In this chapter you'll set up several different hosting and development environments for building your
Wordpress Web sites.
This video will introduce you to all the types of hosting and development systems including shared hosting
dedicated servers and cloud hosting managed WordPress hosting and local development environments.
By the end of this video you'll know about all these hosting systems the benefits and drawbacks of each
as well as several different ways of building WordPress locally.
Without an internet connection let's get started.
Shared hosting is an inexpensive way to get started with web site hosting its advantages in price but
it has some drawbacks because other sites are using the same server space and all the sites on the server
are sharing resources shared hosting means that if one site starts using all the available memory storage
space or bandwidth the other sites on the same server can be put at risk of slowing down or at worst
going down for a period of time.
Modern hosting companies have protocols in place like site monitoring resource limit warnings and other
processes in place to prevent sites from going down.
So shared hosting programs are a good place to start to keep a development environment that will not
see much traffic or to keep small sites with little resource usage as the site grows in popularity traffic
and file size.
It may be smart to move to another type of hosting account and will get into migrating WordPress Web
sites to different hosts later in this course.
Some examples of popular and tested shared hosting environments are Rob Percival's own eco web hosting
site grounds WordPress specific shared hosting programs.
If you're getting started these companies can offer you a space to build multiple Web sites and take
them live for a very small investment.
Most of the hosting companies offer an upgrade from shared hosting splitting off the server space into
private hosting areas called Dedicated or private servers.
There's a middle ground which is very effective at separating web sites from each other but doesn't
have to cost as much as full private servers called a VPN or virtual private server VPN just means that
the hosting company has partitioned the hardware and disk space that holds the website hosting areas
into separate spaces so that each hosting space can't affect the others on the same master server to
the end user who's purchasing the hosting.
There's effectively no difference between a dedicated server and a virtual private server.
The end result is the same cloud hosting takes this idea one step further and enabling the server to
stretch and grow instead of losing speed or going down in the event of a traffic spike or a need for
expansion.
Cloud hosting is a good way to provide hosting for a group of clients in one place.
As a web site designer in my business I use site grounds cloud hosting program so I can host and take
care of all of my clients web sites in one place give them access to the server for just their own site
if they need it.
A control panel and pay one inexpensive price for the package.
It lets We charge a monthly or yearly fee for web site hosting and maintenance without having to work
with a lot of different hosts that my clients have chosen.
My hosting and Web site maintenance and care plans are what let me achieve a level of recurring income
in my business and I'd recommend you do the same thing in the next video will be setting up a free student
sandbox hosting account at site Ground specially made for W.P. of course students at the students W.P.
of course dot com website down at their site.
Ground link you'll see that they're offering a special deal for Greg Davis students three months of
free hosting so that you can set up sites and work on them in the site ground environment another level
up for Wordpress hosting is the idea of managed WordPress hosting several hosting companies have seen
the popularity of Wordpress grow and are filling a need for designers and developers managed WordPress
hosting is a server setup that has additional thought built into the server architecture and layers
of programs in the server setup for site speed reliability ease of use and other WordPress specific
needs.
Manage hosting programs usually have a caching layer to drastically speed up the loading of Wordpress
Web sites improving the experience for the end user.
Managed WordPress hosting companies also optimize the hardware and server programs for the way WordPress
works in every way they can.
This is a little more expensive to use but there are a lot of advantages.
I use flywheel WordPress hosting for my own sites and client sites who expect to have more traffic where
speed is important like site ground.
Flywheel is offering WP dev course students a special deal on a free development environment for working
on sites in the students that WP dev course does come resources page.
Again the link to flywheel will open up a free 60 day trial where you can develop a site on the fly
wheel platform specially for WP dev.
Course students will be setting that up in this chapter.
Cloud ways is an interesting company as well and I use them for spinning up sites quickly for development
and very inexpensive hosting.
They might be considered a hybrid between cloud hosting and managed hosting because you can easily install
WordPress in a very fast optimized environment.
But as far as security and a firewall for hacking attempts and traffic filtration it's more of a manual
experience.
I found that I have to be diligent with sites hosted at cloud ways because they are more exposed to
robot or bot traffic which can degrade performance.
The fully managed hosting companies provide a firewall between you and these potential attacks.
You can do your own research to find which hosting company fits your vision for your business online
and reviews signal.
Dot Com has a lot of independent reviews and comparisons.
There is a WordPress hosting benchmarks test article that they've written for a few years in a row and
that's where I've narrowed my choices and improved my client's site's performance support and ease of
use for your particular business.
Are other important considerations.
So review sites like this one are an important part of choosing a website hosting company.
The resource pages at WP dev course dot com and here in this course have special student discounts and
updated recommendations based on my experience.
So be sure and check those out.
We took a tour in the last chapter of map available at map that info and how you can use it to set up
a local development environment on your own computer.
There are some other options as well that make it easy to set up Wordpress and play with it locally
or without having to be connected to the Internet.
Each one of these options builds a server on your local computer just like map and they're all pretty
easy to use a map alternative is called zap x.
Am P-P and it works exactly the same way as map but it was originally designed for Windows while map
was originally for the Mac platform.
It now supports both and the same is true of them.
It's available here at Apache friends dot work desktop server is a program that can set up local environments
too and it's available at server press dot com.
Another option is called Instant WordPress designed to set up WordPress local environments exclusively
and available at instant W.P. dot com.
I'll be teaching how to install a map for a local environment and will also be signing up for a free
flywheel account and a free site Ground account to create the sites we'll be building in this course.
In this video we explored hosting options and development environments from shared hosting to cloud
hosting and managed WordPress hosting.
There are options for every purpose in your business.
We also looked at options for easily setting up local development environments for staging building
sites locally without having to be connected to the Internet and playing with wordpress for learning
in the next few videos you'll set up your own systems.
Many of these hosting environments as well as set up your own local development environment.
Here we go