In this guide we’re going to talk about one option you have when hosting your WordPress website: managed WordPress hosting.
If you have a therapy website built on WordPress, or you’re looking to create one, you probably know that website hosting is something that’s needed to make that happen.
Website hosting is a service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible on the Internet.
A hosting service provides the technologies and support needed for the website to be viewed on the Internet.
But as anyone who has had a website for a few years can tell you, not all hosting is created equal.
And after consulting with therapists for many years, I’ve heard some pretty terrible stories about how some hosting companies couldn’t provide straight answers for support issues, try and upsell other services, or took hours away from their clients on support calls.
So, when it comes to hosting your WordPress website, you’ve got two options: shared hosting and managed WordPress hosting.
Let’s talk about these hosting options to help you understand the difference and why hosting is something you shouldn’t skimp on.
Table of Contents:
- What is Shared Website Hosting
- What is Managed WordPress Hosting?
- The benefits of Managed WordPress Hosting
- My Recommendation for Managed WordPress Hosting
- All of Our Website Care Plans Include Free Managed WordPress Hosting
What is Shared Website Hosting?
Shared website hosting is a type of web hosting service where multiple websites are hosted on a single server.
The server is typically owned and maintained by a hosting company, and the hosting company rents out space on the server to its customers. Each customer is allocated a certain amount of storage space and bandwidth, and they are responsible for maintaining their own website and files.
Shared hosting is often the most affordable option for hosting a website, making it a popular choice for therapist websites.
Because the cost of the server is shared among many customers, it allows the hosting company to offer lower prices than other types of hosting.
However, because multiple websites are sharing the same server resources, there is a risk that one website’s high resource usage could affect the performance of other websites on the same server.
Because we maintain over 50 websites with our Website Care Plans, we can see when these shared hosting services fail. We’ll see the red alerts go up that a few websites are down, and 99% of the time it’s the ones that are hosted on Go Daddy.
Additionally, in shared hosting, the security of all the websites is the responsibility of the hosting company and the customer. It is important to choose a reputable hosting provider that offers robust security features and monitoring to keep the website secure.
A few months ago we saw a string of our clients’ websites hosted on Go Daddy became red-flagged by Google due to malicious code being installed on the websites.
With shared hosting, if one site gets impacted, it could mean your site gets impacted
What is Managed WordPress Hosting?
Ok so let’s talk about the other option for hosting your WordPress website: managed WordPress hosting.
Managed WordPress hosting is a type of hosting service that is specifically optimized for hosting websites built using the WordPress content management system (CMS).
This type of website hosting typically includes a range of features and services designed to make it easier to run and maintain a WordPress website.
Some of the key features of managed WordPress hosting include:
- Automatic updates for WordPress and its plugins
- Advanced security measures to protect the website from hackers and other types of malicious attacks
- High-performance servers optimized for running WordPress websites
- Easy integration with popular WordPress tools and services
- Daily backups of the website’s files and databases
- Technical support that is specifically tailored to WordPress websites
Managed WordPress hosting plans are generally more expensive than standard web hosting plans, but they offer a higher level of performance, security, and ease of use for WordPress websites.
Businesses, bloggers, and e-commerce websites often use managed WordPress hosting to ensure their website runs smoothly and is well-protected.
What Are Some of The Benefits of Managed WordPress Hosting?
Ok so now you know a little more about what exactly Managed WordPress hosting is. But why should use it for your private practice website?
So let’s talk about the benefits.
Managed WordPress hosting offers several benefits, including:
1: Improved Performance:
Managed WordPress hosting providers use servers that are optimized for running WordPress websites, which results in faster loading times and better overall performance.
Here are a few ways that managed WordPress hosting can improve the performance of a website:
- Optimized servers: Managed WordPress hosting providers use servers that are specifically configured to run WordPress websites. This includes using high-performance hardware and software, such as solid-state drives (SSDs) and caching plugins, which can significantly improve the speed and responsiveness of a website.
- Caching: Caching is a technique that stores frequently accessed data in memory, so it can be quickly retrieved when needed. Managed WordPress hosting providers often use caching techniques such as object caching, database caching, and full-page caching to improve the speed of a website.
- Content Delivery Network (CDN): CDNs are networks of servers that are distributed across multiple locations. They store and deliver website content from servers that are physically close to the user, which can significantly improve the loading times of a website. Many managed WordPress hosting providers offer CDN services that are integrated with their hosting plans.
- Minimizing resource usage: Some managed WordPress hosting providers use technologies such as containerization, and limiting the number of requests to the server to minimize resource usage and improve performance.
- Automatic updates: Managed WordPress hosting providers often automatically update the core WordPress software, plugins and themes, which helps to ensure that the website is always running the most recent and secure version of the software. This can improve the performance of a website by fixing bugs, improving security, and making sure that the site is compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
- Monitoring: Managed WordPress hosting providers often provide monitoring services that can detect and resolve performance issues in real-time, which helps to ensure that a website is always running at its best.
2: Enhanced Security:
Managed WordPress hosting providers offer advanced security features to protect your therapy website from hacking and other malicious attacks.
Here are a few examples:
- Automatic updates: Managed WordPress hosting providers often automatically update the core WordPress software, plugins, and themes. This helps to ensure that the website is always running the most recent and secure version of the software, which can help to protect the site from known vulnerabilities and exploits.
