WordPress Hosting
Part of the GoodHost Knowledge Centre.
WordPress will run on almost any hosting plan, and that is precisely what makes choosing one difficult. A five dollar shared account runs it. So does a container with 8 GB of memory and reserved processor time. Both get sold as WordPress hosting in Australia, both descriptions are technically accurate, and the sales pages rarely explain what actually changes between them.
What changes is resources, and whether the host is willing to publish them. GoodHost lists the container limits on every WordPress plan: WP 10 at $45 per month plus GST gives 10 GB of storage, 400% vCPU, 4 GB of RAM, 40 entry processes, 8 MB/s IO and 4,000 IOPS. WP 20 is $79 and WP 50 is $169, each stepping those figures up. Most hosts describe the same thing as a monthly visit allowance, which measures traffic rather than capacity.
That is not an argument for buying the largest plan available. A five page brochure site does not need reserved CPU and will not feel faster for having it. The job is matching the plan to the work the site genuinely does. If yours already crawls, the diagnosis of what makes sites slow will help more than a bigger invoice, and the visit limits guide covers what happens when a traffic cap gets hit.
Do you need WordPress hosting to run WordPress?
No. WordPress runs perfectly well on standard cPanel hosting, and a great many small Australian sites live there without trouble. What a dedicated plan buys is reserved capacity and a stack tuned for a single site, so a busy store or a plugin-heavy build is not competing with neighbouring accounts for processor time.
How can you tell whether a plan is big enough?
Judge it on what it commits to in resources, not on what it promises in visitors. Storage, vCPU, RAM, entry processes and IO throughput are the figures that decide whether requests queue at busy moments. GoodHost publishes all of them per plan, which makes two plans comparable in a way visit counts never manage.
What slows a WordPress site down that hosting cannot fix?
Enormous uncompressed images. A page builder loading its entire library on every page. Fifteen plugins each adding requests and database queries. A theme doing work on every visit that it should be caching. Faster hardware shortens each of those, but it does not remove them, so fix the site before you judge the plan.
The current plans, their published container limits and what is managed for you sit on the WordPress hosting page. If the site is a WooCommerce store, the store requirements guide is worth reading first, because checkout behaves differently under load to a blog. The wider Knowledge Centre covers domains, email, security and moving hosts.