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WordPress.com vs WordPress.org: Key Differences

Creating your very own website used to be reserved just for those who were familiar with programming languages like HTML and CSS, but as the world goes forward, the online world evolves too. We have reached the point where anyone can have a fully functional website with just a few clicks.

One of the most famous Content Management Systems (CMS) is WordPress. Why choose WordPress? The main reason is that it’s incredibly simple and easy to use. The simplicity of use helped it rise to the top. With a long and rich WordPress history, it’s become the largest CMS today, running more than a third of all global websites.

You may be wondering, what is WordPress used for? Users can get confused as there exist two instances with the same names, wordpress.com and wordpress.org.

Even though they have the same name, there are many differences between them. Keep reading to understand the differences between wordpress.com and wordpress.org.

WordPress.com

WordPress.com is, in short, a service that will take care of hosting your WordPress website for you. With WordPress.com, a user can create a website, and then relax and focus on other tasks at hand, such as marketing or content creation.

You may be wondering, is WordPress a hosting site? In this case, it is, as it is actually hosting your website.

One of the biggest advantages of WordPress.com is that it is completely free to use. Anyone can sign in and start creating a fully functional website. It will, however, be necessary to upgrade from a free plan to a personal plan if you wish to use a specific domain name and remove the WordPress marketing from your website.

👉 Why Do You Need Hosting for WordPress? >>

If you are, however, in need of a more complex website with more features, you will need to upgrade to a more expensive plan. Some of the features are only available with a more high-priced plan. For example, one of the more handy features that a user can get with WordPress Business plan is to purchase a WordPress theme elsewhere and install it on the website.

Overall, WordPress.com is more suitable for those that are new to the world of websites and hosting, and it is also an appealing option for those users that simply wouldn’t like the responsibility of running their website to fall on their shoulders. It is guaranteed that the site will be up and running at any time.

WordPress.com offers the user a simple way of installing the software and it provides its users additional maintenance of the website.

When you are first accessing WordPress.com interface, you will be greeted and encouraged to create an account.

After signing in, you can choose your domain name, and if you plan on registering your domain name elsewhere, you can simply choose the WordPress free option, for-example.wordpress.com. If you already own a domain name, you can connect it to your WordPress.com site through mapping or transfer. That option will be presented to you on the right side of the screen.

Once you are finished with setting up a domain name for your future website, WordPress.com redirects you to choose a payment option. Aside from a free option that you can choose, the cheapest one is a personal plan for $4 per month. With that plan you can get a free domain name for an entire year. Your website will be free of WordPress advertising, and you will get unlimited email support. 

Of course, as the price goes higher, the possibilities multiply. With the $45 ecommerce plan, you can have more advanced features such as SEO (search engine optimization) tools and even earn ad revenue from your site.

👉 The Essential Guide to WordPress Plugins >>

And now, the fun can begin. After choosing the payment plan, you will be redirected to an interface where you can create your very own website. You will be given an option to name your website, update your homepage, confirm the email address, and edit the site menu.

From there, you have several convenient options available. For example, you can use the WordPress app for both Android and iOS mobile phones, which enables editing your site on the go. You can also access a large WordPress knowledge base, which can be tremendously helpful. Furthermore, WordPress.com has a large library of copyright-free photos you can use when creating a website.

On the left side of the WP-Admin Dashboard, you can find some account-related functions. If you wish to change your payment plan, you can manage that under the Upgrades section. All the comments users leave on your website can be conveniently found in this section when you click on the Comments link. The appearance of the website, as well as plugins that you have installed or are available to you, can also be accessed from this section.

Everything is simple and ready to be used. For example, if you wish to install a plugin on your website, simply click on the Plugins link. You will be taken to an interface where you can easily install any plugin you want with the click of a button.

It’s really as simple as that — and it’s easy to understand why WordPress.com became so popular in the world of user-friendly web development. But what about WordPress.org? 

WordPress.org

WordPress.org is open-source software — its code can be accessed and modified by anyone. WordPress.org is known as self-hosted WordPress. That means that the user has more control over the creation of his or her site.

