There are thousands of choices when it comes to choosing a hosting platform for your WordPress site. Prices range from FREE – $1000 per year or more. The range of prices is the main indicator of the differences in choices.

What many people (especially entrepreneurs, startups, and home-based warriors) don’t understand about hosting is how to make a decision about their hosting service.

To fully understand the differences between hosts you have to understand the components of hosting, the nuances of WordPress, and the trade-off between your resources, meaning your time and money. The general rule of thumb is this:

The less you pay for DIY hosting, the more you will pay in time (and money) to maintain your site. The more you will “pay” in downtime, broken functions, and time explaining to a tech (if and when you can get ahold of them) with zero business experience (never mind your industry) what needs to be done.

When it breaks, you will have to fix, or hire someone to do so. Either way, running a successful business platform costs time and resources.

Hosting is not one size fits all. Every client is different. Every business owner has different skills, different employees, time challenges, and of course budget plays a role.

The web hosting industry is always targeting business owners, site operators, bloggers, and anyone who will click an advertisement with the “lowest cost” plan and the “feature rich” plan for slightly more. Most people have no idea what they are purchasing, and while hosting companies have commoditized the actual service of web hosting, it has not made the consumer more diligent when choosing a web hosting company.

Running a website is more complicated than most companies lead you to believe. 99.99% of hosting companies are merely renting hard drive space to you for $X per month. They have no interest in your business, your operations, whether you are profitable or not, how fast your site loads, the plugins you use, where you rank in search, or any other “aspect” of your business that is directly or indirectly impacted by the performance of your website.

Our solutions address these hidden issues and are crafted to help you choose where to start, knowing you can always scale up with us.

We offer 4 levels of managed hosting for UIS clients. They range from economy to elite and provide you with maximum efficiency and value with world-class hosting and professional plugins tailored to your exact business needs.

We are sure you will find the perfect fit your business in one of these solutions.

WordPress is technically an application, just like the apps on your phone. Additionally, the plugins that power the features and functions on your site are also apps. So like your phone, these apps must be updated continuously to make sure they are working right, and are as secure as they can be. Cheap hosting will never include actual human eyes on your site, making sure that these updates go smoothly, and the backup before and testing after the updates are installed.

One reason WordPress is so prolific is the fact that it can be easily modified using plugins.

Plugins are installable code that can add features, functions, and aesthetic elements to your site with relative ease.

Currently there are over 50,000 plugins available in the WordPress plugin repository.

They are divided into 2 groups: Paid & Free.

The fact that there are Free plugins available presents a challenge to the owner of a WordPress site due to the fact that if something is FREE you will generally choose it without understanding it.

In the last decade of building and operating WordPress sites we have learned (several times unfortunately) that, like in life, in WordPress NOTHING is free.

There are are costs and consequences to choices.

This is the reason we DO NOT USE FREE plugins (with a few exceptions) on our managed sites.

We only use professionally developed software that is well supported and regularly updated.

This increases the stability, and dependability of your site by reducing errors, downtime, and wild-goose chases when something breaks.

The UIS Economy plan includes must-have plugins for just about any WordPress site valued at over $600 per year, and the Elite Plan includes licensing for $8500+ worth of the best plugins the vibrant WordPress community has to offer!