9 Best Managed WordPress Hosting Services

Managed WordPress hosting may sound complicated, even unnecessary to some, but I assure you it isn’t. In fact, the best managed WordPress hosting services are there to make your life easier.

You can focus on developing your website, brand, product, or business while the hosting company has you covered on all the technical aspects. Isn’t that just awesome?

That said, not all managed WordPress hosting services are the same. For instance, many plans are affordable to begin with, but turn sorely expensive when you have to renew. Some services also throw in a free domain, and even advertising credits to boot, while others do no such thing.

You’d be surprised at how many managed WordPress hosting reviews are the product of affiliate marketing, rather than legitimate arguments. Of course, everyone’s got to make a living, but for the reader looking for an unbiased opinion, it can be confusing. To make the choice easier for you, I’ve actually taken the time to research, test, and compare the industry leaders.

Although InMotion Hosting is at the top of my list, this doesn’t mean it’s ideal for everyone and everything. In some cases, cloud infrastructures (WP Engine) or isolated resources (DreamHost) are superior. Read the full story to find out why.

Top Managed WordPress Hosting Services

Between big brand marketing and biased reviews, finding the ideal managed WordPress host for your needs can be a difficult task. My job is to seek, identify, and compare the best hosting services for WordPress currently on the market.

This list is a result of extensive research and careful consideration. Ultimately, you’ll notice that the companies with better value plans, i.e. more features at better prices, made their way to the top.

For those of you in a hurry, here’s the short version:

• InMotion – best value managed WordPress plans with top-notch performance
• SiteGround – 100% renewable managed WordPress hosting with collaborator features
• WP Engine – Best managed WordPress hosting for developers, premium website builder and white-glove onboarding on higher plans
• Pressable – Managed hosting with server architecture made by WordPress developers
• DreamHost – Premium Jetpack licenses on all WordPress managed plans and isolated server resources
• A2 Hosting – Turbo servers for premium WordPress performance and impressive security suite
• Kinsta – Custom-built dashboard with a variety of tools and hack-free guarantee
• Bluehost – Unlimited resources and marketing tools on all managed WordPress plans
• 20i – fully managed, feature-rich WordPress hosting platform, emphasizing speed, security, and user-friendly management tools

It might seem like it’s a lot to take in, but I assure you that it isn’t. Each of these companies prioritize certain aspects in their managed WordPress plans. With each host, I get into the details of what makes it a viable option.

By the time you’re done reading this, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what it is that you want, as well as where you can get it.

1. InMotion Hosting

InMotion Hosting is one of those rare, employee-owned companies who stood its ground in front of aggressively-expanding hosting multinationals. What makes it all the more impressive is that InMotion is also one of the oldest hosts, founded in the early 2000s.

You can tell how much the company cares about the quality of its service by the fact that it still keeps an in-house support team. They want it done right, so they do it themselves.

Unlike many of its competitors, InMotion does not resell someone else’s infrastructure – they own and manage two fully redundant data centers in the US. This is part of the reason why the host has some of the best performing servers in the business.

Its WordPress plans are affordable, pack a lot of features, and come with a free domain name for one year to boot.  For US-based websites, InMotion might just be the best managed WordPress hosting you can get. Let’s take a closer look at the reasons why.

Highly-affordable Managed WordPress Plans

It’s a given that managed WordPress offers are more expensive than shared hosting. However, is the upgrade worth the extra buck? In the case of InMotion, its plans are worth every penny and you’ll get the most value for your money.

In addition, if you have long-term plans, you can opt for a two-year contract and get even better value for your purchase. I’d recommend going with the WP-2000s, since it includes a free domain, 100GB SSD storage, unlimited email accounts, a one-click staging environment, and a Jetpack Personal license. WordPress comes pre-installed and you can turn on automatic updates at your discretion.

The staging environment is tremendously helpful for beginners, since it allows you to create a duplicate of your website and test out new updates on it. This way, you’ll know if something breaks your platform before it goes live, rather than after the fact.

Jetpack is a premium WordPress plugin that’ll make your life much easier. You get spam protection, an extensive activity log of the changes made to your website, daily automatic backups, and more.

WordPress Optimized Web Services

InMotion has perfected the art of WordPress hosting and the team behind it doesn’t mind sharing its recipe with the public. The server stacks are entirely optimized to run PHP powered applications, WordPress included, as fast as possible.

