At MrBloggen we’re constantly trying out new hosting servers – due to the fact that we want our sites to be fast. When we were presented with the chance to write a review on WPEngine – we jumped on it. Wpengine Unique Visitors
Who hasn’t heard of WPEngine? This company has built its reputation on WordPress hosting. It’s built right into their name: WP Engine so they’ve set themselves an excellent standard to meet, they are the engine that powers your WordPress.
As experts who have used a myriad of hosting services, too many to list, we are able to evaluate a hosting service and tell it as it is for us. And that’s what we will do with this article – provide you with all the details about hosting your site with WP Engine.
We host our own web pages on WP Engine ourselves, we’ve also just revisited the article in November 2022 and updated with all the new details as necessary. Wpengine Unique Visitors
Who is WP Engine?
WPEngine is one of the most well-known name in the field of managed WordPress hosting.
Established in 2010, WPEngine where not one of the early players in this market, but they’ve certainly earned themselves a top position in this niche industry.
Contrary to other hosting providers, WPEngine focuses on one single thing:
WordPress.
Essentially, they focus all their energy and resources to WP. WP framework, which is why they have their name.
The WPEngine business is powered by a prestigious team of WordPress experts. Today the company employs more than 250 people located in Austin Texas, but with offices in San Francisco, San Antonio, London and Limerick (Ireland).
One method by which we evaluate the strength of a business is based on the amount of it receives in terms of funding, in the event of any. Wpengine Unique Visitors
With close to $290 million raised over the years and the most recent round of $250 million that was raised in January 2018, from venture capital firm Silver Lake, you can be confident that this business is making waves.
The motivations for wanting to be able to raise that large amounts of money are many:
WPEngine it is one of the biggest WordPress hosts
it has an extremely profitable productized platform, it is the WPEngine Digital Experience Platform
The company is estimated to have an annual revenue of $100 million with 70,000+120,000 users (up 30 percent over the prior period) and a value of around $500 million at least
WPEngine provides around 5% of internet visits – a hugely significant portion of the web.
Trusted by major brands that have mega-sites like Under Armour, Trend Micro, Thomson Reuters, Hello Fresh etc.
That’s right, the numbers certainly are capable of doing this business justice.
Although there’s an increased amount of competition for managed hosting market than in any other sector It’s evident that WPEngine is the market leader here, with excellent brand recognition, cutting-edge features, and a leading platform for all kinds of enterprises which includes the enterprise sector.
Find out the current pricing and plans (20% OFF until December 2021) (or receive 4 months off annual plans) This review on our personal experiences We’re basing it specifically on our technical knowledge in hosting companies. We evaluate literally tens of hosting packages each and every month, which means we know what to look for when it comes to hosting.
Websites that receive hundreds of hits per day, we must be aware of the ins and the ins and what matters the most . We’ve highlighted all of these aspects where they are essential.
Let’s get to the details of hosting on WPEngine.
WP Engine Platform
When it comes to the actual product, the company offers a platform, and an experience called The Digital Experience Platform. What exactly is this? Does it match the hype?
Let’s get deep to discover. Wpengine Unique Visitors
Dashboard
When you log in to admin console you’ll first go to the Dashboard that displays numerous important notices and a quick overview of what’s happening with your account.
On the top, we saw a few messages which we dismissed prior to taking the screenshot below, but let’s have a look at the Dashboard as well as some of the features it has, some of which offer a real difference already when compared with other hosts.
As you can immediately observe, WPEngine is not a CPanel powered hosting platform. It is a different kind of hosting. WPEngine created their own custom platform. Essentially, WP Engine has got rid of all the unnecessary fluff and only left the essential stuff.
Summary of installations and important stats: the dashboard starts with a brief summary of all of the installations of WordPress that are in place and some statistics on them, such as Total Visits as well as a 10-day average, as well as bandwidth and storage usage. This quick glance at these vital details will tell you if there are any anomalies, such as traffic or bandwidth spikes.
Live Chat + delay time: The availability of connecting with support for Live Chat support right via the Dashboard is sweet. But what is even cooler is that by hovering on the chat option, you will immediately see the expected delay before getting contact with a support agent.
