The 9 Best Reasons for Managed WordPress Hosting

Byjames brown

 Contents

  • What is managed WordPress hosting?
  • Why you should choose managed WordPress hosting
  • Managed WordPress Hosting FAQs

What is managed WordPress hosting?

First of all, what exactly do we mean when we talk about managed WordPress hosting, and how is it different from shared hosting or do-it-yourself (DIY) hosting?

From a bird’s eye view, managed WordPress Hosting Australia gives you a place for your website to show the world. It’s also a service with lots of extra features and supports to keep your websites running efficiently, securely, and fast. The idea is that you can leave the technical know-how to the experts to focus on your business.

To best explain this, let’s first break down the general online population into the three typical WordPress hosting scenarios.

  1. Shared WordPress Hosting

The first group usually consists of newcomers who opt for cheap shared WordPress hosting. These include GoDaddy, Bluehost, Hostgator, SiteGround, Media Temple, OVH, GreenGeeks, etc. Usually, these are people who:

  • Create your first website
  • Migrate from WordPress.com
  • are on a tight budget and want to keep everything as cheap as possible

They don’t know the differences between the various hosts, so they only decide based on price (hint: that’s not good!)

WordPress shared hosting plans typically range from $3 to $25 per month. There’s nothing wrong with starting this way, but there are a few things you should know.

Hidden costs

No matter how you do the math, $3 a month isn’t going to generate any revenue for the host, especially when you add support costs into the equation. One support ticket, and they’re in the red. Navicosoft is the Best WordPress Hosting Australia company.

A shared host makes most of its money from upselling and hidden fees. This includes migrations, domain registrations, renewal fees, SSL certificates (for WooCommerce websites), etc.

Hidden throttling

Most hosts offer their “unlimited resources” plan to make money. You’ve probably all seen this before.

 

In reality, however, there are no unlimited resources. The hosts throttle the clients, which consumes a lot of help. This, in turn, causes those disgruntled customers to leave and make room for new customers who aren’t as resource-consuming.

In the end, a vicious cycle is created in which the hosting providers offers cheap plans and solicits customers who it hopes will not consume many resources and buy upsells. It’s all about the volume.

Resource scarcity

Because the offer is so cheap, it usually forces the host to overcrowd its servers to consolidate resources. Even if you don’t know it, your website may be on the same server as 500+ other websites. Any performance issues experienced on other websites can also affect your website.

  1. DIY VPS WordPress Hosting

DigitalOcean, Vulture, and Linode.

The second group is typically bootstrap startups and people with more development or WordPress experience. This is the DIY faction. These people are usually still trying to save money, but they also pay attention to performance and know how important it is to the success of their business. Typical configurations are DigitalOcean, Linode, or Vultr VPS, along with a tool like Server Pilot to make it easier to manage.

The DIY approach can be great, but it can also backfire if you’re not careful. Don’t do this just because you want to craft! Your time is money, and you should invest it in growing your business. Leverage the Navicosoft team’s 20+ years of experience solving WordPress issues daily.

  1. Managed WordPress Hosting

The third group is typically small to medium-sized businesses, high-traffic blogs, and companies looking for a dedicated enterprise WordPress host. This target group recognizes that managed Australian WordPress Hosting is a good investment because it saves workforce and time and usually offers better performance because it is aligned with the CMS.

Managed WordPress hosting prices typically range from $25 to $150 per month or more, depending on your site’s size and needs. You are probably familiar with some popular managed WordPress hosts: Navicosoft, WP Engine, Flywheel, Pressable, Media Temple, Pressidium, and Pagely.

Why you should choose managed WordPress hosting

We categorized people into three different groups above doesn’t mean it’s always the right way to go. Maybe you start with the DIY method and move to managed hosting as you grow.

Or you can invest in managed hosting first and concentrate fully on growing your business. There is no right or wrong way, but we want to give you nine reasons why you can benefit from managed WordPress hosting.

