9 reasons to use managed WordPress hosting
Contracting managed WordPress hosting services is one the best ways to outsource daily maintenance duties and focus on growing your business. Let’s explore 9 reasons why managed WordPress hosting will benefit your website.
A competitive WordPress website for your business involves a considerable time and money investment. However, keeping your website updated and maintained will make it more attractive to potential customers, so you can’t escape the need for a well-maintained business website.
Combining update and maintenance duties with the time and money commitments necessary to keep a digital brand afloat can be overwhelming. That is why managed WordPress hosting can be an alternative for those who want to focus on growing their website and brand without worrying about ever-changing technical needs.
Managed WordPress hosting services cover most of the technical aspects of running a website by delegating those duties to trained experts so you can focus on improving all the other parts of your business.
Keep reading to discover the top 9 reasons to choose managed WordPress hosting instead of running the hosting yourself.
What is managed WordPress hosting?
Managed WordPress hosting services are web hosting services provided by companies specialized in hosting WordPress sites. Their expertise, tools, and techniques are geared toward providing the best possible hosting for your WordPress site.
These companies offer a series of features designed to optimize the security and speed of your website. They also provide superior support, premium DNS, and SSL certificates, among other services.
In short, this hosting plan offers you private server space and provides automated installations, updates, and backups. It will also alert you if there are any performance or system issues on your site.
These services are designed to take care of the day-to-day maintenance aspects of your website, freeing up time for you to focus on the rest of your business.
Managed WordPress hosting is an excellent investment if you want to save time on labor and CMS maintenance. They’re highly recommended for high-traffic websites and non-technical users.
Hosting plans typically range from $25 to $150 per month, depending on your site’s size and needs.
Why choose managed WordPress hosting?
Investing in managed WordPress hosting can significantly benefit your website. The main benefits are:
- Dedicated server hosting
- Daily backups
- Premium support
- Optimized performance
- Testing environments
- Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Advanced security
- Premium DNS
- Scalability
Let’s take a closer look at each of these benefits.
1. Dedicated server hosting
Managed WordPress hosting services offer the possibility of hosting your website in a server dedicated exclusively to your website: 100% of the server’s resources are committed to your website. The benefits of dedicated server hosting include the following:
- Reliable service with the most uptime
- Highest security standards by not having to share server resources with other websites
- More scalability
- Maximum speed, memory, and power
The downside of a dedicated server is, of course, its higher price tag. That level of investment may be too much for some smaller businesses, for whom a dedicated server is an unnecessary expense.
When dedicated servers are too much, you may opt for Virtual Private Servers (VPS) instead. VPS are servers that host multiple websites instead of one. They offer many of the same services, but to a lesser degree.
Depending on the size of your website, you should explore the best server arrangements for your needs. Speak to support to understand what each plan entails before signing for one.
2. Automatic backups
Backups let you restore your website in cases like an irreparable crash, damage caused by a theme or plugin installation, a cybersecurity breach, or the accidental deletion of an essential element. Backups guarantee you always retain important data.
Managed WordPress hosting services and set automatic backups at a specified frequency. The frequency of these backups is up to you, but typically you’ll have options to fix it daily or even hourly.
3. Superior support
With managed WordPress hosting, you’ll get customer support services. This means you’ll have a team of experts to assist you with any issues your site experiences. Most managed WordPress hosting services offer 24/7 support, ensuring you have an immediate response for any of your problems.
Support services often also include frequent automated scans that will likely find and fix problems before you notice them.
Additionally, customer support teams help you with installations, plugins, templates, and other aspects of website development. This can be a game-changer for non-technical users.
4. Optimized performance
Page speed is fundamental for a better user experience and impacts a site’s organic search rankings.
Since site performance depends on the stability and overall health of the server it’s hosted in, the crew maintaining the servers should be experts. Managed WordPress hosting services guarantee that your site’s server is maintained by professionals whose work powers its functionality and performance.
Managed WordPress hosting includes offerings such as full-page caching and server-level caching. Caching ensures that your web page is stored on the server so users can access the information much faster.
In addition, the maintenance crew ensures all relevant software is up to date. You’ll always have the current versions of HTTP, NGINX, PHP, etc., which will also improve performance and security.
5. Testing environments
Testing areas ensure performance, stability, and functionality for changes introduced to your website. While you can manually generate a testing environment, copying your entire site with its plugins, themes, and everything else can be tedious.
Most managed WordPress hosting services provide testing environments where you can run tests and experience previews of the changes you make. This way, you’ll isolate any mistakes made during development and prevent them from going online, protecting your site’s security and performance.
6. Content Delivery Network (CDN)
CDNs are a series of servers geographically distributed throughout a country, a continent, or the world. These servers work together to deliver multimedia content to internet users as fast as possible. Their popularity has grown to the point that most web content is provided through one CDN or another.
As you can imagine, many managed WordPress hosting services have set up CDNs, which they provide to their subscribers.
This feature helps you serve your site’s multimedia content to users faster by caching media in multiple locations and delivering it through the server nearest to the user.
7. Advanced security
With DIY hosting, you (and only you) are responsible if your site gets hacked.
With quality managed hosting, you’ll have a security system to take care of your WordPress site, so it’s safe from hackers and malware. It will also provide 24/7 support in case of any security issues.
High-quality managed WordPress hosting services provide various security features, including:
- Protection from common malicious attacks like brute force and DDoS
- Network monitoring
- Malware scans
- Firewall integrations
- Two-factor authentication
- Periodic password changes
- Disaster recovery
- SSL certificates
8. Premium DNS
DNS servers translate domain names into IP addresses so that browsers can load Internet resources. The better the translation, the faster the user can access a site. If you want to provide a good loading experience, it’s ideal to have a reliable premium DNS.
Premium DNS is included in the price of managed WordPress hosting.
9. Scalability
If you own an online business, you should plan ahead. Maybe your site won’t get much traffic initially, but you’ll eventually get more traffic if you keep growing, so you must be prepared to handle scale to high-volume traffic without issues. Managed WordPress hosting can provide you with that scalability.
Managed hosting services let you manipulate traffic limits, and they set up notifications if you exceed specific traffic thresholds. You will always have the option to upgrade your website’s capabilities to meet your users’ needs and expectations.
WPEngine provides world-class managed WordPress hosting.
WPEngine is the #1 WordPress hosting platform in the world. Their managed WordPress hosting services provide the following benefits:
- Streamlined site management through automated updates, daily backups, one-click staging, and premium themes.
- Free SSL and platform-level protection
- +40% page speed after migration
- 24/7 global support
If you are willing to consider WPEngine as your web host provider, you can use the code FREEDOMTOCREATE to get the first two months free on your first annual subscription.
Managed WordPress hosting is an excellent option for you
High-quality managed WordPress hosting gives you the peace of mind of 24/7 personalized support, security, and performance. Selecting a service provider that can fulfill your needs will free you from performing daily tasks that can be difficult for non-technical users.
In short, if you have or plan to have a WordPress site for your online business, hiring managed WordPress hosting services can be an excellent investment.
There are plenty of options with different features and prices. Explore multiple service providers and their services, read reviews about them, and familiarize yourself with how they work. For a breakdown of the 5 most popular WordPress web hosts, check out this post by our CTO.
Combining your deep understanding of your own needs with the information we’ve provided here, you should be able to find a provider that ticks all the boxes.