Whether you are a brand new real estate agent looking to launch your first website or an established agent who wants to relaunch a new website, you are going to need to find the best web hosting provider to host your website.

Web hosting is a field in which I have much experience. In fact, I started off my career some 10+ years ago doing tech support for a small web hosting company here in Los Angeles. It was probably the 70+ tech support calls a day that instilled many of the soft skills I use today for teaching, networking, and cold-calling prospects.

If you aren’t a total tech geek like myself, fear not! I’ll cover a few basics for you so that you can at least ask the right questions to your hired web developer and/or hosting company.

What is this “web hosting” thing you speak of?

Any website you visit on the internet is comprised of a bunch of files containing code that tells your browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc) what it should say and how it should look.

These files need to live, or be hosted, somewhere so that they can be served up whenever someone types in you-are-the-best-agent-in-town.com.

There are literally thousands of options for you to choose from when it comes to finding a web hosting provider for your real estate website, but not all web hosts are created equally. Some are more technical and allow you more granular control over the infrastructure that will host your website(s) while others offer almost no customizability in order to keep the service lower in cost and easier to use.

What should you look for in a web host for your real estate website?

There are thousands of features that could impact your decision to go with one host over the other. However, almost 99% of real estate professionals I’ve met and work with use WordPress to power their websites.

Because the odds are that you will also use WordPress as the backbone of your website, I am only going to focus on the features and functionality a web host should have to support your website.

Here are few requirements that you should seek out in a WordPress host:

• One-click Installs – Can your web host install WordPress automatically through the web hosting control panel?
• PHP & MySQL – PHP is the programming language that WordPress-driven websites are written in. MySQL is one of the databases that WordPress supports out of the box. Any web host you use should have support for these technologies baked-in.
• Subdomains – Does your website support unlimited subdomains (subdomains are things like blah.your-awesome-domain.com)
• Reliability – Is your web host reliable? Can you trust it will always be up during peak hours of the day? What could be worse than an outage while you are advertising your website in Facebook or Google?

I could go on with other requirements, but this is a good baseline set of requirements that you should require of any web hosting provider you choose.

My Recommendation for the BEST Web Host for Agents

As a software engineer and tech guru for most of my adult life, I’ve used a lot of different hosting providers. In fact, I’m currently using four different providers for various websites and applications I’ve built and are running on the web.

However, one host stands as my go-to utility web host for hosting a marketing website such as a real estate lead generation or personal branding website and that is DreamHost.

I’ve been a DreamHost customer for more than a decade and I can say that over time, they have remained consistent in everything they do. Prices have rarely gone up, they support all of the requirements above, reliability is always improving, they are one of the largest WordPress hosts on the internet, and I could go on and on.

The only drawback about DreamHost is that their MySQL is a little slow which can impact the performance of your website. However, with one of the many WordPress caching plugins, you can mitigate the speed issue entirely and make your website snappy.

Check out Dreamhost.com

Ready to sign up? Use coupon code: bestforagents to get $50 off your first year of hosting.