Knowledge Center and System Status is also accessible in the sidebar are links to the most important pieces of information that can assist you in creating your site effectively. WP Engine’s System Status is also accessible on the sidebar , too. This is a great way to be transparent. Rather than hiding any issues that are currently impacting the service, you can find out where you can see exactly what’s going on regarding the current status and resolutions for any incidents that have occurred recently.
This is more that you’ll require as soon as you log into your website’s Dashboard.
Moving forward, let’s examine The Installs Dashboard of WP Engine and a vital component that is part of WordPress hosting.
Check out this WP Engine Dashboard Wpengine Unique Visitors
Installs Dashboard
This is the place to begin by looking over the details of each WordPress installation that you’ve hosted.
Once again, we are able to observe that a lot of thought has gone into organizing this information in a manner that presents all the information needed quickly, and makes the rest of the information accessible via menus as necessary.
Evidently, a lot thinking has gone into the User Experience to make the experience as seamless and as simple as possible.
At a glance, we can see most of the important details about our WordPress installation, including details like your CNAME of the website (something you’ll require in order to make DNS changes for your website) and your IP address, country that it’s hosted in, the PHP version, your direct technical contact and the current version of WordPress your website is running.
There’s also a collection of stats on the current trends of visitors to your website.
The left-hand menu is where you can access many other features that are related to the configuration of your WordPress.
Domains: The Domains function is what you can use to connect your domain’s existing address to your hosting on WP Engine.
It provides you with all the information you require to redirect Your DNS preferences to the WPEngine. There’s an CNAME and A record, the CNAME and A records that you’ll require to make the necessary changes, as well as an easy hyperlink to an Knowledge Base article of what you’ll need to accomplish to enable the settings above through the Domain Registrar.
CDN: So if you’ve been browsing our site for long, you’ll be aware that we think CDN’s are great idea for a faster website , especially when they’re absolutely no cost!
If you’re not familiar with the basics of what is a CDN is in simple terms, a CDN is a geographically dispersed server network that can serve your heavy website resources from a site which is physically near your visitors – making your WordPress more efficient to load.
When we came to this article and saw this feature, we were genuinely shocked.
You may be aware (or perhaps not), a CDN service plan usually starts at no less than $10/month for the most basic plans, and you’re usually considering a monthly cost of $20 or more for a good plan.
This service is included in the hosting plan, it means you’re getting the speed benefits of CDN without having to purchase a CDN and not needing to pay extra cash for it.
*thumbs up* WP Engine offers the built-in CDN for WordPress hosting, through an alliance with MaxCDN – now acquired by StackPath . In addition, it is our CDN of choice. Wpengine Unique Visitors
Redirect rules: basically require your website to forward users to a particular web page to a new (different) address for the page, or to another website you’d prefer to forward the visitors to.
This is especially helpful in the event that you’ve completed a website overhaul and you want to be sure you don’t lose any traffic to broken sites. Particularly, redirects will ensure that you don’t destroy the value of any links you may have gained.
Typically, redirects are done via the use of a WordPress plugin, but having these accessible on a server level is more beneficial since performing this on the server level takes away the burden from your WordPress site and make the whole process quicker.
These tweaks are what can make WP Engine faster than traditional hosting.
Access Logs: While this isn’t something that everyone will be attracted to, it’s great to have it accessible. They are full logs directly from the web servers hosting your site i.e. both Apache Nginx as well as . In essence server access logs document all requests handled by the server. This can be useful for knowing how the caching of your site impacts the performance of your site. (For instance the SEO might ask for these logs for a technical SEO audit) Apache access logs contain the hits to your WordPress that are uncached and require processing through the servers.
Nginx access logs record every single request from Your WordPress which includes requests from cached, static and uncached pages.
Error logs: also a fairly popular feature, it’s to make sure that if WordPress has any issues, you should be able quickly to fix any problems by looking directly at the errors coming straight out of the website server.
SFTP Users: If you don’t possess direct access to files stored on your server, the best thing is to access the directory of files using Secure File Transfer Protocol or SFTP. This is where you can set up credentials to access the Secure FTP feature.
GIT Push: Another important distinction between WP Engine and most other hosts. If you’ve got plenty of modifications to your WordPress then you’ll have to secure them in a cloud-hosted source control service. GIT is the most common protocol utilized to communicate with a source control system. As you can see GIT Push, the GIT Push function lets you push source code by your developers onto the secure and hosted environment of WPEngine.
