7+ Best Managed WordPress Hosting Compared [2021]

Are you looking for a managed hosting provider for your WordPress website?

A managed WordPress host takes care of all the technical stuff of your site and allows you to concentrate on your business.

In the article, we’ll compare the best-managed WordPress hosting companies and help you to choose the right service for your website.

Here’s a table of contents if you’d like to jump ahead:

1. WPEngine
2. SiteGround
3. Bluehost Optimized
4. DreamPress by DreamHost
5. HostGator Cloud
6. Liquid Web
7. Pagely

What Is Managed WordPress Hosting?

A managed WordPress hosting solution provides the best infrastructure for your WordPress website and helps you with the essential tasks, including daily backups and security checks.

And unlike a shared hosting service, it assists you in optimizing your site for speed and high performance.

So let’s take a look at the advantages of using managed hosting:

• Fast and secure compared to shared hosting environments.
• Daily automatic backup of your website and database.
• Expert support team to help you to solve your WordPress-related problems.
• Takes care of the core WordPress and plugin updates.

And here are some of the cons of managed hosting:

• Limitations on using specific plugins that may slow down your website.
• It’s expensive as compared to shared web hosts.
• You can host WordPress-based websites only, not even simple HTML sites.

Things to Look For in a Managed WordPress Host

First of all, you should understand one thing: we don’t recommend a managed hosting service provider to everyone.

So if you’re just starting out, you can easily use a regular or shared hosting solution like Bluehost. They also provide free domain and professional email with their service.

However, if you’ve got a high-traffic website or you’re not confident with the technical aspects of running a WordPress site, then you should use managed WordPress hosting service.

But with so many hosting providers out there, how to decide which managed hosting company is suitable for your needs?

So here are the essential factors to look for before choosing a managed host:

• Fast, reliable, and secure service
• Daily backups of your website
• Free SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and CDN (Content Delivery Network)
• Expert customer service team

And, don’t forget to look for hosts that specifically offer WordPress plans like the ones on our list.

Best Managed WordPress Hosting in 2021

By now, you should have made up your mind that you need to buy or migrate to a managed WordPress hosting for your website.

So without further ado, let’s take a look at the best options.

Note: Our sister site WPBeginner conducted speed tests on some of the hosting service providers listed here. And we’ll be using those results to give you a better idea about each of them.

1. WPEngine

WPEngine is a fast and reliable managed WordPress hosting provider. It’s one of the most popular managed hosts out there.

WPEngine comes with some fantastic features like daily automated backups, Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates, disaster recovery system, and handles core WordPress updates.

And it also offers the Genesis framework and 35+ StudioPress themes with every plan. Isn’t that great?

Not only that, but they also provide free CDN to all their customers. This will help your website’s page load time to be faster as compared to your competitors.

Let’s take a look at the speed test result of WPEngine:

WPEngine is known for providing excellent customer support. And they’ve got a team of trained WordPress experts who are ready to help you at any time of the day.

The startup plan of WPEngine starts at $25 per month. It allows you to host just one website with a traffic limit of 25,000 per month. And you can always upgrade to a higher plan to host more sites.

Planning to migrate your site to WPEngine but scared of the technical stuff involved? Don’t worry! Their expert team will handle the migration process for you at no additional cost.

2. SiteGround

If you’re looking for a WPEngine alternative, then you can certainly use SiteGround managed hosting. And the best part is they’re one of the officially recommended hosting providers by WordPress.org.

And even though SiteGround is a popular shared hosting provider, they also offer a powerful managed hosting solution too. They use the latest technologies to make sure your WordPress website is fast and suffers zero downtime.

So let’s take a look at some of the features of SiteGround:

• Free SSL certificates by Let’s Encrypt
• Automated WordPress installation
• Automatic Updates
• Create unlimited professional email accounts
• Free Cloudflare CDN to make your site faster
• One-click staging tool to create a copy of your website, do necessary changes to it, and then make it live
• Free site migration service

And like most hosting providers on our list, SiteGround takes daily backups to make sure your data is always safe. They keep up to 30 backup copies which can be restored quickly. You can even manually backup your site with a single click.

Here’s the speed test result of SiteGround:

You can purchase the basic or startup plan of SiteGround at $4.99 per month. However, that limits you to host just one website. Plus, free site migration isn’t included with this plan.

Instead, we recommend you use the GrowBig plan which is priced at $5.95/month. And that way, you’ll get all the features.

