Wordpress hosting & maintenance (at a reasonable price)

[Durzel]

This has probably been done to death before, so sorry...

Someone with whom I am doing business with has a Wordpress website that got SEO spam hacked as a consequence of his current hosting/support basically charging him for maintenance and not actually doing anything. I noticed it was hacked because Google searches for the company brought up that tell-tale "This site may have been hacked" entry.

Anyway, long story short - some work on my part revealed that Google had been marking the site hacked since the beginning of the year, and he was running a pretty old version of Wordpress, with similarly old and probably vulnerable plugins. I cleaned it all up, save for about 600+ links that are still indexed by Google, but he now understandably wants to migrate his website elsewhere.

He's asked if I can maintain it but to be honest Wordpress maintenance is not really my forté and not the best use of my time. I don't want to charge the guy over the odds for periodical maintenance, and a fair amount wouldn't really be worth my time - to be brutally honest.

Long story short - I think he would be better off going with a company who specialise in this stuff, who can handle the hosting, email & maintenance of his website (he's still using a @hotmail.com address rather than a @companyname.co.uk, etc). Realistically I don't think he needs a very bespoke package - he just needs someone who will keep on top of Wordpress & plugin updates.

Anyone have any recommendations? I've heard TSOhost mentioned - and their prices are reasonable - but their Trustpilot reviews have suggested that they have gone downhill recently, and I've been waiting 15 minutes just to speak to a sales bod on their Live Chat, which doesn't instil much confidence...

[Craikeybaby]

I've left TSOhost recently, as the service went downhill. I've moved my blog to AWS, but that means I am responsible for maintenance, so not what you are looking for.

[Bikerjon]

Wordpress hosting is one thing, maintenance is another. A hosting company wont usually get involved in the day to day theme updates, plugin updates etc that all Wordpress self-hosted sites require. If your contact wants to be totally hands-off then I'd look at another website product - maybe Squarespace, Wix or one of the many other template systems? If they want to stick with Wordpress then having the site hosted with Wordpress.com might be a better way to go, although there are restrictions with that.

[TonyRPH]

Why not just host it with Wordpress themselves?

[Durzel]

Cheers all. He knows enough to be able to log in and add basic content (it would seem), but beyond that he is in the dark.

Maintenance probably isn't that much work on this particular site. I updated all of the plugins and Wordpress itself to the latest versions (after taking a backup of course) and everything worked afterwards. His site is using a premium theme called Enfold but I'd be surprised if he had paid for it himself, more likely the hosting company/designers (the same company I believe) have either installed it illegitimately or have some kind of developer licence.

As Wordpress sites go it's very basic, so "maintenance" would consist of logging in periodically to update plugins & WP itself.

[sgtBerbatov]

I host a few WordPress sites I built for clients myself on my own servers which I maintain. The updating of WordPress is really easy these days (THANK GOD!). The newer versions now update themselves (if set up to do so), so it's fairly painless. Obviously it pays to check the site after an update to make sure nothings broken.

If it were me I'd set his WordPress site to do it automatically. The hosting provider, as you know, may charge you for this service but not provide it. So if you're in anyway competent you could easily set the site up for him on Linode or Digital Ocean and let WordPress look after itself. I'd say this is the easier option really.

Alternative to the above is build the site in static HTML with a contact form. More often than not clients have requirements that can be suited to just bog standard static sites without involving the hassle WordPress provides.

[Hoofy]

Updating is easy until 4.9 throws up a few errors at the top of the site on every page. See my thread started around midnight last night.

[Craikeybaby]

I’d also advise against enabling auto update on the WordPress. I run a second copy of my blog on a virtual machine on my Mac, so I can test updates before updating the live version.

[buggalugs]

WPengine does managed Wordpress hosting, Wordpress themselves I believe don’t, when you take out a package with them you get a cut down Wordpress something more like wix or squarespace you can’t use custom themes etc. So you’d have to migrate the site to their system.

[SCEtoAUX]

I too have found that TSO Host have gone downhill rapidly.

Gradually moving my sites to 20i.com who have been superb so far.

As for maintenance I have nothing to add, but I thought I'd mention the the above.

[RobDickinson]

I run a bunch of wp sites and a squarespace one.

For admin the squarespace is piss easy, you don really do any, less flexable overall but it can give some good results.

www.heroworkshops.com is the squarespace one

[strain]

I run several wordpress sites from Guru host, really good and come with built in caching etc.

Auto update on wordpress is not an issue, keep daily backups on the server and also monitor the websites through something like pingdom, Ive had 1 auto update issue over the last few years, it depends how modified the website is though

[Durzel]

Cheers all.