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Copyright © 2016 - 2024 SiteDistrict, All Rights ReservedAt SITEDISTRICT, we have what we think is some of the best WordPress hosting on the planet, when it comes to performance, security, features, pricing, and support.
But this page isn't here to convince you of that. That's a different topic. You don't have to believe that. Heck, you probably don't actually have the time or expertise to figure out if it's true. But that's OK …
First of all, this page is rather long. It's full of text. It will take a while to read. But your WordPress hosting is important, right?
This question is actually pretty easy to answer. Can you say "Yes" to at least one of the following?
In many cases, you should also be able to say "Yes" to this:
If you can't say "Yes" to any of the points above, then it's probably not worth the effort to convince you why hosting with us might be a good idea, or why you should make it a priority.
If one of our current customers recommended us, then great! If you trust them, then you probably don't need to read this, unless you're curious. Hopefully, they already told you what you need to know, and why you should host with us.
The funny thing is, even though we know more about our hosting and can probably give better or more complete answers as to why you should host with us, you'll probably trust your friend / colleague / developer more. That's OK - recommendations are weird like that.
One thing worth noting: almost nobody picks SITEDISTRICT as their first WordPress host, without some kind of genuine recommendation.
We don't have an affiliate program. Probably never will. So places that recommend hosting aren't going to list us. All those "Best WordPress Hosting" pages? Yeah, 99% of them are full of affiliate links.
If you don't know enough about WordPress hosting (and most people don't) to tell the difference between offerings, then you pick what's cheapest. That's not us.
We don't have as much brand recognition. We've spent most of our time & budget on engineering instead of marketing, so far. As a result, our name isn't as well known. There are fewer mentions out there. And unfortunately, with recommendations, quantity beats quality.
Most people switch WordPress hosts for one of these reasons:
If you're having pain around any of these points, or just feel like there might be "something better out there", then read on.
WordPress sites can be slow. Really slow. Especially on slower hosting.
If the WordPress Admin is dreadfully slow, a faster host can make a huge difference. If your site runs WooCommerce and a bunch of plugins, a page builder such as Elementor, Beaver Builder, or Divi, has a membership or e-Learning system, it's almost essential to have optimized hosting, to keep your visitors from experiencing slow page loads.
Better-optimized WordPress hosting platforms can generate pages 3 - 10 times faster than many of the bigger, well-known brands. If you value your own time, you should at least check to see how much faster your site might run on SITEDISTRICT.
At SITEDISTRICT, we'll clean up your hacked site for free if you switch to our hosting. We can often do this in as little as 30 minutes, once the site is copied to SITEDISTRICT.
In addition, our backups, site isolation technology, and WordPress firewall ensure that your site probably won't get hacked again.
We'll clean up your site for free if it ever does get hacked while on our platform. Yes, for free. In fact, that kind of guarantee is the best way to tell if a host cares about security.
Are you getting dubious responses from your current hosting provider when you contact support? Do you feel like you know more than the support person you're talking to? Do they blame problems that seem like they are hosting related to other things, like plugins, third-party services, or even you?
The best hosting support comes from people who have the expertise, knowledge, patience, empathy, and curiosity necessary to understand your problems and help you figure out the best solution. But even then, support people are only as powerful as their tools and data. SITEDISTRICT provides unparalleled tools and information to both our support staff and our users, enabling a level of support other hosts just can't achieve.
Is your website showing the "There Has Been a Critical Error on Your Website" message, or a blank screen? Is certain functionality broken after an update?
At SITEDISTRICT, our tools also make it easy to figure out what is causing errors on your site, whether it's a plugin, your theme, or your own code causing an issue.
In some cases, your problems might just go away by moving your site to SITEDISTRICT. We ensure sites get the necessary memory, CPU, and other resources necessary to perform their best - which means a lot of problems that are common on other hosts just don't happen in the first place on our platform.
Missing staging functionality at your current host? Is it slow to make a staging copy, or are staging copies often broken? Are backups difficult and slow to restore?
Our Staging and Cloning and Backup and Restore systems have you covered.
Is your current hosting provider saying that you need to upgrade to a higher plan, and pay for an additional feature, to solve one of the above issues?
Or have you reached your site limit, and want to add just one or two more sites, and don't want to jump to the next tier or plan, which is more than twice as expensive?
Our flexible pricing system solves these.
A few people find our pricing confusing or a turn-off at first. They also seem to be the same people that never bother signing up (which is free) and hosting a site. Our actual customers love our pricing.
