Here’s the real deal about the benefits of managed WordPress hosting:
Many website owners assume that only having “superior content” is sufficient to succeed on the web.
“If I create amazing posts, people will naturally visit my site,” they say.
If only things were that simple…
To truly leverage the benefits of managed WordPress hosting, you need a strategic approach to building and managing your website.
Otherwise, you’re just playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey with your digital strategy: trying random tactics and hoping for success.
Statistics show websites using managed WordPress hosting perform better than unmanaged WordPress hosting.
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Understanding the Core Benefits of Managed WordPress Hosting
If you’re looking for a hosting solution that’s tailor-made for your WordPress site, managed WordPress hosting is the answer. This service covers all technicalities, letting you focus on growing your business while experts handle the backend.
Let’s look at some of the key benefits next.
Highlight Key Features
Automatic Updates: A managed WordPress hosting plan has features specifically designed to enhance and protect your website. These include automatic updates where the host updates both plugins and WordPress core, ensuring security vulnerabilities or compatibility issues are not in your way.
Caching: Server-level caching features speed up load times without needing additional plugins—this improves user experience and boosts SEO as search engines favor faster sites.
Content Delivery Network: Another common benefit of managed WordPress hosting is a content delivery network or CDN. A CDN places your static assets (think images, videos, CSS, and JavaScript) on its network of global servers. When customers visit your website, they pull those images from the nearest location saving precious milliseconds on transfer.
Security: Daily backups, malware scans, and premium security plugins are just a couple of security features offered by managed WordPress hosting companies.
Focusing on Dedicated Resources
In contrast to shared hosting plans where resources can be affected by other websites’ traffic spikes (the ‘noisy neighbor effect’), managed WordPress hosts typically provide dedicated server resources exclusively for use by your site. Your website performance remains unaffected even during high-traffic periods—a critical factor when executing successful digital marketing campaigns.
“Dedicated resource” doesn’t mean you have an entire bare-metal server to yourself—that’s one of the things you’re trying to get away from! If you don’t have IT staff to manage your website, you definitely don’t want to add server maintenance and management to your lengthy To-Do list!
One of the primary benefits of managed WordPress hosting is the obfuscation of the server and storage layers. You just want a fast site and don’t care about the underlying server infrastructure.
Be sure to ask your hosting company’s presales support or review their knowledge base to determine how your website is configured on their systems. You don’t want to manage WHM, cPanel, Plesk, InterWorx, or any of the other panels, and you definitely don’t want to waste time on the intricacies of server security, management, and maintenance.
Simplifying Website Management Tasks
Making life easier for businesses like yours is at the heart of these services; they come equipped with one-click installations making it convenient to add tools required by today’s modern businesses online. Plus, staging environments let developers test changes before going live—reducing downtime risks due to errors during updates or modifications.
And if something does go wrong? You have expert support from teams who specialize in troubleshooting WordPress-specific problems and are ready to help out.
Diving Deeper into the Benefits of Managed WordPress Hosting
Managed WordPress hosting offers a range of advantages that can greatly benefit your business website. From enhanced security to improved performance and expert support, many reasons exist to consider opting for managed WordPress hosting.
Boosting Security
Managed WordPress hosting offers enhanced security through regular malware scanning and automatic backups, providing additional protection for your website. Regular malware scanning and automatic backups protect your website against potential threats like cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and SQL injection attacks. This added layer of security gives you peace of mind and ensures the safety of your valuable data.
Certain providers or full-service agencies offer additional features at no extra cost, such as iThemes Security Pro or CleanTalk Anti-Spam, when you subscribe to them. HostingRadar’s parent company, 37SOLUTIONS, provides added value by offering third-party off-site backups if your hosting provider experiences a major outage or ransomware attack similar to the one Rackspace encountered in December 2022.
Enhancing Performance
Managed WordPress hosting can significantly improve the performance of your website by using a CDN.
Content delivery networks (CDNs) play a crucial role by serving static files from servers near users’ geographical locations, reducing latency and boosting loading times significantly. This can lead to a faster loading speed and a smoother browsing experience for people visiting your site. Additionally, fast-loading websites tend to rank higher in search engine results, boosting your online visibility.
This feature typically comes bundled in many managed WordPress hosting plans at no extra cost, saving small businesses the money and time required for manual setup if they used shared or VPS hosting options.
Did you know there are different types of CDNs?
Cloudflare is known as a reverse-proxy CDN that caches your content only when a visitor needs it. Traditional CDNs like MaxCDN and Akamai store all of your static web assets shortly after they’re uploaded to your server.
Which CDN type is better?
