There are lots of inexpensive hosts available that supply a decent service. WPEngine Domain Masking
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? In that case, you’ll want to check out our WP Engine evaluation for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific webhosting, using managed strategies that are totally enhanced for the platform. Naturally, when compared to many other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t exactly inexpensive. Therefore, you’ll would like to know whether this hosting service deserves the cost before making a purchase.
To assist you out, we’re going to carry out a thorough WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its crucial functions, support options, efficiency capabilities, and whatever else you’ll need to know. Let’s start!
WP Engine Video Review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mcpf7ULveLk
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About WP Engine
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is now one of the leading managed WordPress hosting business in the market. Serial business owner Jason Cohen started WP Engine when he saw a need for specialized WordPress hosting due to the increasing appeal of WordPress.
WP Engine is Headquartered in Austin, Texas with offices in San Antonio (Texas), London (England), Limerick (Ireland), Brisbane (Australia), and Kraków (Poland).
The company has won numerous awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and consistently contributes to the WordPress core and neighborhood.
WP Engine Features
The core reasons to pick WP Engine over more affordable WordPress hosting are increased dependability, efficiency, support, and management, however these are tough to quantify. Some features stand out when you browse the interface, however, that can give you some insight into the service offered.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool developed to assist you accelerate your WordPress site by using meaningful metrics on efficiency.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that details how rapidly your page rendered, how long it required to pack in its totality, and the overall size of the page. It even includes historic information on your website’s performance over the past 6 months and recommendations on how you can minimize page load.
You can establish your WordPress site in a Staging or Development environment prior to making the modifications live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid awkward errors on your site by making changes to a copy of your site prior to it goes live. This is called Staging, and it allows your developers to make substantial changes to your website without affecting your clients.
WP Engine has an extensive list of plugins that are disallowed (Image credit: WP Engine) In a relatively unusual relocation, WP Engine limits the WordPress plugins you can install. Those generally limited are plugins that have been kept in mind to cause efficiency concerns and security holes. For important functions such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has actually made options offered that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine only offers managed WordPress hosting. There are 5 different plans offered: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans consist of endless information transfer. The strategies vary based on:
- number of WordPress sets up
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Customized plan includes dedicated dev. environments, customer success, and priority assistance
WP Engine includes some unique functions for WordPress users that most hosts do not use, or charge additional for. These special functions include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: quickly develop a copy of your website for screening
- Easy transferable installs from free to paid accounts
- Leading edge technologies consisting of latest PHP variation.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we found that WP Engine uses the most sophisticated and extensive managed WordPress hosting functions.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
Interface and in use
WP Engine’s interface is expert and well laid out, but the powerful functions might mean a steep learning curve for inexperienced users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and reroute rules, you’ll be right in your home here, however otherwise you’ll need to spend a long time on the support website.
In our testing, the default WordPress home page filled in simply over two seconds. This is one of the fastest responses we’ve evaluated, with competitor Liquid Web just somewhat behind.
Assistance
A managed WordPress service should offer additional value through its support, and WP Engine delivers. The assistance website includes videos and posts of a quality you ‘d get out of a paid training course, with assistance on deeper WordPress functionality that numerous WordPress hosts don’t enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the reaction fasted and the representative experienced. For all strategies except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Remarkable Load Speed: If website loading speed is a leading priority, WP Engine does well in this regard. The host’s mix of custom-made NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD innovation ensure that your web pages load quickly. NGINX extension prioritizes human requests over robot requests and offers load balancing, offering your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN delivers website content to your visitors based upon their place to improve your website’s speed and decrease latency. You get this ability totally free with all WP Engine plans.
High Performance: It’s difficult to beat WP Engine’s efficiency, which is why people continue to pay a premium price for this service. WP Engine ensures 99.95% server uptime, roughly 4 and a half hours of downtime a year. You can even more increase your uptime to 99.99% with enhanced SLA, which equates to a little under an hour of downtime each year. WP Engine will compensate you with hosting credit if your uptime falls listed below the warranty.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps an eye on all the traffic going to your website and instantly detects and obstructs possible attacks. Additionally, the hosting service instantly updates and patches the WordPress core to get rid of prospective vulnerabilities. In a worst-case situation, WP Engine automatically backups your website every day and has a one-click repair function to get you support and running quickly. This hosting service safeguards your site versus JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Sensational Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to get in touch with customer care through chat. The assistance team has an exceptional knowledge base and can assist you solve problems rapidly. You get 24/7 phone assistance for all strategies except the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat support on all strategies.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area enables you to clone your website’s live variation and make changes or check new plugins and styles. Anything you carry out in the staging area does not impact your live site. This feature allows designers to work on sites without disrupting the live site’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting designers, this feature permits you to build a website from your WP Engine account. You don’t need to wait for the customer to include you to their WordPress website. As soon as completed, you can transfer the website to the client or host the site on WP Engine. This performance saves time if you routinely build websites for customers.
