I’m curious who people are using for managed Wordpress hosting. We currently self-host on Azure but want to move to a managed solution. Who are you all using? Thanks!
I used to run WP sites on an Azure VM but moved to Inmotionhosting (WordPress Hosting - Best WP Plans & Prices | InMotion Hosting) for WP sites a few years ago. Difference was huge. Very high performance for a smaller price.
Do consider running your WP sites behind Cloudflare and use Cloudflare Access to do 2FA for /wp-admin.
I agree with @CGreenTX and use/recommend Flywheel. Been very happy with it for our websites and a couple of customers, though we don’t generally do web design or hosting.
Managed WordPress webhosting is an interesting beast. I’d say #itdepends mainly because of the stack that each webhosts uses are quite different. Some use a classic LAMP stack (Linux, apache, MySQL, PHP) where many use Nginx for the webserver. Each host is different and each stack they use is different and sometimes each product in their lineup is different as well. Add that in with what they are using for caching, what infrastructure they are hosting their setup on (AWS, Google, Self Hosted) and you end up with a pretty complicated thing. Sadly you don’t know until you find one that works with the complicated selection of WordPress plugins, custom code and requirements your site needs. I’ve had to move one client site 3 times until we found a webhost that works well with their setup.
All that to say here are the trusted ones I’ve been using over my career. These are naked links with no affiliate links to them. I have sites with 8million a month visits running on Pagely and I have sites running 500k+ visits on WP Engine (as well as my church website WACC.net hosted on WP Engine) and I have a gaggle of sites hosted on Dreamhost both in their shared offering and their managed hosting (DreamPress)
WP Engine - https://www.wpengine.com
Pagely - https://www.pagely.com
Dreamhost - DreamPress https://www.dreamhost.com
I’d stay away from hosts owned by Newfold Digital, formally EIG (Endurance International) you can find a list of their properties here: Brands | Newfold Digital
I’ve discussed WordPress webhosts a bunch on the WordPress podcast I’ve been producing for the last 8 years, WPwatercooler. Here are some things to watch if you are interested
@markwyse24 You didn’t mention the specific reasons you want to stop self-hosting, which might help point you to solutions that can help solve your unique problems. That said, since you have been self-hosting, you might be interested in a middle way - there are tools that will orchestrate the hosting services needed for WordPress and give you a nice GUI interface to manage it from, like SpinupWP (https://spinupwp.com/) or, if you have lots of sites, GridPane (https://gridpane.com/). You can connect them to your cloud platform of choice.
I’ll second @jasontucker above on WP Engine as a very good platform, with the caveat that they are relatively pricey and if you’re on one of their shared hosting plans with a visits/month limit they will absolutely enforce that limit by charging you overages, and are aggressive on the upsell to larger plans - expect weekly sales calls asking you to upgrade if you go over.
I’ve got several sites hosted on Dreamhost and I’ve found their shared hosting surprisingly better than expected. Their managed WP hosting product, DreamPress, does work as advertised but I’ve found the performance very hit-or-miss so I’m not sure it really justifies the extra cost. Support often suggests or outright states that whatever isn’t working is probably your fault. I’d be happy to host a low-volume, low complexity site on Dreamhost or DreamPress provided large file downloads are offloaded to some sort of CDN and you have caching in place like WP Rocket or Cloudflare in front of your site. I’ve used all the features like the staging environment, backup/restore, etc and they all worked for me.
Thanks for the replies, everyone. We’re looking at managed hosting so that
we can outsource all the updates and management of the backend of our
website. We are a largeish church (~5000) and have moved to an outsourced
IT model for our staff needs and want to continue moving some of these more
specialized IT pieces to others rather than maintain staff positions. I am
the only IT staff and operate from a high-level technology direction role
rather than an “in-the-trenches” day-to-day support role. While I could
continue to self-host I am at the point where I just want to pay someone
else to take care of it.
We havent fully landed on our future wordpress hosting but our main site will likely land at WPEngine. Any subset we have on a cpanel server that we host on site.
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They have a great migration too as well.
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I’m a big fan of WPEngine - they manage everything from Wordpress on down, so you don’t have to trouble yourself with maintaining and optimizing availability, database performance, PHP updates, OS patches, etc.
I switched our site to Strattic (https://www.strattic.com/) and have been pretty happy with the results. It’s a static wp platform, so not technically managed, but works for us.
Just another vote for WPEngine. I’ve been very impressed with the level of support. They weren’t the cheapest we evaluated, but they also reduced our workload and risk significantly.
We started on the Professional plan ($900/year) and have gradually increased until we’re now on Dedicated custom hosting to accommodate all of our sites and content, which isn’t cheap but is absolutely worth it to us.