Managed cloud hosting or managed WordPress hosting: which one is better for your business?

Managed cloud hosting and WordPress hosting are equally popular — but it doesn’t mean that they have identical characteristics. In this article, we’ll analyze the similarities and differences between these two types of hosting. After reading this text, you should be able to make an informed decision on which type suits you best.

What Is Cloud Hosting?

With cloud hosting, your website will be virtually hosted across several servers. The provider will charge you only for the resources that you use. Your site won’t crash because of an unexpected surge in traffic. You’ll get access to almost unlimited resources, which is good for ambitious businesses that are planning to scale.

You can choose between a managed cloud hosting solution and an unmanaged one. You might want to opt for the latter if you have an in-house IT team that can take care of all the technical aspects related to hosting. With a managed hosting plan, your provider will be in charge of that. The price of managed plans is always a bit higher than that of unmanaged.

What Is WordPress Hosting?

The target audience of this service is WordPress website owners. Typically, this type of hosting supports one-click installs and automated WordPress updates.

You can choose between two types of WordPress hosting:

• Shared. It’s cheap, offers only basic functionality, and is ideal for personal or static websites.
• Managed. Here, you get the full package with guaranteed automated updates, enhanced security, and faster loading speeds. This option is more expensive — but you’ll save a lot of time and effort on your website’s maintenance. You should choose it if you need to host a business site or your web project is planning to scale.

Just as its cloud counterpart, WordPress hosting can be either managed or unmanaged. The former is much more popular than the latter. Anyone can build a WordPress site, even those who don’t have any coding or design skills. This website creation platform caters to users who lack profound technical knowledge — so they don’t want to manage their hosting themselves.

Performance

The term denotes how smoothly your website runs. The faster each page loads and the higher the uptime of your web resource, the better. A high-performing site will help you to expand your customer base, boost your sales, and maximize your revenue. If, on the contrary, your site loads slowly, visitors might get bored with waiting. They might leave before they even check the home page and never come back. The good news is that many providers today strive to guarantee the excellent performance of any type of site, regardless of its hosting plan. However, there is a small nuance that you might want to keep in mind.

With WordPress hosting, you can’t exceed your standard resource limits. You might upgrade from a cheaper plan to a pricier one to get access to larger resources, but they won’t be unlimited. As long as the plan provides you with enough resources for your business needs, you’ll be satisfied with your site’s performance.

Cloud hosting, as was said above, allows you to use limitless resources. You can adjust your consumption based on the amount of traffic your site has to handle. Whenever you require more bandwidth, you automatically get it, and you can perfectly cope with an unexpected traffic surge.

To sum it up, both WordPress hosting and cloud hosting can boast good performance — but if your site might face sudden increases in popularity, you might want to opt for a cloud.

Security

Both options compared in this article can be remarkably secure. Yet hackers might try to attack any type of site, especially if they know they can get access to users’ precious confidential data.

A website on cloud hosting might be spread across multiple servers. Nevertheless, you’ll be sharing this virtual space with other web resources. If one of these resources ever gets compromised, you might suffer as well.

Shared WordPress hosting is similar to cloud hosting. But managed WordPress hosting features enhanced security levels. Your site will be automatically backed up. In case of an attack, you’ll be able to quickly restore all the data. And of course, there will be regular malware scans, powerful firewalls, and other efficient measures.

In this aspect, managed WordPress hosting wins. It can provide greater security for businesses that need to deal with lots of sensitive customer information.

Scalability

Most likely, you’ll put a lot of effort into scaling your business because it means you’ll earn more money. Your site should be ready to cope with a consistent increase in traffic without compromising on the speed of loading or performance.

This is how the process of scaling looks for a typical WordPress site: you start with shared WordPress hosting, and then you upgrade to a managed WordPress hosting plan. After that, you have no space to grow. Once you reach the limit of the resources that the provider can offer you, you’ll need to look for another provider and another type of hosting.

With cloud hosting, you can expand freely. The resources that your site uses come from several servers. You’ll just need to pay more for consuming more resources. You’ll be able to stay with your provider even if the success of your business exceeds your expectations and your web project turns into a multimillion-dollar business.

When speaking about scalability, cloud hosting far outperforms WordPress hosting. WordPress hosting allows you to upgrade from shared to managed, but one day, there will be no space left for growth.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, this article came in handy, and now you better understand the difference between managed cloud hosting and managed WordPress hosting. In both cases, you don’t need to handle the technical aspects related to hosting because the provider will take care of it. WordPress hosting outperforms cloud hosting in terms of security thanks to automated backups and regular updates. But if your online business might need to scale, you might want to opt for cloud hosting because it offers nearly limitless resources. In terms of performance, both types of hosting deliver good results — but if your site might need to cope with occasional traffic spikes, you should consider cloud hosting.