Fast Lane Method For Choosing a WordPress Host Plan

The Fast Lane Method for selecting a WordPress host focuses on looking at the specific plans offered by the various hosting companies as opposed to finding a ‘good host company’. In this article, I want to explain why, it’s better to look for a plan as opposed to a company, give you a way to search these plans, save you time, frustration and probably money while also finding a company with good customer service reviews from TrustPilot.

The problem with finding a ‘good hosting company’ (and its solution)

Hosting companies specialize in plans for certain customers and you don’t necessarily fit into their preselected plans. As such you may have found a good company but not necessarily a plan in your price range with the features you want. Maybe the amount of email addresses isn’t quite enough or the features are good but you need a lower cost – there can be a lot of details to get right.

If you didn’t find what you wanted you may start to look for other hosting companies and this is where the difficulty begins because it’s hard to compare all the different features and prices of the various plans as you shop around. I’ll give an example below but my basic premise is that this leads us to get frustrated and make a poor decision when it comes to hosting. Onto the examples.

When comparing hosting plans across companies you will find,

some hosts ‘hide’ their ‘renewal prices’ by offering a lower cost p/month on the first invoice and then increasing the price (sometimes between 2x and 4x the initial price) on the next invoice. So, it’s hard to compare prices across plans and companies because there are actually 4 different prices to keep in your head.
On top of this the prices change over the length of the plan. For example, a plan can be over 1, 12 or 36 months commonly and each time you change the term both the initial and the renewal cost change. This means when comparing two plans there could be as many as 12 different prices to compare in just 2 plans! That’s obviously ridiculous for making a decision.
From there you still have to consider,
- Disk Space,
- RAM,
- Bandwidth,
- how many emails you need,
- how many sites you need to support,
- is the customer service any good
- oh, and these will often change between plans as well so the amount of options to try and understand increases even more!
As a final kick in the teeth months or years down the road your renewal cost turns out to be 3x what the initial cost was. Now you find it too cumbersome to move hosts so you end up paying a lot more than you needed to. This is because amongst all the info you had to weigh up you missed that the price changes dramatically after the first invoice.

For these reasons I propose it’s much easier to search for a plan by the criteria you need of your hosting. This allows you to narrow down the plans which work for you without having to wade through all the different features and variables. So let’s see how this might work.

How does the “Fast Lane Method” work?

The Fast Lane Method is basically a search form which allows you to search through dozens of hosting plans from dozens of companies. It provides 10 different filters to search plans. Let’s look at some examples of how one might use these filters.

Use case 1:

$40 monthly hosting budget, you want managed hosting and you only have one website.

In this case you might want to filter hosting plans by,

renewal cost (not initial cost) of $30.00 – $40.00 monthly,
managed hosting filter set to ‘yes’,
and 1 website needing to be hosted

This search would reveal very quickly that there are 3 plans from 3 companies offering hosting within these parameters. You then compare the plans and understand that,

one particular company is significantly lower than the others,
has the highest TrustPilot Score so you know there customer service is good
and renews at the same rate that you pay initially so you know there isn’t a ‘hidden cost’ here and all done within 2 minutes.

Use case 2:

You are a freelance front end designer and you design low traffic brochure type websites for local clients. You want to provide hosting for clients in your package but you don’t want to do the technical upkeep of server admin.

In this case you might want to filter hosting plans by,

Unlimited websites able to be added to your account
and ‘Managed Hosting’ so you don’t have to worry about updating plugins and themes.

You see there are 11 plans from 5 companies who fit this criteria. You see a company in the list and you have been recommended them before so you look at their plans. The price is affordable and does what you need. Very quickly you found that this companies host plan does indeed work and so you signed up. Total time taken under 5 minutes. Brilliant.

Use case 3:

You have 25 websites and you’re a technical user (developer or server admin) and you know you will have more websites coming onboard.

In this case you might want to filter hosting plans by

VPS server in order to give your sites individual resources,
over 100 GB storage,
and unlimited websites.

This search quickly reveals that there are 2 plans from one hosting company which suit. You figure that you can always upgrade the account if you need to so you choose the lower cost one and expect to upgrade in 3 years to get more resources.

What filters can you use to dissect the search results

Initial Cost: The cost p/month of the initial invoice or contract period. Typically 1, 12 or 36 months. Often lower than the ‘renewal cost’.
Renewal Cost: The cost p/month of the next invoice or contract period. Often higher than the ‘initial cost’.
Managed or Unmanaged Hosting: WordPress Software needs monthly updates of plugins, themes and its core code. A managed hosting service will do this on your behalf.
Disk Space: This is the amount of storage space your website(s) can take up on the hosting server. The more data and images and sites you have the more you require.
TrustPilot Score: The hosting companies’ review out of 5 on TrustPilot which is an independent review service for hosting and other companies.
Hosting Company: The company offering hosting plans. You can search for all plans from one company if you like.
Server Type: Either shared, dedicated, VPS or Cloud. These have different uses depending on your needs. Most people used shared hosting with WordPress but as you grow you may want to move to another.
# of websites able to be hosted: Some web hosting plans only allow you to have one website hosted there. If you have multiple sites to host you will need a plan which allows more.
# of email accounts able to be made: Some web hosting plans only allow you to have a limited amount of email accounts. If you want to have multiple you need a plan which supports this.
Free Domain: Some hosts offer a free domain (at least for some time not forever) included in the hosting plan and some do not.