For your business to succeed online today you have to juggle all sorts of things; everything from marketing, hosting, social media, advertising, content creation, etc. This can all become quickly overwhelming and very stressful. Today we want to explore why choosing a managed WordPress hosting service, as opposed to a shared host or small VPS, can be one of the most important decisions you can make as it pertains to your website. Your business deserves the best and a managed WordPress host can help give you that competitive edge.
So first off, what exactly do we mean when we say managed WordPress hosting and how is it different than shared or do it yourself (DIY) hosting? To best explain this let’s first break down the general online population into the three typical hosting scenarios we typically see:
The first crowd is typically people just starting out who choose to go with low-cost shared WordPress hosting. Usually, these are people building their first website, migrating away from WordPress.com, or are strictly on a budget and need to keep things as cheap as possible. Shared hosting plans usually range anywhere from $3 to $25 a month. There is nothing wrong with starting like this, but there are a few things people should be aware of.
Make sure to check out our in-depth article from our COO on the truth about the economics of the web hosting industry.
The second crowd of people are typically bootstrap startups and people with a little more development or WordPress experience. They are the DIY crowd. These folks are typically still trying to save money, but they are also usually concerned with performance and realize its importance in the success of their business. Commons setups might include using Digital Ocean, Linode, or Vultr VPS; and possibly a tool like ServerPilot to manage it more easily.
A small VPS from DigitalOcean starts at $5 a month and the popular plan at ServerPilot starts at $10 a month. So depending on your setup you could be looking at a cost of between $5 to $15 or more a month. The DIY approach can definitely cut costs, but it also means that you are responsible if something breaks, and for optimizing your server for performance. The DIY approach can be great, but it can also backfire on you if you aren’t careful. Don’t go this route just because you want to tinker! Your time is worth money and you should be spending it on growing your business.
The third crowd of people are typically small to medium-sized businesses, high traffic blogs, and companies looking for specialized enterprise WordPress hosting. This crowd realizes that a managed WordPress hosting is a good investment because it saves them manpower, time, and usually offers better performance since it is fine-tuned for the CMS. Plans for managed WordPress hosting typically range anywhere from $25 to $150 a month or more depending on the size of your site and needs. Large companies like jQuery, Plesk, Dyn, and NGINX are all using WordPress to host their website. Check out our in-depth post on 100+ top WordPress sites dominating the web to see more examples.
Now just because we separated people into three different groups above doesn’t mean it is necessarily always the right way to go. You should do your research to make the right choice for your business. Perhaps you start with the DIY method and upgrade to managed hosting after you grow. Or you could invest in managed hosting, to begin with and focus all of your efforts on growing your business. There is no right or wrong path, but let us share with you 9 reasons below on how managed WordPress hosting can benefit you today.
The number one reason you should choose managed WordPress hosting is superior support. Typically managed WordPress hosting providers only deal with the WordPress platform. This means they don’t mess with Cpanel, Magento, Drupal, or any other type of platform or software. Typically support teams that focus on one area will become experts in that area, even if they aren’t to begin with!
The support team here at Kinsta are all WordPress developers, contribute to WordPress Core and other open source projects, and use WordPress on a daily basis. As a result, the expertise of our support department is second to none. Nothing is worse than launching a chat session and feeling like you know more than the person on the other end. This will never happen at Kinsta!
WPMU DEV recently reviewed Kinsta without us knowing, which makes for a great unbiased opinion. Here is what Raelene thought of our support team.
My experiences contacting the support team were excellent. I received detailed and honest answers to all of my questions. When I enquired about their hardware I didn’t expect an answer like this:
“We use Google Compute Engine servers, which ensure high speed and automatic scalability which means that instead of being constrained to 2-6 CPUs per VPS as with other providers we actually let the site’s container to scale to as many CPUs as needed when there’s a surge, and for load balanced clients an infinite number of CPUs as our system dynamically spins up more machines and scales back when the traffic wave subsides.”
I tried to quiz them with some common WordPress related site issues and got all the right answers, so top marks!
Kinsta uses a ticket-based support system via Intercom. It feels like a real-time chat but in the background it isn’t. I got a response within 5 minutes when I tried to talk to them a 3pm. I also tried at 5am (I happened to be up early while writing) and got an answer within 3 minutes. I may have just picked two low-support times by chance but impressive nonetheless!
