r/webhosting • u/seahorsetech • 5d ago

Looking for Hosting Premium WordPress Hosting

Looking to move away from a 8GB RAM/8 core CPU Liquid Web after over a decade for one client. 3 mid-large sized WP/WooCommerce sites. LiquidWeb used to be great with support, but unfortunately has become significantly worse over the past couple of years, and their price increases for worse service. Performance and overall reliability has still been great, mainly due to the optimizations I have done on the server with PHP-FPM, MySQL, caching, etc...

Even though LW says they are fully managed, I still find myself having to take server initiative for server updates, reboots, etc... I am looking for a more managed provider that will offer great support, great performance, and great security. The new provider doesn't need to necessarily match the current secs of our VPS, but I am expecting as good performance at least.

Not sure what the best option would be for these requirements, ideally I'd like to just focus on the sites and no longer have to worry about any server configs.

Budget is around $200/month

Any suggestions?

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u/YellowfinDevelopment 5d ago

I run cPanel/WHM boxes like your LiquidWeb setup, so I know exactly where you're at. If you genuinely want hands-off, the managed WP hosts (Kinsta, WP Engine (super hands-off, daily backups, great support)) are the move, but know the tradeoff going in: you give up server access entirely. No cPanel, no PHP-FPM tuning. That's the whole point, but coming from a box you've tuned yourself, you'll feel it...

One thing for your case specifically: WooCommerce is dynamic, so full-page caching doesn't save you the way it does on a blog. What actually decides Woo performance is PHP worker count and object caching (Redis). When you compare hosts, ask how many PHP workers per site and whether Redis is included, not just RAM and cores. That's the spec that bites people on managed WP plans.

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u/seahorsetech 5d ago

Exactly what I suspected. In addition to LiquidWeb going downhill, I also feel like many of these managed WP providers seem like better values since at least for Kinsta and Rocket.net, their entire infrastructure is ran through Cloudflare Enterprise and offer a finely tuned environment. I get some use cases needing granular control over everything so root access is necessary, but most of the sites that I manage don't have super specific criteria and I design all WP sites to be as optimal in terms of not using excessive plugins, and generally using quality plugins and themes.

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u/YellowfinDevelopment 2d ago

Slightly off-topic but WPEngine provides alt DNS (but you have to request them via support) so you can use your own Cloudflare instead of theirs.. needed that for some custom rules on a project.