If you are going to use WordPress to build an eCommerce website for your business, you will need web hosting. You will find not only there are many hosting providers, but there are also some other web hosting types, like WordPress hosting and managed WordPress hosting.
Which hosting type and which hosting company is good for a beginner to build an e-commerce website and focus on your own business? I will tell you that Managed WordPress Hosting would be the best choice if you are a beginner and want to focus on the business, while not spending much time on building and maintaining the website.
So you will want to know what is managed WordPress hosting. and you will search for it and find that the prices for managed WordPress hosting can be much higher than many shared hosting, Which one should I get? Is the expensive managed WordPress hosting worth it?
I expected that you would have many questions as a beginner, so we picked the most popular hosting providers, reviewed and compared them with pros and cons, We will give our recommendations and opinions in this article, I hope you can get the right one for your e-commerce websites.
Learn about Managed WordPress Hosting
A Quick View of the Top Managed WordPress Hostings
Before we start the details of the hosting, I want to show you an overview of all the managed WordPress hosting we are going to explore, It will show you the discounted prices and some essential features and help you to do a simple comparison.
Please note that these prices in the table are approximate and may vary depending on promotions and specific features you choose.
1. WordPress.com (Recommended)
WordPress.com is not the official website of the open-source CMS WordPress that we commonly use. The official website for the open-source WordPress system is WordPress.org. However, WordPress.com is a fully managed WordPress hosting service created by Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress.org. It can be considered the first generation of fully managed hosting specifically designed for WordPress.
WordPress.com was established in 2005, two years after the launch of WordPress.org. It is part of Automattic Inc., a company dedicated to supporting and expanding the WordPress ecosystem. The goal of WordPress.com was to simplify website creation, making it accessible to a wider audience, particularly those with limited technical expertise.
The hosting service was created by the founder, their understanding of WordPress is undoubtedly deep, making WordPress.com a reliable option.
Learn more about WordPress.com from our review.
📜 Major Features / Pros
- SaaS and Easy to Use – Although WordPress.com is a fully managed hosting service, it also has the advantages of SaaS, which is very similar to Shopify. Once you subscribe, you can start building your site right away. This makes it very user-friendly, especially for beginners.
- Super Excellent Performance for Websites, WordPress.com utilizes a network of global data centers, ensuring that websites are hosted close to their visitors, which reduces latency and improves load times, It also leverages a robust CDN that caches content across multiple locations worldwide. WordPress.com uses an optimized and streamlined codebase too, when you try it you will know how fast the websites on this platform are.
- Serious security, WordPress.com has evolved into a hybrid solution that combines the strengths of Shopify and fully managed WordPress hosting. They have comprehensive security measures, including firewalls, DDoS protection, real-time security scanning, and spam and virus protection. Plus, with Jetpack, users don’t need to worry about these issues at all.
- 99.99% uptime guarantee.
- Easy to Use and Automated Migrate website,
- Daily Backup and on-demand Backups, you can take backups at any time with Jetpack.
- Woocommerce, Jetpack, and even Gravatar are from WordPress.com
- Specially optimized for Woocommerce managed hosting
- 24/7 Support with WordPress Experts
👎 Cons
- For a fully functional eCommerce store, you need to subscribe to the Creator Commerce plan or higher, which might be a concern for many beginners.
- You cannot change the currency during the subscription process. For example, my wordpress.com account shows prices in Euro, they claim it’s based on your IP address, but clearly, it’s not, I using an IP in the US. It seems to be determined when you first register your account.
- If you want to change the currency, you need to contact customer support, you can send a message to their customer support through the chat option at the bottom right of their homepage, it seems not an instant chat before you make a purchase.
💰 Price (See the quick view above too):
You can start a small website at $4/month with wordpress.com, and they offer a life-time free trial plan for any users. If you want to build a feature-rich e-commerce website to sell products, you might need to subscribe to the Creator plan..
Refund Policy
WordPress.com offers a generous refund policy to ensure customer satisfaction. The refund period varies depending on the billing cycle you choose:
- Annual, Biennial, and Triennial Plans: For plans purchased or renewed with an annual, biennial, or triennial billing cycle, you can request a full refund within 14 days of purchase or renewal.
- Monthly Plans: For monthly plans, you can request a full refund within 7 days of purchase or renewal.