Like Raelene said, we have used Intercom since day one here at Kinsta and it has worked very well for us. Nobody likes the old-fashioned ticket systems and many companies are now migrating to more innovative solutions such as Intercom. It has provided an easy way for us to integrate chat and support tickets (as seen below) it into our dashboard so customers know we are always one click away, 24×7. Our average response time in Q3 2017 was 2 minutes! Check out some other SaaS products we use.
Managed WordPress hosting chat support
So when it comes to choosing a host with a reliable and knowledgeable support team, managed WordPress hosts typically will be a level above the rest, simply because they live and breathe WordPress on a daily basis. Kinsta also includes premium uptime monitoring for all clients via New Relic. We check the status of all websites we host every 2 minutes. That translates to 720 checks for each of your sites every day.
This means that if your website goes down, we will be the first ones to be notified and our support team will hop on it! We also have support for your own custom New Relic tracking.
The second reason to choose a managed WordPress hosting provider is that their environments are typically fine-tuned to work with WordPress. If you go with a shared host or the DIY route they will typically be on more barebone machines and you will need to spend time installing software and optimizing to obtain the same speeds that a managed WordPress host offers out the box.
For example, lots of managed WordPress hosts including us here at Kinsta implement server-level caching and or full page caching. What that means is that caching is handled by us. There’s no need to hassle with figuring out what the fastest caching plugin is because you won’t need one. This alone can save you a lot of frustration as caching plugins are never fun to deal with. And in most scenarios, server-level caching is much faster than any plugin.
A high-performance managed WordPress host should also provide you with the latest and greatest architecture. This includes utilizing technologies such as PHP 7, MariaDB, HTTP/2 and NGINX which have all been proven to be one of the fastest combinations for WordPress.
And to take it one step further, we here at Kinsta were the first managed WordPress hosting provider to exclusively use Google Cloud Platform, and the only enterprise host using them. Kinsta was just recently named top tier once again in Review Signal’s annual 2018 WordPress hosting performance benchmarks. And we are in fact recommended by Google.
Here is an example below of load times significantly decreasing on a client’s site after we moved them to Google Cloud Platform. Before the move, they were getting spikes well over the 2-second range, and after they stayed consistently under 1 second, and under 400 ms in the United States. So just by migrating them to Google Cloud Platform, they saw a 62% decrease in load times!
Google Cloud Platform load time
And here is an example of what happened when someone migrated away from Kinsta to shared hosting. Their load time went from 300 ms to 14 seconds! The shared host was just not able to handle the large traffic site.
Shared hosting vs managed WordPress hosting
Here is another example of our test site running on Kinsta. As you can see it loads in under 400 ms with a performance grade of 100. That is fast!
WordPress speed test at Kinsta
If we take a look at the HTTP header we can see it is being served up from Kinsta cache on a server-level and there is no caching plugin running.
Kinsta HTTP cache header
Managed WordPress hosts fine-tune their environments specifically to ensure that WordPress runs as fast as possible!
Kinsta utilizes LXD managed hosts and orchestrated LXC software containers for each site. What this means is that every WordPress site is housed in its own isolated container, which has all of the software resources required to run it (Linux, Nginx, PHP, MySQL). The resources are 100% private and are not shared with anyone else or even your own sites.
Besides just server-level performance, managed WordPress hosting providers also typically have a larger infrastructure that is designed for global reach. Thanks to Google Cloud Platform, we have 17 different regions here at Kinsta from which you can choose to host your WordPress site. This includes locations across the USA, Canada, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and South America. Strategically placing your site closer to your visitors and customers decreases network latency, TTFB, and ensures for faster page load times.
Google Cloud data center locations
Latency refers to the time and or delay that is involved in the transmission of data over a network. The further the distance the greater the latency. For example, if you run a local WooCommerce shop in Sydney, Australia, you should be hosting your site in Australia. If you were to host your site in the USA, customers would see a much longer first-time page load. The initial DOC load comes from your host server, so having the ability to place your site where your customers are is very important!
Utilizing a content delivery network (CDN) can then help with speeding up the rest of your site’s media. Kinsta includes a free HTTP/2 CDN with 33 global pops to turbocharge your assets. Another great free alternative that many utilize is Cloudflare.
