With managed WordPress hosting becoming the rage and traditional website hosting taking a back burner, you might find yourself in a pickle wondering whether your WordPress agency should switch from traditional hosting to managed WordPress hosting.
This page is about that one decision: managed hosting versus running servers yourself. It is not a provider shortlist and not a full buying guide. For the wider question of what an agency should judge any host on, and what a client portfolio costs to run, see our guide to WordPress hosting for agencies.
In the past, traditional web hosting, including shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting, was the go-to for any WordPress agency. Some hosting providers have also built WordPress hosting infrastructures for these traditional hosting services.
However, traditional WordPress hosting has never been able to truly satisfy this gap, especially when it comes to meeting all the demands of WordPress hosting for agencies.
Managed WordPress hosting was developed to fill that gap and then some. In this guide, you will discover how to elevate your WordPress agency with managed WordPress hosting by taking advantage of features such as seamless performance and expert support while focusing on creativity and business growth.
Table of Contents
Importance of Managed Hosting for WordPress Agencies
The idea behind managed WordPress hosting is to provide specialized and managed-for-you WordPress hosting to alleviate the technical burdens associated with server management.
With managed WordPress hosting, your hosting provider will take care of website performance and SEO optimization, security, and WordPress updates while still providing expert support for any challenges that may arise.
Managed WordPress hosting is good for WordPress agencies because it reduces the website management workload, leaving your team with fewer technical issues, such as content management.
If you own a WordPress agency, managed WordPress hosting will help you save time, work less, and improve your workflow while delivering high-quality services and maintaining client satisfaction. This will have a ripple effect on your overall business performance and growth by providing room to work on more projects and promoting a healthy working environment for your team members.
Benefits of Managed WordPress Hosting
Here are some of the most lucrative benefits of managed WordPress hosting that your agency stands to gain with best managed WordPress hosting provider for agencies:
1. Faster Sites and Improved Performance
One of the key benefits of managed WordPress hosting is that the sites are faster than ever and lagging is no longer to deal with. This happens because of the specially configured and optimized tools like in-built caching, CDNs, and optimized server resources that agencies get with managed WordPress hosting.
WordPress caching makes data retrieval easy for WordPress sites while CDN reduces latency by making content readily available. All these resources that you get with managed WordPress hosting enhance WordPress performance, handle traffic surges effortlessly, and improve user experience, making it ideal for agencies delivering high-performing, reliable websites to their clients.
2. Guaranteed uptime
Apart from offering 99.9% guaranteed uptime, your managed WordPress hosting provider will actively monitor your site’s uptime and respond swiftly to any detected downtime before it is noticeable.
Some managed hosting providers also host your sites on cloud-based infrastructure, which possesses a tool called a hypervisor that averts downtime due to hardware malfunction by automatically moving your site to another working machine.
3. Scalability
Managed WordPress hosting plans are flexible and readily scalable. By integrating cloud infrastructures, managed hosting allows you to easily scale up or down the hosting resources available to your WordPress site based on its current needs and traffic spikes.
4. Regular automated updates and backups
Managed WordPress hosting comes with automatic updates for WordPress core, themes, and plugins ensuring your site runs smoothly on the latest versions. Some managed hosting providers also scan updates for malware and errors before pushing them to mitigate risks.
Apart from automatic updates, another major benefit of managed WordPress hosting is regular site backups which allow easy restoration when your site encounters data loss, corruption, or security breaches.
5. Fully secured site
Another core-managed WordPress hosting benefit for agencies is robust security protocols and hardening, which include firewalls, malware scanning, and active monitoring. These ensure that WordPress sites are always safe from risks and vulnerabilities.
6. SEO Benefits
Site speed, optimal performance, and foolproof security are ranking factors in SEO. When you choose managed WordPress hosting, you don’t have to worry about these things. With these factors improved by managed WordPress hosting, your customers’ sites can thrive in a competitive search engine space and attract more visitors.
7. Reduced plugins
Since your managed WordPress hosting is already optimized for optimal performance, there won’t be any need for site performance optimization and WordPress caching plugins. This means fewer plugins, saving storage space and time that would have been used to configure those plugins.