Again, the fact the source control is linked to the hosting provides it that extra factor that is the most important factor in a live environment. Instead of using a separate repository for source control like GitHub, then having to deploy to your hosting, this is all performed in-place as a part of your plan. Wpengine Unique Visitors
Backup Points
This is a fantastic feature offered through WP Engine, that we must dedicate a whole section all to it.
You probably already know that backups are essential and lifesavers when things go wrong, particularly in the event of major failures.
As we say in our blog, when you’re not taking backups , you’re truly living life on the edge.
But, making excellent backups can be a challenge. Many people who are not tech-savvy will discover that creating backups is quite a bit of trouble. So yes, most people take the easy way out (and do not bother with them at all) … or simply hope that nothing goes wrong.
If something goes wrong…the consequences can be quite unpleasant. It’s not a good idea to find yourself in this situation We can tell that. We’ve seen clients lose lots of money because they didn’t have adequate backups.
You need to keep backups.
Well, the service you get from WP Engine means that backups are fully handled – you need to do absolutely nothing.
Backup points are exactly what they sound like they are points where you can take a complete backup of your WordPress setup has been performed.
By default, you’ll get what’s known as the Daily Checkpoint, essentially this means that you have, at the very least a daily backup of your site.
You can then choose to perform additional backups manually by clicking Back up now, should you be planning to perform a drastic (risky) modification – and want to make sure that you have a backup version that you can revert back to.
You can also download a ZIP archive of the backup, so it can be restored from another location.
Or the easiest option to take if things go belly up, simply Restore your WordPress to a previous version.
In all seriousness, this aspect alone is what sets this business apart from other companies.
SSL Certificates
Just a few months ago, and even in the last few days, preparing your website to be deployed on secure certificates is now more crucial than ever before.
The most recent versions of Chrome have been labelling websites that aren’t HTTPS https:/or as not secure.
Besides the security implications associated with non-HTTPS websites, it can be a bad user experience which impacts on the credibility and trustworthiness of your website.
Simply put, these days, HTTPS is a must.
Check out the following Enhance Security Certificate to Medium.com:
This means, of course, that your host should ensure that the installation of secure certificates for your WordPress as easy and as full-featured as you can.
As always, WP Engine is a great service. WP Engine service delivers on 100% with all the options for deploying HTTPS. Wpengine Unique Visitors
1. Free Let’s Secure Certificates
Enabling HTTPS by using Let’s Encrypt, is the easiest, most affordable and the most efficient way these days.
They are certificates that are free and accessible directly through your hosting service and are just as secure just like the paid ones. As can be seen from the screenshot below You just need to go through the easy steps in order to “Request SSL Certificate” and your WordPress is now ready to have a safe certificate.
2. RapidSSL Wildcard Certificates
The second option for SSL is a cost-effective solution from RapidSSL. A wildcard certificate implies it is a certificate that HTTPS can be installed on any sub-domain your website(s) is hosted on. The cost of a RapidSSL wildcard certification is $199/year, which is the standard cost in the market for this type of certificate.
3. Import a new certificate
The 3rd alternative is if you’re about to buy a new certificate or get it created somewhere else. To be able to do this, you must create a Certificate Signing Request or ( CSR ). It is basically an unofficial form that will show you, the Certificate Signing Authority who will issue the certificate on your behalf and that you have administrative access to the domain where your certificate is issued.
The process is fairly easy to follow and you only need to complete a questionnaire with specifics that will later be shown on the certificate you will purchase.
After you have completed the form after which once you’ve completed the form, a .CSR document will then be generated, which you will then need to send to the organization from which you’ll buy the certificate from.
Once this is done once you have completed the process, you can collect the details and turn the information to the authorities.
The SSL certificate will then be issued and you can follow the next form to upload it to your domain. You can do this by using the next form. The certificate will be installed by the support staff, so in essence, this form informs support the certificate’s status. prepared to be installed and attached to the appropriate information.
4. Import an existing certificate
The final method of installing the certificate is in the event that you’ve already obtained and have the information of the certificate and wish to integrate it into your domain.
In this situation, this option helps you reach out to support staff to allow them to use this information to create the certificate for you. Wpengine Unique Visitors
Production Vs Staging
This is another feature that we consider to be a significant differentiator among WP Engine and other WordPress hosting providers. While a majority of hosting providers claim that you can create an testing or staging environment but only WPEngine do it the right method.
