WordPress websites need continuous care and focus, especially when the website has a large number of everyday visitors. Managing WordPress consists of optimizing WordPress for Speed, Security, Performance, Fault Tolerance, Scalability and even Disaster Recovery. Therefore making certain the WordPress website is always accessible to visitors and there is minimal downtime. This information covers whether you really need Managed WordPress Hosting UK or any ordinary shared hosting will also be enough. The purpose of this post is to present a beginner or a novice WordPress Webmaster from deciphering the info and hype produced about Managed WordPress Hosting.
Precisely what is Managed WordPress Hosting?
Managed WordPress Hosting is whenever you outsource the management of your WordPress set up to your hosting company. It might be called a special type of hosting which might have been optimized for WordPress or particular equipment which will improve the overall WordPress experience.
Many managed hosting providers offer services particularly fine-tuned for WordPress which can commonly be sorted as Caching Resources, Web Application Firewalls, Version-Control Tools, Content Delivery Network (CDN) routing, Staging Areas and more.
Do they offer a distinction between normal shared hosting for WordPress and Managed WordPress Hosting?
Yes and No. A few hosts who offer managed WordPress Hosting suggest the exact differentiation between their WordPress Plans and ordinary hosting plans. They also point out that you can add more capabilities for a cost. They generally offer features like CDN and Version Control as add-on packages which you have to pay for. If a service provider has not especially described that they offer Managed WordPress hosting, you are able to assume that their WordPress plans have minor modifications from their regular shared hosting plans.
Are you able to "Do-It-Yourself" for WordPress Hosting
The brief answer is Yes although with particular restrictions. Lets look into a few options which the Managed WordPress providers sell and also list the solutions which are available on ordinary shared hosting.
Website Speed
Content Delivery Networks (CDN) cache the static portions of your website like images and directly give the visitor with the images from their servers. You are able to purchase a CDN solution to boost your website's speed and accessibility. This is often bought independent of your shared hosting account. Options like CloudFlare, Photon, MaxCDN can be purchased separately as and when you need them.
WordPress also contains great plugins like W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache and WP Fastest Cache which will do the caching in your hosting account. This will be a similar technology used by the Manage WordPress Providers. Nonetheless, some companies will have their own proprietary software to do the caching, which maybe significantly quicker or use a different technology. Many of them also use HTTP Accelerator's like Varnish to speed up pages at the Web Server level, something which you maybe in a position to accomplish only if you have your own server.
Website Protection
Most web hosting providers UK have several levels of protection implemented by default on their servers. Which means that Web Application Firewalls are integrated by default. You can also use reverse-proxy services like CloudFlare to improve the security level.
Developer Tools and Aids
While you may not be capable of setup an experienced staging area for your website, you can create do with a couple of plugins for WordPress, which will be capable to give you some limited performance for staging. An ideal plugin is SitePush which can effortlessly move content and code between WordPress websites and also pull your site's database to a development website or push new code to a staging site. The same applies to version manage tools like git as well. Nonetheless, some of these software's may need you to have server level control, which maybe achievable only if you have your own server. This maybe a costly affair and taking the managed option maybe worth it.
Do you require Managed WordPress Hosting?
Managed WordPress services hand-hold you and execute routine tasks on your behalf. They may also have some special technology to offer. They do come at a cost, but if you believe that you cannot manage your website on your own, you are better off with such a service. In case you are even a little tech savvy and have a bit of development knowledge, that you can do It Yourself and obtain reasonably great results without having to pay a fortune. Having a managed service on a quite high traffic site will certainly show some efficiency improvements. But if your daily visitors are in the thousands, then you will observe only a marginal difference. Make sure to do a cost-benefit analysis and take a trial account before you actually put your money into it.
