Managed WordPress hosting means your host keeps the software current, keeps working copies of it, watches for trouble and renews the certificates before they lapse. Every host on earth would sign that sentence, which is why the sentence is not much use to you.
So rather than define it again, here is the work itself: what happens to a WordPress site sitting on our servers across an ordinary month. Nothing dramatic occurs in this month. A month in which nothing dramatic occurs is the thing you are buying.
Reading the update list before touching it
A WordPress site is three things wearing one coat: the core software, a theme, and however many plugins you have collected. Each of those releases on its own schedule, written by different people, with no obligation to get along with each other.
The month therefore begins with a list, and the first job is not applying anything on it. It is reading it. A release note saying “fixes a flaw allowing an unauthenticated visitor to upload files” is a today job, and if it appears at eleven at night it is a tonight job. A release note saying “adds a colour picker to the settings screen” can wait for a quiet hour when there is time to look at the site properly afterwards.
That looking afterwards is the half nobody sells and nearly everybody skips. A monitoring tool will tell you the page returned a 200 and was perfectly happy to serve you a broken layout while doing it. What we do instead is open the site and use it, concentrating on whichever pages would embarrass you most if they stopped working.
The one that breaks something
Once or twice a month an update does not survive contact with a real site. It is rarely dramatic and it is usually specific: a layout that shifts because a page builder changed how it handles a container, a slider that stops sliding, a product filter that starts returning nothing at all.
What follows is unglamorous. The update comes straight back off, so the site is working again before anyone has to think hard about it. Then the thinking starts: which two plugins disagreed, what the changelog says was altered, whether a setting resolves it, and whether the author already knows. Sometimes it ends in an email to a developer in another country and a fortnight on the old version. Sometimes it ends with us telling you the plugin has been abandoned and you need to plan a replacement.
Most customers hear about all of that afterwards rather than during. That gap is more or less the whole product.
The copy you hope never gets used
A copy of the site leaves the server every day, and the word doing the work in “daily off-site backups” is not “daily”. A backup stored next to the thing it is protecting dies in the same fire. If the machine fails, or ransomware reaches everything it can touch, a copy sitting on that server goes with it.
A backup nobody has ever restored is a hope rather than a backup, which is the part worth interrogating with any host, us included. The questions that get you a useful answer are set out in our piece on what daily backups should actually mean.
The alert nobody is awake for
WordPress runs a large share of the web, which makes it the platform most worth attacking. Almost none of that attention is personal. It is scripts, working through lists of sites, trying known holes in old plugins and having a go at weak passwords.
The watching is mostly mechanical as a result: login attempts arriving faster than a person could type, files changing when nobody has logged in to change them, load on the machine that does not match the traffic, and mail suddenly pouring out of a site that has never sent an email in its life. That last one is often the first sign a site has been turned into somebody else’s spam relay.
Our monitoring genuinely runs at three in the morning on a bank holiday, rather than nine to five with an alarm bolted on. Out of hours it reaches the same people it reaches during the working week. Olly, who runs the place, picks these up himself at weekends. There is no night shift reading from a script, because there is no script.
None of that means nothing will go wrong. It means the gap between something going wrong and us knowing about it stays short, with a clean copy sitting behind it either way.
Renewing certificates, over and over
The padlock in the address bar comes from a certificate, and certificates expire. Modern ones are deliberately short-lived, so renewal is not a diary note for a few years’ time. It is a recurring job that has to keep succeeding, and the failures worth watching for are the ones where the renewal itself is fine and something around it moved: a domain pointed at a different DNS provider, a subdomain added months back that never made it onto the list.
When one does lapse, browsers do not put a small warning at the top of the page. They put a full-screen red interruption in front of your website telling visitors it is not safe, and most people turn round at that point. The certificates are free and the renewal is automatic, so the actual job is making sure automatic is still what is happening.
Then there are the jobs you send us
Plenty of the month does not arrive on a schedule at all. It arrives from you: a mailbox for someone who has just started, a DNS record for a booking tool the marketing agency wants to plug in, a heads-up that a campaign goes out next week and a question about whether the server will cope with it.
Those are the calls we would much rather have than not, because they cost minutes in advance and hours afterwards. The same goes for plugins. You still choose what goes on your own website, and anything you install this afternoon becomes something we maintain from tomorrow. Tell us before you add something heavy and you get an opinion on it beforehand rather than an apology afterwards.
Where managed WordPress hosting stops
Two edges are worth naming, because finding them later is a miserable conversation. None of this is unlimited development. Redesigning a page, building a booking system or writing your content is project work and gets quoted on its own, usually by dijitul next door. And hosting cannot rescue a badly built site. We can make a slow site quicker. We cannot turn a bad theme into a good one, and where the real answer is a rebuild we would sooner say so early than host the old one for another three years.
All of the work above sits inside £1 a day + VAT, about £30 a month + VAT, with the move from your current host included. A handful of sites under one roof gets priced on its own, because no two setups carry the same load, and for a shop the conversation moves to WooCommerce hosting, which is a different amount of work again.
The itemised version of what is included lives on our WordPress hosting page. If you would rather have the general argument than the WordPress one, including how the managed tier differs from unmanaged and from budget shared, that is what fully managed web hosting means.
Managed WordPress hosting FAQs
What is the difference between managed and unmanaged WordPress hosting?
Unmanaged hosting gives you server space and leaves the software to you. Managed hosting means the host applies core, theme and plugin updates, takes off-site backups, watches for security problems and keeps your SSL certificate renewed. You still own the site and its content. Somebody else owns the maintenance.
How often does a WordPress site actually need updating?
As often as the software releases, which on a site with a normal collection of plugins means something most weeks. Security releases go on the day they appear, or the night they appear if they are serious. The rest are grouped, applied at a quiet time, and then checked by a person who loads the site and uses it.
Who do I speak to when something breaks?
Us, directly, on 01623 650 333 or by WhatsApp. The people answering are the people with access to the servers, so you are not describing your problem twice. Out of hours messages reach the same team, so nothing sits in a queue waiting for an office to reopen.
Can you take over a WordPress site somebody else built?
Yes, and a good share of the WordPress sites we host started life somewhere else. Migration is free. We take a copy, stand it up on our kit for you to click round, and only point the domain at it when you tell us you are happy. You do not need the original developer’s permission or blessing.
Hand the maintenance over
If you are currently the person who remembers to update the plugins, you can stop being that person. Send us the site, we will move it for nothing, and the next time WordPress ships a release it will be our problem rather than yours.
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