At MrBloggen, we’re always trying new hosting servers – due to the fact that we want our sites to be quick. When we were presented with an opportunity to write a WPEngine review – we jumped on it. Wpengine Geoip
Because who hasn’t heard of WPEngine? This company has built its reputation on WordPress hosting. It’s included in its name: “WP Engine” – therefore they’ve set themselves an excellent standard to live up to as they’re the engine that powers your WordPress.
As experts who have used a myriad of hosting options, far too many to count, we’re able to examine a service’s performance and make it sound like us. And that’s what we will write about in this article. We will provide you with all the details about hosting your site with WP Engine.
We host our own websites that run on WP Engine ourselves, we’ve recently reviewed this article back in the month of November, and updated with all the new details as necessary. Wpengine Geoip
Who is WP Engine?
WPEngine is one of the most well-known names in managed WordPress hosting.
Established in 2010, WPEngine wasn’t one of the early entrants into the market, however they’ve certainly carved their way to the top of this niche.
Contrary to other hosting providers, WPEngine focuses on one particular thing, and only one thing:
WordPress.
In essence, they put all of their efforts and resources to their WP framework, hence their name.
The WPEngine business is powered by an award-winning team of WordPress experts. At present, the company employs over 250 employees, headquartered out of Austin Texas, but with offices in San Francisco, San Antonio, London and Limerick (Ireland).
One method by how we assess the reliability of a company is actually based on what it receives in terms of funding, if any. Wpengine Geoip
With more than $290 million raised in the past with the most recent round being a whopping $250 million in January 2018by venture capitalists Silver Lake, you can be confident that this business is on the rise.
The motivations for wanting to be able to raise this large amounts of money are many:
WPEngine it is one of the biggest WordPress hosts.
It is a very popular productized platform called the WPEngine Digital Experience Platform
It’s estimated that the company has an annual revenue of $100 million and 70,000+ 120,000+ clients (up 30 percent from previous year) and a valuation of about 500 million, at a minimum.
WPEngine provides around 5% of internet visits and is a massive portion of the web.
Trusted by major brands with mega-sites such as Under Armour, Trend Micro, Thomson Reuters, Hello Fresh etc.
So yeah, the numbers are definitely able to do this company justice.
Although there’s greater competition within the managed hosting industry than in any other sector It’s evident that WPEngine is a market leader , boasting excellent reputation, innovative features, and an enviable platform for all kinds of companies which includes the enterprise sector.
Check out current prices and plans (20% OFF until December 2021) (or receive 4 months off on annual plans) This review on personal experience, we are basing it specifically on our own technical expertise regarding hosting companies. We analyze the tens of hosting services each and every month, so we know what to look out for when you’re looking for hosting.
Websites that receive thousands of hits every day, it is essential to be aware of the ins and ins and the things that matter the most . We’ve highlighted all of these aspects where they are essential.
Let’s get to the nuance of hosting with WPEngine.
Platform for WP Engine
With regards to the actual product, the company offers a platform, and an experience called the Digital Experience Platform. But what is this exactly? Does it live up to the hype?
Let’s go deep to learn more. Wpengine Geoip
Dashboard
When you log into your administration panel, first hit the Dashboard which is where you’ll find numerous important notifications and a brief overview of what’s happening in your account.
Then, at the top we received a couple of messages which we ignored before we took the screenshot below, but let’s have an overview of the Dashboard as well as some of the features it has, some of which make a huge difference in comparison to other hosts.
As you’ll discern, WPEngine is not a CPanel powered hosting service. Instead, WPEngine created their own platform. In essence, WP Engine has got overwhelmed by the additional clutter and left only the essential stuff.
Summary of the installations and crucial statistics: The dashboard begins with a brief overview of all the WordPress installations of WordPress that are installed and some information about them, including the total number of visits and the 10-day average, along with bandwidth and storage use. This brief overview of these crucial details will inform that you’re experiencing any anomalies, such as traffic or bandwidth spikes.
Live Chat + delay time: The option of connecting with the Live Chat support right via the Dashboard is a treat. What’s more exciting is that by hovering on the chat feature, you’ll be able to immediately see the expected wait time before you get contact with a support agent.
Knowledge Center and System Status: also accessible in the sidebar are links to the most important details that will aid you in building your website efficiently. WP Engine’s System Status is also available right there in the sidebar. This is a great way to be transparent. Rather than hiding any issues that may be affecting the service , who knows where you can see exactly what’s going on regarding the how things are going and the resolutions to recent incidents.
