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You may make a huge difference in your website’s performance by selecting a Managed WordPress Hosting provider, rather than a shared host or a modest VPS.
What Is Managed WordPress Hosting?
So, what exactly is “managed” WordPress hosting, and how is it different from “shared” or “do-it-yourself” hosting?
Managed WordPress hosting provides you with a place to host your WordPress site so that you may show it off to the rest of the internet community. As an added bonus, it includes several tools and resources to aid in the smooth operation, safety, and quickness of your online properties. The idea is to let the specialists handle the technical aspects of your company so that you can concentrate on operating it.
The three most common WordPress hosting circumstances will help us better understand what’s going on here.
If you’re a newbie who wants to get your feet wet, you’ll likely find yourself in the first group. SiteGround, HostGator, Hostnats, Hostnats, GoDaddy BlueHost OVH GreenGeeks MediaTemple GoDaddy The majority of the time, these folks are:
Building a website for the first time
Making the switch from WordPress.com to a different platform
Need to keep costs down as much as possible on a limited budget.
You’re not aware of the variations between the various forms of hosting, so you’re just going with the cheapest option.
From $1 to $25 a month, monthly fees for shared WordPress hosting plans are typical. It’s OK to begin this way, but you should be aware of a few things.
Hidden Costs
Assuming all costs are included, $1 a month generates little money for the hosting firm – much more so when support costs are taken into consideration. They’re already in the red after one support ticket.
Upselling and hidden fees are two of the primary ways in which a shared host earns a profit. This includes migrations, domain registrations, renewal costs, SSL certificates, and so forth.
Hidden Throttling
In order to recoup their costs, most hosts promote their “unlimited resources” service. This is probably familiar to most of you.
In the actual world, there are no unbounded resources. Those clients that take up a lot of resources will be throttled by hosts. As a result of this, unhappy customers will leave, freeing up space for additional clients that don’t consume a lot of resources.
In the end, you have a vicious cycle where the hosting firm pushes low-cost plans, signs up clients who they think will not use a lot of resources, and purchases upsell. This is the eventual result.
Resource Scarcity
To save money, many web hosts may overcrowd their servers to save money by consolidating resources. As a result, even if you’re not aware of it, your website may be hosted on the same server as more than 500 other websites. Any problems with other sites’ performance may have an impact on yours.
For more on how inexpensive WordPress hosting really works, be sure to read our CBO’s in-depth essay. A lot of stuff will surprise you.
2. DIY VPS WordPress Hosting
Those with greater programming or WordPress knowledge often make up the second group, which includes bootstrapped firms. They belong to the “do-it-yourself” camp. This group of people is still seeking to save money, but they also tend to be worried about performance and know how important it is to their business’s success. ServerPilot, DigitalOcean, Linode, or Vultr VPS are common VPS providers with which ServerPilot may be used in conjunction.
If you’re not cautious, the DIY method might work in your favor, but it can also backfire. This is not the path to choose just because you like to fiddle! Your time has a monetary value, and you should use it to advance your company. Take advantage of the Hostnats team’s everyday expertise in addressing WordPress bugs, which spans over a decade.
3. Managed WordPress Hosting
SMBs, blogs with heavy traffic, and enterprises seeking specialist corporate WordPress hosting make up the third group. Managed WordPress hosting is an excellent investment for this group since it reduces their need for in-house resources, frees up their time, and generally provides superior performance due to its CMS-specific tuning.
According to your site’s size and requirements, managed WordPress hosting plans might cost anywhere from $25 to $150 per month or more. WP Engine, Flywheel, Pressable, Media Temple, Pressidium, and Pagely are some of the most popular managed WordPress hosting.
WordPress is used by large organizations such as jQuery, Plesk, Dyn, and NGINX.
Why You Should Choose Managed WordPress Hosting
Not every situation necessitates dividing individuals into one of three categories, as we did above. When making a business decision, you need to do your homework. You may begin with self-hosting and then go on to managed hosting as your business grows.
While this may be a viable option, it may not be the best long-term strategy for your organization. Managed WordPress hosting can help you in a number of ways today, and we’ll discuss nine of them with you.
Superior customer service is the primary reason to go with a managed WordPress server. In the majority of cases, managed WordPress hosting services focus only on the WP platform. In other words, they don’t muck about anything like Drupal, Magento, etc. It is common for support staff to specialize in one area, even if they aren’t specialists in that field, to begin with!
The support staff at Hostnats is made up entirely of WordPress developers and Linux engineers, who actively contribute to WordPress Core and other open-source projects and use WordPress on a regular basis. This has resulted in our customer service team being the best in the business. Nothing is worse than starting a chat conversation and thinking you know more than the person on the other end of the line does. At Hostnats, you can be certain that will never happen!
We started Hostnats because we saw a problem with the way WordPress support was handled in the industry. This is why we have an entirely different team structure. There are no levels or hierarchies in our organization. The member of our support staff that assists you is completely equipped to handle any issue you may be having, from the simplest to the most complex. No jumping about between reps, since we believe this is a waste of time. Our Fortune 500 and corporate customers’ support team members are available to everyone!
2. Optimized for High-Performance
As a second incentive to go with a managed WordPress hosting company, their environments have been optimized for WordPress.
