Chances are you know a blogger, or are yourself a blogger. And the chances that your or your blogger friends use WordPress are great indeed.
The platform is so popular that there are now MSPs that specialize in supporting WordPress. There are so many, in fact, that they are starting to buy each other.
Well, there is at least one such acquisition, as the four year-old Page.ly (yup, that’s how they spell it), which claims to be the first WordPress managed hoster, is buying the year-old BlogDroid.
BlogDroid bloggers will be moved over to the Page.ly service (and they’ll have to figure out how to spell the darn name!), but the domain names should all survive and be managed by the new owners.
Page.ly co-founder and CEO likes the managed model: “Managed WordPress is what we do, we have future plans for the blogdroid.com domain in that regard,” said Joshua Strebel, who founded the company with his wife Sally.
One item that should comfort BlogDroid customers is the security Strebel offers in the form of PressARMOR.
“PressARMOR offers best-in-class WordPress security. It’s system wide and not just an add on or plugin to an otherwise unsecure and stock platform. We have refined it over the years, protecting all our many thousands of customers," said Strebel.
The WordPress hosting space, while young, is flush with activity. In fact, if you Google “WordPress Hosting” you get 168,000,000 results. That’s more than Britney Spears, though a bit less than Justin Beiber. The search term “WordPress Managed Hosting”, however, only returns 34,800 results.
Page.ly Review
There’s nothing like a blogger reviewing a blog platform. That’s exactly what Eric Binnion did.
“As a managed WordPress hosting solution, Page.ly is definitely a much better provider than shared hosting,” Binnion blogged. “If you have having issues with your host being slow or your host not being able to keep up… Then Page.ly is a great solution. With Page.ly you can expect automatic core updates, increased security, amazing speed, and better than average customer support. Page.ly also does automatic backups which can be a lifesaver if your site gets hacked, or you accidentally nuke your website,” he said, adding that his page loads also got faster.
“Page.ly also backed up their service with super quick customer support. I usually received responses to my support requests within about 20-30 minutes, which is perfectly fine with me. Although, one time they did seem to get a bit short with me,” he explained.
There were only two downers. For starters, Binnion would like to see a security guarantee.
“One other thing that truly irritated me was that I had to pay $5 to get FTP access. Why would I want to pay $5 extra for FTP when I’m already paying for top of the line hosting? This irks me, and is one of the reasons that I would not personally recommend Page.ly as a managed WordPress host,” Binnion’s blog concluded.
TMC Web Editor Explores Another Approach
TMC’s own Blaise McNamee today wrote about a different WordPress solution – DreamHost. “The company offers shared, dedicated and virtual private Web servers to help companies get the most out of their websites, providing advanced control, visibility, security, and reliability,” McNamee wrote. “And with its newly launched DreamPress hosting service, content creators, entrepreneurs and software developers can reap all of the great benefits DreamHost Web hosting, but with specially enhanced WordPress performance, advanced security, excellent reliability, ease of use and straightforward pricing. What’s unique about the service is that it’s built on open source technology.”
Edited by
Blaise McNamee