- Advanced Firewall: Many managed WordPress hosting providers use advanced firewalls that can block malicious traffic, such as hacking attempts and DDoS attacks, before it reaches the website.
- Malware scanning and removal: Managed WordPress hosting providers often use malware scanning and removal tools to automatically detect and remove any malware that may have been installed on a website.
- Two-Factor Authentication: Many managed WordPress hosting providers offer two-factor authentication as an option to add an extra layer of security to the login process.
- Backup and restore: Managed WordPress hosting providers often provide automatic backups of the website’s files and databases. This means that in case of a security incident or other problem, the site can be quickly restored to a previous, known-good state.
- SSL certificate: Many managed WordPress hosting providers offer SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certification, which encrypts the communication between the website and its users, and helps to protect sensitive information such as passwords and credit card numbers from being intercepted by hackers.
- Expert support: Managed WordPress hosting providers often have specialized support teams that are well-versed in the security best practices for WordPress websites and can provide guidance and assistance in securing a website.
Overall, managed WordPress hosting offers a number of security features and services that can help to protect a website from a variety of potential threats, and keep the site running smoothly and securely.
3: Technical Support:
Managed WordPress hosting providers offer specialized support that is tailored to WordPress, meaning you’ll get help from experts who know the ins and outs of the platform.
This is one of the main reasons why Private Practice Elevation has partnered with Flywheel hosting (affiliate link) for hosting all our client’s websites.
I know that no matter what issue we may run into on a website, I have a team of professionals who will quickly (emphasis on quickly) be able to diagnose the issue and provide a solution.
They’ve helped us restore crashed websites, address performance issues, and identify plugin conflicts that were negatively impacting our clients’ websites.
With both a chat and support ticket feature, Flywheel is like having a team of hosting developers in my back pocket!
4: Scalability:
As your website grows and attracts more visitors, managed WordPress hosting providers can easily scale your resources to accommodate the increased traffic.
As a website attracts more visitors, it can start to experience performance issues if it doesn’t have enough resources to handle the increased traffic. Managed WordPress hosting providers can help to mitigate these issues by providing the ability to easily scale resources to accommodate the increased traffic.
When a website experiences an increase in traffic, it may require more server resources such as CPU, RAM, and storage. With managed WordPress hosting, the hosting provider can quickly and easily increase the amount of resources allocated to the website to handle the increased traffic. This is known as scaling up, or vertical scaling.
Scaling up can be done in several ways:
- Increasing the size of the server: This can be done by upgrading the server’s hardware or increasing the number of CPUs, RAM or storage.
- Adding more servers: This can be done by adding more servers to the hosting environment, which can help to distribute the load and improve the performance of the website.
Additionally, some providers use a technique called auto-scaling, which automatically detects when the website is experiencing high traffic, and automatically increases the resources allocated to the website. This allows the website to handle the increased traffic without the need for manual intervention.
Managed WordPress hosting providers can also help to reduce the resources required by a website by optimizing the website’s performance and reducing its overall resource usage. This is known as scaling down, or horizontal scaling.
This can be done by:
- Optimizing the website’s code and database
- Reducing the number of requests to the server
- Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Overall, managed WordPress hosting providers can help to ensure that a website has the resources it needs to handle increased traffic, by providing the ability to easily scale up and scale down the resources as needed.
5: Ease of Use:
Managed WordPress hosting providers usually offer easy integration with popular WordPress tools and services, making it simple to set up and manage your website.
Managed WordPress hosting can often eliminate some of the plugins and tools that you’d need to use in order to optimize or improve website performance when NOT using this kind of hosting.
Because things like caching, performance tools, and backups are built right into the platform, you don’t need to worry about setting that up yourself.
All this makes it simple to set up and manage your private practice website because you don’t have to spend time searching for and configuring these tools and services on your own. This can save you time, reduce the risk of errors, and ensure that your website is set up and configured correctly from the start.
6: Focus more on growing your private practice:
By outsourcing the technical aspects of running your website to a managed WordPress hosting provider, you can focus on running and growing your business.
When you’re trying to grow your business, it’s important to identify the things that you don’t enjoy doing, don’t have the expertise to do, or the time to do them.
The technical side of websites is often one of those things that most private practice owners want to outsource.
And if you find the right Manage WordPress hosting provider – one that’s going to be a partner in your business – it can mean less time spent on technical issues and more time doing the things you love to do to grow your business.
My Recommendation for Managed WordPress Hosting:
At Private Practice Elevation, we’ve been working with the amazing team at Flywheel for over 3 years now.
I consider them an absolute asset in my own business and I can’t say enough great things about their support, as well as the great service they provide.
While they mainly focus on website agencies and their clients, you can easily use Flywheel to host your own therapy website, on one of their “tiny” plans.
Plans start at just $15/mo and in my opinion, their support team is worth that alone. Not to mention the great performance your website will enjoy.
In fact, we’ve built websites on Flywheel servers, but have had clients want to host their site on their own Go Daddy account and have seen just how much faster Flywheel hosting is.
Click here to learn more about Flywheel. (affiliate link)
All of Our Website Care Plans Include Free WordPress Hosting
I believe that this type of hosting is a must-have for any private practice website using WordPress.
That’s why we’ve included hosting as part of every Website Care Plan we offer at Private Practice Elevation.
If you’d like to offload all your WordPress maintenance, security, hosting, and content updates to a team of WordPress professionals, then check out our Care Plans here.
