WordPress currently powers over 455 million websites, with 500 new WordPress websites every day. Well over a third of the top 1 million websites is WordPress based, so no one is ever going to deny its popularity or success, but that doesn’t mean that it’s immediately straightforward – there are key decisions to make right from the start which could have a long term impact on your website’s success.
In this guide, we’ll walk through when managed WordPress hosting can make sense and why for many use-cases running your own infrastructure paired with a popular cloud provider like Railway, DigitalOcean, Vultr, etc. can be the better choice. Without further ado – let’s dive in.
What is Managed WordPress Hosting?
Managed WordPress hosting is a service that takes care of all the technical aspects of running a WordPress website. This generally includes everything from maintaining the performance, stability, and security of your hosting infrastructure all the way through to providing support for technical issues that arise.
For those willing to pay a premium to have everything taken care of for them, managed hosting can afford you some extra peace of mind. We’ll get into the advantages and disadvantages shortly.
Overall, the main attraction in finding a managed WordPress host is convenience. You delegate responsibility and let experts handle the technicalities, freeing up to do what you want to focus on which may not be anything related to your hosting infrastructure.
The Pros & Cons of Managed WordPress Hosting
Although the features and services may differ from host to host, you can still rest assured that the majority of these pros and cons will be present in every host.
Managed WordPress Hosting Pros
There are really only two main advantages of choosing managed WordPress hosting – support & the absence of responsibility.
Support
Managed WordPress hosting providers tend to pride themselves in the level of support they’re able to provide.
The Absence of Responsibility
When you work with sites where 100% uptime and maintaining security, stability, and performance are not things that you wish to be responsible for, they’re often a good choice.
Managed WordPress Hosting Cons
Price (better yet, what is your business model?)
Managed WordPress hosting is more expensive, but that’s not really what cost comes down to. Whether or not you choose to go with managed hosting as a result of the cost, realistically is a matter of what your business model is. If you’re a WordPress design and development agency that has made the decision they want to get into the hosting business (a billion-dollar industry), then running your own infrastructure, eventually staffing your own support, etc. becomes a more logical choice.
Whereas, if you wish to maintain the stance that hosting is not something you’re interested in getting into and you would rather focus solely on your area of expertise as a design and development partner, perhaps eventually expanding into offering other services like SEO, then going with a managed WordPress hosting provider – depending on the site – can make more sense for your business.
Less Control
When you go with managed WordPress hosting, you are tied into their ecosystem of how you can scale sites, and traffic and how you can optimize when you reach a certain point, i.e. can you decouple your database and use a dedicated database server & do you need to pay $100/month to enable Redis caching because your host offers it as an add-on? All of these are out of your control and tied to how your managed WordPress hosting provider wants you to handle them.
Happy Coding!!!
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