Managed WordPress Hosting – The Everyone’s Guide

I still remember some 7+ years ago, the first time I tried to installed WordPress on my dirt cheap shared hosting account, “manually.” In those days, there used to be no WordPress auto-installers, I used to manually create a MySQL database and username, configure the WP-config.php file, and run the WordPress setup.

However, things have been totally changed since then, now a days there are one-click auto installers integrated, even with the shared hosting packages.

I had tried nearly all types of WordPress Hosting till today, (except the dedicated servers) my first was a super affordable WordPress hosting on shared server at Znet India (which was horrible), then I tried Hostgator shared hosting plans for a while, it was decent hosting for the money but, every once in a while due to limited shared resources, my sites goes down or starts generating internal 500 errors.

Later at Hostgator, I had upgraded to a fully-managed VPS hosting solution, it was really good in the start, but on the peak traffic hours it used to blow off.

Further a friend of mine, recommended me DigitalOcean, yes the self-managed VPS provider, the experience was good, but I remained un-satisfied since it requires everything to be managed by yourself, and being a sole person responsible for all my work, I simply don’t have enough time for that.

Finally, I came around the managed WordPress hosting, and I can say it was mind-blowing experience. Surely, the managed WordPress hosting was expensive amongst of all the other WordPress hosting solutions I had ever tried, but it gave me peace of mind, and that really what counts me.

I was so happy with the performance, that by halfway through 2014, I had migrated all of my sites to the managed WordPress hosting environment.

Current WordPress Shared, VPS, Dedicated hosting Challenges

Shared Hosting

• Very limited resources, can’t survive sudden traffic surge
• Shared resources, slow site performance
• Forced to upgrade to VPS due to server load, if your site grows quickly
• Upgrading will be expensive, for a shared hosting user
• No true site backup and restore
• Security concerns, due to single shared server
• Limited support

VPS hosting

      Managed

• Expensive, for the beginners
• Managed VPS, only comes with limited support for OS, database, and other server-side issues, expect zero help on the WordPress issues
• Requires knowledge, to tune the VPS for performance
• Pay extra charges every time, to modify/install server enhancements, such as Varnish, PHP cache, etc
• Under capable to perform well with mid-high end traffic
• No true site backup and restore

      Self-managed

• Not suitable to managed for the beginners or average WordPress user
• Requires a lot of knowledge, to install and configuring everything from OS, web server, MySQL, firewalls, manually installing WordPress, etc.
• Zero support from the provider, left with the community support and search internet to fix even the basic issues.
• Risk of site being hacked, due to lack of knowledge in securing your VPS
• Consumes time to manage, not good for sole site/business owners like me, who have many things to deal with on their own
• No true site backup and restore

Dedicated

• Very expensive
• Requires knowledge, to tune the server for performance
• Pay extra charges to modify/install server enhancements, such as Varnish, PHP cache, Memcache, etc

Introducing Managed WordPress hosting

Imagine, you love reading books, but buying all of them is expensive, and the even harder part is to manage them. Now think of Managed WordPress hosting, like a library with a dedicated librarian, he manages and keeps all your favorite book titles, arranges and place them in proper orders, just for you.

Now what all you’ve to do is, to just pay for the monthly membership cost of the library, and you do what you love, that’s “reading books.”

In simple terms, Managed WordPress hosting, as the name clearly suggests is a type of hosting that’s specifically designed ground up only for hosting WordPress sites. You don’t have to worry about any of the technical aspects of your WordPress site’s speed, performance issues, hardening your site for security, and no need of configuring any cache plugin.

With a bit extra monthly charges, you will also get integrated CDN for your WordPress site, and most importantly, true daily backups, with one-click restore system.

Actual Benefits of Managed Hosting for WordPress

Performance – Before switching my sites to Managed WordPress hosting, I know how much time I keep on wasting while tweaking my site for speed, playing around plethora of options inside caching plugins that includes minimizing CSS, javascripts, combining them, configuring page cache, object cache, database cache, browser cache, 404 page cache, feed cache and what not?

But trust my words, since the day I had jumped to Managed WordPress hosting, I had never worried about the performance of my sites. On managed hosting for WordPress, everything related to cache is controlled by the hosting provider, with the advanced layers of custom caching powered by Varnish,  Memcache, and PHP accelerators etc, that makes your WordPress sites load rocket fast.

Since, caching is handled at the server level, therefore you don’t have to deal with installing external cache plugins on your site.

Security – It’s widely open, CMS such as WordPress based sites are known for highly targeted by attackers, with Brute Force and DDoS attempts. I personally know many of the bloggers, who devote least of their time in making their sites secure, in fact the truth is that a majority of WordPress users, don’t have enough knowledge on how to protect their site against such security issues.

They just install a couple of security plugins, and that’s all they do, leaving their site’s security in the hands of not so secured traditional hosting.

With the managed hosting for WordPress, you will get end-to-end managed security including hardware firewalls, web application firewalls, malware monitoring and removal, filtering bad-bots, access to your site files using sFTP, and most importantly even if you’re site get hacked, the providers will fix it for free. 

Automatic WordPress updates  –  Every time, when a new version major WordPress core updates is released, it’ll be automatically tested and updated by the host for all of your sites, and since the introduction of version 3.7, WordPress has introduced background updates for maintenance and security updates.

Finally, with the managed hosting for WordPress, you’re completely free with updating your WordPress sites, forever.
True Daily backups, with one click restore points – With traditional hosting they always promise to offer you daily backups, but tell me how many time you were able to easily recover your site’s data, in case of data loss? I’ve been there, and I know most of the times they don’t have the latest backup of your site’s content, or it would require a couple of phone calls or even tickets to restore your site.