It all starts with the Nginx web server, which is configured as a reverse-proxy alongside the Apache HTTP server. Whenever someone tries to access your website, Nginx requests the content from Apache. This plays to Apache’s strengths (content delivery), while bypassing its weaknesses (simultaneous connections).

Simply put, InMotion’s infrastructure can serve your visitors with an up-to-date version of your website straight from the server’s software. In terms of execution, InMotion uses the PHP FastCGI Process Manager (PHP-FPM) to ensure WordPress performs flawlessly.

We’re just scratching the surface here. However, the gist is that this platform will reflect in superior page-loading speeds and equally impressive responsiveness.

Peak Performance for Visitors from around the World

One of the few disadvantages of InMotion is that it has just two data centers, one in LA and another in Washington. Still, the company’s infrastructure is placed in the proximity of major IXPs (Internet Exchange Points) in North America. These are international crossroads for the Internet and being close to them guarantees fast connections for remote visitors.

There is a free, in-built content delivery network (CDN) offered on all managed WordPress plans. A CDN stores cached versions of your website in major data centers across the world. When someone far away from your website’s home base wants to access it, the CDN steps in to instantly deliver a cached version, so that distance does not delay the connection.

2. SiteGround

SiteGround may not be one of the flashiest web hosts out there, but it’s definitely among the most reliable. Since it’s slightly more expensive and doesn’t come with a free domain for one year, it comes in a close second to InMotion Hosting. It’s also one of the services recommended by the WordPress foundation itself.

Like InMotion, SiteGround has nearly two decades of hosting experience under its belt. Despite growing its portfolio, the host kept its original, small-business structure entirely focused on delivering quality and great customer service. Although it started off in Europe, SiteGround quickly expanded its infrastructure to North America, and Southeast Asia.

As of early 2020, the host moved a large part of its infrastructure to Google Cloud in a bid to provide failsafe storage, as well as enhanced performance for its customers. According to SiteGround, GCP’s commitment to carbon neutrality and its massive global network of servers are the foundation of this collaboration.

Now, let’s see what makes this host so great, especially for web developers.

Collaborators and More

All managed WordPress plans from SiteGround come with pre-installed WordPress, a tool to migrate WP websites at your discretion, as well as automatic core and plugin updates. Like with InMotion, there’s a free CDN included in the form of the basic Cloudflare and the server software has Apache and Nginx working together to provide the best possible performance.

The team is pro-active with WordPress-related security and support. If any vulnerabilities surface in the popular CMS, the devs take steps to prevent them from affecting your website at the level of the infrastructure.

On higher-tier managed WordPress plans, such as the GrowBig, you get a series of awesome benefits.

Among them, there’s a one-click staging tool, an in-house WordPress caching tool that speeds up website loading times, and the option to add collaborators to individual websites. If you’re a developer, you can also ship your website to clients. In addition to automated daily backups, SiteGround offers on-demand fail safes for the GrowBig and GoGeek subscriptions.  

100% Renewable Match

This is far from a corporate ploy to be more desirable for the hipster client-base. SiteGround is committed to renewable energy hosting and it sticks to this commitment with confidence.

Its partnership with Google is based on the same eco-friendly values, and the American multinational guaranteed it will match 100% of its consumption with renewable energy.

As technology continues to expand, the global ecosystem continues to deteriorate due to pollution. Achieving carbon-neutrality has become a widespread concern and these two companies are committed to fighting the good fight even when (some) local administrations refuse to do so.

If you also want to do your part in diverting waste and maintaining the natural environment, green hosting is a small (although not insignificant) step towards achieving that goal.

White Label Clients and Priority Support

The best managed WordPress hosting offer from SiteGround also features advanced client management with white-label access. This is really useful if you want to create websites for others using WordPress. White-label hosting makes it possible for your clients to access the administrative section of their website without seeing the SiteGround logo.

Other neat features of the highest tier plan are Git support, which enables the creation of repositories of your websites, as well as advanced priority support. If you have any issues, technical or not, you’ll be assigned to the front of the queue and you benefit from immediate troubleshooting.

3. WP Engine

Although SiteGround has its advanced features, WP Engine is the first developer-focused managed WordPress host in this list.

A niche target audience is the main reason why WP Engine comes in third place, because honestly it offers an excellent service throughout. It’s also the uncontested market leader in terms of the number of managed WordPress hosting websites by comparison to other companies who offer WP hosting.

