Most business owners, wear a lot of hats to keep their business up and running. Consequently, things like website content, content management and web hosting management are responsibilities for which most business owners don’t have time for.
As a managed WordPress hosting company, Page Progressive is able to help you boost your local area business (Charlotte, Raleigh or Triangle) to be stronger than ever, while you focus on your business. If you have never heard the phrase “Managed WordPress Hosting,” you may be wondering why it is so important. So, let’s break things down a bit before explaining how a managed WordPress hosting plan could benefit you.
Types of Web Hosting
First understand that there several main types of web hosting:
- Dedicated Servers
- Virtual Private Servers
- Cloud Servers
- Shared
The above list starts with the most powerful and costly at the top and ends with the least powerful but most economical. There are several variations of each type of hosting, depending on the provider you work with. This article is going to focus on the latter, “Shared” hosting option, as that is most commonly used by small businesses. While shared hosting typically costs less, it can often lack in the area of server resources available, or reliable and professional support personnel to help you when there’s a problem. Some providers update their shared servers infrequently or pack too many sites onto the server, leaving it slow and insecure. If you pay less than $30 a month for your hosting, you are probably on a lower end shared hosting plan. If you run a WordPress website, lower end shared hosting is often not enough to keep your site running smoothly, so many providers have started offering WordPress specific hosting plans with more memory, security and other features that benefit WordPress sites specifically.
Why You Need Managed WordPress Hosting
- Support – Just because a hosting provider offers managed WP hosting, it does not necessarily mean support will be better than cheaper plans. Do your research, and generally, if it’s lower cost, you should generally have lower expectations when it comes to tech support. Ideally, you want a team that not only knows web hosting, but also common issues WordPress websites suffer from, so they can diagnose things quicker and be more hands-on in helping you when there is a problem. That is why we have a team of WordPress developers manning our support system for our hosting clients.
- Performance – WordPress specific hosting plans typically include things to speed up your WordPress site, like caching, more memory.
- Backups – A managed WP host company will automatically backup your website on a regular basis. You should become familiar with how your hosting company handles backups. Do they offer offsite backups? How far back do they keep copies? Do they back up your files AND your database? Do they charge you to restore from a backup? Typically, you get what you pay for and many people looking for bargain hosting get burned in this area.
- Updates – If your website has plugins (and most do!) they need to be updated periodically along with any core WordPress updates, to make sure your website is secure. Most hosting companies will not update WordPress or plugins for you, which means you have to do that…and that is very important to stay on top of it. That is one reason we include WP and plugin updates with most of our hosting plans – then you don’t have to worry about that.
- Security – Perhaps one of the most important aspects of anything on the Web is the security it offers. A managed hosting plan typically had a higher level of security. For example, we offer regular malware scanning, cleanup should you need it, an included SSL certificate to make your site secure, and also a wide-area firewall (WAF).
If your website is important to your business, opting for a WP managed hosting plan may be one of the best decisions you make. If you’d like to know more about our Managed WordPress Hosting offerings, check out our hosting page or contact us to see if we are a good fit for you.