Buyer s Guide to Managed WordPress Hosting

Buyer s Guide to Managed WordPress Hosting

dfsdsdf A good managed hosting service makes it easy to manage your WordPress website. It takes the burden of configuration, performance tunning and security management off your plate so you can focus on your website content and achieving your website objectives. IN THIS EBOOK, YOU LL LEARN: ww ww ww ww What is fully managed WordPress hosting Why fully managed WordPress hosting may be the best choice for your website What are the important criteria you need to consider when reviewing fully managed WordPress hosting services How DreamPress measures up against the criteria

Simply reviewing vendor websites will not give you the full scope of important features you need to consider when evaluating WordPress hosting options. The objective of this ebook is to assist you in your evaluation, especially when considering fully managed WordPress hosting options. Table of Contents PART 1: FULLY MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING 4 Why Fully Managed Hosting? 5 WordPress Hosting Myths 8 WordPress Hosting Requirements 10 PART 2: DREAMPRESS 16

PART 1: FULLY MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING

PART 1: Fully Managed WordPress Hosting Why Fully Managed Hosting? It helps to know what types of hosting options are available when looking for a hosting service for your WordPress website. This ebook explains what fully managed WordPress hosting is and why it is worth considering. First of all, what is the difference between fully managed WordPress hosting and other alternatives? For purposes of this ebook, we ll group WordPress hosting into three general categories: Self-managed hosting. Completely self-managed hosting is primarily for software developers who want total control of their hosting environment. Self-managed hosting requires a hosting platform with full administrative rights to the server (i.e., root access) that you can find on many VPS, dedicated and cloud servers. It is completely possible to setup WordPress in a self-managed hosting environment, but it is generally not recommended for anyone other than software developers or very technical individuals. Partially managed hosting. Partially-managed hosting is a more insulated environment that will provide a simple way to install WordPress. These hosting services include a tool to install WordPress, such as Softaculous, Fantastico or one of their own tools. This definitely helps you get started with your website, but from then on you are pretty much on your own. Partially managed hosting includes services that do not allow a custom domain name as well as those that allow you to 5

PART 1: FULLY MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING use your own domain name. This category of hosting represents the largest of the three hosting options and includes many shared hosting services. Fully managed hosting. Fully managed hosting solutions go much further at installing, setting up, configuring and providing overall management of the WordPress hosting environment. So why use managed hosting for your WordPress website? Setting up your own website can require quite a bit of effort. You need to be a sort of jack-of-all-trades, especially if you are creating a website for your small business, your organization or your personal interests. Creating a nice looking website, writing compelling content, handling search engine optimization to get visitors to your website, and understanding quite a few details of a hosting service are demanding. Many give up after a short while because of the difficulty. The benefit of fully managed WordPress hosting is that it dramatically minimizes the need to be a knowledgeable hosting user. This allows you to concentrate on the look of your site, the content, both which are very important, and how to get visitors to your site so that you can achieve your website objectives. That s enough work, right? For example, a good fully managed WordPress hosting service will be tailored for good performance. Performance is pretty important. It can improve your search 6

PART 1: FULLY MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING engine results, the number of website visitor traffic you have and it can encourage the length of their visit. It also adds to your credibility when your site is speedy and quick. One challenge that many WordPress website users experience is that over time, their WordPress site can slow down. There are a number of reasons for this, some which you as the content creator have control over. But some are tricky to solve and can be handled by a good managed WordPress hosting service. Another challenge with shared hosting services is that you can be impacted by other shared hosting users on your same server. When their traffic goes way up, it can means your website performance goes down. There can also be security issues with a shared hosting environment. For example, sharing the IP address with other users can mean your site gets blacklisted if another user was sending out spam email which gets them blacklisted, since this is done at the IP address level. If you plan to use an email address with your domain name, this problem can prevent you from sending and receiving email from that email account. The bottom line is that a fully managed hosting service takes much of the headache and pain out of hosting, so you can focus on your website, your content, your target visitors, and reaching your website objectives. 7

PART 1: FULLY MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING WordPress Hosting Myths It helps to review some WordPress hosting myths that may have been true at one time but either is no longer the case or you need to hear the other side to get a true picture. So let s review a few myths to help you as you evaluate the type of hosting service you want for your WordPress website: Myth #1: An inexpensive hosting service is all you need for WordPress. There are many inexpensive partially-managed WordPress hosting services. These may be fine to start with, but there are many things to consider to really get the true picture of the total cost of your site. With partially-managed hosting services, you are going to need to set up, configure and tune your WordPress site quite frequently. If you have unlimited time, go for it. It may not be the best option, however, for small business, non-profit organizations and other organizations. Cheaper is not always better. You need to consider the total cost of the service. Myth #2: The unlimited resources of shared hosting is enough for WordPress. There is no such thing as an unlimited service. This is a marketing tactic that was started and copied by many of the general purpose web hosting vendors back in the mid-2000s. Some hosting vendors still use this language. The reality is that these messages are a bit misleading there is no unlimited anything. Don t be swayed by thinking you are getting unlimited resources just because the marketing language on the vendor s website says so. 8

