After going through many false starts and frills in the initial era of the world wide web, it has been equivocally agreed that the vast majority of web businesses only need blogs and information-rich articles, not those flashy actionable features and UI elements. This is why WordPress became so popular as a content management solution among businesses, individuals and organizations who need to prove their relevance by publishing audience-specific blogs.

WordPress as the uncontested leader among the CMS solutions empowers more than 10 million websites. All the business websites and professionals who need blogging to stay relevant for their target audience find WordPress as the ideal platform to publish content and build up an audience that really matters for their business promotion. Many content marketers invariably have prior WordPress experience as WordPress remains the standard tool for content publication across websites. This is another reason for embracing WordPress as the default content platform.  

Now, if you want to start a website using WordPress, you basically have two hosting choices. One is shared hosting that you can take from any other hosting providers in the market and a managed WordPress hosting solution provided and maintained by WordPress only. While the first has too many limitations, the second has some exclusive advantages. 

Let us begin our discussion with a detailed comparison between shared WordPress hosting and managed WordPress hosting.

Shared vs Managed WordPress Hosting in a Nutshell

Simply and straightforwardly put, shared WordPress hosting will give the entire load of tasks related to the hosting and maintenance of your website on your shoulder. You need to deal with every aspect like taking backups, optimizing WordPress and similar tasks on your own or by taking third-party services. In complete contrast, managed WordPress hosting will work as the concierge of your apartment and take care of all including optimizing WordPress, taking backups and all. 

Shared hosting is the type of hosting plan that makes your website share the resources with other websites hosted on the same server. Managed WordPress hosting apart from providing the basic hosting service comes with a lot of value-added services and performance optimizations delivering additional benefits on top of regular hosting plans. 

Obviously, shared hosting is cheaper as most of the additional services and requirements you need to take care of your own. Managed WordPress hosting comes with a hefty price tag as such hosting service comes with a lot of additional services. 

Many businesses simply prefer managed WordPress hosting just because of the practical advantages it comes with. However bigger you grow with your WordPress website, managed WordPress hosting takes care of every requirement including the scalability needs. Some of the key reasons to opt for managed hosting include optimum scalability and flexibility across devices and platforms, value-added features such as automatic backups and WordPress optimization, easier site maintenance, optimum website security, etc. 

Now that you are almost convinced of the value proposition of the Managed WordPress hosting, let us categorically explain the pros and cons of shared and managed to host for WordPress websites. 

Pros and Cons of Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is cheaper but it has several drawbacks. Let us mention here the principal pros and cons of shared hosting. 

Pros 

• The biggest pro for shared hosting is the cost advantage coming in the form of a lower subscription fee. 
• As for additional value, there are several shared hosts who allow hosting multiple or even unlimited websites against just a flat accumulative cost. 
• There are many well known shared hosting service providers who ensure pretty well performance for most websites with a certain threshold of traffic growth. 

Cons 

• The cost advantage apart, shared hosting is slower than managed or dedicated hosting. It becomes slower as and when traffic volumes suddenly grow beyond a threshold limit. 
• Just because you need to share the resources, the loading speed and time can be severely affected by the happenings in other websites using the same server. 
• You don’t get value-added features such as automatic backups and updates.
• While using shared hosting from other service providers, you are unlikely to get performance optimization and security tweaks. 

Pros and Cons of Managed WordPress Hosting

Though managed WordPress hosting comes with a lot of value offerings for the users, there are several significant cons as well. Let us explain the pros and cons of managed WordPress hosting one by one. 

Pros 

• Managed WordPress hosting comes with WordPress-specific server architecture and that is why you are most likely to get better website performance and speed. 
• Managed hosting comes with inbuilt server-level caching that helps loading pages faster. 
• Managed hosting provides automatic updates for the WordPress websites to boost security and performance if your website.
• Automatic backups also help in securing WordPress website data from time to time. 
• Managed WordPress hosting also offers an array of valuable security features including firewalls, malware scanning, login hardening, etc. 
• On top of regular WordPress dashboard, managed hosting comes with a more convenient and easy to use dashboard. 
• Managed hosting also provides help for staging the website.  
• Finally, managed WordPress hosting users get support from the dedicated WordPress experts. 

Cons  

• Managed WordPress hosting solution is more expensive. Though there are some companies who provide solutions in between the two extreme cost dimensions.  
• Managed WordPress hosting generally comes with a strict capping on the number of visitors per website. 
• To ensure optimum performance, some managed WordPress hosts put restrictions on the number of plugins as well. 

Leading Managed WordPress Hosting Providers

There is no dearth of professionally managed WordPress hosting providers in the market. But there are some providers who stand out from the rest for their value offerings. 

WP Engine

WP Engine, originally a brainchild of Automattic, the company that built WordPress.com is a leading managed hosting service provider. The most common and popular 3 plans from WP Engine cost respectively, $29, $99 and $249 monthly.

Flywheel

The flywheel is one of the most popular and worldwide recognized managed WordPress hosts. Among all the managed hosting service providers they offer the lowest entry-level cost for WordPress hosting. Apart from this, they provide a substantial load of unique features and free of cost website migration. Their cheapest plan starts from as low as $15 a month.

Kinsta 

Kinsta is very well known as a leading managed hosting service provider. It emerged as the biggest managed WordPress hosting service provider in the whole of Europe only within a span of a couple of years after starting. They ensure optimum performance by putting their entire infrastructure on Google Cloud. Kinsta also boasts of a wide range of plans starting from $30 a month to as much as $1500 a month. 

Pagely 

Pagely is a leading WordPress managed to host service provider with a long list of clients who are leaders across industries. Some of the most well-known clients who use Pagely as their managed hosting service include Facebook, Twitter, Disney, Visa, and several others. Their plans are relatively costlier and the entry-level plan starts at $99 per month. The enterprise plan starts at $1999 per month. 

Conclusion

So, Managed WordPress hosting is not only beneficial for your business website running with WordPress CMS but now this hosting solution comes with a variety of price tags and choices of features as per the suitability and requirements of the specific websites. If you need a high-performance Custom WordPress development service you can always start with a low-cost plan and switch to heavier plans as your business and audience grows.