Best Web Hosting Companies for Real Estate Sites Built on WordPress?

by Drew Meyers on March 7, 2012 | Category:

Though not often talked about, a web hosting company is a critical component to any website — since without one, your website wouldn’t exist on the internet unless you owned your own servers (not recommended). Even with their importance, finding a reliable host is extremely hit or miss from my experience. I seldom can go an entire day without seeing someone ask which hosting company to go with on Twitter.

So, what are the important factors to consider when choosing a hosting company?

Downtime – 100% uptime for eternity is all but impossible, but how often do their servers go down?
Tech support availability – do they have email support? phone support 24/7? How quickly do they respond?
Hardware – old or new hardware? do they just manage a RackSpace server or do they have their own server rack?
Scaleability – if your site goes from 500 to 50,000 visitors a month, is that going to be a problem?
Cost – $5? $10? $50?
Reputation – what do their clients say? what are the biggest sites on their servers?

Are there any considerations I’m missing? Leave them in the comments if so.

Where are Geek Build 2012’s participants currently hosting their websites, and what are they paying?

Greg Fischer is on HostGator for $10 a month. Daniel Bacon has a VPS (virtual private server) at A2 hosting for $60 per month. Dave is on Hostmonster at $5.95 a month. John Womeldorf is on GoDaddy at $6 a month, with a 2 year contract. John Stegner is hosting with BlueHost for $117.35 per year. Jason Richards is building a brand new site, and doesn’t have a hosting account yet.

What is the best web hosting solution for a real estate website built on WordPress? What hosting company should Geek Build 2012 participants be using?

Note from the Editor: Not sure what Geek Build 2012 is? It’s building a few real estate websites from scratch publicly with the help of the Geek Estate Community and overseen by an experienced steering committee. Read more about Geek Build 2012 here, or view all posts related to Geek Build 2012 here.

**Geek Build logo designed by Dominic Morrocco at M Squared Real Estate.

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Tags: geek build, web hosting providers, wordpress website hosting

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About Drew Meyers

Founder of GEM Diamond. Zillow Alum. Real estate tech geek. Travel addict & former co-founder of Horizon. Social entrepreneurship advocate. Fan of Red Hot Chili Peppers.

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28 Comments

JeffRiber
Posted at 10:35h, 07 March

Good post.

I treated hosting companies more as a commodity when I built my site. Currently using bluehost and haven’t had any huge hiccups (minor issues once or twice). Although, I don’t think I’m in any danger of racking up 50,000 visitors in a month any time soon 🙂

Curious from those who have done it… How complicated it is to change hosting providers?
- Dave Sentenn
  Posted at 10:22h, 08 March
  
  I don’t know if you saw my post above as Dave A, but moving WP sites is a complicated hassle. I wouldn’t recommend trying to move it yourself. I used a site moving service to move mine when I’d finally had enough of my old host. It cost $199 and was handled in two days with only about three hours of downtime at the end when they had to physically move the database.
  - Daniel Gensollen
    Posted at 12:12h, 31 March
    
    Im sorry but if you spent a day or so researching and with trial and error you will learn that $199 is ridiculous for that. Ive moved many wordpress sites since I do web design for a living. Honestly with a 30 minute – an hour downtime and would do it for less than half what you paid or for free if the client purchases a web design package for a rebuild. oh and it does not take 2 days to do the transfer, not even close.
- Daniel Bacon
  Posted at 10:27h, 08 March
  
  As I mentioned A2 moved me for free. Westhost will move you to a shared plan for free if you are are already on a shared plan and are running cpanel. Bluehost will not move a site for you.
  - Dave Sentenn
    Posted at 10:30h, 08 March
    
    Bluehost partnered with a company that does the moving and has them as an option in the cPanel (at a cost)… So did MediaTemple (also at a cost.)
    
    Seems to be the new trend having a moving service linked. With so many people hopping around I guess it makes sense. I’d prefer free, though. 🙂
    - Daniel Bacon
      Posted at 10:54h, 08 March
      
      That’s interesting about Bluehost. When I asked them about 1 month ago they said they would not move me, citing liability issues.
Ben Goheen
Posted at 11:22h, 07 March

@JeffRiber:disqus – trust me, changing hosting companies SUCKS. I’ve done it a few times and don’t wish that headache onto anyone.

I’m now with http://site5.com and couldn’t be happier. The prices are pretty much in line with any hosting company and their tech support has been top notch.
Dave A.
Posted at 13:01h, 07 March

My real estate site is built on WP and never carried a heavy trafficwise load. Even still MediaTemple found a way to screw it up. A lot of outages, and often very slow load times, even with caching plugins fully optimized. Add to that extremely long support queue times and I left after two years.

Switching servers is a hassle, but you can hire site movers to handle the task for about $200 and have it handled in a few days and a no/minimal downtime. I moved to Bluehost who I had used before. So far so good.. load time on the site us consistent, and getting real support happens in minutes.
mrwilliamsburg
Posted at 06:26h, 08 March

I will say that I have never had an issue with Go Daddy after using them for a number of years.
mrwilliamsburg
Posted at 06:27h, 08 March

BTW, Drew its John not Greg
- Drew Meyers
  Posted at 08:53h, 08 March
  
  ughh. fixed
Daniel Bacon
Posted at 09:28h, 08 March

As Drew mentioned I have
http://www.baconrealtygroup.com/ running on a VPS (virtual private server) at A2 Hosting, for $60/month. I was on a shared plan at godaddy for about two years and the speed was horrible. If you would like to see how drastically my speed changed check out this screenshot of my pingdom.com response map (great service, you get one web page for free so you can just point it to your home page):
http://screencast.com/t/VAh1lJWIT83

A2 moved my site for me, included with signup. That being said I have had some outages. They gave me the last month for free since they did not meet their 99% uptime guarantee, and I am about to make another claim for another month since I just get my monthly Pingdom report and I was at about 98.6 percent.

