In Web hosting, the term ‘Managed WordPress Hosting’ has been used/abused to the point of being virtually meaningless today.
That is unless the host in question specifies exactly what they manage and exactly what you, as the customer/user, are expected to manage.
Without that information, ‘Managed WordPress Hosting’ is just marketing fluff often meant to sucker newbies into getting something different from what they thought they were getting.
At WPX, this is how we define and operate our ‘Managed WordPress Hosting’ service (applies to all hosting plans here).
What we manage for you (All included in the hosting price):
- 99.95% Server uptime;
- WPX Cloud CDN uptime;
- Email functionality (if using WPX for email) – heavy business email users are encouraged to use Google Workspace or Zoho, our email is pretty basic;
- The functionality of the WPX control panel;
- Platform optimization for high-speed WordPress performance;
- Constantly updated/monitored security at the server level;
- Malware scanning & removal – at no cost to WPX customers;
- Full daily backups going back 28 days;
- Free site migrations from your old host to WPX within 24 hours (free unless it involves a domain change or the express option);
- Technical Support, with a 30 second average response time, according to Live Chat Inc;
- Issues where our ‘Fixed For You’ Guarantee applies due to a site going offline;
- Billing accuracy;
- One time (per website) free speed optimization, analysis & recommendations (if requested by the customer).
What you need to manage:
- Content for your site/s;
- SEO for your site/s;
- Paid ad management for your site/s;
- Social media monitoring for your site/s;
- Secure passwords for your site/s;
- Issues caused by poor software coding in bad templates or plugins created by 3rd party developers (physically impossible for us to do, there are over 57,000 free plugins from different developers in the WordPress plugin repository) – we can’t control or guarantee that every software product out there works as you want it to, that’s an issue to take up with the relevant company;
- Hardware issues at the user-end e.g. wonky laptop, Windows bugs, email client stubbornness (Outlook/Thunderbird) – for security reasons, we do not offer remote troubleshooting on customers’ hardware via Team Viewer;
- Internet connectivity issues at the user end (check with your ISP please);
- Fixes to CSS, PHP, design, cosmetic or visual improvements; these are the work of a Web developer or designer, our main goal with the Fixed For You Guarantee is to get your site back up and working normally fast & free (good WordPress developers are at least $50 an hour so you can see the economic problem);
- Insertion of code into your website/s e.g. Adsense, Facebook widgets, etc;
- Theme and plugin updates – we used to automatically upgrade those but that would often cause sites to breakthrough incompatibilities with newer WP or PHP versions.
At WPX, we do not expect you to have System Administrator skills and our core mission is to handle as much as possible on the technology side so that you can get on with running your business.
If you have any other questions on the topic, don’t hesitate to contact the WPX Support Team via live chat (use the bottom right-hand widget) and they will respond and help within 30 seconds or less.
By Terry Kyle
Chief Dog Lover/CEO
WPX Hosting