Pressable.com Review

Hosting companies like Pressable.com specialize in offering a single product – managed WordPress hosting. This type of hosting is suitable for WordPress website owners who don’t want to get caught up in dealing with performance issues, updates, scalability, or WordPress security issues.

With a managed WordPress hosting plan, you let your hosting provider deal with the upkeep of your WordPress site while you focus on creating and publishing content, marketing and growing your business, knowing that behind the scenes WordPress experts are working to keep everything running smoothly for you.

In this Pressable.com review, we’re going to shed light on the hosting features included with each Pressable.com plan and whether Pressable can be a good choice for someone looking for best-in-class managed WordPress hosting.

Pressable Company Overview

Pressable was founded in 2010 by Vid Luther, and it was first launched under the name ZippyKid. A few years later it was relaunched under the name Pressable, which proved to be a more fortunate choice of branding, since the previous name seemed to be the source of some confusion among clients.

Today, the San Antonio (Texas, USA) based company provides hosting for startups, medium-sized companies and large corporations. Some of their notable clients include Whirlpool, Estee Lauder, Hibbs Lupus Trust, etc.

Pressable’s data centers and networking infrastructure are provided by Rackspace, one of the largest hosting companies in the world. Pressable’s investors also include some of the original founders of Rackspace.

Pressable Plans & Pricing

The page views or visitor based pricing seems to be the preferred pricing system by some hosting companies offering managed WordPress hosting, and Pressable is no exception.

Pressable offers plans suitable for individuals, small and medium-sized companies, but also enterprise-level plans tailored to the unique needs of the client. Therefore, you can choose the plan with the resources and pricing point suitable for you from the following 5 plans:

The base plan starts at $20.83/month with yearly billing that brings a 2-month price cut if you decide to commit for a year. Month-to-month plans sell at $25/month, which is relatively expensive considering it only supports up to 5 WordPress installs and 60,000 pageviews across all your hosted sites.

The most popular Pressable plan costs $37.50/month (or $45 month-to-month) and supports up to 10 WordPress sites and 200,000 shared pageviews.

The highest tier plan in this category can accommodate 20 WordPress sites and supports up to 400,000 shared page views.

Those looking to host more than 20 WordPress sites, can get in touch with Pressable for a custom plan or can choose from the two plans designed for organizations (Agency & VIP) that are looking to host 30+ sites and expect high traffic volumes.

The Agency plan is priced at $135/month, includes hosting for 30 + sites and is configured to deal with 600,000 + page views. The VIP plan costs $750/month and includes hosting for 100 + sites and can handle 5,000,000 pageviews.

When it comes to web hosting, free trials are a rarity since most web hosts will offer money-back guarantees instead. Pressable takes another approach, offering a 15-day trial and no money-back guarantee.

Now that you know where Pressable stands on pricing and plans, let’s see what other features you can expect with these plans.

Pressable Features & Value

All Pressable hosting plans come with the following features:

• MaxCDN content delivery network included for free, which ensures fast page load no matter where your visitors are located on the globe;
• Free SSL certificate using Let’s Encrypt;
• Caching for rapid serving of content to your visitors (uses batcache as a page cache and stores that in the memcache);
• Staging sites and 1-click cloning tool to create a testing environment allowing you to easily push changes to your live site or push the entire cloned site instead;
• Server side optimization: servers are optimized to improve the performance of your WordPress sites;
• Site access and upload via SFTP;
• Possibility to create login accounts for collaborators to your site (e.g. web designers or developers). When the collaboration ends, you can revoke these credentials and they will no longer be able to make changes;
• Free website migration for up to 5 sites;
• Daily backups: if anything goes wrong you can restore your site from their backup without charge. Pressable keeps a backup of your database for two weeks and content for the last two days;
• Managed upgrades: Pressable takes care of any updates to the WordPress core and security patches are applied within one hour of their release;
• Malware scanning and removal: Pressable performs nightly scans and removals and a web application firewall ensure your site is kept secure;
• Protection against brute force attacks: Pressable employs intrusion detection systems to monitor and block intrusion attempts;
• Dedicated WordPress support: one of the advantages of managed WordPress hosting is expert WordPress support;
• Custom Pressable Control Panel.

