Do I need managed hosting?

Managed hosting gets sold as an optional extra, which is where the confusion starts. A WordPress site needs maintaining whether or not you pay someone to maintain it. Rick puts it plainly: it is not really an optional plan, because if you do not take it you have to host and manage the site yourself.

What the work actually is

• Hosting. Somewhere for the site to live, that stays up.
• Updates. WordPress ships updates constantly, and the ones that matter most are security fixes.
• Security. An SSL certificate and scanning, so the browser does not warn people off your site.
• Backups. Taken often, kept somewhere other than the server they came from.
• Edits. The small changes that pile up: a price, a phone number, a new team member.

What happens when nobody does it

Not much, for a while. That is the trap. An unmaintained WordPress site keeps working for months, and then one of a small number of predictable things happens: an out-of-date install gets compromised, an SSL certificate expires and every visitor sees a warning, or something breaks and the newest backup turns out to be from last year. None of these announce themselves in advance, and you usually find out from a customer.

When you genuinely do not need it

If you have someone in-house who is comfortable running updates and checking backups, you do not need to pay anyone for this. The site is yours and it will keep working on basic WordPress hosting. Take it on knowingly rather than by accident, and put a reminder in a calendar.

The bit people are actually asking

Underneath this question is usually a different one: am I being sold something I do not need? Fair. The test is whether the plan lists what it covers in plain words, and whether the person selling it will tell you when you do not need something. Here the plan covers hosting, security, updates, daily backups in two locations, and a couple of hours of edits a month. Anything bigger gets quoted separately rather than absorbed silently.