This is more than you’ll ever require as soon as you sign in to your site’s Dashboard.
For more information, examine The Installs Dashboard of WP Engine – and a vital component that is part of WordPress hosting.
Go through WP Engine’s Dashboard. WP Engine Dashboard Wpengine Geoip
Installs Dashboard
This is the place to begin looking at the real details of each WordPress installation that you’ve hosted.
We will observe that a lot of thought has gone into organizing this view in a manner that presents all of the necessary information quickly, and makes all other information available via menus when needed.
Evidently, a lot thinking has gone into the User Experience – making the experience as seamless and as easy as is possible.
In a glance, we are able to see the most crucial information about the details of our WordPress installation, with things like the CNAME of the website (something you’ll require in order to make DNS modifications to your domain) as well as the IP address, the region in which it’s hosted, the PHP version as well as your direct contact for technical support and the latest version of WordPress your site is running.
You’ve also got a set of data on the present patterns of your visitors to your site.
The menu on the left is where you’ll find many other features that are related to the configuration of your WordPress.
Domains: The Domains function is the one you use to link your domain’s existing address to your hosting account on WP Engine.
It gives you all the information you require to redirect the DNS configurations to WPEngine. You’ll find the CNAME and A records that you’ll require to make the necessary modifications and a direct link to an Knowledge Base article of what you’ll need to accomplish to activate the settings above with your Domain Registrar.
CDN If you’ve been on our website for a while, you know we think CDN’s are a excellent idea to speed up your website – especially if they’re absolutely no cost!
If you’re not familiar with the basics of what a CDN is in simple terms it is CDN is CDN is a geographically distributed network of servers that will serve your heavy website resources from a location which is physically near your site’s visitors, making WordPress more efficient to load.
So when we came to this article we were truly shocked.
As you might know (or not) the CDN service plan generally starts at not more than $10/month for lowest plans and you’re typically considering a monthly cost of $20 or more for a decent plan.
So the fact that this service is included in the hosting plan means you’ll get the speed benefits of a CDN without needing to pay extra cost for it.
*thumbs up* WP Engine offers the built-in CDN for WordPress hosting via a partnership with MaxCDN which was acquired by StackPath . It’s also our CDN that we prefer to use. Wpengine Geoip
Redirect rules: essentially tell your website to redirect users to a particular webpage to a new (different) address for that page, or another page you prefer sending the visitors to.
This is particularly useful after you’ve performed a site reorganization and want to make sure you don’t lose any traffic to broken websites. Most especially, redirects ensure that you don’t devalue the importance of any links you may have accumulated.
Typically, redirects can be implemented using an WordPress plugin, but having them accessible at the server level is preferable since performing this on the server level removes the burden on your WordPress website, and makes the whole process faster.
Tweaks like these are what can make WP Engine faster than traditional hosting.
Access Logs: While this is not a feature that everybody is interested in, it’s good that this is available. These are complete logs directly from the web servers hosting your website i.e. Apache Nginx and Apache . In essence server access logs track all requests handled by the server. This could be helpful in knowing how the caching of your site impacts the performance of your site. (For instance, your SEO might request the logs in order to conduct an SEO audit) Apache access logs contain the hits to your WordPress which aren’t cached and need to be processed in the database by the server.
Nginx access logs include all hits from your WordPress which includes requests from cached, static, and uncached content.
Error logs are, again, an extremely popular feature, it’s so that if your WordPress is displaying any errors you will be able quickly to fix any issues by looking directly at the errors coming straight from the webserver.
SFTP Users: If you don’t be able to directly access the file directory on your server, the ideal option is to connect the file directory via Secure File Transfer Protocol or SFTP. Within this part, you will be able to set up credentials to access the Secure FTP function.
GIT Push: Another feature that sets WP Engine apart from WP Engine and most other hosts. If you have a lot of customizations going on with your WordPress then you’ll have to store them safely in the cloud-hosted source control system. GIT is the standard protocol utilized to communicate with a source control service. As you can observe GIT Push is a feature that GIT Push function lets you push source code of your developers onto the secured and hosted environment of WPEngine.
