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There are quite a few options for bloggers in terms of what they use to get content heard. Of the masses, WordPress has arisen to the top of the bunch as one of the best platforms for blogging. To help keep up with popularity, webhosts are starting to offer WordPress-specific hosting options. But are special WordPress hosts worth the time and effort to try?

What To Expect From WordPress Hosts

Before a blogger can get any work done, he or she needs to install WordPress. But doing that can be tough for those of us who aren’t exactly technically gifted. In that case, many webhosts, even the generalized ones, offer auto-installers that do the dirty work for us. So far, general webhosts and WordPress specific webhosts are neck and neck.

The problem lies within the support for the product. Generalized webhosts don’t always have time to keep up to date on new additions of WordPress- meaning their customers could be at potential security risks. It only takes one delay in upgrades for a blog owner to lose everything they have- and at this point in time a WordPress-specific host would have been the better choice.

Where general webhosts tend to fail bloggers is in the upgrade category. Auto-installers such as Fantastico (packaged with cPanel) offer easy ways to upgrade, but the configurations, themes, plugins, and other content will be lost in the upgrade as files are overwritten. Clearly, WordPress specific hosts get the win here, since they take previously configured files into account when upgrading.

WordPress users will attest that blogs take up a nice amount of bandwidth. This is because blogs use databases to store the vast majority of their information, meaning multiple connections to the database could overload the backend of a blog. In this scenario, WordPress users need a host that allows for flexible bandwidth plans. The host should also have a sturdy hardware setup so that a bottleneck performance issue is not created at the database level.

Bloggers Get Added Bonuses

It isn’t always a game of business- sometimes it’s about the extras that webhosts can offer. WordPress hosts are popular for offering WordPress-specific plugins and themes for their users free of cost- whereas normally extras such as this can cost webmasters hundreds of dollars.

Interestingly, Wordpress hosts have an overlooked benefit: their exclusivity of their WordPress themes. Free WordPress themes are popular, but it seems that everyone has them. But thanks to the exclusivity of WordPress themes from webhosts, the problem of having a unique design is easily solved.

Custom designs for WordPress blogs can easily run hundreds of dollars. As compared to the low fees of a WordPress host, it’s no contest as to which route every WordPress user should take in regards to themes.

When we add the score up, it seems that the WordPress hosts come out on top. But be sure to get quotes from several sources before making your decision. After all, a website is only as good as its host!

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