Our Review of the Best Managed WordPress Hosting Provider

24 Feb Our Review of the Best Managed WordPress Hosting Provider

You’ve invested thousands of dollars on a world-class website, have gone through the involved process of critiquing every detail as it relates to the design, technical details, and content. You’ve optimized your site for the search engines, and are ready to introduce/reintroduce your new website to the public. The last piece to consider is where you should host your WordPress website.

This is not the place to skimp and try to save a few bucks. The performance and security of your website are critical to whether your site will accomplish everything you hoped it would.

Below we’ve reviewed a few of the options our clients often consider and make a case for what we believe is the best managed WordPress hosting provider out there.

What is Managed WordPress Hosting?

Before we start, it’s important to define our terms. According to wpbeginner, “Managed WordPress hosting is a concierge service where all technical aspects of running WordPress is managed by the host. This includes security, speed, WordPress updates, daily backups, website uptime, and scalability.”

The truth is, even if you have an in-house IT department, having a third-party manage the technical aspects of your WordPress site is a solid investment. Although the cost is higher for a managed solution, the amount of time this service will save you each month is significant. Consider the average hourly rate of an IT professional, and it’s easy to see how a managed WordPress hosting service will provide a positive return on your investment.

Who’s the Best Managed WordPress Host?

Our Top Recommendation: WP Engine

In our strong opinion, WP Engine is the best Managed WordPress hosting provider out there. We don’t say this lightly. Rather, we have come to this conclusion through years of experience working with various providers and understanding what each has to offer. In addition to our own experience, we’ve also worked with many clients over the years who have hosted their websites on an array of platforms. When we say WP Engine is the best, we mean it.

WP Engine focuses on three essential things: performance, security and customer service. Their daily backups, one-click restore points, automatic security updates, automatic caching, and top-tier security truly sets them apart from any other host in this space.

There is hardly any downtime at all with most months seeing 100% uptime. When you’re operating a high-traffic website, reliability is a do-or-die issue.  WP Engine is built on a robust architecture that guarantees speed, reliability, and scalability when you need it.

When it comes to security, there is no argument that WP Engine is the best. Unlike other managed hosting providers who have been known to let security vulnerabilities to slip by, WP Engine does not compromise on anything in keeping customer data secure. It starts with physical security in their data centers and escalates high-grade security measures designed to keep malicious exploits and malware at bay.

WP Engine provides real-time threat detection, regular code reviews and automatic WordPress patches and updates, which means sites hosted on their platform are virtually hack-proof. However, in the very unlikely case that your website does get hacked, they will fix it for you completely free of charge.

If you encounter a problem or need some advice, their top notch customer care team is always on hand to help. When we say always, we mean 24/7/365. They have more than a 100 WordPress pros ready to answer your questions or help out with a problem.

When you’re investing thousands of dollars in your website, you can’t afford to make mistakes. A single attack is one too much. Slower website speed, even by milliseconds, could cost you thousands. This is why we recommend the highly trusted WP Engine. You can focus on engaging your visitors with complete peace of mind, knowing that your website is in safe hands.

What about Other Providers?

If you still feel like exploring other options, there are other decent managed WordPress hosting providers out there, but do your homework and proceed with extreme caution. Here’s a look at some alternatives you might come across.

1. GoDaddy

One of the few good things about GoDaddy’s managed WordPress hosting service is the cost. Their plans are really cheap with the basic one starting at $4.99 a month. But that’s just about where it ends. Customers have complained about extremely slow websites, poor overall performance, and unreliable customer service.

We’ve personally had many negative experiences with their hosting service. Recently a client of ours insisted that we migrate their site to GoDaddy after completion of their web design project. At Brown Box Branding, we don’t hold our client’s captive or force their hand when it comes to these choices, although we did strongly recommend they not move forward with this decision. Unfortunately, within just a few weeks their website was infected with Malware as a result of another infected site being hosted on the same shared server. The client only discovered this when trying to visit their site and seeing a warning from their browser not to proceed. Who knows how many visitors had encountered this warning prior to the client discovering the issue.

Soon after their site was infected, they discovered their emails were not being received by clients. Turns out all email addresses associated with their domain had been placed on a number of SPAM directories.

In all, the client spent more than $1,500 to identify and resolve the issue. You’d think GoDaddy would have resolved the issue for them, but no such luck. The client may have saved $15 or $20 on their monthly hosting fee, but the damage to their brand, lost sales, and restoration fees were staggering.

2. Pagely

Pagely is another well-known managed WordPress hosting provider. They have some good features and are certainly better than GoDaddy. But we still feel WP Engine has an edge over Pagely especially in terms of pricing and customer support. They are more expensive than WP Engine with the basic plan starting at $99 per month. Secondly, they offer no phone support, which can be a bit tricky when you need urgent one-on-one help.

3. Dreamhost

Dreamhost is a solid option for some clients. However, we don’t recommend them for most small-midsized companies. If your website has high volume traffic or requires a very robust platform, they’re an option to consider, but this choice is not for everyone. If you’re not a skilled webmaster, you’ll probably find their system intimidating, and since Dreamhost doesn’t offer much in the way of hand-holding, you should proceed with caution if considering this option.

The responsibility for managing your business’ website is not a light one. A lot of things can go wrong, which can translate to lost traffic and revenue. However, with WP Engine they take care of the heavy lifting, which means you can focus on running your business. Save yourself some needless pain, and take our advice. Please.