5 Best Managed WordPress Hosting Providers for 2024 (Compared)

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If you are looking to move your WordPress website to one of the best-managed WordPress hostings, here are the best managed hosts for WordPress:

Before you get into a lot of detail, let me tell you how I got into trying more than 10+ web-hosting companies to compile the most comprehensive list of best-managed WordPress hosting on the Internet.

All the way back in 2008, I started ShoutMeLoud on a shared hosting company.

With time, however, things changed, and ShoutMeLoud became popular, and thus more traffic. I knew I had to move to a more powerful hosting that could handle the growing needs of my blog.

Eventually, I made the switch to managed WordPress hosting. I bounced through a few managed hosts until I found Kinsta, which also currently hosts ShoutMeLoud.

Kinsta is one of the best-managed WordPress hosts, but I’ll also list some other good ones at the end of this post.

If you’re a newbie, I think you can still go with a cheap WordPress host. If your blog gains some traffic, you can look at managed WordPress hosting.

The best-managed WordPress hosting providers

So now that you know the things I look for in a good managed host, here’s my list of the best WordPress managed hosts for your high-traffic blog.

1. Kinsta

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Kinsta is what I use to host ShoutMeLoud, and is recommended as the #1 managed hosting by WordPress experts.

They built their hosting plans specifically to make heavy-duty WordPress sites run fast. They use Google Cloud infrastructure, is fully integrated with Cloudflare and all the best technologies like Nginx,  PHP8+, Redis, and Object cache. This makes sure your site is blazing fast.

As popular as ShoutMeLoud has become, I can still get page load times under 1 second with Kinsta hosting.

Their support is also top-notch. When I moved ShoutMeLoud to Kinsta, I had some problems with older plugins not working with PHP 7, and guess what, Kinsta’s CEO stepped in to help. That’s their level of dedication.

Kinsta also offers other great features like:

• Data centers on different continents so you can pick the location that’s best for you.
• Daily automated backup & on request backups
• Security – multiple firewalls, DDoS, and security scans to keep your site safe
• Easy-to-use staging area
• Free wildcard SSL certificates
• Competitive Pricing
• Excellent customer support available 24/7/365

Speaking of pricing, here’s what you can expect to pay at Kinsta:

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Their cheapest plan starts at $35 per month and goes up from there. I’m on their Business 4 plan with custom pricing – an advantage of being their early customer.

From personal experience, I can say that Kinsta is a top managed WordPress host. You can read a detailed review of Kinsta hosting here.

2. WPEngine

WPEngine is another top-rated managed host. One nice thing about them is that they offer a more affordable plan than Kinsta. I have had some trouble with them in the past, but I know a lot of other people who are very happy with their services.

If your blog isn’t big enough to need Kinsta’s power, you can go with one of WPEngine’s plans to still get a lot of the benefits of managed WordPress hosting while paying less money.

WPEngine’s cheapest plan starts at $35 per month for one WordPress site and allows up to 25,000 visits per month. So if your blog is still getting less than 25,000 visits, it’s a good, affordable option.

All WPEngine’s hosting plans include helpful features like:

• Built-in caching. WPEngine has its own Evercache technology to speed up your site
• Staging areas
• Backups and one-click restore points
• Security scans
• Expert support

Keep in mind that all their plans charge you per visit, unlike Kinsta which allows unlimited visits. That’s why I only recommend WPEngine hosting for blogs that receive well under 25,000 visits per month. Otherwise, you’re in danger of getting hit with big charges like I did.

Here’s what WPEngine’s plans cost:

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3. WPX Hosting

WPX Hosting is another well-regarded managed WordPress host with an excellent reputation for fast performance.

All of the WPX Hosting plans come with:

• Unlimited site migrations (performed manually by WPX Hosting staff)
• Free SSL certificates
• Server-level caching
• Integrated CDN
• Automatic backups
• Free email hosting (most managed WordPress hosts don’t offer this)
• Staging sites
• Malware scans and a hack-fix guarantee

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For its features and performance, WPX Hosting offers generous prices. The plans start at $24.99 per month (or $20.83 with annual billing), which is similar to other managed WordPress hosts. However, there’s one key difference – WPX Hosting lets you host up to 5 sites on its entry-level plan, whereas most other hosts limit you to a single site. The only limitation of WPX is limited number of data center location, however they mitigate this by offering free CDN, which takes care of faster speed through the globe.

So if you have a few sites that you need to host, this offers really good value.

4. Page.ly

Page.ly is a good managed WordPress host that allows you to have unlimited visits to your site like Kinsta.

They have seven different plans, which makes it easy to pick the one that’s right for you. Just make sure you pick one that gives you enough bandwidth, or you can always add more bandwidth as you need.

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All Page.ly’s plans have these basic features:

• Total updates for your WordPress software and plugins
• Built-in Varnish caching
• Daily backups
• Developer tools like GIT and WP-CLI
• Staging areas

Page.ly’s cheapest plan is $199 per month.

5. Pressidium

Pressidium is a good option for entry-level bloggers who still have a limited budget. Their plans start at $21 per month, which allows up to 10,000 visits per month. Remember, like with WPengine, you’re limited by visits when you host with Pressidium.

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Their plans all include these features:

• Automatic updates
• Staging sites
• Backups
• Caching and CDN support

If your site gets under 10,000 visits per month, Pressidium is also a good, affordable option.

A few other managed WordPress hosting options

The ones I listed above are the best, but if you’re still interested in some more options, here’s a quick list of more good managed WordPress hosts:

• WPX Hosting
• Presslabs
• SiteGround

What does Managed WordPress Hosting mean?

