For any business now, irrespective of the industry and size of it, a business website is considered to be the most valuable asset. WordPress has grown to be a wonderful CMS, which helps even a novice to custom build their featured business websites to be present to the world. However, owning a featured WordPress website is not enough, but you also need to ensure that the hosting of your site is also done in a secure manner. Web hosting is an important third-party service to avail, and when you are looking forward to it, there are plenty of options available to confuse you.
Basics of website hosting
In simpler means, web hosting is the process of storing your website assets and data on a server to make it accessible to the users anywhere through a webs browser. Many companies are offering hosting services, and the cost of it also may vary largely from free hosting to dedicated premium hosting.
One needs to be very careful while choosing a hosting service by ensuring various aspects of it ranging from bandwidth, speed, performance, backup, security, site maintenance, etc. along with the cost.
Various hosting options
As we discussed above, different hosting options are available from free to manage.
Let’s have an overview.
- Free WordPress hosting
Free hosting servers are managed usually by the resellers who offer space out of their rented services. The revenue to free hosting providers is through ads, but this may adversely affect your site features. They ideally sell banner space on your website to cover up their cost. Even though free hosting is ideal for blogs or small business websites, the major disadvantages are that you don’t get good support to manage your business websites through free hosting better.
- Shared web hosting
Shared hosting is one of the ideal options to consider for small businesses and beginners. This is largely cost-effective compared to VPS and dedicated hosting services. However, you shouldn’t be misled by terms like unlimited space type offers. You may have significant usage restrictions in shared hosting, and you may also face some performance issues in shared hosting.
- VPS web hosting
Virtual Private Server or VPS also is a shared hosting environment, but a server is effectively partitioned into different clusters, where each acts as a dedicated server. Unlike shared hosting, you get full control over your website and a dedicated space to handle traffic surges too at times. VPS hosting offers more privacy also and better security.
- Dedicated web hosting
As the name suggests, it used a dedicated server to host only your website. Offering full control over your server, you can custom choose your operating system, configurations, and other technical features. Dedicated hosting may not be ideal for small businesses or beginners as the cost involved in it is significantly higher.
- Managed hosting
With a large number of websites being developed on WordPress, many hosting service providers put forth managed hosting, in which the end-to-end site management activities will be managed by the providers. They run the back up from time to time, ensure security, take care of site optimization measures, etc. Managed hosting is ideal for the by business people and dedicated bloggers for whom the cost involved in it is fully justified in contrast to the time, skill, and money requires to take care of the technical tasks related to hosting and site management.
Is Managed WordPress Hosting ideal for you?
As a WordPress website owner, it is essential to ensure that your site is hosted in a secure and performance-assured way. Comparing to all other modes of hosting, managed hosting is one of the best solutions for corporate business websites. We will explore a bit more in detail about managed hosting to identify if it is an apt solution for you.
Any customized package for hosting nowadays can be counted as a managed hosting service. Such a provider offers various levels of website management in the best interest of the admins, who further need not have to spend a lot of time and effort into website management. There is no need for users to manage low-level hosting tasks.
In such a manner, managed to host service server a dual-purpose as to save the website owners from complicated technology tasks with their incompetence in this matter and also to save them from the support tickets their users may tend to raise.
Another higher level of managed hosting is like the users are allowed to perform the high-level tasks on their own like running data backups. This approach is called application-level website management where the tasks involved are:
- Caching at the server level
- Automated on-demand backups
- Website migrations
- WordPress updates
- Creation of staging
- Malware scanning
- Taking care of digital marketing services etc.
Benefits of managed WordPress hosting
- Automated updates
Managed hosting can take the automatic site updates to the level of security fixes also now. Managed service providers notify the users in advance about the preparation to be done in terms of security and updates.
- Automated and manual backup
With managed hosting, the specialized providers help users to do faster backups. Backing up your website and databases are much easier with managed services. This will help secure your data in terms of an unexpected crash.
- Better customer support
Unlike free or shared hosting, managed hosting services offer better customer support. There are experts deployed at the provider end as account executives for each of their clients whom you can contact at any time for any support. Availing the managed hosting services is more or less similar to maintain your technician but at a lesser cost. As, as WordPress CMS acts as a single system sitemap builder, the issues can be resolved quickly through managed hosting.
Some of the key benefits of managed WordPress website hosting are automatic hosting setup, a fine-tuned dashboard for easy management, staging environment, advanced caching, etc. In fact, along with all these benefits, there are a few downsides too to consider as lesser flexibility for the site owners, hosting offered for only WordPress sites, and a bit heavy on budget compared to other basic modes of hosting, etc.