You can install themes and choose from a variety of plugins to make your site. The user is not limited in any way when choosing from a variety of themes and plugins, which can be significant if you are trying to stand out from the crowd. You will, on the other hand, be responsible for the hosting of your site.

👉 Learn How to Use WordPress With Our Most Helpful WordPress Resources >>

With WordPress.org, you can customize any theme you want, and you can even build your own theme from scratch with the help of CSS and PHP.  WordPress.org can make your life easier with features that take care of security, analytics, and more.

If you’re wary of being self-hosted, know that there really isn’t much to be afraid of. There are many WordPress communities and forums dedicated to finding help for any issues that may occur. There are also a number of available resources on WordPress.org as well, both in the form of workshops and articles. 

Additionally, hosting companies offer Managed WordPress services that can relieve you of some of those duties.

How to Use WordPress.org to Create a Website

If you choose to create your website with WordPress.org, the first step in the process would be an installation. WordPress is software which you can download from their official WordPress.org website on your device for free. If you already have a cPanel account, you can download and install WordPress in cPanel using Softaculous or Fantastico.

After installing the software, You will be looking at an interface that resembles the one of WordPress.com. On the left, in a darker box, you can access administration functions, such as updates for your WordPress account, plugins, and themes. From there the user can also review all of the comments from his or her WordPress website, which can vastly improve interaction with the visitors of your website.

Installing a plugin or changing its appearance is effortless. In only a few clicks you can completely change the appearance of your website without worrying about losing your content. The possibilities are endless here — creating the content is complicated enough, and with WordPress you can easily decide what looks best for the content of your website simply by trying various themes. It’s as painless as choosing a pair of pants in a dressing room.

You may be wondering, what is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org? And how is all of this significant to me?

There are advantages and disadvantages with both WordPress.com and WordPress.org, and in the end, all that matters is what kind of website you are building and what are you expecting from your CMS.

One of the main polarities in WordPress.org vs. WordPress.com is that with WordPress.org you can host your own website, while if you are using WordPress.com, it will be WordPress.com that is hosting your website. That makes WordPress.com painless if you are just getting started, but it gives you less freedom than its counterpart. 

👉 Beginner’s Guide to WordPress Performance Optimization >>

With WordPress.com you can have a simple website in a couple of clicks, but for more complex themes and plugins, the user will have to upgrade his or her payment plan. Besides that, there are not a lot of themes the user can choose from if he or she does not upgrade to a higher payment plan. This can raise some concerns if you are trying to make a distinctive website that will be instantly recognizable. 

If you care about the appearance and the variety of plugins, but you would not like to spend a lot of money, then WordPress.org could be a better solution for you. But if you don’t mind that your blog or a website has the same theme as possibly thousands of other websites, and the simplicity of it all is appealing to you, then WordPress.com might be the way to go.

Either way, with either one you get to create a fully functional and great looking website from scratch, without any experience.

However, there is also the option of Managed WordPress. This option lets you have it all — simplicity and a trouble-free experience paired with as much creative freedom as you need.

Consider Managed WordPress Hosting from Hostdedi

Combine the freedom and convenience of WordPress software with a carefree experience of managed website hosting. But what is WordPress hosting? And what is managed WordPress? 

Essentially, the term managed hosting describes a service where your hosting provider takes care of the administration and security of your website, as well as keeping it up and running steadily. As we already know, WordPress websites make up more than a third of all websites on the internet, and a convenient option for WordPress users is to have managed WordPress hosting. 

Some features that make Hostdedi fully managed WordPress so convenient include:

  • Security monitoring that is always on.
  • Support from WordPress experts 24/7 every day of the year.
  • A built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN) with 22 locations.
  • And advanced caching for ultrafast loading of the website.

Hostdedi also offers image compression which can significantly improve the browser loading time. Premium tools with Hostdedi managed WordPress plans include Visual Compare, WP Merge, iThemes Security Pro, iThemes Sync, TinyPNG, and Qubely Pro.

What Hostdedi doesn’t have are overage fees, traffic limits, and metered pageviews. 