Again, the fact it is directly connected to the hosting gives it that little touch which can make all the difference when you’re in an actual environment. Instead of using a separate source control repository like GitHub in order to upload to your hosting provider the entire process is accomplished in-place, as part of your strategy. Wpengine Geoip
Back-up Points
This is such a great feature offered from WP Engine, that we must dedicate a whole section specifically to this feature.
It is likely that you already know that backups are vital and lifesavers when stuff goes wrong, particularly in the event of major failures.
Like we always say, when you’re not taking backups , you’re truly living in the sand.
However, creating the right backups can be difficult. Many people who are not tech-savvy will discover that creating backups is quite a bit of trouble. So yes, most people choose to take the easy route out (and skip them completely) … and simply hope that nothing goes wrong.
But when something does go wrong…the results aren’t pretty. We don’t want you to be in that situation, we can assure that. We’ve had clients lose many dollars due to not having good backups in place.
Also, it is important to have backups.
Well, the service that you receive from WP Engine means that backups are completely handled and you really have to do absolutely nothing.
Backup points are exactly as they sound they are points where an entire back-up of your WordPress setup has been taken.
By default, you’ll get what is called an Daily Checkpoint, essentially this means you’ve got at the minimum, an hourly backup of your website.
You can also opt to make additional backups manually by clicking on Back up now If you’re contemplating a major (risky) change and want to make sure that you have a functioning version to revert to.
You can also Download a ZIP of the backup file so that you could restore the backup to another location.
Or the easiest method to follow if you fail, is simply Restore your WordPress to an earlier version.
This feature alone sets this company apart from the rest.
SSL Certificates
A few months back and more recently, setting your website to be deployed over secure certificates is now more crucial than ever.
The most recent version of Chrome have been labeling sites that aren’t HTTPS:// as not secure.
Besides the security implications associated with non-HTTPS websites, it can be a bad user experience that can affect the credibility and trustworthiness of your website.
Simply put, today, HTTPS is a must.
Take a look at the below Enhanced Security Certificate on Medium.com:
This means, naturally that your hosting provider should ensure that the installation of secure certificates for your WordPress as easy and as complete as is possible.
Once again this time, this time, the WP Engine service delivers on this 100%, with all of the options available to deploy HTTPS. Wpengine Geoip
1. Free Let’s Encrypt Certificates
Enabling HTTPS by using Let’s Encrypt is the simplest, cheapest and most convenient method available today.
These are no-cost certificates that you can deploy directly by your hosting provider that are as secure as their paid counterparts. As can be seen in the below image You just need to go through the procedure to “Request SSL Certificate” and your WordPress will be good to have a safe certificate.
2. RapidSSL Wildcard Certificates
The 2nd option when it comes to SSL is a low-cost solution by RapidSSL. A wildcard certificate signifies the certificate is valid for HTTPS can be deployed on any sub-domain that your website(s) are based on. The price for a RapidSSL wildcard certificate is $199 per year that is the typical cost in the market for such a certificate.
3. Import a new certificate
The 3rd option you have is when you are planning to purchase the new certificate or have it from another source. To be able to do this, you need to generate what is called the Certificate Signing Request ( CSR ). It is basically an unofficial form that indicates to the Certificate Signing Authority who will issue the certificate for you in the event that you are granted permission to the server on which it will be installed.
The procedure is easy to follow, you just need to complete a form and provide information that will eventually be displayed on the certificate you will purchase.
When you’ve completed the form, once you’ve completed the form, a .CSR File will be generated, which you will then need to send to the business from which you’ll purchase the certificate from.
Once you have completed this process, you can take the data and hand it to the authority.
A new SSL certificate will be issued and you can use the next form to upload this to your domain. You can do this by using the following form. The certificate will be installed by support staff, so in essence, this form will notify the support staff of the fact that your SSL certificate is prepared to be installed and linked to the appropriate details.
4. Transfer an already-issued certificate
The final method for installing an SSL certificate is if you’ve already acquired and have the information of the certificate and wish to install this in your domain.
In this instance this scenario, this option will help you contact support personnel in order for them to utilize this information to install the certificate on your behalf. Wpengine Geoip
Production Versus Staging
Another advantage we find to be an important difference in WP Engine and other WordPress hosting providers. While a majority of hosting providers claim the possibility of creating an testing or staging environment, it’s only WPEngine who have done it in a proper method.
Let’s discuss a bit about the creation of a staging area. An environment for staging is copy of your current environment. It is used to test the effect of changes made to your WordPress before actually making the modifications on the live site (production).
