It is essential that your website provides a solid foundation for managing and scaling your business. Instead of hiring experienced WordPress Devops engineers to manage your site and infrastructure, you may want to consider using a managed WordPress hosting solution.
Your business will save money and have a team of hosting experts to ensure your WordPress website remains available, secure, and fast. Additionally, taking a DevOps course can help your team understand the fundamentals of infrastructure management and automation, allowing them to make informed decisions about your site’s architecture and performance optimization.
What is Managed WordPress Hosting?
Managed WordPress Hosting is a specific type of web hosting solution that is tailored and optimized specifically to support WordPress sites and users. Managed WordPress hosting is like having a team of WordPress and hosting experts working on your website, eliminating the cost and burden of managing your site’s hosting in-house.
Managed WordPress hosting exists as a separate option from other types of hosting because WordPress websites have unique needs. They have different server resource footprints than other types of websites, they have unique security concerns, and their proper support requires WordPress expertise.
Managed WordPress hosting solutions are generally defined by:
Managed WordPress Security
Automatic updates of WordPress themes, plugins and core
Managed server resources that meet the technical needs of WordPress
Experienced WordPress experts on staff to handle support
It is a hosting designed from the ground up to serve WordPress. Let’s take a look at how managed WordPress hosting services compare to other hosting options, such as shared hosting and VPS hosting, to see which one offers the best WordPress hosting solution.
What is shared hosting?
Many small businesses are attracted by the affordable prices of shared hosting, which can range from $3-20 per month. It is important to understand what shared hosting offers and what it does not.
For a hosting company to be profitable at those prices, they are volume-dependent and corners need to be cut. A shared host charging $5 per month simply cannot profitably offer quality support and adequate server resources to every customer. Instead, this business model relies on minimizing support interactions and upselling. When someone complains that their site is down or slow, these hosts typically recommend that the website owner upgrade to a more expensive hosting plan to fix the problem.
Basically, these rock-bottom prices are a way to lure people into their hosting solution with the goal of moving them to more profitable plans as they outgrow their shared hosting service. They don’t expect a business to run a large, high-traffic website on a shared plan.
Shared hosting is defined by:
Low prices
Minimum support
Minimum server resources
No WordPress experience, solutions or specialized support
Popular shared hosting companies are GoDaddy, A2Hosting, and HostGator.
However, that is not to say that shared hosting never makes sense. If you have a hobby blog or a side hustle, shared hosting may be adequate. But, if you are an established business that depends on your website being available, fast, and secure, shared hosting is probably not the best option.
Shared hosting simply cannot offer the same quality of hosting service as more expensive options. The age-old maxim of “you get what you pay for” applies here.
What is VPS Hosting?
VPS hosting, or Virtual Private Server hosting, is like shared hosting because your site shares a server with other sites. However, there are fewer sites on the same server compared to the shared hosting option. The server is also partitioned into different virtualized server environments. Unlike shared hosting, WordPress VPS hosting usually provides basic guaranteed resources eliminating the problem of “noisy neighbors”.
VPS hosting is a huge step up from shared hosting, but it has one major downside for many people: running a VPS requires technical expertise that most businesses don’t have. If your VPS server goes down for any reason, you’ll need to know how to troubleshoot and fix it.
VPS hosting is defined by:
Fewer sites per server
Virtualized containers provide sites with separate resources
The need for technical skills to manage the VPS
The most popular VPS providers are Digital Ocean, Linode, and InMotion.
Managed WordPress Hosting
Managed WordPress Hosting is designed specifically to manage WordPress. It provides optimal technology and resources to support WordPress websites. Partnering with a managed WordPress hosting company takes care of all the technical aspects of hosting, including security, performance, and other factors.
Managed WordPress hosting is especially suited for large and enterprise-level businesses due to its security, reliability, and high performance. Any business that relies on its WordPress site will want a host that specializes in that CMS.
Managed WordPress hosting prices vary, with plans ranging from $20 to $1,800 per month depending on the resources and level of support they offer. Businesses invest in this because they understand that the benefits of the service far outweigh its costs. These businesses save time and money because they don’t have to pay for dedicated engineers to manage their sites. Partnering with an experienced WordPress host also improves site performance, further bolstering profits through key metrics like conversion rate, time on site, and more.
The Benefits of Managed WordPress Hosting
There are some key benefits that only managed WordPress hosts can offer.
1. High availability and uptime
Site availability and server uptime are critical to any online business. If your business website generates revenue, downtime means lost revenue. It can also damage your brand reputation and negatively impact your site’s visibility on search engines (also known as search engine optimization). Typically, web hosts guarantee at least 99% uptime. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean you’ll actually get 99 % uptime.
High traffic to a WordPress website can put a strain on server resources due to the dynamic functionality of WordPress. A host that is optimized for WordPress hosting can use smart caching and robust database solutions to ensure that your site remains functional and responsive when you need it most.
For business websites that require maximum uptime, it may be best to choose a host that provides a high availability architecture that distributes the workload across two or more servers in different zones. This approach reduces the risk of an outage during maintenance events, unexpected outages, or traffic spikes.
