Many WordPress website owners fail to understand the importance of WordPress Hosting and still live under the impression that traditional hosting types such as Shared Hosting would suffice all their hosting needs. Although this is true, specialized WP Hosting holds the key to the true potential of your WordPress website. There are quite a few things that you can achieve for your WordPress website with WordPress Hosting that you may not be able to achieve with other types of Hosting. This post will help you understand WordPress Hosting better and list down certain pros and cons that can enable you to make an informed decision on if you should go for WordPress Hosting or not.
Let’s start with the basic question, ‘what is WordPress Hosting?’ WordPress Hosting is a hosting plan designed for optimized security, speed, backups, WordPress updates, and scalability for hosting WordPress websites. In theory, any server can be configured in a way to run any software or system you desire. In our case of WordPress websites, a general web host may optimize their servers for general cases (but not all). A WordPress host, on the other hand, optimizes specifically for WordPress. When they build their networks and servers and configure the software stack, every decision made is designed to create an environment suitable for hosting a WordPress site.
Advantages of WordPress Hosting:
- Easy WordPress Maintenance: With WP Hosting, you will no longer need to worry about having your WordPress installation up-to-date. Most WordPress Hosting plans provide automatic WordPress updates. If you want to know more about updating your WordPress instance, check out this in depth post. Another aspect of your WordPress website maintenance is optimizing the WP-Database. This database is like the heart of your WordPress site where essentials like pages, posts, form entries, theme settings, and plugin settings are stored. As your website grows, the WP-Database keeps getting bigger and the average retrieval speed goes down and affects the overall performance of the website. Many good WordPress Hosting providers like ResellerClub include WP-Database maintenance within their plans taking care of this aspect, too.
- Automated Backup: Disasters can happen at any time, for multiple reasons. However, when one happens and you lose your website data, the first point of investigation for your digital forensics team is a good restore point. Having a backup taken by your internal team is always a good idea, but it is also helpful if your WordPress Hosting provider provides frequent and complete back-up of your WordPress website. It not only saves time but also offers a failsafe for your own backup.
- Better Security: WordPress websites, by design have a few vulnerabilities that can be leveraged for security threats. For instance, the ‘/WP-Content/’ and ‘/WP-Upload/’ folders are used by themes and plugins to execute write commands and make the desired changes to your WordPress website. But hackers can maliciously use such folders to deploy remote code execution attacks. WordPress Hosting providers are aware of such attacks and design WordPress Hosting plans that include security measures, keeping in mind various vulnerabilities in the WordPress architecture. ResellerClub, for instance, provides 2 state-of-the-art security tools called SiteLock and a backup tool like CodeGuard in their WP Hosting Plans. SiteLock works in the background to protect your website. CodeGuard monitors your website/database regularly and if any changes are detected, it notifies you. Traditional hosting plans may lack security measures specific to WordPress websites. And hackers who are experts in breaking into WordPress website may still find a way to use WordPress vulnerabilities to their advantage.
- Managed Hosting Support by WordPress Savvy Experts: There are two aspects to this. 1st aspect is that you have a dedicated team of WordPress experts to take care of the technical aspects of your website while you and your team can focus on developing your core business. They will silently work in the background without much dependence on you. The second aspect is that WordPress Hosting providers will provide WordPress savvy support team members who will be in a better position to understand WordPress based queries. They will have a better understanding of the system operations and limitations giving them an upper hand to service you better. And who doesn’t want great support?
If you look deeper, there are also a few cons that you must consider before you make a decision.
- Migrating from WordPress may Render WP Hosting Moot: Let’s say you start off with a WordPress website. Definitely, a WordPress Hosting Plan makes a lot of sense. But what if later on, you wish to migrate to a different CMS? If that happens, most features of a WordPress Hosting plan will not be applicable to you. In which case you may have to migrate and port to a different Hosting Plan which is a hassle in itself.
- Cannot Have Multiple CMS sites on one WordPress Hosting Plan: Another limitation is that certain WP Hosting Plans allow you to host multiple sites on the same hosting plan. However, if you are in a place where you have a mix of WordPress and non-WordPress based websites, then they cannot be hosted on the same plan. You might have to invest in multiple Hosting plans for your websites depending on the CMS(Content Management System).
- Limited Control: In WordPress Hosting, most of the times you may not have cPanel access. This gives you a lot more control over your hosting. Also, if you opt for Managed Hosting where all maintenance and technical aspects will be taken up by the WordPress Hosting provider, you might not have as much flexibility or control over the hosting backend and site optimization. At times there will also be restrictions on the kind of plugins and themes you can install.
Although I personally think if you have a WordPress website and are planning to stick to WordPress, the pros of WordPress Hosting outweighs the cons, hands down. But it is essential to be aware of the limitations. I hope this post sheds some light on what WordPress or WP Hosting is and puts you in a better place to evaluate if you need WordPress Hosting for your site or not. If you have any follow up questions or thoughts, please share them in the form of comments in the comments section below, I would be more than happy to address them.
