5 Reasons Your Business Needs Managed Hosting
Managed WordPress hosting, probably the world’s most frequently used managed hosting service, allows businesses to hand over the management of their sites to specialized hosting providers. These providers keep their users’ administrative work at a minimum by automating a lot of website building work.
Managed WordPress hosting, probably the world’s most frequently used managed hosting service, allows businesses to hand over the management of their sites to specialized hosting providers. These providers keep their users’ administrative work at a minimum by automating a lot of website building work.
Especially companies/private users that run a high traffic website usually don’t have the time or expertise to deal with the technicalities of running a website. This is where managed hosting comes into play.
But realizing that you need external support for the management of your site is only the first step. You will also have to consider what kind of managed hosting plan is best suited for your business.
To understand this is to understand the reasons why your business needs managed hosting.
Security
Most people underestimate the severity of hacker attacks because they assume that hackers usually go after big enterprises. But this could’t be further from the truth. They also target smaller websites.
So, how come? It’s simple, really: hackers usually use botnets for illegal activities. They infect as many devices as they can with malware, also known as “bots”, to build and expand their networks. For this, the size of the website doesn’t matter.
To protect your site from malware, managed WP hosting providers make sure that your site as well as its plugins are always running on the newest version, which offers less area for attack.
Should your site nonetheless get hacked, your hosting provider will ensure a quick response and clean your server completely.
This will allow you to carry on your work without a care in the world.
Backup
Now let’s assume your website gets hacked despite all the efforts to protect it from malware. What does this mean for your site? The first scenario is you suffer a data breach and your records get stolen. The second scenario is that the hackers bring your website down by increasing the traffic flow.
In each of these instances, a quick response is key. To ensure this, you will need to be able to restore your data as fast as possible. That’s why you need to make sure that your hosting provider offers a website backup service.
Here, it’s important that your provider allows you to automate your backups. Backing up your website only on single occasions means that your data is not always up to date. So in case of a sudden server crash you might still lose data in spite of having a backup service.
Getting hacked is bad enough as it is, there’s no need to add to your frustration by witnessing how all the data you spent years creating gets lost overnight.
Speed Optimization
At the latest since Google announced that page speed is a ranking factor, it has become a well-known fact that one critical success factor for your website is speed.
That’s why good managed WP hosting providers make it their priority to ensure that your website consistently runs at a high speed. For this purpose, the server architecture is adapted to suit the specific elements of WP, which will ensure a smoother functioning.
In addition, managed WP hosting providers rely on caching and content delivery networks (CNDs) or they increase the amount of PHP memory and offer faster-performing SSD memory to help you maintain the speed of your website.
Scalability
People who started out with a shared hosting plan probably know best how frustrating it can get when your traffic inflow increases but your hosting provider can’t scale up the resources provided according to your needs.
That’s why shared hosting users have to personally see to it that they upgrade their hosting plan as quickly as possible, otherwise they risk losing page speed, or even worse, their website might crash, leading to a significant loss of site traffic.
Managed WP hosting providers, on the other hand, usually identify your needs and provide you resources in accordance with those needs. Should your needs increase, the resources will scale linearly in capacity.
Staging Environment
Usually, if you’re not sure about the changes you’re making to your website and want to examine them first before they go live, you’ll have to duplicate your site, add the changes and once you’re happy with them integrate them to your original site.
To eliminate the possibility of wasting your time through unnecessary activities, managed WP hosting allows you to make those changes in a staging environment first, test their functionality and then go live.