There are lots of low-cost hosts readily available that provide a good service. WPEngine Smtp
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 review for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific web host, using managed strategies that are totally enhanced for the platform. Naturally, when compared to numerous other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s plans aren’t exactly low-cost. You’ll desire to understand whether this hosting service is worth the expense prior to making a purchase.
To assist you out, we’re going to carry out an extensive WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its key features, assistance options, performance abilities, and whatever else you’ll require to understand. Let’s get going!
WP Engine Video Review
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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 entrepreneur Jason Cohen started WP Engine when he saw a requirement for specialized WordPress hosting due to the rising popularity 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 several awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and consistently adds to the WordPress core and neighborhood.
WP Engine Features
The core factors to pick WP Engine over less expensive WordPress hosting are increased reliability, performance, support, and management, but these are tough to quantify. Some features stand apart when you browse the interface, however, that can give you some insight into the service provided.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool developed to assist you speed up your WordPress site by offering significant metrics on performance.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that information how quickly your page rendered, how long it required to fill in its entirety, and the overall size of the page. It even consists of historic data on your website’s performance over the past 6 months and suggestions on how you can decrease page load.
You can develop your WordPress website in a Staging or Development environment prior to making the modifications live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid awkward errors on your website by making changes to a copy of your website prior to it goes live. This is called Staging, and it enables your designers to make substantial changes to your site without affecting your clients.
WP Engine has a detailed list of plugins that are prohibited (Image credit: WP Engine) In a fairly uncommon relocation, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can set up. Those normally restricted are plugins that have actually been noted to trigger efficiency issues and security holes. For important functions such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has actually made alternatives available that don’t put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine only offers managed WordPress hosting. There are five various strategies offered: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans consist of unrestricted information transfer. The plans vary based on:
- number of WordPress sets up
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Customized plan consists of dedicated dev. environments, consumer success, and priority support
WP Engine includes some distinct functions for WordPress users that a lot of hosts do not use, or charge extra for. These unique functions consist of:.
- Git version control
- Staging: immediately produce a copy of your website for testing
- Easy transferable installs from free to paid accounts
- Innovative technologies consisting of most current PHP variation.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we found that WP Engine offers the most sophisticated and extensive handled WordPress hosting features.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
Interface and in use
WP Engine’s user interface is professional and well laid out, but the effective functions might imply a high knowing curve for unskilled users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and redirect rules, you’ll be right in the house here, but otherwise you’ll need to invest some time on the assistance site.
In our testing, the default WordPress web page filled in just over 2 seconds. This is one of the fastest reactions we’ve evaluated, with rival Liquid Web just a little behind.
Assistance
A managed WordPress service must offer extra value through its assistance, and WP Engine delivers. The assistance site consists of videos and short articles of a quality you ‘d anticipate from a paid training course, with aid on much deeper WordPress functionality that many WordPress hosts do not enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our screening, the action was quick and the representative experienced. For all plans except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Remarkable Load Speed: If website packing speed is a leading priority, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s mix of custom-made NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology ensure that your websites load quickly. NGINX extension focuses on human requests over robotic demands and provides load balancing, giving your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN delivers site content to your visitors based on their place to boost your site’s speed and decrease latency. You get this ability for free with all WP Engine plans.
High Performance: It’s tough to beat WP Engine’s performance, which is why individuals continue to pay a premium cost for this service. WP Engine ensures 99.95% server uptime, approximately 4 and a half hours of downtime a year. You can even more increase your uptime to 99.99% with improved 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 below the guarantee.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps an eye on all the traffic going to your website and immediately finds and blocks potential attacks. Furthermore, the hosting service instantly updates and patches the WordPress core to eliminate potential vulnerabilities. In a worst-case scenario, WP Engine instantly backups your website every day and has a one-click remediation function to get you back up and running quickly. This hosting service secures your site versus JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Remarkable Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to contact consumer care through chat. The support team has an excellent knowledge base and can help you solve issues rapidly. You get 24/7 phone support for all strategies except the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat assistance on all plans.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area enables you to clone your site’s live variation and make changes or check brand-new plugins and themes. Anything you do in the staging area does not affect your live website. This function allows developers to deal with sites without interfering with the live site’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this feature permits you to build a website from your WP Engine account. You don’t need to await the client to include you to their WordPress website. Once completed, you can transfer the site to the client or host the site on WP Engine. This functionality saves time if you regularly construct websites for customers.
