The 4 best WordPress hosts of 2016

As a seasoned WordPress developer, I am frequently asked what WordPress web hosts I recommend. There are so many solid choices now! The WordPress ecosystem is truly a bounty of choice in 2016. I could write an exhaustive comparison of all of the options, but these are called “exhaustive comparisons” for a reason. Let’s skip that, and I’ll just tell you the four WordPress hosts I recommend in five distinct tiers.

Note that many of these hosts target a range of sites, from starter sites to enterprise sites, so I am picking the hosts that I think fit each tier of site best, even though they might also work for other kinds of sites.

Starter Site

SiteGround is one of my favorite WordPress hosting companies. They offer a range of hosting solutions, but their WordPress-tailored plans are a tremendously good value and have many WordPress-specific perks. Ask around the WordPress community — SiteGround is a well-respected company that works hard to win and retain the business of WordPress customers. Their plans start as low as $3.95 a month, which is an incredibly good deal. If you aren’t sure what you need, SiteGround is what I would choose.

Take a look at SiteGround’s WordPress hosting plans.

Developer-Friendly Site

What if you know your way around WordPress, want things like Git and WP-CLI access, or want advanced WordPress-friendly caching for your site? SiteGround has you covered there, too. Their GoGeek plan (currently $14.95 a month) offers all of these perks, unlimited sites, WordPress staging sites, and so much more. I love working with GoGeek-level SiteGround sites, because they work really well and give me access to all the tools that I need as a developer. Or, if you’re not a developer, but have hired one to work on your site, you may want to upgrade to GoGeek hosting so she can work at maximum efficiency.

Go sign up for SiteGround’s GoGeek WordPress hosting.

Intermediate Site

WP Engine has been around since 2010, focuses entirely on WordPress hosting, and has established themself as a solid choice in the intermediate range. Their plans start at $29/month and include a 60-day money-back guarantee and free automated migration of your existing WordPress site. WP Engine also has more advanced hosting options, so they’re an option that could grow with you.

Sign up for WP Engine using this link and you’ll save 20% off your first payment.

Professional Site

Pantheon got their start as a Drupal host, but have taken their innovative container-based hosting technology to the WordPress market. As a developer, I appreciate their Git-based development flow, their powerful “Terminus” command line client, and their built-in and dead-simple dev/test/live environments. On the higher level plans, you get “Multidev” which lets you spin up a sandboxed development environment for a specific Git branch. This means you can send clients and testers URLs for testing new features in isolation, before they are merged back into the main code branch. Awesome.

Their professional tier starts at $100/month, which isn’t cheap, but your developers will love their deployment tools, their dev/test/live code staging flows, and their Git-based deploys to the development environment. Pantheon is a great choice for professional WordPress sites that have a developer on staff or on retainer.

Check out Pantheon’s professional WordPress hosting plans.

Enterprise Site

Pagely has been around since 2006! They started the whole WordPress-dedicated hosting marketplace. When they started, they targeted a range of WordPress sites, but now they focus on enterprise hosting. This is where big brands go for custom WordPress hosting solutions. The folks at Pagely know WordPress well, and will be an excellent hosting partner for your enterprise WordPress site. Their VPS solutions start at $499/month, but they also have a shared server plan called Neutrino for $99/month.

Get started with Pagely enterprise hosting.

How I Picked

My method here was simple. I thought about how I answer if a friend or a client asks me for hosting advice. I found that I regarded sites as fitting in one of five categories. Then, I considered which hosts offer the best service and value in those categories, and picked these four hosts. After I had made my picks and written about their benefits, I went to see which of my picks had affiliate programs. Three of them did, and one did not. I used affiliate links for those that offered them, and a direct link for the one that did not. Using affiliate links to sign up for their service will earn me some money, but you can of course just go directly to their sites if you like. I stand by these recommendations, either way. I’ll write a new post in 2017 with my new picks. Let me know on Twitter what hosts are your favorites, and why!

Tips for Hosting WordPress on Pantheon

Pantheon has long been hosting Drupal sites, and their entry into the WordPress hosting marketplace is quite welcome. For the most part, hosting WordPress sites on Pantheon is a dream for developers. Their command line tools and git-based development deployments, and automatic dev, test, live environments (with the ability to have multiple dev environments on some tiers) are powerful things. If you can justify the expense (and they’re not cheap), I would encourage you to check them out.

First, the good stuff:

Git-powered dev deployments

This is great. Just add their Git repo as a remote (you can still host your code on GitHub or Bitbucket or anywhere else you like), and deploying to dev is as simple as:

git push pantheon-dev master

Command-line deployment to test and live

Pantheon has a CLI tool called Terminus that can be used to issue commands to Pantheon (including giving you access to remote WP-CLI usage).

You can do stuff like deploy from dev to test:

terminus site deploy --site=YOURSITE --env=test --from=dev --cc

Or from test to live:

terminus site deploy --site=YOURSITE --env=live --from=test

Clear out Redis:

terminus site redis clear --site=YOURSITE --env=YOURENV

Clear out Varnish:

terminus site clear-caches --site=YOURSITE --env=YOURENV

Run WP-CLI commands:

terminus wp option get blogname --site=YOURSITE --env=YOURENV

Keep dev and test databases & uploads fresh

When you’re developing in dev or testing code in test before it goes to live, you’ll want to make sure things work with the latest live data. On Pantheon, you can just go to Workflow > Clone, and easily clone the database and uploads (called “files” on Pantheon) from live to test or dev, complete with rewriting of URLs as appropriate in the database.