But, with managed WordPress hosting, you’ll get true nightly backup of your WordPress site, and the even easier part is to restore your site, with one click restore points.

Whenever, you want to do risky tasks like updating a plugin, just take a snapshot of your site, and it’ll automatically backup the entire database, files, content etc to a restore point, and you can easily restore site to that point, using an another click.
One click site staging and cloning – As you all know, it’s not advised to make code changes, test a new theme or a new beta plugin on a live site, so I usually create a clone of my site all manually by backing up the database, wp-content, either on a separate WordPress installation on a subdomain or locally on my desktop. It was highly time-consuming, as well as, messy for me.

However, with managed WordPress hosting, cloning is just a click away, create a clone of your site, modify any changes without any fear of messing up your live site. And when you’re ready to make the changes to appear on the live site, just sync the staging site to the production or live site.

Integrated CDN – We all know, integrating CDN is one of the most recommended solution to increase your WordPress website for speed, with managed WordPress hosting you’ll get integrated CDN along with the hosting plan. However, with affordable managed WordPress hosting plans, they charge an extra amount to provide integrated CDN feature for your site.
Expert support for WordPress related issues – I know with regular hosting, whenever I stuck with any issues related to WordPress, all you can expect from their support team is “I am afraid, it’s beyond our support criteria, further you can content your developer.”

But, with the managed hosting for WordPress the response you’ll get will be completely different, they always try to sort your issues related your WordPress, since these support guys are pro at WordPress, and they know WordPress inside-out.
Git version control – If you’re a WordPress developers, it becomes incredibly easy to manage versions of your WordPress sites or apps. However for typical WordPress users it’s recommended to use traditional site staging functionality to make changes to your WordPress sites.
Zero downtime –  Even if your WordPress site managed to hit the front page of Reddit, fear not, your site will easily survive the sudden traffic spike, and your site won’t be taken down. Additionally, once you transfer your site to managed WordPress platform you’re less likely to see any “your website is down” mails from your website uptime monitoring services.

Few downsides of Managed Hosting for WordPress

Price – Let’s face it, with so much of integrated services, and advanced set of features, the managed hosting for WordPress won’t come cheap. I always tried to stay away from managed WordPress hosting, just because it’s very expensive in comparable to traditional shared hosting or even entry-level VPS, but once I started using managed WordPress hosting, I never looked backed at VPS, or shared hosting.

But if you’re just a beginner, who can’t pay higher costs or your site niche doesn’t generate enough of profit to transfer your WordPress site to a managed WordPress hosting then there are multiple affordable options, such as SiteGround with starting price of just $7.95/month or if you’ve a high traffic with millions of pageviews, then look no other than MediaTemple, with fixed charge of $60/month or if you choose to pay annually then, a discounted price of $600 per year.
Less control – As a majority of Managed WordPress hosting offers various plans with low to high price points, there comes the various limitations with each plans, such as support for total no of WordPress sites, limitations with total no of pageviews each month.

Additionally, a majority of managed WordPress hosting providers won’t allow you to use any caching plugins, as well as a host of other plugins which consumes higher resources or duplicates/ interferes with any existing functionality of managed WordPress platform.

Top 10 Managed WordPress hosting providers 2016

WPengine (Founded – 2010) – Founder, Jason Cohen.

Based in Austin, Texas, USA.

Server location – United States, United Kingdom, & Japan

Price starts at $29/mo.

WPengine is the most popular, of all the managed hosting provider that you might have ever heard about, they were one of the first dedicated company to introduce the Managed WordPress hosting services.

And since the beginning, they were always ahead in terms of providing superior managed hosting platform for WordPress with advanced features such as EverCache, integrated CDN, One-click staging, bulletproof security, just to name a few.

Top reasons to choose WPengine Managed WordPress hosting

• Ability to scale – WPengine is known for scaling WordPress sites with traffic surge to 15,000 simultaneous visitors, and is capable to serve over 100,000,000 request.
• Enterprise ready security –  With WPengine, you’ll never have to worry about your site security, data loss, and DDoS attacks. They’ll keep your site covered with their intrusion prevention system, script protection, and even if your WordPress site got hacked, they will fix it for free.
• Advanced hosting features – WPengine, offers you advanced set of developer tools such as, Git version control, One-click restore points, staging area, managed WordPress updates, and requires no caching plugin, thanks to EverCache tech.
• Dedicated WordPress support – You’ll be amazed with the quality of support, even if your site issue is related to any plugin or theme, they’ll always try to fix it for you.
• Integrated CDN – Once you move to WPengine, you don’t need to sign up or configure CDN for your WordPress sites, they have already integrated CDN with their hosting plans.
• Zero downtime – With service availability rate of 99.965% expect zero downtime with WPengine, even if your site goes down then you’re entitled to claim 5% of your monthly fee for each hour your website remains down, in a month.

The Bad part about WPengine

• Expensive – In comparable to a typical shared or entry-level VPS hosting, WPengine is going to cost you a lot but since you’re opting for a top-notch managed WordPress hosting solution then no doubt you’ve to pay the higher price, after all peace of mind won’t come cheap, ain’t it?
• No integrated email – Yes, again this is a major drawback of all the managed WordPress hosting provider, not just WPengine. With WPengine, you’ve to host your emails elsewhere, more likely at  Zoho or Google Apps for Work.

Pagely (Founded – 2006) – Founder – Joshua Strebel, Sally Strebel.

Based in Phoenix, Arizona, USA.

Server Location – Global (Amazon Web Services)

Price starts at $64/mo.

