No, it is not a requirement. But, the benefit of using WordHerd as your web hosting provider is that we will have complete control over the web hosting environment and not have to rely on the support of a third-party web hosting provider. Your WordPress environment will be managed and backed-up daily keeping everything up-to-date , ensuring uptime. As the original developers of the website we will be able to better address and support your website moving forward. Web hosting through WordHerd includes disaster recovery through offsite nightly backups of all files and database. Our servers have a solid history of 99.9% up-time and includes a monitoring system to immediately notify our team if your website is to ever go down. To help our clients eliminate miscellaneous costs, we offer free SSL, CDN and premium plugins including Visual Composer, Gravity Forms and more. WordHerd will however offer web hosting free of charge during the development of your website platform for ease of access and testing purposes.