You certainly have come across the two types of hosting services available. One is shared and the other is Managed.
When you don’t want to think how your website back-end technical maintenance would be done and just carry on with making badass content for your website you go for Managed WordPress hosting.
Doing your research you must have come across numerous hosting providers who offer Managed WordPress services. By now you must have known that it costs higher than the shared hosting plans. The price comes with numerous benefits along.
You will never have to worry about the technical aspect of your website. The hosting provider will do it for you. In case of any issue, the customer service responds lightning fast as any technical fault would in their name. The customer service you get is excellent.
The managed hosting aspects include speed, website backup, daily backups, uptime, security, WordPress updates, and scalability.
The reason to consider Managed hosting over shared hosting is evident. Your business website getting slow or having a breakdown will result in loss of revenue, loss of reputation, and above all your precious time.
This is the reason why anyone will go with Managed WordPress hosting. The technical stuff will all be managed by the hosting provider, the website will be fast and you can focus your time and energy on the more important aspects like building quality content, SEO and marketing.
After reviewing and comparing many hosting providers combined with my own experience in creating and running WordPress websites over time, I have handpicked the best few choices for you to pick from.
WP Engine Review: The best and most recommended Managed WordPress Hosting
WP Engine is the best Managed WordPress Hosting provider. Period. Yes, they are the original Managed hosting service provider.
WP Engine was the first company to provide Managed WordPress Hosting Services. Each aspect of this platform is designed and optimized for WordPress websites. They have set the standards high for everyone. The service they provide is the best a customer can hope for.
The plans start at $22.5, which is a little higher than what you pay for shared hosting plans. But paying this much is considered as you get services and features for what you pay for.
Every plan has multiple benefits, one of them is the Free site migration. This is crucial if you want to migrate your website. Not all WordPress hosting providers provide this feature. With WP Engine you get this feature with any of the plans from basic to the most premium you opt for.
One more thing is the Content Delivery Network(CDN). Many other providers charge you for the CDN service you choose. As you know CDN is vital and helps you improve the site performance and speed. With every plan free CDN is included from WP Engine.
The response time of websites hosted with WP Engine is recorded to be under 0.5sec evidently. This is phenomenal. Speed and uptime is a major factor that results in the customer experience who visits your website.
Some noteworthy features you get:
– Free CDN with every plan
– Automated SSL certificate
– Staging environment
– Completely optimized for WordPress platform
– Free site migration
– WordPress savvy customer support
All the plans available come with these features included. All include free migration and free page performance. If you sign up for one year upfront for any plan you can avail of three months of free services.
Most sign-ups with WP Engine tend to stay with the service provider for a longer period. With the quality of service, they provide it’s hard to find another option with all these benefits. Unless you don’t have constraints with the price you wouldn’t mind leaving WP Engine.
Most small and mid-size companies powered by WordPress would prefer to be hosted on WP Engine. With this service provider, you can be assured of the website technicalities working at the best of your capability. You can focus your time and resources on building quality content and marketing so that your business keeps growing. Rest you would not have to worry about the performance of your website.
I recommend WP Engine for most organizations or individual businesses and get the best off managed WordPress hosting services. This also includes the best in-house customer support and the queries of customers are solved at a lightning-fast speed. But if you are searching for cPanel access and server control, you can look for other options.
Try WP Engine today with the 60-day money-back guarantee that comes with any of the plans if you do not like the services. I guarantee you, in terms of Managed WordPress hosting, they give impeccable services and any buyer would not regret going with them.
Nexcess Review: A Liquidweb company- The best choice for E-commerce website
Nexcess is actually Liquidweb’s little brother specializing in managed hosting services. They are one of the elite hosting providers with solutions for multiple dynamic needs for a website. They are the best option for e-commerce websites as of today’s websites, especially e-commerce has a lot of dynamic processes to be done.
Nexcess offers a range of plans to choose from on a solid reliable infrastructure that is optimized to provide the best WordPress performance a user can experience.