PART 1: FULLY MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING Myth #3: Traditional general purpose hosting vendors do not provide fully managed WordPress hosting. One idea is that you need one of the newer WordPress-only hosting services to get fully managed WordPress hosting. Not so. A select few general purpose hosting companies offer excellent fully managed WordPress hosting. They definitely should be considered. Some of these companies have been hosting WordPress for over 10 years and have a lot of experience with WordPress hosting. Myth #4: To get good WordPress performance, all you need is a good caching plugin. While caching plugins are helpful, they are not the only solution to improve your WordPress website performance. In fact, most fully managed WordPress hosting services provide caching at the hosting service level. Some provide multiple levels of caching to provide exceptional performance. In addition, many of the caching plugins have a lot of options to tune the plugin for performance. This can get quite complex. Having your hosting vendor handle this for you takes a lot of the burden off your plate to deal with these configuration questions. Myth #5: To get good WordPress technical support, you are going to need phone support. Phone support is nice, but what is more important is the quality of the technical support team that you are working with. The goal of some fully managed WordPress hosting services is to provide VIP-level support with highly qualified support agents to help you with your WordPress hosting issues. It doesn t do any good to be able to talk to someone on the phone if they can t help you because your question isn t a simple or the best they can do is send you a link to a help desk article or put you on a list to get a callback from a more qualified support professional. Quite often, companies with phone support have more junior level agents that take the initial call. 9

PART 1: FULLY MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING WordPress Hosting Requirements OK, now that we have covered a few of these myths, let s review a checklist of requirements you are going to want to consider when evaluating fully managed WordPress hosting vendors. Reliable, dependable, stable. First and foremost, you need a hosting service that is reliable. It does no good to select a hosting vendor that has downtime issues. Downtime will definitely affect your reputation with search engine vendors and with your visitors. Keep in mind that no one is up 100% of the time, but the more downtime is minimized, the better off you are. One of the best ways to check this is to consider the reputation of the hosting vendor. Architecture optimized for performance and designed for WordPress. As we mentioned earlier, performance is very important to your visitors and to search engines. Caching plugins definitely do help, but the best caching solution is when it is done at the hosting service level. There are a number of caching alternatives, such as Varnish, Memcached, Xcache and more that can be used at the hosting service level. Really good host level caching will employ multiple levels of caching. Provide you with PHP version options. A good fully managed WordPress hosting service will give you the option to choose which PHP version you want to use. PHP 7 has made excellent progress in performance over previous versions of PHP. It will significantly improve your website s speed. The question is Is it is stable enough for my website?. PHP 5.6 is still considered the most stable release, but you may want to experiment with PHP 7. Another alternative is HHVM which was created by Facebook 10

PART 1: FULLY MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING as a PHP alternative. It has also improved performance quite a bit and will speed up your site over PHP 5.6. If you choose to use either PHP 7 or HHVM, make sure you test it with the plugins you want to use to insure compatibility with your website. No technical limits to the size of the WP database. Some hosting vendors will restrict how large your WordPress database can become. If your current WordPress site is large and growing or your goal is to create a sizeable website, you don t want to be given an irrational size of how large your database can grow. Instead it should be a limit of how large your hosting service storage is. Do not arbitrarily place bandwidth limits or number of visitors per month restrictions. There are two limits here that can affect your website. One that is easy to tell is a restriction on how many visitors you can have per month. The second is harder to detect but is also problematic some vendors may not cap your bandwidth but will throttle how much traffic you can have on your site. As you grow your site traffic and run promotions that creates traffic spikes, both of these limits could affect you. The first would potentially put you in a more expensive hosting category or charge you an overage fee. The second could start creating errors in the communications between your server and your visitor s browsers, slowing down their performance. Built-in security. Security is a major issue with any open source application. Because WordPress is open source, hackers can more quickly find holes. And because WordPress is so popular, it tends to be a popular target for hackers. There are three security areas you want to review with a potential hosting vendor: 11

