Going with WordPress? Smart choice.
It’s one of the best solutions out there for businesses looking to get their site up and running.
But wait. Before you begin to take your site live, you need two essentials with you: domain and hosting.
Purchasing the latter (hosting) is one of the most important decisions you can make for your website. There are plenty of considerations ranging from disk-space, bandwidth, SSL support and plenty more.
But in the midst of all these things: you might have heard of this thing called WordPress hosting.
Sounds exclusive doesn’t it? Well, it’s a mix of both. To some it can be beneficial, but to the others, it might not be so.
To help you find the difference between the two, we’ve written this post.
Table of Contents
WordPress Hosting: Explained
WordPress hosting is just like any other hosting. The only difference is that it’s optimized to support WordPress websites.
WordPress security, installation, server management, and more – WordPress hosts provide a better level of service for each of these factors.
If you’re not a tech-savvy person, just know this: WordPress hosting makes it easy for you to get started. It will keep your WordPress site secure, provides you with one-click installation options, making software updates a lot easier, and more.
Similar to regular hosting, WordPress hosting comes in two distinct flavors: managed and shared WordPress hosting.
Both of these solutions are advantageous in their own right, as you will find out below.
But before that we’d like to take a moment to clear out a common myth:
WordPress Won’t Run on Anything Besides WordPress Hosting
WordPress is a CMS that runs 64% of websites on the internet, according to W3Techs. Logically speaking, most of these website owners won’t know about WordPress hosting.
Maybe they subscribed to a hosting service way before WordPress hosting as a concept became a thing. Whatever the case, you don’t necessarily need WordPress hosting to run a WordPress website.
The technical requirements are so simple, any regular website host will support WordPress.
We won’t get into those technicalities, but only mention the fact that the cPanel of every major website host has an option to install WordPress, which means they’re able to handle WordPress with relative ease.
The only difference between a WordPress host and a regular host lies in the essential nature of hosting services. Not all hosting services are built the same. Yes, while all are able to run WordPress, it doesn’t mean that it’s able to run a quality website.
If you want a quality website, you need a quality solution. Henceforth, you have WordPress hosting services – helping you get started, and maintain your WordPress website with ease.
Before you ask, what’s the quality? Well, surveys have found that WordPress websites with hosts optimized to run the CMS have found their operations going more smoothly. In addition to that, they have also experienced more satisfaction with the host.
Now that we’ve talked about the importance of WordPress hosting, it’s time we move on to see the differences between shared and managed WordPress hosting.
Shared WordPress Hosting
Out of all the hosting options available, shared hosting is the cheapest. Because of this, shared WordPress hosting is also being used by the majority of people looking to get started with WordPress.
With shared hosting, the server is “shared” but only this time, the server space is optimized for running a WordPress site.
Besides the obvious performance boost, you’ll also gain access to one-click installation options for a WordPress website. While this is common in most WordPress hosts out there today, the main benefit you gain from this is the fact that your WordPress site gets more secure.
Considering the level of security threats faced by a WordPress website, this is pretty beneficial.
If you’re looking for a shared WordPress host, don’t just opt for it if it provides security and one-click installs.
Get familiar with WordPress’ features and see if the hosting service provides it out-of-the-box. If it indeed does, then it’s a good option to have.
Managed WordPress Hosting
When explaining shared vs managed hosting service, the following parallel is drawn upon a lot.
Using shared website hosting is like living in a rented apartment with other people. In comparison to that managed hosting is like living in a gated community that provides you with all the external amenities.
Managed WordPress hosts provide you with a ton of useful benefits. While the costs are generally higher, the benefits far outweigh them. Managed WordPress hosting servers are:
Faster:
Managed hosts provide you with a dedicated server. This means that you get a faster loading website: a factor which has significant SEO and customer experience benefits.
Cached:
On any regular host, you need to do the caching yourself. Managed WordPress hosts provide caching servers, so you don’t have to worry about caching.
Secure:
This one’s the prime forte of WordPress hosting services in general. However, with managed WordPress hosting, you’re getting more benefits with security. WordPress specific firewalls, to malware protection, and brute force attack protection – it provides all of that and then some.
Staging Friendly:
On a regular host, while this is done primarily with the help of plugins, but with a managed web host, you’re getting a built-in service that lets you create a staging site with ease.
As mentioned before, WordPress hosting is a lot more expensive than regular WordPress hosts. High quality and trusted managed hosting services for WordPress sites can cost you on average $25 per month.
If you have a budget to back that up, then go for the service by all means.
Which One Should You Choose?
Now comes the ultimate section. Which one should you choose? Managed or shared WordPress hosting services?
The answer to that depends on the nature of your website, your budget, and your familiarity with WordPress.
If you’re a beginner just looking to get hands-on experience with a WordPress website, then you can use a shared WordPress host. Not only can you get familiar with WordPress, you will also be able to run things smoothly.
If you’re a student of WordPress (or want to be), then this is good. However, if you’re strapped for time, and are willing to invest, then you should definitely opt for managed WordPress hosting.
Of course, you have to pay more for the service, but you also get an easy-to-install solution. What you’re paying for in cash helps you save the time taken trying to configure some functionality on your site.
As discussed before, there are several factors at play if you’re looking to get started with WordPress hosting. Your choice of hosting will depend almost entirely on what you want to achieve with your website.
Recommended WordPress Hosting Services
Now that you know about the various types of WordPress hosting services, it’s time we conclude this article by discussing the various companies providing these hosting services.
The following are some of the best WordPress hosting services available today:
- Siteground: starts at $6.99/month.
- A2 hosting: starts at $2.99/month.
- Flywheel: starts at $13/month.
- Kinsta: starts at $30/month.
- Exabytes: starts at $3.99/month.
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