How you can get the total freedom to create without the hassles that come with managing your own website.
The open source WordPress project has given the world a powerful publishing platform that now powers 41% of the web. While this is the most widely adopted CMS on the internet, you’re also going to need a hosting provider to make your website available online.
When choosing a web host, it’s important to think about how hands-on you’d like to be with maintenance. If you aren’t familiar with technical website operations, it can be daunting to install updates, fear of breaking something or forgetting to backup! (it’s ok, we’ve all been there) Good news: there’s another way and it’s called managed hosting.
Managed hosting is a convenient service offered by WordPress.com, which is 100% dedicated to hosting the open source WordPress software. Managed hosting is a great option for people who don’t want to deal with the backend technical operations of running a website. You get all of the freedom of WordPress, with none of the hassles.
Here’s what you get with WordPress.com managed hosting:
A faster website.
Because slow websites are the worst! Especially if you plan on growing your audience and customers. To keep it fast, WordPress.com runs on its own global CDN with 28 state-of-the-art data centers (and counting) all over the world with servers, switches, and routers we own instead of lease. This environment is especially unique because it’s specifically designed and optimized for WordPress sites, so you’re never at the mercy of another provider. The result: baseline page load speeds for a website running on a WordPress.com Business plan clock in around 1 second compared to the industry standard 2.4 seconds. That’s more than speed. It’s a platform that you can depend on.
Powerful, built-in SEO.
WordPress.com has great SEO right out of the box. That means you don’t have to do anything extra to reap the benefits. In fact, WordPress takes care of 80-90 percent of the mechanics of SEO for you, according to Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team. All of our themes are optimized for search engines, which means they are designed to make it easy for the Googlebot (and other search engines) to crawl through them and discover all the content.
WordPress.com also automatically sends notifications to Google every time you publish or update a post or page. This is similar to how your subscribers get email updates. Every time you post, you’re telling Google, “hey! Check this out.”
Security and systems experts.
Your website is only as good as it is safe. And managed hosting makes security simple by handling patches, spam protection, updates, and more without having to lift a finger. At WordPress.com, we take security a step further with dedicated systems and security teams who make sure your site stays secure.
Scalability and uptime you can depend on.
What’s the worst thing that could happen if your site gets popular? Crash. We’re here for you when it really matters and we’ll make sure this doesn’t happen. Our systems are built to scale as you grow and we have experience hosting some of the largest brands on the internet, like Facebook, Spotify, Microsoft, and CNN. We know how to seamlessly scale your website for millions of visitors, without additional costs for increased traffic.
Automatic WordPress Updates.
One of the ways we keep your site working in top condition is by automatically handling all version upgrades to make sure you’re on the latest version of WordPress. The best part is that you won’t even notice that we’re doing it for you, so there’s no need to stress about doing something wrong.
Real-time backups.
We don’t want anyone to lose their hard work. That’s why all WordPress.com plans come with automated backups to save your content. With the Business plan, we take that a step further and do real-time backups so you’ll always have peace of mind. We also diversify our locations, so each time you upload an image to WordPress.com, six copies are made in different locations with a 7th going to an Amazon s3 bucket –– just to make sure. Losing all your content is the worst feeling on earth. Constantly having to think about manual backups is a pain. That’s why we do it all for you.
This is just a small sample of how managed hosting can make running your website easier. When you leave the website maintenance to us, you can save so much time that you can refocus towards making your content instead. Plus, there’s no need to install WordPress software – it’s ready to go instantly –– as soon as you sign up.
If you’d like to learn more about how our managed hosting services can help your website run better, join us at our upcoming webinar Wednesday, June 16th at 1am PT | 11am MT | 12pm CT | 1pm ET | 5pm UTC.