Shared vs Managed Hosting Which Fits Best to Your WordPress Website?

Hosting is an essential component of any online business. Fast page loads, higher website speed, and tons of other factors heavily rely on the hosting plan you’ve chosen. It is essential to choose an ideal plan that suits your needs. It can directly influence your website’s revenue. Figuring out the appropriate type of hosting can be an exhausting task to deal with.

Shared and managed hosting are the popular options for hosting WordPress websites. It has been a hot topic in the WordPress community for a long time. If you’re a new website owner, shared hosting will bring the necessary features within your budget. On the other hand, managed WordPress hosting is costlier than shared hosting but brings more features and benefits. Therefore, the decision on choosing WP managed hosting or shared hosting isn’t necessarily clear-cut.

Not sure which one is a good fit for your business? Are you confused between WP managed hosting and shared hosting? In this blog post, we’ll figure out the differences between WordPress managed hosting and shared hosting. Also, we will take a look at which is suitable for your website.

Before we jump into a deeper comparison, it is crucial to understand one thing that shared and WordPress managed hosting are not always so exclusive from one another.

When it comes to shared hosting, it is a type of WordPress hosting service where you are using shared resources on the server with others. On the other hand, managed WordPress hosting is a set of WordPress features and optimizations that can be appended to any hosting environment. It is possible that you can have managed hosting that utilizes shared infrastructure. On the other hand, you will also find a lot of shared hosts providing their own managed WordPress hosting offerings. So, it is not exactly so different in the way it is IMPLEMENTED.

Now that you know what shared hosting and managed hosting are, we can deep dive into what each of them offers to you.

WP Managed Hosting Benefits

• Server architecture designed specifically for your WordPress website. With managed WordPress hosting you can find that the server is optimized for WordPress, which brings benefits like faster load times and improved performance of your website.
• Built-in caching mechanism. Another benefit of opting for WP managed hosting is that it has built-in server-level caching, which significantly improves the performance of your website.
• Never miss any WordPress update. With the help of automatic WordPress updates enabled, you can keep your site secure and functioning all the time.
• Leverage automatic backups. It helps you save critical data on your website.
• Brings firewalls, login hardening, malware scans, and other WordPress-specific security features.
• You can also leverage the staging site feature to manage your website easily.
• Most skilled and experienced WordPress experts to help you resolve technical queries or concerns on the spot.

Benefits of Shared Hosting

• It is highly affordable. You don’t have to pay hefty fees for shared hosting. A couple of dollars per month and you’re done!
• Leverage from more bandwidth and storage. You can add multiple websites, more visitors, and possibly everything more than managed hosting – that’s a major benefit of having shared hosting.
• Your hosting is not limited to WordPress only. If you want, you can get additional software installed on the server. So, more freedom to utilize the servers.
• Most shared hosting providers offer at least one email address and email hosting to use with your web host and domain.

The downside of managed WordPress Hosting

• Managed WordPress hosting is costlier than shared hosting. It usually costs three to five times higher than the cost of shared hosting.
• You don’t benefit from hosting multiple websites using WP managed hosting. You can, obviously, host only a single WordPress website.
• You don’t get a chance to maintain your website on your own. If you want to get your hands dirty to solve your website problem, managed hosting might not be your cup of tea.
• You have to find an email service provider on your own since many WordPress managed hosting providers don’t include emails in their plans.

Problems with Shared Hosting

• Shared resources. Shared resources are the biggest drawback of shared hosting. Since you are sharing the resources, your site’s load time increases significantly.
• You might face performance issues. The focus is more towards saving cost rather than performance and hence, your website will load a bit slow.
• You don’t get extended features like automatic updates and backups or any WordPress-specific security tweaks.
• You are on your own! The biggest downside of shared hosting is that you have to do everything on your own. Though it brings more control to your hosting experience, you won’t enjoy such activities, if you have to do certain things frequently.

Deciding between managed WordPress hosting and shared hosting isn’t something carried out so easily. It heavily affects your website's performance and reliability. Analyzing the positive and negative sides discussed in this blog post can surely help you make the right decision. If cost is not a concern for you, managed WordPress hosting is the best choice since it offers more features and benefits as compared to shared hosting. On the other hand, your website can run smoothly even on shared resources, shared hosting is definitely the best choice as it will help you save a lot. Want an expert opinion?