Cloudflare’s service is easier to use because it’s automatic and requires very little configuration. The only problem you’ll ever have is that it has a CSS or JS file cached in its network and won’t update it with your latest version. Simply click the “Purge Cache” button on their home page, and the problem is solved!
Traditional CDNs from providers like MaxCDN and Akami are somewhat difficult to configure and troubleshoot, so be sure to discuss the advantages and disadvantages with your web host, agency account manager, developers, or WordPress experts.
Enjoying Expert Support
With managed WordPress hosting, you can access dedicated support around the clock. Unlike shared hosting plans or VPS hosting options where troubleshooting can be challenging, managed WordPress hosting providers offer swift resolution of almost any issue that may arise. This ensures minimal disruptions and lets you focus on running your business without worrying about technical problems.
Managed WordPress hosting offers numerous benefits that can greatly enhance your website’s security, performance, and overall user experience. By choosing a reliable provider, you can enjoy the convenience of comprehensive management services and expert support, allowing you to focus on growing your business.
Caution: Expert Support Does Not Mean Free Web Development
Remember that hosting support staff are there to fix errors and help get your website running again. They are not there to help you add new features to your website. The typical hosting company does not have staff with the skill to develop new features on every customer’s website.
Some hosting companies have “best-effort” clauses in their support where they can spend a few minutes solving your problem for you instead of providing directions to do it yourself—sometimes, it’s just easier for them to fix it rather than deal with all the back-and-forth support messages.
Consider a full-service managed WordPress hosting agency like 37SOLUTIONS, LLC, if you need WordPress developers to build new features. They act as an account manager for your business and assign the same people to your site each time there’s a problem or feature request. No more dealing with multiple support techs as they change shifts throughout the day!
Some full-service agencies will host your website on managed WordPress hosting and deal with technical support for you. These agencies offer the best of both worlds—you have one person to call for both hosting and development requests, and they already know everything about your business, so they’re in a great position to help fast!
Security Features and Benefits of Managed WordPress Hosting
The world of managed WordPress hosting is filled with robust security features. These are meticulously designed to shield your website from potential threats, ensuring that both your data and server resources stay intact.
If you’ve never monitored the firewall and security logs of your website or server in real-time, you would be truly amazed at the sheer number of individuals attempting to hack into your system every single second. It’s truly a remarkable sight to witness, but it’s not meant for us mortals—leave it to the experts.
Detection: Malware Scanning
A key feature in many managed WordPress hosting plans is automatic scanning for malware. This preemptive measure aids in identifying any harmful software on your site before it can inflict damage. Some providers even extend their services to cleaning infected sites; however, this is usually an extra cost.
Prevention: Daily Backups
No one can overstate the importance of regular backups when you’re operating a business online. With most managed WordPress hosts, daily or sometimes real-time backups are typically included in your package—giving you peace of mind knowing that unforeseen circumstances won’t result in losing valuable content or data.
Mitigation: WordPress-Specific Security Measures
Beyond general measures like firewalls and SSL certificates, some hosts offer protections tailored to WordPress websites. These measures involve hindering suspicious IPs, halting identified spamming and hacking efforts, and automatically refreshing core files to ensure they are up-to-date with the most recent fixes.
This provides another layer of protection against common vulnerabilities found within many WordPress sites, which could otherwise be exploited by malicious users and compromise the integrity of your website.
Managed WordPress hosting provides robust security features like malware scanning, daily backups, and WordPress-specific measures to protect your site. However, no system is foolproof—maintaining strong passwords and following best practices is essential. Always consider service reliability alongside price when choosing a provider.
Remember, while these features significantly improve your website’s security profile, no system can guarantee 100% protection against all possible threats. Maintaining strong passwords and following best practices remains crucial.
In choosing a provider, not only compare their offerings but also check out customer reviews to get a sense of the reliability of each service. After all, quality support is just as important as the price point.
Exploring the Cost Benefits of Managed WordPress Hosting
When evaluating a managed WordPress hosting plan, understanding how it stacks up cost-wise against other options is crucial. Sure, there might be an extra cost involved with managed hosts, but the value you get often surpasses this.
Pricing: Shared vs Managed Hosting
The price tag on shared hosting plans can seem appealing due to their lower costs than managed WordPress hosts. But remember: in shared hosting scenarios, your website shares server resources with numerous others, which could impact performance negatively.
On the flip side, even though initially more expensive than shared solutions, dedicated resources from a managed host ensure optimal WordPress site performance.
The amount of time you will spend troubleshooting a slow and underpowered “managed WordPress server” from unreliable providers like GoDaddy will far outweigh any potential cost savings.
VPS or Managed WordPress: Which Costs More?
