What is Managed WordPress Hosting?

WordPress occupies the largest market share in terms of personal blogging and CMS platforms. This is largely because WordPress is free and easy to setup, very user-friendly and has a plethora of plugins and themes that can help you design and develop a website just the way you want it. The rise in the user-base has led to hosting companies offering WordPress Hosting. The whole objective of this Hosting is to have a hosting environment that is highly compatible with WordPress websites and its development. When we talk about Managed WordPress Hosting, it is more so to provide maximum support for managing and maintaining WordPress for your website.
To understand what is Managed WordPress Hosting, let us first define it:

Definition of Managed WordPress Hosting

It is a web hosting type which is tailored for WP websites and provides support to take-up WordPress specific management and maintenance tasks. Thus, the business owner or the webmaster need not spend time and resources in managing and maintaining WordPress as the hosting company takes care of it.

What are the Features of Managed WP Hosting?

1. WordPress Instance Maintenance:
   As a default feature of WordPress Hosting, you get WordPress pre-installed on the hosting server. This takes away the need for developers to download and install WordPress on the hosting server. This saves a lot of time and effort. Especially for WordPress developers, when you have to constantly develop new WP-based websites, having WordPress Hosting makes things easier and faster. Moreover, it also ensures automatic updates so that you do not miss out on an update and you always have the latest version is running on the site.Apart from this, the Managed WordPress Hosting team also takes up other WP optimization and maintenance tasks such as optimization of WP-Database. This database contains all the important aspects of the site such as pages, posts, form entries, comments etc. As the website keeps getting bigger, more and more data is added to the WP Database. Because of this, over time, the WP Database becomes slow and sluggish. As the WP-Database becomes sluggish, every data retrieval request from the database becomes slower, thus slowing down the website as a whole. The optimization service offered as part of the managed services help prevent this.
2. Managing Plugins and Themes:
   Another important feature that Managed WordPress Hosting has to offer is the management of plugins and themes. WP website development depends heavily on the use of various plugins and themes. More often than not, these plugins require maintenance such as updating them regularly, cleaning up the cache so that their performance is not diminished, etc. Moreover, certain Hosting providers also keep a tab on the usage of various plugins. If certain plugins are not being used for a long duration, then they also initiate clean-up of such plugins to save space and keep the WordPress instance lean. Additionally, this Hosting by default also comes with certain pre-installed plugins to make the job easier.Many of the Managed WordPress Hosting providers also offer support in terms of Plugin and Theme suggestion and recommendations. Suppose you want to integrate certain functionality in your website, then the Hosting team will do their own research and provide alternatives as to what can be used.
3. System and Data Backups:
   Managed WordPress Hosting also includes support to maintain backups of your website. As you know, having backups to the website is essential for disaster recovery processes. However, taking backups requires a lot of time and resources. You also need to make available enough storage space. But in Managed WP Hosting, this task is taken up by the managing team. They not only take care of periodic backups of your website or app but also help in the restoration process in case of disasters. This, I think is a very important feature.When your website is down and you are in the disaster recovery process and when you and your team are scrambling across the workspace to get things in order, having some support from the hosting team who take care of the restore points, migration, and activation of your website in such scenarios is a huge plus.
4. Better Security and Protection:
   Security is perhaps one of the most important aspects to be considered in the online world. Setting up great security not only depends on the hosting provider, but also on the website owner and the webmaster. This includes setting up a strong firewall, installing security software and constant monitoring of the website to detect security threats. This again is a time consuming and an expensive task. However, with Managed WordPress Hosting, this is again simplified where the managing team does all the heavy lifting. The team ensures that they have all security and anti-malware software up and running, they initiate periodic website scans for threats and malware, they analyze threats detected and share reports on a regular basis with the website owners to take necessary action.
5. Dedicated Support:
   Everyone who has experience working with the service industry understands how important great customer support is. The primary advantage of Managed WordPress Hosting is that you get a dedicated team to help you with tech and general support. This means lesser wait time, more urgency and a better system understanding of your website as they work more closely with it. Things usually work a lot smoother if you build a rapport with your hosting team and they start working as an extension of your own team.

As you can see from the above points, Managed WordPress hosting provides us a lot of support from the hosting provider’s team to do most of the heavy lifting. Although Managed WP Hosting comes at a higher price than basic WordPress Hosting, it brings with it a lot more peace of mind. The fact that you and your team can focus on the business and not spend time on WordPress maintenance, can actually go a long way.

Hope this helps you get a better understanding of what is Managed WordPress Hosting and if you have any other questions or queries regarding this, please feel free to write about them in the comments section below. We would be more than happy to get back to you on them. Also, while you are at it, you can visit the ResellerClub website to know more about our WP Hosting plans and packages.