Cons
WordPress-Only Hosting: If you are utilizing any other content management system aside from WordPress, then you are out of luck. WP Engine only works with WordPress. From a business perspective, it makes good sense to concentrate on a single market and offer exceptional services because location. This model locks out many people who might otherwise benefit from WP Engine’s services.
No Domains or Email Hosting: If you prefer to host your email account and register your domain through your site host, you’ll require to look elsewhere. You’ll have to use third-party services for domain registration or e-mail accounts.
Inflexible Pricing: WP Engine runs a tight ship, and this is shown in its prices structure. You will be punished for surpassing your strategy’s visitor limitations. This might not be an issue if you have predictable traffic, and you can always update your plan as your site grows. Substantial spikes in traffic throughout item launches or seasonal service can cost you significant excess charges.
There is no other method to put it: WP Engine is pricey. Is it worth the expense? The answer lies in finding out what you are spending for.
You can get shared hosting that can handle the same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a fraction of the rate. You can even get dedicated hosting for the exact same price as WP Engine. What you are really paying for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most notably, assurance. The ultimate question is how much these things deserve to you.
Plans and Pricing
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
With a WP Engine plan, you are generally paying for performance & not needing to think excessive about upkeep, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s prices based upon the features you’re getting- you truly do not get a great deal.
And if you are the type who will consider your site’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress upgraded and typically visiting frequently), you’ll likely be paying for “management” that is unnecessary.
Many shared hosting servers can deal with the very same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the rate. My individual site a shared hosting strategy from HostGator with standard caching) dealt with more than 15,000+ visits in a 24 hour duration when a post of mine And if you are running a trusted VPS, you can certainly manage a lot more for much less. In fact, the site you are on handles more than 110,000+ check outs each month with a lot of room left to spare for side-projects, gigabytes of media, e-mail, RSS apps, etc with an InMotion VPS. I spend for the VPS plus a CDN for less than WP Engine’s starter plan.
They are relatively transparent about how they count gos to, but it can still be rather a surprise for “little” site owners how quickly they can enter the $290 monthly tier. I have a customer who started with the Startup plan, however rapidly wound up with a custom-made plan.
And as mentioned previously that doesn’t even consist of a lot of the features you don’t get with WP Engine’s strategies. You can’t run any e-mail from your servers. You have low limits on regional media storage. Anything above the limits needs additional costs & technical application of Amazon cloud services.
And most notably for me- you are restricted on your installs. If you have a few side projects or low-traffic test sites, you need to factor those into the cost. You can’t use them to spread out the expense of your plan- especially if you are striking your visitor cap rather than your set up cap.
If you are wanting to spend for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & dish out your website files- WP Engine is a costly choice, especially compared to other non-managed hosting options.
Start-up
The Startup bundle is one of the most basic strategy and will set you back $25 monthly. With this plan, you get:.
25,000 gos to monthly.
50GB bandwidth each month.
10GB storage.
One site included.
WP Engine targets small websites and blogs with this plan, but we believe it might be overkill for most people in this classification. You can get a far better handle shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you don’t wish to take any chances with uptime or require a warranty that your site can deal with 25,000 visitors per month, WP Engine is a sure bet. We ‘d suggest this choice to small companies, affiliate websites, and blog sites making good money and desire assurances that nothing will change.
You can save $60 annually or 2 months totally free if you pay each year.
Growth
The development strategy targets growing organizations and will cost you $95 each month. Here you get:.
100,000 sees each month.
200GB bandwidth monthly.
25GB storage.
Ten sites included a while.
This strategy is a fantastic entry point for a growing service, and it might be a while before you require to update. With this strategy, you also get 24/7 phone support in addition to day-and-night chat assistance. This addition will can be found in convenient if you have an intricate issue that you need to deal with quickly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or more months totally free with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine promotes its scale strategy as the very best value alternative. This one costs $241 per month. Here you get:.
400,000 visits monthly.
500GB bandwidth per month.
50GB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
We advise this option for a fast-growing blog or service. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone support in addition to the assistance center.
