Buying a house. Proposing. Whether the dress is blue and black or white and gold. These are the most important decisions you’ll make in your life, and now there’s one more:
Choosing the right Web Host.
A web “host” is aptly named – it’s like the host of a party. The Host makes everything run smoothly, makes sure only folks who are invited make it through the door (security) and they make sure they’re ready for emergencies (constant backup).
In Razorfrog’s 8 year history, we’ve worked with dozens of different web hosts, and we have finally found our definitive favorite. This host is like Neil Patrick Harris at the Grammys, or Tina Fey/Amy Poehler at the Golden Globes, or Mary Poppins, all the time: Practically perfect in every way.
WPEngine and Kinsta are industry-leading managed WordPress-only web hosts which offer all the bells and whistles we have spent many years trying to find elsewhere. They will both give you, the partier, the flexibility to increase traffic flow to your site, have a greater sense of security, faster loading times and amazing exclusive services to help you with any kind of issues to keep your website running.
Backups
Host rule number one: prepare for emergencies. Both WPEngine and Kinsta are great at this. Your data is safe at any point thanks to the automatic nightly backup feature, plus, you can run a backup point at any time as needed through their user portals. Backup points contain your database, core files, themes, plugins and uploads.
Staging
Another good host tactic is setting things up to see how it looks before anyone is invited. Same goes for websites! It is essential to test your website before it goes live. With a staging server, you can easily create an independent clone of your live production site to test themes, plugins and custom code. Make a change on the stage, and it’s easy to migrate that change to the live site. This gives a lot of room for trying out new ideas that your consumer base doesn’t need to see just yet. With the type of staging WPEngine and Kinsta provide, when you’re finally ready to have customers (partiers) show up, you know exactly what they’re seeing, and how your site’s elements will work for them.
SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Certificates
Okay so the metaphor breaks down at this point. It doesn’t matter, though, because both hosts have great SSL offerings as well. As you might know, not just eCommerce sites need SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificates these days – all sites should have one. Both WPEngine and Kinsta offer automatically-renewing certificates through Let’s Encrypt that we’ll install on your site. It’s an easy and hassle-free way to provide a secure route for financial information, usernames and passwords.
CDN (Content Delivery Network)
What’s a Content Delivery Network? It’s a collection of servers located in different locations around the world to speed up your files. While your web pages are loaded into a browser, the request is automatically routed to the server closest to your customer’s home. Translation: pages hosted with global CDNs enabled load faster. This means no frustratingly long load times, no moment that your guest can wonder if this is the right party for them. Both WPEngine and Kinsta offer this feature with almost no configuration required, whereas this can be incredibly time-consuming to set up on your own.
Optimized for WordPress
Lastly (and perhaps most importantly), both WPEngine and Kinsta have optimized their servers from the ground-up for WordPress sites. Lots of host offer WordPress support, but very few offer dedicated WordPress servers and configuration for your site. This means everything from caching, fine-tuned memory usage, customized plugins, and automated security tools that know WordPress inside and out. For more details on their technical features, take a look at the WPEngine “Our Difference” page and Kinsta’s “Features” page.
Convinced? You should be. With all that, offered at a discount through Razorfrog, it’s hard to say no. So why would you? We’re excited to show you all that this definitive web host is capable of. This is one decision we are happy to commit to for a good long time.