Let’s have a quick discussion about creating a staging environment The staging area is basically a replica of your environment which is used to test the impact of changes to your WordPress prior to actually implementing the changes in an actual environment (production).
The web-based development concept that is usually used in the Enterprise area, where changes to production have to be thoroughly tested before they are made available for release. So a staging environment is constructed, so that If the “change” passes the tests on the testing or staging environment, then the changes can be released onto the live (or manufacturing) instance.
The staging and production environment is built into the platform at WPEngine.
What this means is that by default, the moment you have created a WordPress installation, you already have these two environments in place for you.
Instead of having to build this system yourself This is a parcel of the actual service – you will have a staging and a production environment as per the definition.
Set up a staging area is a technically challenging endeavor it is essential to do it right. It is essential that your staging has exactly like your production instance, otherwise, it’s a waste of time.
With WPEngine it’s all done for you, straight out right out of the gate.
WordPress loading speed
One of the major concerns of website owners comes if their WordPress is loading slowly. This is typically a severe issue for those who are not technical. Therefore, there are two components to WordPress speed:
- Having a website which is quick by default
- Problem solving WordPress loading speed issues
Let’s run a few tests and see how an install using WP Engine performs. We’ll start first with an entirely new WordPress install and see what happens:
Wow – that’s excellent This is even running a test at peak hours. Blazing fast! Take note this: TTFB (Time To First Byte) or what search engines utilize to determine how fast your site’s speed is, comes in at 191ms. This is amazing.
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 Unique Visitors
The load time is 392ms. That’s less than 400ms! It’s safest to say that the blank WordPress configuration is as quick it can be – there are There are no complaints here.
We’ll run a few tests on a fully-set up site.
But before we get started however, we’re going to try to do an WordPress transfer from another host into WP Engine. To do this, first we’ll need to try using the Migration tool that is available as part of the toolset offered by the managed WordPress hosting service.
We first installed the plugin on the website we’d like to migrate and enabled the plugin.
We then entered the details we needed from our personal Dashboard:
This is actually a service that is powered by BlogVault which is the WordPress backup and security service . As the migration was happening, we could see the tables and the information being moved from one website to the next.
Once we installed the plugin, and then gave it the details of the new host, and then selected migrate, there was no intervention was needed from our side.
Once the wizard was done, our site was moved, and we were able to lock stock and barrel. We logged on to the new URL, and saw exactly the same site as our old site hosting provider – the smoothest most fast, cleanest and fastest transfer of WordPress we have ever done.
Truly, this is an amazing service offered by both BlogVault as well as WP Engine.
The site is now an agency’s portfolio website. fictitious agency, based on a well-known Themeforest theme. Let’s run another set of test on this site. It’s now located on the WP Engine Live server.
It’s an incredible result. It is evident that a page which is larger than 7MB in size can be loaded fully in 2.2 seconds, which is faster than the suggested 3 second loading time.
Let’s see if this is a fluke or not. Run an experiment using Pingdom tools.
The results are much faster when using Pingdom instruments, 1.7 seconds, an increase of more than 0.5 seconds over GTMetrix.
We believe we can confidently affirm that there is no issue regarding WordPress loading speed using WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting.
It’s obvious that the technology behind WordPress at WP Engine has been highly customized, with extremely fast caching as well as a more sophisticated “stack” (software required to host sites) that is more advanced than the typical web hosting service.
The knowledgeable support staff is capable of logging into your WordPress install and identify exact bottlenecks in performance to ensure that your website running smoothly.
The site is so aggressive in their speed configuration that they don’t even allow caching plugins to be installed on their sites because they could interfere with the setup that, as you can see is running flawlessly.
The good thing is that even non-optimized WordPress installations (like most users would have) are still very efficient because the WP Engine platform does all the heavy lifting.
This is an advantage over other businesses.
Since the service comes with an integrated CDN and CDN, you can be at ease knowing that your website is always going to be fast – very fast.
Try your WordPress hosting today with WP Engine service today
Customer Care
A differentiator in determining where to set up your site is customer support.
This has been WP Engine’s mantra, from their early days. Because this is a company that is offering an managed WordPress service, rather than as hosting products, it is understandable that there is a heavy importance placed on support.
