WPShout is happily hosted on SiteGround. And we frequently recommend SiteGround for WordPress hosting to our readers and clients. For shared WordPress hosting, we think SiteGround is the best choice. (Here’s our complete SiteGround hosting review.)

Last night I was invited to speak at the Boulder WordPress meetup. My friend Angela drew a big crowd, and they listened intently to me talking a little too long about WordPress security vulnerabilities and what you can do to protect your WordPress site. That talk, like this article, is focused on protecting WordPress users and site-owners from common security problems. I have a whole other course about what WordPress developers should do to keep WordPress secure. This article will intentionally simplify complex technical details which often just cloud the story of security from a WordPress site owners perspective. There are far too many complex acronyms for WordPress security conversations to make sense easily to most non-developers.

Migrating WordPress sites is a common and annoying task. Whether that’s between two different remote web servers, between a development server and production, or from production to local, there are lots of directions your WordPress site migration might flow. All-in-One WP Migration remains the tool of choice for us at WPShout most of the time. It’s certainly one of the best free ways to move a WordPress site.

So, you want to remove the date from your WordPress post URLs? I get it. Those /2016/07/09/post-slug URLs that seemed pretty cool when you (or someone else) set it up get old. The primary reason: when you update that post, what should you do? Leave it’s URL looking old? Move it to the new one and worry it’ll break. These concerns are why we use the “Post name” option for WordPress permalinks here at WPShout and encourage most of our clients to do the same.

There are two big ways that WordPress hosting breaks down: nerdy stuff for people who know what “a command line” is, and approachable stuff for people who don’t. That’s at the heart of the “VPS vs shared hosting” comparison. (VPS stands for “virtual private server”, by the way.)

When you need to choose a WordPress host, an obvious first step is a Google search. Searching for “best wordpress hosting” yields lots of hosting comparison articles. You can skim a few of them to get a sense for the patterns, and then make your decision. Easy, right?

Both the traffic demands and the technology used to host personal websites differ. As you might guess from our site title, we mostly offer advice on WordPress specifically. If you’re newly looking into a personal website on WordPress, you’re in the right space. If you’re in a hurry, here’s my twelve-second answer for “what’s the best WordPress web hosting for a personal website”:

In the Quick Guide we’ll use WP Security Audit Log to keep an activity log of what’s happening on our WordPress site. Activity logs are a chronological list of records of what logged in users did on your WordPress sites and multisite networks. A WordPress activity log a vital part of site security and management because in them, you can find a user log full of information about user logins—from where they logged in and when, what content they have created, published, modified and deleted, what user profile and WordPress settings changes other administrators have done, and much more.

Along the journey of understanding WordPress, most people start with a similar situation. They talk to a more tech-savvy person they know, that young lady tells them they need a “WordPress website.” Then they’re Googling desperately, trying to find out how they get “a WordPress.” The idea of “WordPress hosting” is nowhere on your radar and doesn’t quite make sense at that point. If that’s precisely you, welcome. If that approximates your experience, please share your exact story with us in the comments. 🙂

Free web hosting for WordPress—it’s an appealing idea, regardless if you want a site for personal expression, a business, or something else. Who wouldn’t want free WordPress hosting? WordPress hosting is one of the most expensive things about having a WordPress site, and getting hosting for less is an understandable and admirable plan to save money.