8. Expert support
Do you know how to outsource or hire more staff to handle some tasks? Well, you don’t have to worry about that when it comes to website hosting management. Talk about an extra expert team working for the good of your business without being on your payroll or you paying a premium buck. You can’t get this elsewhere.
What Changes When You Hand Server Work to a Managed Host
These are the responsibilities that move off your team and onto the host when you go managed. Each one is work you would otherwise do yourself on a self-managed server, so this list doubles as the honest cost comparison between the two models. For the full evaluation checklist covering every provider type, see our guide to WordPress hosting for agencies. A managed WordPress hosting provider should cover the following:
Available Performance Tools
You need to choose a hosting provider that offers tools that boost site speed and performance, such as caching, CDN, virtual machines with high processor speed, ample storage space, and cloud hosting with multiple data centers.
Robust Security Measures
Watch out for the security measures in place. Is there DDoS protection, malware scanning, firewalls, etc.? Do they actively monitor for vulnerabilities and release security updates and patches regularly? Your managed hosting should feel like a fortress.
Guaranteed Uptime
Are there uptime issues? Is there a confusing clause regarding uptime? Your managed hosting provider should both promise and deliver 99.9% guaranteed uptime. In addition, they should offer redundancy or failover mechanisms by using a hypervisor to automatically move sites from compromised servers.
Expert support and positive customer reviews
Is the customer support team made up of competent professionals? What means are available to contact them? How fast do they respond to issues and queries? What are other customers saying about them? Are they positive or negative? You should look for a hosting provider with 24/7 expert support and positive customer reviews.
Automatic updates and Regular backups
Managed WordPress hosting means your hosting provider is handling the updates of your WordPress core, themes, and plugins, as well as the backup of your sites. Your managed hosting provider is expected to offer automatic updates and regular site updates if they want your business.
For agencies managing payroll, HR, or accounting clients, having access to a reliable check stub template can also simplify financial documentation workflows and improve client reporting accuracy.
One-click staging and local environments
From time to time, you will have to get your hands dirty, either creating new projects or making changes to existing ones’ configurations, themes, content, user permissions, etc. Having one-click staging or a local environment will make things a lot easier for your agency, so this should be part of the criterion for selecting WordPress hosting for agencies.
Scalability and Pricing
When selecting WordPress hosting for agencies, your customers’ budget also needs to be considered. You need to consider cost, transparency, and what offers are included in the hosting plans, including the allocated storage space, processor, supported visitors, and other server resources.
Apart from the pricing structure, are the hosting plans readily scalable to adjust to site growth and traffic spikes?
The ability to resell hosting
While your agency has the room to create and hand over finished WordPress sites to your customers, there are times when you will want to resell hosting to them. As you can resell traditional web hosting, your agency can also resell managed WordPress hosting. Sometimes, you can even sell WordPress sites with hosting, otherwise known as WaaS (Website-as-a-Service).
InstaWP’s Managed Hosting Solution: InstaWP
InstaWP hosting is a reliable managed WordPress hosting for agencies. It comes with all the benefits and factors discussed in this article. InstaWP hosting runs on InstaWP’s own infrastructure, with InstaCDN caching at 120+ global edge PoPs, and is a strong fit for your WordPress agency.
WordPress hosting plans offered by InstaWP come with robust security, high performance, flexible scalability, and generous hosting resources that transform your customers’ WordPress sites into powerhouses.
Features of InstaWP
The features of InstaWP managed WordPress hosting for agencies include:
- One-click WordPress installation
- Cloud-based infrastructure
- Edge caching and built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Robust security measures
- Automated backups
- One-click remote staging environment
- Guaranteed uptime
- Advanced Development tools
- 24/7 expert support
Advantages for WordPress Agencies
To fully understand InstaWP’s advantages to WordPress agencies, let’s examine each feature and discuss its comparative edge over other managed WordPress hosting providers.
1. One-click WordPress installation: You can spin a WordPress site without complex setup configurations with just a few clicks.
2. Cloud-based infrastructure: WordPress sites are cloud-based and have origins worldwide, so they are readily accessible from anywhere and experience zero downtime.
3. Edge caching and built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN): Sites have ultra-fast loading speeds with zero latency. With built-in CDNs, you don’t need to configure your hosting with any external CDN provider.