Pagely claims themselves to be the first name in the managed WordPress hosting services. With near decade of experience, they’ve gained a deeper understanding of WordPress hosting expertise, which you’re less likely to find elsewhere.

The Pagely hosting is powered by Amazon Web Services, the global leader in cloud computing, with Amazon’s globally distributed server location, your WordPress site is bound to load super fast.

Top reasons to choose Pagely Managed WordPress hosting

• First advantage – Pagely were the first hosting company to provide dedicated hosting for WordPress, with years of expertise, be assured that your website is in good hands.
• Ready to scale with Amazon Cloud – No other WordPress managed hosting provider, is offering Amazon web services to host your sites, with Amazon cloud your WordPress site can scale like biggest websites on the web.
• PressArmor security – Pagely has developed PressArmor, a security architecture, that guards your WordPress site with hack attempts, offers real-time malware scanning, comment spam prevention etc.  Since nothing is hack-proof, Pagely promises to recover and restore your site, in case if gets infected or hacked, without any extra cost.
• Advanced caching – Unlike other managed WordPress hosting, Pagely’s PressCache not just caches your site in fact they also distribute your site to a global network of DNS routed cache nodes. Essentially, a request for your WordPress site is routed to the nearest global PoPs, which is closest to the user. This process shortens the distance between your site and user, which greatly improves the load time of your site to a global audience.
• Integrated PressCDN – With Pagely you’ll get the integrated Pagely CDN, which is a combination of multiple CDN networks that includes MaxCDN, Akamai, Amazon Cloudfront etc. This combination of multiple CDNs dynamically decreases your site load time, by serving all of your site’s static content from the closest location to your site’s individual visitor. For instance, if a visitor from India access your site, then the static content will be served from Amazon Cloudfront, since they have a POP location in India. This kind of feature won’t be available if you use a CDN service, individually.
• Fully Managed WordPress – Not just WordPress updates, at Pagely your site will also receive automated plugin updates.
• Pro WordPress support –  With deep knowledge of WordPress and years of experience under their belt, Pagely support ninjas are ready to assist you 24/7. With an an impressive customer satisfaction rating of over 98%, be assured that none of issues will be left unresolved.

The Bad part about Pagely

• More expensive – Now Pagely is even more expensive, than most of the managed WordPress hosting hosts, the starting plan costs $64/ monthly. However, even with their lowest plan, you’ll get integrated CDN cost, as well as you can host three WordPress sites.
• No integrated email – Alike other managed WordPress hosting, with Pagely you’ve to host your emails elsewhere, such at  Zoho or Google Apps for Work.

MediaTemple (Founded – 1998) (Managed WordPress Hosting – March 2014) – Founder Demian Sellfors and John Carey.

Based in Culver City, California, USA.

Server Location – Virginia, California (USA)

Price starts at $20/mo.

MediaTemple is one of the oldest web hosting provider, they’ve been known for their quality hosting and support since very early days. Last year they had started offering their Premium WordPress hosting service with a universal $29 plan, and ability to “support for millions of visitors.” At present, I am using their Managed WordPress hosting for one of my Indian site, with over million+ page-views each month.

All I can say, is that they truly know how to keep their customers happy, for support they deserve no lesser than 5 star rating from my end, while if you talk about the managed WordPress hosting experience, my site remains rock solid even with thousands of visitors at a time.

Recently, they had introduced their next level of Premium WordPress hosting with four new plans starting at $20 monthly.

Top reasons to choose MediaTemple Premium WordPress hosting

• Limitless WordPress hosting – The reason, why I had chosen MediaTemple for my sites, is just because of quite a limit less managed WordPress hosting features, that means even with the lowest plan, your WordPress site can support over 400,000 monthly visitors, more than finite 30GB storage, 2 WordPress site installs, and no bandwidth limit, at all.
• Integrated Email – A majority of managed WordPress hosting providers excludes Email hosting, but unlike all of them, MediaTemple offers integrated email with their Premium WordPress hosting. With the introduction of new plans, they now bundle integrated Google Apps for Work email/user accounts.
• Superb site performance – With managed hosting for WordPress, MediaTemple offers load balanced servers with multiple caching layers, that makes your site load at blazing fast speeds, without even dealing with the cache plugins.
• Excellent security – Sign up an account with Managed WordPress hosting at MediaTemple, and forget about your site security. Your site remains secure with DDoS attacks, intrusion prevention, malicious plugin removal, malware detection and removal with SiteLock Pro.
• Advanced WordPress hosting – You get all the WordPress hosting tools included such as managed WordPress updates, one-click site staging, daily backups with restore points, WP-CLI administration, Git integration, access to your PHP database with phpMyadmin.
• WordPress resources – You’ll also get professionally recorded WordPress education and walk through from Sidekick, and WP101. Additionally, they had also provided a bunch of few exclusive WordPress themes, which you can freely use on your sites.
• Expert support – You’ll get support with WordPress experts, I had personally used their support and they are really humble, ready to help anytime.

The Bad part about MediaTemple

• No integrated CDN – MediaTemple offers no integrated CDN with managed WordPress hosting, you’ve to use other CDN solution with CDN linker. Despite owning their own Edgecast powered ProCDN, they don’t offer one click solution to integrate CDN with their WordPress hosting. ProCDN by MediaTemple is an affordable solution that costs just $20/mo for 200GB bandwidth.

Flyhweel (Founded – 2012) – Founder – Dusty Davidson.

Based in Omaha, Nebraska, USA.

Server Location – New York City, San Francisco (USA)

Price starts at $30/mo.

Flywheel is an another popular managed WordPress hosting provider that takes a bit different approach at managed hosting for WordPress. Flyhweel is aimed at WordPress designers and developers, who create the sites based on WordPress for their respective clients.

