The WP Help is a WordPress hosting and support service that provides support to customers 24 hours per day.
The company has taken a completely different approach to WordPress hosting than other managed WordPress services. Rather than offering customers a user-interface to administer their website, they handle all aspects of hosting WordPress. Customers can then email The WP Help whenever they need something adjusted.
In this respect, you could say that The WP Help is “Fully Managed” or “Truly Managed”. This will interest those of you who are looking for a company to handle all aspects of hosting for them so that they can focus on running their WordPress website.
Let’s take a closer look at what The WP Help offers and how much their packages cost.
What Does The WP Help Offer?
The WP Help was launched by the SEO company 51Blocks in 2018.
51Blocks was started by Michael Borgelt in 2009 in Portland, Oregon, USA and the company started growing quickly after moving to Denver in 2012.
The WP Help’s services can be divided into two categories:
- Hosting
- Support and Maintenance
All plans include hosting and support and maintenance features. They are not sold separately.
Like every hosting company, customers receive a defined amount of SSD storage and bandwidth to host their website, but The WP Help also integrates the global content delivery network StackPath into their service.
This means that a cached copy of your website will be stored across 45 data centres around the world. The total throughput of the StackPath CDN is 65+Tbps. This allows website visitors to access a local copy of your website almost instantly.
Page loading times will be significantly improved as a result of this; which can help your search engine ranking.
90 days of offsite website backups are provided with plans too in addition to a free SSL certificate for your website and free website migrations from your existing hosting setup.
The WP Help checks your website daily to perform core WordPress updates, plugin updates and theme updates. Malware scans are performed daily too and if the company finds any malware or hacks, they will fix it immediately. Real-time uptime monitoring is also provided so if your website goes down for any reason, they can resolve the issue.
A monthly report is also provided to all customers that details the exact work that has been completed.
Unlimited edits are included with two of the available plans.
This gives you an unlimited number of website edits. Obviously, The WP Help will not create content for you or create a custom plugin or theme for you, but what they do help with is many common website administration tasks such as CSS styling edits, plugin settings, theme settings and more.
The Cost of Using The WP Help
Three care packages are available to customers.
The $45 per month Secure plan offers 10GB of SSD storage and 100GB of bandwidth. If you upgrade to the Secure & Support plan at $119 per month, you will increase storage to 20GB and bandwidth to 200GB; but one of the main reasons to upgrade to this plan is unlimited edits.
The most expensive plan is called Support Pro. This plan retails at $199 per month and is suitable for website owners who want The WP Help to handle every aspect of maintaining their website. In addition to increasing storage to 50GB and bandwidth to 500GB, the Support Plan adds monthly SEO advice, SEO reporting and Google Analytics & Google Search Console integration.
One month of hosting is provided free if you pay for a plan annually instead of monthly.
If you have questions about any of the above plans, you can contact The WP Help between 7am and 7pm Mountain Standard Time (MST) between Monday and Friday. Direct support is available 24/7 via email and online chat. The company states that most replies are given within 15 to 20 minutes.
Whilst unlimited edits does not include custom development work, the company does offer this service separately. They charge around $100 per hour for development, design and content writing.
The WP Help has an affiliate program, but they are also one of the few managed WordPress hosting companies that allow you to resell their services. This means that you can offer The WP Help’s services to clients as if they were your own.
Design companies and others who work closely with website owners may want to take advantage of this as it means that they are offloading the hosting and support tasks to someone else.
Final Thoughts
It’s a little difficult to categorise The WP Help correctly as it does not slot into any one category.
The company’s support and maintenance services, such as unlimited edits, highlights that The WP Help is a WordPress support company; not just a managed WordPress hosting company. Other managed WordPress hosting solutions provide security scanning and will help you with common WordPress tasks, however they do not provide unlimited edits.
On the other side, The WP Help’s approach to website hosting is clearly not right for everyone. You are not going to get the same level of control over your website that other managed WordPress hosting companies give you.
For example, whilst you do get a monthly report, you cannot just access website analytics at anytime. Nor can you access phpMyAdmin or the file manager.
One glaring ommission for me is website staging. Website staging is one of the best reasons to use a managed WordPress hosting service as it allows you to perform website changes safely and then push them to your live website.
Of course, if you are someone that needs website staging to regularly make changes to your website, The WP Help is not for you.
The whole point of The WP Help is that they take care of everything. They handle plugin updates, theme updates, core updates, security scanning, performance (CDN), backups and more. There is no doubt that this will greatly reduce the time it takes to administer your website.
So is The WP Help for you?
In my opinion:
- If you still want a level of control over your website and like to change things yourself, you would be better using another managed WordPress hosting solution
- If you want a company to handle all aspects of website maintenance, The WP Help is a solid option
Be sure to check out the official website of The WP Help to learn more about what they offer.
Thanks for reading.
Kevin