Here’s an example of getting in touch with WP Engine – this was during peak hours. Wpengine Unique Visitors
In light of the fact that WP Engine has been growing rapidly over the years, and given that there have been periods of time when there was a lot of criticism – we were a bit hesitant regarding the reaction we might be expecting.
The issue with support stories is that the majority of people will recount their own experiences and it is unlikely that everyone will feel they have received excellent service – this will depend on the actual experience that the user is experiencing, and even the mood they are experiencing when they contact the company.
The question is typically the percentage of good reviews in comparison to the criticism a company gets.
So instead of reading individual reviews, we prefer to examine an entire company.
- Does the business have the expertise to offer the appropriate assistance?
- Are there good processes in place that allow customers to comprehend the current state of support?
How reliable is access to support staff when required?
All of these require the investment of time, money and know-how.
Our experiences with WP Engine has shown us that the company is very proficient in all three areas.
Knowledge – when we were working with our installs we were constantly referring to articles and knowledgebase articles that provided the information we needed to know from all angles. The articles contain information in a way that is simple to follow but completely actionable. It is very simple to solve any issues that you face by searching for solutions within the knowledge base that is kept up-to-date and kept.
Systems – there is several support channels that are available through WP Engine, including Live Chat support, Phone support, and a ticketing system – besides the actual knowledge base.
Access – we were constantly amazed by the speed of response from the support team. Through Live Chat, email , or actually getting on the phone to the WP Engine team, we believe that the service you receive from this company is truly top-of-the-line. Any issues or requests that we made were met with a helpful answer or resolution, including trivial stuff like resetting passwords to more complicated issues such as how to deal with a complex migration.
Security
Sites that are powered by WordPress today power a significant part of the web, with the latest statistics quoting over 30% of the web which makes it among the lucrative targets for hackers and malware actors.
Like all programs, WordPress is not insecure as a tool, however it needs to be up to date, and if any vulnerabilities are identified, they are closed immediately and especially in the open-source community in which there are a lot of users, testers, and contributors.
The biggest issue is with plugins and themes.
If these become unsupported and unsupported, they could cause serious issues for the website they are located on, as any issues remain vulnerabilities.
We’ve talked about how to protect your WordPress from hackers in previous posts on this website , but let’s review some of the key elements, the basic:
- Always ensure that your core installation, all plugins, and themes updated to the latest versions
- Only install files from trusted sources and reliable vendors (stay away from pirated or cracked sources)
- Be sure to have a security software installed to protect your system from the most prevalent attacks
- Always have backups ready in case something goes wrong
While the basic principles of security are straightforward, the responsibility of securing WordPress rests with the website’s owner. The people who are not too technical or don’t have enough time to take care of their site are in a disadvantage as they aren’t aware of everything about security.
In the end, of course, this service helps. It was designed specifically to serve this purpose, WP Engine’s managed hosting premise is to accomplish what WordPress owners do not know or don’t want to undertake, or not know how to do. The idea is that WP Engine will do all of the security needed for your site to function well, and without the possibility of losing anything when fighting hackers.
As we’ve mentioned a few paragraphs up that not only is WP Engine secure WordPress, but you’ve also got daily restore points, so that in the event of a disaster it’s possible to get your site back up and running within a matter of minutes.
WP Engine works with the concept of installing instead of an instance. What this means from a technical perspective that the majority of security issues are tackled at a server level and the result being a safer environment for all users.
As a company with a reputation that needs to remain intact, WP Engine have partnered with top security firms to perform code reviews through their system, as well as having an internal security team.
With the guarantee that in the event of a hack, they will handle it at no cost – you can rest assured that you’re WordPress is as secure as it is.
This is as good as it gets. Recovering a hacker’s site can be costly and laborious and the ease of which you don’t need to fret about this is a huge plus for this WP Engine service. Wpengine Unique Visitors
Pricing
Let’s make one thing clear.
This isn’t your typical hosting service. WP Engine is a managed service, which means you shouldn’t expect this to be competitive with the lower priced packages offered by the more well-known companies.
Plans start at just $25 per month (this is a custom offer available to MrBloggen only) However, let’s take this price down a in order to appreciate the value that this rate provides.
- The average cost for a separate CDN generally starts at $10 per month.
- A backup service like BlogVault costs around $8 per month.
- A security service such as Sucuri starts from $16/month.
- An aggressive caching plugin (such as WP Rocket) costs about $40 annually.
