[ad_1] Do you really need managed WordPress hosting? Let’s face it: Running a WordPress blog or site is no easy game. You have to take care of all the content, marketing, site design, social media, and so forth. But before you do that, you have to make sure your WordPress site is running smoothly and your current WordPress hosting provider isn’t giving you any headaches or issues. Today, most of the web hosting companies out there focus on providing affordable solutions. It costs you less than $5 to get an account with a shared hosting provider. And that’s a great solution if you’re just getting started. But for a medium-sized or business site going for high-quality WordPress hosting is a better alternative. By quality hosting, I mean managed WordPress hosting, which is specifically created for WordPress users. Managed WordPress hosting can help you get a faster-loading site and it also takes a load off your shoulders by handling a lot of the basic maintenance and performance optimization tasks for you. Yes – it costs more than cheap shared hosting, but that extra expense is worth it for most WordPress users because you get a lot more value. In this article, I am going to provide some basic information on the eight most trusted and best WordPress managed hosting services, so you can make an educated decision about what’s best for you and your business. In a Hurry? Our Top Three Picks for Managed WordPress Hosting To get a detailed look at all eight hosts, you should keep reading the full article. But if you’re in a hurry, here are the top three hosting providers I recommend (& why): Name Loads Under Suitable for (visits/ month) Cost WPEngine 0.26s 25,000 $25 Flywheel 1s 5,000 $15 🥇 WP Engine — WP Engine is for those who want a bit of everything. They are perfect is for you if want to scale without compromising the quality of support or losing developer-friendly tools, all while not spending a fortune. Don’t forget to use our special WP Engine coupon “wpkube20” to get 20% off. From $30 per month for one site. 🥈 Flywheel — Flywheel is the kind of host you wouldn’t want to change. They are perfect for bloggers, agencies, and small businesses. Flywheel has a ton of unique features such as billing transfer, demo site, and blueprint (a tool that basically allows you to create sites with default theme & plugin configurations of your choice). WPKube is also hosted on Flywheel. From $15 per month for one site. Want to see some other options? Keep reading to learn more about the benefits of managed WordPress hosting and get more detail on our eight recommended hosts… What is Managed WordPress Hosting? Managed WordPress hosting is specifically designed and optimized for WordPress websites. In other words, it takes care of all the technical aspects of WordPress for you, allowing you to focus on creating and sharing great content. You don’t have to worry about site updates, site speed, up-time, or anything like that. Many hosting companies use their own CDN and server-level caching, so you don’t have to rely on cache plugins such as W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. This type of hosting is perfect for those who don’t have any technical skills or time to manage a server. The Pros of Managed Hosting for WordPress Security – The main aim of premium managed hosting is to provide bulletproof security. They have a very tight layer of security on their servers, so you don’t have to worry about hacking, DDoS attacks, malware, or other security issues. Expert Support – It wouldn’t be fair to say that shared hosting providers have poor support. In fact, most companies have excellent staff who are well-trained and possess a good knowledge of WordPress. But they can’t assist you with things like performance, site functionality, WordPress errors, etc. With managed hosting support, you will get expert WordPress assistance, always. Speed – Speed plays a significant role in site rankings and there a lot of things you can do to improve it like implementing a caching plugin, using a content delivery network such as StackPath, and reducing image sizes. Most of the managed hosting companies out there enable content caching at the server level, so you don’t have to rely on any external caching plugins. If you’re going with a normal plan, then you might need to use a content delivery network to improve site speed. Daily Backups – They take a daily backup of your site including content, data, themes, and plugins, which you can then download from the dashboard. This can save you some money, especially if you are using a paid backup or maintenance service such as VaultPress or BlogVault. They also create a restore point. In case something goes wrong, you can easily restore your site to a previously working version with just one click. Automatic Updates – They will automatically update your WordPress Core files to the latest version, as soon as an update is released. You don’t have to pay someone extra to update your site anymore—your managed hosting provider does it for you. No Downtime – No matter how much traffic your site gets, it will never go down. That means, if you hit the homepage of Hacker News or Reddit, your site will still be up and running without any issues. The Cons of Managed Hosting for WordPress Expensive – There is a huge difference in the price of managed and shared hosting. An average shared hosting plan will cost you a mere $3.95 while a managed hosting plan will set you back $30 on average, though we’ll share some budget options below. Limitations – Basically, any plugin that consumes heavy resources isn’t allowed. They also do not allow any cache plugins including W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache. Here’s the full list of disallowed plugins shared by most managed hosts. No cPanel – If you are moving from
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9 Best WordPress Hosting Options Compared (2021)
