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Self Hosting Vs Managed WordPress Hosting – Which is the Better Option in 2022?

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This will not be the first time nor will it be the last time that you hear a discussion about self hosting versus managed hosting for WordPress. The reason why there is such an animated debate about shared hosting, dedicated hosting and cloud hosting for WordPress sites is that in a world where people are trying to use the Internet as a source of income, the tools that they use can make the difference between them getting access to certain financial opportunities and having these opportunities pass them by.

Most people would agree that choosing WordPress as a publishing platform or as the basis for an eCommerce website is the best decision. WordPress offers flexibility and can be customized to meet the needs of a blogger, a small business, or a large enterprise. This is why WordPress is used by almost a quarter of the top websites on the planet.

If you are contemplating using WordPress for your personal blog or portfolio, but you haven’t already set up once, check out this guide to find out the cheapest web hosting solutions to start with.

Despite being regarded as WordPress, it actually comes in two varieties. You have WordPress.org, and you have WordPress.com. While WordPress.com is a combo service that bloggers use to host WordPress blogs. It offers a forever free plan that allows you to have a running blog as long as you like, and you will never have to worry about paying for it.

On the other side of the coin, there is WordPress.org. Downloading and installing WordPress is free. However, since this is the self-hosted variant, you will need to choose a server, select a domain name, and then pay money periodically in order to have your WordPress site hosted.

WordPress Hosting – Features to Look For

Some people look at these two options and automatically think that using WordPress.com is going to be their best option because the hosting is free. What they fail to realize is that free options do not necessarily mean that there is no cost. It’s good, especially if you are looking at using WordPress for your blog or for your website for years to come, to become familiar with the positives and negatives of using WordPress.com. Having the differences between the two options clear in mind will make it easier for you to make a good decision moving forward.

Here are the top points to consider when evaluating the best web hosting company for you now and later on:

  • Data transfer and bandwidth overages
  • Uptime and loading speed
  • Customer support

Different Hosting Options Provide Different Outcomes

At this point, it may be a good idea to give a little bit more information on the differences that exist in the hosting options you have. The first hosting option most people usually choose is shared WordPress hosting. Shared WordPress hosting is sought after by individuals who are building their first website, have financial restrictions and need to keep things cheap, and by people who do not really understand the difference between hosting options and are making their decisions based solely on price. Shared hosting is relatively inexpensive, somewhere between $3 and $25 a month.

  • Shared hosting companies make their money not through the fee they charge you every month but by up-selling you and sticking it to you through hidden fees.
  • Shared hosting companies offer “unlimited resources” as a sales gimmick. The truth is there is no such thing as unlimited resources. If your WordPress site starts to use too many resources, your hosting company is going to throttle the resources. This will have an impact on the clients who visit your site.
  • Shared hosting is cheap hosting. This means that the servers are overcrowded and any performance issues on another site may affect your site.

If we were to sum up shared hosting in a few words, we would describe it as cheap service, slow performance, and bad support.

wordpress hosting providers

Do-it-yourself VPS WordPress hosting is a second option that people use. Those looking for do-it-yourself VPS WordPress hosting are still looking to save money. But they also have a little bit of experience with WordPress, so they hope that they can use their experience to save money while at the same time maximizing performance and the success of their website.

On the plus side, do-it-yourself WordPress hosting will cut costs. On the downside, do-it-yourself WordPress hosting means that if anything goes wrong with your hosting, you are responsible for. If something breaks or if your server needs to be optimized, you are the one who needs to do it. This is why for some people, especially those who got into do-it-yourself hosting because they like to tinker, things backfire. You have to remember that your time is valuable. So while you may save a few dollars a month on hosting fees, the time you spend trying to fix what’s broken is probably a lot more valuable.

Managed WordPress hosting is usually sought after by medium-size businesses that have a substantial amount of traffic to their website. These individuals are looking to maximize the experience their clients have and realize that managed WordPress hosting is a good investment. They are able to offer their clients a faster loading page, security, and quicker response times because the hosting services they use has been fine-tuned to work with WordPress.

