- By WinningWP Editorial
- Last updated: February 13, 2020
Hosting is an essential part of any online business. Making sure that you use a plan that’s ideally suited to your needs is crucial to serving a fast, secure website for your visitors. As such, the hosting plan you choose can often directly influence your website’s earnings!
The aim of this article is to compare shared and managed WordPress hosting. Perhaps you’ve come across these terms before, but aren’t yet clear on a few things, like: What are the benefits of managed WordPress hosting? Is it worth the added cost? Is it worth switching from shared to managed, and who are the top managed WordPress hosts? If so, read on!
Shared vs Managed WordPress Hosting: Not Inherently Different Things
Before we get into the deeper comparison, it’s important to note that shared and managed WordPress hosting are not always mutually exclusive offerings.
Shared hosting is a type of hosting setup where your account “shares” resources with other accounts on the same server. This has a number of drawbacks, which we’ll discuss in a second. But it has one distinct advantage — it makes hosting a website incredibly cheap, which is why it’s so popular.
Beyond shared hosting, other popular hosting setups are:
- VPS/Cloud — your site gets its own dedicated resources, either as part of a single machine (VPS) or spread across multiple machines (cloud). You don’t have to share your resources with anyone else.
- Dedicated — you get your own physical server all to yourself. Most “regular” WordPress sites will never need this.
Managed WordPress hosting, on the other hand, is perhaps best defined as a concierge set of WordPress-specific features and optimizations that can be added to any hosting setup. For example, managed WordPress hosting typically encompasses:
- Hosting environments that are optimized for WordPress performance
- WordPress-specific security rules
- Automatic WordPress updates
- Automatic backups and easy restores
- Support members that are experts in WordPress
- Staging sites to test changes
You can have managed WordPress hosting that uses shared infrastructure, managed WordPress hosting that uses VPS/cloud infrastructure, or even managed WordPress hosting using dedicated infrastructure.
Nowadays, most performance-focused managed WordPress hosts use cloud hosting infrastructure from Google or AWS.
However, as the demand for managed WordPress hosting has grown, we’ve also seen it move “down market” to more accessible price points. As such, you’ll also see a lot of shared hosts offering their
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This article was written by WinningWP Editorial and originally published on WinningWP.