Once you learn more about hosting providers, you’ll find that most of them have a sales model similar to WordPress.com, especially fully managed WordPress hosts. So, it’s fair to say that WordPress.com is a pioneer in this industry.
✨ Get a Free Trial→
I strongly recommend WordPress.com for Beginners to start your WordPress website, you can try it for free anytime
2. Cloudways (Recommended)
Cloudways is one of the most popular managed cloud hosting providers while WordPress hosting is one of the major managed types they provide, and there are more than 250,000 users who put their projects on Cloudways.
You can choose a cloud hosting provider with Cloudways that’s because they manage hosting based on other DIY VPS or cloud hosting like Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr, Amazon AWS, and Google Cloud platform, etc. Meanwhile, You can get a dedicated IP with most of the managed hosting on Cloudways.
Although Cloudways doesn’t have its own servers, all the cloud hosting it uses is provided by the most famous and reliable hosting companies, so you don’t need to worry about that. In fact, many hosting providers operate this way.
Cloudways allows you to host unlimited websites on their managed hosting since it is based on VPS or cloud hosting, but you should not host more than 5 websites if you choose a small server. They charge only for the server resources you consume.
Like most managed WordPress hosting services, Cloudways prepares everything you need for new WordPress websites, taking your worries away so you can focus on your business.
Cloudways also provides managed WooCommerce hosting that’s specially designed for e-commerce websites. If you want to build an e-commerce site, I recommend you choose this type of hosting.
📜 Major Features / Pros
- Dedicated Environment and Friendly Development – You have full control of your cloud hosting with a dedicated IP address and a host of resources, choose different hosting IaaS Providers.
- Super Excellent Performance for Websites, Cloudways uses a lot of technologies to speed up your website, first of all, with the dedicated environment you don’t need to compete with others, and optimized stake, in-house cache plugin, Cloudways CDN, etc.
- Serious security, Dedicated Firewalls filter out malicious traffic and protect your servers from intruders and threats, Cloudways also uses the Cloudflare Enterprise add-on and offers advanced protection against DDoS attacks, hackers, and threats at the edge, it also offers the technology of self-healing.
- 99.99% uptime guarantee.
- Unlimited Websites hosted, Easy to Use and Automated Migrate website,
- Daily Backup and on-demand Backups, you can take backups at any time
- Specially optimized for Woocommerce managed hosting
- 24/7 Support with WordPress Experts
👎 Cons
- Free Trial time is too short, only 3 days, it seems they don’t have a money return guarantee too, the probable reason is they charge hourly
- Cloudways doesn’t offer Email hosting, so if you want to create a business email account based on your own domain you need to pay extra or find a 3rd-party service like Google Workspace(Google Suite).
💰 Price (See the quick view above too):
You can start a small server at $12/month with managed WordPress hosting or woocommerce hosting, and you can get 3-day free trial before purchasing the Cloudways managed to host. And $0.033/GB per server will be applied for external backup storage(if you want), as my experience, the total size for backup size is very small.
They use the post-billing method and charge in arrears, this means they will charge how much you actually consume since the cloud hosting is always charged by the hour.
✨ Get a Free Trial for 3 Days→
I recommend Cloudways much more than WP Engine, we hosted an e-commerce website on Cloudways, and it is cheaper and more flexible, but other features are similar
3. Nexcess (Full Managed) – Recommended
Nexcess is one Brand of the Liquid Web, it was founded in 2010. Liquid Web is one of the most famous cloud server providers in the world while Nexcess is specially built for fully Managed hosting, of course including Managed WordPress Hosting.
Not like most hosting providers, Nexcess uses its own data centers, as Liquid web their own is a cloud and dedicated cluster hosting provider, that’s why it can offer you a lower price and more resources than other providers, only $19/mo but 2TB bandwidth for starters.
Another aspect that probably makes Nexcess very competitive is it optimizes performance and enhances security for hosting and websites with custom-built technology and tools.
Nexcess also offers most of the features offered by other managed hosting providers, you will have a very good experience if you choose Nexcess too. and there are more than 500,000 websites under their management.
📜 Major Features / Pros
- Built-in CDN, advanced Multi-Layered caching, premium image compression, and other more cut-edge technologies make your website load unparalleled fast.
- iThemes Security Pro and Malware monitoring tools keep your website constantly protected.
- Nexcess offers automatic SSL certificates to websites to protect the sensitive information between your hosting and the users.
