Webhosting Shootout – Installing WordPress Winner

It’s a pretty close race, but I know what I consider important when installing and managing WordPress. Here’s who I like for this round.

If you’re going to manage 1 blog then the installation portion is not as important to you. If it gets hard call Support. But if they can’t help you you’re just screwed.

If you manage a lot of blogs then you want control and fast access without a lot of messing around. And you want consistency – if you’re going to have a problem let it be a problem consistently so you can create workarounds or simply live with it.

CartikaHosting makes installing WordPress completely easy and simple – if you’re a little technical and you like to manage everything yourself. With Cartika you configure your paths, your HTACCESS file, everything. You do get the classic ‘5 Minute Install’ – my preferred method. It may not be what the gentle user is looking for.

MediaLayer and Media Temple both make installing WordPress easy and fast with their install scripts. MediaLayer lets you feel all technical with their database configuration page – I like that. Their database prefix is ‘vwax_’ which is just weird but doesn’t affect anything. The Media Temple installation got strange during the actual installation – I was left to wonder what was going on just a little too long. But that could be easily fixed with some better wording on the screen that displays while things are installing. Still, it’s enough to be more worry than a gentle user would want.

Setting up plugins is damn fast on both MediaLayer and Media Temple. Cartika forces me to use my FTP login to install and delete plugins which is just a tad tedious. But with Cartika everything works – with MediaLayer and Media Temple I had to upload my own HTACCESS files during the WP Super Cache setup.

Once I got in via FTP I found Media Temple’s structure to be a bit strange and confusing – I see ‘containers’ and ‘data’ and ‘domains’ – for me it’s fine, but for a ‘gentle user’ maybe it’s a bit much. I don’t recommend that Media Temple dumbs down their stuff – seems fine to me.

So who wins? It’s close, but my subjective scoring ranks it:

CartikaHosting: 10

MediaLayer: 9

Media Temple: 7