Best managed WordPress hosting comparison

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April 3, 2024

When you’re starting a new website on this popular CMS, you need all the help you can get to make it stand out. With the best managed WordPress hosting for your website, not only will you see an improvement in its speed, but you’ll also get access to tons of features and plugins. 

In this article, we have compiled a list of all the best companies that provide top-notch WordPress hosting services so you can easily pick the one that’s right for your site. After you’ve decided which provider to use, you can use one of the FTP clients for WordPress to connect to and transfer files via FTP/SFTP.

Before you start:  Just remember that you must have a remote server that has FTP running and valid credentials (username, server address, and password).

What is managed WordPress hosting?

Managed WordPress web hosting is a service that essentially lifts the burden of technical maintenance of your site off your shoulders. It takes care of almost every aspect of site optimization, so you can focus on growing your online presence.

You need Managed WordPress hosting when you don’t get a lot of time to handle the technical side of your site. It’ll automatically take care of server maintenance so the site loads faster, plugin and theme updates, backups, and security. While you don’t need it to start your website, it can be invaluable as your site grows and starts to see higher traffic.

Instead of hiring a technician, which is more expensive, you can use the services of an optimized WordPress hosting at a fraction of the cost. 

The WordPress CMS is opened on hte laptop

There are other methods of managing a WordPress site, but they require more effort and time. Virtual Private Server or VPS hosting, for example, is another popular option. It allows you to host your site on a virtual server, where your files are separate from other sites. 

While it gives you more flexibility and control compared to managed website hosting, it’s not very user-friendly and doesn’t have many automated features.

Shared hosting is a similar concept as VPS, but resources are shared among all websites that are running on a server. It’s easier to set up, but if one website on the server faces a problem (too much traffic, for example), then others can be affected as well.

Dedicated hosting, as the name indicates, has an entire physical server for a website. It provides even more control than managed web hosting and VPS, but it can be expensive to set up.

Compared to all these three options, managed hosting is the one that requires the least amount of effort. It may be more expensive than a shared one, but it provides a high level of convenience.

Quotes from Reddit:

“Managed WP should be automatically applying all WP updates including security core updates, major plugin updates, and major theme updates. Some hosts may take it step further by tweaking performance of the WP site so it loads faster and uses less system resources. As well as securing your WP install in some fashion.”
“We install, manage, update, patch, backup and protect your WordPress site so that you don’t have to and your site is less likely to get hacked or infected”

Advantages and disadvantages of the managed WP hosting

There are tons of benefits to using managed hosting services, but as with everything else, there are some disadvantages as well.

Advantages

Let’s take a look at the steps required to make an SSH connection via Terminal on macOS:

Here are some of the things top managed WordPress hosting services can help you with:

  1. Backups: Backups of your site are created automatically to make sure that you don’t lose all of your data

  2. Updates: Your site’s plugins, themes, and security core are updated on a regular basis.

  3. Protection against hacking/security: You get tons of security features such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and malware scans.

  4. Speed optimization: It optimizes your site using technologies like caching and content delivery networks (CDNs) to ensure that it loads quickly.

  5. Customer support: These companies have great customer support so you can reach out to them whenever you need help with something.

Disadvantages

Here are some cons to using managed hosting:

  1. Cost: Compared to shared hosting, a managed one is much more expensive. The former can cost as little as $1 per month, while the latter usually costs somewhere between $50 to $100.

  2. Less control: Since it automates the technical aspects of the site, you end up sacrificing some control and flexibility.

What should you look for when choosing managed hosting for WordPress?

There were lots of things we considered while looking for the best WordPress hosting company. While testing different services, we found several factors which we believe will help you choose the right option.