The basic plan called ‘Spark’ is priced at $19 a month. The interesting part is that for the first 6 months you will have to pay at the rate of only $9.50. If you feel the platform is reliable for your website and you feel the user experience is up to your expectation, then you continue with it, or you opt-out without much investment. Though it does not happen often that someone chooses to discontinue after 6 months. Yes, the platform really turns out to be reliable.
Even with the basic plan, you get a bandwidth of 2TB. Yes, you read it right, 2TB bandwidth with 15GB of storage. No other platform offers anything near to this for any entry-level plan. This is a big deal for e-commerce websites, or also a large processing website like who sell courses or any digital products online.
Noteworthy features with every Nexcess plan:
– Free CDN for all WordPress and WooCommerce plans
– Free SSL certificate
– Unlimited Email accounts
– Daily backups
– Staging area
– Updated plugins
– Automatic Image compression
The features that you get with each plan are staggering to run a high user experience website. The Automatic image compression that Nexcess provides makes them stand out. This feature will save a lot of space and manual effort doing the same work. This will automatically increase the page loading speed of your website and also increase your space available.
Nexcess provides you 24/7/365 support through phone, emails and live chat with every WordPress managed hosting plan. The support team members are WordPress experts who are always available to solve your hosting queries. As for them anything about the WordPress site, it’s their job to come up with the perfect solution to fix your website issues.
Nexcess is one hosting provider which is widespread and other than WordPress they also provide managed hosting services for other platforms like Magneto and BigCommerce. For companies using multiple channels to reach their customers, Nexcess provides you with a lot of flexible options.
As you know the basic plan ‘Spark’ starts at $19 but for the first 6 months for new users, you will be billed only at $9.50/month. The same way as you move up ‘Maker’ plan is at $79 but after 6 months. For six months it is only $39.50/month. This plan also comes with 10 websites. It is a little similar to the Kinsta Pro plan but there you will have 2 websites option.
If sometimes your traffic surges unexpectedly then Nexcess will automatically upscale and make your website performance doesn’t get affected. And in traffic surge cases they also won’t charge you for the first 24 hours. This is what makes them also stand out from other providers.
Try now Nexcess WordPress hosting free for 14 days. After sign-up also get a 30-day money-back guarantee if you choose to opt-out.
Bluehost Review: Well structured and best marketing tools for managed WordPress sites
Bluehost ranks at the top of the list when you look for hosting providers best for beginning with a new website. They make the daunting task of starting with a new website easy. Looking to start your website, a new online business, or anything on WordPress, Bluehost is your hosting destination.
Bluehost provides a great balance between value and price. They provide plenty of options for a new website and also a lot of choices for pro users. The Managed hosting service of Bluehost is called WP Pro.
There are enough resources offered in any of the WP Pro plans you opt to choose from. All the plans have a few common features. You can have as many websites you want, set up an unlimited number of domains you need, unlimited subdomains and there is no limit set on disk storage or bandwidth.
Bluehost is among the only three recommended hosting providers by WordPress. The customer support they provide makes them stand out and how easy it makes for any new user also to get into WordPress makes them among the best choice for Managed WordPress hosting.
One of the major plus one can have when they opt for any managed hosting plans is that there will be a 1 hour onboard concierge call with one of the WordPress expert support members from Bluehost and they will walk you one-to-one through all the features you are getting. You can ask as many questions to clarify your needs and make your web journey smooth. They will help you install themes and plugins and clear any more doubts that you need clarification from.
WP Pro is more optimized for new websites and users new to WordPress. They do not match the more mature and pro specifics like WP Engine or Kinsta. Or give you the depth like Nexcess. But they may not be so important if you are just getting started with WordPress. But if you are a pro and know what your business requirements are go for more pro platforms available and I have mentioned those in the list.
Noteworthy features with every Bluehost WP Pro plan:
– Staging area
– Global CDN network
– Automatic updates
– Daily backups
– Free SSL for all sites
– Malware detection and removal
– Unlimited disk space and bandwidth
The major three categories of plans offered in WP Pro are Build, Grow and Scale. The build is more than enough for getting the needs of your business website covered and it will cost you $19.95 a month.
