Promoting your business/brand online includes much more than marketing, social media, advertising, and product development. It’s also crucial that your website provides a solid underpinning for both running and scaling your business. This can become quickly overwhelming and very stressful.
Along with the stresses of running an online business, there comes the technical side of things. There are risks involved in not optimizing and tuning your server the right way. That being so, today I propose exploring why choosing a managed WordPress hosting service, can help solve all these issues.
Let’s look into some basics of web hosting :
Sparing all the geek-speak, there are primarily three things that you need to get a website online – a layout (code, that will help you knit the visuals of your site), a domain name (example – www.mybusinessonline.com) and a web hosting service.
A web hosting is a service you need to store code that was knit together and make your website accessible online, to the vast lands of the internet. This is a service you have to buy from a company.
Regardless of which company you choose, it is certain that they will offer several plans that range from including just the bare minimum – just a publicly accessible website, to plans that take the weight of securing, fine-tuning and general site management off your shoulders.
Types of Web-Hosting ( other than Managed )
1. Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is a popular option for new businesses online. If you sign up with a shared hosting service like GoDaddy or HostGator, your site goes onto a server along with thousands of other websites.
Essentially, you’re sharing space on the server with every other customer. Implying, that you’ll share resources critical to your site’s responsiveness.
One way to describe shared hosting is it’s like living in an apartment building. Each resident has their apartment, but everyone shares things like the hallways, elevators, and stairwells.
Shared hosting is the best option for new businesses, but that’s me strictly speaking in economic terms.
This also means your hosting package will come with uncompromising limitations on server space and bandwidth. Shared hosting usually doesn’t guarantee the security of your website, either.
2. VPS Hosting
VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting, is similar to shared hosting since your site shares a server with other sites. However, there are a smaller number of sites on the same server compared to the shared hosting option. The server is also partitioned into separate server environments. Unlike shared hosting, VPS Hosting usually provides a guaranteed baseline of resources. You also receive additional resources at a moment’s notice should your site experience a spike in traffic. VPS Hosting is more expensive as compared to shared hosts.
Although it sounds better than shared hosting, you often have to take care of all the technical aspects of your site yourself.
Benefits of Managed Hosting – What and Why
Managed WordPress Hosting is designed to handle WordPress sites specifically. In other words, it is the optimal technology to support WordPress websites. It is particularly well-suited to large and enterprise-level businesses due to its superior security and high performance.
It is slightly more expensive than the VPS option, but it will certainly save time, and money too, because there won’t be a need to hire another person to look after your site for you.
Coming to the question ‘why?’, here are some perks that will uplift your website above the norm-
1. High Availability and Uptime
Sites availability and uptime are crucial for any online business.
For enterprises that require maximum uptime, it might be best to choose a host that provides a reliable architecture that spreads the workload over two or more servers in different zones. This is something a Shared hosting service or a VPS will not be able to provide.
This approach reduces the chances of an outage during maintenance events, unforeseen outages, or spikes in web traffic.
2. Modern High-Performance Hosting Technology
Choosing either of the other two options will make your website feel like it’s crammed away in a corner on the web since they don’t run on cutting-edge hardware that is optimized for this sort of activity.
A typical Managed WordPress Hosting company invests in the best technology.
Managed WordPress Hosting Companies like Wpingy use a modern hosting stack and fine-tune it to handle the demands of WordPress, providing their clients with unparalleled speed and performance. Superior stacks are built on services like Amazon Web Services.
This allows the customer to leverage technologies like PHP7, HTTP/2, and SSL management. This ensures that your website delivers unmatched speed.
3. Automatic Updates
You can easily update core WP plugins and apps with managed wordpress hosting. Easy since it happens on its own.
It’s no rocket science that you should keep the software that powers your website up to date to ensure performance, security and compatibility.
If you’re a good managed WordPress host, they’ll ensure your website is up to date and monitor how these updates affect your website. This is done to ensure that your site runs smooth after update as well.
4. Better Caching
If you have effective caching on your website, both you and your readers are happy. This is because, by using the very best caching system possible, a website will run faster and require fewer server resources, which, in turn, will help the host save money.
This also helps with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which will make sure that your website is always visible to the person that is looking for it!
5. Security
Shared hosting packages typically don’t offer any assistance if your site falls victim to a cyber attack or if you encounter malware problems.
Excellent hosting service will prove outstanding security for its clients. For base level security, your host would use a firewall that blocks code injection attacks and known exploits alongside attempts to break limited access given to a user.
This dramatically reduces the success of a distributed denial of service attack or a brute force attack. They should also practice real-time system malware scanning, continually looking for things like trojan horses, viruses, keyloggers, spyware, and adware.
Your business deserves the best, and a managed WordPress host gives you your website at its best.