We are extremely passionate about our Managed WordPress Optimized (WPO) plans because we have seen tens of thousands of sites over our 12 years as BigScoots directly benefit from everything WPO has to offer.
Shared services can be a low cost option to maintain an online presence, but we never recommend moving off our Managed WordPress Optimized (WPO) services because of all the value we know WPO brings. By migrating to a Shared hosting service your site will loose many of the benefits that directly improves site speed, security, monitoring as well as the level of management your site receives. It is very important to know the differences between our services before making the very important decision to change your plan.
By being hosted on a WPO service, you gain access to:
A site specific level of management. This means that we dig deep into and manage site specific issues such as plugin conflicts, database issues, stuck PHP processes, resource consumption problems and much, much more - with an average ~90 second reply time.
Proactively and reactively assisting with speed and core web vital concerns.
An isolated, purpose built, dedicated managed WP hosting environment, designed from the ground up for performance and scalability. With our Starter plan providing an average of ~10x the available resources of a Shared service.
Address site and network security issues in real time and providing professional cleanings when necessary at absolutely no charge.
We proactively monitor your site, which means looking for and addressing issues before they impact you or your visitors - all hours of every day.
We setup, integrate and manage all the security and performance benefits of Cloudflare's DNS and CDN services.
Digging a bit more into key differences between WPO and Shared services...
Our managed WordPress services are built very specifically with WordPress in mind from the ground up which means they deliver seriously improved load times and drastically elevated management as a result when compared against any provider we’ve ever tested against (some more than others). Each WPO plan is built on its own dedicated (virtual or physical) environment which allows us to completely optimize your individual WordPress environment with just your site in mind.
While the dedicated environment is important for leveraging things like nginx and redis which help optimize and speed up your site, perhaps more importantly and what really sets these services apart, is our hands on management. Within our WPO services, we proactively dig deep into issues other providers tend not to touch such as stuck PHP processes, database inefficiencies, plugin conflicts, ongoing optimizations, security hardening, and much more. With ~30 proactive monitors in place, we actively seek out and work to prevent issues before they impact you or your visitors.
Shared Hosting on the other hand is exactly that. You are sharing your resources with others on the server which is a great way to reduce your overall cost, but will unfortunately be unable to achieve the same level of performance, hands on management, optimizations, or security benefits.
Will I experience a change in performance?
Shared hosting has many technological limitations, it cannot possibly provide the same site speed and performance, causing your site to be slower than on our WPO plans. Why? Simply put, because of how the platform and technology is designed. Servers that are built for shared hosting are tuned to share all resources, fairly, among all users on the server, hence the name, shared hosting.
To prevent any resource abuse, there needs to be limits on consumption, and those limits need to be carefully managed. This is done so that the resource utilization of one particular user doesn’t come at a cost of other users on the same server. As a shared hosting customer you will not have access to the same amount of resources as a WPO service, and possibly be affected by another user’s over-utilization.
Although we do our very best to deliver the absolute best performance possible with all our services, there is a cost of being on a cheaper Shared plan.
Optimizations and performance limitations
Your WPO service is built from the ground up, with complete optimization in mind.
Your fully managed WordPress service is designed to handle many thousands of concurrent users. When your site is receiving a sudden surge of traffic from viral content or a seasonal advertising effort, or irregular resource consumption due to a security vulnerability or plugin conflict, your site will not feel the effects.
BigScoots Cloudflare management
The configuration and management of Cloudflare is a service provided to all of our Managed WordPress Optimized (WPO) services and has many security and performance benefits.
We recommend anyone who has an online presence to use Cloudflare, whether they are on our WPO or shared services, or even whether they are hosting with BigScoots or not. You are very welcome to continue to use Cloudflare, however since we no longer manage your DNS on our shared plans, it will not be possible for us to manage your Cloudflare integration.
Cost to change
If after careful consideration you wish to still migrate from our WP Optimized plans to a Shared service, you may proceed by signing up for a Shared plan off our website. Once signed up, please submit a support ticket requesting the migration. Once we've confirmed your migration has completed, you may request a cancellation of your WPO plan.
Please note, because you are not just downgrading, but actually migrating to a different server entirely, there is a one-time manual migration fee of $25.
While we love what our WPO plans offer, if Shared hosting makes the most sense for your site right now, it will be our pleasure to help in any way we can. When the time is right, you're always very welcome to upgrade back to our WPO services at any time.