Can you see how quickly the cost adds up? The pricing you see above includes all of the above. It is important to remember that as your website grows in terms of traffic, all the above prices will go up – together with the complexity of maintaining the site.
In reality, the prices above are giving you the guarantee of an WordPress setup that runs smoothly without any effort from your side.
In a world where your email subscription is priced at tens to hundreds of dollars per month, would you be worried at paying $25 per month to ensure the security of your WordPress installation that is likely to bring an important portion of your revenue?
We don’t think so. Because really and truly that’s what it boils down to.
How much is your time worth? What’s the cost of your WordPress having to go down for few hours? If it costs you more than $25 if your site goes down then you have already earned an ROI on the cost of hosting your website with WP Engine.
For the sake of comparison, a VPS offered by InMotion costs about the same however you won’t receive the same level of service like this. In fact, you’ll need to take on the task by yourself for the majority of what’s discussed here. Shared hosting services start at a couple of bucks a month, but if you care about your website, it’s best to benefit yourself by choosing to stay clear of the cheapest options.
If you had to judge feature by feature and feature by feature, you could find some areas in which this service does not come in the top spot, but , as we mentioned, the fact that this is an all-hands-off, hands-off service, it’s an excellent value.
Your own, your developer or designer’s time, even for only two or three hours per month, will be much more than the quoted price – seeing as your time is likely to be worth more than $50/hour and you’ll find it difficult to find developers and designers working for less than $50.
It is likely that similar services, like Kinsta are similarly priced, but having worked with both services, we are able to confidently say we believe that WP Engine is much more mature as a service.
In the event that you lose a few milliseconds on the loading speed of your website could cost your company significantly over a period of time. It’s been proven repeatedly that web pages which load more than 3 seconds significantly affect conversions – negatively. The speed of service and the performance tools are well worth the money you spend and not even counting the options for add-ons.
Simply put, for the quality of service you’re receiving – this is excellent value. It’ll surely bring you a good ROI. Wpengine Unique Visitors
$2000 Genesis Framework + Premium WordPress themes for free
In June of this year, WPEngine acquired one of the top WordPress theme vendors, StudioPress. StudioPress is part of the StudioPress team is responsible for the wildly popular and highly popular Genesis template and framework.
Another benefit from this purchase is that customers who use WPEngine have access to both the Genesis theme as a framework and all premium themes associated with it. This meansthat all users of WP Engine have free access to more than $2000 worth of themes.
There are more than 60 themes to choose from across all niches such as eCommerce, blogs websites, authority sites, portfolio, magazine, recipe blogger lifestyle, membership or course websites, business or corporate galleries, and more.
It’s good to note this theme is targeted towards high-end customers who are premium The cost of each theme beginning at $129.95.
The argument we’re saying the point that themes like these are high-ticket itemsthat are normally sold at a premium, so getting these free of charge means that you have the theme you choose for your WordPress site is sorted too
Go to the Plans page (get 4 months FREE on plans for the year until November 2021)
What is the perfect customer for WP Engine?
If you’re just beginning your journey with WordPress and you’re not making a lot of earning a living from it, this platform is not suitable for you. But, there are a few niches which WP Engine serves very nicely thanks to its tools and features.
Like I said at the beginningof the article, WP Engine isn’t for everyone. There are 3 types of customers that WP Engine seems to be an ideal fit for. For those 3 types of clients, WP Engine has a strong focus with many tools and a attention to each.
1. WordPress Developers and Designers
Due to the vast number of features geared toward developers, one could easily see that this focus is perfect for designers, developers and agencies working with WP that require an efficient and reliable platform that they can rely on during their work and are able to transfer to their clients.
Features that we mentioned above like Git Push, staging environments and easily transferable setups help save time (and cash) for this type of clients.
They typically have customers who are able to pay an annual maintenance fee that the developer is able to mark up to their client while not having to work on anything at all, because everything is handled by the service – the hosting, the security, the speed is everything is handled. Wpengine Unique Visitors
2. Non-technical business owners and website owners who want to grow their businesses.
If 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 simply maintaining the site, is simply a wasted time. That’s besides the fact that managing your company should be your area of expertise instead of focusing on your website.
These customers are those whose sites are already well-established, but are beyond the capabilities that shared WordPress hosting and need an improved, more reliable service.