Hostdedi offers a variety of fully managed WordPress hosting plans, and with every plan you choose, you have a staging environment, 30-day backups, and unlimited email accounts. You also have an option of a 30-day money back guarantee, so you can be confident when choosing your plan.

Give it a try. Start your free two-week trial of managed WordPress today.

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Why You Need a WordPress CDN

When you hear someone refer to a CDN, they mean a content delivery network. The topic most likely comes up during a discussion about website speed and WordPress hosting. CDNs play a big part in delivering your website from the closest server to your visitors’ browsers. 

You may be wondering, why do you need a WordPress CDN and what does it do for your site?

This post addresses:

  • What a CDN is.
  • The benefits of a CDN for your WordPress site.
  • Options for connecting your site to a CDN.

Understanding CDNs

You may be wondering, what is a CDN? A content delivery network is a feature for the modern web. CDNs deliver most of the content you consume. They distribute the work of delivering content to your web browser. By increasing the number of sources, their closeness, and caching, CDNs make delivering content online more efficient.

In other words, a CDN is a network of remote servers that contain a copy of your website to give access to visitors from anywhere. A CDN’s goal is to minimize the distance between your visitors and the source server for your websites. A CDN stores and optimizes the static content of your website (images, style sheets, etc.).

For example, your hosting company and your website’s server are in San Francisco. Your visitor is in New York. They theoretically receive your site’s content faster than someone residing in Berlin or London. But a CDN uses copies of your site’s images and files that result in the people in all the locations mentioned above accessing your website as fast as someone in San Francisco. 

What are the Benefits of a CDN?

Your site visitors value the page loading speed that comes with a CDN. They get impatient if a website takes too long to load. They might not even wait long enough for the important content to be visible. Speed is an obvious benefit of using a CDN, but it’s not the only one. There are many other benefits to using a CDN.

Crash Resistance and Increased Availability

Together with cached pages, a CDN increases your website’s uptime. It makes it available even if your server is down for a few minutes. A CDN ensures continuous availability of your content and takes some load off of your primary server. It reduces the site’s size via compression of various files, decreasing the bytes it needs to travel the internet. 

Improved User Experience

With the images and other assets like video traveling short distances, the user experience improves. Users expect your site to load within two to three seconds, regardless of their connection’s bandwidth.

A WordPress CDN guarantees that your visitors don’t have to wait needlessly for images to arrive. Critical business interactions like purchases happen more quickly and more reliably. After deploying a WordPress CDN, you should see a reduction in shopping cart abandonment and payment interruptions. 

Improved Search Engine Optimization

Google recently started using site speed measurements as a ranking factor. 

Google measures three main Core Web Vitals:

  • Loading speed.
  • How fast a user can interact with your site or page.
  • Visual stability.

A CDN is crucial for page loads and how fast a visitor can see the relevant content.

The higher your site ranks in the Google search results for specific key phrases, the more likely potential customers will find your site, services, and products.

Options for Implementing a CDN for your WordPress Website

There are multiple ways to obtain a CDN for your WordPress website. You can install a plugin, sign up for a third-party service, or use your hosting company. Managed hosting companies offer CDNs with all their basic hosting plans. 

Plugins

WordPress offers plugins to assist you in connecting and configuring your site’s CDN.

WordPress CDN plugins include:

These plugins require a certain level of technical understanding of CDNs and caching content. In addition, you can only use them after you sign up for an account with a Cloud service provider like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, or Amazon Web Services.

WordPress Plugins By CDN Services

CDN services also publish WordPress plugins to connect with your website natively. They provide a seamless connection between your dynamic content and your static content.

CDN service plugins include:

These plugins focus on the CDN connection and provide good documentation and setup guides. 

CDN with Managed WordPress Hosting 

The best option for a WordPress CDN is to choose a fully managed host that offers the service. Using a CDN through your site’s host is easier because you don’t have to install or set up the CDN. You also will get the best performance from the service. In addition, you’ll get hosting support with the streamlined service. 

