Your business has to juggle all kinds of things for it to succeed online today; everything from marketing plans to hosting plans, social media marketing to content creation. The juggling act becomes very overwhelming and stressful very quickly. The choice of managed WordPress hosting services over a shared hosting service or small virtual private server could be one of the most important decisions you make for your website.
With a managed WordPress host, you can put your business on the cutting-edge of technology.
Managed WordPress hosting is what it sounds like.
The first thing to know about managed WordPress hosting is how it differs from shared hosting or DIY hosting. Let’s breakdown the typical WordPress hosting situations we see into three groups to explain how this works best:
1. Hosting for WordPress on a shared server
Most beginners choose shared WordPress hosting due to its low cost. Some of them include GoDaddy, Bluehost, Hostgator, SiteGround, Media Temple, OVH, and GreenGeeks, etc. Their clients are usually:
- The first website they built.
- Leaving the WordPress.com platform.
- Keeping things as cheap as possible on a strict budget.
- People who aren’t aware of the differences between hosting types, and therefore only make decisions based on price (hint: this isn’t a good idea).
The price range for shared WordPress hosting plans ranges from $3 to $25 per month. Although this is not a bad way to start, the following tips should be taken into consideration:
- Whatever you do with the math, the hosting company isn’t earning anything after expenses. This is especially true if you include support expenses. The company is already losing money after just a single support ticket. Upselling and hidden fees are two of the ways that shared hosts make money. The upsells include services such as migrations, domain name registration, renewals, SSL certificates (including WooCommerce sites), etc.
- Many hosts offer their unlimited resources plan as a way of making money. This is probably something you’ve seen before. But unlimited resources do not exist in reality. A host will throttle the clients that consume most of the resources. This results in angry clients leaving, freeing up space for less resource-intensive clients. Ultimately, you’re left with a vicious cycle of hosting companies selling cheap plans in the hopes that customers won’t use much bandwidth and will purchase upsells. That’s how it works.
- Due to the low cost of the plan, the host is typically forced to overcrowd the infrastructure. Although you might not realize it, your website might be hosted on the same server as 500+ others. It is possible for performance issues with other sites to affect your site.
Imagine combining everything mentioned above and what would you get? Poor performance and poor customer service. They must spread their teams incredibly thin, which leads to long ticket turnaround times and inadequate customer service.
We’ve published an in-depth article from our chief business officer about how cheap WordPress hosting actually works. You might be surprised.
2. Hosting for WordPress on a VPS
People with WordPress experience or bootstrap startups make up the second group. These are the DIY types. In addition to trying to save money, individuals in this category are also focused on performance and realize how important it is to their business. VPS services like Digital Ocean, Linode, and Vultr are often used and a tool like ServerPilot is used to manage them easily.
