Pressable is a WordPress-focused web hosting service designed to keep your site running safely and smoothly, and it excels at doing just that. It’s not surprising, given that Pressable is owned by Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Pressable only offers WordPress hosting, but its services are tailored towards entrepreneurial endeavors, setting it apart from the more general-purpose web hosts on the market. Pressable’s managed WordPress plans offer daily site backups, malware scanning and removal, page caching, staging, and WordPress-oriented security. This feature-rich tool suite makes Pressable a touch more costly and business-focused than your average host, and it has a few notable shortcomings, but the overall service is well worth exploring if you’re looking to build a website.
Pressable’s Plans
Pressable has steadily expanded its offerings over the years, and now features a convenient slider for selecting one of its 10 WordPress plans that suits your needs. You can search by WordPress installs, which is to say, the number of sites you want to host, or by the number of monthly visitors. Pressable defines a “visit” as traffic coming from a unique, genuine (non-bot) IP address within a 24-hour period. Pressable offers unlimited monthly data transfers, so this monthly visitor metric is how the company tracks traffic.
Pressable starts with a $19-per-month Entry plan that includes 24/7 expert support, 5,000 monthly visits, and 5GB of storage for one WordPress-powered site (hosted on the WP Cloud Platform). If you’re whipping up a small blog or personal site, this is a fine starting point. The Personal plan is a bit more robust; it bumps the cost to $25 per month, but boosts your site’s monthly visits to 30,000 and the storages to 20GB. This plan also includes the Jetpack Security Daily, a premium WordPress plugin with useful starter themes, CRM for customer data management, and valuable SEO tools to help improve your site’s visibility.
Regardless of the plan you select, your hosting installation comes with staging environments, free site migrations, enterprise-class architecture, personalized onboarding, site caching, a free Content Delivery Network (CDN), WordPress training, and many other valuable features that you may not find with a web host that doesn’t specialize in managed WordPress.
Beyond the Personal plan, Pressable’s offerings scale to include more monthly visits, sites, and data storage. The Premium plan, Pressable’s mid-tier offering, includes 400,000 monthly visits, 50GB of storage, and support for up to 20 WordPress installations, for $155 per month. If you’re managing a big business with even bigger web hosting needs, Pressable’s Business 150 plan gives you 150 WordPress installations, 3,000,000 visits per month, and 250GB of monthly storage, for $1,000 per month. You receive a solid discount upon signing up for an annual plan, which equates to roughly two free months of service. Pressable isn’t free web hosting or cheap web hosting, but then again, enterprise-tier services rarely are.
For comparison’s sake, Media Temple, another service with business-centric WordPress plans, has a top tier Pro 25 WordPress plan, which offers 100GB of storage, support for 25 sites, 25 staging sites, and unlimited monthly data transfers for $120 per month. WP Engine, the Editors’ Choice pick for enterprise-class WordPress hosting, has a high-end $290 per month plan that includes support for 30 sites, with 50GB of storage, 400,000 monthly visits, and 500GB of monthly data transfers.
Unlike Cloudways or WP Engine, Pressable doesn’t give you the option to select Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform as your website’s foundation. You must use Pressable’s WP Cloud platform, which utilizes the NVMe server infrastructure .
If you don’t need enterprise-class WordPress hosting, we suggest checking out A2, the category’s Editors’ Choice pick for businesses with less demanding WordPress hosting needs. The Linux-based A2 offers four excellent WordPress hosting tiers (starting at $7.99 per month) that offers unlimited storage and monthly data transfers across the board. The plans top out with the $24.46-per-month managed WordPress package that includes unlimited databases and websites.
The Pressable Experience
Pressable’s managed hosting environment is specifically designed for WordPress installations, themes, and plug-ins. As a result, you don’t need to install WordPress as you would with other web hosts; the content management system comes preinstalled. It was a nice change of pace to simply open our introductory email, view our log-in credentials, and then get started without any additional setup; it even includes a few useful preinstalled plug-ins. Using Pressable is very much like using a regular self-hosted WordPress installation. We found it incredibly easy to create posts, pages, and galleries in testing.