4. Robust security measures: WordPress sites are secured to a fault with robust security measures, including DDoS Protection, Web Application Firewall (WAF), and real-time monitoring.
5. Automated backups: Site backups are regularly carried out with hourly database and daily file backups.
6. One-click remote staging environment: The InstaWP Connect plugin allows you to quickly create full, quick, or custom staging sites for live sites away from your hosting.
7. Guaranteed uptime: With features such as a failover mechanism and heartbeat monitoring, your site is guaranteed 99.9% uptime at all times. Should your WordPress miss a heartbeat due to downtime, you’ll receive an email notification immediately.
8. Advanced Development tools: InstaWP’s comprehensive tooling suite, including SSH, SFTP, WP CLI, PHPMyAdmin, and site templating, can streamline your development workflow.
9. 24/7 expert support: InstaWP customer service comprises competent and experienced members readily available via chat 24/7 to assist you with any technical issues.
Benefits of the InstaWP Platform
What can the entire InstaWP platform do for your WordPress agency? WordPress hosting providers lack the added features of the entire InstaWP experience.
The InstaWP platform, beyond managed WordPress hosting, can greatly benefit your WordPress agency in the following ways:
1. Instant WordPress setup: InstaWP lets you spin WordPress sites in seconds, saving your agency time and significantly speeding up your development workflow.
2. WordPress Demos: Your agency can showcase its expertise and close customers by creating demo sites for their scrutiny at no cost.
3. Easy Collaboration: Team members can use InstaWP’s remote capabilities to collaborate on projects and provide feedback.
4. No need for a local environment: InstaWP eliminates the complexities of configuring a local environment for your development process. The InstaWP staging environment is plug-and-play.
5. Centralized site management: You can connect multiple sites to InstaWP and manage them from one dashboard, saving time.
6. Reduced Cost: The cost of InstaWP managed WordPress hosting for agencies is competitive and affordable, reducing significantly with an increasing number of hosted sites.
7. Testing and Staging: InstaWP offers one-click staging with a 2-way sync feature for faster testing and deployment of site updates and changes. It equally provides a safe space for experiments and innovations without risk.
8. Backup and Restore capabilities: Site backups are automated, and whenever the need arises, you can easily push a backup to restore a compromised WordPress site to normalcy.
Integrating InstaWP with Agency Operations
You can easily integrate InstaWP into your agency’s WordPress hosting and management operations including site creation, multiple site management, WordPress staging, etc. Integrating InstaWP into your agency’s workflow and process will overall increase productivity and save time.
Potential Drawbacks and How to Address Them
While there are ample of benefits of managed WordPress hosting to enjoy, it’s not always flawless. There are certain drawbacks of this type of WordPress hosting, which are:
- Limited control
- Expensive plans
- Limits on backup and recovery
- Security concerns
- Difficulty in site migration
- Lack of transparency
If you want to make most of managed hosting for your agency, you need to select the best managed hosting provider for agencies that can help you overcome these challenges.
How InstaWP Overcomes These Challenges
InsteaWP is capable of addressing these challenges in the following ways:
- User control: InstaWP allows you to create and manage WordPress sites, edit databases and files, and decide what you want to do afterward.
- Affordable Pricing: InstaWP plans are very affordable, even with more features, when compared to other managed WordPress hosting providers.
- Backup and Recovery: There are automated hourly database backups and daily file backups, with easy recovery options.
- Easy Migrations: InstaWP offers a flexible WordPress migration tool. You can migrate your WordPress site via URLs!
- Foolproof Security: InstaWP has a robust security system for curbing vulnerabilities.
- Transparency: InstaWP provides clear information about their pricing plans and resources, with no hidden costs.
Why InstaWP Might Be the Ideal Choice for Your Agency?
InstaWP hosting, through its unique features and approach, might be an ideal choice for your agency. WordPress hosting with InstaWP comes with unique features, including managed WordPress service, DDoS protection, advanced Web application firewall (WAF), automated backups, real-time failover, guaranteed uptime, content delivery network (CDN), advanced development tooling, expert support, ample server resources, and free WordPress migration.
It is easy to use and efficiently streamlines workflows, making it the best-managed WordPress hosting for agencies.