How Hostdedi Can Help

Hostdedi provides fully managed WordPress hosting that includes a built-in CDN service. We help you keep your site loading quickly and performing at its best to eliminate visitor frustrations. 

Contact us today to learn more about our hosting services. Or start your free two-week trial of Fully Managed WordPress by Hostdedi today.

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Why Do You Need Hosting for WordPress? Advantages & Features

You’re ready to take the leap and launch your new website, but you keep hearing that you need to choose a hosting service first. So why do you need hosting for WordPress? Quite simply, because your site can’t function without it. 

Who you choose to host your site is as important as why you need a host. This post explains why you need a host with WordPress.

Why Do You Need Hosting for WordPress?

WordPress is software. It runs additional software to bring your content, images, and products to the browser. 

WordPress stores your content in a database. The application server queries the database and formats your content, then pushes it to a visitor’s browser. The person can then read and interact with your content from their mobile device or desktop computer. 

That’s a semi-technical way of saying that you need a service to hold the software and your content to get it online. You need a company to connect your WordPress to the internet pipes. The service listens to calls for your site’s domain from anywhere in the world and delivers the website to the visitor’s browser. 

The solution to making all of those steps happen is a WordPress host. There are many forms of hosting. They come at different price points, offering various levels of services and competencies.

With all the pieces mentioned above, you can imagine multiple points of potential failure and hundreds of ways things can go wrong. Making sure your website works properly for your customers is why you need managed WordPress hosting. 

Advantages of Managed WordPress Hosting

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Arthur C. Clarke, British science fiction writer.

You could rely on magic or work with a managed WordPress hosting company. A managed hosting company makes the internet magic happen for you.

With fully managed WordPress hosting from Hostdedi, you have the advantage of:

  • Speed. Your site is guaranteed to load quickly for visitors. 
  • Scalability. You can build out your site’s features as much as you desire. You also can have as many visitors as you want. Neither will slow your site down.
  • Security. You don’t have to worry about hacks or anyone stealing your customer’s private information.
  • Support. We don’t just launch your site, then leave you. We’re here to help whenever you need it.

With other shared hosting services, you get what you pay for. You might encounter slow site performance, which is detrimental to the success of your website. You might have to deal with an underpowered system, resulting in connection errors. 

The support technicians might not be WordPress experts and can’t help you when problems arise. You’ll end up asking yourself when it’s time to leave shared hosting and upgrade to managed WordPress. 

It’s better to start in the right place from the beginning and save yourself the hassle.

Features of Hostdedi Fully Managed WordPress Hosting

You can count on various features with fully managed WordPress hosting that you don’t get with shared hosting services. These features make the internet magic happen without you needing to think more about it.

As a result, you can focus on building your business instead of worrying about why your website isn’t functioning.

Hostdedi Fully Managed WordPress Hosting includes the following features.

Scalability 

What if you have a special discount sale or you offer something for Cyber Monday or Black Friday? You’ll have a short period with more traffic, more orders, and therefore a need for more server power.

Hostdedi WordPress hosting provides you with a seamless, scalable server configuration. It expands and subtracts according to your site’s traffic and bypasses the capacity limits. In other words, your site won’t crash because of increased traffic.

Everything You Wanted to Know About Auto Scaling >>

Security 

Hostdedi’s security services are essential for the safety of your business and your customers’ information. They provide you with ongoing malware monitoring, automatics SSL, PHP optimization, and automatic plugin updates.

In addition, instant backups secure your work and keep your data from getting lost or corrupted. In other words, Hostdedi protects you and your customers from hacks. 

Speed

Google considers the speed at which visitors receive your content when determining whether your site ranks for a good user experience. Core Web Vitals are now ranking factors for search engine results. 

With a multi-layered caching service built on the latest PHP version, and server caching with Varnish, Hostdedi answers powerfully to your need for speed. It integrates with the content delivery network across its owned data centers and with premium image compression. Hostdedi optimizes your site for fast delivery.

It’s a fancy way of saying that visitors won’t have to wait for your site to load. And Google rewards you for having a fast site.