Cons
WordPress-Only Hosting: If you are using any other content management system aside from WordPress, then you run out luck. WP Engine only works with WordPress. From an organization point of view, it makes sense to concentrate on a single market and deal remarkable services because location. This design locks out many people who could otherwise benefit from WP Engine’s services.
No Domains or Email Hosting: If you choose to host your email account and register your domain through your site host, you’ll require to look elsewhere. You’ll have to utilize third-party services for domain registration or e-mail accounts.
Inflexible Pricing: WP Engine runs a tight ship, and this is reflected in its rates structure. You will be penalized for surpassing your plan’s visitor limitations. This may not be an issue if you have foreseeable traffic, and you can always upgrade your strategy as your site grows. Significant spikes in traffic during item launches or seasonal service can cost you considerable excess charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is expensive. Is it worth the expense? The answer depends on finding out what you are spending for.
You can get shared hosting that can deal with the very same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a fraction of the cost. You can even get devoted hosting for the same cost as WP Engine. What you are actually spending for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most importantly, assurance. The supreme concern is how much these things are worth to you.
Plans and Pricing
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
With a WP Engine plan, you are normally paying for efficiency & not needing to believe too much about maintenance, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s pricing based upon the functions you’re getting- you actually do not get a whole lot.
And if you are the type who will think of your website’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress updated and normally visiting frequently), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is superfluous.
Numerous shared hosting servers can handle the same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the price. My personal site a shared hosting strategy from HostGator with fundamental caching) managed more than 15,000+ sees in a 24 hour period when a post of mine And if you are running a reputable VPS, you can definitely manage a lot more for much less. The site you are on manages more than 110,000+ gos to per month with plenty of space left to spare for side-projects, gigabytes of media, e-mail, RSS apps, etc with an InMotion VPS. I pay for the VPS plus a CDN for less than WP Engine’s starter plan.
They are relatively transparent about how they count visits, however it can still be quite a surprise for “small” website owners how quickly they can enter the $290 each month tier. I have a customer who started with the Startup strategy, but quickly wound up with a custom plan.
And as pointed out earlier that does not even consist of a lot of the functions you do not get with WP Engine’s plans. You can’t run any e-mail from your servers. You have low limits on local media storage. Anything above the limits needs extra costs & technical application of Amazon cloud services.
And most importantly for me- you are limited on your installs. If you have a few side projects or low-traffic test websites, you have to factor those into the price. You can’t utilize them to expand the cost of your plan- particularly if you are hitting your visitor cap instead of your install cap.
If you are looking to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & dish out your site files- WP Engine is an expensive choice, particularly compared to other non-managed hosting options.
Startup
The Startup package is one of the most standard plan and will set you back $25 each month. With this package, you get:.
25,000 check outs per month.
50GB bandwidth per month.
10GB storage.
One website consisted of.
WP Engine targets small sites and blogs with this strategy, however we believe it may be overkill for most people in this classification. You can get a far better handle shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you do not want to take any chances with uptime or require a warranty that your website can handle 25,000 visitors each month, WP Engine is a sure thing. We ‘d advise this option to small businesses, affiliate sites, and blogs making great cash and want guarantees that absolutely nothing will alter.
You can conserve $60 each year or two months totally free if you pay each year.
Growth
The development strategy targets growing services and will cost you $95 each month. Here you get:.
100,000 sees per month.
200GB bandwidth per month.
25GB storage.
Ten websites consisted of a while.
This strategy is a fantastic entry point for a growing company, and it might be a while prior to you require to update. With this plan, you likewise get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to round-the-clock chat assistance. This addition will can be found in handy if you have a complex issue that you need to resolve quickly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or two months free with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine advertises its scale strategy as the very best worth choice. This one costs $241 monthly. Here you get:.
400,000 check outs per month.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
We recommend this choice for a fast-growing blog or service. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone assistance in addition to the assistance center.
You can conserve $580 or two months complimentary with yearly pre-paid billing.
Customized
Lastly, if you have a mission-critical site or big organization, the Custom plan may be appealing. With this plan, you get:.
Millions of check outs per month.
400GB+ bandwidth monthly.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 websites consisted of.
