Are you looking for a reliable hosting for your WordPress website? If so, Pressidium is worth considering. Pressidium is a hosting company that offers premium managed WordPress hosting service. Not as popular as WP Engine, Kinsta or even Flywheel, but Pressidium really deserves more mentions. If you want to use Pressidium on your next WordPress projects, then read on to learn more the service.
First thing first, if you expect your website to run on cloud platforms like Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, or Microsoft Azzure, Pressidium is not the one you are looking for.
Also, Pressidium is not a suited option if you are a non-techie who just want to get started with WordPress. To use Pressidium, you have to at least understand how to set up DNS server.
A Brief Intro About Pressidium
As briefly mentioned above, Pressidium is a hosting service provider that focuses on offering managed WordPress hosting. Meaning that its hosting environment is designed specifically for WordPress. In Pressidium, you can’t install CMS or app other than WordPress. The fact is that Pressidium offers no installer tool on its control panel (much like Softaculous). You will get a website pre-installed with WordPress every time you add a new website on you plan. When adding a new website, you are offered with two options whether you want to migrate your existing WordPress website or create a blank WordPress site.
The number of websites you can add depends on the plan you subscribed to. The cheapest plan allows you to add only one website, while the most expensive plan (the Enterprise plan) allows you to add unlimited websites.
Pressididum doesn’t use a third-party service like Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, etc. Instead, it builds everything from the ground up. Pressidium has four main data centers spread in the US, Europe, North America, and Asia. In addition to four main data centers, the Pressidium hosting service is also supported by 73 strategic edge locations.
As a premium hosting service, Pressidium also offers features like CDN (Powered by StackPath), cache, staging environment, automated backup, and so on.
Pressidium Features
— Custom-built Control Panel
There are some adjustments you need to make on Pressidium, especially if you switched from a traditional shared hosting service. One of which is regarding how you control your website. Instead of using cPanel or the similar third-party software, Pressidium uses a custom control panel built by its own.
The Pressidium control panel has a simple interface, with some menu items you can use to access the offered features. On the main screen, you are presented with some basic information about your website. Such as WordPress version, PHP version, IP address, active theme, and so on. Here are some screenshots of the Pressidium control panel:
Here are menu items available on the Pressidium panel:
- Overview: The default screen when you enter the panel. You will be presented with some basic information about your website
- Domains: To add your domains. You can add multiple domain names but can only connect domain names according to your plan
- Backups: To access your backup files
- SFTP: To create and access FTP accounts
- Database: To manage your database
- Logs: To monitor error logs and access logs
- Analytics: To access site stats
- Settings: From this menu, you can change PHP version, disable/enable WordPress file editor (theme and plugin), enable/disable CDN
Pressidium offers no menu to control cache. Cache will always be active on your website. Clearing the cache can be done via the WordPress dashboard. More about cache will be covered shortly on the next section below.
One thing that makes working with Pressidium less convenient is that the login session is too short.
— CDN and Caching
While most WordPress hosting services use Cloudflare for their CDN and cache, Pressidium is not tempted to adopt the same approach. Instead, it uses its own resources for CDN and cache. According to its documentation, its CDN service has 22 edge servers for North America, 31 for Europe, and 3 for Asia.
CDN feature itself is not available on the cheapest plan (Micro). To use its CDN feature, you need to at least subscribe to the Personal plan. CDN can be controlled via control panel by going to the Settings menu.
What about cache?
Just like other premium WordPress hosting services out there, Pressidium also offers server-level caching feature. It uses a unique multilayer adaptive caching solution that it developed in-house. As mentioned earlier, all websites hosted on Pressidium automatically have this feature (caching). In fact, Pressidium offers no option to disable this feature. What if you need to clear the cache?
Every WordPress website hosted on Pressidium has extra menu item — which lies at the top of the menu sidebar. This menu contains several sub-menus. One of which is Adaptive Caching. You can go here to clear the cache on your website.
— Staging Environment
You are always recommended to test a new change on a staging site before applying it to a live site. With this approach, you can avoid unexpected events when you want to make a new change to your live website (Pressidium use the term “production site” for the live site).
Creating staging website is extremely easy in Pressidium. You can simply click the Staging tab on top bar. You can also access the staging website from here. Staging website can be accessed via a domain provided by Pressidium when you created it.