3. Bluehost Optimized

Bluehost is one of the most popular shared hosting service around. Just like SiteGround, it’s recommended by WordPress.org.

However, we’ll not be talking about their shared hosting solution here; instead, we’ll take a look at their WordPress Optimized service called Bluehost Optimized.

Before talking about the features of Bluehost Optimized, let’s take a look at the speed test results:

Bluehost Optimized service uses VPS technologies and thus makes sure your site is secure and extremely fast.

They offer a free domain with all their plans. Also, you’ll get free CDN, daily backups, SSL, and business email service. And you can manage everything from their enhanced cPanel.

The basic plan of Bluehost Optimized is called wp standard and will cost you $19.95 per month. This plan allows you to receive up to 100 million visits per month.

4. DreamPress by DreamHost

DreamHost, known for their reliable service, is one of the oldest hosting companies in the market. And, they’re also officially recommended by WordPress.org.

DreamHost offers a managed WordPress hosting plan, known as DreamPress. Here are some of the amazing features provided by DreamPress:

• Built-in caching system
• 1-click WordPress install
• Automatic backups with one-click restore option
• Free migration service with every DreamPress plan
• Pre-installed Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates
• Each plan comes with free SSD storage
• 24/7 expert support for solving your problems

So now let’s check out the speed test results of DreamHost:

So as you can see, the test site loaded in less than a second which is quite impressive.

And along with all the fantastic features, DreamHost also provides a free domain with privacy protection to all its customers.

The pricing of DreamPress hosting starts from $12 per month. They also offer a money-back guarantee with all their plans.

5. HostGator Cloud

HostGator is a well-known shared hosting solution that’s popular with bloggers and small businesses owners.

One of the services of Hostgator for high traffic sites is Hostgator Cloud. It’s a cloud hosting service that loads your website 2 times faster than your normal shared host.

Some of the features of HostGator Cloud are:

• Integrated caching to speed up your site.
• Easy to understand dashboard to keep track of everything.
• Offers cPanel to manage things like email, domains, and more.
• More than one data center to house their servers

So unlike most hosting providers, Hostgator Cloud doesn’t provide website backup and restore feature. However, you can purchase CodeGuard addon to keep your website data safe.

Finally, let’s talk about the pricing plans of Hostgator Cloud. The Hatchling Cloud plan comes with just 1 domain and starts at $4.95/month. However, their Baby and Business plans do not have any such restrictions.

6. Liquid Web

Liquid Web is a fully managed web hosting company. They provide complete service for your WordPress websites.

Plus, they’re one of the few companies to offer managed WooCommerce hosting service for your online stores.

And Liquid Web uses the latest technologies including PHP7 and NGINX web servers. Also, each of their hosting plans comes bundled with an image optimization plugin to help you to improve the speed of your WordPress website.

So here’s the speed test result of Liquid Web:

Liquid Web offers tons of useful features like automatic daily backups, staging environments site, SSL certificate, 24/7 support, and free migration service.

You can host a single website with them for $9.50 per month. And to host more sites, you’ve to upgrade to a higher plan.

7. Pagely

Pagely is a reliable managed hosting company. They’re the ones who came up with the concept of managed WordPress hosting.

It’s powered by Amazon Web Services so it uses modern tech to host your website. So you can expect your WordPress site to have unbeatable high performance.

They’ll handle every technical aspect for you including the core WordPress updates, plugin updates, speed optimization, and WordPress security. Plus, you don’t have to worry about taking backups as your entire site and database will be automatically backed up on a daily basis.

And Pagely offers some developer tools like SSH, GIT, WP CLI, and REST API for their advanced users. However, most of them are available on their higher tier packages only.

And Last but not least, let’s talk about the pricing of this managed host. Well, compared to other hosts, Pagely is the most expensive service provider on our list. And the pricing of their basic plan starts from $499 per month.

Final Thoughts

We hope this WordPress hosting comparison helped you choose a managed web hosting service provider for your WordPress website. For most, we can conclude that WPEngine is the best managed WordPress hosting you can use for your website.

But if you’re looking for a more affordable alternative, then you can go with SiteGround hosting. It’s another web host that we can highly recommend.

If you want to know how many people are visiting your website, then check out our tutorial on how to track site visitors coming to your WordPress site.

And if you love comparison posts, make sure to check these ones out as well:

• WPForms vs Contact Form 7
• Wufoo vs WPForms Compared
• WPForms vs Formstack Compared
• Tableau vs WPForms
• WPForms vs SurveyMonkey

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