7 Reasons Why You Should Use Managed WordPress Hosting
One of the crucial moments of choosing a web hosting provider is figuring out which packages they offer and under which conditions. There’s a hierarchy of different types of hosting – with dedicated servers beating VPSs, and shared hosting generally being considered the least ideal of the options. Somewhere among all the choices is managed WordPress hosting – a type of hosting service that’s usually only offered for WordPress websites.
Now, you know that WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system and that it’s the backbone of a huge share of all websites, so it makes perfect sense that someone will create a service, slap “WordPress” on its name, and market it towards WordPress users. But what do you get for the extra cost of opting for managed WordPress hosting, and is it worth it?
We’re here to help you find out! In this article, we’ll list seven of the top reasons you should at least consider using managed WordPress hosting for your WordPress website. The reasons we’ll list include:
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With general hosting support, you can expect to get answers to the hosting issues that are common to all website platforms. Support staff might have some knowledge about WordPress, but its extent could vary, leaving your requests unfulfilled to a satisfactory level.
With managed WordPress hosting, the support staff that helps you with the problem are people who know WordPress. Some would say that this might be the most important reason to opt for managed WordPress hosting, as you’ll always be sure that you’ll have access to someone who knows WordPress and is willing to help you.
Their skills are just one part of what makes them great. With regular hosting, you are to a large extent responsible for fixing things around your website. With managed hosting, it’s almost like you share custody over the website – the support staff will take care of the technical stuff for you, making managed WordPress hosting a perfect choice for busy people or novices.
Regular backups are an important item in your website maintenance schedule. There are different ways you can back different parts of your website, from manual database backups to backups using some of the WordPress backup plugins. With managed WordPress hosting, you still might want to create a backup, but, likely, you won’t need to. The hosting provider will take care of that for you.
Regular backups are just one of the services routinely offered by providers of managed WordPress hosting. You should make sure to check how often they back your website up, where the backups are stored, and how you can access them. Whatever the frequency of the service, however, it should relieve you of some of your work.
The same goes for some aspects of your website’s security. Sure, you’ll still be responsible for the things you install on your website and the people you give access to. Providers will, however, have some types of built-in security features specifically created for WordPress websites. Not to mention that you can expect an extremely swift reaction when new WordPress-specific threats arise.
A website host can do several things to ensure top performance for your website. They can, for example, use data centers around the world, so that people visiting your website don’t experience issues based on their locations. Access to CDNs is another welcome feature, and some managed WordPress hosting providers are bound to offer it.
The main boon to performance with managed WordPress hosting is that you can expect the hosts to have a closer look and a more thorough understanding of how the CMS’ architecture affects performance issues. Your website is hosted by WordPress specialists, after all, and you’re well within your rights to expect them to have a deep knowledge of the workings of a WordPress website.
Hosting a website in an environment that’s built to support WordPress websites is a major performance boost. Implementing services such as server-level caching are a more than welcome addition, as are other optimization techniques a host might use.
There are many different scenarios when you might need to create a staging site. Whether you’re preparing to migrate a website from another host, or you’re trying out some new features before you implement them onto your main website, a staging site can be an invaluable tool. You can use plugins to create them if you want, but with managed WordPress hosting, chances are you won’t have to.
One-click staging sites are one of the services you’ll find most of the managed hosting providers offer. It might seem just like a convenient service because it takes care of building the staging site for you. In reality, however, it supports security and responsible website management. It’s also great because it’s so easy – if one click separates you from trying a plugin out on a clone of your website instead of the real thing, you’ll be more likely to use the clone.
If things go according to plan, your number of website visitors will not remain flat – it will grow with time, as you invest in attracting new audiences. You’ll have to keep up with the increased traffic by continuing to give people what they want – and probably more of it. Your hosting provider will have to keep up with new traffic, too.
When compared with other, weaker types of hosting, managed WordPress hosting is likely to have awesome scalability possibilities. It’s much better than you’d get with shared hosting, that’s for sure. It might not be as good as having a dedicated server – a few things are – but when it comes to getting the biggest bang for your buck in terms of scalability, managed hosting could be the best choice.
To deal with the increased demand, you might need to adjust your server to gain access to additional resources. With managed hosting, it’ll be completely up to your hosting provider to take care of this for you. Once again, managed WordPress hosting proves itself to be the best option for people who lack the time to learn all the technical skills needed to run a server.
Plugins are great – they’re arguably one of the best things about WordPress. You can do incredible things with your website thanks to plugins, and you won’t have to write a single line of code to do it. But plugins have another side to them, too, as they will inadvertently become a drain on your website’s resources.
Thanks to managed WordPress hosting, that’s another thing you won’t have to worry about. Managed hosting will apply on the server level some of the solutions you’d apply, with plugins, on the website level. We’ve mentioned a couple of examples – caching, backups, and some security features will be taken care of by the host, leaving you with less need to install the solutions on your own.
Having fewer plugins to bog down your website can lead to a boost in its performance. If anything else, it will give you more room to install other plugins that will provide an even better experience to people visiting your website.
Taking care of a website is a lot of work. Just making sure it’s regularly stocked with fresh content is a chore. Getting people to visit it is another one, setting up ads the third one, optimizing for search engines a fourth, setting up and linking social media a fifth, and so on. The work on a website never stops.
Thanks to managed WordPress hosting, however, you can rid yourself of the technical side of running the website. Your host will take care of most of the things that happen under the hood, leaving you to make sure people get to the website and have something to see or do once they come. And that just might be the most important reason you should use managed WordPress hosting.
Let’s Wrap it Up!
When you’re choosing the perfect hosting package for a WordPress website, managed WordPress hosting has to be on your radar. The benefits of using it are many, from the freedom it gives you by doing plenty of behind-the-scenes tasks for you, to the performance boost you might get from specially optimized servers. The only real downside to managed WordPress hosting is that it’s not the cheapest hosting option out there. If that doesn’t turn you off managed WordPress hosting, though, you might as well give it a try.
