If you’re looking for high-traffic WordPress hosting, your focus is obviously going to be a lot different than someone looking for cheap entry-level WordPress hosting. Price becomes less of a factor, with performance and reliability taking center stage.
Let’s be real – these WordPress hosting providers definitely aren’t the cheapest hosts around, but they offer good value for the performance and can help you reliably and quickly load your site for tens or hundreds of thousands of visitors.
Typically, you can expect to pay $50+ per month for these hosts, though I’ll note some cheaper options depending on how “high” your high-traffic site is.
What to look for in high-traffic WordPress hosting
Before we get into the list, let’s quickly run over some considerations for hosting a high-traffic site, as it will give you some insight into why we chose the hosts that we did:
Smart caching:
Caching is a great way to speed up your WordPress site and lessen the load on your server, which is especially important for high-traffic sites. While there are plenty of great WordPress caching plugins that can help you implement caching at the application level, a more performant approach is often to serve cached content at the server-level, because it completely eliminates the need to load WordPress/PHP when serving cached content.
Dedicated resources:
Most cheap WordPress hosts are able to offer budget prices by having you“share” resourceswith other sites on the same server. That’s fine for a low-traffic site, but it’s not a good option for high-traffic WordPress sites.
Instead, you want dedicated resources that are only for your site. While a dedicated server can get you those resources, a more popular approach that you’ll see is to use cloud hosting from Amazon Web Services (AWS),Google Cloud Platform, or other cloud providers. You still get dedicated resources for your site, but it’s much easier to scale and reconfigure if needed.
Nginx:
Nginx is a web server and reverse proxy that’s especially popular for high-traffic websites because it can often out-perform the popular Apache web server in high-traffic situations.
While Apache is theoverallmarket leader in the web server space, Nginx is by far the market leaderwhen you look at the top 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 most-trafficked sites. So for ahigh-traffic site, you really want a host that uses an Nginx stack.
Scalability:
If your site is high-traffic now, there’s a good chance it might be even higher-traffic in the future. To be able to address that, high-traffic WordPress hosting should make it easy to scale your plan up as needed.
Most of the hosts on this list utilize cloud hosting infrastructure, which makes it easy to add resources when you need them.
Uptime:
Uptime is important for all websites, but it’s especially important for a high-traffic website because the impacts of downtime are magnified. Down for thirty minutes on a low-traffic site?
You might impact a couple of visitors. On a high-traffic site? You could negatively affect hundreds or thousands of visitors. Don’t just accept words on the marketing copy – look for an actual service legal agreement (SLA) that guarantees a specific uptime and comes with options for redress if the host can’t meet that guarantee.
Typically, you’ll get a refund or credit if a host can’t meet its uptime guarantee.
Content delivery network:
A content delivery network (CDN) helps speed up your global load times and lessen the load on your server by delivering static content from a network of servers around the world, rather than just the single server where your site is hosted.
Many premium WordPress hosts now offer integrated CDN functionality to improve performance without forcing you to integrate with a third-party CDN service.
High Traffic WordPress Hosting
Let’s have a look at those hosting companies that you can trust for your growing WordPress blog.
Kinsta Managed Hosting
Kinsta hosting is top in the managed WordPress hosting as they build specially for hosting heavy WordPress sites. If you like technical details, they use Nginx, PHP7-FPM, Redis, and Object cache to make your site blazing fast. I have experienced a loading time of less than 1 second for ShoutMeLoud.
My experience with them is great so far, and their tech support is par excellent. Their entry-level hosting plan starts with $30/month which lets you host 1 WordPress sites.
High traffic websites should look at their Enterprise plans which start at $600/month. You can learn more about their pricing & offer over here.
What you would like the most is their excellent customer support. When my site shifted to PHP7.X on the Kinsta Google cloud platform, I faced a lot of issues because of using a few outdated WordPress plugins.
Their team including CEO ‘Mark Gavalda‘ helped me at every point to fix all the issues. I have never had such a royal experience with any other WordPress hosting.
If you are looking for the best solution for your growing WordPress blog, you should host it on Kinsta Hosting. Once you have made the decision, their friendly support team will migrate your site for free.
Pros:
Pricing is competitive & service quality is excellent.
20 server location
Free website migration on all plans
SSD storage
Free Website backup
Staging & Free SSL
Cons:
The entry-level package is $30/month, which offers limited resources.
After running ShoutMeLoud on Kinsta hosting for the last two years, I could say it’s a top-notch solution for heavy traffic WordPress blog.
Cloudways
Before moving to Kinsta hosting, I was with Cloudways for 4 months & they were pretty good with their offering.
You can host your site on DigitalOcean server (DO), Linode, Google cloud platform, VULTR or Amazon AWS. They provide a custom dashboard which makes it easier for you to install a new WordPress site, or you can migrate all your existing WordPress Blogs.
One of the best things about them is that you can host any Website using Cloudways & they are not only limited to WordPress. This also creates an issue with the support, as they are fine-tuned for all the platforms.
If you have basic knowledge of troubleshooting WordPress, I would suggest going for Cloudways. The major benefit which you would be getting here is the pricing which comes down to a cheaper price. You can also consider hosting your entry-level WordPress site with them, as their most reasonable plan comes for $10/month.
In short, you will be hosting your WordPress site on a Cloud server with no requirement for technical knowledge.
Pros:
Host on the DigitalOcean server or Google cloud.
Their dashboard is user-friendly.
Perfect for entry-level as well as enterprise-level websites
Scale up or down a server in real-time.
Pricing is cheap & you can customize your hardware requirement.
Offers 14 days of free trial & free site migration.
Cons:
Support is average.
Too many options could be overwhelming.
Pagely
Another top hosting option for high-traffic WordPress blogs. They also allow unlimited visits & their service quality & hardware offering is top-notch. The good thing about them is, they are affordable for entry-level bloggers to who have a limited budget.
You can pick the right plan for you from their seven different plans. Do notice the bandwidth column when picking up Pagely plans or you can always add additional bandwidth any day of the month.
Pros:
WordPress multi-site support
Free-site migration of 2 sites
Bluehost
Bluehosts' high powered servers can support several hundred websites easily. Bluehost has taken many steps to allow your site to become very popular without a degradation of service.
However as users share the certain resources, including disk space, processor (CPU), and bandwidth limits (the speed and capacity of the Internet connection). If one website becomes extraordinarily popular it can threaten the normal speed of access you have been accustomed to.
CPU Protection
Shared servers from Bluehost are monitored to make sure each customer gets their fair share of resources on the server. This software is in place so that you have a low chance of being affected by abusive users on the server. When a servers performance is being affected by an abusive user we can identify the user and take corrective action.
CloudFlare
CloudFlare is a very powerful Content Delivery Network (CDN) that we offer to all of our customers for free. If you are worried about a sudden spike in traffic CloudFlare is a great way to handle this increased traffic.
To enable CloudFlare you will need to:
Login to your Bluehost Control Panel
Click the CloudFlare icon, located in the Domains section of the cPanel.
Click the Activate link, located to the right of your Domain Name.
Dedicated Hosting
However if your website becomes very popular (such as having tens of thousands of simultaneous users) please consider looking into a dedicated hosting solution.
Due to shared server model, Bluehost is able to offer unsurpassed prices and the best customer support, that will not be found easily and cheaply elsewhere. Many customers that left come back and choose to stay with us and just move portions of their site to the dedicated solution.
Customers that need Flash Servers, or game server commonly leave their Web sites and email with us and move the content that demands a dedicated solution. This is the most economical solution for most customers.