Website and WordPress hosting is a contentious subject. This article is based on my twenty years creating and designing websites and dealing with website hosting. With a self-hosted WordPress website, you need two things – 1. Domain 2. Hosting.
Website hosting can be complex. I am not going to go into all of the technical aspects of hosting and the massive range of plan, packages or prices. In this article I'm going to highlight a few of the benefits of investing in managed WordPress hosting, especially for business-critical or e-commerce website.
#1 Performance
Page load speed is important for everyone. Your visitors, Google indexing and conversions. Managed WordPress hosting is generally built to provide the best WordPress technical delivery. Managed WordPress is are not trying to create an environment for Drupal, Joomla, Typo3, Umbraco (to name a few of the lesser used CMS platforms.) Its focus is on a perfect WordPress experience.
This means managed WordPress hosting is created for the best performing WordPress websites, which generally means your WordPress website will load faster and perform better.
#2 Customer Support
How often have you had a problem with your hosting and tried to contact someone quickly? Having worked with website hosting for nearly twenty years I've had to deal with some quite awful customer support services, who are certainly not supportive. My experience with managed WordPress hosting services has been like a breath of fresh air. They typically respond quickly, have live-chat, can quickly find your account and guide you when solving your issue.
Managed WordPress hosting is certainly not perfect, however, no hosting services are ever perfect. I am still waiting for such a service to appear. I think it must be down to cost to the hosting companies. Hosting pricing seems to be a race to the bottom, so they have to cut costs and keep customer support automated or to a minimum.
I would rather pay for quality support alongside quality hosting. Yes, I am paying more but this is completely offset by how much time I save and that peace-of-mind that if there is an issue with one of my client's website, I can get it resolved quickly and efficiently form them.
#3 Uptime
No hosting offers 100% uptime. This is probably technically impossible due to the complex nature, so many factors affect server uptime. However having managed many, many websites and monitoring their uptime, I can see, on a daily basis, which hosting companies have regular outages and sites that are down.
What I can see is that the WordPress websites that I manage seem to be consistently fine on managed WordPress hosting. Then I can see websites on low-cost shared hosting have regular downtime, some almost every day. This downtime is only 1-2 minutes, perhaps some are down for 15 minutes. Which isn't that critical, however, why are they regularly down? Probably due to the sheer amount of sites crammed on to cheap, shared hosting.
Find out more about our tailored WordPress Training. Learn your way.
Solving your WordPress problems fast and giving you the confidence to publish and promote with WordPress.
#4 Speed
People don't tend to wait around if your website page is slow to load. One of the key factors around page speed is quality hosting. Okay, there is a wide range of factors that affect page load speed. Take a look at my article about improved speed on your WordPress website.
Most managed WordPress hosting offer speed improvements.
#5 Automation
WordPress core, themes and plugins need to be updated on a regular basis. This takes time. Many of the managed WordPress services offer a certain amount of automation. Usually for WordPress core. They can offer automated point-version release updates. They will send you an email when your site has updated.
#6 Security
Most managed WordPress hosting offer enhanced security on a server level. With additional back-ups and servers designed to offer greater security for a WordPress website. Plugins send out alerts when security updates are available. These are picked up by your managed WordPress hosting provider and quickly flagged to you so you can take action. Sometimes they will even remove a plugin from your website if it is particularly vulnerable.
The Takeaway
If your WordPress website is business-critical and you need the reassurance of high-quality hosting then selecting a managed WordPress hosting service is well worth the investment. The downsides to managed WordPress hosting can be price and lack of flexibility. However, I have found the extra investment of managed WordPress hosting certainly pays for itself when a website is business-critical and needs to perform consistently and drive business enquiries.
If you are serious about a high performing WordPress website that brings in business, whether you have an online store that needs maximum up-time or a business website that needs to be fast and secure for visitors, then managed WordPress hosting is a valuable investment.
Find out more about our tailored WordPress Training. Learn your way.
Solving your WordPress problems fast and giving you the confidence to publish and promote with WordPress.
Some affiliate links on this article.