- Stencils and Templates for Easy and rapid site building, free and expert website migration
- Daily Backup and Instant Backups
- Email hosting is available, you can create a business email account with your own custom domain name.
- E-commerce features to boost sales for your business
- Nexcess has built a team of WordPress experts who manage and support the sites hosted on their platform
- One-click staging makes Development easily
- lower price and any new guys can get a free trial for 14 days without adding a credit card.
👎 Cons
- It seems I can’t show you an obvious disadvantage like the above providers
💰 Price (See the quick view above too):
- Monthly Plan: start at USD13.3/mo(30% discount) for the first 3 months on Nexcess, then renew at the regular price of USD19/mo.
- Annual Plan: Nexcess offers a discount too if you purchase the hosting annually, you can pay USD190/year only and then renew at USD190/year too. (30 days money-back guarantee).
For People not sure Nexcess is good, Nexcess gives you a free trial of managed WordPress hosting for 14 days with No Credit Card.
4. WP Engine – Most Popular
WP Engine was founded in 2010, and it is one of the most famous managed WordPress hosting providers no matter where you search for managed WordPress hosting, you will see WP Engine. There are more than 1.2 million websites hosted on WP Engine from 150 countries in the world, you can imagine how big the number is.
WP engine is absolutely the number #1 Managed WordPress hosting regardless of the number of users or the managed hosting features for WordPress, that’s probably the reason why managed WordPress hosting is more expensive than other providers.
The price for managed WordPress hosting on the WP engine could be one of the highest ones for start, but the features are rich for a WordPress website, you can obtain almost any features that need for a website, including SEO, speed, security, daily and on-demanded backup, WordPress expert support and so on.
WP engine also provides premium features for e-commerce & woocommerce to help you build your e-commerce websites, such as streamlined store creation and Instant Store Search.
You can build the website with your own content and focus on the business without any effort on hosting with WP engines, and you can also get help and some opinions from WordPress experts at any time.
📜 Major Features / Pros
- High Performance and Fastest Speed for Loading Website, The WP engine uses dedicated servers & server clusters, which makes your website load super fast with the data centers around the world and the CDN, You can also use the in-house WP cache plugin developed by the WP engine to optimize the performance.
- Threat blocking & serious security, WP engine offers Platform-level protection and WordPress-optimized WAF to detect threats & block attacks, they will monitor your website continuously. And Free SSL certificates to protect the information delivery from your hosting to users.
- Easy to Use and Migrate website, WP Engine uses a beginner-friendly in-house dashboard, you can manage everything in the dashboard. and it offers a migration plugin, you can use it automatically migrate your business from another host in minutes.
- Daily Backup and on-demand Backups, The hosting will automatically backup your website every day, Furthermore, you can take backups you own at any time.
- 10 Premium WordPress Theme, it can save you $100 at least each year.
- E-commerce features to boost sales for your business including streamlined store creation and Instant Store Search.
- Supported by the WordPress Expert Team, whatever questions or issues you have for WordPress, you can contact the WordPress experts to get their help and suggestions.
- Friendly Development, One-click staging to make you spin up a copy of the site easier to test changes at the click of a button and then push to your live site with the push of another button.
👎 Cons
- Disallowing many 3rd-party plugins if you use WP Engine managed WordPress hosting, please check the details here before starting with WP engine. Actually, the WP engine also offers the features that the plugins offer, so it won’t be affected when you use the hosting, but some people probably feel restricted.
- You can’t create an email account with your own domain, WP engine does not support email hosting.
💰 Price (See the quick view above too):
- Monthly Plan: You can start your WordPress website at $27/mo for the first month, and then at a regular price of $30/mo monthly,
- Annual Plan: WP engine will always give some discount for people who buy a one-year period at a time, The discounted price is USD22.5/mo annually, which is actually 3 months free, The discount may be changed anytime, and the renewal price is USD300 annually.
5. Kinsta – Best for Company and Agency
Kinsta is another managed hosting provider that focuses on WordPress websites, it was founded in 2013, and the company can help users host and manage websites of almost all industries.
Kinsta is powered exclusively by Google Cloud Platform like WP Engine, and the features of Kinsta managed WordPress hosting are very similar to WP Engine too, with some aspects even better than WP Engine.
The C2 compute-optimized VMs of GCP are used for all plans on Kinsta in 29 supported data centers, this is based on Google’s Premium Tier network, which is much faster than GCP’s lower-tier machines.
