The best question a client ever asks me is “How do you make money off of this solution?” I usually reply with “My job is to provide small business owners solutions that they need, and to partner with companies that will provide them longevity for their solutions, as well as outstanding customer service.” I am usually considered the go-to guy. I would rather make a person happy recommending the right hosting company that they will want to stay with for life then make a small amount of change for recommending a bad hosting company. In the end its your recommendation. While each client is different I have access to a few partners who are able to meet my clients needs with no problems. After I resolve the original issue that they were encountering I know that I won’t have to worry about future hosting issues.

If I recommend the right hosting to my client it just makes my job easier. I know that the hosting company has by default the features I need to help my clients wordpress site stay secure, work with popular themes, and plugins. In some cases my clients’ websites have matured to the point where they need VPS hosting instead of shared hosting. “How do I know when I need to upgrade?” Some hosting companies will send you an email that you are overloading the server, your site will become slow and take a long time to load, your traffic logs will show a steady growth in traffic over time. Most hosting companies let you use only 10% of the CPU and RAM resources. They never really tell you how much is 10% and some automatically suspend you without notification.

One thing you can do before trying to upgrade is to peed up your wordpress blog. Installing wp-cache, optimization your database, removing plugins you are not using are a few simple steps you can take. Locking down comments so that robots can’t post fake comments can greatly improve the performance of your site as well as reduce the amount of time you have to spend to administrate spammy comments. I use wp-register on my sites, and I make sure that the administrator always has to approve comments before they appear from the settings->discussion are of wp-admin. I also set the “links in a comment to hold for moderation” to 1.

Most hosting companies offer wordpress through fantastico as an auto install feature. When it comes to how wordpress works, what plugins need to installed, how to set widgets in your sidebar you should seek advice from a wordpress expert. Most small hosting companies will know what wordpress is but support beyond, is the server up and running is beyond the scope of their expertise. They are responsible for the server to be optimal, to have backups on hand, to be able to show you how to use their control panel features. I only choose hosting companies with cpanel because it is easier to manage your email, mysql databases, files and backup without having to contact anyone at the web hosting company for help.