Lost Factor

When you need to choose a new host for your WordPress blog, you have a specialized situation which calls for a specialized plan to answer your needs.

To that end, you are going to want to go with a host which offers a plan that caters specifically to WordPress bloggers. I was reading an iPage review the other day and as it so happens, iPage offers two such plans for your convenience.

WP Starter

This plan starts out at the introductory rate of $3.75 per month. This is not a bad rate at all; there are hosting companies that charge more than that as the starting rate for their basic general-purpose plans, and even more for their WordPress hosting plans.

The Basics Included

The WP Starter plan at iPage includes core hosting, a customized control panel, and pre-installed themes and plugins for your blog. The customized control panel allows you to access the controls you use most right on your dashboard. Pre-installed plugins include W3 Total Cache, Jetpack, and more. You get the standard level of customer support.

Pricing

After the introductory rate expires, you will have to pay significantly more to retain your plan, but you can get discounts if you are willing to pay for 12 or 24 months at a time. The Starter plan costs $10.49 per month after the introductory rate expires. You can get that down to $9.49 per month by purchasing a year at a time. Buy two years at a time, and you will pay only $8.49 per month.

WP Essential

The WP Essential plan is an enhanced version of the Starter plan. The introductory rate has you paying $6.95 per month. After the introductory period expires, the monthly rate jumps up to $12.49 monthly. If you buy a year or more at a time, you can reduce the price. The lowest rate is the three-year rate of $10.49 per month. Note that this is the same rate as the monthly term for the Starter plan.

Better Value

So if you are paying monthly on the Starter plan, you may want to consider an upgrade to the Essential plan. If you try out the service and you love it, and you have no reason to believe you won’t be using it in three years, you may as well get a better value.

The Extras

What does the extra expense or commitment for the Essential plan buy you? You get the same features which were included in the Starter plan, but you add to that enhanced security and super speed. You also get better support, since you get access to iPage’s team of WP experts, instead of just the general support staff. That means if you have a question which only an expert can answer, you can get the help you need right away.

Special Features

These are the special features included with the WP plans on iPage. But as with the other types of plans on iPage, you also get an abundance of other features. These include:

• Free domain registration (note that if you get this through a monthly account and cancel it, you need to pay a
• $15 fee to keep the domain)
• Unlimited disk space and bandwidth
• Unlimited email accounts
• A money-back guarantee to protect your purchase
• Free advertising credits from Google, Yahoo, and Bing

If you read an iPage review focused on WP, you will find that many WordPress users are very happy with both the Starter and Essential plans. So if you are looking for a new host, consider giving iPage a try.

You’ll have an easy time importing your existing blog or starting from scratch, and all at a very reasonable price!

Time to move your blog from free blogging platforms like WordPress.com or Blogger.com? You will need web hosting for that, and preferably a good one.

I have been there, done that and I have found one finally that just provides everything I need. That’s Web Hosting Hub, if you couldn’t figure it out already. Let me sum up in this short post why I think they are one of the best on the small business / shared hosting market.

Ranked High Over the Board

You can check all over the internet what people think about WebHostingHub, and most of the times you will find very positive reviews. You can also check out their website, as that also features a lot of genuine customer reviews.

Need More than a Blog?

If you decide to venture into e-commerce, you get every support at Hub. They have a number of the open source shopping carts softwares ready for one-click installation. They can also set up an SSL certificate and secure connections to your web site. Need to accept online payments? No problem, Hub helps you with that too.

Not only that, but for all that I mentioned above, you get 24/7 support. Believe me, when we talk about a mission critical web site, you want to be able to reach support all the time without waiting. It’s just a must!

The Buttleneck of Web Hosting: Reliability

All those fancy features don’t worth even a penny without good uptimes. You should aim for at least 99.9% uptime. That’s a 43 Minutes, 12 Seconds downtime over a period of a month. Unfortunately with most hosting companies that’s the best you can get. But 43 minutes is not bad at all if you ask me, considering that some of that happens at nighttime, so your visitors won’t notice it.

With Web Hosting Hub, I have not experienced any major downtime issue. I know they had a pretty big hacking accident years ago, but I think they have learned from that a lot and take security even more seriously.

Yeah, cPanel Baby!

cPanel is the easiest platform for the everyday webmaster to manage all aspects of a website. You can point and click and a lot of server tuning is done for you. 1-Click installations, add-on domains, security, traffic compression, it’s all at your fingertips with cPanel. I love it!

Bonuses

When you register an account with WebHostingHub.com, you will also get a free domain name. That’s a nice gesture, but I believe that starting from the second year, they will bill you for that too. So your decision if you take andvantage of it.

Oh, and it’s cheap!

So the bottom line is, I think we have a good bargain at hand here. Don’t hesitate if you are working on a website to give WebHostingHub a try!