10 Reasons to Go for Managed WordPress Hosting: You Get What You Pay For

It’s getting harder and harder to keep up with the exceedingly faster pace that’s become standard on the market nowadays. The explosion of the internet as a marketplace, especially over the last year, has prompted the need for everyone to have their presence known.

Unfortunately, not everybody is equally equipped to handle something like that. Imagine your neighborhood flower store or handyman having to build up and run a site by themselves – it’s hardly feasible.

This is where managed hosting comes in – it will take some of the pressure off, but not so much that you’ll be paying huge amounts like you would with outsourcing your website management in its entirety. Let’s go over in more detail what managed hosting is and why it could be the solution for you.

All-in-one service

Managed hosting, more specifically, managed WordPress hosting, is essentially a service that handles both your hardware and software need you’ll have when running a site. This includes automatic WordPress core updates, security updates, backups, everything regarding servers, etc.

On the other hand, “regular” shared or dedicated hosting stops their services at providing server support, while everything that has to do with maintaining the site is left in your hands. The obvious downside is the cost, which is higher than your usual shared/dedicated hosting price, but with hosting, you really do get what you pay for, and most of that money is in the service.

You could do a lot of the work yourself, but more often than not, the time you’d have to put into learning what to do and actually doing it simply isn’t worth it. Therefore, you pay for the “managed” part of the equation. Having said that, there are affordable solutions around the web, even for those on a thinner budget.

In no particular order, we’ll list all the major benefits of managed WordPress hosting that may sway you to opt for it as a solution for your site.

High-end specialization

This one is a bit obvious, but we’ve decided to include it anyway. Namely, managed “WordPress” hosting is designed for WordPress – who would have guessed. Unlike other hosting services that aren’t designed with a specific platform in mind, managed hosting always comes better equipped to handle anything you might need if you’re working with WordPress.

Usually, there are some extra benefits included, like access to premium theme services or plugins/extensions you would otherwise have to pay separately for, commonly from a dev team affiliated with the service. Generally, although it is personalized to the platform, it will feel like it’s personalized just for you.

Automatic updates

Just like everything else nowadays, WordPress is constantly being upgraded. Since this affects the plugins you’re using (most of them following along with the core updates), it’s very important to keep up with the current version.

Unlike Windows, where everything mostly works even if you postpone the updates, WordPress isn’t as forgiving. Using managed hosting, you won’t need to worry about any of that because everything is handled by your hosting service.

Automated backups

From automatic updates to automated backups, managed hosting covers everything. A good backup system is essential for managing a site because it’s your last line of defense if something ever goes wrong. You could have an internal malfunction, be the target of an external attack, or something different altogether, with the end result being your site has crashed.

There are a few things to do in such cases, but the final option is always reverting to a backup. Now, if you have a good system in place, this will be a recent copy, no older than 24 hours, but if you do only manual backups and simply forgot, there’s a chance of huge data loss. Managed hosting usually makes backups of your backups, so there is minimal chance of losing anything significant.

Optimization

Your site shouldn’t “just work.” It should be able to fulfill its potential fully at all times (from a technical standpoint). Addons, extensions, themes, plugins – essentially everything you add to your core files reduces the level of optimization.

Managed hosting provides you with optimized environments to work in using various Content Management Systems that implement code rules that make your site run smoothly. The caching engine that comes with these types of hosting solutions expands the optimization rules to servers, themes, and plugins, not just the core data.

Security 

It seems like every day, a new threat arises on the web looking to take your site down. It’s, therefore, crucial to keep your defenses on par with the threats they’ll face. Since managed hosting in itself is a premium choice, the built-in security is also top-notch. The end result is a security system you simply forget you have – it does the job in the background, and you rarely even have to lift a finger to interact with it in any way.

Speed

A high level of optimization results in higher speeds. We can’t stress enough how important it is for your site to run fast. Loading times are one of the key metrics used in allocating the SEO score, which directly correlates with the results your pages will get on search engines.

Having your core load times high will also mean you can add more content to your pages and still be under the target load times – this means your site is fast, and there’s a variety of content to keep your visitors occupied.

Support

Our third “S” in a row is also a characteristic of a premium product or service in the scope of allocated support. With managed hosting, you’ll usually be getting around-the-clock direct lines, chat, email, instant messaging, etc. Basically, whenever you need to contact your provider, there’ll be someone on the other end ready to help.

Keep in mind that you have to contact them as the last step. Before that happens, there’s a whole team of people ensuring it never comes to that, and this is where the true premium support lies.

Staging site

Most managed hosting services will provide you with a staging site you can quickly access and make changes on safely. This is important because you should never make significant changes to a working site, or you risk critical failure. A staging site is perfect for testing because it doesn’t matter how bad things get. You can always revert back to the original values and start again without any fear of consequences.

Fewer plugins

The beauty of WordPress is the virtually infinite number of plugins you can use to make your site truly unique, both from the frontend (to the user) and the backend (functionality). Keeping that in mind, how can fewer plugins be a good thing. Well, over time, as you accumulate dozens and dozens of plugins, you’ll have a less stable site.

It’s only natural that out of 30 or 40 components, some of them won’t be compatible with all the others. Additionally, more plugins mean more code to load, making your site slower.

With managed hosting, the provider handles the maintenance of your plugins, so everything will always be functional, without you having to manually check every time you activate something new, and they provide services like backups and security, eliminating the need to have plugins that handle those.

Scalability

The great thing about managed hosting is that it follows your pace. More specifically, this means you can start off with managed hosting while you’re just starting up, and both your content and your traffic are far from challenging to handle.

As you grow both of these aspects (and many more besides them), your hosting service grows with you without losing a step, adjusting the resources you need along the way.

Summary

Managed hosting is a solution for those that want to focus on creating content, interacting with their visitors, building up their visual brand, or all of the above, without getting into too many technical details.

Be sure to do a little research before committing, though, and try to find a managed hosting service that covers most of the features listed here. Keeping that in mind, you can’t go wrong.