Recommendations for Website Hosting for Dental Practice Websites
Over the last decade, I have designed and built many websites using WordPress and Squarespace. For general dentists, the best platform for their websites is self-hosted WordPress. I wrote a guide about why WordPress should be chosen and you can read it here.
Once you decide to use WordPress, you will need to choose a hosting provider. I have used many services to host websites. In the past, I have hosted sites using FatCow, GoDaddy, Media Temple, BlueHost, SiteGround, Pressable, FlyWheel, and even Digital Ocean.
I currently host my websites using either Pressable or Siteground. In fact, this website is currently hosted using Pressable. While Pressable offers a robust set of features, I do not necessarily recommend it for the typical dentist because migration off the platform is more technical, and their control panel is not as user friendly as the competition. More importantly, Pressable is not one of the most economical hosting providers because their product offering is built to offer power and scalability to developers who are either managing multiple websites or hosting a resource-intensive website with high traffic.
Given my experience with multiple hosting providers, I recommend that dentists use either SiteGround or FlyWheel to host their website. SiteGround offers the perfect balance between affordability and reliability for websites serving static content. When selected, SiteGround will deploy your website onto a shared server, which is perfect for the majority of dentists. A shared hosting environment offered by SiteGround will offer enough storage capacity, memory, and bandwidth to reliably serve your website to potential customers every day.
There are some drawbacks to shared hosting though. The major drawback is that your website’s performance (it’s up-time and speed), are affected by other websites on the server. Sharing a server with other websites is usually not a problem, however if one of your neighbors on the server is abusing the service or is under attack, the server’s resources may be consumed by another website on the server because the hardware is not dedicated to your site.
If you want the hardware to be dedicated to your website, you need to purchase a virtual private server (VPS) or a dedicated one. A dedicated server is not necessary for a dental office under any circumstances. Virtual private servers are an affordable alternative to dedicated servers that offer speed and reliability to dentists. Many managed hosting services used to be spin up virtual private servers in the cloud for their clients, however, the scalability of cloud computing has become very popular as of late and is often recommended over a VPS. While you could use Amazon Web Services or Digital Ocean to set up a cloud hosting or VPS environment for your website on your own, it’s so much easier to pay for a managed service. This is where a company like FlyWheel comes in. FlyWheel sells managed WordPress hosting in the cloud, so you do not have to worry about noisy neighbors disrupting the performance of your website. I used Fly Wheel for several years before switching to Pressable to host Embrasure Space and I highly recommend their services.
In summary, when dentists ask me where to host their websites, I tell them to start with manage WordPress hosting using either SiteGround or Flywheel. You can learn more about both of their services using the buttons below.