WP Engine Hosting Review

WP Engine Hosting Review - WP Engine website picDoes WP Engine Hosting live up to the expectations and can it really deliver a smooth service or is it just another dissapoitment? Well wonder no longer! I reveal to you today the details in this WP Engine Hosting Review. Lets get cracking!

OVERVIEW

WP Engine is a premium managed hosting environment that is specifically designed and highly optimized for WordPress installations and plug-ins. It promises to deliver an optimal WordPress experience with stunning speed, powerful security, and best-in-class customer service. WP Engine is designed to deliver innovation-driven technology not only resulting in fast loading times, but it also ensures your website is always running smoothly and securely.

WP Engine Hosting Review

  • Name:                           WP Engine Hosting
  • Type:                             Managed WordPress Host
  • Website:                       wpengine.com
  • Price:                              $35/mo Startup
  • Founder:                      Jason Cohen
  • Overall Ranking:       3.95/5  (79 out of 100)
  • Verdict:                         Legitimate

Who is it for?

WP Engine hosting is suitable for:

  • smaller sites (under 25k visits/mo.) with a decent budget
  • agencies or resellers with up to 25 smaller sites
  • non-technical business owners who do not update their site often and just need it to work
  • small business owners
  • web developers
  • all WordPress users

History

WP Engine was founded in 2010 by Jason Cohen together with Ben Metcalfe and Cullen Wilson. Jason Cohen is a serial enterpriser who started the WP Engine when he saw a requirement for specialized WordPress caused by the rising quality of WordPress. The company’s headquarters are in Austin, Texas USA. It also has three offices located in San Francisco, CA, San Antonio, Texas, and Ireland, as well as three data centres in London, Tokyo and in Midwest of the United States.WP Engine Hosting Review - World Globe

Comparatively, WP Engine is new to the hosting world, but they are not shy about taking on the competition. In just 8 years, they managed to get a decent foothold and did not waste time in earning an outstanding reputation. The company has won multiple awards for Best Place to figure in the capital of Texas and systematically contributes to the WordPress core community. Currently it has over four hundred workers. WP Engine hosts millions of WordPress websites and caters to around 68,000 clients in 120 countries.

WP Engine Top Features Rundown

When running a business or project, outsourcing the time-consuming IT tasks to professionals can save you time, money and headaches. WP Engine, a managed WordPress host, can handle all the tedious technical tasks that could prove to be a bit overwhelming for business owners and bloggers on WordPress, and at the same time keep your website secure and running in improved speed. It means you have more time to focus on providing quality content and enhancing targeted promotions for your small online business or freelance project.

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If you are someone who is serious about building and growing your online business, and if you want to do away with all the hassles involved in the tech side of websites, then WP Engine may be a great option for you to look into. WP Engine certainly is worth each and every penny that you invest in the hosting fees thanks to its unique features, reliable support, and outstanding performance as detailed below.

Managed WordPress hosting -They have a team of over 100 expertly trained WordPress support technicians which can provide nothing but managed WordPress hosting. It means that their support team focuses singly on providing excellent, knowledgeable support, giving you the assurance that you are hosted on a reliable platform.

Advanced Security Features – WP Engine provides a number of premium security features designed to protect your site like automatic patching and updating to the latest version. Before upgrading to the customers, it completely tests the updates and uses a specialized prevention and detection technique to prevent malware attacks like

  • DDoS attacks
  • Brute force attacks
  • JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks

Faster Loading using CDN – WP Engine’s partnership with NetDNA makes their hosting service even faster. This feature has recently been made available at no cost even to the basic Startup Plan, whereas before users needed to pay extra fees each month in order to access it.

Agility: WP Engine features one-click tools for staging, testing and deployment. You can also personalize your visitors’ experience based on where your visitors are located geographically.

Performance: While features and support are an important aspect of any hosting service, it’s the performance that can actually make or break a hosting provider. Luckily, WP Engine has plenty of performance-enhancing features to offer, including:WP Engine Hosting Review - Performance

  • Page performance solutions aimed for testing your website and helping you to make improvements
  • Add-ons such as the GeoTarget that you can use to optimize your website for certain regions

In addition, WP Engine has partnered with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform to deliver blazing fast load times. WP Engine has various server locations (19 at last count), including Europe, Australia, Asia and North America, and boasts of being the only non-Canadian hosting providers with servers in Canada.

Intelligence: Google Analytics-powered provide actionable insights right within your WordPress admin on the performance of your content, page and application.

Integration: Your favourite marketing application can be easily integrated into your WordPress site to grow your business.