This is a web development idea that is usually used in the Enterprise sector, where releases to production must be thoroughly tested prior to when they are made available for release. Thus, a staging or testing environment is constructed, so that when the “change” passes the tests in the staging or testing environment, then the changes can be released to the live (or production) instance.
This staging vs production setting is built into WPEngine’s platform. WPEngine.
What that means is that by default as soon as you created a WordPress setup, it will already have these two environments set up for you.
Instead of having to build this system yourself it is a part and parcel of the actual service. You will get an staging and production environment as per the definition.
Set up a staging area is a technical challenge, you need to get it right. Most of all, it’s essential that your staging has identical to the production environment, or else it’s just an unnecessary waste of time.
With WPEngine it’s all accomplished for you out right out of the gate.
WordPress loading speed
One of the biggest concerns of website owners comes if their WordPress is loading slowly. This can be a major issue for those who do not have a technical background. Therefore, there are two components of WordPress speed:
- Having a website which is quick by default
- Solutions to troubleshooting WordPress loading speed issues
Let’s try a few tests and see how an installation of WP Engine performs. We’ll start first with a brand new WordPress install and see what happens:
Wow – that’s excellent This is even an experiment run during the peak times. Blazing fast! Take note that the TTFB (Time To The First Byte) or what search engines utilize to determine how fast your site is, comes in at 191ms, which is fantastic.
You can see the full report here: https://gtmetrix.com/reports/dattard.wpengine.com/jb8ZrzbI (unfortunately, these are no longer available online) We’ll run another WP Engine speed test on Pingdom tools: Wpengine Geoip
It is evident that the load time, is 392ms. This is under 400ms! It’s safest to say that a blank WordPress setup is as fast as it can be – there are no complaints there.
We’ll then run a few tests on a fully-set up site.
But before we get started however, we’re going to attempt to carry out a WordPress migration from another hosting provider to WP Engine. To accomplish this, we’re first going test the Migration tool which comes available in the toolset offered by the managed WordPress hosting company.
The plugin was first installed on the site we’d like it to migrate to, and activated the plugin.
We then entered the information required from our own Dashboard:
It is actually a service that is powered by BlogVault – the WordPress Secure and Backup Service . As the migration was happening we could see tables and data being transferred from one website to the next.
Once we installed the plugin and provided it with the information of the new host, and then click on migrate, no intervention was needed by us.
Once the wizard had finished, our website was transferred, we had the lock stock was removed and the barrel. We logged on to the new URL and discovered an exact replica of our website on the previous host – the smoothest, fastest, cleanest migration of WordPress we ever did.
It’s an incredible service provided by BlogVault as well as WP Engine.
The site is now an agency’s portfolio website. fictitious agency, based on the popular Themeforest theme. Let’s do another set of tests on the site, which is now being hosted by our WP Engine Live server.
Another amazing outcome. It is evident that a page that is more than 7MB in size loads completely in 2.2 seconds. That’s faster than the recommended 3 seconds loading time.
Let’s check whether this is an isolated incident or not and run an experiment using Pingdom tools.
The results are much faster with Pingdom tools, 1.7 seconds, an increase of nearly 0.5 seconds over GTMetrix.
We believe we can confidently affirm that there is no issue with WordPress loading speed using WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting.
It’s obvious that the technology behind WordPress on WP Engine has been highly customized, with extremely fast caching and a very advanced “stack” (software that is required to host sites) as compared to a standard web host.
The support team is able to zone into your WordPress install and identify exact performance bottlenecks that can prevent your site running nicely.
It is fast with their speed setup that they refuse to allow caching plugins to be installed on their servers because they can disrupt the configuration, which , as you can see is running flawlessly.
The good thing is that even non-optimized WordPress installations (like the majority of users) can still run very quickly, because the WP Engine platform does the bulk of the lifting.
This is a major benefit over other companies.
Given that the service also has an built-in CDN, you can rest assured that your site will always be extremely fast.
Test your WordPress hosting by using the WP Engine service today
Customer Service
A differentiator in determining the best location to establish your site is the support offered by customer.
This has always been a core to WP Engine’s ethos, starting from the beginning of their existence. As this is a company which offers an managed WordPress Service, rather than as hosting service it’s not surprising that there is a strong importance placed on support.