 

  • You get first-class support.
  • Optimized for high performance
  • Strategically located data centers for global accessibility
  • Automatic backups (never lose your data)
  • One-click staging environments
  • Developer friendly (SSH, Git, WP-CLI)
  • Security is taken seriously
  • Scalability in view
  • Premium DNS (faster, more reliable lookup times)
  1. You get first-class support

The number one reason you should choose managed WordPress hosts is the excellent support. Managed WordPress Hosting Australia providers usually only care about the WordPress platform. That means they don’t deal with Drupal, Magento, or any other platform or software. Typically, support teams that focus on one area become experts in that area.

Navicosoft’s support staffs are all WordPress developers and Linux engineers, working on WordPress core and other open-source projects and using WordPress daily. Therefore, the expertise of our support department is second to none. Nothing is worse than starting a chat and feeling like you know more than the person on the other end of the line. This will never happen at Navicosoft!

When Navicosoft was founded, we knew the industry wasn’t doing well for WordPress support. That’s why our team is structured very differently. With us, there are no different stages or levels. The support team member helping you is fully qualified to solve all problems. There is no jumping back and forth between other employees, which we believe is a complete waste of time. Anyone can talk to the same support staff who serve our Fortune 500 and enterprise customers! 👏

I tried many different hosts – LiquidWeb, SoftLayer, WP Engine, Web Synthesis, Rackspace, etc. Navicosoft was the best in terms of support, speed, and price out of all these providers. I am very impressed with the knowledge and skills of the support team, their response times, and not dealing with typical “Level 1” support. Competent and fast support, what more could you ask for? Your WordPress site runs very fast with Navicosoft, and it was challenging to find the necessary expertise from other companies. I also love that I can spin up a server for a week during peak traffic times to handle the load. Amazing.

My experience with the support team was excellent. I received detailed and honest answers to all my questions. When I asked about the hardware, I wasn’t expecting a response like this:

“We use Google Compute Engine servers, which ensure high speed and automatic scalability. We are not limited to 2-6 CPUs per VPS like other providers. Still, we let the website’s container scale to as many CPUs as needed when there is an increase in traffic and clients with load balancing even across an infinite number of CPUs. Our system dynamically spins more machines and shuts them down when traffic ebbs.”

I tried querying them about some common issues related to your site and got all the correct answers – top marks!

Navicosoft uses a ticket-based support system through Intercom. It feels like real-time chat, but it’s not running in the background. I got a reply within 5 minutes when I tried to speak to them at 3 pm. I also tried at 5 am (I was up early while writing this) and got a response within 3 minutes. I may have randomly chosen two times with few requests, but impressive nonetheless!

As Ralene said, we’ve been using Intercom here at Navicosoft since day one, and it’s worked for us. Nobody likes the old-fashioned ticketing systems, and many companies are now switching to more innovative solutions like Intercom. It has given us the ability to integrate chat and support tickets into our dashboard, so our customers know we are always just a click away, 24/7, 365 days a year. In 2021, our average response time was 1 minute and 22 seconds!

So when it comes to choosing a host with a reliable and knowledgeable support team, managed WordPress hosts are often a cut above the rest simply because they live and breathe WordPress daily. Navicosoft, the Best Managed WordPress Hosting Australia, also offers top-notch uptime monitoring for all clients via Sentry. We check the status of all websites we host every 2 minutes. That’s 720 reviews for each of your websites per day. However, we also provide tools that you can use to monitor the health of your websites yourself.

If your site goes down, we’ll be the first to be notified, and our support team will take care of it right away! To help you diagnose performance issues, we also support your New Relic tracking.

  1. Optimized for high performance

The second reason to choose a managed WordPress host is that their environments are built to work with WordPress.

If you decide to go with a shared host or the DIY route, these will typically run on barebones machines, and you will need to spend time installing and tweaking software to get the same speed that a managed WordPress host offers from home. In some cases, there is nothing you can do with a shared host to get the rate you want.

