Membership sites are created on WordPress for many reasons. Common membership sites include forums and niche blogs where you can post moderated comments, videos, songs, etc.
In forums, the goal is to monetize through advertisements.
In others, the aim is to monetize the knowledge base through subscribed members.
You may be surprised to notice that most of the forums you visit are “Powered by WordPress.org.” Most membership WordPress blogs use Managed WordPress hosting. These multilevel blogs are vastly different and more complex than single-page basic CMS supported sites and need the active support of your hosting partner to implement and run seamlessly.
In membership WordPress sites, your site viewers should experience a fluid, seamless surfing experience. Nobody wants to encounter an ugly or buggy, slow interface when they enter a forum or a professional site.
So, how do you choose a WordPress hosting company for your membership WordPress site? Here are some quick pointers:
- Compare the page loading time of your host with its peers. Many review websites list historical data for page loading times. Page loading times over 500 ms result in SEO, and consequently ranking, downgrade.
- Check whether your host provides SSD for data storage and retrieval. SSD output is 20x faster than that of conventional disk drives. In forums, people log in and out simultaneously in large numbers, resulting in a lot of physical movement of conventional disk drive memories. It’s no wonder that your page loading time decreases considerably when your host provides you with only a free/low-cost SSD plan.
For quick, professional loading time, hardware-level optimization through nearby servers is a must. In short, your page loads faster when the server from which it originates is nearby. Check the availability of servers in all key regions, especially in the USA and Singapore. Nearby servers mean fewer hops or interconnecting nodes. Each interconnecting node has its latency. Naturally, the output gets bogged down when your request routes through a larger number of nodes.
Does your host include CDN in a package or at economical rates? CDN can help increase speed by putting a cached version of pages like Login, About Us, and Contact Us (dormant pages which are not updated frequently in membership sites) in far-flung servers where they are in demand, dishing out the cached page lightning fast from the nearby servers when required.
Find out if your host helps you to implement cache at the hardware level in some “exception” pages. Please note, your host may not permit you to use WordPress cache plugins separately, as they already have hardware level cache built in to your package. That’s because hardware level optimization will result in faster output than virtual software cache plugins.
You do not want your site to go down because of DDoS attacks. Every host declares that they have the best protection against DDoS attacks. But the best way to find out for sure is to put on your reading glasses and check the hacking reports from sucuri.net for your host and its peers.
Malware can easily enter through the back door to corrupt your files. That back door, in many instances, is an outdated version of PHP. To minimize your risk, check whether your host provides the latest version of PHP. Choose a host who automatically upgrades your site and installs the latest version of WordPress and PHP.
It’s hard to build a membership site, even in WordPress. It involves many layers and many different interface pages. So it’s a boon if your host helps you by throwing a one-step drag-drop interface WordPress site builder in the package or at an economical rate.
A no-brainer in your decision should be site uptime. Do not choose any host below 99.5% uptime. While this may not feel very different from a 99.1% uptime, when your website is live 24 hours a day for 365 days, this difference is palpable at an extra 7–10 hours of downtime within a specific time period.
Choose hosting rates carefully. Those rates will be different from normal single-page sites. More importantly, find out what the rates will be once your promotional period ends. It may be much higher than anticipated.
And yes, try to choose a host who has been recommended by WordPress. It means that not only will their whole system be optimized for WordPress hosting, you will get better technical support from a team that is more attuned to this CMS.