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How to Find the Right WordPress Plan (and Why It Should Be with A2 Hosting)

A2 WordPress Picture
  • Jun 30, 2021
  • 0
  • by Kate Meda

As of June 2021, 39.6% of the internet is powered by WordPress and 64.1% of websites are built with a Content Management System (CMS) alone. With over 50,000 plugins and over 31,000 themes, WordPress has an edge over competitors when it comes to website customization. As for WordPress hosting providers? There are so many of them that you may be frozen with the paradox of choice. In this blog post, I want to explain to you why A2 Hosting should be your choice to host your WordPress site. 

Hans Solo Frozen in Carbonite
Hans Solo, frozen by the paradox of choice.

So A2 Hosting offers Shared WordPress and Managed WordPress plans. What are the key differences?

We offer two tailored WordPress packages: our Shared WordPress plans and our Managed WordPress plans.

Our Shared and Managed WordPress plans are both fully managed and are optimized for WordPress.

Our plans offer a WordPress-optimized solution in a shared environment.  This means they are on a single web server with other accounts. 

Either WordPress can be pre-installed and configured on your account or we offer free migration services so you can transfer your existing site over to our services.

What are the differences between your Shared and Managed WordPress plans? 

There are a few main differences between our Shared WordPress plans and our Managed WordPress plans.

Shared WordPress 

To start, our Shared WordPress plans offer:

      • cPanel control panel which features a toolkit specifically tailored for WordPress. If you aren’t familiar with cPanel, you can take their virtual tour.
      • Fully managed 24/7/365 support on phones, LiveChats, and email.
      • Server Rewind backups up to 50GB of storage. These are daily snapshots taken of your server.
      • Include unlimited storage, email accounts, and bandwidth. (for the exception of our Startup plan which caps at 100GB of storage and do not include backups)
      • Turbo servers. Our Turbo Boost and Turbo Max plans include Litespeed and LScache, and are built with NVMe storage, and the AMD EPYC processors making these the better choice for a site in need of additional power.
      • Site staging.
      • SSL certificates for every domain. We provide free SSL certificates through Letsencrypt for every domain

Managed WordPress 

In contrast, our Managed WordPress 1-Site, 3-Sites, and Unlimited plans offer: 

 

Our Managed WordPress plans are limited by resources like disk space and bandwidth. The average WordPress site is 5GB in size, so these plans may offer the perfect amount of storage for your needs. 

Is the Shared plan still managed and is the Managed plan still shared?

Both of these questions are common. The answer is a resounding yes. Our Shared plan has 24/7/365 support on phones, LiveChats, and tickets. Our Managed plan is on a shared server with other Managed WordPress clients.

What exactly sets A2 Hosting apart from other WordPress hosting competitors?

Speed. Our speed really is your success. Speed is not only a landing page factor for Google searches and ads, but also for mobile searches. Our Turbo servers can reduce your time to first bite by over 250 milliseconds. 

Support. Our WordPress plans are fully managed and offer 24/7/365 support on phones, LiveChats, and email. Some of our competitors require a client to pay more than $30/monthly to access their basic support. Ours is available to you at any price point without paying an add-on fee.

Flexibility. Even our least expensive WordPress plans allow for SFTP, plugin installations, and database access. Along with charging for support, some of our competitors require a client to pay more than $30/monthly to access these basic features.

A2 Optimized WordPress. A2 Optimized is our own WordPress plugin. It combines our custom settings and functionality from third-party plugins to provide:

      • Page caching
      • Database caching
      • HTML/CSS/JavaScript minification
      • Image compression
      • Page compression with Gzip
      • CAPTCHAs on comment forms and login pages
      • Randomized login page URLs, among others!

 

Find details here on how to install this using Softaculous. You can also install it manually if you have an existing WordPress site.

A2 Site Accelerator. Our own caching solution to set up speed-enhancing tools including Memcached, OPcache/APC, and Turbo cache. 

So, which plan is better for my needs?

Our Shared WordPress plans are ideal for a general user looking to break into the art of WordPress or for a user looking to add more than one CMS application to their hosting plan. Page speed is a direct ranking factor for SEO and as such, our Turbo Boost and Turbo Max plans provide the speed needed to get your site to the top. They are a fully-managed solution at a cost-effective price.

Our Managed WordPress plans are ideal for existing WordPress users looking to scale up quickly and advanced WordPress users alike. This environment provides a polished solution loaded with features and optimizations including a free Jetpack license, Litespeed cache for the extra boost in speed, and more advanced features like WP-CLI, site staging, and Git.

 

Related Resources: 

How to Get Started with WordPress

How to Install WordPress on Managed WordPress Hosting

A Complete Guide on Navigating Your WordPress Dashboard

How to Become an Expert WordPress Site Owner (3 Key Tips)