I am looking to build the support website for my product and plan to use WordPress for it.
Currently, I am thinking of using DigitalOcean for this but I was curious to see if you have any other budget-friendly recommendations.
If you self-host your WordPress website, what is your hardware configuration? Would a 512MB be enough or should I go for 1GB or more?
In my experience, if you are going to be using a “modern” theme and plugins then 512MB wont touch the sides - 2GB or more would be my recommendation unless the traffic will be really low
Have you considered using Wordpress.com? $99/year => about $9/month and they handle all the upgrades and such for you. Might be worth your time to just have them do it, unless you’re really wanting to dig and and modify Wordpress.
If you’re trying to do it on the cheap, look into a static site generator and host it on S3 for pennies.
Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, from what I see Wordpress.com doesn’t allow me to upload my theme (a knowledge base theme) so I can’t use them for that.
I looked into static site generators but came back to Wordpress for a simple writing experience. I am still waiting for someone to build a good plugin that would allow me to export and sync my wordpress blog to s3 whenever I make a change. I would pay for a plugin like that but I can’t find one right now. Do you know any?
Unfortunately, from what I see Wordpress.com doesn’t allow me to upload my theme (a knowledge base theme) so I can’t use them for that.
I didn’t know that, actually. I typically use getflywheel.com for my WP hosting needs because I work with designers, but it’s more expensive that wp.com
I would pay for a plugin like that but I can’t find one right now. Do you know any?
Hm, no I don’t know of such a plugin (but that’s no surprise.) It’s an interesting idea. Run wordpress locally, mirror it statically to S3.
You could do it yourself with wget --mirror and maybe some other options. That’s what I use to spider local applications and make them static sites.
Ha! I totally didn’t see the thread just a few away from this one until after I replied.
My favorite hosting company is WPengine.com They are solid, fast and very helpful. Plus they have a staging area to test your site away from you live site. One click and the staging site become your live site. Plus they also have daily backups and they remove any potential malware for free. I have used them for close to a year and love them 
If you can manage the server yourself, you can’t get any cheaper than Digital Ocean or Linode. Configure nginx instead of Apache, setup a caching plugin like W3TC or WP-Rocket, and run it through Cloudflare and you’d be surprised how much a little 512mb instance can handle.
Then there are the “managed WordPress hosts” like WPEngine, SiteGround, Pagely, Pressable, and GoDaddy. [Before someone punches me in the face for recommending GoDaddy, this is specifically their managed WordPress hosting (they bought MediaTemple some time ago) and not their shared hosting.] They are a little pricier, but fully managed so there isn’t much to worry about. The pricing model for overages on some (all?) is based on “hits” so read the fine print.
A nice middle ground is Cloudways which charges a fee for managing your instances on Amazon AWS, Google Compute Engine, or Digital Ocean. They will one click setup your instance with security, LEMP + varnish + memcached, and WordPress (or Drupal, Laravel, etc).
One thing to note for those recommending “managing yourself”–there is a cost (and a painful, ongoing one at that) for self-managing a WordPress site. Yes, DO and AWS servers can be had cheaper. Yes, you can strip something down and get a small server to do that–configure nginx vs Apache and so on…But is that really a valuable activity for your business? Do your customers get actual value from you doing the work of upgrading to WP 4.1.1? Or removing malware? Or patching the latest security hole in Xen?
For $49/mo, WPEngine basically takes that hassle completely away from you (for one site, $99 for ten). That is a MAJOR win in my book when my focus needs to be on marketing, sales and customer support, not DevOps and maintenance.
I would seriously consider a service like WPEngine, Page.ly or Synthesis (recommended by Joost DeValk of Yoast on WP here) Managing a WP site server is not time well spent running a business IMO.
Regards WpEngine, required reading:
One of our developers has started writing a series on hosting your own WordPress installs on Digital Ocean:
I would go with digital ocean.
Wow. That’s a brutal review.
Not sure how relevant this is to wordpress but I use serverpilot.io to manage my php app on do droplets. Love it. Has a nice firewall baked in.
Sent from phone
Just make sure that it’s running PHP 5.5 or preferably PHP 5.6.
Well, that’s most definitely NOT my experience with them. Going on Year 3 of hosting with them. No major issues and tech support has been more than what I need (and I can be demanding about that since I’m in the support biz and WP biz too). If you have a crazy-custom WP install (which it sounds like that guy did) maybe you’ll have issues. That’s definitely not the common use case in my observation with WPEngine customers (a number of my clients use it as well–those who do upgrade from lesser hosts like DreamHost or BlueHost or GoDaddy and are universally happy with it)
I’ve been using GoDaddy managed Wordpress Hosting for a couple months now, seems to work descent.
They have a coupon code “cjcrmn1hos” that works currently (I think it’s expiring soont) to get 12-months of economy wordpress managed hosting for $12.
I moved to wpengine.com a year or two ago and I’d recommend them.
I use wpengine.com instead of self-hosting because I didn’t want to have to spend my own time and energy keeping a server patched, up-to-date, and locked down. And I didn’t want to have to install WordPress updates myself.
It’s part of my “outsource anything I can” strategy.
Was using Digital Ocean for a while until I ran into some problems updating parts of my VPS. Decided I’d rather be building than administering a server. If you do go the VPS route, however, I’d suggest considering https://www.scaleway.com/ - cheaper than Digital Ocean with a nicer admin UI (imo).
Otherwise, maybe consider https://www.webfaction.com/ which has a nice balance of one-click type features and developer friendliness. It’s certainly my go-to anytime I don’t want to have to worry about server admin.