Top 7 Reasons to Choose Managed WordPress Hosting over Shared Web Hosting
WordPress hosting vs web hosting: what’s the difference?
Are you trying to figure out the difference between Managed WordPress hosting and regular web hosting for your website? And then decide which one is better?
If so, you’re not alone. It can be confusing to figure out which hosting solution is the best fit for your needs, especially if you’re new to building websites.
And choosing the wrong one can lead you down a path of frustration and compromised sites.
What is Managed WordPress Hosting?
To understand the difference, let’s first define what Managed WordPress Hosting is.
Managed WordPress Hosting gives you that white-glove service that you may have heard of like when you buy a new 4K HDR TV. It typically means they will deliver the TV, unbox it, set it up where you want and hook everything up for you so you can start watching TV right away.
Managed WordPress Hosting is similar. When you sign up for service, everything you need to start building your site is in place and you’re not left wondering if you’ve missed anything. Security, updates, speed and backups are all done on a server level so you don’t even have to think about them.
Getting these points correct is crucial otherwise you could be left scrambling, searching the internet for which plugin to install to fix your current problem or how to log in with that FTP program you never use.
No Tinkering with the Technical
Unless you’re technically inclined or just like to tinker with your site, this situation leads to ‘band aid’ fixes which eventually have to be ripped off. Sites with far too many plugins to fix that last problem which are now slowing your site down and haven’t really fixed the problem are not an ideal situation
Why do many people and businesses fall prey to this? Simple, money.
Most people want to save a few bucks wherever they can, never realizing the trauma they are about to impose on themselves.
If you love to tinker or have a penchant for technicality, then you’re all set, but envisioning that you can call up your favorite techno-nerd whenever you have a problem wears out your welcome very fast.
Let’s break it down even further.
What is Shared Web Hosting?
With shared web hosting you get hard drive space for your site and sometimes email. You’re left to your own devices to install and build your site whether that be coding with traditional HTML or self-installing a content management system (CMS) like Joomla, Drupal or WordPress.
You can install anything on your space which gives you a sense of freedom. Traditional HTML means you’re coding your site like we did back in the mid 90s and while this gives you a great understanding of how websites work it’s a little daunting to say the least.
With the 1-click installations that many hosting providers offer you can absolutely install Joomla, Drupal or WordPress or an eCommerce package like Magento on your own but then you have to set it up so it’s safe, secure and fast. Remember purchasing the new 4K HDR TV is just the first step.
Of the three, Joomla, Drupal and WordPress, WordPress is by far the most popular powering 43% of ALL websites on the internet (W3TechS, 2022) and due to it’s open-source framework there are nearly 60,000 free plugins available for WordPress (WordPress, 2022) and over 10,000 free themes.
WordPress has been tested and is loved and trusted by many, so you’re probably going to be building a WordPress site.
Keeping everything updated is an absolute necessity, WordPress even has an auto-update feature that will automatically update your plugins and themes and core WordPress files.
However there is a catch, sometimes these updates can break your site.
You’ve undoubtedly heard of problems with updates on mainstream software and operating systems, this is the same.
Everything has to jive, the plugins and themes and WordPress core files all have to be in sync otherwise you’re faced with a broken site scrambling to get it working again.
Alas there is hope. Enter Managed WordPress hosting.
Top 7 Reasons to Choose Managed WordPress Hosting over Shared Web Hosting
Managed means the hosting company specifically caters to WordPress sites and has done the heavy lifting for you. You get the white-glove treatment from Happy Camper, other managed WordPress web hosting companies only offer about half of these features.
1. Superior Security
Security isn’t taken for granted.
In comparing WordPress hosting vs web hosting, shared hosting forces you to install security plugins and configure them on your own. These generally take up valuable resources which can slow your site down.
While the free versions of these plugins can offer a basic security, you often have to pay for the more advanced security that can still be lacking in the features of a server level package like Imunify360.
Imunify360 at Happy Camper is a comprehensive security suite. It utilizes highly tailored and integrated components for proactive real-time website protection and security.
It has:
- Automatic virus & malware scanning and removal. Imunify360 is constantly scanning your site.
- Malicious PHP script detection and blocking
- Stops brute-force attacks at both network and HTTP levels and DoS (denial of service)
Imunify 360 also has server level reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA, when implemented on the server, provides more control than most other popular DDoS protection solutions.
Legitimate visitors will be able to access the site, while malicious actors will be stopped, providing a powerful tool to mitigate resource usage.
Imunify360 combines an Intrusion Prevention and Detection system, a Web Application Firewall, Real-time Antivirus protection, a Network Firewall, and Patch Management components.
These elements are seamlessly integrated for flawless interoperability that instantly detects, fixes, and protects from any threats that your website may encounter.
2. LiteSpeed Server – Superior Server
The server that hosts your website has an operating system like any other computer. And like that operating system that runs your computer, some are better than others, in this case some are way way better than others.