With Grow and Scale provide you get additional support features and tools. Tools for SEO, video compression, and Paypal integration. Yes these tools, if needed for your website these plans are for you. Please note these premium features you can use for one website even if you are hosting multiple websites under the plan.
There may be chances that many users or enterprises move to managed hosting a bit later after making their sites live. Any way you want to move on the web and host your website, Bluehost serves you best. With Bluehost, you never need to worry about your website getting slow even when there is a surge in traffic.
Visit Bluehost and check out the WP Pro plans and see which one suits your requirements best.
Kinsta Review: Best for high traffic website and alternate for WP Engine
Kinsta is among the premium Managed hosting solutions competing with the best player in the game WP Engine. Kinska makes the selection of hosting plans much simplified by giving the amount of visitor traffic you get on your website. The biggest of businesses with high traffic and demand to scale up anytime use Kinsta.
Similar to WP Engine, Kinsta is made on Google Cloud which plays a vital role in giving you the best uptime speed. With Google Cloud Kinsta works a little differently than WP Engine. Kinsta uses LXD managed hosts which gives each individual website individual containers. This makes your website more secure and upgrading more easier.
The container set is a default setup with Kinsta whereas with WP Engine you need to ask for it with higher plans.
Kinsta is made and optimized for WordPress. It is created to make tasks simple for its user. They make sure that your PHP is updated. If your website seems to slow down Kinsta will automatically sort this out. They automatically upgrade PHP and check the services every minute.
Kinsta offers a wide range of WordPress-managed hosting plans. They have around 9 plans to choose from with a traffic handle of over 3 million. If this was not enough for you, they also offer a customized setup for your website if needed. Build on containers on Google Cloud, companies can easily scale up or down as per the requirement. The best part is that there is no contract terms or penalty. You just pay for the time of services you buy.
Noteworthy features with every Kinsta plan:
– Staging area
– Daily automated backups
– 24/7 support
– Free SSL certificates
– Hack and malware removal
– Free CDN
– Free migration
– Application performance monitoring
Kinsta offers you a full range of features and capabilities with any of the plans you choose to go from. There are a number of plans available with the Starter plan costing $30 a month. There are over 9 options to choose from in terms of the plan.
With each plan moving up the order you get more WordPress installs and one major thing of the amount of traffic per month that the plan is easily capable to handle without any extra charge. The large sites with a lot of traffic to manage go for Kinsta.
The highest plan available has the bandwidth to easily manage the traffic of around 3 million a month. If this is also not enough for you there is an option to customize your plan as per your requirements.
There is also build-in caching available with Kinsta, so the platform doesn’t allow you to use plug-ins for the same. If you use the platform you will know the in-build caching is more than enough for your website’s performance and lower latency while loading from any location.
There is one more point to mention about the customer support provided by Kinsta. You get 24/7 live chat support and customer service is available to solve all your queries. They do not have call support. They are clear about this and it is also not a negative point according to the reviews received by their customers. Their system is keeping their customers more than happy and this is the reason that large organizations stay with them for a longer period.
Select from the wide range of plans available with a 30-day money-back guarantee. One month is enough to see what the platform offers and then you can move ahead. Click here and explore the plans.
Dreamhost Review- The best choice for high traffic sites and monthly pay plan
Dreamhosts’ managed hosting plans are named as DreamPress. Along with Bluehost and Siteground, DreamHost is the officially recommended hosting provider by WordPress.org
They are among the best choice if you want to have month-to-month plans and do not want any longer commitment with a hosting provider yet. They do offer discounts with longer plans but there is not much difference in the cost if you choose to pay for monthly plans too.
They offer managed hosting plans starting from $12 a month if you choose to go for a monthly payment plan. The charge is less compared to any other monthly basis plan from the competitors. Yes, you do get a 17% discount if you pay on a yearly basis.
All DreamHost plans come with domain privacy, which keeps your personal data off the public record. These already included in the plan save you around 10-15 extra dollars.
