What do you need to know about Managed WordPress Hosting
You got an idea to build on the web and after making some effort to research, you get to know WordPress would be the platform that suits your need. With WordPress powered more than 28% of the websites on the Internet, you know you have made the right choice due to extensive plugins and themes that can help you get the website up in very easy way.
The next move is you start to look around for a reputable WordPress web host to host your website including getting the right domain name for your website. But you stumble upon on some of the hosts which offer the conventional web hosting that also has WordPress hosting and also some of the hosts that offer Fully Managed WordPress hosting. Which one should you go with?
In this post, I am going through some of the benefits you will get when you go with the Fully Managed WordPress web hosts.
Ease of Management
This would be in the view of the provisioning and management tools for you to manage your WordPress website on the day-to-day basis.
You usually will get your WordPress auto provision with your preferred domain upon your sign up is completed. You do not want to get involved in the complicated steps in downloading the WordPress source file – unzip it locally on your computer – upload via FTP (what is FTP?) – create the database before you can see your WordPress website is up and ready for you.
Features / Specs
This includes total disk space for your WordPress websites, number of MySQL database, number of email accounts, subdomains…etc
As you are starting to build your WordPress website either as a professional branding or for a business website, you probably would be looking around 5-10GB of disk space required to kick start. The WordPress installation and database will take up less than 1% of your total disk space as you start.
Also, take into consideration if email services are supported. Some of the premium WordPress hoster like Pagely, Pantheon does not offer any email services for your WordPress services. That would means if you will need to use your WordPress domain with your own email address, you will need to find another web host to host your email. That significantly increase your cost and also you have to maintain your Website and Email separately with 2 different providers across 2 different platform.
Resource Allocation
As you grow your website traffic, there will be more and more visitors hitting your website every second. You need to ensure your WordPress Managed provider allow you substantial resources to run your WordPress website due to the fact that there’s a resource cap in terms of CPU and memory for each of their plans. Otherwise, your user will suffer slow loading and constantly be getting page error when making the attempt to reach your WordPress website.
DEVELOPER TOOLS (OPTIONAL)
While this may not be a must options for the WordPress web hosts to make it available for you. if you are a WordPress web developer or designer that have the requirement to customise WordPress for your client, you will be looking also for the WordPress staging, GitHub, WP-CLI function. The staging area allows you duplicate the production WordPress as another “copy” that you can run your new enhancement and changes to test it before rolling it out to the production website.
Shared or Do-It-YourSelf
You may be juggling around shared hosting vs VPS. A typical shared hosting means your WordPress website is hosted on the same server with other customers in a server sharing the same resources such as CPU and Memory. While some opinion says that to run your website in a dedicated environment so you won’t get affected when any of other websites abuse the resources and affect your WordPress website, it may not be necessary needed. There are technologies used by the Managed WordPress web hosts to “limit” the resources each of the websites running on the same server from overusing the resources that are being allocated. So is important for you to get to know how much is being allocated on the WordPress plan you have subscribed. As your traffic goes, it’s recommended for you to move out to a dedicated environment so you can have a higher resource to run your WordPress website.
However, if you are building your WordPress on the provider like Amazon or DigitalOcean that typically refers to “Do-It-Yourself”, you will need to build up your sysadmin skill to troubleshoot any of the Web services, database servers, and email services when they run into any issues that may impact the loading of your WordPress website. You will be looking at a minimum of $5/mo for the VPS and $10/mo for the tools like ServerPilot to help you to manage the VPS and WordPress. The cost of running on this options would typically not be cheap, you may potentially back-fire yourself if some of the services screw up which require some skill set to fix it.
Security
WordPress is an open source platform and having said that the source code is publicly available for anyone to download to review. Some of the release version may have some security loophole which allows any malicious users to exploit your WordPress installation. Some of the damages include uploading some files to your WordPress websites without you knowing it and use your WordPress domain to launch a certain attack against other targeted websites. Other include stealing your WordPress database (if your WordPress contains valuable information such as any e-commerce customer information) or uploading certain malware that’s going to be embedded and infect your visitors’ workstation when they browse your website.
With your WordPress fully managed by a reputable WordPress web host, they will take care all the aspect of the security to filter and block off all this attempt to get into your WordPress installation. This includes having a good firewall, daily malware scan on your WordPress website, web security request filtering and brute force detection that autoblock off the malicious attempts IP address from reaching out to your WordPress website.
Also, go through our 7 simple ways to secure your WordPress website.
Speed and Performance
The loading speed of any websites determines if your visitors or potential customers will convert. Typically your website should be loaded within 3-4 secs or less, anything beyond this, you will be seeing high bounce rate on your web analytics data (ie Google Analytics).
Most Managed WordPress provider will run a comprehensive fine tune on the server which hosts your WordPress. This includes running your website on NGINX, HTTP/2, extensive caching and CDN-enabled together with the proper fine tuning of the MySQL server.
While the tuning of the web server is important, there is also another aspect of performance improvement you can do on your WordPress installation. One of the examples would be the WordPress theme that you choose for your WordPress website. Some of the WordPress themes will cause a major slow down as they have built in all the functionality that would require being loaded. Choose only those functions that you need when you are looking for the right theme. Check out the 7 tips that you can work on to further improve your WordPress loading speed.
Backup
Another important aspect of recovery point for any disaster recovery requirement. You never know when you will need it until you need it – just like an insurance policy subscription.
A Managed WordPress provider will bundle this as part of your subscription package that will run a daily backup off to their backup server for any emergency crash. In the event, if your WordPress website crashed due to any customisation was done that will not be able to revert or be exploited by malicious users, you always have a copy of the last good backup from your host to restore your last working website.
Personally, I am seeing a minimum of 7 days backup retention copy is good from any Managed WordPress host as it won’t take you more than a week to realize that your WordPress website has suffered a crash that needs to restore from the backup.
Cost
There are the different tier of Managed WordPress provider in the WordPress industry that offers the WordPress managed services.
The top premium tier such as Pagely start with the minimum of $499/mo. If you are just starting up, this plan will not be something you will be looking at. A standard entry level would be ranging between $5 – $10/mo for a Fully Managed WordPress solution.
There is some provider that offers lower than that but be careful of the trick that this would typically be a 3 years contract and your next renewal will be up back to their normal price before discount. You can, of course, negotiate with the provider to offer the same price as it comes to the renewal but most of the times they would have charge your card before you would realize. Approach the host sales and ask for this before you sign up.
Typically, you will also be getting a Free lifetime domain bundle with your WordPress hosting as long as you continue the renewal on each of your annual billing cycle. Some may be just offering on the first year though.
Summary
To grow your business and build up your personal brand thought leadership through your WordPress website, you need a Fully Managed WordPress web host that takes care all the technical aspects of managing the WordPress infrastructure and security so you can fully concentrate on growing the business and web content.
WPWebHost offer the Fully Managed WordPress Hosting that helps you take care the daily maintenance of the server security, website loading with the same renewal cost as you signed up PLUS a FREE lifetime domain name as long as you continue renewing your WordPress hosting subscription.