From my research it looks like Bluehost and Westhost are two of the best, and I am actually considering moving back to a shared plan on one of those to try it out. However, right now I’m running smoking fast for free, so I’ll sit tight for a bit and see how it goes.

For my Clearwater site I would vote for either Westhost or Bluehost.
- ds61976
  Posted at 10:14h, 08 March
  
  Not having any experience with Westhost for comparison, Bluehost works great for my WP site. I’m on a shared plan and the speed is good. Not amazing, but good. I’m planning on implementing cloudflare on the site (cloudflare.com) as it works incredibly well to speed up sites. It’s like a caching plugin, but much much easier to use and test CSS changes, etc.
Brian Tercero
Posted at 09:36h, 08 March

I’ve been using a level 7 VPS from hostgator.com. Works fantastic.
Greg Fischer
Posted at 11:07h, 08 March

Anyone use Synthesis from Copyblogger? Important to point out that it only works with Genesis framework (which some of us are on).
- Greg Fischer
  Posted at 11:21h, 09 March
  
  Another consideration for Synthesis is that cost goes considerably higher when hosting multiple sites. It seems that most of us will have a variety of domains as part of our plan.
Eric Bramlett
Posted at 07:22h, 09 March

At Displet, we’re migrating away from a few dedicated servers to Amazon Web Services. AWS is the absolute best hosting platform out there, but you get zero support & you have to know how to work in the command line. So…it’s definitely not for most.

I’ve been with Dreamhost (horrible, horrible nightmare), godaddy (not as bad as people say), 1and1 (fine), and InMotionHosting. If you need a VPS, IMH has the best customer support, in my opinion. I’ve worked in HostGator’s environment a lot, and it’s super solid for a shared product.

The best managed WP hosting, in my opinion, is also pretty expensive. WPEngine is on AWS, and does a sick job managing it for their clients. They use some really extensive, proprietary caching modules, and the sites just hum. They’re a smallish company out of Austin, with enough funding you don’t have to sweat their viability. The only downside is that they charge $50/month for a single WordPress site and $99/month for a multisite install with up to 10 sites. So…it’s expensive.
Alex Cortez
Posted at 17:22h, 10 March

Interesting info, A2 is sounding pretty good regardless of the costs.
Alex Cortez
Posted at 17:22h, 10 March

Interesting info, A2 is sounding pretty good regardless of the costs.
M Squared Real Estate
Posted at 06:04h, 13 March

I have a dozen or so servers from WiredTree, been with them for years. No complaints.
http://wiredtree.com

I never hardly ever contact support, but I can pick up the phone and call someone in Chicago who is sitting in front of my box 24/7.
M Squared Real Estate
Posted at 06:04h, 13 March

I have a dozen or so servers from WiredTree, been with them for years. No complaints.
http://wiredtree.com

I never hardly ever contact support, but I can pick up the phone and call someone in Chicago who is sitting in front of my box 24/7.
M Squared Real Estate
Posted at 06:04h, 13 March

I have a dozen or so servers from WiredTree, been with them for years. No complaints.
http://wiredtree.com

I never hardly ever contact support, but I can pick up the phone and call someone in Chicago who is sitting in front of my box 24/7.
M Squared Real Estate
Posted at 06:04h, 13 March

I have a dozen or so servers from WiredTree, been with them for years. No complaints.
http://wiredtree.com

I never hardly ever contact support, but I can pick up the phone and call someone in Chicago who is sitting in front of my box 24/7.
M Squared Real Estate
Posted at 06:04h, 13 March

I have a dozen or so servers from WiredTree, been with them for years. No complaints.
http://wiredtree.com

I never hardly ever contact support, but I can pick up the phone and call someone in Chicago who is sitting in front of my box 24/7.
Craig Mullins
Posted at 01:22h, 14 March

Love these guys – http://wordpresssetup.org/ They’ll set up a basic wordpress site and theme for $100.00 bucks. They use servint for hosting. Bulletproof…
Daniel Beer
Posted at 18:30h, 13 March

My WP sites have always been on GoDaddy and I never had any problems until recently. Actually most problems are with email where certain messages won’t come through for hours or even at all.
Drew Meyers
Posted at 08:12h, 15 March

This site is on Wphost.com right now — and, as you probably know, uptime has been hit or miss recently.

All my other sites are on WIredTree.com (per Dominic’s recommendation) and I have no complaints thus far..
John Little
Posted at 07:33h, 19 November

Hi all, i recommend http://agentroost.com, It’s a WordPress hosting made especially for real estate agents. They have their own themes but i think if you ask them it’s possible to use your own theme. I use one of their themes…and overall i’m happy with them. I made a huge economy because i pay monthly and i didn’t need to pay for webdesign, also they add new features and themes constantly.