Think about it–
You walk into a fancy bistro for dinner. The chef has crafted a wonderful three course meal for his guests this evening. He’s carefully picked ingredients that compliment each other and make three wonderful dishes. Along with those dishes, he’s paired a wonderful wine selection. You eat your meal. It was delicious.
When doing web projects for clients, your role should be similar to that of a chef. It is your responsibility to pick the ingredients (plugins, themes, code) to make the dish (project) come together. But it doesn’t end there, they need a fine wine (hosting) to compliment it.
Looking at things this way gives a good illustration of all the pieces involved to launching a successful web project. Hosting should be paired depending on the scale of project you’re doing. You wouldn’t pair a light white wine with beef entree; the beef would overpower the wine. Likewise, you wouldn’t pair a heavy red wine with a delicate fish entree.
More often than not, I see hosting mis-paired for web projects though. With more and more specialized/niche hosts appearing it’s key to remember everything isn’t one size fits all. A host with a great cache setup might be good for content driven sites where the site is for the most part read-only. That doesn’t really work when you have a lot of moving parts like dealing with sessions (e-commerce) or geolocation.
Knowing how to pair projects with hosting will save you the pain of developing an awesome project for a client then falling flat on your face when rolling it live. I’ve learned those lessons before– the hard way.