All hosting companies are not equal, and some are more not equal than others! Here is why we have never kept WPMU DEV’s managed WordPress hosting partnership with DigitalOcean’s cloud infrastructure secret…
Not Your Garden Variety Hosting Company…
Although WPMU DEV started in a garden shed as a simple plugin repository with a handful of products way back in 2005, we are now one of the top WordPress companies helping web developers all around the world grow their businesses.
WPMU DEV’s continued growth and expansion is due largely to the hosting partnership we have forged with DigitalOcean for the past 3 years.
Thanks to DigitalOcean’s evolving hosting technology, excellent product offerings, and amazing support, we have not only built the best managed WordPress Hosting available today on top of a robust infrastructure, but we have also turned this into a beast of a WordPress platform solution that web developers of all skill levels can use to build a solid and sustainable business on.
As James Farmer, our CEO states…
“Our mission at WPMU DEV is to be your ultimate web development partner. Our aim is to provide you with the tools and tech you need to run your business and to price our hosting, plugins, tools, and support in an affordable manner, so you can grow your business.”
DigitalOcean plays an important role in fulfilling WPMU DEV’s vision to provide a unique service offering integrated with ‘next-level’ WordPress hosting that includes all the perks of dedicated, fully managed hosting proactively included with every plan.
For example, here are just some of the developer tools and performance and security features we have added to our hosting:
Developer Tools
- One-Click Staging – With one-click sync to staging and sync to live.
- Self-Healing Architecture – Automated monitoring to restart or rebuild server resources.
- SFTP / SSH – Create accounts with different permissions whenever you need.
- phpMyAdmin – Manage your database painlessly.
- WP-CLI – Includes custom commands.
- Git, Composer, & NPM – Everything a developer needs for superhero-worthy sites.
- No Read/Write IOP File Limits – No IOPS limits on our systems, based on what the underlying disk can handle.
- NewRelic & Blackfire Support – One-click connect NewRelic or Blackfire to debug performance issues.
- Reset WP – Quickly reset sites back to default on both production and staging.
Performance & Security
- Free SSL Certificates – Automatically added via Let’s Encrypt.
- Dedicated IP – For security, SEO, and reliability – nothing here is shared.
- Nightly Backups – Automate incremental backups with nearly instant restores.
- Hourly Hosting Backups (Optional) – Although this is not automatically included with our hosting plans, we have priced it super low as a hosting reseller addon…a perfect upsell for high data volume sites, eCommerce stores, etc.
- Object Cache – Improves performance and lets you handle traffic with ease.
- IPv6 – The latest and fastest Internet technology.
- Web Application Firewall – Stop malicious traffic before it ever reaches your site with our hosted WAF.
- Static Server Cache (FastCGI) – Activate to handle an average of 10 times more parallel site visitors.
- Optimized For WordPress – Dedicated and optimized resources, built on a powerful LEMP stack.
Advanced Tools
- Painless & Free Migration – Use our automated tools or we can migrate unlimited sites for you, completely free.
- 45-Point CDN – Lightning-fast images and assets via our Smush & Hummingbird plugins.
- Analytics – See your sites’ live stats, visits, storage, bandwidth, and email activity in one easy place.
- Cloning & Templates – Streamline your workflow with our templates or create your own to resell to clients.
- All-In-One Interface – Access all the hosting features you need from one central interface via The Hub.
- Easy File Management – No messing with FTP, save time with our complete and built-in file manager.
And we are not just stopping at hosting…with new integration features like our soon-to-be-released domain registration and Automated Reseller just around the corner, we are well on our way to providing web developers with a complete “WordPress business in a box” solution.
But don’t take it from us…let’s take a look at what our own members have to say about the role our hosting plays in their business before we dive into everything we’ve built on top of DigitalOcean’s infrastructure.
“We value the customers that come into our client pool looking for websites. We hope they’ll stay with us for years as loyal hosting customers.” Jim W. (WPMU DEV Member)
Reliable Hosting That Inspires Complete Business Confidence
“I’m not comfortable to use other hosting that is not reliable.” Jay C. (WPMU DEV Member)
WPMU DEV is built entirely around providing WordPress web developers with a complete white label business and hosting platform that you can fully brand as your own.
If our products and services didn’t inspire developers with the confidence to go out and build their businesses on our platform, it wouldn’t just be our reputation on the line but those of our members too.
Fortunately, WPMU DEV’s hosting is built on DigitalOcean’s solid infrastructure and monitored 24/7 by our own team of in-house hosting experts, so you can build your business with us with complete confidence that you are getting the best of the best.
“I will never have anything to do with low budget hosting. If they ask whether they can keep their current hosting or use cheaper hosting, I tell them that I can’t professionally recommend it because of the terrible experiences I’ve had myself and heard about, and I do not offer maintenance services for sites I don’t host. But once I explain the benefits, the risks, and the maintenance things they’ll have to do or find someone to do, they usually end up on my hosting anyway.” Greg (WPMU DEV Member)
It cannot be stressed enough how important reliable hosting is when it comes to building a global company responsible for providing thousands of web developers with the tools they need to build, host, and maintain hundreds of thousands of websites for businesses all around the world.
As one of our members put it most succintly…
“I won’t host on shitty hosts.” Edwin (WPMU DEV Member)
Affordable Reseller Hosting You Can Build A Great Business On
“I’d rather make less up front on the design but make a loyal long-term hosting customer.” Phil M (WPMU DEV Member)
Because we offer WordPress web developers a white label reseller experience, we’ve had to make sure that our hosting is not only competitively priced in the managed WordPress hosting arena but that there is also room for our members to make a profitable margin when reselling any of our hosting plans.