It comes with powerful tools for designers such as collaboration, transfer billing to your client, free demo sites so you, only have to pay the price when your site goes live, plus a unified site management dashboard to manage all your own, and your client sites.

Top reasons to choose Flywheel Managed WordPress hosting

• Built for designers – If you’re a WordPress developer or designer, Flywheel can make your work life a lot easier. The Flywheel managed hosting is designed ground up from the designers & developers for the designers & developers.
• Site collaboration – You can develop a WordPress site with the help of others, without the need to share usernames and passwords, once you finish the development of the site, simply revoke the access, without even changing the passwords.
• Billing transfer – You can easily transfer billing of your client site anytime during your demo site’s life span. Once you setup the final demo site, you can easily transfer the billing to your client, and once he finishes the payment, the site will automatically go live.
• Free demo sites – Flyhweel gives you the liberty to create free demo sites for your client, as long as the site is in demo mode, you won’t be charged.
• Ready to scale – Even with the tiny plan at Flywheel, your site is capable to handle over millions of visitors.
• Advanced security – You don’t need to worry about your site security at Flywheel, even if it gets hacked, they’ll fix it for free. Additionally, your site remains secure with limited login attempts, intelligent IP blocking, and top of all your site remains under Sucuri site scan, to keep an eye on malicious malwares.
• Integrated CDN – Flywheel has partnered with MaxCDN, you can easily activate the Flywheel CDN add-on, that makes your site load faster, even if your visitors are on the other side of the World.
• Site staging – Easily test things on your staging sites, once you’re finished you can push the changes to your production site, with a single click.
• Daily backups – You site remains safe, with automated nightly backups, even if something goes wrong, you can restore your site easily.

The Bad part about Flywheel

• Expensive – Indeed, FlyWheel could be expensive for your personal WordPress site but, if you’re a professional blogger, web developer or if you run a web agency, then I guess it’s fairly decent amount you’re paying for the exclusive designer & developer features on top of the rock solid managed WordPress hosting.
• No integrated email – Similar to the other managed WordPress hosting, with Flywheel you’ve to host your emails elsewhere, such at  Zoho or Google Apps for Work.

WebSynthesis (Founded – 2011) – Founder – Brian Clark.

Based in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

Server location – USA, Europe.

Price starts at $47/mo.

Web Synthesis is a product of popular Copyblogger Media, the same company behind the popular StudioPress’s Premium WordPress theme framework, Genesis.

Synthesis, is a VPS based Managed WordPress hosting provider, they offer NGINX/APC/PHP-FPM server architecture, that is claimed to optimized specially for WordPress CMS, even their started plan is capable enough to sustain huge sudden traffic spikes, while consuming 1/8th of the resources.

Top reasons to choose Synthesis WordPress hosting

• Superior performance – With VPS backed WordPress hosting architecture your site will load super fast. They are the only WordPress hosting, with Google SPDY protocol support, however Google has now decided to say goodbye to SPDY in favor of new protocol HTTP/2.
• Bundled Marketing tools – I really like the Synthesis’s idea of bundling their suite of Scribe Content tools, that comes with all plans you purchase with Synthesis. You’ll get integrated access to site optimization, on-page optimization, keyword research, social media research and influencer out reach tools, which will greatly help you to create awesome content, and take your existent site content to a new set of audience.
• Top notch security – With highly secure sever configuration, Synthesis protects your site from DDOS attacks, hack attempts, brute force login & cross scripting attack prevention, malware scan/removal, and Sucuri server-side scanning keeps your WordPress site guarded, all the time.
• Site Sensor – Synthesis has created a unique website monitoring solution specific to WordPress sites, it provides realtime technical, and content related checks, including the freshness of your RSS feed, and XML sitemap. All Synthesis plans comes with bundled Site sensor service, and the most interesting part is that you can even access the site sensor with an iPhone.
• Included Genesis Framework – Synthesis sweetens the deal with bundled Genesis theme Framework, worth $59.95 with all their plans. If you’re considering buying, Genesis framework, here you’ve got one more reason to choose Synthesis.
• Genesis Framework support – Genesis is a popular WordPress theme framework,  If you use Genesis theme framework, for your WordPress site, then you should definitely consider Synthesis, since they’ve specially tuned their server for the Genesis Framework to make your site load even faster.
• W3 Total Cache Pro – Most of the managed WordPress hosting provider, blocks all sorts of popular WordPress cache plugin, but Syntheses takes a different approach. Instead, of blocking the cache plugins, they’re offering a Pro version of W3 Total cache bundled with their hosting plans, and with correct settings and fragment caching on, your site will be benefited with reduce in page load time of over 30 to 60%.
• All plugins allowed – Unlike other managed WordPress hosting, Synthesis never blocks any plugin, they just recommends you to use a plugin or not, to use it on your site, is totally up to your will.
• Beyond WordPress support –  With Synthesis, you won’t just get quality support for WordPress and hosting specific issues, in fact they’ll also help you with your theme issues, related to Genesis framework.

The Bad part about Synthesis 

• No integrated CDN – Although, they don’t provide integrated CDN solution, but they do support a majority of major CDN providers including NetDNA, MaxCDN, Amazon S3, Amazon Cloudfront, EdgeCast and more.
• No integrated email – Alike other managed WordPress hosting, with WebSynthesis you’ve to host your emails elsewhere, such at  Zoho or Google Apps for Work.
• No Managed WordPress updates – Since, Synthesis offers VPS backed WordPress hosting, you won’t get the goodness of automatic WordPress updates. You can’t call it a bad thing, but personally I enjoy managed WordPress updates, after all you’ve one less thing to worry about your WordPress site.
• No site staging and cloning – Alike me, if you like to test new themes, and plugins on a staged site, rather of a live site, then you’re really going to miss one click site staging and cloning tool at Synthesis.

