WordPress Managed Hosting
In order to have a successful business today, you have to research and juggle all sorts of things; including marketing, social media, hosting, content creation, etc. This process can be quite nerve-wracking. In this article we will discuss why choosing a managed WP hosting service is better in comparison with shared hosting or small VPs. You want the absolute best for your business and managed WP hosting gives you that competitive edge.
What does Managed hosting imply?
We will first take a look at the three hosting scenarios that the general online population is divided into and how are they different from each other?
1. Shared WP hosting:
The first category consists of people just getting started and opts for the low-cost option of shared hosting. Typical examples are Bluehost, GoDaddy, Hostgator, SiteGround, etc. The people who go with this type of hosting are newbies, migrating away from WP, have a strict budget and need cheaper alternatives. They can be people who do not know the difference in various hosting types and just choose the cheaper option which is not good.
When we talk about shared hosting, you get good value for your money. The plans range from $3 to $25 per month.
2. DIY VPS WordPress hosting:
The second crowd is the one that chooses DIY hosting. This crowd consists of people with bootstrap startups and has a little more know-how about development or WP experience. Their goal is still to save money but they want better performance and realize that performance is key to their successful website. Some notable mentions are ServerPilot, Linode, Vultr VPS and, Digital Ocean.
3. Managed WP Hosting:
Usually small or medium-sized businesses opt for this type of hosting. High traffic blogs and companies that are looking for specialized enterprise hosting also fall under this category. This crowd knows fully well the importance of managed hosting. It is a good investment as it saves time, manpower while offering better performance (as it is fine-tuned with CMS).
Monthly plans for managed hosting start from $25 and go up to $125 depending on your requirements. Some WP hosts are Kinsta, WP Engine, Flywheel, Pressidium, Media Temple and Pagely.
Why choose Managed WordPress Hosting?
Managed hosting is an investment at the beginning of developing your site as it lets you focus on making your business grow. There is no right or wrong path here but we’ve shared here nine reasons why you should consider managed WP hosting.
- Offers superior support
- It has been optimized for high-performance
- Strategically located data centers for global reach
- Automated backup mechanisms
- Very developer-friendly
- One-click staging environments
- Premium DNS (Faster lookup times)
- Data is secured
- Built with scalability in mind
1. You get superior support:
Typically managed WP hosting providers do not mess with other platforms like Drupal, Magento or others and only deal with the WP platform. As their focus is on one platform, they become experts in this area. Hence, they provide superior support because it is their specialty area.
2. Optimized for high-performance:
Another reason to choose managed hosting providers is that their environments are fine-tuned to work with WP. DIY and shared hosts will be on more barebone machines and your time will be wasted in downloading software and optimizing to get speeds that managed hosting already offers. In some cases, you won’t be able to achieve the speeds you want at all.
3. Strategically located data centers for global reach
In addition to server-level performance, the managed WP hosting providers generally have a large infrastructure specifically designed to reach the global level. Strategically placing client websites near their locations decreases network latency, TTFB and ensures lower loading times.
Latency implies the time or delay that is involved during the transmission of data. For example, if you run an online business in Sydney, your hosting provider should ideally be in Australia as well. If your provider is located let’s say in the US, your users will experience a delayed page loading time. Hence, the location of your managed WP hosting provider matters.
4. Automatic Backups:
You should be prepared for the worst; this means that all your data should be backed up regularly. With managed hosting, you don’t need to worry about the loss of data as it backs up data automatically. This means that another chore is off your chest. Ideally, managed hosting providers offer free of charge automated backups. With DIY hosting, you have to set up your own backup system. While in the case of shared hosting, automatic backup is usually included in premium packages.
5. One-click Staging environments:
A website owner cannot afford that his site goes down for even a few moments. Hence, they are always involved in testing new changes, updates and plugins on a development site and then migrate those changes on the original site. This is a time-consuming process, so a lot of managed hosting providers include one-click staging in their plans to make this step a breeze for users.
6. Developer-friendly hosting:
If you opt for managed hosting, you get access to a lot of additional developer-friendly features that are not available in DIY and shared counterparts. Some features include SSH access, HeidiSQL, Composer and Git. In DIY VPS, these features can be set up but it will be a time-consuming task.
7. Security- A Top Priority:
If your site gets hacked in a shared hosting/DIY VPS environment, they will not usually help you. The same is the case with malware. With managed hosting, many providers do offer support in case you get hacked and have the necessary systems to protect you from malware. But generally speaking, if your WP site is hacked that is your problem.
8. Built with Scalability in mind:
Providers manage scalability for you or they notify you to upgrade and the upgrades are easy to install. This option is seldom offered by the other types of hosting.