Many sites and blogs (such as Craving Tech) are powered by WordPress, a free and most popular online website creation tool (Content Management System).
However, as good and powerful WordPress is, it can sometimes be a resource hog to the server if one is not careful. With great power comes a great responsibility – and if you happily install lots of plugins to power your site/blog, your web hosting provider will soon send you a ticket.
Seeing the importance of having a WordPress-optimised service, HostGator takes the front and offers a new web hosting plan: Optimized WP, a special WordPress hosting that just doesn’t WordPress, but built specifically for it.
For a WordPress power user like me, it’s easy to get around optimising a WordPress blog with powerful plugins and web services such as caching, CDN, and other optimisations.
For a non-WordPress user or those who just want to focus on creating contents, however, the tasks can be daunting.
HostGator Optimized WP offers a great solution for both power and non-power users of WordPress. That is because the new plan will include everything you can think of to optimise your site/blog such as:
- Built-in Caching and CDN (Content Delivery Network)
- Automatic Malware scanner and removal
- Daily Backup with up to 5-level/iterations (provided by CodeGuard)
- Unlimited Storage
- More powerful servers to handle a spike of traffic
Now, compare this to what I have set-up at the moment on this blog:
- Running on HostGator’s shared hosting server
- W3 Total Cache WordPress caching plug-in
- CloudFlare CDN
- VaultPress backup solution
Looking at those, the new all-in-one solution from HostGator does sound intriguing.
Now, from what I knew before during the beta testing, the new WP Optimized plan doesn’t seem to include cPanel so you may have to let go some power and flexibility. That is, if you only need to run a WordPress blog/site, this is a perfect hosting plan. However if you’d like to install Ruby on Rails or set up some other scripts or web pages of your own with cPanel File Managers, you are seem to be out of luck. Again, they may have included it now but it’s unclear from the product page.
I’m definitely contemplating to give this new HostGator service a try, though. Any speed optimisations and the fact that I can just combine all services into one (backup, CDN & caching) is a gem in itself. A small boost on Google’s ranking perhaps?
If you want to know more, find out about the plan & pricing at HostGator Optimized WP page. You can also read my WordPress optimisations to reduce CPU usage.
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