Everything You Need to Know About Shared Hosting vs Managed WordPress Hosting
When first launching a WordPress website, you can easily find yourself overwhelmed by the important decisions you have to make. You’ll have to figure out what your website is about and which WordPress theme brings out its purpose the most. You’ll need to pick the plugins you’ll use for your website. Above everything else, however, you’ll have to choose a hosting provider and a hosting package.
For starter WordPress websites, the two hosting options that come up the most are WordPress shared WordPress hosting and managed WordPress hosting. If you’re not sure what’s the difference between them and which one you should choose for your website, don’t worry. We’ll help you out!
In this article, you’ll learn:
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Shared hosting is the type of hosting where your website shares the server and its resources with a lot of other websites. Every server has a certain amount of processing power, storage space, and memory associated with it, as well as a certain bandwidth for internet access. With shared hosting, all the websites on a server will have access to the same pool of resources.
The Pros and Cons of Shared Hosting
The main benefit of using shared hosting, and the reason why it’s such a commonly chosen entry-level hosting option, is that it’s inexpensive. The prices might depend on the hosting provider and the exact package, but the prices for shared hosting generally start at a couple of dollars per month.
For a little more money, you’ll easily be able to set up an unlimited number of websites. You might also get free email account hosting, the use of cPanel for management, and a lack of a hard cap on visitor numbers.
On the downside, shared hosting is the worst-performing of all the hosting options. Because your website has to share resources with many other websites, you might expect more downtime, a slower response time, and other performance issues. The bigger your website and the more traffic it gets, the more pronounced these issues might get.
What Is Shared WordPress Hosting?
When looking through web hosts’ service plans and packages, you’ll often notice that they provide some sort of branded service for WordPress. It might involve several packages at several price points, with the most affordable one being almost indistinguishable from shared hosting.
If you come across this type of service, you should compare the shared WordPress hosting package with the regular shared hosting package. Chances are you’ll probably notice that the WordPress hosting package offers pre-installed WordPress and maybe a site builder, while the rest is the same as regular shared hosting.
While these packages aren’t solely a marketing gimmick, they won’t provide much additional value to you. Then again, they might not add to the price. But it’s important to remember that it’s still shared hosting and that the additional service you get is extremely limited.
Managed WordPress hosting is a label used for packages that include some WordPress-specific services. Your host will set up the servers to optimize WordPress performance, maybe even install the website for you. They’ll take care of updates and backups for you. Managed WordPress hosting might also include security rules specific to WordPress hosting. All in all, it’s a service tailored for WordPress websites that takes some of the website’s maintenance tasks off your hands.
The Pros and Cons of Managed Hosting
There are a couple of strong benefits of using managed WordPress hosting. Usually, this type of service will bring better performance as it’s built specifically for WordPress websites. Overall, you might expect better security, too. Finally, you’ll have more room to focus on content, for example, while the hosting provider takes care of some of the more technical things.
All of this will, however, usually come at a higher cost. Managed hosting will also pose certain limitations on your WordPress website. For example, you might not be able to install some plugins. You might also notice that your hosting provider has put a harder cap on the number of visitors your website can have. While these restrictions are made in the name of performance improvement, they still might be annoying or downright disruptive.
Could Managed Hosting Be Shared?
The obvious question is, if managed WordPress hosting is just a type of service, is it possible to have shared WordPress managed hosting? The answer is yes, it is. Hosting providers might offer managed WordPress services to go along with shared hosting. It’s also something to consider when choosing between VPS and dedicated hosting, as both can be managed.
These will come at different pricing points, of course. You should expect them to cost more than their unmanaged counterparts, and to enjoy all the other benefits and limitations of managed WordPress service.
The gap between shared hosting and managed WordPress hosting has been shrinking. Providers are offering managed WordPress hosting at increasingly competitive rates, and some have gone so far as to offer them at the same cost as shared hosting.
With the price out of the way as the deciding factor, you should turn to the other pros and cons when picking the best hosting package for your website. More precisely, you might consider whether the limitations of managed WordPress hosting are something you can live with since its benefits outweigh shared hosting or shared WordPress hosting.
You should also keep in mind that different hosting providers might include different services in their hosting package, whether it’s shared, shared WordPress, or managed WordPress. You should always shop around when looking for hosting, of course, but you should pay extra attention to detail when choosing between these types of hosting. Go service by service, and make sure that what you get is exactly what you need.
Let’s Wrap It Up!
Thanks to the immense popularity of WordPress, most hosting providers will offer some kinds of services that are tailor-made for WordPress websites. While there’s a consensus regarding what’s managed WordPress hosting and how it’s different from regular types of hosting, including plain shared hosting, you should always be careful when choosing hosting for your website.
Some providers will include different services in managed hosting, while others might create their brand of shared WordPress hosting that’s a mix of regular and managed WordPress hosting. The most important thing for you is to get the services that you need and the best possible website performance at the most affordable price.