5 Advanced Techniques to Speed Up Your WordPress Site >>

Support 

Hostdedi provides tools that help with an optimized rollout and configuration of the servers. They provide you with separate staging and production servers. These servers allow you to test new features or a new layout on the staging server.

This server means the trial is out of sight from the public and doesn’t interrupt the existing site’s business. You can use the staging server with the one-click staging or cloning of your site. You can test your new tool or design using all the data from your live site. 

With Hostdedi hosting, you have access to a team of WordPress experts who have experience working with thousands of sites. Put simply; you aren’t alone. We’re always here to help.

Why Hosting Support Is Important >>

Choose Fully Managed Hosting from Hostdedi

Your website contributes to your business’s bottom line, so signing up for managed WordPress hosting is a prudent decision. It optimizes your site’s visibility on the net. It’s kept secure from hacking and corrupted data. And, when something goes wrong, you have a team of experts at your fingertips.

To learn more about Hostdedi fully managed hosting or to host your site with us, contact us today. Or start a free trial of Fully Managed WordPress hosting.

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What Automatic Plugin and Theme Updates Mean for Managed WordPress Hosting

As you may have heard, WordPress 5.5 introduces a User Interface (UI) for toggling automatic plugin and theme updates.

The underlying functionality has actually existed in WordPress since automatic core updates were introduced way back in WordPress 3.7, but for the first time WordPress core is shipping with a user interface for controlling what gets updated.

What Automatic WordPress Plugin and Theme Updates Look Like

As of WordPress 5.5, WP Admin contains a column in the plugins table and on individual themes’ detail screens enabling site administrators to enable (or disable) automatic updates.

Twice a day, WordPress will check to see if newer versions of your installed plugins and/or themes are available and, if you’ve opted into automatic updates, install the latest versions.

If any plugin or theme should fail to update, WordPress will revert that change and send an email to the site’s administrator.

Should I enable automatic WordPress plugin and theme updates?

The short answer, unfortunately, is “it depends.”

If you’ve worked with WordPress for a while, you’ve probably heard (or experienced) horror stories about plugin updates going awry: broken functionality, plugin incompatibilities, or even the dreaded “White Screen of Death” (WSoD) have occurred.

For a hobby site or personal blog, these may be a minor annoyance, but for stores running on platforms like WooCommerce, this can have a significant financial impact.

Ultimately, whether or not you enable automatic updates will come down to your risk tolerance and how much you trust the developers behind your favorite plugins and themes.

Note: For Hostdedi customers, you can rest assured that we’re taking daily backups of both your sites’ code and content. We also have visual regression testing to validate that the update went smoothly. If something goes wrong, we can have your site up and running again in short-order.

With that in mind, here are some tips to reduce the chances of an unattended plugin and/or theme update going off the rails:

Use single-purpose plugins from trusted developers

There are hundreds of thousands of WordPress plugins and themes available, but they are not all built the same.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, maintains several of the most popular WordPress plugins: Jetpack, WooCommerce, Akismet, and more. They also have entire teams of developers and support technicians (“Happiness Engineers”) dedicated to the ongoing development of these plugins.

Likewise, companies like iThemes, Yoast, Sandhills Development, and Awesome Motive have built extremely popular plugins and products installed on millions of WordPress sites, but tend to run smaller teams that may be focused on multiple products concurrently.

Not all plugins have this same level of attention, though. In fact, many WordPress plugins are the result of a single developer scratching a particular itch and sharing their work with the world. The developer may not be interested in providing support, or may not have plans to update the plugin moving forward.

If you’re running a plugin that’s maintained by bigger names in the WordPress community, the chances of a plugin update completely breaking your site is likely far smaller than a small developer who may not have the bandwidth for handling support requests nor a solid QA process.

Your best bet is often to stick to plugins and themes from known entities. You might also consider incentivizing the developers of the plugins and themes you depend on; the plugin may have been free to install, but maintenance of a free plugin still takes time.

Similarly, try to avoid using plugins that try to do too much: the less an individual plugin is responsible for, the less likely it is to break in new and spectacular ways or have conflicts with other plugins.