 Bluehost (1996) (Managed WordPress Hosting – October, 2014) – Founder – Matt Heaton.

Based in Provo, Utah, USA.

Server location – Utah, USA

Price starts at $12.49/first mo. (normally $24.99)

Bluehost is one of the oldest hosting provider, they’re being officially recommended by WordPress.org since 2006. However, they had launched optimized WordPress hosting services only since October 2014, their managed WordPress hosting is backed by VPS platform, which runs on the NGINX web server with custom PHP-FPM configuration.

Even the starter plan under the managed WordPress hosting, is claimed to handle 100 million visits/month and costs just $12.49 for the first month, and $24.99 from the second month on-wards.

Besides of the affordable WordPress hosting, Bluehost has integrated ManageWP with each of their plans, that allows you to control all your WordPress sites from a single dashboard.

Top reasons to choose Bluehost Optimized WordPress hosting

• Affordable and scale-able – Bluehost is really affordable at optimized WordPress hosting, at just $24.99, they’re claiming to handle 100 Million visitors per month. If we talk about their higher end plan, at just $74.99 monthly cost, your site can easily sustain over 300 Million visitors.
• Integrated ManageWP – Instead of creating their own solution for managing WordPress sites, Bluehost has integrated ManageWP service, that allows you to easily manage all of your WordPress sites. ManageWP allows one click access to all of your WordPress sites, with a single click you can update WordPress, plugin, themes. You can securely monitor, optimize, backup, clone, publish from a single dashboard.
• Advanced SiteLock Pro security – Bluehost promises to keep your WordPress site secure with SiteLock Pro security, and their WAF (Web Application Firewall) keeps your site safe from bad guys.
• Integrated CDN – All of the optimized WordPress hosting plans, comes with the integrated SiteLock CDN, a globally distributed CDN that gives your WordPress sites a huge performance boost.
• Integrated email – With Bluehost optimized WordPress hosting, you don’t need to host your emails separately. (Thought, it’s not clearly mentioned on the Bluehost website, that whether you’re getting email hosting along with optimized hosting for WordPress, but I had talked with one of their representative, and he said yes, they indeed offer integrated “email with purchase of any of our hosting accounts.”
• Site backup – Your site data is automatically backed up to a dedicated backup storage.
• Upgradable resources – At any point of time, whenever you feel you need additional resources for site, you can instantly add more resources such as CPU, RAM and additionally storage right from your dashboard.

The Bad part about Bluehost Optimized WordPress hosting

• Not so great support – Bluehost is known for not providing quality support, they always try to copy paste support answers from their knowledge base or internal support documents. There are not many true reviews about Bluehost WordPress hosting, but people had bad experience with their support.

 Godaddy (1997) (Managed WordPress Hosting – January, 2014) – Founder – Bob Parsons.

Based in Provo, Utah, USA.

Server Location – USA

Price starts at $3.99/mo.

Godaddy is known for the domains, at present they are the world’s largest ICANN-accredited registrar but, besides of domains the they are also in the hosting business. Last year, early in January they’ve launched their own Managed WordPress hosting service, with the plans starting at just $3.99 per month, even the beginners can host their WordPress site at Managed WordPress platform.

All known Managed WordPress features comes included with Godaddy WordPress hosting such as managed WordPress updates, integrated caching, one-click site staging, automated daily backup & restore, malware scanning DDoS protection and more.

Top reasons to choose Godaddy Managed WordPress hosting

• Affordable and auto-scale ready – Godaddy managed hosting for WordPress is affordable, at just $3.99/mo you’ll get hosting for 1 WordPress site, that can easily support 25,000 monthly visitors, 100GB of storage, you’ll also get a free domain name if you choose to pay annually. Additionally, if your website gets sudden traffic spike, fear not, your site will automatically scale instead of getting down.
• Managed WordPress – With Managed WordPress hosting at Godaddy, you’ll get automatic WordPress core updates.
• Enhanced security – Godaddy guards your WordPres site with all known threats including intrusion detection, brute force login protection, DDoS mitigation, comment spam, bot blasting and more.
• Integrated caching  – Alike other top managed WordPress hosting providers, Godaddy has also added server-side caching, so that you don’t have to deal with caching plugins.
• Nightly backup – You don’t need to worry about site backups, Godaddy takes nightly backups of your WordPress sites for the last 30 days, and you can easily restore your site with a single click.
• Advanced tools – Besides of all the managed WordPress hosting features, you’ll also get access to additional tools such as Site staging, Temp domain, WordPress command line access, database access and sFTP access to your WordPress site files.

The Bad part about Bluehost Optimized WordPress hosting

• No integrated CDN – You don’t get integrated CDN with Godaddy managed WordPress hosting. However, you can easily use this guide to integrate any CDN with managed WordPress hosting.
• No integrated email – Alike other managed WordPress hosting, with Godaddy you’ve to host your emails separately at Godaddy or other external email solutions, such at  Zoho or Google Apps for Work.

SiteGround (2004) – CEO – Tenko Nikolov.

Based in City of Panama, Panama.

Server Location : Chicago, USA / Amsterdam, Europe / Singapore, Asia-Pacific.

Price starts at $3.95/mo.

If you want a high-quality yet affordable WordPress hosting with the benefits of managed WordPress hosting, look no other than SiteGround.  I’ve been personally using SiteGround hosting since last year, and I can easily say that by far they’re one of the most customer friendly hosting provider out there.