In our opinion, the following are the most important factors:

  • Scalability: Look for a WordPress hosting provider that is able to accommodate your website’s growth, so you can easily scale resources like storage and bandwidth.
  • Performance: It must have features that improve the performance of your site, such as content delivery networks (CDNs) and caching systems.
  • Fast load times: It should provide fast load times so your website opens quickly for visitors.
  • High traffic: It should be able to handle a large influx of visitors to your site, which is especially important if you’re running an e-commerce platform.
  • Security and backups: Managed hosting for WordPress must be able to provide airtight security and create backups of your site’s data automatically. Many providers offer free SSL certificates, which let your website use HTTPS.
  • Professional email address: Some providers will also include a professional email address that has your website’s domain name attached at the end of it.
  • Customer service: The best managed WP hosting provider must be able to respond fast and provide personalized assistance.
  • Plugin support: The support team must be able to provide assistance with WP plugins.

List of the best managed WordPress hosting providers

Here are 7 companies that have the best managed hosting for WordPress:

1. GoDaddy

GoDaddy is one of the most popular names in the web hosting industry. As of now, it has over 20 million customers. Their “Basic Managed WordPress” plan includes a free SSL certificate, weekly backups, daily malware scans, and an “AI creation” tool.

The main page of the GoDaddy's website - screenshot

Pros

  • Easy to set up
  • Includes security features like malware scanning and a firewall
  • Weekly backups

Cons

  • Inconsistent customer support
  • Doesn’t have many good reviews

Price: Starts from $10.99/month

To remain objective, we collected some reviews from Reddit users who used each hosting provider we describe in our article.

Quote from Reddit:

“I moved three client sites away from GoDaddy and their constant pressure to upgrade services. All of the “issues” the sites were experiencing disappeared immediately…”

2. Bluehost

Bluehost is another great fully managed WordPress hosting service. While there’s no live WP support in its most basic plan it does offer auto plugin updates, basic autoSSL, sFTP/SSH access, and WordPress auto updates. It lacks many of the features that GoDaddy’s basic plan has, but it’s also much cheaper. It currently has over 2 million users.

The WordPress hosting page on the Bluehost's website

Pros

  • Budget-friendly option
  • Includes free SSL for a year in basic plan
  • Free content delivery networks

Cons

  • Professional email only available for 3 months in basic plan

Price: Starts from $1.95/month

Quote from Reddit:

“I’ve worked with both managed and shared hosting on Bluehost, and frankly I struggle to tell the difference when it comes to performance…”

3. Hostinger

Hostinger’s premium plan lets you create 100 websites per account. It includes weekly backups, 100 email addresses with each inbox having a limit of 10GB, and a WP vulnerabilities scanner. There are over 2 million people who host their websites using Hostinger.

Managed WP hosting page on the Hostinger's website

Pros

  • Includes 100 websites
  • 100 free email addresses with 10GB storage for each inbox
  • WordPress Acceleration for increasing loading times

Cons

  • No free CDN in the premium plan
  • No dedicated IP address
  • Premium plan doesn’t have priority support

Price: Starting from $2.99/month

Quote from Reddit:

“With Hostinger, don’t look at the promo prices. Things get expensive when you renew. On top, if you want staging, or a CDN, you have to upgrade…”

4. SiteGround

SiteGround’s “StartUp” plan (its most basic one) is capable of handling over 10,000 monthly visits. It includes free SSL certificates, WP autoupdates, free CDN, updates of the core software and plugins, and a custom web application firewall.

The page of the SiteGround website dedicated to the managed WordPress hosting

Pros

  • Website can handle 10,000 monthly visits
  • Daily backup
  • Has a 30-day money-back guarantee
  • Free SSL

Cons

  • No priority support in StartUp plan

Price: Starting from $2.99/month

Quotes from Reddit:

“SiteGround was great (and free/easy SSL). Better pricing. Much smarter/better service. Again, I was happy. And then site speed became crucial…”

5. WP Engine

While WP Engine is better equipped to handle large WordPress websites than the first four options, it comes at a higher cost. It can handle 25,000 monthly visitors and includes automatic WP and PHP updates. Some other features it offers include free SSL, a firewall, automatic backups, and CDN.