— Scheduled Backup
Scheduled backup is a common feature offered by a managed WordPress hosting. By Pressidium, your website is backed up on a daily basis. Pressidium itself offers two backup types:
- Full backup: Daily backup that includes all WordPress files and database. Stored for 30 days.
- Instant backup: Daily backup that includes WordPress core files and database. Stored for 15 days. This backup type doesn’t include media uploads.
There are two actions you can perform on each backup: download and restore.
Your backup files are stored to the Pressidium servers. Unlike, for instance, Kinsta, Pressidium offers no external backup destination.
— Team Collaboration
Want to invite your team members to join a project? Pressidium has a feature to do so. You can invite your team members and grant access according to their role. There are three levels of users you can set:
- Team admin: Have access to everything
- Website admin: Have access to all or specific websites
- Billing admin: Have access to team billing
You can invite your team members via email. An existing team member can be edited. This feature is extremely useful if you often create websites jointly with your team members.
— Analytics
The analytics feature of Pressidium allows you to monitor the resource usage on your account. It doesn’t provide stats related to visitors like Google Analytics does. Some stats you can monitor are:
- HTTP requests
- Caching requests
- Geo and IP
- Server response time
Other stats like disk space usage and CDN usage are available on the main screen of the Pressidium dashboard.
Detailed Specs of Pressidium
Pressidium offers different specs on each plan. The Personal plan, for instance, is designed to handle 3 WordPress websites with the storage capacity of 10GB. The higher the plan, the higher the specs as well. But in general, here are the specs you will get when subscribing to a Pressidium plan:
| Hosting infrastructure: | In-house |
| CDN plaftorm: | StackPath |
| Control panel: | Custom-built |
| Web server: | Apache |
| Dabatase client: | MariaDB |
| PHP versions: | 7.4.x and 8.0.x |
| PHP memory limit: | 256 MB |
| Maximum upload file size: | 100 MB |
| phpMyAdmin: | Yes |
| SSL: | Yes |
| FTP: | Yes |
With the specs above, you can install and run any WordPress plugin on your website. Including Divi Builder, Elementor, and other page builder plugins.
Performance Test
Testing the performance of a website involves several things, not just web hosting. Especially in the context of WordPress. Aspects like used theme, used plugins, and page design play a role in determining the overall performance of a website.
There are a number of tools to test website performance out there, with Google PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix being the popular ones. In this test, we use the Google PageSpeed Insights. Google PageSpeed Insights itself scores the following aspects:
- Performance
- Accessibility
- Best practices
- SEO
When it comes to hosting performance, you can pay your attention to the Performance score as other aspects, such as accessibility and SEO, are also determined by page design.
Here is the detailed information about our test:
- Server location: North America
- Page: A Divi page consisting of 6 sections and 50 modules. You can check the live page used on this page here
- No CDN
Here are the testing results:
Here are the detailed metrics of the testing result:
If you need a comparison, you can jump to this section on our Kinsta review post.
Pressidium Pros and Cons
As you can see on the performance test above, the biggest issue with Pressidium is its low score on mobile performance. However, the score could be higher if you use CDN or further optimize your page design.
Overall, Pressidium is not a bad hosting service, although we cannot say that it’s an excellent hosting service. Pressidium is a great option if you are looking for a hosting service designed exclusively for WordPress.
— Pros
- Fully managed WordPress hosting
- Designed exclusively for WordPress
- Easy backup
- Easy to collaborate with team
- Simplified control panel
— Cons
- No file manager feature
- No domain registration service
- No email hosting
- Doesn’t allow WordPress installation on sub-domain, unless you subscribe to a plan that support 2 WordPress installations or more
The Bottom Line
Pressidium is worth trying if you plan make a migration from your current hosting service. Before moving your website, you can try it first for free for 14 days. In the trial platform offered by Pressidium, you can install up to 2 WordPress websites and access Pressidium dashboard to try the offered features. Pressidium offers free migration in case you decide to move.
Pressidium is a fully managed WordPress hosting service whereby its environment is designed exclusively for WordPress. It has four main data centers located in the US, Nort America, Europe, and Asia. Pressidium is an ideal option to run an e-commerce website, membership website, to regular websites like portfolio, blog, and so on.
One more thing. Once subscribed to a Pressididum plan, you can’t cancel until you create a ticket stating you want to cancel your plan.
