What Does “WordPress Hosting” Mean?

Because of how widespread WordPress is, most web hosts offer “WordPress Hosting” in addition to their normal web hosting packages. This trend seems to have really taken off in the past few years and has forced many hosting providers to also display “WordPress Hosting” on their website. But what does this mean? Is WordPress hosting different from ordinary shared hosting? That’s what I’ll discuss today.

“WordPress Hosting” Is USUALLY Just Ordinary Hosting

The big secret here is that “WordPress Hosting” ordinarily gives you nothing different from what you get with regular shared hosting plans. No additional features, no special protections or services. In some cases, the hosting provider will automatically enable some settings that you could have done yourself anyway.

Here are a few examples of what WordPress hosting does differently in most situations.

Automatic Installation of WordPress

If you specifically purchase “WordPress Hosting”, then the chances are that the web hosting provider will install it for you automatically without you having to do anything. This is only a mild benefit, since you can manually install it on your own with just a few clicks using the Softaculous plugin that’s available with just about every cPanel hosting provider, including NameHero.

But it’s possible that I’m viewing things as someone who’s been hosting for years. It’s possible – perhaps even likely – that someone trying to host for the first time has no idea how to do this, and a tutorial is just another step in the process.

So useful, I guess. But not in the long term.

Automatic Updates of Plugins and Themes

If you’ve used WordPress for a while, you would know that if there’s a long gap between logins, you’ll be inundated with update requests from themes and plugins as soon as you visit the dashboard. Keeping your software updated is absolutely vital – even though I recommend waiting a bit before doing so, just to iron out any bugs.

There’s a way to automate this process. We’ve written before on the NameHero blog about how to automatically update WordPress components, and you should take a look at that tutorial to see how it’s done. But again, this is an additional step that those new to WordPress have to take. And given that most WordPress hacks are a result of outdated software, it’s quite a critical function to enable.

Once again, the value of WordPress hosting is seen for those new to the process. Personally, I prefer to update my software manually after 4 days have passed since the last update. But it could be a good idea for newbies to set the automatic updates and forget about them.

Malware Scanning – Sometimes

You would think that specialized “WordPress Hosting” plans would always include free malware scanning at least once a day, but you would be wrong. Here at NameHero, we have malware scanning via the Imunify360 plugin for cPanel for all our hosting plans, not just WordPress hosting. But most other web hosts don’t provide this service, when they absolutely should.

Is “WordPress Hosting” Worth it?

Like I said, in most cases it’s exactly the same as shared hosting – up to and including the price. So it’s a moot question about whether or it’s “worth it”. If the shared hosting is worth it, then the WordPress package definitely is! There are a few companies out there that provide truly specialized WordPress hosting, but those are a lot more expensive, and for good reason!

For now, just keep in mind that from a functional point of view, WordPress hosting is pretty much the same as ordinary shared hosting with a few pre-set parameters. That’s it!