WordPress hosting isn’t all the same: what are you actually paying for?
At a glance
- WordPress hosting varies enormously. The cheapest option isn’t necessarily the best value.
- Managed hosting includes more than server space, with security, backups, monitoring, updates and technical support all potentially part of the service.
- Performance and reliability matter, particularly for busy or business-critical websites.
- Security needs active management, not simply a hosting account.
- Know what you’re paying for. Compare the service and responsibility included, not just the headline price.
Good WordPress hosting is about keeping your website secure, fast and reliable, not simply putting it on a server.
It is easy to compare WordPress hosting on price. There are providers offering hosting very cheaply, while a fully managed service from a web development company costs considerably more.
On the face of it, both appear to do the same thing: they host a WordPress website. But there is a fundamental difference between providing space on a server and taking responsibility for a website.
At Castlegate IT, we provide high-end, highly available managed WordPress hosting for organisations that regard their websites as important digital assets. The hosting infrastructure itself is only part of that service.
Keeping your website updated and working
A WordPress website consists of WordPress itself, themes, plugins, databases and connections to third-party services, all of which change over time and need to be managed.
Our hosting platforms allow us to schedule WordPress and plugin updates during quieter periods. Automated regression testing checks the website afterwards and, if an update causes a problem, it can be rolled back rather than leaving the site broken. Our developers can then investigate what happened and decide how the update should be handled.
We support this with professional tools covering backups, transactional email, security, spam protection and software monitoring, together with agency licences for a range of premium WordPress services and plugins.
Somebody is watching
The websites we manage are also monitored externally. Our developer on duty checks these systems every weekday morning and investigates anything requiring attention, while automated monitoring continues outside office hours so that we’re alerted if a website becomes unavailable or its performance deteriorates.
This matters because a website can develop a problem without the organisation behind it immediately knowing. We don’t expect our clients or their customers to be the people who tell us that something has gone wrong.
Clients also have access to our support desk and experienced in-house development team. If something stops working, they don’t need to work out whether the problem lies with the server, WordPress, a plugin, email, DNS or a third-party service before deciding whom to contact. They can ask us, and we’ll investigate.
Why is some hosting so much cheaper?
Because it is a different service.
There is nothing wrong with inexpensive hosting when that’s all an organisation needs. A hosting provider can supply the infrastructure required to keep a website online for a relatively small fee.
What it generally doesn’t provide is an experienced development team actively monitoring and managing the WordPress application running on that infrastructure. If an update breaks something, the website slows down, emails stop arriving or a security problem emerges, somebody still has to understand what has happened and deal with it.
With basic hosting, much of that responsibility remains with the website owner. With our managed service, we take responsibility for the ongoing performance, availability, security and maintenance of the website.
So when comparing WordPress hosting costs, don’t just ask:
“How much does the hosting cost?”
Ask:
“What does the service include, and who is responsible when something goes wrong?”
There will always be cheaper hosting. The important thing is to make sure you’re comparing the same service before comparing the price.
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