Lightning Base Managed WordPress Hosting
A couple things we love about Lightning Base…
- They are fast! Yes they live up to that name.
- They were one of the first, less expensive managed WordPress hosting companies we found breaking the mold for Premium = Managed.
- Great value for the money.
- We’d suggest that this is the stripped down version of Managed WordPress Hosting. No frills, but very fast.
No Frills powered by a basic cPanel setup this host seems to have evolved from the founders superb ability to manage multiple sites for himself and a few years ago he translated that into a startup.
Dig in and learn more about Lightning Base
Lightning Base faqs
It depends on the plan and Lightning Base has more than a three!
- Personal plan allows up to 1 site for $9.95 a month with a maximum of 10,000 pageviews.
- Small plan allows up to 3 sites for $19.95 a month with a maximum of 25,000 pageviews.
- Medium level plan allows up to 10 sites for $49.95 a month with a maximum of 100,000 pageviews.
- Large level plan allows up to 25 sites for $99.95 a month with a maximum of 250,000 pageviews.
Everything is pretty much what you see is what you get and if you don’t see it, you don’t get it. We do like the pageview to site number ratio. These numbers seem realistic. Other managed hosts also offer different numbers of sites with maximum pageview numbers, but sometimes those seem high on site numbers and low on pageviews. This seems a bit more workable even if all of the sites are somewhat average in terms of traffic.
Speaking from experience, it is also easy to scale an account up or down from within their system.
No.
At least not anywhere that we could see. They offer essentially a cPanel environment, so expect to do your typical ftp/file manager and phpMyAdmin work setting up typical test accounts. We believe that sub domains powered by WordPress would count toward the total number of sites. So a Small account or higher would be needed if you want to have a live site and a test site, leaving space for one more site beyond that (3 allowed in the Small Plan at Lightning Base.)
No.
At least we do not think so, although there is a mysterious ‘Login to Webmail’ button with the Services section after you login. It doesn’t seem to work on our account, and we could not find any mention of email services for sale on the Lightning Base site.
So like many others, you will need to BYOE – Bring Your Own Email and sign up for a plan through Google Business Apps or Office 365 or Rackspace or something. This might require some work on your MX entries at your domain registrar.
Yes.
They do offer managed WordPress hosting services. Based on our testing, Lightning Base is very fast and fast is one of the cornerstones of Managed WordPress hosting. They optimize their servers so you don’t have to futz with a bunch of cache plugins and other garbage.
Lightning Base doesn’t offer a lot of other services however such as 1 Click staging, email, multiple user access etc. That may or may not be important, but the speed is there! 🙂
Yes.
Plus, if you aren’t satisfied with their service, they will give you a refund on your first month of hosting.
Yes.
Lightning Base offers a free CDN (Content Delivery Network) on all plans. The storage level varies for each plan.
- Personal Plan – 20 GB
- Small Plan – 50 GB
- Medium Plan – 200 GB
- Large Plan – 500 GB
Notice the pattern in their numbers, 20, 50, 200, 500. We get the impression that with many of their prices, levels, numbers in general, that this is a no (marketing) nonsense kind of company. Its easy to remember their numbers and understand where your account fits in their different levels. You won’t be hassled or troubled with a bunch of upsell, cross selling malarchy or shenanigans with Lightning Base!
Compared to some hosts, Lightning Base is a very refreshing experience.
If we have missed something, we would love your feedback on how we might update our information or answer your questions more completely. Please contact us or leave a comment to make this happen!