In this post, you will learn how to choose the best WordPress Hosting solution for your website. This guide will be suitable for both non-developer and developer with coding and server management knowledge.
Choosing the good fit Hosting is critical to make your work easier, so you can focus on contents and SEO fully. You don’t have to worry about one day your site freeze up and users can’t even browser the site or worry about how to scale the hosting capacity when more and more traffic coming to the site.
Cloud VPS or Managed WordPress, we will only focus on this two in this article. Each has specific implications way to managing your WordPress or your website. You will be learning Pros & Cons of each and how to apply them to your site.
Table of Contents
- What is Cloud VPS Hosting?
- What is Managed WordPress Hosting?
- Pros & Cons
- Speed & Performance
- Security & Customization
- Scalability
- Cost
- SSL
- Summary
What is Cloud VPS Hosting?
Cloud VPS is powerful infrastructure can give you a configurable virtual machine ( VPS ) on the cloud, each VPS or instance such as is a fresh Linux OS, with given number of RAM and CPU depend on your need, so you are free to use and scale up to what you want.
I have used most of Cloud VPS hosting myself since 2010 and I can list down 3 best option you can go for
DigitalOcean is easy to scale and deploy the droplet ( VPS Instance ). But their price is higher. Vultr give you more flexible option on RAM and CPU, and the speed benchmark is a bit faster compare to DigitalOcean.
What is Managed WordPress Hosting?
WordPress is so powerful this day, perhaps the best blogging platform , so some of web hosting providers have chosen to specialize in WordPress, they make it best for speed and optimize up to bottom to make it fast, so that’s called WordPress managed Hosting.
I have also used Managed WordPress for myself and for both of my customers, some of the good one are:
Both of them are very good, the different is just price. WP Engine is alway better but higher price.
Pros & Cons
Let’s get to the real part, what is the advantage and disadvantage of Cloud VPS & Managed WordPress hosting?
Speed & Performance
If your site host on Managed WordPress, even the best hosting these day, you will be on powerful machine but shared server, there could be thousands of sites hosting on the same machine, using the same IP address.
With Siteground, there is will less site and less crow on the server but you will still notice the performance different, sometime it can go very fast, sometime it can go slow. The average response time will be around:
Test Case 1: Siteground GoGeek Shared Package ( $12 / month ) on US server:
0.8 seconds to 1.5 seconds even with Supercache and Dynamic Cache on.
If your site host on Cloud VPS, you will have a clean Linux OS of your choice, there will no cPanel or any tool to help you setup your website easy, you will need to learn how to configure and managed the server. Luckily, there will be some services can help you make it easy even you don’t know anything about it. I will talk about this later.
Test case 2: Vultr Cloud Compute ( VC2 ) – $5 / month.
0.3 seconds to 0.6 seconds with ServerPilot web setup. You can handle up to around 500 users at the same time.
==> So in term of speed, Cloud VPS win this round, let’s head to next point.
Security & Customization
With Managed WordPress hosting, you don’t have to worry about security, they will do it for you, launching new website is easy by one click, server is protected by their powerful network. You can managed emails, files managed, even the FREE SSL Let’s Encrypt is available for you with one click.
If you decided to go with Cloud VPS, you are on your own, if you are a tech guy, good for you, learn and twitch the server the way you want, if you are not, better hire a good geek guy to take care if for you.
So basically, with Managed WordPress hosting, you are paying for support and managed time.
==> Managed WordPress hosting win this round. Managed servers are always protected with anti-DDOS system and updated software.
Scalability
Scalability is super easy on Cloud VPS, one click and you can upgrade the whole VPS to next level with upgraded CPU, RAM, Capacity.
Upgrade to higher package may not be easy as you think on Managed WordPress server, sometime it will take a few days to transfer to different server with higher capacity
SSL
Most website use SSL for SEO advantages, even just the normal blogging. And it will be hard when come to setting up SSL on Cloud VPS, you need depth knowledge to get SSL certificate up and running properly with the web server.
I just setup free SSL Let’s Encrypt on Ubuntu server on Vultr for wpspeedinsight.com. I will write the full articles to help you setup in 5 minutes.
With Managed WordPress, SSL is super easy by one click, Siteground or WP Engine both offer these free services for their customers.
==>> Managed WordPress win this round.
Cost
So like I said, main different with Managed Hosting and Cloud VPS, you are paying for support and managed time.
VPS is much faster and more efficient in term of Cost and Performance, but you need to pay for management and setup. You also in risk of security if you don’t know how to keep the server updated regularly.
On Managed WordPress Hosting: Price is likely less than $5 to $10 for most package. Best fit for new website with less traffics like a personal websites, fresh new blog.
On Cloud VPS Hosting: Minimum price is $5 for testing new server but you should upgrade to over $10 and scale up more to powerful server. Best fit for site with lots of traffics coming in. You also need to get the “Expert Help” to set up the server but once everything is done, it will be worth it.
==> No matter your choice of hosting, it’s alway a good idea to plan for scalability. As your site and business grows, you will face more problem.
Summary
So on top of this, both Cloud VPS and Managed WordPress hosting do have advantages and disadvantages. Cloud VPS is faster but you need expert help in setting and managed the server so “Expert Help” is expensive while Managed Server is easy for you. In my experiences, if your site starting to generate more traffics and income, you should be ready to opt-in for Cloud VPS, make sure to make the full backup before you do anything and get the “expert help” if you don’t know what you are doing.
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