If you choose a shared hosting plan or go the DIY path, you’ll have to spend a lot of time installing and optimizing software in order to have the same speeds as a managed WordPress server. If you’re using a shared hosting plan, you may not be able to get the rates you require.
We conducted a Twitter survey, and 63% of respondents said that “performance/uptime” is the most important feature they look for in a managed WordPress server.
Server-level caching and/or full-page caching are common features on managed WordPress hosting like Hostnats. That means we’ll take care of the caching for you. You won’t need to waste time researching the quickest caching plugin. If you don’t like dealing with cache plugins, this will save you a lot of time and headaches. Server-level caching is often quicker than plugin caching in most cases.
During periods of high traffic, you must provide as many assets from the cache as feasible. This decreases the server’s burden and assures lightning-fast delivery. Your WordPress site’s performance may be improved with the help of Hostnats’ Cache Analysis report.
You should be able to take advantage of the most up-to-date architecture and technologies with a high-performance managed WordPress server. It’s important to use the most recent versions of popular WordPress-optimized components like as PHP, MariaDB, HTTP/3, and NGINX.
3. Strategically Located Data Centers for Global Reach
Managed WordPress hosting solutions often feature a broader infrastructure geared for worldwide reach in addition to server-level speed.
4. Automatic Backups (Never Lose Your Data)
The loss of all of your possessions would have a profound effect on your life. Maintaining regular WordPress site backups is an important part of being prepared for the worst-case situation. Automatic backups should always be included in a decent managed WordPress hosting service.
Backups are often only included in more expensive plans for shared hosts. You’ll have to set up your own backup system and take snapshots of your VPS if you decide to go the DIY way with a VPS.
5. One-Click Staging Environments
There is a lot of testing going on. The production site is not the place where you should be trying out new plugins, PHP versions, and upgrades since you cannot afford for it to go down! When it comes to testing with most web hosting companies, the process of replicating your site locally, running the tests, and then migrating the changes back to the live site is a time-consuming and difficult undertaking. For testing purposes, several managed WordPress hosting companies provide one-click staging environments for WordPress.
6. Developer-Friendly (SSH, Git, WP-CLI)
Additional developer-friendly features are generally available with managed WordPress hosting, unlike with a shared hosting plan. SSH access, Composer, HeidiSQL, Sequel Pro, and Git are all included in the package. SSH access is often not available on shared servers, therefore none of the functions listed above will be available to you. If you’re using a DIY VPS, it’s possible to put them up, but it may need some more effort.
7. Security Is Taken Seriously
And don’t forget about safety! If your site is hacked or infected with malware, shared hosting providers are unlikely to help. This also applies to self-configuring virtual private servers (VPS). That means you’re the one who has to answer if your WordPress site has been compromised. Support for hacking and malware prevention is included with many managed WordPress hosting companies.
Your web host’s cloud provider is also critical. The Google Cloud Platform we employ provides you with a security paradigm that has been in place for over 15 years and now protects Gmail, Search, and other Google services. More than 500 security experts work full-time at Google.
8. Built With Scalability in Mind
Scalability is another important consideration for any host. When your shared hosting package’s resources run out, your only alternative is to purchase a more expensive plan. If you haven’t already been suspended, this is what you can expect. Eventually, if you’re using a shared hosting plan, you’ll have to upgrade to a dedicated server. This might take up a lot of time since you have to continuously monitor your limitations. Upgrading your server may also take some effort on your side.
There are several drawbacks to using a DIY VPS, such as the need for greater server expertise to enlarge disc space, etc. You don’t have to worry about any of this when you use a managed WordPress hosting service. Simply alert them if you’re going over their pre-defined restrictions, and if necessary, an upgrade is only a few clicks away.
9. Premium DNS (Faster, More Reliable Lookup Times)
Finally, you should choose a high-quality DNS service. Shared hosting or a DIY VPS won’t provide you with that level of control. You’d have to pay for the service individually.
What is a DNS server? This is basically a phonebook for the internet. Even if you don’t see the IP address, every address you put into your browser returns to it. DNS servers handle the mapping for you. As with web hosting, you may find both sluggish and fast DNS service companies. Amazon’s network is one of the biggest in the world. Using a fast DNS provider will result in faster DNS lookups.
GoDaddy and Namecheap, for example, both provide free DNS services, but both services are notoriously laggy. Moreover, the lookup times may vary, and the consistency of the results may be questionable. One notable exception is Google Domains, whose infrastructure is so large. Amazon, Cloudflare, Dyn, and DNS Made Easy are some of the greatest DNS service providers because of their large DNS infrastructures.
Because DNS providers can defend you from DDoS assaults, they’re essential. Furthermore, you should be aware of the criticality of DNS after the DNS Doomsday on October 21st, 2016. There are many reasons for this, and this is an excellent one. There were several firms whose websites fell down on that day because they depended on Dyn, the DNS company targeted in the hack. Reddit, Twitter, and Spotify encountered downtime.
If one of those organizations joined a second DNS provider on the same day, it wouldn’t have mattered much since the TTL was set to expire in days rather than minutes. This is one of the most prevalent problems with DNS providers. To fix this, just set up numerous DNS providers in advance as a precautionary measure.
