A few years ago, when I was in the market for buying new hosting, I remember having the choice between shared hosting and dedicated hosting. That was a clear choice really, if you needed the powerful infrastructure and you were willing to spend money on hiring somebody to manage your server, you’d go for dedicated hosting, while for pretty much anything else you would start with shared hosting.
Nowadays hosts have fine tuned their offerings much more. We’ve seen the introduction of VPS and Cloud services, while other hosts have introduced an extra level of management to take the dirty work away from their clients, obviously at an extra cost. Hosts also started to target particular platforms like WordPress, since they have a huge market share.
Today we’ll be taking a look at the SSD Hosting plan from Doteasy Technology, which is especially optimized for WordPress websites.
Have you heard of Doteasy before? Let me introduce this Canadian hosting company to you.
Doteasy have recently launched a 100GB SSD hosting plan. With Doteasy’s SSD hosting, all of the user’s content, including website files, MySQL databases, and email, will all be stored on SSDs. The plan is specially designed to target those who need to run database-heavy applications (such as WordPress) without experiencing any loss in performance.
When you ask yourself what is WordPress Hosting, you may arrive at different conclusions. The easiest way to think of this is simply the Hosting Environment in which you setup WordPress. That environment needs to have the technical capabilities needed to run WordPress along with the creative freedom needed for your site to flourish and grow. Doteasy try to make sure you have everything you need to run WordPress now and in the future.
The Unlimited Hosting plan comes with a WordPress auto-installer that can help you easily, and quickly sow the seeds of your WordPress site within their Hosting Environment. Doteasy’s stable servers have 99.98% up-time to make sure that when you and your visitors come to see your creation, it’s there waiting for everyone to behold.
There are times along the way where you may find yourself having questions when trying to make it work the way you wish. No need to worry as the friendly Doteasy technical & support staff will be there to lend a helping hand when you need it.
Doteasy has more than one method for you to obtain support. The phone lines are open 6am to 6pm PT, but you can also search the knowledge base, try the forum, or open a support ticket (the latter is my preferred method). If those are not enough, there is also a live chat facility offered, which is limited to the Doteasy office hours (same as phone support).
Doteasy take WordPress seriously. They have a WordPress dedicated section on their site, where you can find useful resources such as a beginner’s guide, recommended plugins and themes, plus some very helpful video tutorials. They even have a WordPress help forum.
I particularly liked their WordPress video tutorials, they chose some of the most commonly discussed topics amongst beginners to WordPress, and targeted them in their videos.
Doteasy seem to want to really give their clients a full package of resources and help to get their site online. In fact they also offer the Doteasy All-in-One Web Design Package (including 1-on-1 design consultation). This costs $495 and gives you a 5 page website along with some other goodies. Check out the WordPress design services brochure.
Here’s what you get with the Unlimited SSD Hosting package:
- Free Domain Name†
- 100 GB SSD Storage
- Unlimited Data Transfer
- Unlimited Domain Hosting
- Unlimited Email Accounts
- PHP/MySQL
- Free shared SSL, FTP, Stats
- 30 Day Money Back Guarantee
Right now there is a special offer of $4.95/month when signing up for a year, which is the minimum period. You can also sign up for 2 or 3 years at once.
The unlimited aspect of this package relates to data transfer, the number of domains hosted, as well as email accounts. That means that you can easily use this account for yourself plus a few small clients of yours. Since SSD storage is quite expensive, the drive storage is not unlimited, but you get a generous 100GB. This package is of great value at this price, although I do find the package name a bit misleading, since at first glance ‘Unlimited SSD Hosting’ can easily be taken to mean unlimited storage on SSD.
When signing up to the Doteasy SSD hosting package, you can select the free domain you’d like to have, or even transfer an existing one to their hosting environment.
Next up you will have to select the hosting type. As you can see Doteasy not only offers the Unlimited SSD Hosting plan we’ve been talking about, but also a normal drive Unlimited Hosting plan, as well as a Basic Hosting plan. There’s also a Windows Hosting plan should you wish to go for that, although I don’t recommend it for WordPress websites.
When signing up, there are also some extras you can select.
I would sign up for the daily site backup, at $1.50/month it is affordable, and you’ll thank yourself later if you ever need a precious backup to restore your site. Personally, I wouldn’t bother with the other extras. Email powered by Google costs around $5/user/month, I’d go for that if I needed an email infrastructure, rather than rely on my host. Since WordPress has some excellent 3rd party photo gallery and form plugins, that makes the gallery and forms extras redundant as well.
Well, that’s it for signing up, just fill in the usual contact details, credit card details (Visa, Mastercard and American Express accepted), signal your acceptance of the user agreement and you’re good to go. I’d have liked the option to use PayPal for payment rather than my credit card, I’d recommend Doteasy to start accepting this easy payment facility.
After signing up, you’ll soon have access to your account via FTP or the cPanel, which is the same as used by many other hosting providers. There are no surprises here, you can use the control panel for many tasks including creating databases and users, setting up email accounts and checking your resource usage.
Of special interest in the cPanel is the option to create a WordPress site via Softaculous. This is super easy, let me walk you through it.
Click the WordPress icon in the Softtaculous section.
The next screen will give you a brief introduction about WordPress, but we know all that right? We want to get down to business, so just hit the blue ‘Install’ button.
The next screen is the settings screen, most fields will be filled in automatically, but you can also change them to your liking. If you want to set up a WordPress site as quickly as possible, just enter your admin username (please don’t use ‘admin’) and hit the ‘Install’ button.
Within less than a minute (it took 5 seconds for me) you’ll have a spanking new WordPress website to play with. From here onwards, your own imagination is the limit. You can of course install your favourite themes and plugins, or even sign up to the web design package by Doteasy if you want extra help.
Conclusion
WordPress hosting is a hugely competitive area, but Doteasy have a very affordable and fast offering in the Unlimited SSD Hosting package for WordPress. The price is very compelling, with the current offer of 60% off I think you are grabbing a bargain when signing up. With the good support facilities and easy to administer cPanel system, going for Doteasy’s SSD hosting plan lets you make a leap in performance from the standard shared hosting services that are so common nowadays. Experience higher performance at the same prices you’re used to (or cheaper), that’s what I think should be the tagline of this hosting package.
One Response
Thank you a lot!