A VPS (Virtual Private Server) is another popular choice among small businesses because of its affordability and flexibility.
It may appear less costly upfront when compared to fully-managed services like those offered by Kinsta, WP Engine, and Siteground. However, managing a VPS requires technical know-how or hiring IT staff, adding significant hidden expenses over time.
Intrinsic Value of Opting for Managed WordPress Hosting
A major advantage of opting for providers who specialize in running WordPress sites efficiently lies in their ability to handle security updates on the WordPress core itself and optimize content delivery networks, ensuring faster load times. These maintenance tasks, handled by expert support, allow you to focus solely on growing your business rather than dealing with tech issues yourself.
To sum things up briefly—while there are initial higher costs associated with choosing such a service as opposed to traditional ones like VPS solutions, considering potential expenditures related to employing IT personnel and spending valuable time troubleshooting website problems—investing in a reliable provider possibly saves money long-term through consistent, high-quality performance improvements and excellent customer support whenever needed.
Managed WordPress hosting may initially seem pricier, but it’s a case of “you get what you pay for.” With dedicated resources and expert support handling tech issues, your site performs optimally while you focus on business growth. It could save money long-term by preventing hidden costs associated with VPS solutions or shared hosting scenarios.
Guidelines for Selecting a Managed WordPress Hosting Provider
Choosing a managed WordPress hosting provider can be overwhelming. It can be difficult to compare specifications between vendors as they all have slight differences, making it hard to see the clear advantages and disadvantages.
When considering a managed WordPress hosting provider, these are some key considerations.
Determine Server Resources
Analyze Your Needs:
Your website’s performance hinges largely on server resources. The more you have at your disposal, the better equipped your site is to handle heavy traffic and deliver content swiftly. Some managed WordPress hosts offer scalable solutions that let you adjust server resources based on demand.
Gauge Security Features
Safety First:
A robust security setup should be non-negotiable when choosing a host—think malware scanning, automatic backups, and DDoS attack protection. Also, consider if they regularly update the WordPress core, plugins, and themes, which could help shield your site from vulnerabilities.
Ponder Performance Improvements
Faster is Better:
A quality, managed WordPress hosting plan will include performance enhancements like caching mechanisms and content delivery networks (CDNs). These tools expedite load times by storing copies of web pages across various global locations for faster user access regardless of their location.
Evaluate Customer Support Availability
All Day Every Day:
The availability of expert support cannot be overstated when managing technical issues and queries about your website. Look for providers who offer customer service through multiple channels, including phone calls, live chat services, and email tickets.
Weigh Cost Against Value
Budget Wise:
Last but not least are cost considerations. While cheap shared plans might seem attractive initially due to the low price point, remember that these often come with limited capabilities compared to a fully-managed solution, where extra costs arise over time due to maintenance tasks being outsourced elsewhere instead of being handled internally within the package itself.
Choosing a managed WordPress hosting provider requires careful thought. Prioritize server resources, strong security features, performance enhancements, and round-the-clock customer support. Also, remember to weigh the cost against value—don’t let initial low prices fool you into settling for limited capabilities.
FAQs in Relation to Benefits of Managed WordPress Hosting
Why use managed WordPress hosting?
Managed WordPress hosting offers enhanced security, superior performance, and expert support. It’s ideal for businesses that require a robust web presence without technical hassles.
The key benefits include automatic updates, daily backups, malware scanning, speed optimization, and 24/7 customer service to ensure your website runs smoothly.
What is the difference between managed WordPress hosting and regular hosting?
In contrast to regular hosting, where you’re responsible for maintenance tasks, managed WordPress Hosting takes care of all backend issues like updates and security measures, freeing up your time.
Are there any benefits of managed WordPress hosting with GoDaddy?
No. Just stay away from them. We’ll publish a separate post about the problems we’ve experienced with their terrible hosting platform and support over nearly two decades of being forced to work with them while managing client websites already hosted there.
Do websites from WordPress.org have managed features?
No, the free and paid websites you get from WordPress.org do not qualify as “managed” hosting.
Conclusion
Managed WordPress hosting is the secret sauce to a successful website.
It’s not just about content anymore; it’s also about how you manage and optimize your site.
The benefits of managed WordPress hosting can be game-changing for any business owner or blogger out there.
Better security features, improved performance optimization, and 24/7 technical support – all these perks come bundled with this service.
Cost efficiency is another major advantage when compared to other web hosting options.
Finding a trustworthy provider may appear intimidating, but with some investigation and thoughtfulness, you can locate one that fits your requirements flawlessly.
In essence, managed WordPress hosting could very well be the strategic approach you need for online success. So why wait? Make an informed decision today!
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