Since it mainly caters to developers’ needs, the baseline price for WP Engine’s plans is higher. The company works with AWS and the Google Cloud Platform to offer secure, high-performance servers close to their clients’ audience.

In fact, WP Engine is one of the managed WordPress services recommended by Google. Flywheel used to be among the recommendations, but it was recently acquired by WP Engine. If you want a more affordable managed WordPress experience, Flywheel has a Tiny plan that gives you almost everything you get on WP Engine at a lower price.

Developing your website in the cloud with WP Engine certainly has its advantages. Let’s see what these are.

Premium WordPress Framework (with Website Builder)

One of the main reasons why you should consider WP Engine is free access to the Genesis Framework, best described as a foundation of features you can use to easily make and optimize your own website.

Since WP Engine acquired StudioPress – the creators of the Genesis Framework – back in 2018, the host can afford to give its clients an awesome deal on it. It’s hard to overstate just how great a deal this is. Just visit the Genesis Framework homepage on StudioPress to see how much the package is worth on its own.

With Genesis, you can easily create mobile responsive WordPress websites that offer a complete digital experience. You can make your pick between 36 ready-made, easy-to-use templates and customize them to your own liking.

If this wasn’t enough, the premium themes also feature in-built SEO and security.

Scalable Resources

The advantage of working with two of the biggest cloud providers on the market (AWS and GCP) is that you can easily provision and scale your resources as needed. You can start off with the Growth plan, which includes 10 websites and 200GBs of bandwidth and see how it goes from there.

If any of your website experiences a surge in traffic, the host will dynamically scale your resources to handle the additional load. Then, you can use WP Engine’s page performance tool to see what you can do to improve loading speeds and website responsiveness.

Alternatively, you can upgrade to a higher plan in order to have access to more bandwidth at a given time. There is no entry-level subscription, but you can use Flywheel if you need something in-between, since it’s owned by WP Engine and gives you the same features.

White Glove Onboarding

What’s clear is that this host is more suitable for creating websites meant to service thousands, even hundreds of thousands of visitors on a daily basis. As such, WP Engine has a Premium-tier of plans that come with white glove onboarding, 24/7 phone support, launch readiness assessment, and more.

Basically, you’ll have a dedicated WP Engine team (including devs and account managers) to ensure your time-to-market expectations are met and that your website(s) continue to run smoothly afterwards. Expensive, but worth every penny if you can afford it.

4. Pressable

Similar to WP Engine, Pressable is a managed WordPress hosting service that uses a cloud infrastructure to service its customers. The difference is that Pressable is hosted by Rackspace, rather than AWS or GCP.

In mid-2010s, Pressable was acquired by Automattic, the company responsible for the freemium version of WordPress, and for its contribution to the overall development of the CMS. Following the merger, the entire infrastructure behind Pressable was rebuilt, from server software to corporate management. As a result, the managed WordPress service has received numerous industry honors and acknowledgements.

Now, Pressable is a strong contender for the title of best managed WordPress host and a viable alternative to WP Engine if you want a similar, but more affordable solution. Unfortunately, like Flywheel and WP Engine, Pressable does not offer email hosting, nor does it include a free domain.

If you need to purchase a domain name, you should take these costs into consideration and include them in your overheads.

Great Value Proposition

Pressable challenges WP Engine quite seriously by including several features free of charge. For example, with Pressable you get unlimited bandwidth on all managed WordPress offers, and personalized on-boarding on all but the entry level one.

You might not have a Genesis Framework to help you launch sleek websites in a matter of hours, but you do get access to an immense repository of WordPress tutorials, WP101, free of charge. This is a great opportunity to get your team up-to-speed on how the most popular CMS on the Internet works.

In addition, you benefit from collaborator access throughout all of the WordPress managed hosting plans. You can add people to your projects, configure their permissions, and even include two-factor authentication for additional security.

Automattic’s WordPress Architecture

You know WordPress is going to work flawlessly with Pressable because the server architecture is designed by one of the co-founders of this CMS. In addition to a solid web service stack, you get in-built caching, which means you don’t have to fiddle with third-party plugins.

Aside from WordPress caching, Pressable guarantees consistent and fast page loading speeds with the help of its proprietary CDN. This will not only improve your website’s user experience, but also help you rank higher in search engine results page.