There are also many in-house tools developed by the Kinsta development team, such as their own custom application performance monitoring tool for website performance, etc.
Kinsta also works deeply with Cloudflare, which is shown in they offer Cloudflare enterprise-level firewall, CDN, and DDoS protection on all plans for free. As I know WP Engine doesn’t have these features.
So many advanced features are offered by Kinsta, That probably the price is expensive for Kinsta managed WordPress hosting, It is also on par with WPEngine in this regard
📜 Major Features / Pros
- Performance-oriented host, Kinsta uses GCP’s Premium Tier network and the fastest virtual machines for the hosting stack, and they use Cloudflare CDN for all plans, as well as some well-known technologies like http3, Gzip, object cache(Redis Add-on), etc.
- the utmost important security, At first, as I mentioned above Kinsta uses Cloudflare enterprise-level firewall and DDoS protection, They promise 99.99% uptime for all hosting and monitoring sites every two minutes for uptime, 100% hack-fix, and an auto-healing guarantee.
- Kinsta has its own custom built-in Tools, application performance monitoring tool for performance, custom control panel MyKinsta dashboard (Multilingual), and built-in multisite support.
- Free Features: Free Cloudflare Integration and SSL certificates, Free expert Migrate website, free IP Geolocation manager, and so on.
- Six types of backups: automatic daily backup, manual on-demand, optional hourly, system-generated, downloadable, and external backups.
- Optimized for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads to boost sales for your business.
- Premium 24×7 Support Supports by WordPress Expert Team.
- Friendly Development, you can even develop locally with DevKinsta.
👎 Cons
- Have a List of Banned and Incompatible Plugins like WP Engine. if you use WP Engine managed WordPress hosting, please check the list here.
- Kinsta doesn’t offer email hosting for custom domain email accounts.
💰 Price (See the quick view above too):
- Monthly Plan: Like WP Engine, You will also need to start at USD30/mo on Kinsta.
- Annual Plan: They will offer a discount if you purchase the hosting annually, you can pay USD300/year only and then renew at USD300/year too. (30 days money-back guarantee).
If you want to create an e-commerce website, they recommend you to choose a Business plan, but I personally thought the starter plan is enough to build a small e-commerce website, but it depends on how big is your business.
✨ Get 2 months free at $300/year annually →
After comparing Kinsta with WPEngine, Kinsta is better in many features.
6. Elementor Cloud Hosting – Best WP Page Editor
If you ask me which page builder is the No.#1 for WordPress, I will definitely tell you it is Elementor. The team started a business called Elementor Cloud Website in 2021, it is actually a managed WordPress hosting, and you can use it to build a website very quickly and easily.
Elementor is the most used and popular tool for WordPress theme development, there are Thousands and hundreds of themes are created by this builder, and due to Gutenberg and the new Editor in the New version of WordPress, more and more themes are created by Gutenberg.
The market is getting smaller, I think, therefore, Elementor launched the Cloud Website. whatever the reason is, the Elementor Cloud website is a new way for beginners to build their website easily, Anyone can use the full features of Elementor Pro with Elementor Cloud Website.
The Elementor Cloud Website is powered by the Google Cloud platform too, like other managed WordPress hosting, they will offer everything for you to run a WordPress website fast securely, and properly.
📜 Major Features / Pros
- All Features of Elementor Pro Builder, including the drag & drop editor, all Pro widgets, features, kits, and templates.
- CDN By Cloudflare, you get fast-loading websites and high-reliability
- Automated backups take place daily and manual backup and restore.
- Easy to use and create a website quickly, you can manage everything from the My Elementor dashboard
- You can get WordPress expert Support, as well as Premium Elementor Pro
- very good for Beginners
👎 Cons
- incompatible with many 3rd-party plugins, you can check the details here.
- Do not offer email hosting.
💰 Price (See the quick view above too):
- Monthly Plan: currently no
- Annual Plan: USD99/year. (30 days money-back guarantee).
A very low price for starting and you get 20GB Storage, 100GB bandwidth, and 100,000 visits monthly.
7. DreamPress (Dreamhost)
Dreamhost is one of the oldest hosting providers in the world, It was founded before the year 2000, and it is one of the most famous hostings for WordPress, It also provides managed WordPress hosting: DreamPress.
Like many other managed WordPress hosting, DreamPress offers a lot of features to ensure WordPress websites run securely and at an extreme speed. they use their server infrastructure, so they can offer a relatively lower price to the users.
