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UK WordPress Hosting: The Best

11.10.2009, 3 Comments, Hosting, by .

There are now a number of decent UK hosting companies that have set up one click install for WordPress.

Thankfully gone are the days where you excitedly buy your domain from 123 Reg, then realise they can’t set up your blog on their servers, rather you had to go to their sister company WebFusion – an extraordinary pain-in-the-ass process.

It is important to choose the hosting wisely – for customer support and the location of your hosting. If your website is to target UK visitors, it is good to ensure the hosting company will put your website locally. It also can have a small added effect for your ranking in natural search engine results for more information check out: localised wordpress hosting and domain selection. For a bit more of an overview about where to start with hosting and domain selection, try this post: choosing wordpress hosting.

Now for some of the best hosts for WordPress in the UK. As always – make sure you sign up for Quidco before you make any hosting or domain purchases, as you can save some money for your first year. Some of the below hosting companies are available on Quidco, so read about how it works here if you want to save money on hosting.

123 Reg

123-reg-logo123 have sorted their lives out, and with the mid level hosting package you can set up your WordPress website with them with ease. Through 123, your site will be hosted in the UK, which is helpful if you are targeting visitors from the UK. Make sure you sign up for the Plus Package, as the cheapest one doesn’t cater for WordPress setup since they don’t give you any databases. View all their packages here.

Currently the cost is £4.99 per month for Plus, but if you buy it having visited from Quidco, it will be cheaper.

It can be better to have multiple databases available, so you want to consider the Pro Package (£8.99 per month). Or you can just upgrade as and when you need it in the future.

Fasthosts

fasthosts-logo

Pretty competitive pricing and you website will indeed be hosted in the UK. The Home package will cover you.

Again they are listed in Quidco, so further savings available through them. Customer service, as is the case for 123 reg, can be difficult – whereby you have to submit support tickets and the like, but in general the service level is OK.

Super Green

supergreen-hosting-logoExcellent customer service and a great dashboard/admin panel make this host stand out. They are always available for live chat via the homepage and support sections, and the WordPress installation and setup is very easy and efficient. The only downside is that currently your website will be hosted on a server in the USA.

Ideally it would be hosted in the UK. But for a professional, reliable service, go with SuperGreen Hosting! Massive fan.

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How to manage your content in WordPress

11.04.2009, Comments Off, CMS, by .

By default, WordPress pushes you to be uber-organised. It’s best to structure your content in a tidy manner from the outset, but you can go back and organise old content as well. Some things to help give you a clean setup, and to help your content be easily picked in search engines like Google are as follows.

Categories

Do not get carried away with Categories, remember you can arrange content with more specific tags if you need. Idealy each category should have at least a number of posts within. To keep your site ultra tidy, assign your post to just one category, and multiple tags.

Tags

Assign a handful of relevant tags to your post. These should not be as generic as the Categories, rather they should be more specific, and even variants on the same word/phrase.

N.B. Be sure to noindex tag pages in your All In One SEO Pack, otherwise your content can be indexed multiple times, which is not helpful for your ranking in natural search results.

Permalinks

Turn off the ugly default URLs, switching to the pretty ones :)

Admin > Settings > Permalinks > Custom Structure… /%postname%/

You may prefer to have the date or month as well; I prefer to keep the URL as succint as possible, with as few unecessary levels as possible.

wordpress-permalinks-urls

Remeber though – if your site has been around for a while, and you have pages indexed in Google, make sure when changing URLs that you apply a 301 server-side redirect as soon as you change to pretty URLs. Otherwise you will lose traffic to the new page if your old post is ranking on certain keywords. So as soon as you change to pretty URLs, define the old to new URL in the admin panel of this excellent 301 plugin.

For more general information about the theory behind 301 redirection, check out this article. There you can also find a free online tool to check if you have SEO friendly redirects setup on your website. Chances are by default you won’t.

Keywords for Categories and Tags

Try to use Keyword Tool to help you refine your approach. There is no reason why you should not see what people are searching for when developing your category structure.

Here is Google’s Keyword Tool. For more about keyword selection and wordpress seo, check out this post.

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Choosing WordPress Hosting

11.03.2009, 3 Comments, Hosting, SEO, by .

Who is your target audience? Is your website / blog hopefully going to attract viewers from around the world or are you focussed on a particular country or language?

It’s important to answer these questions, the earlier the better in you site development. Here are some general tips for choosing your WordPress hosting package and domain ccTLD (country code top level domain):

  • Choose a neutral .com domain if you are targeting multiple languages or North America (English). This means you can subsequently set up sub domains for each language (or sub folders) then geo target them in Google Webmaster Tools. For example, with .com or other neutral domains, you can specify to Google that http://fr.mydomain.com/ pages are for French natural results. More information can be found here about geo targeting websites for natural search engine results.
  • Choose your hosting company based on customer service, hosting location, and cost of course. If you intend to target French visitors, use a French hosting company – and double check with them that your website will be hosted in France. You can use this Firefox Addon (Flagfox) to easily check where a website is hosted.
  • Make sure the hosting company offers a one click install for WordPress software, otherwise it can be a pain in the arse to manually configure the database needed to run WordPress.
  • Call the host before you sign up – if you can get through to them, then it’s a better start than it could be! Some very good UK WordPress hosting companies are detailed here. For USA WordPress hosting companies, click here.
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Hosting WordPress in the USA

11.02.2009, 2 Comments, Hosting, by .

If you are targeting visitors in the United States, good to get yourself a US-based hosting package for your WordPress website or blog.

For reasons why you should get US-based hosting, check out: localised wordpress hosting and domain selection. For a bit more of an overview about where to start with hosting and domain selection, try this post: choosing wordpress hosting.

There are thousands of hosting companies who use US servers, I will suggest just a handful that are super reliable, well priced, and all round winners! Well ok so far we just have FX Domains in here, but the site is still being built, and I don’t want to fill it with crap!

FX Domains

fx-logoFeedback is great for this company, and personally I have hosted many sites through them and always found the hosting to be perfect. The site will be on US servers, the pricing is very fair, and the WordPress setup is as good as one click. Check out their Linux hosting plans here, they start from $3.99 per month. Sign up for a couple years and it’s cheaper of course. They have a pretty good support forum and they have always been efficient when it comes to answering questions. A bonus is even on the basic packages they give you 10 databases, so you can have multiple installs of WordPress in different folders – perfect if you want to have different themese running, like a forum theme or an online shop, or anything else like that.

Other hosting companies to come…hang tight!

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