Never modify plugins or themes directly

Sometimes a plugin does almost everything we want or a theme is almost perfect, and it can be tempting to tweak a value in the source and call it a day.

Unfortunately, the next time that plugin or theme gets updated, these changes are wiped away as WordPress replaces the entire plugin/theme directory with the newly-downloaded version.

A better approach is to extend the plugin or theme using actions and filters (collectively “hooks”) to make adjustments without touching the third-party code.

In the case of themes, we can further extend and/or override parts of the theme by creating a child theme.

Follow the development of critical plugins

If there are a handful of plugins that are crucial to your business, it may not be a bad idea to subscribe to any updates the developers might publish.

For instance, a WooCommerce store owner would likely benefit from subscribing to the WooCommerce Developer Blog — even if you’re not a developer, these blogs often hold details about the new features (and potential conflicts) in future releases.

Some of the larger communities (including WooCommerce) have dedicated Slack teams, where users can interface directly with the plugin developers.

Create (and Test!) Regular Backups

Sometimes, things will go wrong; whether an update goes awry, a site gets hacked, or an editor accidentally deletes a very important post, it’s always a good idea to have backups readily available.

For Hostdedi customers, you can rest assured that we’re taking daily backups of both your sites’ code and content. If something goes wrong, we can have your site up and running again in short-order.

If you want to have a second backup of your site (or first, if your host doesn’t offer backups), you may consider a plugin like UpdraftPlus or BlogVault, which let you schedule backups to external services.

It’s not enough just to create the backup, though; on a semi-regular basis, you should be restoring site backups to a development or staging environment to make sure everything you’re expecting to see is present. Don’t wait until you’re restoring a broken site to discover that some crucial data wasn’t included in your archives!

Automate the Testing of Updates

There’s a big movement towards automation these days, and you can take advantage of these tools and techniques to make sure your sites are always behaving as you expect.

For example, you might use a service like Reflect to write a series of automated tests for your site. Specify key URLs, tell the service where to click and what to look for, and instruct it to run the tests every few hours. Should the tests ever fail, you’ll get an email alerting you to the fact that something has gone wrong.

Of course, if you’re running tests every 12 hours but plugin updates are happening somewhere between those intervals, you may find that your site is broken for hours before you even know about it!

This is where your web host comes in: if you’re on any sort of Managed WordPress hosting plan, your host should be proactive in letting you know if updates are breaking your site.

For example: at Hostdedi, we don’t simply apply every plugin update as it becomes available. Instead, we perform what’s known as Visual Regression Testing before each and every plugin update. Here’s how it works:

First, we determine a set of important, representative URLs on a site: the homepage, shopping carts, product catalogs, blog posts, etc.

Next, we create a copy of your site within our network, and take screenshots of these key URLs; these serve as the “before” snapshots.

Once we have a set of screenshots, we upgrade the plugin on the cloned site, then take fresh screenshots of those same URLs to get our “after” images.

Finally, with both before and after screenshots in-hand, we compare these images to see if anything has changed on any of the pages and/or if any errors have popped up; if nothing has changed, we go ahead and upgrade the plugin on the production site. If however we do detect differences, we alert you (and show our work) so you can decide whether or not to upgrade the plugin in question.

What’s the point of Managed WordPress hosting if I have automatic updates?

Whether you opt for WordPress’ native automatic updates or the more sophisticated offerings included in your Hostdedi Managed WordPress/WooCommerce hosting, keeping your site performant, secure, and online extends beyond just keeping things up-to-date.

Every day, we’re tweaking configurations and building new features to squeeze every bit of performance out of our platforms, built by people who know WordPress inside and out. From auto-scaling to Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), our platform is designed from the ground-up for speed, security, and ease of use. At the same time, we’re partnering with industry leaders to deliver the best of the WordPress community for a low, monthly price and backing it all up with best-in-class, 24/7 support.

Whether you opt to use WordPress core’s automatic updates or trust us to handle them for you, know that Hostdedi is there for you every step of the way.

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When is it time to leave Shared Hosting & upgrade to Managed WordPress?

