Can I host my site somewhere other than AuthorBytes?

In short, if you want us to maintain it, no.

Not all hosting services are created equal.

Shared Hosting
The vast majority of hosting options available on the Internet are typically shared hosting accounts and while they claim to run a WordPress site, they typically don't do it very well. They suffer from noisy neighbors and overcrowding, which can significantly hinder your reader's experience. While this can be an extremely low cost option you get what you pay for.

Dedicated / Semi-Dedicated Hosting
There are also VPS (virtual private servers) and bare metal servers (dedicated stand alone servers.) These options are typically for people who have the knowledge and expertise to manage and run their own server as they typically require extensive tuning and management. While these options typically solve the noisy neighbor issue, the cost of setup and maintenance of these servers would far exceed the cost of a managed hosting provider that already does these things.

Managed Hosting
In a managed hosting environment, the service provider handles pretty much everything web stack related including the web server, database, caching, backups, network monitoring, etc. This does not include content updates or development requests.

AuthorBytes Hosting is a managed WordPress hosting service. This means:

• We only host WordPress sites.
• We provide the site licensing for the common plugins we use on every site.
• We manage your WordPress core and plugin updates.
• We allocate semi-dedicated resources to our sites to prevent “noisy neighbor” issues common in shared hosting environments. (Someone else’s site on the server isn’t going to take yours down due to resource needs or malware.)
• We utilize advanced server side in-memory caching techniques to make your site as fast as possible. (Important because part of your search engine ranking is your load time speed.)
• We deploy a web application firewall that sits between site visitors and your WordPress installation to protect it from bad actors.
• We deploy an antivirus scanning and cleanup solution that monitors for malicious code and automatically cleans it in most cases or alerts our operations team to a problem and we manually fix it. Your site is monitored 24/7 and if there’s a problem, in all likelihood, we’ll have it fixed before you or your visitors are aware of it.
• We take daily backups (some of our advanced plans offer hourly) of your site and store them on the server as well as an off-network mass storage array to protect your site in the event of a worst case scenario.

Our hosting plans are extremely competitive in the managed WordPress hosting space and the value far exceeds the monthly or annual cost to our clients.

It is important to note that we do NOT provide email hosting. Google and Microsoft are much better at it. We recommend their service and will gladly add whatever DNS entries you provide to make those services work on your domain.