PART 1: FULLY MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING DDoS Protection. Do they provide any DDoS protection? Denial of service attacks happen frequently on the web nowadays. An effective DDoS attack can take down your website with ease. Small hosting vendors may not be able to afford the expensive network appliances that are required to block DDoS attacks. When they are in place, these network appliances go a long way to blocking the majority of DDoS attacks so you don t have to worry about them. Web Application Firewall. A web application firewall is a network appliance, plugin, or filter that applies a set of rules to any conversation between your website and the outside world. Generally, these rules cover common attacks such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection, both which can affect a WordPress website. A good fully managed WordPress service will use a web application firewall with custom rules to block common attacks on WordPress sites. WordPress Security Releases. As soon as a new WordPress security breach has been discovered, the WordPress development community will work on a fix. They are generally very good about coming out with a security release soon thereafter. The key question is how quickly does the hosting vendor provide updates to new WordPress security releases? The quicker is the better when it comes to protecting your site. Offer a CDN. Content distribution networks (CDN) are another way to boost performance. CDNs will cache static and even dynamic content in the cloud throughout a large network, so your website content is available at a location closer to your visitors to improve the performance of your site. Some CDNs also add web 12

PART 1: FULLY MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING application firewall services and DDoS services to protect your website. Check to see if a CDN is available with the fully managed hosting services you review. Free or inexpensive SSL. In the past, SSL was primarily used on ecommerce sites to protect customers credit card information. Now, however, SSL has become important to get good search engine rankings and has become a common practice to protect all communications between you and your site visitors. One of the best options available today are the open source, free Let s Encrypt SSL certificates. Except for high end ecommerce sites, these certificate are sufficient for the majority of websites. Check to see if the hosting vendor you are evaluating supports Let s Encrypt SSL certificates. Ability to use any plugin or theme you choose. Some fully managed WordPress hosting services restrict which themes and plugins you can use on your website. If your specific needs are not meet with a theme or plugin that falls into their approved list, you could be out of luck. Why limit yourself? You should be able to choose whatever theme or plugin you want to use. Easy upgrade from shared hosting. If you decide to start with shared hosting for your WordPress site, it is always useful to find out how easy it is to upgrade to a fully managed hosting service if one is available. Good fully managed hosting vendors will provide an easy upgrade. 13

PART 1: FULLY MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING Migration service. If you already have a WordPress site hosted elsewhere, but now are looking for a fully managed WordPress hosting service, it is helpful to find out if the hosting vendor offers a WordPress migration service. Whether a free or a paid option, this can be one of the easiest ways to migrate a site. WordPress website migration can be tricky. WordPress pre-installed and preconfigured. As we mentioned in the introduction, one of the best things about a fully managed WordPress hosting service is one the not only pre-installs an instance of WordPress to get started, but will also preconfigure it for you. This makes site management super easy. Easy to use control panel. Another form of onboarding is helping you to quickly learn how to use the hosting vendor s control panel, where you set up different options and manage your account. Some control panels can be difficult to navigate and use. cpanel, for example, has been around for over 15 years. Its user interface hasn t changed that much and can be difficult to learn how to use for novice users. Built-in backup. Another important thing to do to protect your website is to do regular backups of your WordPress data. Some hosting vendors provide enhanced backup services. Alternatively you can use a third party backup plugin to manage your backups. In either case, you will want to store your backup data on a different server 14

PART 1: FULLY MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING than your hosting platform. That way, if anything happens to your data, you have a good backup to restore your site. Secure Shell access. For advanced users, it can be helpful to have secure shell access (SSH) to your website hosting service. This is not for everyone, but can be useful for advanced users, like setting up a software repository of your WordPress website on your server. WP-CLI support. When SSH access is available, it can be useful to use WP-CLI to manage your WordPress site. Again, this is an advanced feature for power users. Great technical support. Access to knowledgeable WordPress support representatives is critical. You never know when something may go wrong and you need assistance to figure out the problem and the solution. Is it a WordPress issue or a hosting issue? A good fully managed hosting service will provide you with 24 hour 7 days a week access to WordPress knowledgeable support gurus. In addition, they will offer different methods to contact them based on the timeliness of a response you need. These can be phone, chat, email, trouble tickets and support forums. Plus you will want to make sure they have a good help database of articles that you can review when searching for a solution. Reputation is worth everything. A good reputation for WordPress hosting is always a good measurement of a potential fully managed WordPress hosting vendor. 15

PART 2: DREAMPRESS A Fully Managed WordPress Hosting Service

PART 2: DreamPress Fully Managed WordPress Hosting DreamPress is a fully managed WordPress hosting service from DreamHost. To help you evaluate DreamPress as a potential service for your WordPress website, we have a score card below of how DreamPress measures up to the key features you want to consider for your hosting needs. DreamPress Fully managed WordPress hosting Reliability, stability. DreamHost has been in the business of hosting WordPress websites for over 10 years. DreamPress is an enhanced version of the WordPress hosting the company has done for quite a while. It is very reliable and stable. Architected for performance. DreamPress runs on powerful isolated servers. It has a multi-layer caching architecture designed for performance. And it is configured with auto-scaling memory to handle increased performance needs. It is extremely fast compared with other hosting services in its price range. PHP version options. DreamPress comes standard with PHP 5.6 optimized with Opcache, which is pretty fast. Alternatively, you can easily choose PHP 7 or HHVM in the control panel if you wish to use one of these versions. Both are even faster! Technical limits to the WordPress database size. The only technical limit to the size of your WordPress database is the size of the DreamPress storage, which is 30GB. Bandwidth or visitor/month restrictions. DreamPress has no bandwidth or visitor per month restrictions. It is designed to easily handle your website s traffic spikes. This is not true with many other managed WordPress hosting services. 17

