Wordpress Hosting: Managed, Unmanaged, and Everything in Between
Need a home for your site but not sure where to house it? We’ve been there. Here’s a side-by-side breakdown of your options.
Every website or web application needs a good home to thrive. And a good home is much more than a safe and comfortable place to live. It’s a place your website should be able to grow and thrive and be the best damn internet property it can be.
(Of course, when we say home, we mean hosting, which is where your site is stored.)
Lucky for you, we design and build a lot of Wordpress sites for our clients. That’s important, because Wordpress currently runs about 35 percent of the internet! And we know how difficult and nuanced finding the right hosting solution can be.
Wordpress currently runs about 35 percent of the internet!
When it comes to the world of hosting users traditionally have had two main options: managed or unmanaged hosting.
But how do you know which is best for your website?
We put together a quick showdown of the pros and cons of each version so you can be better informed about the blueprints of your new website, no matter what kind of cool funky thing it needs to do.
MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING
To harp on the house metaphor, you can think of managed hosting like a pre-furnished home. Everything is pre-fabricated and ready to go, but also set in stone. You won’t get to choose how many windows you get or rearrange any of the furniture, but there’s a cleaning service and security guard monitoring the place. You can move in right away and focus on other things.
A managed solution should free up your dev and devops engineers so they can work faster as the responsibility of system administration and infrastructure management is handled by a third party.
MANAGED HOSTING // THE PROS
Avoid the Devops Burden:
Do you think you can create a more efficient Wordpress stack than the companies that specialize in just that? Even if you can, is it worth it? With a managed provider the devops burden is offloaded.
Yes, using a managed hosting might make a seasoned devops engineer cringe, but if you or your devops team isn’t that familiar (or interested) with the intricacies that come with running Wordpress at scale, you should definitely consider the managed route.
Super Wordpress-Focused:
The best managed providers are laser-focused on Wordpress and all it’s specificities. Their stacks are designed to overcome some of the inefficiencies and intricacies that come baked in. They’re active in the Wordpress community and are actively preparing their environments for the next upcoming version. Not too shabby.
The best managed providers are laser-focused on Wordpress and all it’s specificities. Their stacks are designed to overcome some of the inefficiencies and intricacies that come baked in.
High Speed & Scalability:
While the speed of Wordpress has a lot of factors, it’s definitely not blazing out of the box. Providers such as Pantheon use a combination of Varnish and Redis to overcome those issues.
Another plus? Depending on the exact plan and provider, the environment should be scalable without involving any downtime.
Program-Specific Security:
With any large open source software exploits are especially attractive to bad actors as their potential attack radius is huge. If you let a Wordpress exploit linger long enough you will suffer the consequences.
The best providers follow the Wordpress ecosystem enough to know which plugins and versions have exploits and will proactively protect against them at the edge layer, while simultaneously working with their clients to make sure the plugins or code in question are patched or removed. They understand the security weak points and the rulesets come standard in their firewalls. (Automated backups also come standard here, but don’t rely exclusively on your hosting provider for this.)
24/7 Support:
Never-ending support? You’ll sleep a whole lot sounder, that’s for sure.
Low or High Cost:
A pro and a con. There’s a sweet spot with managed hosting. If your business runs on Wordpress and you receive less than 50K hits a month, managed hosting is usually the most cost effective route, all things considered.
If your business runs on Wordpress and you receive less than 50K hits a month, managed hosting is usually the most cost effective route, all things considered.
MANAGED HOSTING // THE CONS:
Low Customization:
Want a fully custom CI (Continuous Integration) pipeline using your favorite tools? Want to run a specific devops stack or even just tweak one server configuration? Need to control pretty much anything on the devops front? Big problem for a managed host.
Less Control of the Codebase:
Typically, with a managed host, there are certain things you cannot change, (like Wordpress core), or that you may need to use a specific plugin for that’s not supported by your host. Having to migrate to a new provider because you need to tweak one thing is not fun. (We have actually run into niche issues with WP core we needed to patch which would not have been an option on a managed provider.)
Potential High Costs for Enterprise Software:
If you fall into the “Enterprise” category, managed hosting may be pretty pricey. But if you are lucky enough to have capable devops talent in house, you should seriously consider going the unmanaged route.
If you fall into the “Enterprise” category, managed hosting may be pretty pricey. But if you are lucky enough to have capable devops talent in house, you should seriously consider going the unmanaged route.
UNMANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING
If you can still stomach more house metaphors: Unmanaged allows you to build whatever house fits your needs. 15 bedrooms? Not a problem. Central air? Very possible. One giant open-air treehouse? Also fine, as long as you know what you’re doing.
With unmanaged hosting, system administration and infrastructure management falls almost entirely on the shoulders of your devs and devops engineers.