Managed WordPress hosting is going to be expensive. You can expect to pay on the low-end $25 a month and on the high-end upward of $200 a month. This price is going to vary, depending on how big your site is and what you need.

In recent studies by Hosting Canada, WordPress hosts perform an average of 32% better compared to hosts on other popular blogging platforms like Wix, or Squarespace. WordPress also offered a wider variety of easy to use third-party plugins and apps.

Reasons Why We like Managed WordPress Hosting

There are a number of reasons why we feel that managed WordPress hosting is the way to go. We recommend that you take your time and do your due diligence when looking at your personal circumstances and determining what hosting option is right for you.

One of the things that we love about managed WordPress hosting is that it allows you to focus your efforts on what you set out to do, grow your business. You are not worried about anything to do with your hosting service and know that you are going to be able to offer your clients superior performance all of the time.

hosting analytics of resource allocation

Managed WordPress hosting providers offer an environment that is fine-tuned to work with WordPress. If you use a shared host or if you use a do-it-yourself host, you are going to find yourself spending a bunch of time installing software and engaging in optimizations with the goal of getting the same speed that you could get from a managed WordPress host out-of-the-box. Performance and uptime are going to be improved with a managed WordPress hosting celebs like:

  • Cloudways: Great performance and simplicity
  • Pantheon: Fast page load and powerful scalability
  • Kinsta: User-friendly dashboard and advanced add-ons

Managed WordPress host use CDNs. They offer a large infrastructure that reaches around the world.

Kinsta and Cloudflare integration

Content delivery networks make it possible for you to put your site closer to the individuals who want to access it, thereby decreasing network latency. Latency is the amount of time it takes for information to be transmitted over a network. The farther the information stored on your site needs to travel, the longer it is going to take for it to arrive. This means that your customers will have to wait a lot longer for your site to load. Check the Kinsta review.

How Managed WordPress Hosting Can Protect Your Data

One of the coolest things about managed WordPress hosting is that you are almost always guaranteed a backup. These backups are included at no additional charge. You can imagine how valuable this is because if something happened and you accidentally lost everything, your business could be down for weeks or months as you try to restore the lost information. If you lose client information, the damage to your reputation and credibility may never be undone.

If you decide to go the do-it-yourself route, use some cheaper shared hosting options, or work with a VPS, you are responsible for creating your own backup system. If you do something wrong or do not configure something properly, you run the risk of losing everything.

Another area where managed WordPress hosting shines is security. Shared hosting environments are not known for providing their clients assistance if they are hacked or if there is malware. The situation is even worse for do-it-yourself and VPS servers. When your site is hacked, you are on your own. Managed WordPress hosting companies are known for actively protecting against attacks and malicious intents. They will often offer malware removal and software designed to detect and prevent DDoS attacks.

Conclusions

As you can see, there are a number of benefits that come from opting for managed WordPress hosting as opposed to shared hosting or do-it-yourself VPS. Sure, you are going to spend a little bit more money out of pocket. But you have to ask yourself, how much money are you willing to spend in order to have peace of mind and the freedom that comes from knowing that the security and performance aspects of your website are cared for? How much is it worth to you to have the time to focus solely on growing your business and attracting customers? How much is it worth to you to know that when your customers visit your site, they are going to find that your page is up and will have short load times?

Of course, we are just scratching the surface when it comes to managed hosting versus self-hosting for WordPress. We would love to hear what you have found. Please let us know more about your experiences in the comments section below.

Managed Cloud Hosting – Cloudways Review

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Choosing a web host for your WooCommerce store can become a huge challenge if you don’t do thorough research. To help you with the process, this article focuses on Cloudways, a managed cloud hosting platform that lets you host your ecommerce site on a managed cloud server and lets you manage them through an intuitive frontend panel.

Let’s begin by understanding what Cloudways is and what it offers to its users.

1. Cloudways Review – An Overview

Cloudways offers managed cloud hosting through its state of the art platform which lets you launch cloud servers on any of the five cloud providers. Normally, when you launch a server by yourself on cloud infrastructure, it takes hours to set everything up, assuming you have all the technical knowledge to carry out the process and handle any unexpected event. If that’s not the case, you are going to need professional help which is going to cost you a lot of money.