Manage unlimited WP sites for free
“I have increased monthly hosting fees for a few of my early clients by $10/month, with no reaction whatsoever.” Brad (WPMU DEV Member)
We constantly engage with and solicit feedback from our members to assess how happy they are with our services. We do this through forum discussions, surveys, analyzing support tickets and reviews, etc.
For example, we recently asked members to share with us their experiences offering maintenance services to clients as a way of generating recurring revenue. Over 90% of all the members who participated in the discussion said that they offer maintenance plans with their services and over two-thirds said they include WPMU DEV’s hosting with their plans.
“Hosting is included in our plans. If a client has hosting and comes to us for maintenance, we do not automatically take over their hosting and transfer to our account. In the case that the client is on terrible hosting, we may charge a surcharge.” P. Taubman (WPMU DEV Member)
Many of our members, in fact, prefer to bundle hosting as part of their service offering, which is easily done with our reseller hosting and integrated site management platform.
“Bundled with hosting, this is the goal. Bundled without hosting – trying to avoid!” Owen K. (WPMU DEV Member)
Although we offer competitively-priced dedicated managed WordPress hosting, we still have some challenges. For example, being a global service, some of our members’ clients simply can’t afford dedicated hosting in certain regions of the world. We would love to be able to offer our reseller hosting with a tiered-pricing structure to regions that are struggling financially, and we are working on this.
We Add Massive Value To Digital Ocean’s Hosting For Developers
“The BEST support team supporting the BEST hosting service 24/7 literally!” Levent U. (G2)
We have never made secret of the fact that we are proud to build our services with DigitalOcean for a very simple reason…thanks to Digital Ocean’s Droplets, we are able to offer fully compartmentalized hosting on all of our hosting plans.
We don’t use DigitalOcean for everything (e.g. we use different datacenters for servers in Australia and Japan), but we have added tremendous value by building the ultimate WordPress platform for web developers integrated with an affordable, world class dedicated managed hosting service on top of Droplets.
In addition to the tools andfeatures mentioned earlier, we also include the following on every hosting plan:
Free Email Accounts
All plans also include 10 professional and free hosted email accounts. Connect your clients’ emails to their favorite email providers or use unlimited email forwarders.
Pro Plugins
“I like that they have a group of plugins that eliminate the need for having to use multiple suppliers to get the same result.” David B (G2)
All sites hosted with WPMU DEV have access to an integrated suite of our best Pro plugins:
- Defender Pro – In addition to our hosting security features, Defender stops brute force login attacks, SQL injections, cross-site scripting XSS, and other WordPress vulnerabilities and hacks on websites with automated malware and antivirus scans, IP blocking, firewall, activity log, security log, and two-factor authentication (2FA) and biometric login security.
- Smush Pro – Our award-winning plugin is the best image compression and performance optimization plugin available. It includes a host of features including fast CDN image delivery, WebP conversion, automatic resizing, the ability to optimize images up to 32MB, one-click bulk smush optimization for all your images, auto-convert PNG to JPEG, full-sized images copying and restoring, and so much more!
- Hummingbird Pro – Make websites faster, optimize site performance, and boost Google PageSpeed Insights with fine-tuned controls over file compression, deferring CSS and JavaScript styles and scripts, CSS and JS minification, Lazy Load integration, and world-class caching. Hummingbird works hand-in-hand with Smush to provide a complete speed boost solution to websites.
- Forminator Pro – Our easy-to-use WordPress form builder plugin. Create any form, including contact forms, order forms, payment forms, email forms, feedback widgets, interactive polls with real-time results, buzzfeed-style “no wrong answer” quizzes, service estimators, and registration forms with payment options including PayPal and Stripe.
- SmartCrawl Pro – Improve your sites’ SEO and rankings with real-time keyword and content analysis, automatic XML sitemaps, social sharing, schema builder, and automated scans and reports.
- Branda Pro – Customize every aspect of WordPress without touching any code with our premium white label plugin. Transform your dashboard, customize system emails, toggle maintenance mode and coming soon landing pages, change every aspect of your login screen, remove or replace logos, create color schemes, and much more.
- Shipper Pro – Easily migrate WordPress sites using safe and secure API migration or fast and convenient Package migration methods. The plugin works for all sites (including multisite) and allows sites to be moved safely without disruption and to be restored anywhere. Shipper features an easy migration wizard, pre-migration checks, migration troubleshooting, enable safe mode, and more.
“Excellent hosting and plugin company that is 100% worth it!” Emily B. (G2)
Full Hub Access
The Hub gives you all the features you need to work like a pro, including automated updates, configs, performance, uptime, analytics, reports, support, client billing, and white labeling.
“The site management tools are amazing, all your sites in one dashboard with any and every tool you could think of to manage your websites, from client billing to performance analytics, its all there.” Web Host Wizards (Trustpilot)
Support
Customer support is the area where we really shine above the rest. We provide members with 24/7 live chat expert support for any WordPress or hosting-related issue, in addition to private ticketing and support forums.
“WPMUDev is an amazing hosting provider with top-tier customer support. They go out of their way to help you with every inquiry you might have. 10/10 would recommend.” Gabriel (Trustpilot)
WPMU DEV – We’re The Host with The Most
“Best WordPress Managed Hosting Company Support Hands Down!” Daniel M. (G2)
DigitalOcean’s hosting infrastructure has allowed WPMU DEV to become the best managed WordPress hosting and web development business reseller platform available. Our affordable membership plans provide everything web developers need to build, run, and grow a profitable business, including site management tools, plugins, community forum, and 24/7 expert support.
Our Agency Plan also includes hosting credits.
However, for a limited time only…
Try DigitalOcean Droplets – Now Free with WPMU DEV!
We are currently running a special promotion for new users, so if you’re thinking of switching over to WPMU DEV, we invite you to try our hosting today for the next 7 days free!
