I recently switched website hosting providers and thought I’d share my experience.
Name.com
About eight years ago, I used Name.com to find a domain for another business. I don’t recall why or how I landed on Name.com, but I remember I wasn’t thinking about hosting. I just wanted to find an available domain name. When I finally settled on a domain, Name.com made it easy to upgrade from a domain registration to a website hosting package.
Like many website hosting providers, the base package included three domains. I only had the one domain at the time, so the other two slots were unused for many years. Then, when I decided to create Moto Woodworks, it made sense to start with Name.com because I had the unused slot. No extra charge fit my startup budget!
It worked okay. Not great, not terrible, just okay. When I saved a page in WordPress, it would hesitate for a few seconds before saving. When I updated a plugin, it would take a little longer than usual. If I updated multiple plugins, the update would finish but not return to the updates page. I’d have to refresh the browser to get back to the updates page. I kept reminding myself that I didn’t pay anything.
Then I created the YouTube Woodworkers Dashboard. Suddenly, there was a lot of data moving between some spreadsheets and the website. Now, it wasn’t just WordPress that was slow. The entire website was slow. I installed a caching plugin to optimize performance, but it was still slow. I put a reminder in my calendar to look for a new website hosting provider once my free year was up.
Bluehost
I looked at a few different website hosting companies. WP Engine is what my company uses. Great service and the performance is top notch, but it’s expensive and overkill for my website. We migrated from GoDaddy to WP Engine due to performance hiccups, so GoDaddy was out. It came down to Hostinger and Bluehost. Both have very reasonable hosting plans, but the reviews seemed to be a little better for Bluehost.
The migration was super easy. I backed up the website before starting the process, but it turned out to be unnecessary. Bluehost stepped me through the process and the migration was done in a few clicks. It was so easy I didn’t really believe it was done. I inspected every page in my website to convince myself it had worked.
I was so impressed I decided to move the domain to Bluehost as well. The process failed the first time, but it was because I had the domain locked at Name.com. Once unlocked, the domain moved seamlessly.
Most importantly, the website is super fast. Plugins update quickly and pages load without hesitation. I verified with PageSpeed Insights that my website is blazing!
Final Thoughts
The website can still be optimized further. I’ll probably implement caching again and there are some images I can tweak. But I’m very happy with Bluehost and am happy to endorse them as a WordPress host.