The original web server was called Apache, which was initially released in 1995. The name “also makes a cute pun on ‘a patchy web server‘—a server made from a series of patches“.
To this date Apache still powers 32.8% of the web servers (W3Techs).
LiteSpeed web server, on the other hand, is a relative newcomer being initially released in 2003.
LiteSpeed web server is optimized to securely handle thousands of concurrent customers without consuming a lot of memory and CPU resources.
When performance tested against Apache, LiteSpeed was 84x faster than Apache! This means far less stress on the web server, which means a far greater server stability and one that is capable of handling bigger traffic spikes effortlessly.
We run every server at Happy Camper on the LiteSpeed server and the LiteSpeed Cache plugin is pre-installed on every new website.
3. Smart Updates – Updates that won’t break your site
Because most of the security problems with a website are due to outdated plugins and themes, you need to regularly update WordPress: themes, plugins, and core.
However, these updates can potentially break your website.
To ensure your WordPress installation is always automatically updated safely without breaking your website, Happy Camper has included Smart Updates with every website.
Smart Updates helps you keep your production websites up to date without the risk of breaking your website. Smart Updates analyzes the potential consequences of installing updates and advises you whether doing so is safe.

This is how it works:
- Clones the installation and then analyzes the clone and takes screenshots of the website’s pages (including dynamic content and carousels).
- Updates the clone, analyzes it again, and then takes screenshots of the website’s pages again.
- Detects issues (PHP issues, HTTP response code errors, changed page titles, and others): not only those the update can cause but also those that existed before the update.
- With manual updates, Smart Updates shows you “before” and “after” screenshots and then you decide whether it is safe to update or not.
- With auto-updates, Smart Updates automatically updates the production website unless there is at least one issue caused by the update. Otherwise, the update is not performed and you receive an email with the results of analysis and the “before” and “after” screenshots.
In the question of WordPress hosting vs web hosting this feature sets us apart.
4. Speed Kit – Crazy Fast
Being average is not enough. Amazon showed that for every 100ms increase in page load speed, they saw a decrease of 1% in revenue. Google noted that if their site is 500ms slower, they see a 20% decrease in traffic.
Speed does matter, people drop off and leave when your site is slow, it makes you look amateur.
Computers talk to each other. A visitor on their computer or phone in New York is looking at your website, which is in Los Angeles, the physical location of the server.
It takes an amount of time for the information to travel from Los Angeles to New York. If your server was moved to New York, then your website would load faster than when the server was in Los Angeles because it’s closer to the user.
The distance the information has to travel makes a difference in the speed at which your website loads.
To solve this, a technology called CDN, Content Delivery Network, was developed.
CDN servers are strategically placed around the world which store most of your website. So when that visitor in New York calls up your website instead of having to pull the information all the way from Los Angeles, it finds the closest CDN server and grabs the information from there, reducing the distance the information has to travel.
A user in London will see your website just as fast as someone in Los Angeles.
Speed Kit is a cutting edge Content Delivery Network that boosts your page loading speed by up to 4x. With a worldwide network of CDN servers, your website will load instantly anywhere.
Using Speed Kit in conjunction with LiteSpeed server caching, we saw our main website speed up from 86% to 100% performance on GTMetrix.

5. WordPress Tool Kit – Simple WordPress Management Tools
Managing your WordPress website, whether you have 1 or 100 sites, can be challenging when you have to log into each site individually and check for updates or do security adjustments.
With WordPress Tool Kit, you can do all the basic tasks from a simple control panel. Many times if your WordPress site breaks, you’re locked out of the site and can’t log in, which forces you to get out your FTP program and tinker with it.
With WordPress Tool Kit you can get under the hood, make repairs or even restore from a backup if your site is down, all from a very simple control panel which makes WordPress hosting vs web hosting a no brainer.
Plugins can be a godsend or the bane of your site and are the usual cause of site breakage, so being able to get to specific plugins and deactivate or remove them without having to actually log in to your site is worth it all by itself.
If your site is already up and running yet you want to do updates to the front end of the site, the pages that people see, then you can easily create a ‘staging’ site with the click of a button.
Easy One-Click Staging Site Creation
A staging site can be a copy of your main production site. It can also be a place where you work on a new site before it goes live. In the first case, you make a staging site (a copy of the main website) to do updates and test them out so they don’t accidentally break or disrupt your main site.
When you’re happy with the updates, you can copy them to the main site. WordPress Tool Kit makes the entire process of creating the staging site and copying the update back to the main site very simple.
Additional Security Measures
WordPress Tool Kit also adds a host of additional security measures to keep your site locked down even more and informs you of security vulnerabilities in the core WordPress files.