Here’s an example of getting in touch with WP Engine – this was during peak hours. Wpengine Geoip
Since WP Engine has been growing rapidly over the years, and there were periods of time where there was lots of criticism – we were a bit hesitant regarding the reaction we might expect.
The issue with stories of support is that most users will relate their own experience and it’s not likely that every person will feel that they have received excellent service. This also depends a lot on the overall experience the customer has and even the mood they are experiencing when they contact the business.
The issue is usually the proportion of positive reviews in comparison to the negative reviews a business receives.
Instead of just reading individual reviews, we prefer to view a company holistically.
- Does the company possess the necessary knowledge to offer the appropriate assistance?
- Are there effective systems in place to enable a customer to understand the current state of support?
How reliable is access to support staff , when necessary?
All of these require a significant investment in terms of time, money and know-how.
Our experience with WP Engine has shown us that the business is equipped in all three areas.
Knowledge – when we were working with our installs we were constantly referring to articles and knowledgebase articles that covered what we needed to know from all angles. The articles are written in a style that is easy to read, yet completely practical. It is quite simple to solve any issues that you face by searching for solutions in the knowledge-base which is constantly up to date and updated.
Systems – there is a number of support channels offered by WP Engine, including Live Chat assistance, telephone support and a ticketing system – besides the actual knowledge base.
Access – we were constantly delighted when it came to the quickness and responsiveness of the support team. It was whether via Live Chat, email or even calling with the WP Engine team, we think the customer service from this company is truly top-of-the-line. Every request and issue we submitted were dealt with by a quick solution or response that ranged from simple issues such as resetting passwords, to more complex queries like how to deal with a complex migration.
Security
Sites that are powered by WordPress today power a significant part of the web according to the most recent statistics quoting greater than 30 percent of the web which makes it one of the lucrative targets for malware and hackers.
As with all programs, WordPress is not insecure as a program, but it needs to be up to date, and if vulnerabilities are found and fixed, the vulnerabilities are immediately closed and especially in the open-source community in which there are a lot of testers, players and contributors.
The biggest issue is with plugins and themes.
If these aren’t supported You’ll notice that they could cause serious issues for the site they’re hosting on, since any issues remain vulnerabilities.
We’ve covered how to protect your WordPress from hackers in previous articles on this site We’ll now review the most important aspects, and the fundamentals:
- Always keep your core install along with all plugins and themes, updated to the latest versions
- Only install your files from trusted sources and trusted vendors (stay away from cracked or pirated sources)
- Be sure to have a security software installed to harden your installation against the most prevalent attacks
- Make sure you have backups just in case something goes wrong.
Even if the basics of security are straightforward the responsibility for securing WordPress is largely on the person who owns the site. This means that those who aren’t tech-savvy or just simply don’t have time to maintain their site are at a general disadvantage because they wouldn’t know everything about security.
Of course, once again the service is there to help. Since it was specifically designed for this purpose – the premise behind managed hosting by WP Engine is to accomplish what WordPress owners do not know and don’t wish to do, or not how to do. No matter the cause, the idea of the service is WP Engine will do all of the security necessary for your site to function smoothly, with no chance of suffering losses when fighting hackers.
Just like we mentioned in the previous paragraph and beyond, not only is WP Engine secure WordPress, it also provides daily restore points, so that even in the event that something goes wrong it’s possible to have your website back up and running within a matter of minutes.
WP Engine works with the idea of installing, instead of an instance. What does this mean from a technical perspective that the majority of security concerns are dealt with at the server level, with the end result being a more secure environment for everyone.
As a business with a name that has to be maintained, WP Engine have partnered with top security firms to conduct code reviews through their system, as well as having their own security team.
With the guarantee that should you be hacked, they will handle it at no cost. You can rest assured that your WordPress is as safe as it can be.
This is the best thing you can get. Recovering a hacker’s site can be an expensive and time-consuming task and the ease of which you don’t need to fret about this is an additional plus on WP Engine. WP Engine service. Wpengine Geoip
Pricing
Let’s clarify one thing.
This is not like the usual hosting services. WP Engine is a managed service, and you shouldn’t think that it will rival the less expensive pricing packages offered by more popular companies.
Plans start at $25/month (this is a customized offer available to MrBloggen only), but let’s break this down a little into the value that this rate brings with it.
- The cot for an additional CDN usually starts at around $10/month.
- A backup service, such as BlogVault costs around $8 per month.