For example, many managed WordPress hosts here at Navicosoft implement server-level caching and full-page caching. This means that we take care of the caching. You don’t have to struggle with finding the fastest caching plugin because you don’t need one. That alone can save you a lot of frustration because dealing with caching plugins is no fun. And in most cases, server-level caching is much faster than any plugin.

When traffic is heavy, you need to serve as many assets from the cache as possible. This reduces the load on the server and ensures that everything is delivered at lightning speed. At Navicosoft, you can use our cache analysis report to ensure that most of your WordPress site is serving from the cache.

Managed WordPress hosting cache

A mighty managed host for WordPress should also offer you the latest and greatest architecture and technology. This includes using the latest versions of PHP, MariaDB, HTTP/3, and NGINX, which have proven to be one of the fastest combinations for WordPress.

If your WordPress host takes forever to release the latest PHP versions, they’re holding you back! That’s not the case with us. Navicosoft released PHP 8.0 just a few weeks after the final and tested version, and with the upcoming 8.1 version, we aim to be even faster. This allows our customers to start testing earlier and benefit from the free and immediate performance improvements.

How important is the version of PHP you’re using? Our PHP benchmark report shows that PHP 8.0 is 18.47% faster than PHP 7.4. Who doesn’t want a free 18% speed boost? 😉

And to take it a step further, at Navicosoft, we were the first managed WordPress hosting provider to use Google Cloud Platform and their Premium Tier Network exclusively. Navicosoft, the Best WordPress Hosting Australia, has been recognized as one of the best hosting providers by independent hosting publications. And we are even recommended by Google.

 

The following example shows how a customer’s web page load times have improved significantly after switching to the Google Cloud Platform. Before the move, peak times were in the 3-4 second range, after which they remained consistently under 1 second and 400ms in the US. By switching to Google Cloud Platform, loading times dropped by 75%!

Google Cloud Platform load time.

And here’s an example of what happened when someone switched from Navicosoft to shared hosting. Its load time went from 300ms to 14 seconds! The shared host just couldn’t handle the high traffic of your site.

Shared Hosting vs. Managed WordPress Hosting.

As you can see, it loads in under 400ms at a power level of 100. That’s fast!

WordPress speed test at Navicosoft.

If we look at the HTTP header, we can see that it is being served from Navicosoft’s server-level cache and that no caching plugin is running.

Navicosoft HTTP Cache Headers.

This means that each WordPress site is housed in an isolated container that contains all the software resources (Linux, Nginx, PHP, MySQL) required to run it. The resources are 100% private and are not shared with other people or even your websites.

Navicosoft Hosting Architecture.

We then use virtual machines located in one of the numerous data centers of Google Cloud Platform worldwide. Our VMs are configured to route traffic through Google Cloud’s premium tier network. Compared to Google Cloud’s standard tier network, the premium tier network routes most traffic through Google’s private data centers rather than the public internet. This results in lower network latency and faster loading times for your WordPress site.

Each GCP virtual machine has up to 96 CPUs and hundreds of gigabytes of RAM. We use computer-optimized (C2) virtual machines in the available regions. The hardware resources (RAM/CPU) are automatically assigned to each website container by our virtual machines as needed.

  1. Strategically located data centers for global accessibility

In addition to server-level performance, managed WordPress Hosting Austrlia providers typically have more extensive infrastructure designed for global reach. Thanks to Google Cloud Platform, we at Navicosoft have 29 different regions from which to host your WordPress site. This includes the US, Canada, Europe, Asia Pacific, and South America. Network latency decreases when you strategically place your website closer to your visitors and customers, and TTFB and page load times decrease.

Google Cloud data center locations.

Latency is the time or delay when data is transmitted over a network: the further the distance, the greater the latency. For example, if you run a WooCommerce store in Sydney, Australia, you should host your website in Australia. If you were to host your website in the US, customers would experience a much longer loading time the first time. The first DOC load comes from your host server, so it is essential that you can place your website where your customers are!

