Your website is your online business card and the most important marketing you have at your disposal. Customers will decide whether to do business with you based on the quality and performance of your website. It pays to get it right.

Many businesses use the excellent WordPress platform to host their website, but without the right care and attention, a WordPress website can be slow, buggy, and insecure. It takes a lot of time and effort to keep a WordPress website running smoothly. Managed WordPress hosting is a type of web hosting service that does this for you, leaving you time to focus on your core business.

In this article, we take a look at some advantages of managed hosting with a particular focus on managed hosting for WordPress.

Lets break down the concept of managed WordPress hosting into its composite parts.

Hosting refers to storing a website on a publicly-accessible computer server so that anyone can visit it using a web browser. You rent some server space, upload your website, and point your domain name to it. This is also known as unmanaged hosting, as youll handle all of the maintenance, security, and backups yourself.

Managed hosting is the next step up and means the web hosting company will perform some of the day-to-day duties for you. The provider will take an active role in securing your server, updating software, taking backups, and making performance tweaks.

Managed WordPress hosting is a specific type of managed hosting that focuses on WordPress websites. On top of handling day-to-day server management tasks, a managed WordPress hosting service takes care of administering and optimizing your WordPress software. You dont have to worry about any of the underlying nuts and bolts and can instead focus on providing great content for your visitors.

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Managed hosting clearly has several benefits. Lets look at some of the reasons you might choose managed hosting over unmanaged hosting.

1. Simplicity

Certainly, the most noticeable benefit of managed hosting is how simpler your life is if you choose it over an unmanaged solution. If you have an existing website, the support team will help migrate your website across to your new host.

Managed hosting is particularly useful for beginners. Setting up an entire website on an unmanaged hosting environment is too complicated for people without existing experience in the field, and youll spend days or weeks trying to get up to speed on how to control and manage everything.

As technical challenges are handled by the web host, you can do more with your website hosting. For example, you could run several websites targeting different customers without having to think about how it all works under the hood because the managed hosting company will take care of the details for you.

2. Speed

Modern Internet users do not tolerate slow websites. If a web page takes longer than a few seconds to load, visitors will head elsewhere with their business. Its bad enough youll lose their custom, but Google will also interpret the visitors actions as disapproval of your website, downgrading your website in search engine results. So, you should always be taking pains to make sure your website is running as quickly as possible.

If youre managing your own website, you have a mountain of things to do to keep your website running quickly. Youll need to ensure the server configuration is sound, theres a caching solution in place, and that your website is free of superfluous code, plugins, and images.

Managed WordPress hosting takes care of this for you, keeping your WordPress website running fast at all times.

3. Support

If you choose managed hosting, youll have a team of technical experts at your beck and call. Many managed hosting companies have 24/7 support and can be contacted through email, phone, and live chat.

Unmanaged hosting typically has much weaker support and it's certainly less personalized. Youre expected to fix most issues on your own, with the hosting company setting limitations on what theyll help with and what they wont. If you dont come from a technical background, managed hosting makes much more sense.

4. Additional services

Besides giving you increased support, managed WordPress hosting will offer a range of extra services that make your website run more smoothly. For example, most managed hosting companies will handle your backups and software updates for you. Managed WordPress hosting will update your WordPress sites, maintain your file caching system, and perform a range of administrative tasks that keep your WordPress site secure and performing well. Without managed hosting, your in-house team will have to spend their precious time on these mundane but important tasks.

5. Increased security

Attackers are constantly trying to compromise the security of websites to access private customer information or to use the website as a launching point for further attacks. Keeping your website up to date and patching any potential security holes is a full-time job.

Managed hosting greatly simplifies this task, as the web hosting company will implement a security strategy for you. Theyll make sure there are preventative measures in place, monitor your website for any suspicious activity, and be ready to restore your website from a recent backup if a significant breach were to occur.

6. Scalability

One of the most important web hosting considerations is scalability. Many business websites have relatively low traffic throughout the year but experience huge spikes of visitors around holidays or during sales events. A website hosting service that runs fine when you have few visitors but crashes when youre busy is completely useless.

Massive surges in traffic are hard to handle on your own. Managed hosting takes the problem off your hands, as the website host will respond to any traffic surge by allocating more resources to your website. Managed WordPress hosting usually includes a service where your popular pages and files are cached automatically so that the stress on your WordPress database is reduced. Good managed hosting companies have the staff and infrastructure to take care of any expected or unexpected surges in traffic promptly and effectively.

7. More value for your money

Companies on a budget often gravitate towards unmanaged hosting as they assume managed hosting is expensive. In fact, managed hosting is almost on a par with unmanaged hosting in price, with some managed hosting packages costing less than $10 per month.

Considering the enormous amount of extra value you get from managed hosting, its now a really compelling choice.

Managed hosting doesnt require technical know-how and saves you from having to worry about cyber-attacks, bugs, crashes, and a whole heap of potential performance issues that can tank your website. Managed hosting doesnt cost much more than unmanaged hosting and offers you peace of mind.

Choose managed hosting for a faster website that can easily scale when you experience traffic spikes. Save yourself from having to worry about the minutiae of running a website by opting for a hosting solution that takes care of it for you.

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7 great reasons to choose managed WordPress hosting - ITProPortal