Why Your Next Site Might Use Managed WordPress Hosting

You need a website for your new business, and you don’t know where to start. So you ask your friends and colleagues for advice.

Some people might suggest a website builder that offers simple click and drag design. Others, however, will pull you aside and tell you the best option is WordPress—though you’ve heard that it’s harder to build a site with WordPress, so you’re confused. Making things even more difficult, your tech-savvy friend takes you aside and suggests that not only should you use WordPress, but you should choose managed WordPress hosting.

What do you do? In this article, we’re going to look at the different choices for a business site and explain why your tech-savvy friend might be on to something.

Wading Through the Options

Setting up a new business website has a lot in common with relocating to a new city for a job. When you move, you have to decide whether to get on your feet as quickly as possible by renting a furnished suite or to invest a little time in finding your dream home.

A furnished apartment won’t be fancy—it won’t have furniture that you like and will be pretty basic. Plus it’s not really yours, so when you eventually move you’ll have to start all over. At the same time, you’ll have the bare essentials that allow you to take care of your other business without wasting a bunch of time.

However,  if you buy a house, it will take more time—but you can be choosy. It can be as big as you want, you can fill it up with eclectic furniture, and you can have as many people over at any time as you want. And if you want to move, you can take all of your stuff with you.

Building a Website is Just Like Choosing Your Home

With a website builder like Wix or Squarespace, you can get up and running fast—just like that furnished apartment. On the flip side, you’ll have a lot of limitations on functionality, design options, and scalability. Plus when you leave, you’ll have to leave everything behind. They also tend to be rather expensive for what you get.
Meanwhile, there is a bit of a time commitment when using WordPress, because in a sense you’re building your online home. But with that investment of time comes a lot more options.
What’s the bottom line? Sometimes you might choose a website builder if you need to get going fast and you just need a dead simple website (and if you do, consider Namecheap’s option). But if you want a bit more out of your website, including e-commerce, mailing lists, custom design, members-only areas, and so forth—or you might in the future—you might give WordPress a try.

What’s So Great About WordPress?

Some people think WordPress is just a bunch of hype.
But let’s look at the numbers. WordPress powers over 1/3rd of all websites worldwide. Some estimates put the number at closer to 50%. And people choose it because you can build everything from a simple blog to a massively complex media site or e-commerce shop.

Unlike website builders that offer a handful of different designs, WordPress has thousands of themes that can be customized to your heart’s content. There are even more plugins to allow you to drop in additional functionality at any time. Many themes and plugins are free through WordPress.org, and third-party developers offer many more premium options.
Another huge selling point is that WordPress is a true content management system. It stores all of your web content, including articles, landing page information, photos, and other media in a database. This makes it far easier to add and update content on the fly. It’s also easier to change your design since content and design are separate.

And if all that wasn’t enough, WordPress is free open-source software that is constantly being updated by volunteers all over the world. So it’s always evolving to meet new design and functionality requirements, such as mobile-friendly design, social media connectivity, and more.

Building Your Online Business Home

So you’ve decided to go with WordPress. Great!

WordPress is software that needs to be installed on your choice of website hosting. For a starter business site, most people choose to go with either shared hosting or managed WordPress hosting.
What’s the difference?

Shared hosting is a one-size-fits-all approach. It’s an option for websites of all sorts, which allows a lot of flexibility. Because you have access to cPanel (a dashboard which you use to control your hosting environment), you have more control over your website’s databases and files, you can install different website platforms (including WordPress, but there are other options), and you can manage your own website settings.
However, you will also have more responsibilities, including the need to install WordPress yourself. With some providers, you’ll have to download the software and then upload it to your server via FTP (File Transfer Protocol), and manage some database settings.
To help cut down on the confusing bits that come with installation, some shared hosting (such as Stellar Hosting at Namecheap) offers an app like Softaculous within cPanel to handle the installation. By walking you step by step through the process, Softaculous makes installation quite simple.

Along with installation, with shared hosting you’ll have to consider security and keeping things updated, and you do have the traditional constraints of shared hosting in that if the server goes down, your website will as well. 
Managed WordPress hosting handles the installation for you. It also provides a user-friendly dashboard that allows you to update, manage, and backup all of your WordPress installations later on. That means you don’t have to fiddle with cPanel to manage your sites.
Once your site is up and running, there are other differences to consider as well.
Shared hosting can suffer from server spikes if another website suddenly gets a lot of traffic, slowing down all sites on the server end. This is why most shared hosting accounts have disk quotas and limits on bandwidth, and may throttle traffic if your site goes viral. So when your site becomes popular, shared hosting won’t scale along with you.

With most managed WordPress hosting, the servers are configured differently and optimized for WordPress sites. With cloud technology, your site is isolated from other sites and the servers employ elastic scaling to support traffic spikes. That means your site is less likely to experience slowdowns, and you may have higher data usage quotas and server storage space. And when a talk show host gives your site a shoutout, you’ll be able to reap the benefits of all that new traffic.

For more help making this decision, check out our article on different hosting options.

Consider EasyWP for Your WordPress Site

Namecheap’s managed WordPress hosting platform is EasyWP.

With EasyWP, you’ll get 10GB of SSD storage for your website, easy backups, and no traffic quotas. It also comes with our renowned 24/7 customer support.

Your customers rely on your website to be fast and efficient when they visit. And Google rewards sites that load faster with better search rankings. With EasyWP, we offer 3 levels of advanced caching in a plugin that works with our cloud hosting to bring increased speed and reduce page load times to your website. The best thing is, you don’t need to do anything. The plugin comes installed with every EasyWP installation.

EasyWP is hosted on Namecheap’s own cloud platform. Our platform gives your websites remarkable uptime and speed. Your data never leaves our data centers, so you can rest easy knowing Namecheap’s security and technical staff are keeping an eye on things. We’ve done the hard work in building our cloud platform in our datacenter, using our technology. And we’ve done this hard work because it delivers you more value. That’s why EasyWP costs a fraction of the competition.
And we price EasyWP extremely competitively. Your EasyWP website will be $1.00 for your first month, $3.88/month thereafter. If you prefer, you lock in big savings by purchasing EasyWP for one year for just $29.88, a saving of 35%. That’s a full year of WordPress hosting for less than what one month costs with some of our competitors.

Why not give EasyWP a try today?