 

Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can help speed up the rest of the media on your site. The Navicosoft CDN is particularly fast because it uses Cloudflare’s network, including more than 200 locations worldwide. Plus, it’s free on all plans.

Plus, everything at Navicosoft, the Best Australian WordPress Hosting, is connected via Google Cloud Platform’s highly reliable “Premium Tier” network. This minimizes distances and hops, resulting in your data’s faster and safer global transport. Some hosting providers choose Google’s “Standard Tier” network for cost reasons, but at Navicosoft, we only use the best.

How big of an impact does that have? For data moving across continents, the premium tier network is about 41% faster than the standard tier network on average. For data transmitted to a nearby region (on the same continent), the premium tier network is about 8% faster. However, the network accounts for only a fraction of the total load times, every millisecond counts!

  1. Automatic backups (never lose your data)

You should always be prepared for the worst-case and always have backups of your WordPress site. A well-managed WordPress host should always offer automatic backups at no additional cost.

With shared hosts, backups are usually only included in more expensive plans. And if you decide to go with a VPS, you typically have to set up your backup system and VPS snapshots, which also cost extra.

WordPress backups.

Whether you want to backup your WooCommerce store or just create a copy of your database, Navicosoft makes it easy for you. All packages include six different types of backups:

 

  • Daily
  • Hourly
  • Manually
  • System-generated
  • Downloadable
  • External (on Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage)
  • You can also restore backups in staging or production.

Creating a WordPress backup.

Having multiple options for your WordPress backups can save you a lot of time since you don’t have to mess with backup plugins, cPanel, FTP, or phpMyAdmin.

  1. One-click staging environments

Test, test, test. You can’t afford to have your site down, so you should constantly test new changes, plugins, PHP versions, and updates on a development site, not your production site! However, with most web-hosting providers, testing involves a complicated and time-consuming process that requires you to copy your site locally, test it, and then figure out how to migrate the changes back. Many managed WordPress hosting providers offer staging environments that make testing a breeze.

WordPress staging environment.

With one-click staging or dev environments, you can clone your website with a single click. Your website is then accessible via a test URL, and you can also access it via the usual methods like FTP, SSH, phpMyAdmin, etc. From the dashboard, you can then quickly push your changes into production.

  1. Developer friendly (SSH, Git, WP-CLI)

Another benefit of managed Australian WordPress Hosting is that you usually have access to additional developer-friendly features that you might not find on a shared host. This includes SSH access, Composer, Sequel Pro, and Git. You usually don’t have SSH access with shared hosts, meaning you can’t use any of the above features. Using a DIY VPS, you can generally set up these features, but it can mean extra work.

  • At Navicosoft, you can easily access your SSH connection data and additional developer features from your MyNavicosoft dashboard:
  • You can use different PHP versions on your websites and staging sites. You can also switch engines at will with one click.
  • Support for custom setups like Bedrock and reverse proxy configurations.

Faster performance with our Redis add-on.

WP-CLI is another tool that is gaining popularity in the WordPress community. WP-CLI is a command-line tool that can manage many aspects of a WordPress installation. It can add/remove users, posts, categories, insert test data, search and replace in the database, etc. For many developers, the WP-CLI is a dream come true! And Navicosoft’s architecture natively supports WP-CLI.

  1. Security is taken seriously

And don’t forget safety! There is usually no support in shared hosting environments if you get hacked or encounter malware. This also applies to the DIY VPS variant. If your WordPress site gets hacked, you are responsible. Many managed WordPress hosting providers offer support if your site is hacked, and they have systems to protect you from malware.

WordPress security.

The cloud provider, your host, uses is also essential. We use Google Cloud Platform, which means you benefit from a security model that has been in development for over 15 years and currently secures products and services such as Gmail, Search, etc. Google currently employs more than 500 full-time security professionals.