As the name suggests, this type of web hosting is specifically designed and optimized for WordPress websites.

While I was checking and pondering over some WordPress server optimization slides by one of WordPress.com’s engineers, I realized that there are many things that we can do to scale our server to handle high traffic.

With shared hosting or managed VPS, executing such an optimization is not possible which is why we face tons of issues with slow speed or never-ending downtimes.

Now, this, my friends, is where specialized hosting for WordPress comes into the picture.

This specialized hosting is called “Managed WordPress Hosting”.

For beginners, a Managed WordPress Host is much better than any other entry-level host. (Despite this, WordPress blogs usually start with shared hosting due to their low pricing.)

Managed WordPress Hosting takes care of every inch of server optimization for hosting a WordPress blog/website. Their technical teams are trained to manage WordPress servers, and the best part is, that these teams know the ins and outs of WordPress blogs.

So when you are talking to their customer support regarding issues, be sure to get an instant solution.

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Managed WordPress Hosting companies offer server-level caching and CDN, so you don’t need to rely on WordPress cache plugins to keep your server well-optimized.

This allows your site to load faster, plus, there will be no hosting related technical hassles for you to deal with!

Isn’t that great?

Now, these types of hosting platforms are perfect for any business WordPress blog, big WordPress sites, or non-technical people (mostly where spending money on hosting is not an issue).

Let’s look at some of the advantages of using Managed Hosting for WordPress.

Benefits of Managed WordPress Hosting:

“Managed Hosting” can be defined as the daily management of WordPress by the web host, so that you can focus on other things like creating epic content).

With this kind of hosting, technology-minded professionals will make sure that the critical WordPress platform updates, plugin updates, and other site-specific updates are immediately installed as soon as they are made available.

They also handle speed optimization and backups, as well as some other tools that are meant to enhance your experience when using WordPress.

Security

The professionals who provide people with Managed WordPress services understand this platform in a better way than the typical web host. They know how to use it in the most efficient manner possible too.

With regards to keeping your site secure, they will enhance it to provide you with additional security, while also managing the firewalls they create.

Support

These hosting providers will also provide you with fantastic customer support, which is the most significant advantage when you compare Managed WordPress Hosting providers with the cheaper or free WordPress hosting services.

Many hosts only provide people with space, but they don’t have a good understanding of the WordPress platform itself. If you happen to face a problem, these providers might not be able to help you accurately.

With Managed WordPress Hosting, for a price, you will be able to contact someone who understands the platform really well and will be able to provide you with the help you seek efficiently and effectively.

Let me tell you about a great experience I recently had with Kinsta (Managed WordPress Hosting) when they changed their server architect and moved ShoutMeLoud to their new platform:

• I had a few old plugins installed, and the site was slowing down due to PHP compatibility issues. Their support team looked into this day and night, helped me to find all the plugins which were outdated, and wherever possible, they also added extra coding to ensure the site was smooth.

In my ten years of blogging career, I have never had such a remarkable hosting experience.

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…you can see what I’m talking about.

Daily automatic backups

It can be very stressful when all the content you’ve worked so hard on is wiped out because of a technical issue.

How painful would that be?

Think of how damaging it would be to lose all your site’s data and have to try to recreate everything.

It gives me jitters just thinking about such an incident.

Having backups for your WordPress blog is of utmost importance.

With a good managed WordPress host, you’ll never have to worry about this. All the hosts on this list will back up your site every day so that your data is always safe.

Not only will it be backed up, but if you ever have any issues, you can easily restore to a previous day’s backup. Moreover, with them, you have little to worry about WordPress security.

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Sometimes, scary things happen such as:

• your site gets hacked
• the database crashes
• everything on the site somehow gets lost

A normal hosting service won’t be able to help you.

There’s a very high chance that you will lose everything. Not having a backup is a massive problem here.

With Managed WordPress Hosting, you don’t have to worry about losing your data. The nightly backup feature is commonly included with the price you pay for the service.

Most of these companies have offshore backup services, which is free and cost you no additional money.

It’s very frustrating when everything you have worked for is lost because of something unfortunate. Creating a backup assures you that things will be fine even if the face of an adverse crisis.

Caching to make your site fast

I’ve talked about the best WordPress caching plugins before, but when you choose a good managed WordPress host, they’ll do caching at the server level.

This is the most effective form of caching. With server-level caching, you won’t even need to install a plugin to make your blog fast.

Staging areas so you don’t break your site

Here’s why staging areas are essential for bloggers:

They let you test out changes to your site before you make them on your live site.

So if you want to add a new plugin, or try out a new theme, you can do all the set up in your staging area and then simply apply the changes to your live site when you’re happy with everything.

It’s a really good trick for making changes. Most shared providers don’t offer this service, so this is something unique you get when you pay for managed hosting. On Kinsta, creating and deleting staging site is also easy.

Which managed host for WordPress should you pick?

It’s always hard to recommend because your choice should depend on your site’s needs. I believe you should try to stay with shared hosting as long as you can. Once your site grows big enough, I always recommend Kinsta if you can afford it. You get fantastic support, fast speeds, and unlimited visits.

If your budget isn’t big enough for Kinsta, you can always look at something like WPXHosting.

No matter what, you must consider your own needs as they apply to things like pricing, features, visits, support, and scalability.

Have you used one of these managed WordPress hosts? Which is your favorite? I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments.

Also, read:

• Which is the Top WordPress Hosting for High Traffic Sites?
• Biggest Limitation of SiteGround Shared Hosting

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