What is managed WordPress hosting, and do you need it?

Managed WordPress hosting is hosting where somebody looks after the website as well as the server: the updates, the backups, the security and the fixes when something breaks. Ordinary shared hosting gives you a bit of space on a server and leaves the rest to you.

Do you need it? If your website brings in enquiries or sales, yes. If it's a single page with a phone number on it that nobody has visited since the launch party, no, and you'd be daft to pay for it.

"Managed" means whatever the host wants it to mean

There's no rulebook for the word. Two companies can both sell "managed WordPress hosting" and mean completely different things by it.

At one end, it means the server is set up for WordPress, the caching is done for you, WordPress itself updates automatically and there's a chat window in the corner of the dashboard. That's a decent product. It's also software doing the same thing for thousands of websites at once, and at a lot of these hosts the plugins (where most of the risk lives) are still your job, or a paid extra.

At the other end, a person who builds WordPress websites is responsible for yours. They apply the updates and then load the site to see what broke. They know the contact form is the bit that pays the bills. When it goes wrong, they're the ones fixing it, and you can ring them.

Only the second would notice your checkout had stopped taking money.

What cheap hosting leaves you holding

A shared hosting plan that costs a few pounds a month puts your website on a server with hundreds of others. When one of them gets busy, or gets hacked, yours feels it. That's the trade for the price, and on a quiet Tuesday you'll never notice.

The bigger cost is everything nobody's doing. Nobody at the hosting company updates your plugins or checks the backups work. The support line will tell you the server's fine (it nearly always is) and that the website is a matter for your developer. If you don't have a developer, it's a matter for you.

We've written up why WordPress websites get slow, and hosting picked on price is high on that list. It's one item on it, and the others don't fix themselves when you move host.

What managed should actually cover

Hold any plan up against this, ours included:

• the server set up and run by someone who knows WordPress, with a content delivery network in front so pages load quickly wherever the visitor is
• an SSL certificate kept valid
• daily backups kept with a different company in a different building, so one bad night can't take the website and the backups with it
• updates applied and then checked by somebody clicking through the pages that matter
• security and uptime monitoring running all night, and brute force protection on the login page
• a person to ring who can see the server and the website at the same time

If a plan is missing the last one, it's managed in the same way a self-service checkout is staffed.

The Sunday night it mattered

A client of Genius Division, the agency behind Better, went on Dragons' Den. The website normally got about 50 visitors a day.

The work started weeks before. The whole site was cached as static files so it could keep going even if the database fell over, the images were all squeezed down, a CDN went in front of it, and it moved off shared hosting onto a dedicated server. Then the business name got said out loud on national television and it went from about 20 people on the site to 1,800 in 30 seconds.

It held. Just about. Craig spent the segment logged into the hosting control panel adding more server power while it climbed past 2,500, with a credit card taking a hammering on the upgrade fees.

That's what managed means when it counts: somebody who knows the website is about to be on telly, and is sat with a laptop open when it is. No hosting dashboard was going to do that on its own. The slow website post has more of these, including the morning Outlook clicked 170,000 links.

Who doesn't need it

We sell managed hosting, so bear that in mind for the next paragraph.

If your website is a brochure that rarely changes and doesn't take enquiries, cheap hosting and a free afternoon twice a year will do. If you've got someone in-house who builds WordPress sites and enjoys running servers, you need the hosting and nothing else. And if the website is on Wix or Squarespace, the platform already does the server side, and this whole post is about somebody else's problem. And if your homepage has said "coming soon" since 2019, you need a website before you need hosting.

Everyone else is paying for managed hosting one way or another. Either you pay a company, or you pay with your own Tuesday mornings and the odd week where everything's on fire.

What ours is

Better runs on DigitalOcean servers we set up and manage ourselves, with a CDN in front and an SSL certificate kept valid. Backups go out daily to a different provider in a different data centre. Updates are applied and then checked, brute force protection and monitoring run around the clock, and every month we audit the site and send a report showing what we checked and what we changed.

When you ring, between 10:00 and 16:00 Monday to Friday, you get the people who do the work. We don't do evenings or weekends.

All of that comes in every plan, from £150 a month plus VAT, and we've written up what website maintenance costs across the UK if you want to see where that sits. The longer version of how we do it is on what makes us Better.

If you're on cheap hosting and it's been fine for years, good. Work out what a day offline costs you, then look at the price again.