Furthermore, they provide email hosting for managed WordPress hosting, and you can also use a WP site builder for beginners to create a website quickly.
📜 Major Features / Pros
- Built-in Caching And unlimited CDN for High Performance and Fastest Speed.
- WordPress website builder with a drag-and-drop editor.
- Automated Daily Backups and on-demand backup
- Jetpack Professional is Included in Plus and Pro plans
- Daily Backup and on-demand Backups
- offers email hosting for people to create email accounts with a Custom Domain
- 24/7 Premium WordPress Support Expert Team
- 1-Click Staging for Friendly easily Development
👎 Cons
- Jetpack is a very famous plugin, but it is also known that it may affect performance sometimes, Dreampress uses the Jetpack plugin in the plans, but I have no idea if it will truly enhance the performance of the managed WordPress hosting.
- You need to pay extra for some extra security, like identifying malicious code, out-of-date software
💰 Price (See the quick view above too):
- Monthly Plan: Start at $12/mo for the first 3 months, then renew at $19.95/mo.
- Annual Plan: Starter Plan USD16.95/mo annually (30-day money-back guarantee).
If you are going to start a long-term business, then paying annually is better.
8. Bluehost Managed WordPress
Bluehost is one of the most famous hosting providers, and it is one of the officially recommended hosting companies by WordPress.org too. So of course the managed WordPress hosting is also included in Bluehost hosting lines.
I want to say Bluehost Managed WordPress is very similar to DreamPress, with similar pricing, and similar features. Both companies are very old, they own a large number of users.
The Price for Bluehost Managed WordPress hosting is relatively low, The BUILD plan offers all the main features for people to start a simple website, and you can use their single dashboard to manage everything even control your SEO, social media, and traffic sources.
📜 Major Features / Pros
- Multi-layered caching for Lightning-fast website speed
- With CDN of 200+ Global Edge Servers to store and deliver content quickly wherever you are.
- Multi-tiered security, including auto-updates, and it is a Fully redundant WordPress platform
- Daily automated Malware Detection and Removal
- Daily Scheduled Backups
- E-commerce features to boost sales for your business on the high plans
- Premium Support by WordPress Expert
- One-click staging Environment for users to test and make changes to websites easily but not on the live site.
👎 Cons
- Bluehost also uses the Jetpack plugin in the plans, I have no idea if it will truly enhance the performance of the managed WordPress hosting.
- offers 30 Day Free Trial of Microsoft Email, but does not offer email hosting.
💰 Price (See the quick view above too):
- Monthly Plan: Start with a Build plan at $19.95/mo (regular).
- Annual Plan: Build a Plan starting at USD9.95/mo. for a 36-month term, then renew at the regular price. (30 days money-back guarantee).
Is Managed WordPress Hosting Worth it?
Firstly, if you are a total newbie, fully managed WordPress hosting is absolutely the best for you, You will never feel a headache to anything start your website, what you need to do is to leave professional things to professional people.
You don’t need to spend time learning how to manage hosting and how to build a website, and you don’t need to make an effort to search for optimizing and securing your site anymore, which means that you hire a technical team when you use Managed WordPress hosting. you can really focus on your business without any worries.
Secondly, even if you are a professional or an expert in the related industry, perhaps you think you can handle everything, so you will save some money with other VPS or cloud hosting, but actually, how much can you save?
The most expensive managed hosting starts at $30, one cup of coffee, and you need to do a lot of jobs to prepare everything, performance, security, and debugging, You probably also need to buy some tools. That’s why many IT companies, agencies, and developers hosted their websites on managed WordPress hosting, they saved not only a cup of coffee.
So the answer is absolute, the managed WordPress hosting is worth it!
Conclusion
The most popular and Top Managed WordPress hosting is displayed here, I want to show you more, but it is hard, you know. However, confidently, no matter where you look for managed WordPress hosting, most of the recommendations here will be recommended by other websites.
The prices you saw for the listed managed WordPress hosting are very big differences indeed, Kinsta and WP Engine start from $30/mo while siteground is only $3.99/mo, but SiteGround is not considered as a real managed hosting and Kinsta offers a ton of advance features.
And I personally believe Cloudways and Nexcess are the best choices for many people to start an e-commerce website, They offer many advanced features but relatively low prices, if you have enough budget, then Kinsta will be my first recommendation.
