Wordpress Hosting Screening Standard

Price?

No, Price is not important for shared hosting environment because it is relatively inexpensive. Compare to lose productive hours of yours or your technician on a crappy hosting, spending $50 more a year to get a decent hosting account is a real bargain.

Time is money
Most expensive one costs you only about $100 per year
A few hours of downtime costs you precious time more than $100

1-800 support number

Live chat is nice and convenient but 1-800 number is essential
When you have to stay on the phone with support for hours, you appreciate the benefit of Toll-Free
1-800 number gives your peace of mind

Linux / Apache

There isn’t anything better to host Wordpress than Apache web server on Linux platform

Best performance
Don’t even think of Windows / IIS because I have tried that and learned a big lesson (I am a Microsoft infrastructure consultant for 10+ years and still can’t get IIS web server to work well with PHP).

PHP

PHP 5 support is a must, nice to have the option to roll back to PHP 4 for legacy application support

Unlimited Add-On Domains/Sites

This review is for people who has 10+ Wordpress domains / sites so we look for:

Allow unlimited Add-on Domains/Sites
At least 20 Add-on Domains/Sites
Not Sub-domain, not Parked Domain, you need Add-On Domain

MySQL

Unlimited MySQL is the best but Wordpress sites can share single database easily
MySQL 5 or 4

cPanel

cPanel is the standard
Do you want to learn another control panel?

Money Back Guarantee

Specific Wordpress plug-in may require special configuration of the hosting environment
You need something to fall back on
I have tested a few cancellations, no problem at all

Fantastic / Script (1-Click Wordpress Installation)

Optional
Great for people lack of technical skills