SiteGround has uniquely created custom WordPress hosting environment where, you’ll get free domain name, free site migration, auto WordPress updates, integrated dynamic caching, daily backups, server level security, one-click site staging, pre-installed Git for WordPress, and pre enabled WP-command line.

Did you know : Blogosense runs on SiteGround shared WordPress hosting plan, so far the experience was really good, with faster website load time, I am enjoying features of Managed WordPress hosting at really affordable price points. Do I need to say anything more?

Top reasons to choose SiteGround Managed WordPress hosting

• Best for Beginners – The problem is that now a days everyone wants to use managed WordPress hosting, but since the price always remain on the higher side, a majority of WordPress beginners, settled with typical shared hosting providers. But with SiteGround WordPress hosting, everyone can easily enjoy the benefits of managed WordPress hosting.
• Superior support – Besides of the quality hosting, you can always expect friendly support, ready to fix your issues related to WordPress or hosting, with simple step by step instructions.
• Secure & Managed WordPress -You’ll get automatic WordPress core updates, while your site will be guarded against all sorts of vulnerabilities, hack attempts, and SPAM.
• SuperCacher – A custom caching system, powered by Varnish, and Memcache, that makes your website load super fast. All popular WordPress cache plugins, such as W3 Total cache are blocked.
• Integrated email – With SiteGround WordPress hosting, you’ll get your email hosted.
• Daily backup – A backup copy of your WordPress site will be automatically saved everyday, you can easily restore your site for up to 30 days with few clicks.
• Geeky features – Get the benefits of advanced WordPress tools, including Site staging, WP-LCI, WP-Git and more.

The Bad part about SiteGround Managed WordPress hosting

• Not suitable for high-traffic sites – SiteGround WordPress hosting is not suitable for high-traffic sites, as their top plan is suggested to be suitable for 100,000 monthly visits. Alternatively, if you want to host your high-traffic sites with SiteGround, then you can choose their Cloud hosting solution, which comes with all features of managed WordPress hosting.
• No integrated CDN – You don’t get integrated CDN except CloudFlare. However, you can easily use this guide to integrate any CDN with managed WordPress hosting.

DreamPress (1996) (DreamPress June, 2013) – Founder – Dallas Bethune, Josh Jones, Michael Rodriguez and Sage Weil.

Based in Los Angeles, California, USA.

Server Location – Virginia, USA.

Price starts at $19.95/mo.

Dreamhost is an another popular web hosting provider in the list, they’re re being officially recommended by WordPress.org since 2005. In 2013, Dreamhost had stepped in to the managed WordPress hosting service dubbed as “DreamPress,” a VPS backed completely managed solution to turbo charge your WordPress sites.

Dreamhost offers a single universal plan for DreamPress, at a promotional price of  $19.95/mo, your WordPress site will be ready to handle very high levels of traffic without any reduction in page load time, thanks to the integrated caching layers.

In addition, you’ll get auto WordPress core updates, integrated email, unlimited bandwidth, storage, and freedom to install any plugin or theme of your choice.

Top reasons to choose DreamPress Managed WordPress hosting

• Unlimited scale-able resources – I believe, DreamPress is quite affordable at $19.95 per month you’re getting unlimited resources to host your WordPress site, unmetered site traffic, unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, and top of all, if you get sudden traffic spikes, then your site resources are dynamically auto-scaled.
• Managed WordPress VPS – You’ll get automatic WordPress installation, with managed WordPress core updates.
• Integrated Varnish caching – DreamPress WordPress hosting comes with integrated powerful server-side caching, that keeps you away with using any WordPress caching plugin.
• Integrated Email – You are allowed to host unlimited email accounts at DreamPress with unlimited auto-responders.
• Freedom to use any plugin or theme – DreamPress never stops you with installing any plugin or theme of your choice, no boundations at all.
• Daily backup – Your site will be automatically, backed up, regularly.
• WordPress Command line – Control and managed your WordPress site from command line, update your plugin, perform site-wide operations and more with single commands.
• Expert WordPress support – Besides of the optimized WordPress hosting, you’ll get access to expert WordPress support, trained by WordPress core contributors, Mika (Ipstenu)

The Bad part about DreamPress Managed WordPress hosting

• No WordPress site staging – Unlike other managed WordPress hosting solution, DreamPress doesn’t comes with any WordPress site staging functionality.
• No integrated CDN – With DreamPress you won’t any integrated CDN solution but yes, you can use any other CDN of your choice.

WPOven – (June, 2013) – Founder – Vikas Patial and Vikrant Datta.

Based in New Delhi, India.

Server Location – USA/Europe/Asia

Price starts at $19.95/mo.

WPOven could not be the most popular name in the list of the managed WordPress hosting providers but, definitely they are offering one the most feature rich managed hosting for WordPress out there, at affordable monthly charges.

WPOven provides VPS backed managed hosting for WordPress, every account gets a dedicated VPS, with guaranteed resources that gives you freedom to install any number of WordPress sites, unmetered visits, and no restrictions on using any plugin or theme of your choice.

Besides of quality hosting, you’ll get managed WordPress with automatic core updates, daily offsite backups to Amazon S3, with a single click restore feature. You’ll also get advanced tools such as site builder, one-click site staging, built-in analytics etc.

Alike of FlyWheel, WPOven also offers a similar but more powerful white label client manager, where you can manage all your clients, create and send custom invoices for each client with fixed or recurring payment types, and more.