Key Features Overview

Features Details
Price $35/mo Startup
Number of Websites 25
Instant DNS Setup No
Hosting Speed Undisclosed
Website Space Local storage for WP Engine’s 3 plans are 10 GB, 20 GB and 30 GB, respectively
Bandwidth Included Up to 400k visitors/month
SSL Certificates Free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate. Unfortunately, WP Engine’s free SSLs is not compatible with their CDN service. So, if you want your entire site to be secure, and you want to use WP Engine’s CDN, you’ll need to purchase a third-party SSL certificate ($50-80/yr).
Site Builder Included No
Staging Environment 3-environment staging model
Full Redundancy No
Enterprise Security Yes
Daily Website Backups Full, daily, automatic backups of your site are performed each night. In addition, WP Engine will create unlimited number of backups of your site at any time. Your last 30 days of automatic backups will be stored, plus any backups you initiated manually within the last 30 days.
24/7 Access to Server Admins Yes
Email Accounts No
BotNet Security Yes
Site Health and Performance Tracking No
Site Comments No
Website Feedback No
Community Access No
1 on 1 Marketing Mentorship No

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Customer Service

WP Engine’s online help centre has plenty of support available to help you learn more about the platform.

Online Resources: webinars, guides, blog posts, updates, tutorials and a knowledge base.

  • Live chat
    service is available 24/7 for those who want instant access to support. Factors, such as time of day and any server issues may affect wait times.
  • By phone: WP Engine operates a toll-free phone number, which remains operational during business hours from 9 am to 6 pm CST. This support is available in Growth plan and higher.

One of the best things that set WP Engine apart from competitors is that their support technicians have WordPress expertise, so they can provide WordPress-specific support for your business. This includes:

  • Installing updates
  • Plugin configuration
  • Plugin compatibility issues
  • WordPress page loading issues
  • WordPress Page speed problems

Advantages of using WP Engine Hosting

  • Solid performance (proprietary caching, PHP 7 & HTTP/2)
  • Free SSLs (via Let’s Encrypt)
  • Free CDN
  • Site staging on all plans (3 environments)
  • Automated and on-demand backups on all plans
  • Excellent security
  • Reseller feature: Transfer a site to a client for billing
  • Availability of helpful workflow tools for dev/stage/live environment
  • Automated migration tool
  • 60-day money-back guarantee.
  • Site staging is part of the standard features
  • Automatic daily backups and plug-in updates.
  • Malware scanning and firewall protection for all hosting plans
  • Unlimited monthly data transfersWP Engine Hosting Review - Pros and Cons

A few disadvantages

  • Support has been hit-or-miss
  • Relatively expensive, compared to similar hosts. It can be costly for those who want to host multiple websites with WP Engine
  • Number of visitors are limited depending on your plan
  • Overage charges with no alerts
  • WP Engine does not offer traditional hosting services, so your domain name cannot be registered or your Linux or Windows-based non-WordPress site cannot be uploaded.
  • For WordPress websites only
  • Does not offer email hosting

WP Engine Plans and Pricing

WP Engine offers three predefined hosting plans. There is also a custom option suitable for “large businesses and mission-critical sites” receiving millions of visitors a month, or those who need to host at least 25 WordPress websites on a single account. All plans boast automatic daily backups and malware scanning. These are all managed WordPress hosting plans, so the WP Engine’s technicians give the white-glove treatment on your installation. The plans are all Linux-based, so if you want Windows-based hosting, you must look elsewhere.

All plans are with a content delivery network (CDN) for faster page load times, staging environments to allow you to test site changes in a non-public environment, and WP Engine’s own LargeFS software for transferring and storing large amounts of data.

WP Engine Hosting Review - Pricing Chart

All plans include access to the more than 35 WordPress themes from StudioPress and a free SSL certificate. There is the option of installing more WordPress websites on your plan for an extra $20 per month per site. This means all of your sites will be sharing the resources available on your plan, such as the bandwidth and storage allowances. Other optional paid extras are also available, including the GeoTarget feature mentioned earlier, and support for WordPress Multisite.

Regardless of which plan you choose, your WordPress websites will be hosted on the same type of hardware. Whether you are paying $35 or $290 per month, you will benefit from similar performance levels to their test sites, depending on your website configuration and traffic levels. If you go over the limits on bandwidth and visitors number, you will incur an overage cost of $2 per 1,000 extra monthly visitors, except if you are on the custom plan.

WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee

WP Engine offers a healthy 60-day money-back guarantee that is far superior to the 15-day trial period offered by competitors. This unique offer allows you to try out the service in a risk-free way. This means that you are taking absolutely no risk whatsoever when you sign up for their managed hosting service, and in essence, makes trying it out a no-brainer.

If you decide that WP Engine is not right for your business and would like to reclaim your subscription fees as part of the 60-day guarantee scheme then the process is pretty simple.