Everything at Kinsta is also interconnected over the highly reliable Google Cloud Platform’s “premium tier” network. This is designed to minimize distance and hops, resulting in faster more secure global transport of your data. Some hosting providers might opt for Google’s “standard tier” network service to cut costs, but we believe in only utilizing the best here at Kinsta.
What would you do if you suddenly lost everything? You should always be prepared for the worst-case scenario, and this includes always having backups of your WordPress site. A good managed WordPress hosting provider should always include automatic backups for no additional charge. With shared hosts typically backups are included, but in the higher cost plan. And if you go the DIY route with a VPS, usually you have to set up your own backup system as well as VPS snapshots which also cost extra.
We include automatic backups of all WordPress sites for free, no additional setup is required. 14 backups are accessible at any given time from right within the MyKinsta dashboard for an easy one-click restore. You can also always take manual backups with a click of a button. This is very handy if perhaps you are installing something new and want to ensure you don’t break anything.
Automatic WordPress backups
Having backups set up this way can save you a lot of time as you don’t have to mess with backup plugins, Cpanel, FTP, or phpMyAdmin.
Testing, testing, testing. You can’t afford your website to go down so you should always be testing new changes, plugins, and updates on a development site, not your production site! With most web hosting providers however testing involves a complex and time-consuming process of copying your site locally, testing, and then figuring out how to migrate the changes back. A lot of managed WordPress hosting providers include one-click staging environments specifically to make testing a breeze.
WordPress staging environment
One-click staging or dev environments are designed to let you clone your website with a single press of a button. Your dev site is then accessible via a test URL and you can also access via all the typical methods such as FTP, SSH, phpMyAdmin, etc. You can then easily push your changes to production from within the dashboard.
Another advantage that managed WordPress hosting providers is that you usually have access to additional developer-friendly features that you might not get with a shared host. This includes features such as SSH access, Composer, HeidiSQL, Sequel Pro, and Git. Normally shared hosts won’t give you SSH access, meaning you can’t use any of the above features. If you are using a DIY VPS, these can be usually set up, but it might require some additional work.
Here at Kinsta, you can easily access your SSH connection information via your MyKinsta dashboard, along with these additional developer features:
Developer features
WP-CLI is another tool that is becoming very popular in the WordPress community. WP-CLI is a command line tool for managing many-many aspects of a WordPress installation. It can add/remove users, posts, categories, insert test data, search and replace in the database, and much more. For a lot of developers, WP-CLI is a dream come true! And Kinsta’s architecture supports WP-CLI out of the box.
And you can’t forget security! Typically in shared hosting environments, they don’t provide any assistance if you are hacked or if you encounter malware. This goes for the DIY VPS route as well. If your site is hacked, you are responsible. A lot of managed WordPress hosting providers include support if your site is hacked and they have systems in place to protect you from malware.
We take WordPress security very seriously here at Kinsta and have implemented active and passive measures to stop attacks and malicious intent in its tracks. We even offer free hack repair and malware removal. If your site is infected our support team is most likely already cleaning it up. We also have software in place to detect DDoS attacks as they happen. Hardware firewalls are in place and have very tight software-based restrictions to protect your WordPress site.
The provider your web host uses is also important. We use Google Cloud Platform which means you get the benefit of a security model that has been built upon over the course of 15 years, and currently secures products and services like Gmail, Search, etc. Google currently employs more than 500 full-time security professionals.
Kinsta also uses Linux containers (LXC), and LXD to orchestrate them, on top of Google Cloud Platform which enables us to completely isolate not just each account, but each separate WordPress site. This is a much more secure method than offered by other competitors. On top of that we employ encryption at rest to store customer data.
And beyond the server-level security your account is also very important. You should ensure that no matter which hosting route you go that they offer two-factor authentication. If someone gets access to your account they could change your passwords, delete your websites, change DNS records, and all sorts of horrible things. We here at Kinsta partnered up with Authy and have two-factor authentication available from within your MyKinsta dashboard.
If you pick a web hosting provider that offers the above features, not only will it save you time, but it will also give you peace of mind knowing that if anything ever happens that the host has your back! It’s important to invest in secure WordPress hosting.
Another important aspect for any host is scalability. When it comes to shared hosting your only option when you outgrow your resources is to upgrade to a higher plan. And this is if they haven’t already suspended you. Eventually with a shared host you are going to reach a point where they will simply force you to migrate to a dedicated server. This can simply be time-consuming in itself as you’re constantly having to worry about watching your limits.