Here is the current list of available security measures in WordPress Tool Kit:
- Restrict access to files and directories
- Disable unused scripting languages
- Enable bot protection(can be reverted)
- Configure security keys
- Block unauthorized access to xmlrpc.php(can be reverted)
- Block directory browsing(can be reverted)
- Forbid execution of PHP scripts in the wp-includes directory(can be reverted)
- Forbid execution of PHP scripts in the wp-content/uploads directory(can be reverted)
- Block unauthorized access to wp-config.php(can be reverted)
- Disable scripts concatenation for WordPress admin panel(can be reverted)
- Turn off pingbacks(can be reverted)
- Disable PHP execution in cache directories(can be reverted)
- Disable file editing in WordPress Dashboard(can be reverted)
- Change default database table prefix
- Block access to sensitive files(can be reverted)
- Block access to potentially sensitive files(can be reverted)
- Block access to .htaccess and .htpasswd(can be reverted)
- Block author scans(can be reverted)
- Change default administrator’s username
6. Offsite Automatic Backups – Most Import Feature
This should be named “Most Important Overlooked Feature” in the question of WordPress hosting vs web hosting.
Backups are your best recovery option from a hacked site but unfortunately they often get overlooked. It’s not until someone loses vital data that the realization of having current backups hits them.
If your site does get hacked or just gets messed up somehow, you can restore from a clean working backup and move forward.
Traditional hosting is usually a little sketchy in the backup department. While the hosting provider of shared hosting usually does daily backups, you have to request the backup from them and wait for them to retrieve it and send it to you, which can take a few days.
Having control of your backups and knowing where they are is vital.
If your backups only live on the server and the server goes down, your backups go down as well unless your backups have been stored off site. Offsite backups are next level protection.

Happy Camper Web Hosting gives every user the flexibility to do daily scheduled backups and have them stored locally on the server and in user-friendly offsite locations like DropBox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and others.
This way, they are easily accessible and you know where they are.
If you don’t have an account with any of these sites, we’ll show you how to set up free accounts in our First Things to Do Video.
7. Exemplary Support
Understanding the user’s problem is the greatest skill of a support department and that comes from experience.
Our support staff have been building and maintaining websites and servers for many years and understand the problems that can appear with a WordPress website.
Having a solid hardware foundation and top-notch cutting edge software also reduces many of the problems.
With Happy Camper’s Managed WordPress Web Hosting, you’ll always feel taken care of because we’ve been there.
Summary
How Much Is Your Time Worth?
One problem on a shared hosting plan will convince you when comparing WordPress hosting vs web hosting.
When you factor in not having to deal with security, speed, updates and backups you’ll quickly see how Managed WordPress Web Hosting can make all the difference between a stressful situation with a corrupted non-working site and one that just works and is fast without much attention from you.
This is what you should expect from a Managed WordPress hosting package and this is what we package every website at Happy Camper Web Hosting with.
Because at the end of the day you just want it to work and have people see what you do or sell, right?
Let us do the heavy lifting.
Frequently Asked Questions
WordPress is a popular content management system (CMS) for building websites and blogs. It is free open-source software which can be deceiving as it needs to be maintained and updated properly.
WordPress is a well-liked option for people who want to create a website or blog without needing any programming or web development skills because of its flexibility and simplicity.
43% of ALL websites are built on WordPress. It has a sizable user base and a sizable ecosystem of plugins and themes, enabling users to personalize their websites and include different features and functionality.
A specific type of web hosting service called “WordPress hosting” is tailored for hosting websites that use the WordPress content management system.
Pre-installed WordPress software, automatic smart updates, and server-level caching are a few of the resources and features that WordPress hosting typically includes.
A WordPress website can generally be hosted and managed more easily with WordPress hosting.
Providing a control panel that is tailored for WordPress and technical support from staff members who are familiar with the WordPress platform are two examples of how to do this.
Additional features like staging environments, daily backups, and security precautions tailored specifically for WordPress websites are also included in all of the WordPress hosting plans at Happy Camper.
At Happy Camper Web Hosting all we do is “Managed WordPress Hosting” so for us the terms are interchangeable.
At other hosting companies Managed WordPress Hosting is another level of service support above regular WordPress Hosting.
We don’t make that distinction as we provide the highest caliber of service and support for all our packages.
On the outside it may appear that Managed WordPress Hosting is more expensive until you look at what is involved with managing and maintaining a typical WordPress site.
Keep in mind that your website is your storefront and store on the internet.
Some of the key features that need to be in place and maintained are things like
- Regular Offsite Backups
- Regular Safe Updates to WordPress, your themes and plugins
- Robust Security that constantly checks for and removes malware and guards against hacking attempts
- Server level speed boosters
- WordPress Managing Software
Absolutely!
As long as your previous site is a WordPress site it can be migrated effortlessly. If your site is hosted at place like Wix or Squarespace then the site would need to be rebuilt into the WordPress environment.
Yes!
Email migration is simple and safe. The only limiting factor would be the size of your existing email account. Large email accounts, over 3GB are usually that way because of attachments which can generally be removed to reduce the size.