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 tuning 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 managed WordPress hosting Why managed WordPress hosting may be the best choice for your website Myths about WordPress hosting What are the important criteria to consider when reviewing managed WordPress hosting services

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 managed WordPress hosting options. Table of Contents PART 1: MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING 4 Shared WordPress Hosting 5 Managed WordPress Hosting 6 WordPress Hosting Myths 9 Managed WordPress Hosting Requirements 11 PART 2: DREAMPRESS 19 2016 DreamHost, Inc. All rights reserved. 25

PART 1: MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING

PART 1: Managed WordPress Hosting With WordPress being so popular as a website building tool, there are now many WordPress-specific hosting options available to power your website. With so many choices, it is becoming more difficult to make a decision of which type of WordPress hosting is best for you. Let s explore the difference between the two most popular options classic shared hosting and managed WordPress hosting to help you make an informed decision. Shared WordPress Hosting Hosting your website on classic shared hosting is a great way to get started with WordPress. Shared hosting is a mature solution and generally very inexpensive. You can add multiple domains to one hosting service and nearly all shared hosting solutions include a tool that makes it easy to install WordPress. Also, most include email you can use with your domain, with options to add SSL certificates and many other options. 5 On the flip side, there are some drawbacks to shared hosting. When you host your website on shared hosting, you are literally sharing your server with many other users anywhere from 200 to 2000 others depending on the threshold set by the vendor. (Generally, the lower the price the higher the number of users per server.) If any one of those other websites on your server starts getting heavy traffic, it will slow down all other sites on that server (including yours!). In addition,

PART 1: MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING you are sharing a single IP. If another website goes into email spam-blast mode and gets blacklisted, guess what, your site gets blacklisted too until the hosting vendor jumps through hoops to clear the IP. Same thing with DDoS attacks if one of the sites on your shared IP gets attacked, it impacts your website too. Another major challenge related to shared hosting is that you end up doing a lot of the work yourself to set up, manage and configure your server. You have to choose caching, security and backup plugins, and then configure them properly. And remember, each of these plugins will consume resources needed to power your website, which are already limited with shared hosting. Some VPS hosting services are similar to shared hosting in that you can easily install WordPress. VPS offers isolated resources and are less prone to the problems of shared hosting. They often provide more configuration control, enabling users to further fine tune their hosting. Generally, this requires a more sophisticated user with knowledge to configure their service. Managed WordPress Hosting The managed WordPress hosting market is pretty broad, with solutions that serve the needs from small business to large enterprises. To be fair in this comparison, we ll limit our discussion of managed hosting to those solutions designed for small business and similar sized organizations. 6

PART 1: MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING So what is managed WordPress hosting? This type of hosting solution is one that delivers greater performance, being hosted on more isolated server resources more often than not on VPS servers. Being on isolated resources means you are not sharing a server environment with others, you usually get a dedicated IP, and fewer users are on the server hardware. You don t get impacted by other users spam blacklisting or direct DDoS attacks. Plus more effort is given by the managed hosting vendor to delivering 99.9+% uptime and reliability to managed hosting. In addition, managed hosting means pre-installed, preconfigured services that minimize the amount of time required to get started. These services provide caching, security and backup solutions for you. Better yet, most of these services are much better than what you can get from a plugin being done at a server level. Varnish caching for example, runs on a layer in front of WordPress itself and thus is far superior than what any caching plugin can provide. They re also more efficient in terms of server processing than plugins are. DDoS and brute force attack mitigation, web application firewalls, and automated WordPress updates are some of the features you get with managed WordPress hosting that you may or may not get with shared hosting. Included advanced backup solutions tend to store your backups offsite or in another location (safeguarding them against local server failure). In short, you can spend your time focusing on creating great website content, not worrying about how to fine tune a caching plugin. Managed hosting services also tend to offer advanced features that you don t find in shared WordPress hosting. One of the biggest is staging support. Staging allows you to clone your site, test out new themes, plugins or customizations, without impacting your live site. When the changes look good, a single click pushes them live. 7

