There are two layers at the foundation of every website—the site’s domain and hosting. There are many companies offering hosting and registration services, but there are only two we recommend to clients.
WordPress Hosting
Your options for hosting are endless. A quick search online and you’ll find many places offering shared, dedicated, managed, and many more.
It’s easy to get lost in the details.
For us, we wanted two things–speed and security. We design complicated, custom WordPress sites from the ground up. We don’t use simple templates or themes that limit the design and functionality like other designers and agencies.
Because of our services customized nature, we required fast, high-performing servers, so our customers get incredible user experiences.
We host our site and many of our client’s websites with Kinsta.
Kinsta provides cloud-based fully-managed WordPress Hosting that offers lightning-fast speeds, added layers of security, excellent features, and an incredible customer support team.
They are a little more expensive than other options, but here are the reasons we find them worth the extra costs:
WordPress-specific
We design WordPress sites. Our sites are powerful, custom, and require a little extra oomph. Kinsta allows us to build without worrying. If we were using a shared hosting server, we would be concerned that our sites would get bogged down with the limited capacity those servers offer. In other words, for us, Kinsta gets the job done.
Speed
A website’s speed is critical to its success. A slow website creates a bad user experience, which leads to a loss of sales.
If our goal is to help you grow your business with a beautiful website that says all the right words, that is impossible to do in a shared hosting environment.
Kinsta uses Google’s cloud-based servers, which lightning-fast.
Plus, research shows that back-end speed (servers, CDNs, databases, etc.) impact SEO. The power of your host directly affects where you rank in search engines. The better your hosting environment, the more opportunity search engines will give to your site to bring in customers organically.
Security
Designers often overlook website security. We want to protect ourselves, our clients, and their customers. We need to provide secure sites to our clients so they can protect their assets and customers.
Kinsta proclaims, “Secure like Fort Knox.” They provide firewalls, DDoS detection, SSL support, and more. They take security a step above any other hosting service we’ve used.
Special Features
One of the things we like most about Kinsta are features like automatic daily backups, SSL certificates, and content delivery networks (CDNs) included in the monthly price.
These tools elevate our client’s sites and create a better user experience for our clients and their customers.
These tools allow us to have peace of mind and not worry about our web site’s server, ever again.
Customer Support
Finally, problems will arise. When they do, Kinsta’s support staff is unbelievably good. They have taken care of so many of our questions and resolved our issues quickly. We used to be with another hosting company, but their support was so slow, it caused endless frustration and ultimately forced us to move to Kinsta.
Domain Registration
We register our domains with one company–Namecheap. I have been registering my domains with Namecheap since 2003. Today, it’s the only company we register domains with at KOER Media.
Namecheap offers affordable domain services at unbeatable prices. They are a U.S. based company that has fought for the rights of domain registrars since their inception.
In addition to registration, Namecheap offers affordable private email and hosting services.
Because Kinsta doesn’t offer email services, if a client doesn’t use G Suite, we recommend using Namecheap’s affordable email hosting services. Additionally, if a client has a unique circumstance and doesn’t need the power of Kinsta hosting, we often refer them to Namecheap’s affordable WordPress hosting options.
Summary
Your domain and hosting are essential to the success of your website. These are the companies we trust and use. Many of our clients want us to handle their hosting and domain registration; these are the companies we always use. If you’re going to manage your domains and hosting, we recommend Kinsta for hosting and Namecheap for domain registration.