Cloudways lets you launch cloud servers in a matter of minutes, saving you a significant amount of time and money. You can also manage your server through the Platform and perform activities like scaling server resources, enabling SSL, domain mapping, and other server and app management actions very easily.

In short, Cloudways lets you focus on important things such as your website and your business while the Cloudways Platform takes care of your servers.

2. Cloudways Platform Features

Cloudways managed cloud hosting comes with a number of features that come together to give you an excellent experience. Some features are aimed at improving server and application performance while others give you peace of mind and offer transparency in tracking performance.

Flexibility and Freedom

As mentioned earlier, Cloudways gives you the flexibility and freedom to choose from five cloud infrastructure providers including:

  • DigitalOcean
  • Vultr
  • Linode
  • AWS
  • Google Cloud

This freedom means that everyone, from a small-time blogger with a single website to an agency with hundreds of clients, can use Cloudways to host their sites. This is an important USP that sets Cloudways apart from the competitors because usually a cloud hosting provider offers a single infrastructure provider that is the standard for every user. So whether a user is a blogger or an eCommerce store owner, he or she pays the same amount for the plan they choose.

With Cloudways, a starter plan with DigitalOcean costs a lot less than with AWS or Google Cloud. So by signing up with DigitalOcean on Cloudways, you get all the features of a cloud hosting provider at almost a third of the price and enjoy the flexibility of a managed hosting experience.

This freedom doesn’t end there.

With Cloudways you also get to choose the specifications of your server such as RAM, bandwidth, storage, and processing power. This is another important option because usually hosting providers offer pre-defined plans with little variations.

Pay as You Go

With Cloudways, you have full control over the billing. For instance, the Cloudways’ basic 1GB DigitalOcean plan costs $10/month; however, at the end of the month, you will be charged for the server resources you used

This is called Pay as You Go billing where users pay only for the resources they consume rather than a fixed amount for the entire month.

This comes handy when you decide to upgrade your server. For example, on the 15th of the month, you decided to upgrade your plan from 2GB DO to 8GB DO. In this case, the invoice will split into 15 days of 2GB server and 15 days of 8GB server.

So, to sum it up, the cost of running a WooCommerce store hosted on Cloudways using DigitalOcean can be around $10 to $20/month.

The Cloudways Stack

Every server you launch at Cloudways comes with a stack that optimizes resource allocation and usages for speed and performance. The stack is a combination of caching technologies and servers that works together to ensure that you get optimum performance round the clock.

Here are the components of the Cloudways Stack:

Varnish Cache – Varnish boosts the performance for websites that are rich in multimedia making it a must-have component for any cloud hosting stack.

Redis – Though optional, it significantly improves performance by acting as virtual memory for datasets.

Apache – Apache is a popular web server and provides a great hosting experience.

NGINX – An efficient web server capable of handling significant numbers of requests.

MariaDB – MariaDB is a database server that is highly scalable and robust.

Memcached – Memcached makes database calls, API calls, and page rendering a breeze.

Simple Server and Application Launch

Cloudways lets you launch your server and application through a very simple process.

Here is a brief outline of the process of selecting server specifications before finally launching your Cloudways managed servers.

 

The first step is to select your desired application from the drop-down menu.

To illustrate, I have selected WordPress version 5.4.2.

Next, you need to name your server and your application.

Then, you would need to select one of the five cloud infrastructure providers for your server.

As you can see, I have selected DigitalOcean.

The next step is to select your server specification (particularly, the RAM size).

I have selected 2GB RAM.

Next, select the data center location for your server, and click Launch Now.

That’s it. Your application and server are deployed and ready for business. How simple was that?

3. Cloudways Platform Review

Cloudways managed cloud hosting comes with a one-of-a-kind Platform that allows you to carry out complex tasks in a matter of minutes.

Let’s take a tour to find out more.

Server Management

The platform provides simple management options for both servers and applications.

Let’s have a look at what server management functionalities are available within the Platform.