All these features are more or less typical for a managed WordPress hosting service. Like other managed WP hosting providers (e.g. WP Engine or Pressidium), Pressable doesn’t sell domains or offer email hosting. Instead, they focus on providing a full-featured managed hosting experience. If you want the whole package (domain, email hosting, and WordPress optimized servers), we recommend choosing the services of InMotion Hosting or BlueHost.

Pressable.com’s hosting plans come with several pre-installed plugins like Akismet, Jetpack, VaultPress, Batcache, Gauge.es, and Pressable’s own in-house plugins.

As with any managed WordPress hosting, there are some plugins that are restricted by Pressable, and these usually include plugins that are already built into the hosting infrastructure or that simply don’t play well on Pressable’s system either because of duplicate functionality or interference. For example, caching plugins like W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket or WP Super Cache are not allowed on Pressable. These plugins may interfere with Pressable’s own caching systems and can cause your site to slow down.

For a full list of plugins that are not allowed on Pressable, please refer to the FAQ section in Pressable’s Knowledgebase.

There are a few aspects of Pressable’s services that they aren’t forthcoming about, namely their servers’ technical specs and uptime guarantees. Unfortunately, the 15-day trial period is on the short side for testing uptime performance, and 60-day money-back guarantee offered by Pressidium and WP Engine, or better yet, the 90-day money-back guarantee offered by InMotion Hosting seem like better alternatives.

Pressable Customer Support

Pressable has a dedicated WordPress support team that can be reached via phone for pre-sales questions, directly via email at help@pressable.com, or by submitting a support ticket from MyPressable Control Panel, where you can track the status of your ticket.

Pressable doesn’t offer 24/7 support, their support team is available Monday through Friday, between 8 am and 10 pm CST. Support is available during other hours and during the weekend as well for system-wide emergency issues, however, it’s not as robust as during weekdays.

You can also browse through Pressble’s knowledgebase for getting started tutorials, FAQs, and other useful information about managed hosting plans available at Pressable.

Pressable’s support team has received some mixed reviews with some customers complaining about deficient and unresponsive support, while others praising them for their helpfulness and expertise. Since Pressable offers a 15-day free trial, we advise you to test their customer support yourself to see if you’re satisfied with them.

Pros & Cons of Pressable.com

Is Pressable ready for prime-time or they still need to raise their game? Here’s where Pressable shines and where they still need to make improvements:

Pros

• Premium CDN included with all plans;
• Automatic malware scans and removal;
• Useful site staging feature;
• Collaborator access control;
• 2 months off with yearly billing;
• Automatic backups and updates;
• Up to 5 free website migrations.

Cons

• Only 15-day free trial, no money-back guarantee;
• No uptime guarantees;
• No live support or 24/7 support.

Pressable has gotten down the essentials of managed WordPress hosting and includes some solid performance related tools and security safeguards for your WordPress sites. It also has plans for different needs and at different price points, however, we feel that Pressable doesn’t go the extra mile compared to other managed hosting providers and even shared hosting providers that also offer WordPress optimized hosting.

Pressable.com Review Conclusion

Pressable’s managed WordPress hosting solutions can be a good fit for website owners who need to host a lot of WordPress sites, but don’t want to be tied down by their upkeep and management, and don’t mind that this convenience comes at an extra price. Unfortunately, Pressable is lacking in some areas (support availability and uptime transparency), which prevents it from becoming a solid contender for best-in-line managed WordPress hosting.

Both WP Engine’s and Pressidium.com’s 60-day money-back guarantee, SLA backed uptime, and around-the-clock customer support simply outshine Pressable’s offerings in the realm of managed WordPress hosting.

Those looking for affordable shared hosting optimized for WordPress that includes a free domain, unlimited traffic, unlimited storage, and unlimited email hosting and hosting features comparable to those offered by Pressable are advised to check out InMotion Hosting or BlueHost’s WordPress optimized plans.