- A security company like Sucuri starts from $16/month.
- A powerful caching plugin (such such as WP Rocket) costs about $40 per year.
Can you imagine how fast the cost adds up? The price above covers all of the previously mentioned. You’ll also want to note that when your site expands in terms of traffic, all the above prices will go up – together with the complexity of running your site.
The truth is that the above prices give you the security of having a WordPress setup that runs smoothly without the need for any intervention from your side.
In a world where your email subscription is priced at hundred dollars to a few hundred dollars per month, would you be worried at paying a monthly fee of $25 to ensure the security of your WordPress installation which could bring in a significant part of your income?
We aren’t sure. Because , in reality this is the way is the essence of it all.
What is the cost of your time? What’s the price of your WordPress going down for couple of hours? If it will cost you at least $25 when your website is down, then you have already earned an ROI from the expense of hosting your website with WP Engine.
To give you a comparison, a VPS from InMotion costs about the same but doesn’t offer the same level of service. You’ll have to go it alone for the majority of what’s discussed here. Shared hosting services start with a few bucks a month, but should you be concerned about the security of your website, you’d benefit yourself by choosing to avoid such cheap services.
If you were to evaluate features by features, you might discover some areas in which this particular service isn’t in the top spot, however, given because it’s an all-hands-off, hands-off service, this price is a fantastic deal.
Your own, your developer or designer’s time, even for less than one or two hours per month, will cost much more than the quoted price considering that your time is likely to be worth more than $50 per hour and you’ll be hard-pressed to find developers and designers working for less than $50.
There are other similar services like Kinsta are similar in price however, after working with both services, we can safely say that WP Engine is much more developed as a product.
Even the cost of losing just a few milliseconds from the loading speed of your website could cost your business significantly over a period of time. It’s been demonstrated time and time again that websites that load in more than 3 seconds have a significant impact on conversion – negatively. The speed of service and the performance tools alone are worth the price you’re paying and not even counting the add-ons available.
Simply put – for the value you’re paying for it’s a great value and will surely give you a decent return on investment. Wpengine Geoip
$2000 Genesis Framework + Premium WordPress themes free
In June of this year, WPEngine acquired one of the most reputable WordPress theme sellers, StudioPress. StudioPress is a part of the StudioPress team is the one behind the wildly popular and highly successful Genesis template and framework.
A side effect of this acquisition is that all customers of WPEngine are now granted access both to the Genesis framework theme and all premium themes associated with it. This means, that customers of WP Engine have free access to over $2000 worth themes.
There are over 60 themes to choose from across all niches including blogs, eCommerce and authority websites portfolio, magazine recipes lifestyle, course or membership sites, corporate or business, gallery sites and many other.
It’s important to know this theme is aimed at premium, high-end customers and the cost of each theme starting at $129.95.
The reason we’re saying the point that themes like these are premium items, that are typically available at a higher price The fact that you can get them for free will ensure that the theme you choose for your WordPress site is sorted too
Check out the plans page (get four months of free time on plans for the year until November 2021)
Which is your ideal customer to WP Engine?
If you’re just beginning your journey with WordPress and are not much income from it – this service is probably not for you. There are however certain niches that WP Engine serves very nicely thanks to its tools and features.
Like I said at the beginning, WP Engine isn’t for everyone. There are three types of customers that WP Engine seems to be a fit for. For these three types of customers, WP Engine has a strong focus with plenty of tools & focus for each.
1. WordPress Designers and Developers
Due to the vast number of features geared towards developers, one can quickly see why this approach is perfect for designers, developers and agencies working with WP that require an efficient and reliable platform that they can use during their work and can then hand over cleanly to their clients.
Some of the features that we discussed above like the Git Push, staging environments and easily transferable configurations save a lot of time (and cash) for this particular group of customers.
Such customers typically have clients who pay the maintenance cost, which the developer can charge their clients while not having to perform any work at all, because the entire process is taken care of by the service: the hosting, the security, the speed , it’s everything is handled. Wpengine Geoip
2. Non-technical business owners and website owners who want to grow their businesses.
When you’re a business owner who has a website which is earning a lot of revenue and you have technical issues to deal with or even managing the website, is a complete unnecessary time. This is in addition to the fact that running your business should be your area of expertise rather than caring for your website.
These customers are those whose sites are already prosperous, and are far beyond the limitations of shared WordPress hosting and need a better, more secure service.