  • Monitoring

The Monitoring tab lets you track server resource usage and keep an eye on the server health to ensure that all the operations are running smoothly and you have ample resources at all times.

  • Manage Services

Here you can manage the status of the various components of the Cloudways Stack. This tab lets you enable, disable and restart the component services.

  • Vertical Scaling

Scaling server resources is super easy through the Vertical Scaling tab that lets you upscale resources by simply dragging a slider.

  • Backups

The platform allows you to schedule backups or back up the server upon request. This creates a downloadable copy of the data that you can use to restore the server.

Application Management

Now let’s look at the application side of things that you can manage through the Cloudways Platform.

4. Access Details

This is where you get the access credentials for the WooCommerce application backend. Since I set up a WordPress application, the credentials are used to access the WordPress dashboard.

SSL Certificate

The Platform lets you add Free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates for your application. Just add your email address and your domain name and click Install Certificate. The Platform also supports third-party paid SSL certificates as well.

Backup and Restore

You can easily restore your application to a saved backup point. In addition, you can also request an on-demand backup of your site data.

5. Migration Tools

If you’ve launched WordPress through Cloudways, you will be able to migrate your site from one host to Cloudways using the Cloudways Migrator Plugin. This plugin makes it easy for you to migrate your site. If you do not have the technical skills or want to save time, you can opt for the free one-time migration that will be done by the Cloudways support team.

CloudwaysCDN

Cloudways has a native CDN solution that you can deploy for faster application performance for a global audience.

Final Words

We hope this detailed Cloudways review article has brought you fundamental ideas about how this managed cloud hosting works for you.

Cloudways is one of the best WooCommerce hosting around and is definitely one to consider if you are looking to host larger and complex websites. What sets Cloudways apart is its affordable pricing and the freedom to customize your server according to your needs.

Do you have other recommendations on web hostings? Don’t hesitate to say it in the chatbox below!

Top 6 WordPress Hosting Providers Compared (Real User Experience)

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Finding a good WordPress hosting provider in 2021 can be struggling. If you’re a non-techie or solo founder for your business, you would want to rely on the hosting service that requires the least coding level and provides prompt support. We have sifted through the crowd to curate a shortlist of cheap hosting providers to start with.

So you own a business and want to push it online?

If yes, then you might need a web host service. A web hosting is a server account which is set up on a remote computer and capable of transmitting website files and data (images, pdfs, audios, videos, etc.) via the internet.

These WordPress hosting services are offered by web hosting providers who are in charge of controlling and distributing server spaces to different websites. After purchasing a domain name for your business website, the next big thing to buy is the hosting service. So web hosting is indeed a very important part of building or owning a website. These WP hosting plans usually come in a monthly or yearly subscription-based service and the prices vary across all WordPress hosting providers.

Some of the common types of hosting services offered by the majority of the hosting companies include: Shared hosting, VPS hosting, WordPress solution, Business hosting, Dedicated hosting, Managed hosting, Core servers, etc.

We have developed and managed a lot of business websites and thus had the opportunity to test a lot of different hosting services and hosting plans. That’s how this article is bringing you our first-hand expert experience. We hope it would not only help you understand various hosting providers but also guide you while making a choice on which specific hosting plan you should choose for your website.

Top 6 Cheap Hosting Providers for WordPress in 2021

  • Bluehost
  • Dreamhost
  • Ultahost
  • HostArmada
  • Namecheap
  • Hostinger
  • A2 Hosting

Bluehost

Bluehost is a company whose services are very much beginner-friendly because of its simple settings interface. They are officially recommended by WordPress.org and they’ve been around a long while ago. They provide awesome hosting services at fantastically cheap charges, their hosting services comes with a nice uptime and great loading speed. With Bluehost, you are less likely to face a lot of challenges with their services. They offer an easy 1-click installation of WordPress that also comes with top-notch SEO applications. Those monitoring tools will help you analyse your website’s SEO settings and give you ideas on how to optimize your site for better rankings. They also have website security tools that would help you minimize risks of cyber hacks and attacks.

