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Shared vs. WPO: Making the Right Choice for Your Website
Shared vs. WPO: Making the Right Choice for Your Website

The pros, cons, and process of moving away from Managed WordPress Optimized (WPO) services to Shared hosting

Katie Stapley avatar
Written by Katie Stapley
Updated over 6 months ago

At BigScoots, we are extremely passionate about our Managed WordPress Optimized (WPO) plans. Over our 14 years of experience, we've seen tens of thousands of sites benefit from everything WPO has to offer.

While shared services can be a cost-effective way to maintain an online presence, we don't recommend moving away from our Managed WordPress Optimized (WPO) services because of the extensive value they provide. Here’s why.

Benefits of WPO Hosting:

1. Comprehensive Site Management: Our WPO plans offer a site-specific management level. This includes addressing plugin conflicts, database issues, stuck PHP processes, and resource consumption problems, all with an average response time of just 90 seconds.

2. Speed and Core Web Vitals: We proactively and reactively assist with speed and core web vital concerns, ensuring your site performs optimally.


3. Dedicated Hosting Environment: WPO hosting provides an isolated, purpose-built, dedicated environment designed from the ground up for performance and scalability. Our Starter plan alone offers ~10x the resources of a shared service.

4. Real-Time Security Management: We address site and network security issues in real-time and provide professional cleanings when necessary, at no additional charge.

5. Proactive Monitoring: Our team monitors your site 24/7, looking for and addressing issues before they impact you or your visitors.

6. Cloudflare Integration: We set up, integrate, and manage all the security and performance benefits of Cloudflare’s DNS and CDN services.

Key Differences Between Shared and WPO Hosting:

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.

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.

To help you clearly understand the differences between Shared Hosting and our Managed WordPress Optimized (WPO) services, we've created a comparison table. This table lists the key features and services, highlighting what you will miss if you opt for Shared hosting:

Feature

Shared Hosting

WPO Hosting

24/7 Support with Average ~90 Second Response

✔️

✔️

Speed and Core Web Vitals Assistance

✔️

Dedicated Hosting Environment

✔️

Malware Detection and Removal

✔️

Proactive Site Monitoring

✔️

Cloudflare DNS and CDN Integration

✔️

Handling of Website and Database Issues

✔️

Persistent Cache

✔️

Resource Consumption Optimization

✔️

Server Packages and Security Updates

✔️

Scalability for High Traffic

✔️

Will I experience a change in performance if I downgrade to Shared Hosting?

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 are 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.

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

YoYour WPO service is built for complete optimization, designed to handle thousands of concurrent users. Whether your site experiences a sudden traffic surge, irregular resource consumption due to a security vulnerability, or plugin conflict, WPO service ensures your site remains unaffected.

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.

You can also maximize the benefits of Cloudflare by integrating it with our WordPress Speed Optimization Service, enhancing the performance of your WordPress website through optimized speed.

While we recommend using Cloudflare for any online presence, we won’t be able to manage your Cloudflare integration if you switch to shared hosting, as we no longer manage your DNS on shared plans.

Cost to change

If, after careful consideration, you decide to migrate from our WPO plans to a shared service, you can sign up for a shared plan on our website. Once signed up, submit a support ticket to request the migration. After confirming the migration, you can 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 believe our WPO plans offer unmatched value, if shared hosting is the right choice for you now, we’re here to help. When the time is right, you’re always welcome to upgrade back to our WPO services.


For any questions or further assistance, please don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re here to support you every step of the way.

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