Shared or Managed WordPress Hosting: How to Choose?

Aug 04, 2023

The debate between managed and shared WordPress hosting has long been a contentious one in the WordPress community. We've encountered a lot of fascinating points of view and perspectives coming from both sides of the fence in our numerous hosting evaluations, comparisons, and surveys. Comparing shared versus managed hosting, though, might not be as straightforward as it initially appears. 

Shared vs. Managed WordPress Hosting: An Overview

The enhanced services and performance adjustments you get with managed WordPress hosting ultimately decide between shared and managed WordPress hosting. As a concierge service for your WordPress site, managed WordPress hosting takes care of backups, WordPress optimization, and other tasks that ordinary shared hosting leaves up to you.

There are no fundamental differences between managed WordPress hosting and shared hosting. Most of the time, when people discuss shared hosting, they also refer to "generic cheap hosting."

However, Consider this:

Quite a few shared hosts genuinely provide "managed platforms" or "managed services," these providers are frequently included in the list of managed WordPress hosts.
A hosting arrangement known as "shared hosting" means that your website "shares" server resources with other websites.

On top of standard hosting, managed WordPress hosting offers a number of extra services and speed improvements.

Because of this, shared managed WordPress hosting is affordable - like serversea.pk at $35/per year.

In fact, managed WordPress hosts are available with a variety of underlying architectures, including shared, VPS, dedicated, and cloud.
Despite that warning, we'll stick to standard terminology in this post and distinguish between shared and managed WordPress hosting. Though it might not be technically accurate, it is when you consider how the majority of users use the two terms.

What Sets Managed WordPress Hosting Apart from Shared WordPress Hosting?

Shared Hosting: An Overview

In order to reduce their expenses, hosting providers use shared hosting to jam numerous websites onto a single server. That may sound bad, but it's not at all. Hosting that is shared has a use.

If shared hosts didn't do that, none of us would be able to host an infinite number of websites for the monthly cost we pay for a McDonald's meal.

Shared hosting, for instance, is a fantastic option for hobby or personal websites. And perhaps even for a small business, since all they require is an online business card. Ten such websites can run on a single server when using shared hosting.

Additionally, since your website will share your server's resources with dozens or even hundreds of other websites, something that occurs on one of those websites could cause your website to slow down. To prevent this from happening, high-quality shared hosts won't overwork their servers; by contrast, ultra-cheap shared providers frequently oversell the available space.

Managed WordPress Hosting: An Overview

A collection of services, performance enhancements, and additional value-add ons make up managed WordPress hosting. These extra attributes:

Can help in speeding up the loading of your website as each configuration is deliberately set up to be WordPress-optimized.

Provide you with tools to help you manage and install WordPress easily, as well as resources like staging sites to assist you in making changes to your WordPress site safely.

With features like automatic updates and automatic backups, you can help maintain your website.

Improve the security of your WordPress site with WordPress-specific security guidelines and features.

The dashboards of managed WordPress hosting do not resemble Kinsta's, but the majority of them provide a comparable improvement over the cPanel alternative offered by shared hosts.

However, you typically make a compromise in the form of reduced website limitations and a cap on the number of permitted visits per month in exchange for those advantages.

Shared Hosting Pros and Cons

Majority of the benefits of shared vs. managed WordPress hosting are related to cost, while the drawbacks are related to features and performance.

Pros

Your monthly charges are drastically reduced.

For a single cost, you can host a limitless number of websites on many shared servers.

Although "unlimited visitors" doesn't exist, the majority of shared servers advertise it and don't place a strict limit on how many people can view your website at once.

Cons

Your website will typically load a little slower because the emphasis is frequently on reducing costs rather than improving performance.

Because you're sharing resources, the performance of other websites on the shared server may have an impact on how quickly your website loads.

You don't have value-added features like automatic backups and upgrades.

WordPress-specific speed and security adjustments won't always be available.

Managed WordPress Hosting Pros and Cons

The benefits and drawbacks of managed WordPress hosting are more diverse.

Pros

Better performance is typically a result of WordPress-specific server architecture.

Integrated server-level caching results in improved performance.

Automatic WordPress updates to maintain the functionality and security of your site

Automatic backups to guarantee the data on your WordPress site is secure

Security measures tailored to WordPress, such as firewalls, login hardening, and malware scans

A more practical interface for managing websites (although not all managed WordPress hosting have one).

Staging sites are a useful tool that can help make administering your site easier.

All customer service representatives are WordPress specialists.

Cons

While there are affordable options like Bluehost, managed WordPress hosts are frequently more expensive than the shared hosts.

Additionally, managed WordPress hosting frequently places harsher website restrictions and/or visitor caps.

Typically (obviously), you can only host WordPress websites.

Some managed WordPress sites will limit the plugins you can use in order to ensure performance.