By Jennifer Marsh

Jennifer Marsh is a software developer, programmer and technology writer and occasionally blogs for Rackspace Hosting.

WordPress makes it easy for webmasters to start a website. Even its installation is automated, but what do webmasters do for maintenance or when technical issues bring down the website? If the website owner isn’t familiar with PHP or website maintenance, managed WordPress hosting can take care of everything that gets in the way of sales and revenue. This includes backups, hardware maintenance, server cleanup and malware detection.

Emergency Backups

Backups are the life blood for disaster recovery. While the website owner does not have access to the backups, the managed host provider can quickly restore lost website files or database records. Managed hosts include these backups as a part of the support contract, but there may be a charge for restoring the information. If there is a cost, it is usually small, and it can be relieve the stress of a broken site when malware or software bugs corrupt the site.

Site Maintenance

If the site owner doesn’t know about defragging, malware detection, hardware maintenance and server support, then managed hosting takes care of all these tedious parts of running a website. Hardware maintenance replaces any components that might be faulty, and that includes watching the server’s CPU temperature, which can cause the server to unexpectedly crash. Some hosts run malware detection software to find malicious files on the website, and defragging and hard drive maintenance make sure the system is running at peak performance.

Cleanup and Upgrades

Although these two maintenance options are a part of regular site maintenance, the host performs upgrades to the servers to keep them running smoothly, and this includes moving sites to a different server when one server is depracated and retired. These upgrades occur during maintenance times, usually performed during off-peak hours. This means that the WordPress site doesn’t fall behind in technology and become too slow for modern browsers.

With managed hosting, none of these important factors for web hosting are required, and the site owner can focus on the business and sales while still maintaining control of the site content. WordPress contains a site manager interface that allows the owner to upload and edit content, and the site owner can still install themes and other software without messing with server configurations.