[ad_1] There are plenty of web hosts around to choose from, and new ones appear all the time. And although greater competition results in better services at lower prices, this abundance of choice compounds the problem of choosing the right host to fit your specific needs. The challenge is even greater for WordPress users, who need a provider that understands their particular requirements. To tackle this issue, we rounded up nine of the best-known WordPress hosts and took an in-depth look at each. These hosts offer something that most don’t: WordPress-specific hosting and everything that entails. Before we get into the reviews, we’ll first take a moment to discuss exactly why you should choose a web host with WordPress-specific experience. Then, we’ll dissect each host, with the main focus on support and security features, performance, and pricing. Best WordPress Hosting in 2021: Quick Summary We’re going to go much more in-depth in this post with our hands-on tests and experience-backed opinions. However, if you’re in a rush, we want to start things off by giving you a quick summary of our top picks. So – you can either use this simple summary table as a jumping-off point. Or, you can keep reading to learn exactly why we’ve chosen these hosts and see the test data. Rank Host Price from /mo. Highlights 1st 🥇 HostGator $5.95 ✔️ Affordable prices✔️ Fast load times for low-traffic✔️ Helpful support 2nd 🥈 Flywheel $15 ✔️ Useful managed features✔️ Fast load times for high-traffic✔️ Special tools for agencies 3rd 🥉 WP Engine $30 ✔️ Useful managed features✔️ Fast load times for high-traffic✔️ Expert WordPress support WordPress Hosting vs. Shared Hosting – The Key Differences You may have noticed that many web hosts offer general shared hosting plans and WordPress hosting plans. These are two very different things. To illustrate why, let’s walk through their differences one by one: When you get shared hosting, you’re paying for a set amount of space within a server. You have the freedom to install any content management system (CMS) you want, but performance will never be as good as say a dedicated server (i.e. one that is reserved for your use only). With WordPress-specific hosting, you’re usually paying for space within less crowded servers. Each of these servers is optimized to provide you with a better WordPress experience right out of the box. WordPress-specific hosting often includes security measures tailored for the CMS. WordPress-friendly hosts are more knowledgeable when it comes to the CMS, so they offer better support. Web hosts optimized for WordPress often offer better loading speeds. For example, their servers are tuned for WordPress and they often include optimizations such as server-level page caching for WordPress. Often, WordPress hosts also take care of backups for you, which is a huge load off your shoulders These days, there’s arguably no good reason for a WordPress user to opt for generic shared hosting. WordPress hosting plans usually start at competitive prices, so they’re the best choice – even if you’re on a tight budget. Our Methods for Choosing and Evaluating the Best WordPress Hosts Each of the web hosts we’ve chosen for this roundup are very well-known in the WordPress hosting industry, but we didn’t want to base our comparison on reputation alone. To be as thorough as possible, we went through the following process with all nine of them: We set up paid WordPress hosting accounts for each company. Some of these web hosts come with WordPress pre-installed, but for those that didn’t, we did it ourselves and used the host’s default configuration. We tested each website’s speed using WebPageTest for one-off tests and Load Focus for load testing. Load Focus enables us to test how fast a site loads under heavy stress by simulating multiple visitors within a period of time. Basically, how fast will your site load in a real-world situation where you have multiple visitors at the same time? Finally, we took a look at each of their plans to gauge if they represent good value for money. Knowing this, we can give you specific recommendations about which plans to pick for each web host. When we report the performance data, we’ll share five different metrics: TTFB – short for time to first byte, a general measure of hosting responsiveness. LCP – short for Largest Contentful Paint, part of Google’s new Core Web Vitals metrics and Page Experience update. Fully loaded time – the full loading time. Load Focus average response – the average response time in the Load Focus test. Load Focus 90th percentile – the 90th percentile time. That is, 90% of visits were faster than this time. Let’s check out how each WordPress host performed through our tests. The Nine Best WordPress Hosts for 2021 Ranked After concluding our testing, something became very clear – some providers performed considerably better than others. With that in mind, we decided to rank them below from best to worst, to help you make an informed decision. It’s worth mentioning, however, that our rankings are certainly not just based on raw performance – we also need to factor in price and features. In some situations, you might be better off choosing a host with slightly slower performance if you’re on a tight budget. For example, WP Engine is one of the top hosts on this list in terms of features and performance, but we only ranked it third because its pricing puts it out of reach for a lot of casual WordPress users, especially beginners. We’ll be sure to note these variables in our analysis – for example, HostGator can be a good option for low-traffic sites, but we don’t recommend it for high-traffic sites. With that in mind, let’s start with top nine hosting providers and work our way down! 1. HostGator HostGator is one of the best-known names when it comes to web hosting, but not one of the most highly regarded. In the past, the hosting service has experienced issues with site speed, but it has recently
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