Now that I am moving to just designing WordPress websites, I needed a web hosting company optimized for WordPress. Starting with my own website I am now hosting with Bluehost. I previously hosted with the highly reliable hosting company Cedant. When they were recently bought out by Aplus, things took a turn for the worse. I won’t go into all the nightmare details here but the final nail in their coffin was their non-standardized WordPress implementation. Aside from the non-standard directory naming convention and access restriction on some of the WordPress configuration files I also could not install WordPress in the root website directory using their Control Panel wizard. It had to be a sub-directory meaning I would have to manually relocate the files to the root website directory later (sometimes with mixed results). The non-standard implementation also meant that nearly half of the plugins I installed would not work. I would either have to search for plugins that would work or go into the code myself and correct it. Needless to say this was not sustainable and I wasted many hours customizing existing plugins.
I decided at last to take some recommendations from WordPress.org and find a hosting company that specializes in WordPress installs. After reviewing their recommendations and checking some customer reviews I settled on Bluehost and so far haven’t been disappointed. They ensure that they always run the latest stable version of WordPress and plugin and theme installs are completely problem-free. This will definitely speed up my deployment and transition of my customers to WordPress.