Many customers don’t know that CDNs are also a great way to prevent DDoS attacks. Still, Pressable goes the extra mile and includes malware scans, spam protection, and increased stability for your websites with the help of LXC virtualization.

Onboarding and JetPack Premium

You don’t need to buy a premium managed WordPress plan to benefit from white glove on-boarding with Pressable. When you sign up with the platform, you’re connected with a team of specialists that help you get accustomed to the system, regardless of the plan you opted for.

Each and every one of Pressable’s managed WP hosting plans comes with a Premium Jetpack license. This version offers an add-free unlimited video hosting service, scheduled social media posts, recurring payments, and more.

Instead of having to add 5 or more WordPress plugins to cover security, activity logs, related posts, and other features, Jetpack groups them all into one. Hence, the name.

5. DreamHost

DreamHost is another hosting service recommended by the WordPress foundation. With more than two decades of experience in the hosting business, DreamHost is actually one of the oldest services of its kind.

The company has a reputation for providing a top-notch managed WordPress experience. Its software developers have contributed to the CMS, as well as to the community behind it for over 10 years. Suffice it to say, the team knows the ins and outs of WP and offer the very best in terms of WordPress hosting.

The downside is that phone support is not immediately available with DreamHost. You can request a callback if you wish, but there’s no place to phone in to. The service is paid and available for clients in North America only.

You can expect to pay the price of an entry-level managed WordPress plan for two monthly callbacks, so they don’t come cheap. Like InMotion, the company kept its service team in-house. While this ensures quality support, it does come with additional expenses.

Support, higher-than-average costs, and the fact that you can only host one website are the main reasons why DreamHost takes a lower spot on my list. But what are some of its advantages?

Best Jetpack Offer

The DreamPress Plus plan is the one I’d recommend if you settle on DreamHost. Unlike the entry-level subscription, the Plus plan includes unlimited CDN, which you will absolutely need. Unless your audience is strictly US-based, having a content delivery network (CDN) is necessary to ensure good loading speeds for visitors from around the world.

The CDN is a customized version of Fastly, which DreamHosts calls DreamSpeed CDN. With a presence in all major IXPs around the world and state-of-the-art infrastructure, you can be certain that all your content will reach your visitors at breakneck speed.

The great news about the company’s managed WordPress plans is that you get a free domain name for one year. Obviously, this also includes unlimited email accounts with your domain name, which you don’t get with services like WP Engine or Pressable.

The Plus and the Pro subscriptions come with a Professional Jetpack license, which includes real-time backups, access to unlimited premium themes, daily malware scans, and much more. The value offer here is hard to refuse.

Isolated Cloud Hosting

The level of resource priority for managed WordPress plans on DreamHost is a bit better than the VPS configuration. What does this mean? Well, you don’t get isolated CPU resources, but you do benefit from your very own RAM.

Unlike a regular VPS setup, your WordPress databases are stored in a premium database server. Basically, your data is protected from other users with the help of a Linux private server implementation.

Specialized WordPress Support

Although I’m mentioning it last, this is a major selling point for people who are new to WordPress. Knowing you have actual developers to lend you a hand when things go south is an important part of DreamHost’s service.

The support crew from DreamPress plans is comprised of best-in-class tech responders who undergo a rigorous training and evaluation process. Don’t get me wrong, these people won’t be able to code WordPress plugins or customizations on your behalf.

However, if there is a problem with your current WordPress setup, if a plugin is misbehaving, or you don’t know how to install something, they’ll be there to help.

6. A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting offers a wide range of services, from shared to VPS, managed/unmanaged WordPress, and more. Although a small company, the quality and value of its plans are widely acknowledged. Similar to InMotion, A2 Hosting withstood the test of time and is now closing in on its twentieth anniversary.

The good news is that A2 offers domain name registration, which makes it easier for you to keep track of everything website related, including costs. The bad news is that no WordPress plan features a free domain, although it does include email.

The reason why A2 Hosting is lower on my list is that you get slightly less value for its managed WordPress plans than with other hosts. The plans are overall more expensive and they feature less storage (which is HDD, rather than SSD). There’s no website builder included, but staging is available.

That said, A2 Hosting’s trademark Turbo Servers, anytime money back guarantee, and Edge Side Include (ESI) make for an attractive proposition. Plus, everything is setup with ease of use in mind. Let’s find out more about A2 Hosting’s strengths.