We host all types of sites at SITEDISTRICT. Our platform is engineered to provide excellent performance & security for sites of many sizes
By nature, many of our higher-traffic sites are publications. Some might get as many as 100K page views in a few hours, and handle over 1 million requests per day.
Best hosted on platforms that have excellent raw PHP and MySQL performance, SITEDISTRICT is a favorite for hosting WooCommerce sites.
Plenty of small(er) sites host with us, usually because their entry-level host was way too slow, their site was hacked at their old provider, or because a developer familiar with SITEDISTRICT recommended it to the site owner.
Another type of demanding site that often benefits from having the best raw performance possible.
SITEDISTRICT actually started out hosting some large multisites. We offer unparalleled features & support, including automatic HTTPS for all mapped domains, backup & restore at the site level for subdomain installs, and much more.
Our platform is built to be an excellent match for 95% of WordPress sites. Think you have a "special" site? Want to know if we are a good match? Sign Up for free, import your site if possible, and then send us a message via email or our Live Chat.
One thing that our customers have in common is that they either know us personally or were recommended by someone that knows us personally.
We strive to have a relationship with each of our customers. Our conversations are two-way. We know each other by name, and can often put a face with a name. Our customers feel like we have their back.
Our customers come from all kinds of different hosts. Here are some of the top ones, and reasons for migrating:
The site or the WP Admin is super slow, the site was hacked, or support just wasn't cutting it. These are the entry-level hosts. Discounted multi-year plans that "trap" many customers who don't know better. Some of the worst performance out there, which means a move to SITEDISTRICT can make an incredible, obvious, and immediate difference. At least one customer reportedly jumped out of his seat when he saw how much faster his site was.
Typically a slight step up from the list above, but not a big one. Most customers from here move for better performance. Some took advantage of their free hosting for non-profits but found they would rather pay for "better" hosting.
Since late 2019, SiteGround's used-to-be-good support went downhill. Those wanting better support, performance, or security switch to SITEDISTRICT, although they might need to pay a bit more than at this host. Unless of course, they are paying the full price after SiteGround's initial discounting. Paying "full price" at SiteGround is rarely worth the money.
Unless you need email hosting. Yeah, like most of the "better" managed WordPress hosts, we don't offer email hosting. We recommend Google Workspace.
For anyone with significant experience with both WPEngine and SITEDISTRICT, moving to SITEDISTRICT is pretty much a "no-brainer". Superior performance, features, support, and security - all for less money, in most cases.
WPEngine is also infamous for upselling customers to significantly more expensive plans if their site or sites are demanding in terms of resources. Those higher-priced plans just cost more though - still the same platform, still the same mediocre speeds.
Most customers coming from Flywheel are looking for better performance. Our platform typically delivers 3-4x the raw performance, compared to Flywheel. Other customers also come for better security, better features (backups, staging, analytics), and superior support.
A step up from the entry-level hosts, these offerings are not "bad", but many customers here find themselves overpaying for what they get. These platforms might be decently hyped, but there's nothing special there (yet) for most users, and in many cases, you can get a lot more for less elsewhere.
An excellent WordPress host itself, with generally excellent performance, features, and support. Most customers move from Kinsta when they want even better performance, often for less money. Some also come for better support, and others for even better dashboard features.
Pantheon is an excellent WordPress host … if you are in love with their highly opinionated workflow. If not, then it's more of a hassle and a burden. You get similar power with SITEDISTRICT, but far more flexibility. Most sites also run about twice as fast on SITEDISTRICT, as on Pantheon.
Most customers that come from these hosting control-panel providers found that they wanted to be more hands-off in terms of the server administration & details, and were willing to pay a bit of a premium for it. If you're hosted on one of these platforms, but you'd rather not think about servers and don't want to "own" your infrastructure, then SITEDISTRICT might be a good fit.
We have customers from many of the other WordPress hosts out there. It's almost guaranteed that you'll get some combination of better performance, security, features, support, or pricing by moving to SITEDISTRICT, no matter where you host now.
Remember how the above section talks about typical pain points that cause people to switch hosting, and why people bring their sites to SITEDISTRICT? Well, this section expands on that a bit, by highlighting some of the key points of our platform, and how we prevent many problems, and make others much easier to solve.
Consistent and excellent WordPress performance all starts with the server-side performance. How long does it take the server to handle requests that must be processed by WordPress (PHP + MySQL)? No caching - just generating pages as fast as possible. Along with hosts like Closte and Servebolt, we have some of the best raw performance for WordPress sites on the market. But don't take our word for it - follow the steps on our import your own site and test the copy against your current host.