You can save $580 or more months totally free with yearly pre-paid billing.
Customized
If you have a mission-critical website or large service, the Custom strategy might be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Millions of visits per month.
400GB+ bandwidth monthly.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
You will have to talk to a sales representative to get your tailored quote depending upon your requirements. This strategy likewise provides exclusive assistance should something go wrong.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Strong Uptime
WP Engine attains over 99% uptime thanks to its world-class network infrastructure.
The company likewise has 3 information centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can get better site speeds by choosing to host your site on servers that are closest to your target market.
WP Engine blocks malicious attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that go into site speed, however the guideline is that the more complicated your site is, the more complex the services to speed become.
Out of package- WordPress is fairly lean and fast. If you are running a mostly text site with a couple of standard plugins and a couple of little images, you’ll be great with a budget friendly shared hosting strategy from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of site owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s typically extra plugins, customized style files, lots of images, widgets, advertisements, forms and more.
All these features combined with decent levels of traffic can begin to decrease your WordPress setup.
But a slow site does not indicate that you require a bigger, much better server. It does indicate that you require to get smarter about speed. Often it’s as simple as getting a more powerful server, but often it’s more about caching particular resources in a specific order and optimizing your files. To put it simply- it gets complex.
Envision you are attempting to haul a trailer with a pickup. Picture your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s pointless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you might just require to eliminate the emergency brake, set up a turbocharger, refresh the transmission fluid and consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress requires aid to remain quick as you grow. There are a lot of options … but either you or a designer need to implement them.
That’s where handled WordPress hosting can be found in. WP Engine looks after (nearly) all speed concerns. They have personalized servers with very aggressive caching and much more innovative “stack” than a normal web host. They also have trained support who will enter into your WordPress set up and recognize the specific chokepoint to get your website moving.
They don’t even allow caching plugins on their installs due to the fact that they have such a customized caching setup.
The interesting thing is that even unoptimized WordPress sets up still succeed on their platform since their platform does the additional work.
Here’s the speed test for one of my clients on WP Engine (who has a puffed up theme, additional scripts, a lot of uncompressed images, among other things)- Note the Time To First Byte and the Start Render numbers. That measures how quickly the server returned enough data to start packing the page.
It’s great to have that type of speed right out of the box- and have it remain that way no matter how huge or complex the site gets.
* Note that the other point here is that if you are consumed about speed, you can get back at better numbers with WP Engine than you may get with other services because you are free to focus on speed factors that you can quickly manage like image compression, use of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just provides an incorporated CDN, but they likewise offer global data centers in case your audience is mainly in Asia and/or Europe.
If you are trying to get top speeds without tinkering layered caching plugins- the WP Engine does exactly that. And given that they run on Google Cloud, you do not need to fret about uptime either.
CDN Included
All strategies include an international CDN (content delivery network).
The CDN will help your site load quickly for customers all over the world by serving it to them from the network node that’s geographically closest to them.
Security and Backups
An estimated 78% of hacked websites are WordPress websites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Frequently the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Protecting websites is one of the strengths of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The company takes several measures to protect WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs daily malware/virus scans in partnership with Sucuri.
They monitor an updated firewall program to obstruct the latest dangers.
All websites are backed up daily.
You get a one-click bring back function that can help you recuperate your site in case of an attack.
The WP Engine site supplies a guide on “Tips to Protect Your WordPress Site From Being Hacked.”.
You’ll have access to 24/7/365 technical support for any concerns regarding security.
They offer webinars on security.
They release security standards and lists for developers and engineers.
If your site gets hacked, WPE will clean it totally free.
Online Resources
WP Engine provides webinars, guides, blog posts, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can learn how to:.
Launch your first site.
Troubleshoot typical problems.
Make improvements to your website.
Handle your hosting account with greater performance.
Both novices and skilled WordPress site owners will find the support documentation vital.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back guarantee on all subscription costs is distinct in the hosting market.
It allows you to try the service in a safe method.
Keep in mind: this option is not available on customized hosting plans.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is best overall, but what is finest for you based on your objectives, budget, resources & practices.
If you remain in what I think of as WP Engine’s core markets- they offer a fantastic service with a solid item. As a handled WordPress host, their prices is competitive. They provide more functions than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unrivaled for savvy DIYers, WordPress site designers and/or high-traffic websites that don’t want to stress over hosting concerns.
If handled hosting is a fit for you- then go take a look at WP Engine’s strategies here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back warranty. Do a test set up and see what you believe of their backend. Make certain to chat w/ support & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.