PART 2: DREAMPRESS FULLY MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING Security. DreamHost has a sizeable investment in a network appliance that blocks DDoS attacks. This is available for all its hosting services, including DreamPress. The hosting service includes a highly-tuned web application firewall to block WordPress application specific attacks. It runs on isolated servers to give you complete protection from other users. And DreamHost is one of the few vendors who does a great job automatically updating WordPress to the latest release so that you get all new security updates quickly. CDN. DreamPress offers two CDN solutions. First, it offers support for CloudFlare, an excellent content distribution network with multiple points of presence around the world. CloudFlare also includes support for blocking DDoS and some WordPress attacks. CloudFlare is free for non-ssl, static websites. A premium version is available for SSL powered and dynamic content websites. 200 150 100 50 0 DreamPress BlueHost Average Response Time GoDaddy HostGator SiteGround WP Engine Using indstry test (Loadstorm) starting at 5 users and peaking to 100 users with approximately 6000 browser requests sent to the same WordPress stie on each server. Results shown here were done with higher end WordPress hosting services. Secondly, DreamPress offers DreamSpeed CDN that works with its DreamObjects cloud storage. DreamPress comes with a WordPress plugin that will automatically upload all your images, image thumbnails, videos, PDFs, documents and other media through the WordPress media uploader to DreamSpeed. This means any media from 18

PART 2: DREAMPRESS FULLY MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING your website will be available to your visitors at incredibly fast speeds when you choose to use the DreamSpeed CDN. This supports both non-ssl and SSL-enabled websites. Let s Encrypt SSL. DreamHost was one of the first WordPress hosting vendors to support Let s Encrypt SSL. It is available for free and can be easily configured through the DreamHost control panel. Choose any plugin or theme. DreamPress does not limit or restrict use of any WordPress theme or plugin. You are completely free to choose whatever will work best for your site. Easy upgrade from shared. DreamHost has created a simple upgrade tool to migrate your WordPress website from shared hosting to DreamPress. You even have the option to migrate back to shared hosting if you find you no longer need DreamPress. Migration service. DreamHost is currently beta testing a new migration service to help you migrate your WordPress site from any third party hosting service to DreamPress. Preinstalled and preconfigured. DreamPress pre-installs WordPress and preconfigures it for you. The greatly minimizes the effort to setup and configure WordPress to run optimally. Easy to use control panel. DreamHost is one of the few vendors who has created their own control panel. Significantly easier to use than the more common cpanel, the DreamHost control panel offers a new user interface and responsive design that allows you to manage your hosting from mobile phones to tablets to large monitors. 19

PART 2: DREAMPRESS FULLY MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING Built-in enhanced backup. DreamPress comes with another plugin that allows you to use DreamObjects for backing up your WordPress data. DreamObjects is a very inexpensive storage service that is hosted on completely different servers so your backup data and your WordPress hosted data are on different servers. SSH and WP-CLI. DreamPress supports both Secure Shell access and WP-CLI, the open source command line interface for WordPress. Both are features for our advanced users. Tech support. DreamHost has one of the best WordPress support teams in the business. Technical support is available 24/7 and includes chat, email, tickets, a support forum and recently updated help database with lots of information to assist you with your hosting needs. Reputation. DreamHost is well-known for their expertise in WordPress hosting, with over 10 years experience and hosting now over 800,000 WordPress websites. One of the DreamHost engineers took the lead on the release of WordPress 4.5, which was made available in May 2016. Probably the best credibility for DreamHost s WordPress hosting is one that WordPress.org gives out. DreamHost is one of only four vendors to make the recommended list of WordPress hosting solutions that WordPress.org refer users to. When considering a good managed hosting service, it is a good idea to take into account the key features you are going to need before you make your decision. 20

fsdsdf About DreamHost Since 1997 DreamHost has helped individuals, small businesses, entrepreneurs and developers the world over bring their dreams to life on the Internet. From domain registrations to web hosting and powerful cloud computing services, more than 400,000 customers trust DreamHost to be their online home. Packed with excellent value, DreamHost is a great place to launch a blog, website, or online application into the webosphere. DreamHost hosts over 800,000 WordPress websites and has developers on staff who contribute to WordPress core development. DreamHost s highly optimized managed WordPress hosting service, DreamPress, delivers exceptional performance, simple management and fanatical WordPress customer support. Learn more at www.dreamhost.com. 2016 DreamHost, Inc. All rights reserved.