cpo)
United Hosting is also very good.
-
Very good point about updating WP promptly to avoid security holes. It may not be the hosting company at all.
-
(First... have you been updating your WP promptly when updates are issued? I assume that you have but just askin'.)
If you have a tiny site with very little traffic this host might be OK. However....
Be careful as they offer: "UNLIMITED GB of Site Transfer" (their CAPS, not mine).
With this type of offer once your visitor counts get up to a few thousand per day you might see service outages because instead of throttling your BW they instead limit your "processing units" or some other parameter.
UNLIMITED BW is often true but there will be another variable that will throttle your site.
Some sites require a dedicated server and terrabytes of BW per month. No host will give you that for $6.95/month.
-
Alan, Christine is looking for a host for a wordpress site. discountasp (.NET hosting) doesn't strike me as the right choice.
-
Our WP site has been hacked just about on every possible host and platform from shared to dedicated server. Entry points were different, sometimes through entire server, sometimes via plugin weakness. We're thinking about Amazon right now, still undecided as one of our staff gravitates towards hosting the site on our own box in the office.
PS: Found this presentation: http://blog.rochenhost.com/2010/06/joomla-and-wordpress-hosting-and-security-presentations-cms-expo/ I haven't heard of this hosting company before but anyone who is presenting on wordpress hosting security must be worth investigating further.
-
I am not sure what security problems you had, but the main thing i would be looking for is load speed. this is a factor in ranking.
I host my own sites in Australia, but i do host a few at discountasp. they seem to have all the featuers and they are great value.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Have Your Thoughts Changed Regarding Canonical Tag Best Practice for Pagination? - Google Ignoring rel= Next/Prev Tagging
Hi there, We have a good-sized eCommerce client that is gearing up for a relaunch. At this point, the staging site follows the previous best practice for pagination (self-referencing canonical tags on each page; rel=next & prev tags referencing the last and next page within the category). Knowing that Google does not support rel=next/prev tags, does that change your thoughts for how to set up canonical tags within a paginated product category? We have some categories that have 500-600 products so creating and canonicalizing to a 'view all' page is not ideal for us. That leaves us with the following options (feel it is worth noting that we are leaving rel=next / prev tags in place): Leave canonical tags as-is, page 2 of the product category will have a canonical tag referencing ?page=2 URL Reference Page 1 of product category on all pages within the category series, page 2 of product category would have canonical tag referencing page 1 (/category/) - this is admittedly what I am leaning toward. Any and all thoughts are appreciated! If this were in relation to an existing website that is not experiencing indexing issues, I wouldn't worry about these. Given we are launching a new site, now is the time to make such a change. Thank you! Joe
Web Design | | Joe_Stoffel1 -
Have an eBook. What is best practice for SEO?
Hello We have a free eBook - its a great resource and great piece of content. It is available to download on our website here - http://re-timer.com/the-product/how-to-sleep-better/ The book is available as a whole or as individual chapters (i.e. http://re-timer.com/app/uploads/2015/07/Chapter8.pdf?b0df38). The PDF chapters appear to be doing well in Google search for certain keywords. I can't measure this in GA though. I would like the eBook to assist the SEO of my website overall. If I create a web page and 'embedded' the PDF into it will Google still crawl this page? At the moment we are also using this to collect email addresses, this is a nice to have and it is OK if people get the eBook without doing this (if they find a chapter in Google they currently don't have to enter their email address). I'm sure lots of people have eBooks now. What is best practice and the best way to use this as a tool to maximise SEO for the whole website (http://re-timer.com)? Thank you! Laura
Web Design | | LauraFalls1 -
Website Home page suddenly disappeared after changing Hosting
HI All, My site was ranking very well and was in 1st page of google for most of my keywords. Last week we did some update to the site and moved it to new hosting and from then onwards I dont see my site home page in Google ranking . My Website Name is : royalevents.com.au. We used to be in 1st of Google for keywords like wedding Mandaps, Indian Wedding Mandaps etc, Would be great if some one helps us to figure out whats gone wrong .. I also did Webmaster Fetch as Google but nothing happened. Thanks
Web Design | | Verve-Innovation0 -
Lots of Listing Pages with Thin Content on Real Estate Web Site-Best to Set them to No-Index?