WP Engine's managed WordPress hosting page

Pros

  • Can handle 25,000 monthly visitors
  • Includes 10 premium themes
  • Automatically updates WP and PHP

Cons

  • All plans are very expensive

Price: Starting from $20/month

Quote from Reddit:

“automated daily backups, easy access to php, auto framework updates, integrated cloudflare caching, easy sftp account creation, super easy dns/domain management, a staging environment, development environment, and your production environment.
In addition to all that they have customer service reps on live chat 24/7…”

6. DreamHost

DreamHost is one of the best managed WordPress hosting providers for people who own large websites as even its basic plan is designed to support over 100,000 monthly visitors. It comes with an SSL certificate pre-installed. It also has daily backups, 30GB SSD storage, and 24/7 WP support.

The managed WordPress hosting page on the DreamHost's website

Pros

  • Includes priority support
  • Can support over 100,000 monthly visitors
  • Unlimited email

Cons

  • No unlimited CDN in the basic version
  • Some users may find it expensive

Price: Starting from $16.95/month

Quote from Reddit:

“if you want to use it for 2 or 3 php heavy sites like wordpress, even with all the caching the sites will start to have fails all the time, the reason this happens is (i suspect) because they need to upsell their higher services, they will never force you to go up, but they kinda crippled their shared hosting to force most people to move up…”

7. Hostgator

With a free SSL certificate and a free domain for the first year, Hostgator offers a solid starting package for website owners. It has malware scanning, Cloudflare CDN, and 2 virtual CPUs for increased performance.

The WordPress hosting page - the screenshot from the Hostgator's website

Pros

  • Free SSL included in basic plan
  • 2 virtual CPUs
  • Free malware scanning

Cons

  • No website transfer feature in basic plan

Price: Starting from $4.50/month

Quotes from Reddit:

“A managed server is not a managed website and if you don’t take care of the website maintenance and updates, it’s a matter of time for it to be compromised if some of its components happens to have a security failure.
Unless you have some special agreement with Hostgator, you probably just have a server management service, where they will deal with all the server related operations (OS updates, software/packages updates, cpanel/plesk/directadmin/other updates, server monitorization, etc). They will not take care of your website, only the server configurations and updates…”

Website speed measuring tips for WordPress users

There are tons of tools that you can use to test the speed of your website. They also give you suggestions on what you can do to optimize your site so it loads faster for your visitors. Here are some of them:

  • GTmetrix
  • Pingdom
  • Google PageSpeed Insights
  • Dotcom-Monitor

WPBeginner ran some WordPress website speed tests using Pingdom to see how they perform during peak traffic. They also tested server response time from different locations like the UK, India, and Singapore.

Conclusion

Now that you know which hosting providers are the best for WordPress sites, we suggest that you read about them in detail so you can pick the right one for your website. Once you have decided which one to go with, we recommend learning how to use an FTP client with WordPress to manage all your data.

We have an FTP client for Mac users called Commander One. However, keep in mind that the factors we have listed above for choosing a hosting service don’t depend on your operating system. Use those factors to understand whether you need a special WordPress hosting plan or not.

Frequently Asked Questions

No, you can buy them from different companies as long as you can configure them to work together. However, note that most managed hosting services include a free domain even in their basic plans.

Most managed WordPress hosting services include free website migration, which is a feature that lets you move your site from one provider to another. You should be able to find step-by-step details on how to do this on your chosen provider’s official site.

Yes, you can easily switch to another managed WP hosting provider or to a different kind of hosting service such as VPS. If you’re moving to another company, you will most likely be able to “migrate” your site to it once you purchase their plan.

Yes, there are hundreds of managed WordPress hosting providers on the Internet, so it wouldn’t be possible to list all of them here. However, keep in mind that not all of them are equally good. We recommend that you do thorough research before you make a decision on which service to use for your site.

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