Top reasons to choose WPOven Managed WordPress hosting

• Limitless hosting – With WPOven you can host unlimited WordPress sites, neither you’ve any limits on site visitors per site.
• Managed WordPress – Each plan at WPOven comes with managed WordPress optimized VPS server, you’ll also receive automatic WordPress core updates.
• White label Client manager – Manage all your clients from a single dashboard, add unlimited number of clients with their individual login credentials. You can assign sites to your clients, create custom invoicing, custom pricing with zero transaction charges by WPOven. Learn more about WPOven Client Manager here.
• Turn key Recipes – WPOven provides unique Recipe Manager, a feature that allows you to quickly create turn-key WordPress based sites within few clicks such, as Magazine site, Portfolio site, Blogging site, Video site, Shopping cart, Directory listing site, Coupon site, Classified sites and more.
• Highly secure – Get peace of mind with your site security at WPOven, they covers your site against DDoS attacks, hack attempts, and SiteLock malware scanning keeps your site guarded.
• Built-in caching – You’ll get integrated server side caching, and additionally they recommend their own WPBase cache plugin. Further, if you want then you can also use any cache plugin of your choice.
• Built-in analytics – WPOven, has also integrated their own analytics solution to track visitors on your site. In case if you don’t want to use Jetpack’s WordPress stats, this could be a great alternative.
• Beyond WordPress support – WPOven is known for their exceptional WordPress support, they’ll help you with optimizing your site for speed, and will also fix issues which, are not even from their end.
• Daily backup – Everyday a complete backup copy of your WordPress site will be automatically backed up, and stored at Amazon S3 Cloud to keep your site data secure, which you can use to restore your site, within few clicks.
• Advanced tools – You’ve got access to advanced tools, including site staging, database manager, uptime monitor, usage statistics, etc.

The Bad part about WPOven Managed WordPress hosting

• No integrated email – Similar to other managed WordPress hosting, with WPOven you’ve to host your emails elsewhere, such at  Zoho or Google Apps for Work.
• No integrated CDN – You don’t get integrated CDN with WPOven, alternatively you can use this guide to easily integrate any CDN with managed WordPress hosting.

 WordPress VIP – Founder Automattic

Based in San Francisco, USA.

Server Location – Chicago, San Antonio, and Dallas (USA).

Price starts at $5,000/mo. + One time setup fee $15,000

If the entire above list of the best managed WordPress hosting can’t match your needs, then I suggest better look no other host for your WordPress sites, other than the WordPress itself. Yes, I am talking about the WordPress VIP hosting which, powers the leading internet websites including Facebook Blog, TechCrunch, NBC, CNN, TIME, Metro UK, GigaOm, Fortune, Van Heusen, Ney York Post, News Corp, do I still need to mention any more big names in their list of clients?

WordPress VIP is a very different type of platform in comparable to a WordPress hosting services, which is built specifically to serve very large websites, where speed, stability and security are the highest priorities.

WordPress VIP easily handles sites with over 100+ Million monthly traffic, since they host the World’s largest WordPress site, “WordPress.com,” no one could know, how to scale WordPress better than them.

Top reasons to choose WordPress VIP Managed WordPress hosting

• Truly Managed WordPress – You’ll get the true Managed WordPress hosting experience at WordPress VIP, with the newest WordPress features and functionality, as soon as they’re released into core WordPress. You’ll also be informed regularly with the latest improvements and features to make your site even faster.
• Millions of traffic – You’ve got a very large site with millions of monthly traffic? bring it to the WordPress VIP, they host the largest WordPress sites on the web.
• True WordPress expert support – Well, who knows the WordPress better, other than the creators themselves? at WordPress VIP the WordPress experts works with your developers to make your site’s code optimized for security and performance.
• Unlimited everything – Nope with WordPress VIP, there’s no limit on anything. You’ve got everything unlimited, be it bandwidth, storage or traffic.
• Bullet-proof security – WordPress VIP host your sites on the same WordPress.com grid backed by over 3000 servers in three SSAE16 certified data centers. The WordPress VIP hosting mitigates the largest DDoS attacks everyday, for no additional cost.
• Integrated CDN – Yes, you get the integrated CDN powered by the Edgecast.
• Daily backup – Your site will be backed up to multiple offsite locations on hourly and daily schedules, and tested regularly to ensure you never loss your data.
• Enterprise level Akismet  – You’ll get Enterprise level Akismet to prevent comment spam for large websites.

The Bad part about WordPress VIP Managed WordPress hosting

• Not for everyone – Of course, WordPress VIP is not for everyone, you truly need to have a VIP presence on the internet to apply with them.
• Very expensive – Like I said above, with $15,000 one time setup fee + $5,000 monthly charges for up to 5 sites, with this initial investment, WordPress VIP is definitely not for everyone.

Best Managed WordPress hosting for the price?

The Top 5 most affordable Managed WordPress hosting for beginners compared:

~ = Estimated.

Best Managed WordPress hosting for high-traffic sites?

Top 5 Managed WordPress hosting plans compared for high traffic sites (for 1-2 Million/mo visitors) (under $100/mo.) (Price – low to high) 

Best Managed WordPress hosting for Enterprise or big sites with millions of monthly visitors ?

The Enterprise WordPress hosting is a lot different from your typical WordPress hosting where, up time is your online reputation and a single downtime puts a bad impact on the brand value.

Enterprise websites requires higher availability, custom technical server architecture with enterprise grade scalability, highly secure servers to protect with large DDoS attacks, real-time intrusion prevention and site data security are one of the top priorities, while pricing is one of the least concern.

Enterprise WordPress hosting demands dedicated account manager and 24/7 phone support, in case if anything goes wrong, it should be fixed at the highest priorities.

Top 5 Best Managed Enterprise WordPress hosting

Which Managed WordPress hosting I should choose?