Greetings Moz Community: As a commercial real estate broker in Manhattan I run a web site with over 600 pages. Basically the pages are organized in the following categories: 1. Neighborhoods (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/neighborhoods/midtown-manhattan) 25 PAGES Low bounce rate 2. Types of Space (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/commercial-space/loft-space)
Web Design | | Kingalan1
15 PAGES Low bounce rate. 3. Blog (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/how-long-does-leasing-process-take
30 PAGES Medium/high bounce rate 4. Services (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/brokerage-services/relocate-to-new-office-space) High bounce rate
3 PAGES 5. About Us (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/about-us/what-we-do
4 PAGES High bounce rate 6. Listings (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/305-fifth-avenue-office-suite-1340sf)
300 PAGES High bounce rate (65%), thin content 7. Buildings (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/928-broadway
300 PAGES Very high bounce rate (exceeding 75%) Most of the listing pages do not have more than 100 words. My SEO firm is advising me to set them "No-Index, Follow". They believe the thin content could be hurting me. Is this an acceptable strategy? I am concerned that when Google detects 300 pages set to "No-Follow" they could interpret this as the site seeking to hide something and penalize us. Also, the building pages have a low click thru rate. Would it make sense to set them to "No-Follow" as well? Basically, would it increase authority in Google's eyes if we set pages that have thin content and/or low click thru rates to "No-Follow"? Any harm in doing this for about half the pages on the site? I might add that while I don't suffer from any manual penalty volume has gone down substantially in the last month. We upgraded the site in early June and somehow 175 pages were submitted to Google that should not have been indexed. A removal request has been made for those pages. Prior to that we were hit by Panda in April 2012 with search volume dropping from about 7,000 per month to 3,000 per month. Volume had increased back to 4,500 by April this year only to start tanking again. It was down to 3,600 in June. About 30 toxic links were removed in late April and a disavow file was submitted with Google in late April for removal of links from 80 toxic domains. Thanks in advance for your responses!! Alan0 -
Best SEO practice - Umbrella brand with several domains
Hi, we have several blogs and comparison sites on specific topics. All the domains rank on top positions in very competitive niche markets. We think that we can get more profit out of the domains when we put them under an umbrella brand. Customers that visit domain A can then also find products easily on domain B. We see this for example on health.com, with several brands in the top. To maintain or improve our rankings i'm looking for specific information for the link structure. For example, is it better to have the 'about us'/rel=author on each domain, with contributors on that specific domain or is it better to have them all in the (umbrella) brand domain. At the moment we have the structure like this: domainA.com, domainA.com/blog, domainA.com/about-us and domainB.com, domainB.com/blog, domainB.com/about-us. I think to maintain the rankings it is best to keep specific content (like blog/ about us) on the domain. So is it the best to just do side wide links with a logo (like health.com) and what about hosting? We work with wordpress, so all domains will be hosted on one ip? when we use the multiple site option of WP? All information on this topic is more than welcome 🙂
Web Design | | remkoallertz0 -
Multi-page articles, pagination, best practice...
A couple months ago we mitigated a 12-year-old site -- about 2,000 pages -- to WordPress.
Web Design | | jmueller0823
The transition was smooth (301 redirects), we haven't lost much search juice. We have about 75 multi-page articles (posts); we're using a plugin (Organize Series) to manage the pagination. On the old site, all of the pages in the series had the same title. I've since heard this is not a good SEO practice (duplicate titles). The url's were the same too, with a 'number' (designating the page number) appended to the title text. Here's my question: 1. Is there a best practice for titles & url's of multi-page articles? Let's say we have an article named: 'This is an Article' ... What if I name the pages like this:
-- This is an Article, Page 1
-- This is an Article, Page 2
-- This is an Article, Page 3 Is that a good idea? Or, should each page have a completely different title? Does it matter?
** I think for usability, the examples above are best; they give the reader context. What about url's ? Are these a good idea? /this-is-an-article-01, /this-is-an-article-02, and so on...
Does it matter? 2. I've read that maybe multi-page articles are not such a good idea -- from usability and SEO standpoints. We tend to limit our articles to about 800 words per page. So, is it better to publish 'long' articles instead of multi-page? Does it matter? I think I'm seeing a trend on content sites toward long, one-page articles. 3. Any other gotchas we should be aware of, related to SEO/ multi-page? Long post... we've gone back-and-forth on this a couple times and need to get this settled.
Thanks much! Jim0 -
Best method to stop crawler access to extra Nav Menu
Our shop site has a 3 tier drop down mega-menu so it's easy to find your way to anything from anywhere. It contains about 150 links and probably 300 words of text. We also have a more context-driven single layer of sub-category navigation as well as breadcrumbs on our category pages. You can get to every product and category page without using the drop down mega-menu. Although the mega-menu is a helpful tool for customers, it means that every single page in our shop has an extra 150 links on it that go to stuff that isn't necessarily related or relevant to the page content. This means that when viewed from the context of a crawler, rather than a nice tree like crawling structure, we've got more of an unstructured mesh where everything is linked to everything else. I'd like to hide the mega-menu links from being picked up by a crawler, but what's the best way to do this? I can add a nofollow to all mega-menu links, but are the links still registered as page content even if they're not followed? It's a lot of text if nothing else. Another possibility we're considering is to set the mega-menu to only populate with links when it's main button is hovered over. So it's not part of the initial page load content at all. Or we could use a crude yet effective system we have used for some other menus we have of base encoding the content inline so it's not readable by a spider. What would you do and why? Thanks, James
Web Design | | DWJames0 -
Changing from Squarespace to Wordpress - Will I Lose My Rankings?
I have a friend who has a squarespace site that is giving him lots of trouble. For one, even though it is supposed to redirect to GreenSpaceConstruct.com...Bing and Yahoo don't seem to recognize this domain. Instead, they show greenlightconstruct.squarespace.com in the serp's. Oddly, Google shows the site as GreenSpaceConstruct.com. The site is ranking well for some terms. I'm afraid that converting to wordpress will hurt his rankings in the short term. If bing and yahoo are crawling this squarespace domain, and he moves it...is there a way not to just completely lose the rankings? Thanks for any thoughts. Much appreciated! Josh
Web Design | | JoshTurner0