Turbo Servers

There are several key differences between A2’s turbo servers and its regular stacks. The machines run PHP-FPM in addition to FastCGI to ensure optimum WordPress performance. They also have Alternative PHP Cache enabled by default, which greatly speeds up any PHP-related code (think Drupal, Joomla, PHP), with the help of shared memory.

Plans hosted on Turbo Servers benefit from double the RAM that regular ones have. Beware, though. If you’re a developer who regularly works with Python or Ruby, you will not be able to run your applications. This includes Django and Rails. Unfortunately, you have to opt for a VPS or a dedicated solution.

Enhancing WordPress Performance

You can tell A2 Hosting is committed to its WordPress managed hosting platform when all plans include LiteSpeed Cache. Since the servers already run on LiteSpeed, all you have to do is install the LSCWP plugin from the dashboard and turn it on. Although it’s pretty intuitive, there’s a how-to article showing you what needs to be done in case you get lost.

Furthermore, the host has developed its proprietary WordPress plugin, called A2 Optimized. The latter is an out-of-the-box solution that improves the responsiveness of your WordPress website, as well as overall security.

You also benefit from the A2 exclusive features, which include image compression, Memchaced databases, and more. If some of your sections include dynamic events, Edge Sides Include (ESI) gives you the possibility to cache only the static content, instead of having to give up caching the entire page.

Strong Security Suite

The A2 Optimized plugin comes with reCAPTCHA on login and comments, but also random login URL to protect you from brute-force attacks. To this, you can add the Jetpack Personal license, which automates the process of daily backups and keeps you safe from DDoS attempts.

Naturally, whenever there is a WordPress update released, you can count on the team to step in and patch your websites accordingly. Even if you’re so unlucky that your main server is cut off from the Internet, there’s a quadruple-redundant network of connections that will step in to pick up the slack.

7. Kinsta

Kinsta is the third cloud-based service in this list of best managed WordPress hosting and it is among the fastest growing platform of its kind. Alongside WP Engine, Kinsta is recommended by the Google Cloud Platform as an excellent choice in terms of managed WordPress solutions.

Although the host relies exclusively on GCP’s infrastructure to provision its virtual machines, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, Google’s cloud is part of the reason why Kinsta delivers premium loading speeds, best-in-class uptime, and solid security.

As a remote-first service entirely focused on WordPress hosting, there’s no doubt that Kinsta is a 21^st century organization. From sales to tech support, SysOps and client solutions, they know what works and what doesn’t. Having someone else take care of the infrastructure opened up the possibility to increase the quality of managed WordPress services and this is exactly what they’ve done.

The main reason why Kinsta takes a lower spot is cost. If you can afford it, Kinsta’s expertise might be exactly what you need to get your WordPress website(s) off the ground and into space. Let’s take a closer look at its headline features.

Speed Obsessive Architecture

Even though the company uses GCP’s architecture, each site is isolated from the others through Linux containers that are orchestrated through the LXD manager. This framework guarantees isolation from other users while ensuring privileged access to server resources.

To minimize latency and guarantee faster page load times, databases are hosted on local hosts, rather than remote servers and the connections are handled by Nginx’s software. The company also provisioned Amazon’s Route 53 premium DNS for all its WordPress managed plans.

While every subscription gets a monthly allowance for DNS traffic, going over it does incur additional expenses. That said, you’ll never have to worry about DNS outages or your users’ requests being tromboned to far-away servers.

Powerful and Intuitive Dashboard

The MyKinsta Dashboard greatly simplifies the management of your WordPress website. An in-house solution built from the ground up, MyKinsta is tailor-made for the WordPress CMS.

In addition to everything you get with cPanel, this custom control panel provides you with performance analytics, the possibility to restore backups to staging, push staging to live, and more.

You can even choose to install your website in either of Kinsta’s 23 global locations, easily configure multisites, as well as subdomains, enable/disable CDN, and more. This pretty much covers the important stuff you’d have to figure workarounds for under normal circumstances.

All-Out Security

Kinsta’s managed WordPress platform is developed with a mind for enterprise-grade security. This means that all plans benefit from active DDoS and malware monitoring. The team keeps two weeks’ worth of automatic daily backups, which you can revert to at any time.

There are also options to increase the frequency of regular backups, in case you manage a high-traffic or dynamic-intensive website. You can easily enable two-factor authentication to prevent malicious third parties from using your credentials, WP security patches are automatically applied, and more.