With the DIY VPS route it is a lot easier to scale, but sometimes this requires a little more server knowledge to expand disks, etc. With managed WordPress hosting providers they usually handle all of this for you. If you are going over their pre-defined limits they will simply notify you and upgrade you without any intervention needed by you.
A very cool and unique feature we have at Kinsta is the ability to automatically scale your site due to the fact that we use Google Compute Engine servers. For example, other WordPress hosting providers are typically constrained to 2-6 CPUs per machine. We actually can let the site’s container scale to as many CPUs as needed when there’s a traffic surge.
With our isolated software container technology, hardware resources are allocated to each site container automatically by our virtual machines on an as-needed basis. No resources are shared between sites. The result is a hosting configuration that is secure and private by design while simultaneously allowing server resources to scale up or down as needed based on the demands of the site.
And last, but definitely not least, is that you should be using a premium DNS provider. And in best case scenario, even multiple providers! You won’t get that with shared hosting providers or the DIY VPS method. You would have to sign up separately for the service. There actually aren’t a lot of managed hosting providers that even offer this, but Kinsta does! We include premium DNS on all plans via Amazon Route 53.
What is DNS? Well, think of it like a phonebook for the internet. Whenever you type an address into your browser this actually routes back to an IP address, even though you never see it. DNS servers do the mapping for you. Just like with web hosting, there are slow DNS providers and fast ones. Amazon has one of the largest networks in the world. By going with a fast DNS provider you will ensure faster DNS lookup times.
Typically the free DNS provided by domain registrars like GoDaddy and Namecheap is very slow. Google domains is probably one exception to this rule simply because they have such a large infrastructure. The best DNS providers out there are companies like Amazon, Cloudflare, Dyn, and DNS Made Easy which all have very large infrastructures specifically designed for DNS.
Another reason a reliable DNS provider is important is to protect you from DDoS attacks. And you should know by now from the DNS Doomsday on Friday October 21st, 2016, just how important DNS really is. This is a good example actually of why you need multiple DNS providers. Many companies’ websites on that day went completely offline because they relied solely on Dyn, the DNS provider under attack. Companies like Reddit, Twitter, Spotify, all experienced downtime.
One common issue though is that DNS providers typically set high TTLs, which to put it simply means that if one of those companies had added a 2nd DNS provider on that day, it wouldn’t have mattered much because the TTL was set to expire in days not minutes. This can be resolved by simply setting up multiple DNS providers ahead of time in preparation.
The community must work together to come up with commercial or open source solutions to make DNS configurations compatible between vendors (this is for complex DNS setups like failover, geo load balancing, etc.). This is a no longer a nice-to-have, but a must-have. – Catchpoint
So get set up with a premium DNS provider now, not later! We will be doing a more in-depth post in the future on premium DNS providers.
As you can see there are a lot of benefits from choosing managed WordPress hosting over shared hosting or a DIY VPS. Yes, managed hosting costs more money, but you should treat this as an investment in your business. How much is your time, peace of mind, and data integrity worth to you? If you have any questions regarding hosting for your business or blog we are only one click away here at Kinsta. Let us help take you to the next level.
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Point #2: I think you mean it’s a 50% *decrease* in load time or 200% increase in speed ?
Oops, thanks for the heads up David. That is now fixed. Not the first time that has happened with % ?
I agree Brian What are your thoughts about this platform.
What a beautiful well written post Brian. Cloudways is also a big name for managed WordPress cloud hosting. What are your thoughts about this platform.
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed the writing. I will try to answer this without being too biased :) Cloudways is a great platform and I know a lot of people that use them. It can also be a good affordable option.
However, one advantage that we have here at Kinsta is that we don’t support other platforms or CMS such as Linode, DO, Joomla!, Drupal, etc… This means our entire team is lazer focused 24×7 on WordPress and Google Cloud Platform, which allows us to go that extra mile and ensure your site is always operating at its best.
The first crowd is typically people just starting out who choose to go with low-cost shared WordPress hosting. Usually these are people building their first website, migrating away from WordPress.com, or are strictly on a budget and need to keep things as cheap as possible.
