Hosting Your Wishlist Member Membership Site

Hosting Wishlist Member may not be different than any other hosting decision you have ever taken before but if you have never hosted a membership site before or don’t know what are needs for hosting membership website you will probably want to read this article.

Wishlist Member is one of most advanced platform for creating membership site using the WordPress platform. The real power of Wishlist Member against all other membership plugins is the big community the exist behind it.

Also Wishlist Member is developing all the time and a just in previous month a new 2.8 version has came out with many new features.

But enough with talking about Wishlist Member let go in to the Wishlist Member hosting issue.

Before we start with what type of hosting you will need for membership website you should be familiar with 3 main types of hosting package:

1. Shared hosting / Reseller hosting (this hosting are the same thing) – This hosting package will give you an hosting package with some amount of hosting space / traffic but your hosting resources will be shared among all other website that are hosting on the same server. This may cause unstable hosting speed and limited resources.
2. VPS hosting – VPS is stand for Virtual Private Server. It a lot more powerful than any shared hosting and today we almost say that is as powerful as a dedicated server.
   In a VPS your hosting resources are yours and no one else is using them.
3. Dedicated Server -Dedicated server is like it sounds, you are buying a server that is just for your own usage. you will have all the resources that you needs depend on your server specifications.

Hosting Your Membership Site

As you know Wishlist Member is a plugin for the WordPress platform so basically the basic hosting requirement are the one the WordPress itself need.

But that’s not all using Wishlist Member is designed to give you the ability to manage a membership website.  In most cases a membership website is a community of people that are interested in the same subject and like that they going to visit your website on daily basis if not even more than one time a day.

Saying that you will need to choose a good hosting company the can give you the “power” that you need and will “crash” if you have a little spikes in your traffic.

There are few things you should consider when you are choosing a hosting company and an hosting package:

1. Do your visitors are from one specific country of does your visitor are coming from all around the globe?
   You should always choose a hosting company that have servers in your visitor area. If have a visitors from all around choose a server that will good of the largest group.
2. How much visitors do you think you will have per month / day?
   You server should have the ability to
3. Do you intend to host videos on your hosting package?
   As a general rule of thumb you should host your videos on the same server as your website. You should use a special service or server to host your multimedia files (video/audio), but if you think to hosting your videos files on the same server as your website? You should consider to buy a more powerful server that may support video streaming.

Hosting Companies – Our Choices

We can split these list to 2 kinds of companies ones that we love and the ones that we don’t love

Hosting Companies That We DO Love

These companies listed below are companies that we are using all the time for own usage and for our clients.

We don’t recommend any company that we haven’t used our selves for a long period of time to make sure it’s a reliable company

• VPS.NET
• WPManage
• IntoVPS
• 100TB
• MediaTemple

Hosting Companies That We DON’T Love

Hosting Companies that We Wouldn’t Recommend you. We used all them some of them on a commercial website and some them our client had use them before they moved to a more powerful hosting.

All of this companies (and many more) are selling hosting services like any other product and that sell more hosting package than their servers can host.  We don’t want to get into the details but as a rule of thumb every company that offer you unlimited traffic / unlimited bandwidth should be erased from you list.

Here are some of them:

• Hostgator
• BlueHost
• Godaddy
• HostMaster

* We don’t even want to link to their websites, if want to find them just them of Google the names.

We have the Experience

As a Wishlist Member Certified Developers we have built a lot of membership site using the Wishlist Member plugin. If we are taking the project from the beginning we highly recommend our client not to save on their hosting package and buy hosting package that will support their future needs.

That last thing you will want is that your membership site will be slow. A slow membership site will lower your retention rate and will decrease your website site and your conversion rates.

Want an Even Faster Membership Site?

We know that you are maybe not the technical person and sometimes just hearing all this tech talk can make you head blow. As a part of our all in one service we offer a speed optimization service that will help to make your website work much faster and you ranking and sales go higher you can find more information on under the services menu on directly on the Websites Speed Optimization page.