Budget isn’t really an issue here, because the site makes money. In fact, downtime is more important than the cost of reliability and uptime.
If you’re an business owner, you’re aware that you can count on WP Engine. If you have any issues outstanding customer service is just a call away.
3. Budding Companies looking for a long-term platform
The third kind of client that this service is an ideal choice for is those seeking an ongoing, reliable partner for their platform or website that they are building. They are aware that switching from one host to another is an issue, while the WP Engine backend and platform is far better than having to shop around once the site is launched and growing.
WP Engine has the scalability these customers require to help them get their businesses back on track – with plenty of time and cost savings for them.
Try today (60-day money-back assurance and 20% OFF)
Potential problems with the service
Like any other service, there’s bound to be issues that could arise with any platform and environment. These are not issues we’ve faced personally yet, but it would be unprofessional to not point out the potential disadvantages making use of this service.
There are many reviews you see are not true. There is always a truth between the greatness that the marketing pitch is based on, and the full of reviews of complaints you may find.
As soon as somebody decides that the service isn’t to their liking, you’re likely to be a victim of it. Therefore, you should always take bad critiques with a handful salt.
A service is not always the right match for everyone, particularly when you’ve been used to a different service.
Custom Backend
To push the envelope in terms of performance, security and scale, a custom environment was required to be constructed from scratch and it’s different from other services.
Most hosts give access to standard functions like accessibility to CPanel or WHM as well as all of the standard features that come with them however, if you’re looking for these features – they won’t be found.
If you’re accustomed to these features and would like them, they’re simply not available to you. Although this could be done for very excellent reasons as mentioned earlier, and the custom backend offers a plethora of benefits – it’s not the type of system you’d have been used to.
Although we had no problems setting up our environment, we wouldn’t be surprised when other customers had issues when they first joined this service.
The mitigating factor in all of this is the extraordinary assistance that you will receive. You’ll realize that you won’t be able to endure this experience on your own.
In fact, we highly suggest you not to do on your own. It’s recommended to discuss your experience onboarding to your tech representative, or your customer support agent , so that you are able to get things functioning in the shortest time possible, speeding up your learning curve as much as you can.
Impose Limitations
A customized environment and platform and the way servers are configured implies the WP Engine cannot afford to clients who are able to move around freely, testing and tearing things apart according to their requirements. One rogue plugin or setup could theoretically cause a server to fail – this is why the service takes a drastic method to deal with this.
It limits what is permissible for the service.
Certain plugins are not allowed specific plugins are banned on their platform . It is evident that caching plugins backup plugins, certain security plugins, heavy plugins like Related Posts and a few others are banned.
Again, we do believe most of these functions have already been handled through the services. It is also a good option for plugins that will impede performance to be banned completely – after all, an uninformed user could potentially cause serious bottlenecks that could cause performance problems for the complete system.
Again, we do believe that the result will be positive for ALL the customers of WP Engine.
Yet, if your website is dependent on one of the plugins then you’ll have to figure out ways and means to go around it or choose another resolution.
Other limitations that take the form of the following:
Limited bulk mailing – A fair limit because you don’t want just one person receiving the server’s IP address in a list of spammers.
Only accessible for hosting WordPress considering our name, the company’s, and we believe this is a reasonable limitation.
Number of visits – As your traffic grows you’ll have change plans from one to the other. It’s true that for the majority of users, growing traffic is a sign of increasing revenues therefore this shouldn’t be much of an issue for most users. Wpengine Geoip
No Email Hosting
Given the way that WP Engine works, and the technology they employ, they do not offer mail servers on your site. That means you’ll have for your accounts to be hosted elsewhere. The good news is that domain providers typically will throw accounts for email as part of their service for a reasonable price.
Additionally, the majority of businesses who host their emails via WP Engine already have a business email hosting service such as Google Business Apps or Office 365.
What are the reasons to pick hosted WordPress Hosting?
With the growth of the internet, came the huge huge development of WordPress as a framework but running websites.
Success, naturally, brings along plenty of people who are ready to jump on the band-wagon and piggy-back on the success of other people.
Since as the CMS platforms of preference developed, host companies evolved from simply giving you the components needed to run your website, for example, the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), to offering WordPress specific hosting.
In general it means that the environment is tuned specifically to accommodate the CMS. So rather than having a one size fits every environment, companies have all now started to offer specialized server environments that are specially tuned and optimized to cater to WordPress.
