It doesn’t matter whether you are starting out in business, or whether you already have started your business; it is always going to pay to know the difference between managed hosting and shared hosting. So, let’s take a look!
- Shared Hosting. The cheapest way to host your blog or your business website. While the price is always going to be a factor for your business, you do need to consider why shared hosting is so cheap. The site would be on a shared server with up to thousands of other websites and blogs. This can affect the speed to your website, and one bad website can have a knock-on effect on all the other sites that are hosted on the same server. It’s meant mostly for small-sized websites, and the moment you grow to big enough, you need to move your business over to managed hosting.
- Managed Hosting. The better option, managed WordPress hosting means a higher monthly fee. This could put you off initially, but you have to remember that you get so much more for it. You get better speed, better security, and more advanced features. The best bit? You’ll also avoid having to share server resources with hundreds of others. If your website receives a lot of website traffic, or you own an ecommerce website, you have to choose managed hosting. Your site will have dedicated resources for the server directly, along with the right software to manage everything.
In reality, they both have their pros and cons, but it’s more critical for you to understand the benefits of managed hosting than relying on the cheaper options. Cheap may be helpful on the budget, but in the long run, you may end up paying out more because your site isn’t being managed correctly.
Reasons Not To Use Shared Hosting
Your online business is much like a physical shop. It needs to have the right resources to process transactions and be reliable for customers in the area. When you have an online business, you need the right hosting resources to continue to work for customers. Using cheap shared hosting means that you are still going to be consuming the same resources online as tons of other customers. Would you sit in a coffee shop with 100 other businesses using the same point of sale? Probably not – the system may crash! There are plenty of reasons that shared hosting is a bad idea, so let’s explore some of those:
You Get What You Pay For
Cheap is not a good thing. You want to know you’re paying for a service that will support your website. You pay for something affordable; you get a cheap service – it’s not ideal for a business website of any size.
Shared Resources
Let’s go back to the earlier coffee shop analogy. You wouldn’t sit in a cafe with 100 other businesses to use the same point of sale, where everyone is joshing for position, and the machinery is snagging and crashing. So, don’t share your resources that could support your business directly.
Resources Are Limited
Every shared provider will tell everyone that the resources are unlimited, but they’re not. You are sharing an IP address with every other customer on the same server, and if there isn’t enough space, you can’t scale up!
Low Security
It’s really not certain as to how far a shared host has gone to secure their servers. Though there is a risk that if a website in the same server of your is hacked, there is a good chance your website could be affected too. In this case, even with the best security measures added to your own site, this may not be enough to protect you from hackers.
Lack of Support
There are a lot of sharing providers out there that offer a high volume and low return model for their business. Low fees, huge customer numbers, and there is a stunning lack of support for customers who are expendable.
Reasons Managed Hosting Is The Way To Go
Managed hosting is vastly superior in every way. Whether it’s speed or security, it’s all looked after for you, so you can rest easy.
Let’s look at the ways that managed hosting is much better for your business website than cheaper shared hosting.
Better Speed
An important ranking factor for Google is speed. With better page loading and site speed, you’ll rank better in search engines, and you’ll likely notice a bump in your rankings with the smallest improvement.
Better Uptime
There will be better rates with uptime for your website with Managed WordPress Hosting. There servers are built for stability, therefore your site will almost never be down, except for a very rare scheduled server maintenance, or if you accidentally break something.
Keeping your website online at all times is extremely important, so you don’t lose any of your potential customers, if they were come to your site at the wrong time.
Superior Security
Cyber threats and malware are all around the globe these days. If you are running a business on WordPress, you don’t want to make life easier for hackers. So, the best thing that you can do is go for managed hosting and choose to have your website protected by state of the art security that will make it far harder to break into.
Scalability
With high quality Managed WordPress Hosting, your server resources can be easily scaled as your business grows and you start to gain more traffic.
Excellent Customer Support
You don’t have to be a technical wizard to know that you want solid and reliable hosting. When you choose managed hosting services, you know you’re going to get stellar hosting support with your needs, and you’re going to be able to get your questions answered when you need them.
The Best Managed Hosting Options
There are many great WordPress hosting options out there at the moment, both shared and managed, but there are some that offer more than others.
A few of the best options include:
Kinsta – www.kinsta.com
Flywheel – www.getflywheel.com
WP Engine – www.wpengine.co.uk
RelyWP: www.relywp.com/managed-wordpress-hosting
Each of these providers include some of their own unique benefits, but for the most part are relatively similar and all worthy options for hosting your website.
RelyWP Care Plans
Get fully managed WordPress hosting on your own dedicated cloud VPS, included in our WordPress care and consultancy plans.
We’ll also take care of your website, including ongoing WordPress support, site edits/changes, bug fixes, software updates, security, performance optimisations, SEO and more, so you can focus on running your business.
Optionally, you can host your website yourself on one of the options above, and we’ll take care of the rest!
Checkout our WordPress care plans at https://relywp.com/pricing
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