Web Hosting Options for WordPress

People often ask me, “where should I host my WordPress site?” Well, two web hosting providers that I use everyday for myself and my clients are DreamHost and Media Temple. DreamHost is the cheaper of the two – starting at $10/month. It’s great if you have small to medium websites to host and I really like their easy to use one click WordPress installer.

MediaTemple’s grid service is a bit more high end and double the cost at $20/month but if you’re planning on growing your site to have a decent amount of traffic or have a small to medium business website, I’d suggest MediaTemple (or affectionately known as MT)’s Grid Service. Their one click WP installer is a little quirky that you have to delete the “html” folder via FTP first before you can install WP.

On a personal note, I’ve been able to setup a brand new registered domain with WordPress running in less than one hour, using GoDaddy for domain registration and either DH or MT for hosting!

Some people have asked me about HostGator and after using them for several projects I am not a big fan of the way they organize the sub-domains or sub-accounts. It makes installation and previewing WordPress sites into a pain in the butt task.

Top 3 WordPress plugins

So, where do I start in my new  WPVerse site? How about professing my deep admiration for the WordPress platform and it’s developers? Ok, now that’s done, how about a list of my top 3 plugins for WordPress? These are absolute must haves if you’re serious about working with WordPress as either a blog or content management system

Enable Media Replace
This one is a no-brainer to install. Ever want to overwrite an image in the Media Library? Believe it or not, the standard WordPress installation won’t let you do that easily. You have to delete the image and re-upload the image! The Enable Media Replace plugin gives you a simple text link to overwrite the existing file in the Edit view.

Google Analyticator
How would I know if anyone is actually visiting my site? Well thanks to Google’s free Analytics web application I can tell exactly how many visitors I have and where they are coming from. Simply signup for Google Analytics account, then grab the assigned ID code, and paste it into the Google Analyticator plugin. You’ll also get a WP admin dashboard widget to get a quick overview of traffic coming to your site!

Contact Form 7
The difference a “pro” webmaster and….ehrem amateur, is if you publish your email address for the contact page on your WordPress site. Don’t do it! You’ll soon get added to a spam list. Instead use Contact Form 7 plugin to create a quick and easy to use Contact Form to your WP site. You can customize the fields, direct it to email address(es), and even add a file attachment upload form! Cool huh?

Note that many of these plugins are donation-ware, so please donate if you use it! Even a few $ goes a long way!

Get it: Enable Media Replace plugin | Google Analyticator plugin | Contact Form 7 plugin