On number 6. Security, you are mentioning `… hosting environments they don’t provide any assistance if you are hacked or if you encounter malware. `
For three years already my VPS is hosted with RoseHosting. They’ve installed and configured my WordPress site and they also take the security very seriously. Last year my site got hacked. They removed the bad scripts and updated my WordPress to the latest version. My point is that there are some managed VPS providers that give out full support as per the customer needs.
Hi Laura! Yes, “managed” providers typically do provide these services. Shared hosting and DIY are the ones you have to look out for as that isn’t always included.
Please do not take this as me. saying anything negative about your hosting but you in get lucky or they’re not following their guidelines as many managed listing companies will do amazing things for you in your particular scenario you appeared to have been lucky and maybe your great customer and they didn’t want to see you go or you got a. very good customer service representative. Either way you would be safer on Kinsta then rosehosting based on their own literature.
RoseHosting may very well take care of a bad script . in some cases it seems like it was something easy for them to remove and they unfortunately do not do this every time
“Our best effort for 3rd party applications and services” https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/af9ba27bb30cafaed0ef82006a459d843bdd11a11f06b854f97094e64989bf73.png
From their homepage
“Free Backup
A Free weekly backup is included with all our VPS Hosting plans. More frequent backups are available as an additional option.”
If a hosting company is serious about security there are serious about backups they should be running a backup every 24 hours minimum with the ability for you to create a backup at any time. In addition it is extremely simple remove remember they did not block that script from getting on your site nor did they update your site if it was vulnerable to attacks because it was outdated. Also see panels our weak links in any hosting environment in addition there DNS is awful.
Honestly yes there are managed hosting companies that are very security focused one that I am partial to is armor however they start at $5000 a month will help with learn party applications a.k.a. WordPress in the same manner as rose host which means to the best of their ability. There focused on security not wordpress so they’re perfect for Kevin mimic. Or a full-time dev team with five grand a month for security
https://www.armor.com/why-security-matters/
Please know that everything I’m saying is to try to let you know that you were very fortunate according to your hosting company’s own website.
Brian very well said as you said said below as a somewhat biased Dyn partner and to deal with on that pager duty infested ( until it went down to) October day.
I tried to create a Dyn + NS1 name server combination which my surprise did not work. Once I spoke to both companies I now have it set up correctly.
“One common issue though is that DNS providers typically set high TTLs, which to put it simply means that if one of those companies had added a 2nd DNS provider on that day, it wouldn’t have mattered much because the TTL was set to expire in days not minutes. This can be resolved by simply setting up multiple DNS providers ahead of time in preparation.”
I can say with absolute certainty no amount of development skill by a single person will surpass that of the skill set of managed WordPress hosting providers especially the great ones like Kinsta having moved clients on & off of WordPress VIP and everything else under the sun I can say without a doubt that unless someone tells me their budget is five bucks and it’s not going to change I’m going to tell them use a managed WordPress provider.
Even you top developers want to have some backup just in case you want to not be in front of a computer 24/7 nothing ruins a wedding like a Non managed server crashing. Or even worse . You have been hacked or your WordPress application itself a turn for the worse. Remember if it’s not managed on the app level it’s not managed WordPress.
I always tell my clients stories I hear from other clients like when they have had an outage ( one they did not know why it happened they just knew it was happening so they called Godaddy’s 24/7 support only to be informed by Godaddy “well the server is up so is there anything else we can help you with?”
Because not everyone is reading forms the ones here and their jobs include things that not focus them as much on the Internet as ours may we need to make them understand that the cost of hosting a website compared to the company cell phone that they have is a good test to see what’s more important?
Ask your client what is your average cell phone bill? I’m going to guess it’s going to you’re going to hear around $200 a month for one phone ask them if they had to make decision between their brand being tarnished or would they like possibly save money by purchasing a prepaid cell phone at $30 a month. hoping that nothing will go over the limit that is set and they will not have to deal with the phone company, what would they choose?
I have never heard a client say they would rather have another cell phone. Remember I’m not trying to get people’s phones taken away their important I’m given an analogy for what we think is a fair price or service.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8ba196b496c286aa22dfa893947104a2390c45f795704aa9b5598cb730328417.png
Bryan could not agree with you more on pretty much everything you said awesome journalism.
All the best,
Tom
Wow, first of all… Thanks for taking the time to write such an amazing comment! And we totally agree. Now if we could convince more people :)