Speed ​​up your website and enjoy 24/7 support from our experienced WordPress team. Our infrastructure based on the Google Cloud is designed for scalability, performance, and security. Check out our plans.

Navicosoft also uses Linux containers (LXC) and LXD to orchestrate them on the Google Cloud Platform, allowing us to isolate each account and each WordPress site entirely. Each website container runs on virtual machines secured behind the GCP firewall. This is a much safer method than other competitors. In addition, we use encryption at rest to store customer data.

In addition to server-level security, the security of your account is also crucial. Regardless of which host you choose, you should ensure it offers two-factor authentication. If someone gains access to your account, they could change your passwords, delete your websites, change DNS records, and do horrible things. At Navicosoft, we’ve partnered with Authy to bring you two-factor authentication through your MyNavicosoft dashboard.

Choosing a web hosting provider that offers the above features will save you time, but you’ll also have the peace of mind that the host has your back should anything go wrong! It is essential to invest in secure WordPress hosting.

  1. Scalability in mind

Another important consideration for any host is scalability. If it’s a shared host, your only option to upgrade to a higher plan is if you outgrow your resources. Assuming they haven’t already banned you. With a shared host, you eventually get to a point where they force you to switch to a dedicated server. This can be very time-consuming since you constantly have to worry about adhering to your boundaries. And moving to a better server can cost you a lot of time.

The DIY VPS route is much easier to scale, but sometimes this requires more server knowledge to expand disks, etc. Managed WordPress host providers usually do this for you. If you go over the predefined limits, you’ll be quickly notified, and if necessary, an upgrade is just a click away.

A very cool and unique feature at Navicosoft is the ability to scale your site as we use Google Compute Engine servers. Other Managed WordPress Hosting Australia providers usually limit 2-6 CPUs per computer. When traffic spikes, we can scale your website’s container to as many CPUs as needed. For your website that is experiencing a lot of non-cacheable activity or ends in traffic, we offer a dedicated server solution that allows the PHP workers to scale beyond the limits of our regular plans.

WordPress Caching Spike.

With our isolated software container technology, the hardware resources of each website container are automatically allocated by our virtual machines as needed. No resources are shared between websites. The result is a secure and private hosting configuration while allowing you to increase or decrease server resources depending on your website’s needs.

  1. Premium DNS (faster, more reliable lookup times)

And finally, you should use a top-notch DNS provider. You don’t get that with shared hosts or the DIY VPS method. You would have to register separately for this service. There aren’t many managed hosting providers that offer something like this.

What is DNS? You can think of it as a phone book for the internet. Whenever you type an address into your browser, it is mapped back to an IP address even if you never see it. The DNS servers do the mapping for you. As with web hosting, there are slow and fast DNS providers. Amazon has one of the largest networks in the world. If you choose a prompt DNS provider, DNS lookup times will be faster.

How DNS works.

Free DNS from domain registrars like GoDaddy and Namecheap is very slow. Also, it’s not always consistent, and seek times may vary. Google Domains is probably an exception because they have such an extensive infrastructure. The best DNS providers are companies like Amazon, Cloudflare, Dyn, and DNS Made Easy, all of which have extensive infrastructure explicitly built for DNS.

Another reason why a reliable DNS provider is important is that it protects you from DDoS attacks. And you should have known just how important DNS was since the DNS doomsday on Friday, October 21, 2016. This is an excellent example of why you need multiple DNS providers. The websites of many companies were completely offline that day because they only relied on the attacked DNS provider Dyn. Companies like Reddit, Twitter, and Spotify have all had downtime.

However, the common problem is that DNS providers typically set high TTLs. Simply put, if either of these companies added a second DNS provider that day, it wouldn’t have done much good since the TTL expired in days, not minutes. The problem can be solved by setting up multiple DNS providers in advance.