After server-side performance, website performance often benefits from page caching, a content delivery network (CDN) to cache pages & assets close to your visitors, the latest TLS and HTTP versions & technology,
To top it all off, we collect Real User Metrics for Core Web Vitals across all sites hosted with us, so you can view user-centric performance metrics for your actual visitors, using our Analytics dashboard.
WordPress security involves many things. You as a site owner or user need to ensure your password is decently complex, and that it doesn't get stolen. Most of the rest we handle.
On the server side, good security means sites are isolated from each other (including your own sites, and even staging copies from the live site). Backups are frequent & can't be deleted by accident or on purpose, and are easily & reliably restored. A firewall sits in front of all WordPress sites and protects them from brute-force attacks, file probing, D(D)os attacks, spam comments & form submissions, intensive crawls, attempts to exploit vulnerabilities, and more. Monitoring alerts us of suspicious activity or traffic.
SITEDISTRICT runs an advanced WordPress-specific firewall embedded into our web server, which blocks millions of requests every few days. Most sites on SITEDISTRICT don't run any security plugins. In fact, we typically discourage them, because they cause more problems than they solve. Many sites see their spam counts drop to zero once they migrate their site to our platform.
If you're building or maintaining WordPress sites, it makes a huge difference to have fast & reliable tools. At SITEDISTICT, our philosophy is simple: if it's better or best done at the hosting level, rather than via a plugin or third-party service, it's not site-specific, and it will benefit most of our customers, we'll try to build it into our platform. This has resulted in one of the most advanced, powerful, and useful WordPress hosting dashboards out there.
We've got the basics, including Backups and Restore, a File Manager, phpMyAdmin, and SFTP / SSH Access. We also have Image Optimization, a Speed Testing tool, and a Web Terminal (SSH alternative) built right in. We have an Analytics dashboard that gives you access to Logs, Charts, and Reports for all the many kinds of requests that your site handles, making it easy to understand what is really happening with your website. We have WordPress-specific pages, that let you view your WordPress Users, their active Sessions, your Plugins, and scheduled & executed WordPress Cron jobs.
Even if you don't need, want, or understand all of our tools, it's worth knowing that we at SITEDISTRICT are actually the biggest users of the tools. It's what we rely on to provide fast, efficient, and exceptionally insightful support. Most hosts are limited because they don't have the tools or even the data necessary to provide the level of support our customers love.
Our support is a favorite of many customers. You can get a sense of how we approach support from our page on How to Get Good Support.
Most Support is currently handled by our founder, Matt. There are several reasons for this. He knows the platform better than anyone else, having built most (but not all) of it. As an experienced engineer, and the person ultimately responsible for hosting & supporting thousands of WordPress sites, he knows which questions to ask, how to diagnose problems, which tools & analytics to check, and how to dig deep when necessary, to solve just about any issue, quickly.
Another reason that Matt provides support is that if there is something that can be done at the hosting level to prevent problems in the future, or something that can be automated so that customers have less work, it is this interaction that inspires creative but practical solutions and improvements to the SITEDISTRICT platform. So much of the current SITEDISTRICT platform is based on interactions with customers over the past nine years.
We are not a good fit for just any person or company that has a WordPress site to host.
Some examples of those who should probably look elsewhere:
Not all agencies are created equal. If your development team isn't as smart & technical as you think they are, overconfident in their abilities, or doesn't problem solve properly, they're likely to blame any issues that arise that they don't understand on the "hosting". Team members talk amongst themselves and to the agency owners, instead of involving the host & problem-solving together. In such cases, everyone loses.
Those with more time than money are not a good fit for our hosting. Our pricing starts at $25/month for one site. While we don't think you can find better performance, security, features, and support for a lower price, you can definitely sacrifice some or all of those, and pay less elsewhere.
Our platform is an example of "Managed WordPress Hosting", in that you don't need to think or worry about server or technical specs, such as CPU count, memory, disk space, etc. If you want your sites to run smoothly, without thinking about these things, and you're willing to pay a bit more for it, then SITEDISTRICT is a good fit. Those who think they need or want more control are better served by platforms like Cloudways, or the hosting control panel providers (GridPane, SpinUpWP, RunCloud).
Big corporate companies often have a list of people that need to approve everything, an IT department that doesn't actually understand how websites and DNS even work, and enough paperwork and other random requirements that they are better off served by a different host that will charge them the $$$ required to pay someone to deal with all that and still make it profitable.
If you're ready to host your WordPress site with us, already have some kind of personal first or second-hand connection to us, and ideally are motivated to solve one of the problems above, then the first step is to Sign Up as a new user and create an account (free), and then import your own site.