2018's Best "Managed WordPress Hosting" Services

If I were to rattle off my likes and dislikes, you’d find coffee, elephants, WordPress, and office chair volleyball among my favorites. Oh, and I really love my cat, Zumba, but who doesn’t love energetic calicos?

As for my dislikes, well, I hate cooked spinach, over-zealous or factually inaccurate posts on social media, humidity — and going cross-eyed over software updates. I can’t be alone, right?

If you also love WordPress but don’t necessarily want to maintain every aspect of the software or your server, you might be a match for WordPress managed hosting. Let’s go over why we chose the hosts we did to top our reviews for 2018.

InMotion Hosting has long since been among our favorite WordPress hosting providers in general, so it should come as no surprise they lead the charge in managed service offerings. There are many reasons to choose WordPress as the content platform for your website and many reasons to opt for a managed web host to help you maintain it. Chief among those reasons is often performance. The WordPress software is powerful, and InMotion has the hardware infrastructure to match. What’s more: They tout SSD storage for up to 20x faster page load speeds, and their team is keeping an eye on your site and server 24/7.

With their price point and legacy of reliability, they’re aptly suited for individual customers, SMB owners, and enterprise clients alike. If performance and agility are on your list of needs for your WordPress site, InMotion’s managed WordPress offerings can help you get the job done.

Let’s just say, SiteGround has their bases covered when it comes to business-focused web hosting. Their offerings run the gamut — from business-class email hosting to enterprise-grade dedicated servers — and so does their clientele.

Something we loved about this particular host is their staging area. As members of a fast-moving online media company, we understand the need to swiftly adapt to all kinds of changes on the fly, and this includes updating our websites. SiteGround’s flexible staging area makes it easy to test out site changes and deploy updates.

While just about everything said about SiteGround’s services could be said of Liquid Web, this host has a higher-end client base. The most noteworthy difference: Liquid Web doesn’t offer shared hosting. Touting strictly cloud-based and dedicated servers automatically kicks their price point up a few notches, but the performant hardware, diligent technical support, and premiere security monitoring resources deem them worth the cost.

If you’re in need of a premium web hosting experience, look no further than Liquid Web’s managed dedicated or VPS services. Their Heroic Support® will be there to help you scale your business through every stage.

WPEngine’s differentiator: They only offer WordPress hosting. For some folks, this may be a deal-breaker, but for managed WordPress hosting seekers, WPEngine’s performance-intensive servers and managed services for WordPress pack the perfect one-two punch. Their cost is on the higher end of the spectrum to offset the power of the hardware, the level of support, and the various optimization technologies at customers’ disposal. This is offputting to first-time site owners, but perhaps, just what the hosting doctor prescribed for enterprise websites.

The #1 Domain Name Registrar, GoDaddy leads in a lot of hosting niches. Their WordPress offering is no different. Managed services come standard across all WP plans!

What makes GoDaddy so appealing as a starter managed WordPress host is their simplicity of service: Annual plan holders get a free domain name registration, their team will install and set up WordPress, and you never have to worry about updating the WordPress Core. It’s stress-free hosting service at its finest — and GoDaddy’s pricing is hands-down some of the best you’ll find as an entry-level website owner.