The community needs to work together to develop commercial or open-source solutions that make DNS configurations compatible between different vendors (e.g., for complex DNS setups like failover, geo load balancing, etc.). This is no longer a “nice-to-have” but a “must-have.” – Catch point.

Managed WordPress Hosting FAQs

Finding clear answers to questions about the Best Managed WordPress Hosting Australia can be difficult. To make it easier, we’ve compiled our solutions to some of the most frequently asked questions on the subject.

 

What is Managed WordPress Hosting?

What is Shared WordPress Hosting?

What is VPS WordPress hosting?

What are the advantages of managed WordPress hosting?

What is the difference between WordPress hosting and managed WordPress hosting?

Is managed to host worth it?

How Do I Choose the Best WordPress Host?

Which is the Best Managed WordPress Host?

  1. What is Managed WordPress Hosting?

Managed WordPress hosting is specially designed for websites running on the WordPress platform. “Managed” means that the host takes care of basic administrative tasks for you, e.g., B. installing updates and setting up automatic backups.

  1. What is Shared WordPress Hosting?

Shared WordPress hosting means that multiple WordPress websites share storage space on the same server. This is in contrast to dedicated WordPress hosting, where each WordPress site gets its server.

  1. What is VPS WordPress hosting?

VPS WordPress hosting uses virtual private servers to give each WordPress site its own fully partitioned space on a server, often with full access to backend server tools.

With VPS WordPress hosting, you have to take care of all maintenance tasks like updates and installations yourself – an advantage for some, a disadvantage for others.

  1. What are the advantages of managed WordPress hosting?

Some of the benefits of managed WordPress hosting are:

 

reliability

High speed and performance

Automated server management (backups, installations, updates, etc.)

Modern host stack

Strong security protocols

scalability

staging environments

Access to helpful development tools

Support from WordPress experts

And the list goes on.

  1. What is the difference between WordPress hosting and managed WordPress hosting?

Managed WordPress hosting is hosting for WordPress sites where the host does a lot of the administrative work.

On the other hand, WordPress hosting can mean any type of host that can host a WordPress-based website, including ones that don’t do the chores for you.

  1. Is managed to host worth it?

In almost all cases, yes – managed hosts are worth it. It’s a matter of need and budget, but you’ll typically get a lot more out of a managed solution than investing time working on your website.

  1. How to choose the best WordPress host?

As in any online ecosystem, the world of WordPress hosting does not stand still for long. To find the best WordPress host, it’s best to do your research.

Navicosoft strives to be the best WordPress host by constantly innovating and providing access to WordPress experts 24/7/365.

Our incredible support team sets us apart from the rest compared to competitors like SiteGround, WP Engine, and Flywheel.

  1. Which is the best-managed WordPress host?
  • Improve the performance of your website
  • Automatically perform server and platform updates and upgrades
  • Provides easy migration options
  • Scope for extensions
  • A responsive support team made up of WordPress experts

Navicosoft ticks all of these boxes and more. Check out what else customers get when choosing a WordPress hosting plan from Navicosoft.

 

Summary

As you can see, there are many advantages to choosing Navicosoft’s managed hosting solutions over shared hosting or a DIY VPS. Yes, working on hosting costs more money, but you should think of it as an investment in your business.

How much are your time, peace of mind, and data integrity worth?

If you have questions about hosting for your business or blog, we at Navicosoft are just a click away. We’ll help you get to the next level.

  • Save time, money and maximize your site’s performance with:
  • Fast help from WordPress hosting experts, 24/7.
  • Cloudflare Enterprise Integration.

Optimization with our integrated Application Performance Monitoring.

In a no-long-term-contract plan, assisted migrations, and a 30-day money-back guarantee, all that and more. Check out our packages here or speak. There are so many options that it can be challenging to choose. But the best managed WordPress service for you will find the right plan for you.

Visit for the best managed wordpress Hosting: https://www.navicosoft.com.au/wordpress-hosting

 

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