Unfortunately, the refund policy does not cover the custom hosting plan.

Final Opinion

There is no sugar-coating the fact that WP Engine plans do not come cheap. In exchange for the pricey investment, you will get a quality managed hosting service with lots of vital WordPress-specific features, solid performance, and reliable support.

The extra features, such as automatic backups, security scanning, and WordPress updates, should take some of the stress out of managing a website. If you add the easy-to-use developer-friendly features, such as the development and staging environments, as well as the ability to transfer sites to clients, WP Engine may be worth giving a serious consideration.

Alternative Hosting Option

It’s always a good idea to get a comparison of WP Engine Hosting with another world class Hosting platform, Wealthy Affiliate! The chart compares the key features required to have the best shot at earning online success.

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Rina Walker

Rina Walker - Founder of EarningOnline.come

I am Rina Walker the founder of Earning Online and have been running a successful affiliate marketing website and blogging about earning online opportunites since November 2016. The niches that I am involved in include Wealth Creation, Permaculture, Action Cameras and Social Enterprise - all of which I have a great interest in.

I'm also involved in helping, supporting and coaching online entrepreneurs of all levels to build and run their own successful web-based affiliate business.

10 thoughts on “WP Engine Hosting Review”

  1. I am happy to stumble across your WP Engine hosting review.  I have been looking for a good managed WordPress hosting that is both secure and reliable.  However there are many options on the market who all make the same type of claims for roughly the same price.  Thankfully your blog post is clear, concise and was able to help cut through all the noise in the digital marketing world. 

    Reply
    • Hiya! Thank you Pamela for visiting and your for your comments. Yes, there can be alot of noise indeed, and research can do a lot to fish out the hype without substance to find the GEM that will make all of the differecne to your digital marketing experience. 

      I hope you find the right one and be sure to check out my #1 recommendation!

      Reply
  2. This is rather a very good one from wp engine hosting. My only concern is the fact that it is centered on WordPress and makes room for lot of WordPress plugins and all. The only problem I have is that why don’t we just go for WordPress straight up rather than having to go through wp engine. Though I have no issues with it, it just felt kind of weird

    Reply
    • Hi Rodarrick! Great to see you again! Platforms like WP Engine Hosting are suppose to improve the experience with WP, at least that should be the focus. Sometimes, it can be a bit of a hit and miss approach. So, WP Engine Hosting and others for that matter need to be super confident that what you are offering will enhance a users experience. In the case of digital marketing, you would also want it to increase you profits otherwise, why bother. Wealthy Affiliate is one hosting example of how this is achieved.

      Thanks again for stopping by. I aways love to hear from you!

      Reply
  3. It is the first time that I am hearing about the wp engine hosting platform and it looks like a very good software package that I should try with my own website. It is very true that there are times when a website might not run smoothly but it seems that when one has this type of awesome advantage, it should all work well. I have to be honest as say that the price is too high for me, but if it really can deliver the quality of service it says it can, then it might be worth it for others.

    Reply
    • Hiya John! Sometimes there might be other reasons than hosting behind the poor performance of a website. But what you can expect from a hosting platform are the things it claims it can do. 

      Reply
  4. Thanks for this interesting and helpful review of WP engine hosting review, I personally believe that quality comes with a lot of money and it’s sometimes dependent on the amount a product charges that’ll determine how much delivery it’ll offer. I like the idea of using a good hosting program, it’ll ensure your smooth experience, I’ll consider WP engine and I’ll see how far it can help. Thanks for the help.

    Reply
    • Hi there! Thanks for calling by and for the comments! You would think that by paying more for a product will give you more in return and value for money. But in my experience, this is not the case. Take Lurn for example. It promotes Email Marketing and it’s product is costly, beyond the affordability of most. But in digital marketing, email marketing is just one strategy when in fact there are several strategies. 

      The good news is that you CAN be taught all of the strategies at a very affordable price such as with Wealthy Affiliate. So, why pay exorbitant prices for something you can have for less than a $1 a day?   

      Reply
  5. It truly is worth the consideration looking at how very good one can make ones WordPress website with this engine. I like the fact that the engine has been on for over 9 years now and has been very well updated by the makers. The price is truly steep and that might be a little discouraging. Your rating is very accurate after sizing up this post. Nice work!

    Reply
    • Hiya Henderson! Nice to have you call by and for your comments! The price is steep for sure especially is you have a low or even modest budget. This is what most people are finding. It might be ok for those who have been earning online for a while and can afford it but if you are just starting out, chances are you are a while away yet from being able to pay what WP Engine Hosting are asking. Luckily, there are other much more affordable options such as my #1 recommendation so, go ahead and dive in.

      Reply

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