WP Engine Reliable Wordpress Hosting
There are basically two types of website hosting companies. Cheap, better known as budget friendly, and managed Wordpress hosting, better known as expensive.
There are a lot of the low cost, or budget hosts, on the internet. Many of those are horrible, especially when it comes to getting support. We did an extensive review of them and narrowed the field down to a couple that we were comfortable in recommending.
Our review of the managed hosts was also reduced down to two hosts. Today, we will be doing a comprehensive review on one of them, WP Engine. These folks are based in Austin, Texas and have been around since 2010.
WP Engine Wordpress Hosting Plans
Their lowest cost plan, paid monthly, is $30.00 per month. All sites on this plan are hosted on the Google Cloud servers located in 10 data centers around the world.
The higher priced plans are hosted on the Amazon, AWS servers, in 8 data centers, essentially in the same regions. You’ll find some of the very largest companies in the world on these plans at WP Engine.
To begin with, WP Engine isn’t just a managed host, they are a managed Wordpress host. What that means, is their platforms are fully optimized for Wordpress hosting, and they are fast.
Don’t let their $30.00 monthly cost mislead you. With WP Engine and the second site we reviewed, you get what you pay for! If you’re a speed geek like me or if you operate an eCommerce site, speed and support are the two main criteria to look for.
Build with Wordpress
Let’s begin with Wordpress. If you’ve been around web hosting, even for a short time, you have heard about Wordpress. In my opinion, it’s the best website builder on the planet.
It has a very low learning curve, and you can build a decent website without knowing anything about programming. There are many thousands of free themes that you can use or you can buy a premium one.
Instead of knowing about programming, there are so many free plugins that you can use for whatever action you need, it blows your mind.
Wordpress, today, is a very secure and fast loading environment. My website, is quite large in posts and pages and using the Pingdom speed testing program, it loads in under a half second.
WP Engine specializes in managed Wordpress hosting, and they manage it quite well. They take care of all of the technical aspects, such as security, updates, and so much more.
If you need to migrate (move) your website from another hosting company, WP Engine has a simple automated migration plugin that will do it easily.
They also provide you with a free SSL certificate. (Think HTTPS) If a site today doesn’t use https, there’s a good chance someone’s browser will flash a security warning.
WP Engine Support
WP Engine has a highly trained support staff and knows Wordpress as well. For the Starter plan, the $30.00 one, support is provided by chat and ticket. For the remainder of the plans, they add telephone support too.
Just to get a feel of the support staff and their response, we used the live chat. We had a couple of technical questions that properly trained personnel would be able to answer easily.
Not only did they respond quickly, but they had the correct answers to our questions. WP Engine also has an extensive knowledge base and a resource center plus well written documentation.
Performance
We all know that support and features are very important, but the bottom line is – performance. If this Wordpress hosting service doesn’t deliver what you want, then it’s not for you.
Some of the great features WP Engine offers is:
- Free content delivery network (CDN) for all plans
- A solution to test your website to help you make necessary improvements.
- An add-on feature called Geo Target where you can optimize your site for a specific region.
- Your choice of location for your server. This can keep your site fast & secure where most of your traffic comes from.
- Increase your site’s performance on WP Engine with Google Cloud Platform’s newest infrastructure.
Pricing
WP Engine only offers managed Wordpress hosting with a variety of hosting plans. This is what they’re good at and this is what they provide. This allows them to offer a scalable service to all of their customers.
Their lowest price plan is $30.00 per month, and while some may say that this is expensive, in fact it’s not. Many other hosting services that offer a CDN, charge around $19.95 a month extra just for it.
A CDN helps to speed up your Wordpress site by serving your images and certain other files from a server that is nearest to the person making the request.
Maybe you wouldn’t need a high-speed host like WP Engine if you’re just starting out with a small personal website. But if you intend to build a business or an eCommerce site, this is what you want.
It allows you to grow your site right up to the size of Intuit or some other multi-national site. In fact, WP Engine has many sites that size.
Pros and Cons of WP Engine
Pros
- Strong managed Wordpress hosting
- Frees you up to run your business & let them handle the technical end
- Secure, consistent and solid performance
- Highly trained expert support team
- Uses Google Cloud servers for Starter Plan and Amazon (AWS) for the other higher priced plans
Cons
- Not a cheap budget friendly host
- Still thinking for another con. Let me know if you have one.
WP Engine Alternatives
When you consider all of the features that are included free of charge, it really isn’t all that expensive. You get what you pay for with WP Engine, and that’s a good thing.
However, we realize that everyone simply can’t afford that much for a simple website. In that case, we’ve weeded out many of the low-cost hosts, and have reduced that number down to two.
SiteGround and Bluehost are two of our favorites and even come recommended by Wordpress.
Summary
As we mentioned above, WP Engine isn’t a low cost, budget-friendly host. However, when you look at all of the features that are included in their plans at no extra cost, it’s not that expensive.
But if you’re looking for solid, reliable, managed Wordpress hosting, you won’t go wrong by signing up for their services. Add to that their top-notch support, and it’s a no-brainer.
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