21 Jan Is Managed WordPress Hosting Worth The Extra Cost?

WordPress is booming every single day. Every year it steadily grows by 1-2%. Last year we saw the same trend once again.

First of all, what does the Managed WordPress service give you aside from a basic hosting package?

Assurance. When creating a new website, we tend to look for an easy way to make sure that the whole creation process goes without any major delays or other problems. Managed service essentially gives you an option to ask for assistance from the hosting provider for absolutely any WordPress website development question. It’s almost the same as having your own personal developer to help you out every step of the way.

Let’s take Siteground, for example. It is well known for its customer service oriented practices and while they have both, managed and unmanaged hosting packages — you would only be able to ask for development assistance with ‘Managed’ option. Feel free to read more about it in this Siteground overview.

For any beginner, there is another question that looms around.

Is managed WordPress hosting a game changer? Should I go for managed hosting for the next project?

There are chances that you might be wondering the same question.

Also, read Top 5 Managed WordPress hosting companies of 2019

The main concern here is the price. Managed hosting costs twice as costly as the shared hosting. And, it doesn’t mean that if you can afford it, you should go for managed hosting.

There are many different parameters that you should check before jumping on the managed hosting bandwagon.

Managed hosting providers, on the other hand, are cashing in the demand by providing customized hosting environments for WordPress.

Every managed WordPress hosting provider you come across will tell you that how awesome they are and how managed hosting can improve your business.

To make sure that their claims are right and not exaggerated, we will go through points on finding out whether managed WordPress hosting is worth the cost or not.

Is Managed WordPress Hosting Worth The Extra Cost?

To understand and answer the question correctly, I will go through the points one by one. There is no right or wrong answer.

The answer depends on your requirements and that’s why the answer will go around those horizons.

Speed — Does it make a big difference?

Our first point of discussion starts with speed. Speed for any WordPress website is a crucial factor in its success. It should be noted that Google loves fast loading website and so does the visitors.

But, does the site loading speed really improves over the shared hosting plans?

The answer lies in number.

The good news is that the tests are already run by many prominent players in WordPress. CodeinWP and WPSiteCare, both have gone through the complexity of testing the web servers and found out that the difference between shared and managed web hosting.

For a shared hosting, the time required to load a website completely(considering a well-optimized WordPress website) is around 700 ms to 1.5 seconds.

And, if you are wondering the average loading time of a website using managed hosting, it is anywhere between 300ms to 1.3 seconds.

As you can see, there is not much difference in terms of loading time. But, if you are not using a good shared hosting, you might get loading times over 2 secs.

It should also be noted that proper website loading customization is important for better results. A hosting provider only provides the environment, the work should be done by your part as well.

Conclusion: In short, if you are only looking for raw speed and nothing else, managed WordPress hosting might not give you the desired result in terms of improved loading time.

But, if you have a website with tons of visitors and want good loading time, managed WordPress hosting is for you. Shared hosting fails when a huge amount of visitors try to visit the website.

And since of the KEY factors of SEO is also a fast website, the speed of your site often relies on your web host, so it’s might worth it to upgrade your hosting to some of the fastest web hosting providers, such as A2 Hosting and A Small Orange.

Security — Does the claim stands?

Security is a myth. Well, that’s sounds a cliche.

To not make you feel confused, let’s try to understand security in a laymen terms.

There is no system or platform that is 100% secure. We humans are only capable of increasing the security effectiveness. The more we secure, the better it is.

Right now, there are hundreds of ways, hackers can hack WordPress website. For example, they can DDOS attack, or try to crack the password or inject some malicious code using 3rd party WordPress theme or plugin.

To ensure that your website is as secure as possible, managed hosting providers provide specialized environments that aim to improve security.

For example, many managed hosting providers do regular scans, do scheduled backup, scans for malicious code and updates WordPress core regularly. This ensures that security is maintained at any cost.

Database security is also an important part of managed WordPress hosting. In the end, it is up to you to choose the hosting provider as the security policies and parameters do have an impact on your ownership and usage of the website.

Making security tighter also means that you cannot use certain plugins. For example, WPEngine doesn’t let you use WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, WordFence, etc. The reason is that these plugins don’t corporate well to their custom environment.

Conclusion: You will get a much secure environment by using managed hosting provider. The downside is that you might not be able to use a certain plugin. If you really want complete freedom of plugin usage, you might want to consider shared hosting as a good solution. If security is what you need, managed hosting is the way to go.

Support and Features — Is should be good right?

As I have already mentioned, every managed WordPress hosting provider market them as the best.

The real truth is that every seem to provide a different flavor of the basic design. The choice should depend on how the features match your requirement.

If you come to support, managed hosting provides excellent support for your website. It is so awesome that you might want to go for them for even a simple change.

In theory, it might look great, but it is time-consuming and may not return better results every time.

Overall, I will always prefer a better service anytime. It is up to you on how you utilize the service. Solving small problems yourself is much better than going to open a ticket or live chat. Overall, it takes more time if you try to do everything with the help of the support.

Conclusion: Managed WordPress hosting provides excellent support, but it is always a good idea to maintain a limit on how to utilize their service. Solving a small problem using the customer service is not the brightest thing to do and will cost you some time and eventually money.

Notes and Final Conclusion

If you would ask me whether managed WordPress hosting is worth the extra money? My answer would be a certain, Yes.

But as you have seen from the discussion done above, it is not always the best choice. It all depends on your requirement and what you are expecting from a managed WordPress hosting.

WordPress managed hosting can be extremely costly. That’s why you should double/triple check your requirements before buying an expensive hosting for your website.

But, if you have tons of visitors and want complete scalability, managed WordPress hosting is for you.

So are you going to go for managed WordPress hosting? What other concerns do you have regarding WordPress managed hosting? Don’t forget to use the comment section below to ask queries.

To know which managed WordPress hosting to choose, read our latest roundup of 5 top managed WordPress hosting 2019.

*last updated 02/28/2019