For a busy business owner, your website is critical. Often, it’s the first interaction that most people have with your business. If you’re a digital operation, it’s often the only interaction that someone will have with you. So, making sure your site is up and running with effective web hosting is critical.
Unfortunately, managing that also takes time and requires the completion of a lot of menial tasks. That’s time you don’t have or should be spending worrying about other things. That’s why managed hosting of your WordPress site makes a lot of sense for most small businesses. But the benefits of managed hosting go beyond just the actual management of your site.
Scalability
Managed WordPress hosting helps you create a more scalable website. Those websites that grow in popularity or have fluctuations in traffic experience resource changes. The need for additional servers or server space during peak use, for instance, may mean it’s smarter for you to have your website professionally managed. Web hosts have additional server capacity to handle spikes in traffic and other resources available to meet whatever your needs are.
Support
The hosting team is also another support resource that’s around if something bad happens and you need immediate troubleshooting. Managed hosting means that if something goes dramatically wrong and your website stops functioning in the middle of the night, there are people watching and able to step in and fix it.
Security
Since many websites are hosted on the same server along with other websites and can be somewhat more vulnerable security-wise, having your site security managed by a team of professionals through managed hosting can protect your site.
Security is also essential for transmission of data between your website and the visitors. This is ensured via SSL certificates, which also help boost your search engine ranking. A managed web hosting provider will make it fairly simple to procure and apply a SSL certificate to your website, which shouldn’t take more than a few clicks. While there are many certificate authorities, Let’s Encrypt has emerged as a popular option thanks to its no-cost SSL certificates.
Monitoring the server
Constantly keeping an eye on the server that hosts your website is essential to maintaining uptime. Not only is it time consuming and labor intensive, effective monitoring requires specialized skills as well. With a managed host you can defer this essential task in the hands of experts, while you concentrate on running and maintaining your website.
Backups
Losing data is an expensive proposition irrespective of the type of website you are running. Although setting up backup processes doesn’t take much effort, with managed hosts backups are one less thing that you have to worry about since your provider will be taking regular snapshots of your website and its data on your behalf.
How Managed Websites Are Built Differently
Managed WordPress hosts often have servers that are specifically configured and optimized for WordPress. These websites can achieve greater performance. Managed hosting can mean you use your plugins and software differently, which is something to keep in mind as you build your site.
Shared hosting, an alternative to managed hosting, is generally cheaper and may be more flexible for you if you’re not interested in using WordPress. However, websites with shared hosting require a greater time and resource commitment from their owners. Keep in mind that you’ll be the one managing updates and providing maintenance, for instance.
This is why it’s a good idea to decide how you want your website to be hosted before you build it. A website with managed hosting can be designed and tweaked to work with the optimized server. Websites using shared hosting must work using more generic server resources.
David Andrews, Technical Product Marketing Manager at DreamHost
- Also check out the four S's of managed WordPress hosting.