PART 1: MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING If something unforeseen happened to this new version of your website, you can roll back to a previous version just as easily. Most of all, managed hosting solutions focus on providing a higher level of support than what you get with shared hosting. When you need help, you get support faster and you get the help you need from more experienced support agents. So what s the downside of managed hosting? Well, they are more expensive than shared hosting options. Because you get a lot more, there s a commensurate increase in cost. There are usually more limitations than with shared hosting. For example, many of the managed WordPress hosting services for small business only support one domain per account. To be fair, this is done for performance and security reasons. Having a single site will give much better performance than loading up the server with many of them. And isolating a domain means that if it does get affected with some type of malware, that malware isn t going to be spread to your other domains. It remains isolated. 8

PART 1: 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 true 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 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 these WordPress 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. 9

PART 1: 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 managed WordPress hosting. They definitely should be considered. Some of these companies have been hosting WordPress for over 10 years and have a lot more 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 managed WordPress hosting services provide caching at the server level. Some provide multiple levels of caching to provide exceptional performance. Also, any caching plugin takes away resources from your server thereby slowing your website down. And some of the caching plugins have a lot of options to tune 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 incoming phone support. Incoming 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 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 one and the best they can do is send you a link to a help desk article or put you in a queue to talk to a more qualified support professional. Quite often, companies with phone support have more junior level agents that take the initial call. 10

PART 1: MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING In addition, incoming phone support is subject to social engineering. A better approach is to offer phone call back support and require that the request to the phone call back be made through the service s control panel. This requires panel authentication, which prevents nearly all social engineering attacks. Managed WordPress Hosting Requirements We ve covered the similarities between various managed WordPress hosting services; however, like many online services, different vendors products will vary. Some allow the use of any theme or plugin, while others restrict you to a specific subset. Some limit the number of visitors you can have per month, while other vendors don t restrict bandwidth or number of visitors. Some offer email hosting along with your WordPress website like shared hosting, while others do not. Some add malware scanning services. Some offer easy upgrade from shared hosting. Some offer free migration to their hosting plan. Some provide developer-like tools, such as SSH access, WP-CLI and Git version control support. You will need to decide what features are important to you and look for vendors who can provide what you need. Here s a more in-depth review of the features to consider of what to consider in a managed WordPress vendor and hosting plan. 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 11

PART 1: MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING is minimized, the better off you are. One of the best ways to check this is to consider the reputation of the hosting vendor. Another way is to rely on independent sources that track this, such as ReviewSignals, which has a good article on reliability and performance. 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, and more that can be used at the hosting service level. Really good host level caching will employ multiple levels of caching. And they do not take away from the server s resources, like caching plugins do. 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. Ability to use any plugin or theme you choose. Some 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, especially new ones as they come out. Why wait for the vendor to validate each one? 12

PART 1: MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING 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 PHP 7 is nearly there. Another alternative is HHVM which was created by Facebook 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 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. 13

PART 1: MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING 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 four security areas you want to review with a potential hosting vendor: ww ww ww DDoS Protection. Do they provide any DDoS attack 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 14

PART 1: MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING provide updates to new WordPress security releases? The quicker is the better when it comes to protecting your site. ww Secure control panel authentication. You want to prevent any access to your account through the hosting service s control panel. The best approaches to support this are protection from brute-force attacks and multi-factor authentication requiring a code that is sent to a mobile device to also be entered when logging into your control panel. Both make it extremely difficult for unauthorized access your account. 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 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 TLS/SSL certificate. In the past, TLS/SSL was primarily used on ecommerce sites to protect customers credit card information. (TLS is the new name for SSL.) Now, however, TLS 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 certificates (DV type). Except for ecommerce sites which need an OV or EV certificate, these certificates are sufficient for the majority of websites. Check to see if the hosting vendor you are evaluating supports Let s Encrypt certificates or another free or low-cost option. 15

PART 1: MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING 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 than your hosting platform. That way, if anything happens to your data, you have a good backup to restore your site. Staging support. It s not a great idea to make theme, plugin or customization changes to a live site. You don t know if the change will do something to your site. Staging allows you to clone your live site to experiment with any significant change without worrying if you are going to break your site. When you like the changes, you can push them live. If something unforeseen happens, you can roll back to the previous version. Good staging support will give you the flexibility of what to push live. If you have continued to publish content on your live site while working on the staged version, you don t want to push the database or you will lose your recent changes. 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. 16