In case you get stuck or have a problem, their customer support is reachable at any time round the clock within 24 hours of each day, yes that’s 24/7 support by way of a phone call or live chat.

They also make it easy to upgrade to bigger plans in case your website needs expansion or you just want more web controls, just contact the support for help.

Our Likes

  • Very fast loading time
  • WordPress recommended hosting
  • Fairly cheap plans
  • 24/7 customer support
  • Free packages like domain, SSL, etc.

Our Dislikes

  • Expensive upgrade charges
  • No free site migration — No worries, FastDup can help you with that
  • Unlimited hosting is actually limited
  • Renewing fees are higher than initial fees
Check out Bluehost

Dreamhost

Dreamhost is a reputable company with its own unique operation styles. One of their uniqueness is the fact that they do not offer the popular cPanel unit which many other hosting companies offer their customers. Instead, they have their own built control panel, this may seem nice but swaying away from conventional styles might bring up some difficulty in operation.

This company offers a nice 24/7 Email support but charges an additional fee in case you want phone support. Their live chat support is only available during working hours of working days. Their plans are fairly cheap and it is cheap and easy to upgrade from smaller plans to bigger plans too. They offer easy migration tools in case you wish to migrate your website to their server. They also provide one of the best website loading speed experiences we’ve ever had.

Our Likes

    • Fairly cheap charges
    • Offers some free addons like free SSL
    • Offers up to 3 months money-back guarantee
    • Offers free domain name

Our Dislikes

  • Complex control panel
  • Many addon features cost more
  • Slow Live chat support
Check out Dreamhost

Ultahost

There are usually many advantages when choosing a high-cost hosting, with UltaHost you can get high-cost hosting features but at a much lower cost and it is the right web host with the right packages where you can create a modest website with high performance and reasonable price.

If your site starts to gain popularity and expand more by receiving more than 100 visitors per day, UltaHost offers you a dedicated hosting service for a large number of visitors, as all their hosting plans contain an available amount of disk space and bandwidth which is an excellent choice for companies of all sizes with free features Available and 24/7 support plus it’s a good option for those who are just starting out and don’t have a lot of money.

UltaHost offers online payment services, SSL certificates, shopping cart software, and e-commerce hosting. Although many hosting providers claim to have 99.99% uptime but unfortunately it is not always the same, UltaHost has proven its effectiveness, including its 99.99% uptime guarantee.

Our Likes

  • Outstanding Customer Support
  • NVMe storage
  • 30-day money-back guarantee
  • Free SSL and daily backups
  • 99.9% Uptime guarantee
  • No overselling policy
  • Free malware scans
  • Multiple server locations
  • Free website migration

 Our Dislikes 

  • Limited disk space
  • High renewal rates
  • No free plan
Check out Ultahost

HostArmada

HostArmada is a relatively new company that started offering quality hosting services in 2019. The company draws inspiration from a team of experts with over eight years of experience in the hosting industry.

HostArmada is all about innovation, performance, and security which they incorporate into all their products/services. Their panel of choice is cPanel, as it has been the leader in the hosting industry for over 20 years and is a product with which most people are familiar and used to. They have a high emphasis on technical support and are willing to walk an extra mile for any technical issue, regardless of its origin, 24/7/365. Their flawless review record online shows how serious they are and that despite being very new on the market, they are planning to stay!

On top of all that, they offer very competitive pricing that is unmatched on the market compared to other providers that provide the same service type.

HostArmada Pros:

  • Blazing performance
  • Robust Security
  • Perfectly optimized for WordPress
  • Cheap Plans
  • 24/7 free premium support over three support channels
  • Freebies such as SSL certificates and domains
  • Free website migration
  • Free optimizations

HostArmada Cons:

  • No windows hosting
  • No monthly plans for shared hosting
Check out HostArmada

To find out more about HostArmada, check out HostArmada vs Bluehost – Which is Better?

Namecheap

This is a prestigious company that was launched about 20 years ago. Their hosting service is one of the best as they offer very cheap plans for starters/testers and small businesses. They provide one of the best 24/7 technical support experience because they have a fast, standby team of technical support assistance that will help you immediately in case you need assistance.