No caching plugins

You can get rid of Batcache, W3 Total Cache, or WP Super Cache. You don’t need them. Pantheon caches pages outside of WordPress using Varnish. It just works (including invalidating URLs when you publish new content). But what if you want some control? Well, that’s easy. Just issue standard HTTP cache control headers, and Varnish will obey.

<?php

function my_pantheon_varnish_caching() {
	if ( is_user_logged_in() ) {
		return;
	}
	$age = false;

	// Home page: 30 minutes
	if ( is_home() && get_query_var( 'paged' ) < 2 ) {
		$age = 30;
	// Product pages: two hours
	} elseif ( function_exists( 'is_product' ) && is_product() ) {
		$age = 120;
	}

	if ( $age !== false ) {
		pantheon_varnish_max_age( $age );
	}
}

function pantheon_varnish_max_age( $minutes ) {
	$seconds = absint( $minutes ) * 60;
	header( 'Cache-Control: public, max-age=' . $seconds );
}

add_action( 'template_redirect', 'my_pantheon_varnish_caching' );

And now, some unclear stuff:

Special wp-config.php setup

Some things just aren’t very clear in Pantheon’s documentation, and using Redis for object caching is one of them. You’ll have to do a bit of work to set this up. First, you’ll want to download the wp-redis plugin and put its object-cache.php file into /wp-content/.

Update: apparently this next step is not needed!

Next, modify your wp-config.php with this:

// Redis
if ( isset( $_ENV['CACHE_HOST'] ) ) {
	$GLOBALS['redis_server'] = array(
		'host' => $_ENV['CACHE_HOST'],
		'port' => $_ENV['CACHE_PORT'],
		'auth' => $_ENV['CACHE_PASSWORD'],
	);
}

Boom. Now Redis is now automatically configured on all your environments!

Setting home and siteurl based on the HTTP Host header is also a nice trick for getting all your environments to play, but beware yes-www and no-www issues. So as to not break WordPress’ redirection between those variants, you should massage the Host to not be solidified as the one you don’t want:

// For non-www domains, remove leading www
$site_server = preg_replace( '#^www\.#', '', $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] );

// You're on your own for the yes-www version 🙂

// Set URLs
define( 'WP_HOME', 'http://'. $site_server );
define( 'WP_SITEURL', 'http://'. $site_server );

So, those environment variables are pretty cool, huh? There are more:

// Database
define( 'DB_NAME', $_ENV['DB_NAME'] );
define( 'DB_USER', $_ENV['DB_USER'] );
define( 'DB_PASSWORD', $_ENV['DB_PASSWORD'] );
define( 'DB_HOST', $_ENV['DB_HOST'] . ':' . $_ENV['DB_PORT'] );

// Keys
define( 'AUTH_KEY', $_ENV['AUTH_KEY'] );
define( 'SECURE_AUTH_KEY', $_ENV['SECURE_AUTH_KEY'] );
define( 'LOGGED_IN_KEY', $_ENV['LOGGED_IN_KEY'] );
define( 'NONCE_KEY', $_ENV['NONCE_KEY'] );

// Salts
define( 'AUTH_SALT', $_ENV['AUTH_SALT'] );
define( 'SECURE_AUTH_SALT', $_ENV['SECURE_AUTH_SALT'] );
define( 'LOGGED_IN_SALT', $_ENV['LOGGED_IN_SALT'] );
define( 'NONCE_SALT', $_ENV['NONCE_SALT'] );

That’s right — you don’t need to hardcode those values into your wp-config. Let Pantheon fill them in (appropriate for each environment) for you!

And now, some gotchas:

Lots of uploads = lots of problems

Pantheon has a distributed filesystem. This makes it trivial for them to scale your site up by adding more Linux containers. But their filesystem does not like directories with a lot of files. So, let’s consider the WordPress uploads folder. Usually this is partitioned by month. On Pantheon, if you start approaching 10,000 files in a directory, you’re going to have problems. Keep in mind that crops count towards this limit. So one upload with 9 crops is 10 files. 1000 uploads like that in a month and you’re in trouble. I would recommend splitting uploads by day instead, so the Pantheon filesystem isn’t strained. A plugin like this can help you do that.

Sometimes notices cause segfaults

I honestly don’t know what is going on here, but I’ve seen E_NOTICE errors cause PHP segfaults. Being segfaults, they produce no useful information in logs, and I’ve had to spend hours tracking down the code causing the issue. This happens reliably for given code paths, but I don’t have a reproducible example. It’s just weird. I have a ticket open with Pantheon about this. It’s something in their custom error handling. Until they get this fixed, I suggest doing something like this, in the first line of wp-config.php:

// Disable Pantheon's error handler, which causes segfaults
function disable_pantheon_error_handler() {
	// Does nothing
}

if ( isset( $_ENV['PANTHEON_ENVIRONMENT'] ) ) {
	set_error_handler( 'disable_pantheon_error_handler' );
}

This just sets a low level error handler that stops errors from bubbling up to PHP core, where the trouble likely lies. You can still use something like Debug Bar to show errors, or you could modify that blank error handler to write out to an error log file.

Have your own tips?

Do you have any tips for hosting WordPress on Pantheon? Let me know in the comments!