UNMANAGED HOSTING // THE PROS:
Complete Control:
You now have the ability to run whatever software you want on whatever hardware you want. The devops sky is the limit here.
Potential High Costs:
If you’re running a high-traffic site and managing a fairly sophisticated environment, your recurring infrastructure costs will usually be less than going the managed route. Of course, this doesn’t factor in your team’s time or considerate ongoing support and maintenance costs that are supplemental.
If you’re running a high-traffic site and managing a fairly sophisticated environment, your recurring infrastructure costs will usually be less than going the managed route.
UNMANAGED HOSTING // THE CONS:
A Much Greater Devops Burden:
The responsibility to maintain your site falls almost completely on the shoulders of your dev and devops engineers for unmanaged hosting. Most unmanaged providers will ensure only the infrastructure they provide. Anything outside their specific offering is no longer covered. Are your servers up but your website is down? That’s now your problem.
Potential Lower Speed & Scalability (unless you go rogue):
There’s some nuance here. If you use a traditional LAMP stack on an unmanaged server, the speed of your Wordpress site will pale in comparison against the zoom of a well-tuned infrastructure running Varnish and Redis. Other the other hand, you can of course create your own environment that’s just as fast as the premier managed hosts out there. Just make sure you’re up for the challenge.
No Baked-in Security:
You’ll need to bring your own security here. While web application firewalls like Cloudflare or AWS WAF can improve your posture, if a hacker does manage to find a way in, it’s up to you to clean up the mess.
(Pro tip: Don’t forget to regularly backup your database. Also worth mentioning: Some managed databases like AWS Aurora allow you to restore your database to a particular point in time. Life saver.)
Zero Provided Support:
What support? You’re on your own!
Potential Lower Costs (unless you build a giant):
Remember where I just told you unmanaged hosting is cheaper? Beware. This is only the case if you or your team can handle the system administration and infrastructure management for less.
Fixed costs are one thing. License fees and your team’s time are also factors. Once you add them all up, unmanaged hosting may simply be too expensive.
THE THIRD WAY: HYBRID HOSTING
One final house metaphor for good measure: Hybrid hosting is like using someone else’s blueprints, but leaving in some flexibility to dig up the useless suburban front yard to plant a vegetable garden.
Not everyone cleanly fits into the buckets of managed/unmanaged. Some teams require a bit more control than what managed provides. Maybe you want to provision the hardware on your own, but don’t want to manage the software that lives on the server.
And some teams require a bit more support than unmanaged provides, but still have the technical requirements of unmanaged. For example, you may care less about the actual hardware, but require more control over the software stack itself.
Don’t worry, there are increasingly more hybrid options out there that could suit your needs.
Polyglot Microservice-based architectures are becoming more mainstream, and can be one great option for those who want the best of both worlds.
Polyglot Microservice-based architectures are becoming more mainstream, and can be one great option for those who want the best of both worlds.
A Polyglot architecture allows you to use the right stack for the right job. In the past, if applications based on Wordpress that followed a monolithic architecture, would run entirely on Wordpress. But while Wordpress is an effective CMS, you may not want to run your entire business logic from it.
Enter Platform.sh. Platform.sh allows you to run a Wordpress-optimized environment alongside the environment of your choice (ie. a node.js environment, alongside a Ruby environment, alongside a Python environment…). An ecosystem like this would previously have required a significant amount of devops work, but now can be done quickly through their command line interface (CLI).
If control over hardware is your main concern, but you want to utilize a managed Wordpress stack, platforms like Bitnami can fulfill your needs.
While both of these options come with a cost, they empower your engineers to have a level of control and flexibility in the stack, all while reducing their reliance on devops.
A WARNING: NOT ALL HOSTS ARE CREATED EQUAL
If you do end up going the managed hosting route, do your homework and make sure you pick a host that specializes in Wordpress.
With hosting, like anything else, you get what you pay for. Dishing out a little extra for a platform like Pantheon or WPengine is more than worth it in the long run.
With hosting, like anything else, you get what you pay for. Dishing out a little extra for a platform like Pantheon or WPengine is more than worth it in the long run.
AN ENCOURAGEMENT: YOU’VE GOT OPTIONS!
While platforms like Wordpress have been around for what is basically an eternity in internet years, the options and tools for hosting these platforms are evolving in exciting ways.
Engineers now have the option to offload the devops burden completely (managed hosting), just a little bit (hybrid), or completely go their own way (unmanaged). While hybrid and unmanaged make for a much more interesting house, it’s not the only way to live.
I hope you find a great new home for your Wordpress internet property!
Need more Wordpress hosting advice? Shoot us a note to hello@coalesce.nyc. We’re always happy to scan your blueprint and give you some building suggestions (just as long as it’s not for an actual house.)