Budget is not really an issue, since the site generates money. In fact, downtime is more significant than paying for reliability and uptime.
If you’re an entrepreneur, you know that you can rely on WP Engine. If you have any issues outstanding customer service is only a phone call away.
3. Budding Companies looking for a long-term solution
The third kind of customer for which this service is a perfect option for are companies seeking an ongoing, reliable partner for the platform or website they are building. They understand that moving from one host to another is a headache, whilst WP Engine’s WP Engine backend and platform is a much better option rather than having to look elsewhere after the website is up and expanding.
WP Engine has the scalability that customers need to get these businesses up and running – with lots of time and cost savings for them.
Try now (60-day money-back assurance and 20% discount)
There could be issues related to the services
Like any other service, there’s bound to be issues that could arise with any system or environment. We haven’t experienced personally however, it would be disservice if we did not point out any potential drawbacks of using this service.
You’ll find that many complaints you come across are merely anecdotal. The truth is always somewhere in between all of the greatness the selling pitch offers and the numerous complaints reviews you might encounter.
As when someone decides that the service isn’t to their liking, you’re bound to start hating it. So, always view bad review with a pinch of salt.
A service is not always a good choice for everyone, especially if you’ve already been accustomed to a different service.
Custom Backend
To go beyond the norm in terms of security, performance and scale, a custom environment had to be created from scratch and the way it is built differs from most services.
Given that most hosts provide access to basic functions like the access of CPanel or WHM, and all the other standard functions they come with however, if you’re looking for these features – they won’t be found.
If you’re used to these features and you want them, they are simply not available. Although this could be done for very excellent reasons as mentioned earlier and the customized backend brings a whole slew of benefits – it’s not the environment you might be used to.
We had absolutely no trouble setting up our environment however, we wouldn’t be too surprised to hear that other users had issues with the process of registering this service.
The mitigating factor in all of this is the incredible assistance you receive – you’ll find that you will never need to face this journey alone.
In actual fact, we strongly recommend that you don’t go it alone. It is best to discuss your initial experience with your technical representative or support agent , so you’re able to get everything functioning as fast as you can – cutting down the learning curve as much as you can.
Impose Limitations
A custom-built environment and platform, as well as the way that servers are setup implies that WP Engine cannot afford to allow customers to roam all over the place, testing and tearing things apart as suits their needs. One bad plugin or set-up could, in theory, cause a server to fail – this is why WP Engine has a strict method to deal with this.
It places limitations on what is allowed on the service.
certain plugins are disallowed certain plugins are not allowed on their platforms . It is evident that caching plugins, backup plugins, some security plugins, and heavy plugins, such as Related Posts and a few other plugins are not allowed.
Again we are of the opinion that most of these functions have been catered for by the service. It’s a great idea for plugins that can kill performance to be completely banned as an uninformed user can create serious bottlenecks which could kill performance for a whole set up.
Again, we do believe that the impact of this is beneficial for ALL the customers of WP Engine.
Yet, if your website has a specific dependency on one plugin it is necessary to find ways and means to go around this issue or to find an alternative resolution.
Other limitations coming in the form of:
Limited bulk mailing – A fair limitation given that you don’t want just one person getting the server’s IP in a list of spammers.
Only accessible for hosting WordPress considering the name of the service, we think this is a reasonable limitation.
Number of visits – As your traffic increases, you’ll be forced change plans from one to the next. It’s true that for the majority of users, growing traffic means growing revenues therefore this shouldn’t be much of an issue for most users. Wpengine Unique Visitors
No email hosting
Given the way that WP Engine works, and the technology they employ, they do not provide mail servers to your site. This means you’ll need for your accounts to be hosted elsewhere. The good news is that domain service providers typically put accounts for email in their services at a relatively low cost.
Furthermore, most companies hosting via WP Engine already have a corporate email hosting solution such like Google Business Apps or Office 365.
The reason you should select hosted WordPress hosting?
With the development of the internet, came the huge huge expansion of WordPress as a framework but powering websites.
Success, naturally is a great motivator for people who are eager to join the bandwagon and take advantage of the success of other people.
When as the CMS platforms of preference grew and host companies grew, they moved from simply giving you the components needed to run your website, for example, a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), to hosting services that are WordPress hosting that is specifically designed for WordPress.
