If you’re a blogger looking to build a website, one website building platform stands out amongst all others as the option of choice: WordPress.
Originally designed for blogging and now the world’s most popular website software, it has everything you need to create an exciting, feature-filled blog.
However the success of any blog – or website – depends upon the quality of its hosting.
So let’s take a look at eukhost, a fully managed WordPress hosting provider, and what it offers.
What is fully managed WordPress hosting?
WordPress hosting is a specialised form of hosting dedicated to meeting the specific requirements of the WordPress content management system.
The CMS is composed of core software, a MySQL database, a separate theme and a group of separate plugins that users install to provide additional features. This structure means the website runs multiple scripts concurrently and this level of processing can impact the performance of the server so that the website can load slowly and perform sluggishly.
WordPress hosting overcomes this by optimising the server for its demands.
At its best, this is done by providing high-performance Intel Xeon processors and SSD drives and through the use of NGINX cache, HTTP2, PHP7+OPcache and more. These are features that you won’t normally expect to find in servers designed to host a range of different platforms.
While WordPress hosting is designed to meet the needs of the platform, ‘fully managed’ is a service designed to meet the needs of the blogger. There are three levels of website management you’ll need to keep up with on your WordPress blog.
The most important to you will be to manage the content and look of your site, which you’ll do via the WordPress admin panel.
You’ll also need to manage your hosting and email and carry out other administrative and maintenance tasks, which are done via your control panel.
Finally, there’s the more complex task of managing the server itself, for example, updating and patching the operating system and making sure your server is performing at its best.
Fully managed hosting is when these latter, server management tasks are completely taken care of by your web host. With this in place, the burden of running a blog is significantly reduced.
Above and beyond
While these are the main characteristics of fully managed WordPress hosting, some web hosts go above and beyond, providing features that make the other areas of website management much easier, delivering services that keep your site secure and providing tools that help your blog grow.
Here are some of the things that you should look out for.
WordPress Toolkit
WordPress Toolkit is a control panel tailor-made for managing WordPress websites, providing everything you need to keep on top of your blog and hosting. It features tools like a one-click installer that enables you to install WordPress in less than 30 seconds; a multi-site manager that lets you manage multiple blogs from a single interface; and it enables you to install security patches automatically, preventing your site from being left vulnerable to attack.
One of its most useful attributes is that it enables you to make changes to your site, including installing new themes or plugins, in a development environment. This way, you can check if everything works fine before making it live. As a result, changes that could otherwise have taken your blog offline or stopped it from functioning properly can be avoided. What’s more, if issues arise during a change, you can revert to previous versions, so you don’t need to start again from scratch.
As many bloggers aren’t IT savvy, one of the most helpful features of WordPress Toolkit is that it comes with a built-in security advisor. This lets you check all your WordPress sites for security issues and fix them in a few clicks. It even has a one-click hardening function that applies best practice security measures in just a single click. Of course, a good web host will also defend your server from hacking and malware with a robust firewall and provide a range of other security features, like free SSL certificates and spam filtering.
Email hosting
While the domain name you buy for your blog can also be used for your email address (e.g., [email protected]), surprisingly, not all WordPress hosting plans come with email hosting included. If you want to make use of your professional brand email, it’s a good idea to choose a plan that does. This will save you the expense of having to pay for a separate email hosting account and will mean you can manage your email, e.g., add new addresses, set up forwarding and auto-responders, etc., in the same place you manage the rest of your hosting.
You should also make sure that any email hosting that is provided is fit for purpose, i.e., can you integrate it with Outlook and other clients? Can you access it via webmail? Does it have calendars, contacts and tasks? Is there a spam, malware and phishing filter?
VPS upgrades
Shared WordPress hosting is ideal for most blogs and will provide all the storage and resources they need. Most WordPress hosting providers do offer a range of plans, increasing in size, should your blog grow and your audience get bigger. However, if you become so successful that you have a very large audience or that you run several blogs that between them get a lot of traffic, then shared WordPress hosting might no longer be sufficient. In which case, you’ll need to move up to the next level of hosting, a virtual private server (VPS).
Though VPS is far superior to shared hosting, the difficulty is that only a few web hosts, like eukhost, have decided to offer their customers managed VPS WordPress hosting. So, if you want all the benefits of fully managed WordPress hosting with all the power and performance of a VPS, then these are the service providers to go with.
Free daily backups
Blogs are often a labour of love that people work on for years. Losing all those posts not only means years of work disappear; it can mean your audience and hard-earned income can vanish with them. Your posts and even your entire website can be lost because of issues like cyberattacks, hardware failure, software corruption or even accidental deletion.
There is, however, a simple solution that can ensure disasters like these are soon solved – and that’s to take regular backups of your website. With some fully managed WordPress hosting solutions, you’ll find free daily backups included in the plan, so you won’t need to pay extra for the service. Indeed, you won’t even have to create the backups yourself, they’ll be done automatically for you and will be waiting in case you ever need to use them.
24/7 support
The majority of bloggers will happily admit that while they are generally good at creating the public face of their website, they can be out of their comfort zones when looking after the backend. This means that when something goes wrong, they are going to need help to put things right. For this reason, bloggers need to choose a WordPress hosting plan that comes with free, 24/7 technical support as standard. This way, expert support is on tap, all day, every day, to get your problems solved. In addition, look for a host that also provides support in the form of knowledgebases and community forums – and of course, has a helpful blog of their own.
Conclusion
Fully managed WordPress hosting is ideal for WordPress blogs and other websites, providing optimised performance and taking care of the challenge of server management. The best web hosts, however, go above and beyond this, providing a wide range of other features that make running your website easier, making it more secure and providing you with support along your blogging journey.
For more information visit eukhost.com/wordpress-hosting.