As we recommend Bluehost is the best for any starter website, but if you want an alternative to going for it, we would surely recommend DreamHost. Dreamhost managed hosting will provide you with a website builder tool that is not available with any of the competitors. With the website builders, you will get a drag and drop feature to update the site content after you choose any pre-made template for all kinds of websites.
Noteworthy features with every DreamHost managed hosting plan:
– Staging area
– Daily automated backups
– 24/7 support
– Free SSL certificates
– Developer access
– Full website builder
– Unmetered bandwidth
– Unlimited free emails
All the DreamHost plans also mention the number of monthly visitors it can manage. The DreamPress plan is the starter plan of managed hosting and it can easily manage around 100,000 monthly visitors without affecting the uptime of your website.
The DreamPress plus plan comes at $24 a month if when you sign up for a monthly basis plan. This can easily manage the traffic of over 300,000 a month. This also comes with unlimited CDN which will boost your website speed and performance. The DreamPress Pro plan is at $79.95 a month and this is only recommended if you already have a large-scale website. The amount of traffic it will be seamlessly managing would be over a million. If you have an e-commerce platform and want a large-scale hosting plan, this is your choice.
With DreamHost, you also have the option to go for VPS hosting which is suitable for websites that need more resources and control over their server.
On top of this, they offer a 97 days moneyback guarantee, which no other hosting provider offers. They offer a 100% uptime guarantee which means you should not worry about your site getting slow at any point of the day. They are confident about the quality of service they provide and also the customers can be confident with the service they will receive. Sign up for the most suitable plans for you now.
What factors I looked out for the Best Managed WordPress Hosting
While you go around the web to shop for the best WordPress managed hosting provider for your website there have to be certain factors kept to look out for. There cannot be one hosting provider best for all kinds of websites. It solely depends on the nature of your website and online business requirement. One hosting provider may be best for one and the same cannot be suitable for others. But there are a few major requirements that one must look out for while selecting a Managed Hosting provider.
A complete Managed Hosting solution will mean that the backing up of data, backend maintenance, updates, caching functionality, and the settings, all are managed by the hosting provider. The customer can solely focus on building and creating their website for the best UX.
Some basic features that must be covered under any of the Managed WordPress hosting plans are
– Automated daily back-ups
– 24*7 customer support
– Malware detection and removal
– Security fixes and patches
– Automated WordPress and plugin updates at the back-ends
To make your selection easy I have made a list with the basic requirements of all the above compared Managed Hosting provider
| Hosting | Basic Plan Cost | Free Domain | Free SSL | Staging Area | Automated backups | Traffic(in basic plan) |
| WP Engine | $22.5 | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | 25,000 |
| SiteGround | $4.99 | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | 10,000 |
| Nexcess | $9.50 | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Undisclosed |
| BlueHost | $19.95 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Undisclosed |
| Kinsta | $30 | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | 25,000 |
| Dreamhost | $12 | No | Yes | No | Yes | 100,000 |
Below are the factors to look out for while selecting the best-Managed Hosting plan for your website and online business.
Traffic
This is one of the most important factors to look out for. If you are just getting started then depending on the goal you can choose any of the basic plans from the above-mentioned hosting providers.
If your site is already having over 10k visitors a month then it will surely grow in the coming years then you should look out for premium hosting services like WP Engine. With WP Engine you can keep growing your site and moving up the hosting ladder. If you have an E-Commerce website with a similar amount of traffic and still growing, then Nexcess is the most premium choice. Nexcess is build in a way to favor the E-commerce platform.
Websites expecting to grow with tons of traffic should find the perfect solution with Nexcess. As Nexcess provides a bandwidth of 2TB which is nowhere near to any other hosting provider can match. WP Engine is the best choice for mid-size enterprises and businesses.
When there is a huge growth and to be managed over a million traffic a month, then Kinsta will have a plan for you. A similar high-traffic E-commerce website can still be hosted effortlessly on Nexcess with higher plans. For businesses looking for alternatives for WP Engine can opt for Kinsta.