In general it means that the system is designed specifically to cater for the CMS. So rather than being a one size fits all system, businesses have all now started to offer specific server environments that are specially designed and optimized to WordPress.
Additionally, there are also companies who have expertise in WordPress generally, so the fact that as an owner of a website, will handle the content per se, but you don’t need to worry about the platform or any other technical issues that are outside of your expertise.
Speed as well as support, tuning optimizations, caching, updates as well as updates all are managed by the organization where the website is being hosted.
This removes a significant amount of the work on the host, but for a cost that is just a little higher than traditional hosting facilities.
However, there’s a lot of confusion in the marketplace too.
All hosts are now actually providing WP-specific hosting, which makes it extremely difficult to choose between good hosts, and ones that are in it for the opportunity. All hosts, including the smaller ones as well as larger brands like GoDaddy, HostGator, SiteGround, InMotion, and other major companies are now providing their own version in “WordPress hosting”.
WP Engine is one of the few companies that are exclusively focused on WordPress. This, in turn is why they are more focused than other companies competing in this field.
All of the hosts offer different services offered by them. Some will just provide instruction in the framework, while others will provide their technical support. Some go into the technical and provide things such as server-side features and test environments to your websites and applications.
But the actual controlled WordPress Hosting is the one where you are not only buying the server space needed to host your website – but rather you have the support to keep the site up and functioning properly.
In essence an managed hosting service implies that the provider offers services specifically designed for WP at a higher price point to allow the webmaster to remain focused on the site’s content / functionality, rather than on how to build the site.
This is clear for a very simple reason – you cannot compare a hosting plan that is generic with one such as the one provided by managed hosting.
Instead of aggregating user-generated WP Engine reviews based on personal positive and negative one-off experiences, we take the opposite approach. We review the good things and not so good aspects of WPEngine, and determine the areas and people for whom this hosting is suitable. Wpengine Unique Visitors
Frequently Asked Questions
What is WP Engine?
WPEngine is an automated hosting service for WordPress.
With WPEngine, you don’t need to worry about the maintenance as well as performance of the website because it’s fully handled by the hosting company.
They are one of the most trusted hosts, renowned for the excellent performance of websites hosted with them
What does WP Engine do?
WP Engine handles most stuff that is typically managed by the webmaster such as, website backups, WordPress updates, theme updates, plugin updates etc.
Additionally, security is built-in to the service to ensure your website is secure from hackers.
Also, the company has a highly optimized server stack which translates to very fast website loading speeds.
WP Engine costs more than shared hosting because WP Engine needs to guarantee the performance of your website. This means they host much smaller websites on their servers, which increases the cost of managing their infrastructure. Managing websites on behalf of the website owner means the owner won’t have to worry about technical problems. In actuality, the WP Engine plans are very well priced for high-performance businesses that require mission-critical websites.
What CDN is used by WPEngine?
WPEngine has a partnership together with MaxCDN (now controlled by StackPath) which provides an absolutely free CDN service for all websites hosted by WPEngine. This means that if you host your site with WPEngine, you don’t need to pay for an Content Delivery Network service separately.
WP Engine costs more than shared hosting due to the fact that WP Engine needs to guarantee the performance of your website.
This means they host fewer sites on the same servers and this results in driving up the cost of managing their infrastructure. The management of a website on behalf of the website owner means the owner does not have to handle any technical problems.
In actuality the WP Engine plans are very well priced for high-performance business websites that require a high level of performance.
Last thoughts
If you’ve been around MrBloggen for some time, you’ll realize that we are obsessed with speed. In simple terms, you don’t observe the speed of a website because good websites are fast – full stop. It’s just one of the factors (besides design) which makes a website feel reliable, a pleasure to explore and return to repeatedly.
That’s the cost and the beauty of performance – your speedy website will bring you more money in the long run. In this WP Engine review, we’ve explained how this service is primed for making your website lightning-fast, WITHOUT the technical costs and the time required to do this. We do believe that the service may have some drawbacks compared to apples to apples to other hosts, making this kind of comparison is really and truly an error.
If you’re looking for a speedy reliable and reliable hosting service where you just need to manage your website’s “content” of your website instead of the technical nitty-gritty of running the engine you’ll be in good hands by WP Engine. You have a 60-day, complete money-back assurance, so should you not like them, you’ve lost absolutely nothing, but in all probability you’ll gain from this platform! Wpengine Unique Visitors