It helps to know what types of hosting options are available when looking for a hosting service for your WordPress website. This article explains what fully managed WordPress hosting is and why it is worth considering.
First of all, what is the difference between fully managed WordPress hosting and other alternatives? We’ll group WordPress hosting into three general categories:
Self-managed hosting
Completely self-managed hosting is primarily for software developers who want total control of their hosting environment. Self-managed hosting requires a hosting platform with full administrative rights to the server (i.e., root access) that you can find on many VPS, dedicated and cloud servers.
It is completely possible to setup WordPress in a self-managed hosting environment, but it is generally not recommended for anyone other than software developers or very technical individuals.
Partially managed hosting
Partially-managed hosting is a more insulated environment that will provide a simple way to install WordPress. These hosting services include a tool to install WordPress, such as Softaculous, Fantastico or one of their own tools.
This definitely helps you get started with your website, but from then on you are pretty much on your own. Partially managed hosting includes services that do not allow a custom domain name as well as those that allow you to use your own domain name. This category of hosting represents the largest of the three hosting options and includes many shared hosting services.
Fully managed hosting
Fully managed hosting solutions go much further at installing, setting up, configuring and providing overall management of the WordPress hosting environment.
So why use managed hosting for your WordPress website?
Setting up your own website can require quite a bit of effort. You need to be a sort of “jack-of-all-trades”, especially if you are creating a website for your small business, your organization or your personal interests.
Creating a nice looking website, writing compelling content, handling search engine optimization to get visitors to your website, and understanding quite a few details of a hosting service are demanding. Many give up after a short while because of the difficulty.
The benefit of fully managed WordPress hosting is that it dramatically minimizes the need to be a knowledgeable hosting user. This allows you to concentrate on the look of your site, the content, both which are very important, and how to get visitors to your site so that you can achieve your website objectives. That’s enough work, right?
For example, a good fully managed WordPress hosting service will be tailored for good performance. Performance is pretty important. It can improve your search engine results, the number of website visitor traffic you have and it can encourage the length of their visit. It also adds to your credibility when your site is speedy and quick.
One challenge that many WordPress website users experience is that over time, their WordPress site can slow down. There are a number of reasons for this, some which you as the content creator have control over. But some are tricky to solve and can be handled by a good managed WordPress hosting service.
Another challenge with shared hosting services is that you can be impacted by other shared hosting users on your same server. When their traffic goes way up, it can means your website performance goes down. There can also be security issues with a shared hosting environment.
For example, sharing the IP address with other users can mean your site gets blacklisted if another user was sending out spam email which gets them blacklisted, since this is done at the IP address level. If you plan to use an email address with your domain name, this problem can prevent you from sending and receiving email from that email account.
The bottom line is that a fully managed hosting service takes much of the headache and pain out of hosting, so you can focus on your website, your content, your target visitors, and reaching your website objectives.