As Pressable focuses on WordPress, the company doesn’t offer the traditional shared, VPS, or dedicated hosting plans you’ll find with many other web hosts. Instead, Pressable devotes its resources to automating many WordPress functions, including daily site backups and plug-in updates. It also features caching technology to make pages quickly load. The staging feature is an incredibly useful tool, too. It takes a snapshot of your website so you can tinker with pages without affecting the real site. Pressable makes it easy for you to share credentials with designers, developers, and others, so that you can collaborate on the site’s back end.
Like WP Engine, Pressable doesn’t sell domains, so you must go to a registrar if you want a specific URL for your website. If this sounds like too daunting a process, don’t fret; check out How to Register a Domain Name. Currently, Pressable does not offer email account services either, but that is expected to change very soon. Automattic, the parent company of Pressable and WordPress, partnered with Titan earlier this year. Pressable will be providing email options in the near future.
E-Commerce and Security
If you plan to sell products, you’ll be happy to learn that Pressable offers the WooCommerce e-commerce platform. These plans start at $45 per month, and include three WordPress installations, 50,000 visits, and 30GB of storage.
Pressable uses a combination of nightly malware scans and removals, and Intrusion Detection System integrity checks to keep your site secure from attackers. This is a typical feature among managed WordPress hosting services.
In addition, each Pressable plan comes with a free Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate that helps safeguard data transfers between your site and customers. Considering that some web hosts make you pay for SSL, the certificate’s free inclusion is an appreciated touch.
Excellent Uptime
Website uptime is a vital element of the web hosting experience. If your site goes down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services.
For this testing, we use a website monitoring tool to track our site’s uptime over a 14-day period. Every 15 minutes, the tool pings our website and sends us an alert if it is unable to contact the site for at least one minute. The data revealed that Pressable is incredibly stable. In fact, it didn’t go down once in our tests. You can count on Pressable to be a rock-solid foundation for your website.
Customer Service
We contacted Pressable’s customer support several times during testing—early morning and early evening—to get a sense of its support team’s effectiveness. Pressable offers and 24/7 web chat communication options and ticket support, which is convenient. It currently has live agents and phone chat, but Pressable is moving away from them to focus on online support instead.
We tested both web chat and phone contact, by asking a few miscellaneous questions about monthly visitors, as well as email and domain names, and were pleased with the informative responses. Our web chat inquiries were answered within 5 minutes. Our phone conversation was also pleasantly thorough, despite Pressable not focusing on phone support as much anymore. Of course, you can also submit a ticket to the support squad for 24/7 help.
You can also schedule a 30 minute video conference demo to try Pressable before you plop down money on hosting. We like that you can select the month, day, and hour (in half hour increments). Pressable now smartly features a 30-day, money-back guarantee, matching other web host competitors. It features a unique Pressable Guarantee that credits you 5 percent of your monthly fee for for each hour of downtime, up to 100% for the affected server or servers. Pressable also has a resource page where you’ll find a robust selection of WordPress-related information.
A Great WordPress Host
Pressable gives you many useful tools to create the WordPress site that you desire. It has the robust flexibility, strong uptime, and helpful customer support team you’d expect from a managed WordPress service (though it lacks domains and email, and is shifting away from phone help). Pressable has met the competition’s challenge by improving its offerings to deliver rock-solid, WordPress-exclusive features that are more than worthy of acting as the foundation for your website. That said, if you’re looking for a WordPress-focused host that lets you select your preferred cloud platform, WP Engine (an Editors’ Choice pick for WordPress hosting), may be more your speed.
For the basics of getting started online, read 10 Easy But Powerful SEO Tips to Boost Traffic to Your Website and How to Get Started with WordPress.