Namecheap has a 100% uptime guarantee and their servers are very fast so you have a reasonably fast website loading time. Migrating to their platform is very easy as the support team will guide you very well throughout the process. Upgrading to bigger plans is very easy and fairly cheap. They offer unlimited bandwidth for all their plans and a lot of free add-ons too. This WordPress hosting provider gives a free lifetime whois guard security for your websites.

They offer free domain names. They serve your website for free from their US data centres, which makes your website appear as though it’s being operated from the US even though you are living outside the US. This gives some level of reputation to your website and lastly, they have an automated backup system for your website.

Our Likes

  • Fairly cheap prices
  • Easy 1-click WordPress solution
  • Very nice support
  • Free domain name

Our Dislikes

  • Unlimited everything is actually limited
  • No free SSL
  • Just a 14-day money-back guarantee
Check out Namecheap

Hostinger

This company by far is one of the best when you are looking for a very low budget startup, as low as less than a dollar for a basic plan startup. They have about 99.9% uptime guarantee and an extremely fast 24/7 support. Their fast servers offer a great website loading speed.

They offer free SSL certificates, free domain names and an easy website builder solution to make things easy for anyone even if you are a beginner who is just starting out.

Our Likes

  • Very fast and effective support
  • Cheap prices
  • Nice data centers (US, UK, EU)
  • 30 days money-back guarantee
  • Free SSL certificates

Our Dislikes

  • Only expensive plans enjoy free daily backups
  • Interface is a little complex to get
Check out Hostinger

A2 Hosting

A very reputable company that was launched in the early 2000s offers its users an extremely fast website loading and speed experience because it uses turbo servers which is 20x faster than regular servers.

This company offers free 24/7 support to all its users and they guarantee a 99.9% uptime commitment, they offer free SSL certificates to all their users, they have free migration services with easy 1-click installation for Content Management Systems (CMS) like Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, etc.

Our Likes

  • 20x faster than most other hostings
  • Free SSL
  • Free domain name
  • Free migration service
  • Anytime money-back guarantee

Our Dislikes

  • Not so cheap
  • Cpanel not the best in terms of speed
Check out A2 Hosting

So which WordPress hosting provider is the best choice for you?

In conclusion, therefore, the three main factors to consider while considering what hosting provider to choose for your website includes:

  • Speed – Website speed is very important because it is one of the factors that determine your Google rankings, as Google ranks a fast loading website better than slow loading websites, so it is important to go for hosting provider with fast speeds.
  • Uptime – Sometimes your website will break down due to some server errors, it is very important that they get back online as quickly as possible, hence the why you should consider a hosting provider with nice uptime guarantee.
  • Support – It is an extra advantage to have your website hosted with a hosting provider that has a dedicated and good technical support team because sometimes some things break and need fixing, as a normal nature of the web.

Recommendations

All the WordPress hosting providers we discussed in this article have all been considered to be generally OK for any types of businesses. However, there are still some minor factors in terms of their differences that might help spice up your manner of choices and considerations.

But right before our recommendations:
You can also discover what hosting companies are being used on your competitors’ sites and choose the same hosting as well. All you have to do is head over to a site like “Hoo’s Hosting?” and discover who is hosting a website by using the tool they offer.

  • Bluehost – Since this company is much more beginners-friendly, it is the most recommended for newly established businesses.
  • Dreamhost – If your business already established a presence online and you are only looking for a more advanced upgrade, then you should consider Dreamhost, for they offer a lot of features for advanced users.
  • Namecheap – If your company would need to constantly update and engage your website on a regular basis, then your website is prone to web bugs some times, so you need a hosting company like Namecheap because their support service is very fast, effective and free.
  • Hostinger – This is mostly recommended for small businesses due to the fact that they offer very cheap plans, which is likely to be budget-friendly for most small businesses.
  • A2 Hosting – If your website is very engaging and requires enormous traffics on a daily basis, then you need a fast hosting to avoid frequent website downtimes. In this case, you should consider A2 Hosting because of their reputation when it comes to website speed.