PART 1: 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. 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. WP-CLI gives you access to many of the features available in the WordPress dashboard, allowing some tasks to be automated. Again, this is an advanced feature for power users. Git version control. Git is the most popular version control system in the world. Git is becoming increasingly popular with WordPress theme and plugin developers. If you are doing any kind of development, including just creating child themes, you need to seriously consider using Git. Some managed WordPress hosting services provide Git built into their service. Great technical support. Access to knowledgeable WordPress support agents 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 managed hosting service will provide you with 24 hour 7 days a week access 17

PART 1: MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING 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. 18

PART 2: DREAMPRESS Managed WordPress Hosting Service

PART 2: DreamPress Managed WordPress Hosting DreamPress Managed WordPress Hosting DreamPress is a managed WordPress hosting service from DreamHost. To help you evaluate DreamPress as a potential hosting service for your WordPress website, we have a score card below of how DreamPress measures up to the key features you will want to consider for your hosting needs. 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, close to 100% uptime. Architected for performance. DreamPress runs on powerful isolated servers. It has a multi-layer caching architecture designed for performance with Varnish, Memcached and PHP Opcache. This means no need for caching plugins. 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. DreamPress was recently given the top performance award from ReviewSignal. WordPress pre-installed and preconfigured. DreamPress pre-installs WordPress and preconfigures it for you. The greatly minimizes the effort to setup and configure WordPress to run optimally. 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 works best for your site. 20

PART 2: DREAMPRESS MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING PHP version options. DreamPress comes standard with PHP 7 to give you the latest version which delivers excellent performance. Alternatively, you can easily choose PHP 5.6 with Opcache or HHVM in the control panel if you wish to use one of these versions. 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. This can be expanded with addon SSD storage. This is significantly more storage than other providers in its price category. 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. Compared with similar WordPress hosting services in the same price range using an industry test 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. 21

PART 2: DREAMPRESS MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING DreamHost is one of the few vendors who does a great job automatically updating WordPress to the latest release to insure you get all new security updates quickly. In addition, the DreamHost control panel offers multi-factor authentication support using Google Authenticator, which is supported on a wide variety of mobile devices. Plus, the panel also provides brute force attack protection, which prohibits any logins for 10 minutes if it detects a brute force attack. CDN. DreamPress offers two CDN solutions. First, it offers support for CloudFlare, an excellent content distribution network with over 80 points of presence around the world. CloudFlare also includes support for blocking DDoS and some WordPress attacks. 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 your website will be available to your visitors at incredibly fast speeds when you choose to use the DreamSpeed CDN. This supports both non-tls/ssl and TLS/ SSL-enabled websites. Let s Encrypt Certificate. DreamHost was one of the first WordPress hosting vendors to support the free Let s Encrypt TLS/SSL certificates. Let s Encrypt is pre-installed for all new DreamPress customers. And for those customers who upgrade to DreamPress, it is simple to install. 22

PART 2: DREAMPRESS MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING Fast networking, fast web server. DreamPress uses NGINX and HTTP/2 to supercharge its network performance. The NGINX web server is designed to handle a large number of concurrent user connections, far beyond the more common Apache web server. DreamPress also supports the new industry standard HTTP/2, which dramatically improves internet traffic. It can use multiple connections per user. It compresses network traffice and allows servers to push information to user s browsers. The combination of NGINX and HTTP/2 easily offset any performance loss from using TLS/SSL certificates. 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 large monitors. 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. 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. 23

PART 2: DREAMPRESS MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING SSH, WP-CLI and Git support. DreamPress supports secure shell access, WP-CLI, the open source command line interface for WordPress and the Git version control system. Be able to use the command line to automate certain WordPress functions. Add server-based version control for all your theme and plugin development, including child theme development. 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, call back phone support that is initiated through the control panel to prevent social engineering, a support forum and recently updated help database with detailed information to assist you with your hosting and DreamPress questions. 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 a recent release of WordPress. 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. 24

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About DreamHost Since 1997 DreamHost has helped individuals, small businesses, and developers the world to share and own their digital content on the web. From domain registrations to web hosting and powerful cloud computing services, more than 400,000 customers trust DreamHost to be their online home. Focused on WordPress and packed with excellent value, DreamHost is a great place to launch a blog, website, or online application. 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. Rev. 102816