Bluehost is the best choice for people getting started with a WordPress website and you also get a free domain included with the plan which will save you extra bucks. People looking for Managed Hosting options and who do not want to spend more can go for SiteGround. SiteGround will amaze you with the features they come with at such a low cost. You get the interface specially designed for WordPress and great customer service is always a plus.
Dreamhost is when you want to go for no long-term commitment with any hosting provider. The one thing that will stand out with DreamHost is the uptime speed. The website speed won’t be an issue even when you are experiencing a traffic surge.
No. Of WordPress Installation
How many websites are you going to need or already have?
You must look for this feature while selecting a Managed WordPress hosting. If you have an enterprise business, personal site anyone then you can opt for any hosting provider.
Planning to launch more websites in the future and want to manage all at a single point, as it would suit best for any business. Then you will have to look out for pans with more than one hosting. Every provider has more than one website in different plans. But if you want to invest less then go for the GrowBig plan with SiteGround.
WP Engine will be suited when you have a few enterprises and growing with the same. With BlueHost, you will get an option of unlimited websites means unlimited WordPress hosts with any of the plans you choose to go for.
Uptime speed
With the top-notch maintenance that you would expect from your Managed Hosting provider, one more thing that is crucial is the uptime speed and server response time.
The lower is the server response time, the better is the website speed. Better the speed is better the UX. One second delay of your website loading speed results in around 7 percentage of lower repeat visitors. So this factor is a must to have your website performance at its best.
CDN included with the website plan will add to better website speed and deliver the content with the nearest available data center for the visitor. All the above-mentioned providers have CDN included with each of the plans except for DreamHost. The basic plan of DreamHost does not include CDN, the rest all the plans of DreamHost do have a CDN. But DreamHost is one host which guarantees 100 percent uptime. It means they guarantee that the server speed never goes down.
I have also mentioned a report of the region-wise server response time for each of the Managed WordPress Hosting providers.
Customer Support
Managed WordPress hosting plans generally has better support available as compared to the shared hosting plans. The level of support from each different provider may vary. You would expect if any issue comes up your hosting provider resolves it asap.
All the hosting providers promise a 24/7 customer support service. The thing that matters is how quickly the issue is resolved.
Nexcess provides live chat support, support via call and email from WordPress experts. Live chat is available with all the plans but the call option is available with only the higher plans.
Kinsta doesn’t have a call support option. But they have proven that with live chat they are the best and quick to solve their customer’s issues. With only live chat support available the customers do stick with them for the long run without any issue.
WP Engine and BlueHost both have live chat, email and call support options available 24/7/365. They are pretty good too. With SiteGround the support system is better as the low-cost plan may leave you with some questions at times. You need not worry about it and they fix those at the fastest possible time.
Conclusion
The above-reviewed hosting providers are the ones I can confidently recommend and you can select any one of these according to your requirement.
WP Engine is the original Managed WordPress provider, among the best and the most popular hosting provider available. BlueHost is the option available for users who are not pro with WordPress and getting started with managed services.
For an E-commerce website, there is no better choice than Nexcess. I won’t suggest looking any further to host your E-commerce site. You can grow and avail the amazing interface designed especially for E-commerce with Nexcess.
DreamHost Managed Hosting I will recommend for a large website with a huge amount of traffic to be handled. Kinsta is best for all kinds of sites and especially for larger growing sites. Kinsta covers almost all the aspects available with a WordPress Managed Hosting plan with options to grow to a much larger scale.
- WP Engine Review: The best and most recommended Managed WordPress Hosting
- Nexcess Review: A Liquidweb company- The best choice for E-commerce website
- Bluehost Review: Well structured and best marketing tools for managed WordPress sites
- Kinsta Review: Best for high traffic website and alternate for WP Engine
- Dreamhost Review- The best choice for high traffic sites and monthly pay plan
So tell me in the comments which Managed WordPress Hosting provider you have opted for and how is your experience with the services is.