You will need to talk to a sales representative to get your individualized quote depending on your requirements. This strategy likewise uses exclusive support must something fail.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Solid Uptime
WP Engine accomplishes over 99% uptime thanks to its first-rate network infrastructure.
The business likewise has 3 data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can get better website 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 enter into website speed, however the general rule is that the more complicated your site is, the more complicated the options to speed become.
Out of the box- WordPress is relatively lean and quick. If you are running a mostly text website with a few basic plugins and a couple of small images, you’ll be great with a cost effective shared hosting plan from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of site owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s normally extra plugins, customized theme files, lots of images, widgets, ads, types and more.
All these functions integrated with good levels of traffic can start to slow down your WordPress installation.
However a slow site does not imply that you need a larger, much better server. It does mean that you require to get smarter about speed. Often it’s as easy as getting a more effective server, however sometimes it’s more about caching certain resources in a particular order and optimizing your files. In other words- it gets complex.
Envision you are attempting to haul a trailer with a pickup truck. Imagine your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s meaningless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you may just need to get rid of the emergency brake, install a turbocharger, revitalize the transmission fluid and combine your load.
The point is that WordPress requires aid to remain fast as you grow. There are a lot of services … however either you or a developer need to implement them.
That’s where handled WordPress hosting comes in. WP Engine looks after (nearly) all speed issues. They have actually customized servers with very aggressive caching and much more innovative “stack” than a common webhosting. They also have actually trained assistance who will enter into your WordPress set up and determine the exact chokepoint to get your website moving.
They don’t even permit caching plugins on their installs due to the fact that they have actually such a personalized caching setup.
The fascinating thing is that even unoptimized WordPress installs still do well on their platform because their platform does the additional work.
Here’s the speed test for among my customers on WP Engine (who has a puffed up theme, additional scripts, a lot of uncompressed images, to name a few things)- Note the Time To First Byte and the Start Render numbers. That determines how quickly the server returned enough data to begin filling the page.
It’s good to have that type of speed right out of the box- and have it remain that way no matter how huge or complicated the site gets.
* Note that the other point here is that if you are obsessed about speed, you can get back at better numbers with WP Engine than you may get with other services given that you are complimentary to focus on speed elements that you can quickly control like image compression, usage of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just provides an incorporated CDN, but they also supply worldwide information centers in case your audience is mostly in Asia and/or Europe.
If you are trying to get top speeds without tinkering layered caching plugins- the WP Engine does precisely that. And considering that they work on Google Cloud, you don’t have to fret about uptime either.
CDN Included
All strategies include an international CDN (content delivery network).
The CDN will assist your site load quick for customers around the world by serving it to them from the network node that’s geographically closest to them.
Security and Backups
An approximated 78% of hacked websites are WordPress sites, according to Sucuri, a web security company. Often the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Protecting websites is among the strong points of WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting service.
The company takes numerous steps to secure WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in partnership with Sucuri.
They monitor an updated firewall to obstruct the current hazards.
All sites are backed up daily.
You get a one-click restore function that can help you recover your site in case of an attack.
The WP Engine site offers a guide on “Tips to Protect Your WordPress Site From Being Hacked.”.
You’ll have access to 24/7/365 technical assistance for any concerns relating to security.
They provide webinars on security.
They publish security guidelines and lists for designers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it for free.
Online Resources
WP Engine supplies webinars, guides, article, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can find out how to:.
Release your first website.
Troubleshoot typical problems.
Make improvements to your site.
Manage your hosting account with higher efficiency.
Both novices and skilled WordPress site owners will discover the support paperwork indispensable.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back assurance on all membership charges is distinct in the hosting industry.
It enables you to try out the service in a safe way.
Keep in mind: this choice is not readily available on custom hosting plans.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is finest overall, but what is finest for you based on your goals, spending plan, resources & habits.
If you are in what I think of as WP Engine’s core markets- they offer a fantastic service with a solid item. As a managed WordPress host, their pricing is competitive. They use more functions than “WordPress hosting” strategies from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unmatched for smart DIYers, WordPress website designers and/or high-traffic sites that do not want to worry about hosting concerns.
If handled hosting is a suitable for you- then go have a look at WP Engine’s plans here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back assurance. So do a test set up and see what you consider their backend. Make sure to chat w/ assistance & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.