In addition, there are companies that have developed expertise in WordPress in general, meaning the fact that as the owner of a site, will handle the content however you do not have to worry about the underlying platform or any other technical issues beyond your capabilities.
Speed and support, tuning, optimizations, caching and upgrades and updates are all taken care of by the company that hosts the website is being hosted.
This relieves a lot of the work for the owner, and at a price that is just a little higher than traditional hosting services.
There’s a lot of confusion on the market as well.
Every host is now providing WP-specific hosting, which makes it extremely difficult to make a decision between good hosts, and ones who are seeking the chance. The smaller hosts as well as the bigger brands such as GoDaddy, HostGator, SiteGround, InMotion, and other major companies are now providing their own versions in “WordPress hosting”.
WP Engine is one of the few companies that are solely focused on WordPress. This, in turn, makes them much more focused than the other companies in this particular niche.
Each host are different in the service they offer. Some will just provide training on the framework and their technical support. Some go into the technical and offer stuff like server-side features or test environments to your applications and websites.
But the real controlled WordPress Hosting is the one where you do not just purchase the server space needed to host your site – but rather you have the services associated with keeping the site up and functioning properly.
Essentially the term “managed hosting” implies that the provider offers services that are specifically tailored to WP, but at a higher price point so that the proprietor can remain focused on the site’s functionality and content, rather than on the technical aspects of the website.
We are making this crystal clear for one straightforward reason – you are unable to compare a hosting plan that is generic against a specific plan like one offered by managed hosts.
Rather than aggregating user-generated WP Engine reviews based on personal negative and positive one-off experiences, we take an entirely different method. We review the good things as well as the less than stellar aspects of WPEngine, and determine the areas and people for whom this web hosting service is appropriate. Wpengine Geoip
Frequently Asked Questions
What is WP Engine?
WPEngine is an automated hosting service for WordPress.
That means that with WPEngine, you don’t need to worry about maintenance and performance of your site because it is fully managed by the hosting company.
They are one of the most reliable hosts that are known for their outstanding performance on websites hosted with them
What is WP Engine do?
WP Engine handles most stuff that typically needs to be taken care of by the owner of the website such as, website backups, WordPress updates, theme updates, plugin updates etc.
They also have security built in to ensure your website is secure from hackers.
Additionally, they have highly optimized server stack which translates to extremely fast loading speeds.
WP Engine costs more than shared hosting because WP Engine needs to guarantee the performance of your website. This means that they host less websites on the same servers, which is what drives up the costs to manage their infrastructure. Managing the website by the owner of the site means that the website owner does not have to spend any time handling technical issues. In actuality, the WP Engine plans are very well priced for high-performance businesses that require mission-critical websites.
What CDN uses WPEngine?
WPEngine has an arrangement in partnership with MaxCDN (now controlled by StackPath) which offers a free CDN service for all websites hosted by WPEngine. If you host your website with WPEngine, there is no need to pay for an Content Delivery Network service separately.
WP Engine costs more than shared hosting since WP Engine needs to guarantee the speed and performance of your site.
This means that they host less websites on the same servers, which is what drives up the cost of managing their infrastructure. The management of a website on behalf of the owner of the site means that the owner does not have to deal with technical issues.
In reality it is true that WP Engine plans are actually quite affordable. WP Engine plans are very affordable for business websites that are mission-critical.
Last thoughts
If you’ve been around MrBloggen for a while, you’ll know that we’re obsessed with speed. In simple terms, you don’t notice the performance of a site, since excellent websites are quick all the way through. It’s just one of the aspects (besides design) that make a website feel secure, enjoyable to browse around and visit repeatedly.
That’s the cost and appeal of performance . A speedy website will bring you more revenue over the long term. In this WP Engine review, we’ve shown you how this service is primed for making your site lightning fast WITHOUT the technical costs and time typically associated with this. Although we believe that the service might be a bit shaky when it is compared apples to apples with other hosts, doing such a comparison is really and truly a mistake.
If you want a fast, reliable, hosting service where you just need to manage your website’s “content” of your website and not the technical aspects of running the engine, you’ll be very well served with WP Engine. It comes with a 60-day complete money-back assurance, so should you not like them, you’ve lost absolutely nothing, but in all probability you’ll have a lot to gain when you experience this platform! Wpengine Geoip