One of the best things about shared hosting is the low monthly price. One of the worst things about shared hosting is the low monthly price. The reality that both statements are correct presents a constant challenge to customers who are slowly outgrowing their initial decision to use shared hosting. 

Before we start talking about when it makes sense to leave shared hosting and upgrade to a Managed WordPress solution, let’s highlight why so many people start off with shared hosting.

The 3 reasons people start with shared hosting

While there may be many reasons why people choose shared hosting for their first WordPress and WooCommerce sites, there are three that rise to the surface anytime you find yourself talking about hosting.

First, the low price can’t be beat. 

Ask anyone and they’ll tell you they’re looking for lower prices. This isn’t anything new. 

In the days before wireless phones, where people paid for phone lines, there was a constant desire to look for lower prices for both local and long distance calls. That’s partly because no one understood the complexity that was hidden from them. 

Hosting is very similar. Since everything technical has been abstracted away, it all seems easy and therefore, it shouldn’t cost that much. Shared hosting offers monthly hosting at prices lower than a complicated Starbucks order. 

Second, no one knows what resources they’ll eventually need. 

Another dynamic when it comes to hosting is that few people can predict how well their site will do (in terms of traffic) and how that relates to the resources they’ll need. 

This is similar to the challenge that homeowners face when considering solar panels. They’re often asked by professionals to evaluate how many kilowatts of energy they’ll consume in a day or month. Most of us have no idea because it’s a resource that we don’t measure directly or need to keep track of.

When it comes to hosting, it’s hard to know if you’ll need a lot of CPU or a little, whether you will see consistently high RAM utilization or whether it will peak at random intervals. When you don’t know, sometimes it’s just easier to buy an inexpensive plan to start with and see how it goes.

Third, most of us underestimate the need for advanced support. 

The third and final reason most people get their start with shared hosting is that they don’t place a high value on advanced support. If you’ve never hosted anything before, it’s especially easy to hope that everything will work out and you’ll never need to make a phone call.

Most customers of shared hosting assume that support will be there when they need it and rarely test to see if that’s actually true. Then, when they really need support, it’s somewhat shocking to discover that it doesn’t perform the way we assumed it would.

Signs that it’s time to shift to Managed WordPress Hosting

As you can imagine, the signs that it’s time to shift to managed hosting are the very reasons why someone may have chosen shared hosting to begin with:

Low prices create slow performance

Those low monthly prices are available because your website was placed on a shared infrastructure that houses thousands of other sites. The assumption is that you won’t get enough traffic to create a problem, and when you have a problem you won’t notice it. Often you’ll notice your site getting slower over time. That simply means the server your site is on is getting more and more packed. That’s what high density shared hosting is all about – packing the most sites on a set of servers. Slow performance is a sure sign that it’s time to think about making a move. 

Slow performance and connection errors require more resources

Even worse than a site that gets slower and slower over time is a site that stops loading or presents 502 errors (or 503, 504, etc.). Even if you don’t see these errors, your customers will. More importantly, your website will be “down” for those customers, which can impact your brand or revenue. These errors tell you that you need more server resources and likely a different configuration of your setup, but that isn’t available for $4/month.

Poor support experiences mean you need better expertise

The third way to figure out you need to shift from shared hosting to managed WordPress hosting is potentially the easiest one to spot. If you submit a ticket and the majority of the work is put back on your plate, you know it’s potentially time to make a change. Hosting companies that offer managed WordPress plans staff their support with experts who understand what you’re going thru and can help you. Shared hosting often doesn’t want you getting on the phone at all, redirects you to their knowledge base articles, and invites you to solve your own problem.

When is it time to make the move to Managed WordPress?

The answer to the question is rather simple – the time to make the move from shared hosting to Managed WordPress is whenever you experience any of the following:

  • A site that is so slow that customers leave before the page loads
  • A site that seems to consistently get slower, month over month
  • A site that gets connection errors / becomes unavailable for others
  • When support organizations want you to do most of the work yourself

When you experience any of these situations, you may want to check out Hostdedi Managed WordPress or WooCommerce hosting.

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