Managed WordPress Hosting
Patrice
Hosting comes in all sizes, price ranges and service levels. Depending on the goals of your site, technology skill level and business model, you may opt for one of the less expensive do-it-yourself plans or for a managed hosting plan that offers more technical assistance and security. We have a great post all about what hosting is and what some of the different options are; you can read that on our blog. This article will look more specifically at what we mean by Managed WordPress Hosting.
In order to really answer what Managed WordPress hosting is, we have to first answer what is WordPress?
WordPress started out as a blogging application and quickly became one of the most used tools to create a website. In fact, as of the writing of this blog (2/2021), about 75 million sites (over 30% of sites on the web) have been created using WordPress (source). What helped contribute to WordPress’ global domination was its open-source nature. Being open source means anyone can contribute code to the betterment of the application itself. With many skilled developers contributing plugins to extend the capabilities of the application, WordPress quickly became the web-builder tool of choice for developers and novices. If you’re unsure just how popular WordPress is, consider these stats:
- 14.7% of the world’s Top 100 Websites are WP-based
- over 500 new sites are created daily using the free version of WordPress.org
- 17 new blog posts pop-up every second
And we love it too. In 2015 we made the move from our proprietary software as our primary website application to using WordPress and haven’t looked back since. We didn’t make the move lightly. We had heard the horror stories of WordPress sites being hacked, about the incompatibilities of the core application and the plugins, of sites that seemingly self-destruct overnight due to running a simple update. We have always been a full-service company; meaning we host the sites we create. We never felt comfortable putting our clients in the position of having to decipher whether a problem was a hosting problem or a coding problem. We have always hosted the sites we create because if there ever is an issue, we want our clients to be able to make one phone call and have the issue taken care of; no finger pointing, no blame – just solutions.
But when we moved to WordPress, we really considered not taking on the hosting because of all the horror stories we had heard.
After a full evaluation from our super smart in-house tech folks and some long conversations about our duty to our clients, we decided to set up new servers that would allow us to offer secure, managed WordPress hosting.
So now to the question at hand, what is managed WordPress hosting?
Simply put, it is hosting for your WordPress site that you don’t have to worry one little bit about. There will be updates (sometimes daily), and we will do them for you. There will be hack attempts, and we will thwart them for you. There will be download errors and downtime, and we will fix them for you.
You have enough to worry about, keeping your site up to date and running smoothly is one of the things we can handle for you.
With Managed WordPress Hosting from ProFusion, you’ll get a monthly report that looks like this.This little report gives you a hosting snapshot that shows exactly what was done on your site the previous month. These little bits of data provide you a health update for your site. A healthy site is a functioning site and a functioning site is one that can truly be used as a marketing asset.
One last little bit about updates…
We have clients who are still using Outlook 2003. They’re not big on updates or change. We understand that, however, from a security standpoint, your WordPress site must be kept up to date. Consider this:
In 2019, over 56% of all CMS (Content Management Systems) applications were out of date at the point of infection, unchanged from the data seen in 2018 (Source).
Over ½ the sites that were hacked were out of date and, likely, that hacker was able to gain access to the site due to a known vulnerability. These hacks could have been avoided with simple managed hosting or regular updating. In fact, if your site manages to get hacked while using the managed hosting plans from ProFusion, we’ll clean it up and restore it at no charge. Managed hosting is a great insurance plan for your site.
You should have a backup.
Before we run any update on your site, we make a backup of the site. Poop happens and sometimes the updates don’t go as smoothly as planned. Not having a backup can be catastrophic to your website. Always have a fallback before performing a WordPress update. Do not be forced to rely on data from the WayBack machine or from Google’s cache to rebuild your site. We’ve had to help some good folks out of a jam using those tools and it is not fun for anyone.
Managed WordPress Hosting. It’s not sexy or fun, but it sure feels good to know that at least one part of your life is being managed by a professional.