WordPress began in 2003 as a branch of a popular blogging application. It was then rigorously developed into a blogging platform, which soon overtook its parent. Of recently, that blogging platform has exploded into a full-featured web content system for websites of all types, offering dynamic solutions to the masses.
Currently, over 70 million websites are built on WordPress, and developers cite several reasons for the popularity of this platform. For starters, the software is free and open-source, which allows developers to contribute unique and creative themes, widgets and plug-ins to customize webpages and provide powerful and easy-to-use administrative tools.
To understand WordPress hosting let's first understand web hosting. All of the world's websites are operated from servers. Although you can yourself own and operate a server, the money and time investments required, make it inefficient for most of the individuals businesses. To tackle this problem these companies operate dozens, hundreds or even thousands of servers from a central location. They then rent their servers and resources to individuals and businesses at prices that they can afford.
WordPress hosting is nothing but a variant of web hosting. The only difference being the minimum server hardware and software requirements to run this hosting platform. This standardization of servers allows the platforms to integrate seamlessly into the server and process requests through the Internet quickly and effectively. Since the demand for WordPress hosting is so high, nearly every known company offers WordPress hosting. Moreover, several options are available to cater to a range of requirements and budgets. Someone who just wants to put a personal blog online may choose to opt for a shared WordPress plan while large businesses would rather opt to lease one or more servers.
To install and operate WordPress Hosting, the host server must meet a few standard prerequisites. To run the 3.1 version of WordPress, servers must meet the following software requirements: PHP version 4.3 or later and MySQL version 4.1.2 or later. For 3.2, the requirements are PHP version 5.2.4 or later and MySQL version 5.0.15 or later.
In addition to the above software, experts recommend using either Apache or NGINX Web servers running the optional Apache mod_rewrite module.
Choosing a WordPress Hosting provider is a very important step in your business journey because your website will rely on and be constrained by the host server's capabilities and host's services. Several factors should be evaluated when choosing a host, most important ones are as follows: