WP Engine Review
Hosting Plan Features
WordPress Features
MySQL Features
Founded by Jason Cohen and Aaron Brazell, the company is exceptional at WordPress Hosting, but ensures it’s prosperity by making your experience with them great.
They promise top-notch speed and rock solid platform.
They have several big named companies that use them currently like, A Smart Bear, Blasamiq, Public School, Other Inbox, and more.
Benefits:
- Extremely Fast Servers
- Tech support are WordPress Experts
- Curated Plugins & Themes
- Easily add a CDN to your site
Thinking of taking you website to the next level, WP Engine could be just the hosting company to get you there. We have reviewed WP Engine and we will tell you the Pros, Cons, and everything you need to know before purchasing your WP Engine plan.
A Quick History
WP Engine is located in Austin Texas and was founded in 2010. They now employ around 25 people. The two founders are Jason Cohen and Ben Metcalfe. Jason has founded several companies which he grew to millions in sales and then sold. Ben helped build the BBC News Website and he has been involved with WordPress since it's start.
WordPress Expert Review:
Overview
Lets say you have a WordPress website. You are having some success with increasing traffic and the pages seem to load fine, but not quite as fast as some other professional sites. There is a 99% chance the problem is your hosting. It could be time to move up to the next level. WP Engine is a great example of a top tier Hosting Company with some surprisingly affordable plans.
WPEngine is a WordPress specific or a Managed WordPress hosting service. Meaning all they do is WordPress and will help you keep up with the software updates. This allows you to focus more on making your site better and not all of the numerous WordPress version point releases.
All of WP Engine's servers are fine tuned to run WordPress, they have selected the best standard WP plugins, including the best plugins to make your site run fast. Finally they have an extremely knowledgeable staff to help solve any technical issues you may run into.
They are not perfect though. For some users there plans are going to be a little pricey. They do not have 24/7 technical support and some plugins are not allowed to be installed. Not everyone needs those things but some do.
Our WP Engine Experience
We originally had this site on another server then we decided to move to a better host. We had heard of WP Engine and looked into them. What they said about speed and expert WordPress help seemed worth the money so we decided to go for it.
The entire site transfer process is handled entirely by the WP Engine staff. From our point of view when we moved WordPress Hosting Review to WPEngine the process was smooth and painless. I gave them the information that they needed and they handled the rest.
We have been very pleased with our move to WPEngine and would make the same choice again. I think it speaks very highly of them when we choose to host our review site with them.
Tech support has been excellent, when we have had a few small things happen they were there working with us to solve the problem quickly and efficiently. I can not see any reason to move away from WP Engine.
Pros:
- WordPress Specific
- Extremely Fast Servers
- Tech support are WordPress Experts
- Curated Plugins & Themes
- Easily add a CDN to your site
Cons:
- High Pricing
- No Email Hosting
- No 24/7 Tech Support
WPEngine compared to a standard shared hosting company
- Server Speed - WPEngine is going to be much faster with out a doubt. Their servers are not oversold and everything is geared to making sites fast. A standard shared hosting company is geared more to putting as many sites on a server as possible, this keeps the monthly hosting cost low.
- Price - WPEngine is going to be about 3 times as much but you are getting so much more it is hard to make a straight price comparison.
- Tech Support - With WPEngine you have access to some of the best in the business. They know WordPress inside and out. With a shared hosting company they may know some about WordPress but they typical line is our support stops where WordPress starts. Now one thing you do get with a typical shared host is 24 by 7 by 365 tech support. WPEngine operates more on a standard work week. Support hours are 9AM to 6PM Central Standard Time.
Hosting WordPress:
We have that using WP Engine is like the ultimate WordPress extension. They have such an integrated system that the WP Engine service and WordPress work hand in hand. They provide you with a customized version of WordPress that has a control panel that makes some tasks like “CDN Control” much simpler.
Their servers are secure and they guarantee that if your site is hacked that they will pay to get it cleaned up (Hacker Cleanup Guarantee).
****UPDATE DECEMBER 30 2011**** In a blog post WP Engine announced they no longer have a need for caching plugins. They now do not include W3 Total Cache or Adminer as part of their “curated plugins”. They say that caching is great and can significantly speed up a website, However, since they have moved to their new (incredibly fast) infrastructure, they have found that caching can actually slow them down.
Read their post about how caching slows them down.
WP Engine Plans
- “Personal: for $29/month, you can host one WordPress site that gets up to 25,000 visits per month and 10 GB of storage and all of the standard goodness that comes with a WPEngine account. You can add on a CDN for $19.95 per month.
- Professional: for $99/month, you can host up to 10 WordPress sites that get up to 100,000 visits per month. The storage is increased to 20GB, the CDN is now included, along with SSL and WordPress Multi-site support. A dedicated IP can be added for $5/month
- Business: For $249/month, you can host up to 25 WordPress Sites, get up to 400,000 visits / month. The storage is increased to 30GB. You get all the features of the Professional Plan, the Dedicated IP is included and you get telephone support.
- Premium: This is custom service, the prices are not even listed on the site. I am sure you can get anything you want and more, the price is going to be up there.
WP Engine WordPress & Technical Features
- SFTP Access
- Out of the box Memcached
- Redundant Firewall Protection
- Web Application Protection
- Redundant DoS/DDoS Mitigation
- Weekly Backup & Encrypted Daily Differentials
- 24/7/365 Monitoring
WP Engine Support
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- Phone Support: Yes (Business and Premium Plans)
- Email Support: Yes
- Support Ticket System: No
- Live Support Chat: No
- Support Forums: Yes
- FAQ & Knowledge base: Yes
- Video Tutorials: No
Conclusion
We have found WP Engine to be an excellent hosting company. We have hosted this site (WordPress Hosting Reviews) with them for over a year and it has been a great experience. They are not the cheapest hosting option, but if you have a site that requires top level hosting, WP Engine is a excellent choice and your money is very well spent.
Editor review
1 reviews
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Reviewer Info
Pros and Cons
User reviews
2 reviews
If you run a small, simple blog that gets a modest amount of traffic, WPEngine may be right for you. But if your website is mission-critical, you cannot afford to gamble with WPEngine.
Reviewer Info
Their servers are secure and they guarantee that if your site is hacked that they will pay to get it cleaned up (Hacker Cleanup Guarantee).
Criticism of WP Engine is simple. It’s just expensive. This is serious hosting. We would say for the professional blogger. Or even just someone that takes their site seriously. However, you get what you pay for, and then some.
Speed: We have been astounded by the speed of WP Engine. They really do get it right and make it fast. We have seen our page speeds increase by 350ms since signing up with WP Engine. Nothing else has changed except the hosting.
Control Panel: Their account control panel located on their website at WP Engine is not the most pretty control panel in the world, but you can manage some important things here. Some tools in the admin area are: account user manager, website restore points, SFTP users, domain management, billing, error log, and support. We don’t have any serious complaints, but they should really update the look of this control panel. It’s a little too simple looking. That beings said, everything functions fine.
Support: We have an excellent time dealing with the tech support at WP Engine. So far, every time we have talked with tech support, we have never been ‘elevated’ to a higher support level. All of the staff are knowledgeable and we have end up dealing with the same technician from start to finish. It’s a small knit group that handles support and they are very professional and knowledgeable. We know most of them by name at this point.
Conclusion: WP Engine is for serious WordPress users. You will spend a pretty penny, but their service is excellent.
WPEngine did not provide business-class webhosting services for my site. I’ve had my site hosted with Media Temple (previously) and Rackspace (currently), and by comparison the experience with WPEngine was absolutely horrendous. In six months, I endured more issues, more service requests and more downtime than I’ve seen in the other five years my site’s been around… combined.
If you run a small, simple blog that gets a modest amount of traffic, WPEngine may be right for you. But if your website is mission-critical, you cannot afford to gamble with WPEngine.