Agency-hosted Pressidium setup: stay put or take control ourselves?
Looking for some advice/opinions on our company’s WordPress hosting/setup situation.
Sorry for the essay!
Small-medium Australian B2B company with a WooCommerce product catalogue site. Website was originally built by Perth Web Design (PWD) about 5 years ago for around $8k AUD.
For years we were paying roughly $20k AUD/year covering hosting, SEO, AI-generated blog/landing page content, updates/security, support etc. Earlier this year I took over the website internally and convinced management to reduce the arrangement down to basically hosting only because the additional services weren’t providing much value.
To elaborate on that a bit:
- A lot of the SEO/content work being delivered was AI-generated blog and landing page content that often needed heavy editing before it was usable
- Some of it was factually wrong or didn’t really fit our industry/products properly
- Some sections were suspiciously similar to competitors
- It was usually very obviously AI-generated content/slop
- The time spent internally reviewing and rewriting it often outweighed the value of just writing proper content ourselves
Apparently before I started, it had gotten to the point where a lot of what PWD sent over for approval was just being ignored because nobody had time to properly fix/review it.
That’s when I learned the site is actually hosted on Pressidium through PWD. From what I can tell, Pressidium itself seems pretty solid.
We also have a separate IT company that handles our PCs, servers and office tech support, and they offer hosting too. We originally thought we’d just move the site over to them, but they don’t use Pressidium or managed WordPress hosting. Just more generic hosting infrastructure. That’s one of the main reasons we kept the site with PWD.
The site itself is also not tiny/simple. 400+ WooCommerce products, some with huge variation/SKU counts into the thousands. General performance is okay but not amazing. Some product pages can be heavy/slow. That’s another reason I’m hesitant to just throw it onto generic hosting, because I assume the managed WordPress infrastructure is helping keep it stable.
The issue now is workflow/control.
Today I made a mistake editing functions.php cause I'm a stupid idiot dum dum. Simple syntax error. That immediately took down both the live website and WP admin, which also locked me out of the only access I had to fix it myself.
PWD do not provide:
- Pressidium dashboard access
- SFTP/file access
- staging sites
So even though I had a working backup copy of the .php file ready to go, I still had to go back through PWD just to replace the broken file on the server. About $600 AUD for what was essentially a copy/paste restore job.
To be fair, the mistake was mine, not theirs. But it highlighted how little direct control we have over the environment despite now managing most of the site internally.
Their recommendation was:
- develop locally
- then migrate changes live
Which makes sense in theory, except if replacing a single .php file costs ~$600 AUD, I can only assume requesting the full files/database exports needed to build and maintain a proper local copy would also become a paid process.
And even then, a local copy is only accurate as of the export date. Any newer products/content/orders/plugin changes on the live site wouldn’t exist locally unless we constantly request fresh exports.
So now I’m trying to work out the best direction going forward:
Stay with PWD hosting/support
Host directly with Pressidium and manage updates/security/plugin compatibility ourselves
Move to another managed WordPress host entirely
Move to hosting through our existing IT support provider
A few things:
- PWD’s hosting pricing itself doesn’t seem outrageous
- Historically the expensive part has been support/dev work
- Pressidium advertises 24/7 DevOps support which sounds appealing if hosting directly
- I’m comfortable managing a lot of the WordPress/admin side myself, but I’m not a full-time sysadmin. Definitely capable and willing to learn though.
- What we really need is safer workflows, staging, file access, and quicker rollback ability
Curious what people here would do in this situation.