[mr__y]

Could you recommend some real[0] WP-focused providers? Since the company I work for has several WP websites with relatively high traffic we've been looking for such providers, tested some but ended with having some VPSes to have the ability to set them up properly. Since those servers are self-managed this is obviously a sub-optimal solution as we have to maintain them, so a reliable hosting provider would be great.

[0] "real" as opposed to provider that has a great WP-related pitch but in-reality this is just a regular shared hosting with no actual wordpress oriented optimization/enhancements.

[frereubu]

We've been using a VPS-1 on Pagely for a few years now, and are generally very happy with the service. They take away the management of Ubuntu and security hardening etc, but give you control where you need it such as SSH access - I've written a few bash scripts that use WP-CLI to make it easier to manage multiple sites. We've had one or two small issues, but all fixed quickly, and nothing of the sort that made us start looking elsewhere. You sometimes have to be persistent with first-line support, but things generally get escalated appropriately if necessary.

The one real gripe I have is that they rewrote their control panel as an SPA, and I think it's made it much less usable. It's difficult to do things like open a link in a new window, and state doesn't always remain or update in the right way - for example, you can lengthen and sort a list, go to an item, use the back button and you have to lengthen and sort the list again. However, I don't use that control panel enough to make it a serious time drag, and they're apparently writing an API which should cover most of my use cases.