Honestly, there is no one size fit for all hosting solution for Managed WordPress hosting. You’ve to choose a manage WordPress host with a plan that suits you better, according to your budget, your usage, your criteria, what features you like, whom you want to trust more, etc.

Managed WordPress Hosting FAQ

When it comes to hosting, every one has doubts, I thought it would be a nice idea to sum up a list all of the questions related to Managed hosting for WordPress and answer them carefully, according to my experience and views.

Do I really need the Managed WordPress hosting?

The answer lies in the question itself, do you really need it? I would suggest you to not sign up for a Managed WordPress hosting account just because everyone else is doing so.

Here are the few possible scenario and answers.

Don’t get a managed WordPress hosting,

• If you’re a beginner who had just started his first WordPress site. Instead I would recommend you to opt for traditional shared hosting platform, such as SiteGround.
• If you want to create a personal blog, managed hosting will be an overkill.

Get a managed WordPress hosting,

• If you just want to take your site to Managed WordPress platform, no matter how much it costs.
• If you’re willing to create a high traffic site.
• If your site’s traffic is expected to grow unexpectedly.
• If you’re a professional Blogger.
• If you’re a developer or web agency, who creates WordPress sites for his clients.
• If you’re an Enterprise, who wants a hosting solution for their official blog.
• If your traffic is rapidly growing, and you don’t have time to manage and scale your current hosting solution.
• If you solely want to focus on your site content, rather of actually maintaining the servers behind it.

What is the difference between  page views, visit and visitors?

Pageviews are the number of times someone has tried to viewed an entire page of your site this includes, text, images etc. If a person navigates to the second page of your site, then it’ll be counted as a two pageviews.

A visit means, a single continuous visit to your website, whenever a visitor visits your website, a session is created, a visit automatically ends after 30 minutes of inactivity.

A visitor is the person who visits your time, a visitor is tracked by the visits from a particular IP address. If a person visits your site once in the morning and once in the evening, it’ll be counted as one visitor and two visits.

What if I exceed the limits of my Managed hosting account, will my site be banned?

In case if your site gets featured on a popular site, and your site receives sudden traffic that exceeds your account limit, then they won’t shut down your site. Instead, they’ll charge nominal amount for the extra visits, which is usually counted for each 1,000 visitor over your limit.

For eg. WPengine charges $1 for each 1,000 visitors over your limit.

While, there are also some of the Managed WordPress hosts, who don’t ask for overage charges.

Each Managed hosting provider has different rules I suggest you to please ask with your WordPress host before sign up an account with them.

How to transfer my existing site to Managed hosting for WordPress?

Few Managed WordPress hosts offer one-click site import tool, that automatically imports all the content from your existing WordPress site to theirs. Whereas, some hosts offers free WordPress site transfers, and their are even hosts, who charge a fixed fee to transfer your site to their Managed platform.

If you want, then you can also transfer your WordPress site on your own to any of the managed WordPress host of your choice.

How to access my site files on Managed WordPress hosting?

On Manage WordPress platform, you can easily manage your WordPress site files using SFTP ( Secure File Transfer Protocol.)

Will I be able access my WordPress site database with Managed WordPress?

Yes, a majority of WordPress hosts allows you directly access to your WordPress site database over phpMyAdmin.

Do I really require CDN with Managed WordPress hosting?

Yes and no. Let me explain you, Managed WordPress hosting is a highly performance optimized platform, with multiple caching layers your site loads super fast without any CDN service.

If the data center of your managed hosting provider is located right in the zone of your site’s targeted audience, I would suggest don’t get a CDN.

However, if your targeted audience is global, then you should better get a CDN service, as it will keep your site faster, even if the location of your visitor is far from your site’s server location.

For example: If your site is hosted in the USA, and your targeted audience is in USA or Canada. Don’t get a CDN, unless you really know what difference it actually makes.

But, in case if your site is hosted in USA, and your targeted audience in located in Europe, Asia-Pacific, Australia and other parts of the World, I would suggest better get a CDN, it will greatly improve your site load time.

I saw some Managed WordPress host, don’t offer integrated email?

Yes, since the beginning we’re habitual to traditional hosting that comes with bundled email hosting, at no extra charge. But except few, no Managed WordPress hosts offers integrated email hosting. If you’re looking for Managed WordPress hosts with integrated email, go with MediaTemple, Bluehost, Dreamhost’s DreamPress, and SiteGround.

Alternatively, you can easily get your site email hosted at Google Apps for Work or Zoho.

Does Managed WordPress hosting supports WordPress Multisite or BuddyPress?

It depends entirely with the host, some managed WordPress hosts do offer support for WordPress Multisite and BuddyPress. Ask your host, if you require any of these features with WordPress.

What If I migrate to Managed WordPress and don’t found useful?

It’s highly unlikely, that if you had transferred your site to a Managed WordPress platform and you won’t find the it better than any typical shared, VPS or dedicated hosting. But, since exceptions are everywhere, in case if you don’t like the experience, you can easily cancel your account, and get your refund, if you were eligible.

What if I want to switch back to the traditional shared, VPS or dedicated server?

Before you cancel your Managed WordPress hosting account, you can ask your hosts to give you a backup copy of your entire site. Depending upon your site data size, they’ll give a copy of site data within a day, and you can easily take your WordPress site, elsewhere.

Wrapping up

I had tried to include every single details related to Managed WordPress hosting in this big guide, if you still have got a question or suggestions related to this guide, then feel free to hit me up with your views in the comments below. Alternatively,  in case if you want any private discussion, you can also contact me directly, using this contact form,

For WordPress Professionals, bloggers, and of course you readers, if you found this guide informative, then please don’t forget to mention it on your respective blogs and social profiles. It’ll help me stay motivated. :)

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