If your website gets hacked while hosted by Kinsta, the team will clean it up for you for free, so you know they don’t mind putting their money where their mouth is.

8. Bluehost

Like DreamHost, Bluehost is one of the biggest and oldest companies in the web hosting industry. It’s among the solutions recommended by the WordPress foundation and, even though Bluehost receives its fair share of negative managed WordPress hosting reviews, they do have some great plans.

Bluehost powers over 2 million websites currently live on the Internet. More importantly, the company dedicates time and resources to the core development of the WordPress CMS. However, Bluehost has been a part of the Endurance International Group family of brands since 2010. Suffice it to say that not everyone saw the acquisition as a desirable outcome.

The reason why Bluehost is lower on my best-of list mainly has to do with its data center locations (which it does not disclose) and the fact that the company has no uptime SLA. Barring a couple of exceptions, this seems to be consistent across many EIG brands.

Drawbacks aside, let’s take a look at what makes Bluehost’s managed WordPress plans a great deal.

Unlimited Resources

A major reason why Bluehost features in this best managed web hosting lists is its generosity with server resources. All managed WP plans come with unlimited web storage, unlimited domains and subdomains, as well as unlimited websites.

This is a major improvement from services like DreamHost where you basically have to purchase a subscription for each individual website. Also, there are no traffic limits to speak of.

Bluehost’s WordPress infrastructure is fully serviced by SSDs, so you can rest assured that your content will load at optimal speeds. As usual, daily automated backups, as well as updates are handled by the company’s dev teams.

Marketing Tools

Another standout feature for Bluehost is the Marketing Center, which is built into the dashboard and comes with all WP plans. This tool is designed as a one-stop-shop for tracking website performance and content updates.

If you’re new to web design, this is going to prove useful in the long run, as it gives you an idea of the different aspects you need to keep track of when you’re a webmaster. The Marketing Center has several sections, including SEO controls, business reviews, and more.

For example, you get an SEO score from Bluehost’s SEO tools that tells you how well you’re doing so far, as well as what you can do to improve your ranking in search engine results page (SERPs). This is not to say you can rely on it to replace an SEO agency, but it can help with certain things.

Concierge Call

With any WP plan, you get access to a 1-hour concierge call, which is like a crash course in WordPress.

This feature is designed for WordPress newbies and those who are new to web hosting in general. During the interaction, you work with a Bluehost expert who can help you get your bearings and figure out everything about the dashboard.

In addition, you receive customized advice on what themes to choose, which plugins to add, and even how to create and edit pages on your WordPress website.

9. 20i

20i offers a managed WordPress hosting platform utilising multiple cloud providers, all built and optimised by their in-house experts. They boast unique speed-boosting features, comprehensive security, and a variety of premium WordPress tools.

The platform is fully managed, powered by premium 20iCloud, AWS and Google Cloud Platform technology. This is combined with a robust set of resources that go above and beyond standard WordPress hosting offerings.

My20i is their powerful, easy to use and intuitive control panel, custom built to their customers’ need. Manage all your WordPress sites, domain names, security, email, CDN and backups from one UI. Quickly spin up servers, launch/pause sites, install scripts and more.

Premium and Affordable Managed WordPress Hosting

20i’s WordPress hosting plans offer fantastic value for money. With features such as staging environment, automatic backups, unlimited CDN, WordPress manager, unlimited databases and free SSL certificates, users get a comprehensive set of tools to manage and optimise their WordPress websites.

WordPress developers can also take advantage of free ElasticSearch, Redis Cache, integrated Git version control, full DNS management, unlimited FTP/SFTP accounts, unlimited PHP workers, optimised PHP-FPM, PHP OPCache, SSH access, and WP-CLI.

20i don’t place any artificial limits on how many sites you can launch. Deploy as many sites and apps as your server specifications will allow.

Optimised for speed

20i has fine-tuned its platform to ensure that WordPress websites on their platform are always fast and run smoothly no matter how much traffic they get.

Their WordPress enhanced features include WordPress staging and cloning, a fully-featured WordPress manager, StackCache® Optimisation plug-in, global CDN and an image/code optimisation suite for an extra performance boost.

