The Great

WP Engine They ONLY host WordPress sites and do a great job of it. This is the host to go with if you are looking for the fastest possible WordPress website.

The Good

• AISO.net A solar powered (100% with panels on their roof) hosting company. They charge a bit more due to power costs, however we’ve found their service to be great and many of our green clients choose to host with them.
• Laughing Squid - A small host out of San Francisco costing $6/month and offering really good and fast service. We’ve been recommending them for most of our clients over the past few months and the service has been phenomenal.
• DreamHost - They offer a huge variety of hosting packages which work well for just about every site. They also have some Green practices which are noteworthy.
• BlueHost (affiliate link) - They offer up to 100 sites hosted for one low price and we’ve found them to be well optimized for WordPress. However BlueHost has been having some trouble lately and it will be interesting to see if they can become a stable host once again.

The Bad

• Eapps – This was our host of choice 5 years ago, however they’ve migrated all small sites to old servers and the lag time is easily noticeable.
• GoDaddy – The GoDaddy servers are simply too crowded and we’ve found WordPress will regularly take between 10 and 60 seconds just to load a simple page.
• Network Solutions – They have overcrowded slow servers and do not offer .htaccess rewriting which drastically limits what you can do with a WordPress website.
• Media Temple – We’ve had a number of security problems with (mt) sites getting hacked through their database and do not consider them to be stable or fast enough to host a live website.
• Yahoo – Read our previous post about Yahoo Hosting and WordPress here and stay away.

This is by no means an exclusive list and only covers our recent experience with clients we’ve worked with. If you have other WordPress hosts you’d like to recommend please leave a comment below.

I was turned onto Yahoo’s business hosting offerings through a “featured provider” link on the WordPress site (this has since been removed) and was very impressed with the amount of bandwidth and storage capabilities they offered for a very reasonable price. The “one-click-install” feature also seemed of interest (it usually takes 5-7 minutes to do a new WordPress install manually).

However, while working on a few sites for clients using Yahoo website hosting, these issues came up:

1. The one-click WordPress install adds a huge banner to the admin area (which is removable, but it’s a complicated procedure which took me about 30minutes to figure out and if done incorrectly will quickly cripple the site)
2. The one-click install is also incompatible with many WordPress plugins (such as certain contact forms) and makes other features (like JS Lightbox) much more complicated than they would be with any other host.
3. Permalinks are supported via a plug-in for the one-click install (this works reasonably well, though doesn’t play nice with plugins).
4. Permalinks are not supported for a manual install (the .htaccess file is blocked, keeping web site owners from implementing many useful features such as 301 redirects (very useful for SEO, especially when migrating a site into WordPress).
5. Technical supports responds quickly (within 3hrs) but I’ve yet to receive anything besides a form letter going over the “great” features of Yahoo hosting. So far 3 support emails have yet to even mention the question asked (I’m guessing they have an automated support feature which finds keywords in an inquiry and sends back a automated response).

Hopefully this helps website owners who may be searching for hosting. It usually feels safe to go with a large company like Yahoo for hosting, however it’s good to know the shortcomings of this choice.

I’m very disappointed that WordPress once recommended Yahoo for hosting. It’s good to see they finally revoked that recommendation for the benefit of website owners everywhere.

UPDATE 6/13/06: WordPress seems to have added Yahoo back to their list of preferred hosts. I’ve written to them about this and cannot figure out why they would recommend such a crippled service. I guess the Yahoo name looks good on the WP site?

I still have not gotten a response from Yahoo answering any of the questions I had, though, at this point I don’t think they’ll tell me anything I haven’t already figured out.