Advanced Security Features

20i’s commitment to security is evident in their robust set of security features. Free Web Application Firewall, automatic malware scanning, WordPress Checksum report, anti-bot protection, Two-factor authentication (2FA), enterprise level DDoS protection, FTP security lock, and brute force login protection all work together to ensure your website remains secure.

Additionally, the platform offers features to block visitors by IP or country and Hotlink Protection, providing added layers of security for your WordPress sites.

Global Data Centers

20i offers users a choice of deploying their WordPress sites across20iCloud, AWS and Google Cloud, with over 60 global data centres to choose from, ensuring that yours websites are served quickly to visitors around the world.

Their network features multiple internet connections and operates on a 100 Gbit/s network. The global reach of their data centres and the integrated CDN ensures that your site performs well for visitors from all corners of the globe.

How to Compare Managed WordPress Hosting Services

As you can tell from this list of the best managed WordPress hosting services, there are a lot of companies with great plans out there. Competition has only intensified in the past few years, which is good news for customers because it pushes web hosts to include more value with each plan.

When it comes down to making a decision, though, I advise you first establish what it is that you need. This will help eliminate unviable options and narrow-down your list of ideal managed WordPress solutions.

That said, the best managed WordPress hosts always include a series of basic tools and/or services. This is what I used to compare different WordPress hosts, so you can use the same criteria if you’re trying to evaluate other companies:

• Automatic backups and updates. Without these two, you can’t even call yourself a managed service. Pay close attention here, as some hosts try to bypass either of two and/or make you pay extra. Make sure to find out how many backups you get and get more details on the update policy.

• Specialized WordPress support. Customer service is yet another aspect that gets left behind because new clients often pay little attention to it. There’s no point in going for a managed WordPress service if there’s no specialized tech support there to help you when a theme or a plugin breaks your website.

• Website Builder. Whether you’re looking to create one (or more) WordPress websites, a WordPress website builder helps a great deal. Some companies offer premium themes or frameworks (Genesis), while others go for drag-and-drop editors (BoldGrid, Elementor). Every managed WordPress service worth its salt will give you such a tool.

• WordPress Optimized Servers. As I pointed out throughout my article, many of the industry leading web hosts have optimized their servers to work with WordPress and the PHP scripting language in general. Hosts that offer isolated resources and WP specific infrastructure are usually the ones to look out for.

• (Optional) A Premium WordPress Plugin. Although this is not a deal breaker, all premium WordPress managed hosting services include at least one great plugin. Jetpack licenses seem to be the industry standard, while others develop in-house solutions (A2 Hosting).

• (Optional) Number of Websites/Domains. This is something more developer-specific. However, if you want to create/host more than one website, it’s important to pay attention to website and/or domain limitations for managed WordPress plans. Some let you create just one site, while others give you access to as many as you want.

It’s difficult to point to a service and say they offer the absolute best managed WordPress hosting. This list prioritizes affordability and value plans, but you might be looking for enterprise-grade solutions. If so, companies like WP Engine or Kinsta jump to the top of the list.

Choose the Best Managed WordPress Host for Your Needs

This list of best managed WordPress plans is by no means fixed. As companies continue to diversify their offer and compete for market share, some will move higher, while others might become less competitive.

I’ve settled on InMotion as the very best managed WordPress host because of the awesome value it packs in its plans.

If you want to become a webmaster yourself or you’re already a developer, SiteGround’s white label dashboard will prove quite helpful in the long run. Also, its collaborator features will make working with others (designers, backend devs) much easier.

WP Engine does not offer a free domain name and is clearly aimed at developers. With scalable resources and its premium website builder, you’ll be able to manage tens of sites and scale your resources on demand. Premium plans come with a dedicated team of specialists that will help set you up for success.

Pressable, on the other hand, has more mid-range options than WP Engine. The downside is that you don’t get dedicated VMs and mission-critical solutions for enterprises. But if you don’t need these, they won’t be missed in the first place.

DreamHost has the best Jetpack license, but it only features one-website managed WordPress plans. If you want start another website, you’ll need a separate subscription for it.

A2 Hosting, Kinsta, and Bluehost have their strengths, but they’re more niche picks than the higher-ranked hosts.

Whoever you decide on, make sure to contact customer service and ask about the features included in managed WordPress plans. You can and should ask if the plans will deliver what you need (for example, an eCommerce WordPress website). In competitive industries, quality customer service often makes the difference. This is even more so the case with managed WordPress hosting.