2017 WPEngine Review: Expert Rating (4.2/5.0 Stars)
Two geniuses, Jason Cohen and Aaron Brazell founded WP Engine back in 2010 and right from the start, the company was fated to be a leader in WordPress hosting. Even in its early days, it had the likes of HTC, Sound Cloud and Balsamiq swooning over its services. Eventually, they switched over. Over the years, their growth has been phenomenal.
WP Engine has all their focus put on one niche: WordPress hosting. In fact, you haven’t really enjoyed hassle free hosting until you try out WP Engine. And for security purists, your best bet to a hacker-proof website lies with WP Engine. Their customer service is excellent too and if you happen to be among those who won’t endure getting their hands dirty, you’ve found your savior.
Have Your Blog Up & Running In 20 Minutes or Less!
My Free Step-By-Step Guide Will Get Your Blog Up & Running 20 Minutes Or Less
As pioneers in this space, the company has a huge customer base- prominent and otherwise, and it’s for good reasons, top amongst them being reliability, dedicated WordPress services, and remarkable speeds. But is there a darker side to them we don’t know? We’ll find out that too later in this EP Engine hosting review.
Ratings
- Features: 3.5/5.0
- Reliability: 4.5/5.0
- Ease Of Use: 4.0/5.0
- Pricing: 3.8/5.0
- Customer Service:4.5/5.0
Overall Rating:
WP Engine Hosting Review
WP Engine’s hosting plans carry a great deal of features but very few of them can really excite a webmaster. Most of them are just but the obvious features you need to get your website running well. But the presence of extensive security features is a great thing to note.
Are they worthy of being dependent on? Absolutely yes because there are plenty of satisfied users using their services and nearly all agree that these three elements: 100%uptime, blazing speeds, and excellent customer service, are all at their peak.
Personal, their entry level plan, starts at $29.00 which may be pretty huge for some people, while the one accompanying it goes for $99.00. For multiple site owners, the plans may turn out too costly. Another plan in between would have been a great idea. The user interface is much tidier than it was before although more still needs to be done to refine the navigation and structure. Presence of user guides also helps to figure things out quickly.
Over the years, WP Engine has put several measures in place to refine their customer support service, especially after mounting criticism. With WordPress wizards in place to attend to you and the ability to speak directly to the company’s engineer, things have really changed for the better.
Pros
Dedicated WordPress Hosting
There are two sides to this, the good and the ugly (discussed under cons). So we’ll talk about the good side of it. When all of your focus is dedicated to a specific area, that means there are high chances of you getting extremely good at it.
Since WP Engine’s focus is on WordPress hosting only, that means they have a solid customer service support because there’s only one thing to master after all - WordPress. Besides, there’s no need to split up technology or diversity it. Instead, all effort is invested in it to make it more innovative and efficient.
Hassle-Free Migration
Migrating your website from your previous host to WP Engine should be least of your concerns because they will offer you a plugin that will make the whole process ultra-smooth. You can as well get in touch with their in-house WordPress wizards and ask them to take care of that. All you have to do is give them your login details and they will do the rest.
Excellent Customer Support
Back in 2014, there were rants spread out across the web of how WP Engine’s customer support staff are plainly uninformed and worse, very slow in response. Mounting complaints ignited a complete overhaul of the entire customer service and well, that pretty much explains why their current customer support service ranks with the best. And it’s not just the discipline you are going to love, every support staff you’ll speak to is a WordPress wizard. Best of all, you can reach out the company’s engineer directly.
Faster Speeds
A slow loading website is the worst thing that could happen to your website, especially if you run a business. Besides turning away visitors, it will affect your search engine rank negatively. So to take care of this, WP Engine includes their own EverCache technology in every plan to enhance speeds for returning visitors. You can as well purchase their Content Delivery Network (CDN) if you are on the personal plan to optimize your speed and overall performance. Don’t know what a CDN is and how it works? Please watch the video below:
Reliable
Guaranteed 100% uptime, blazing speeds, and excellent customer support make WP Engine worth being depended on especially for those looking to run a business. Downtimes and slow loading web pages are two of the worst things you could ever wish to happen to your website and for WP Engine, whether you go for the starter plan or the most advanced plan, you are guaranteed those three.
Cons
Hosts WordPress Sites Only
Being a WordPress-only web host, that means if you have a site that is not WordPress-based, the company may not be of much help to you. But for the company, putting much of their focus on WordPress means they can do a fantastic job in that niche as opposed to being a Jack of all trades.
Not Ideal For Multi-Site Owners
If you take a look at WP Engine pricing plans, you will note that the entry-level plan goes for $29.00/month and only takes a single domain. The professional plan, which comes after the entry level plan goes for $99/month and only takes 10 domains. If you run a number of websites, it might be relatively expensive to host with WP Engine. Bear in mind you can have a shared hosting plan for as low as $5.00/month and do all of that.
Lacks Email Hosting
Another downside of WP Engine is that they don’t offer webmail features. If you are a business, you most likely will want to have a professional looking email that ends with your domain name. So the only option you are left with if you intend to have the same with WP Engine is to go ahead and host your email accounts which is pretty expensive.
Top Features Of WPEngine
Top features you will like the most about WP Engine include high security, guaranteed 100% uptime, blazing speed and staging sites.
High Security
WP Engine has put in place a long list of innovative measures to make sure your website –and their servers too, are completely hacker proof. WordPress has its own vulnerabilities and threats and these measures have been designed to take care of that. Here are some of them:
- Daily backups
- Automatic WordPress updates
- Real-time Security threat detection software
- Periodic security audits & code reviews
- Two-factor authentication
So with these measures, you are protected from malicious JavaScipt/SQL as well as XML-RPC attacks. Any IP address associated with hackers will also be blocked from accessing your website. Also bear in mind that having the most up-to-date software guarantees optimum security and with routine security audits, nothing malicious is sure to find you unaware or sneak in with your knowledge.
Guaranteed 10% Uptime
Nearly every web host promises 100% uptime but not all of them live up to that. For WP Engine, the raving reviews about their uptime are enough to win your trust in them. Downtime is a foreign word to them and no matter which WP Engine review you come across, you will search heard to find complaints about that. But you will find rants about the monthly visitor limit.
Blazing Speeds
Very closely associated to uptime is the speed. Every plan comes complete with their own EverCache technology which is the reason why returning visitors will always experience faster speeds because data is automatically kept in their browsers thus saving them the need to download the same data every time they access the site. You can as well buy the CDN (not included in the personal plan) which will help to take the performance to a whole new level.
Staging Area
A staging area is a duplicate version of your site that allows you to try out changes, updates, customizations, plugins, and so forth to observe how your site reacts without really putting it to risk. So, as a developer, you will have an easy time knowing whether certain changes are right or not appropriate before making them live on the site.
Conclusion
Overall, WP Engine is a worthy choice for the business person or serious website owner who has all their hopes put on WordPress for business success or whichever it is they hope to achieve. Reliability on their part makes them a WordPress host of choice for such tasks.
But the webmaster who wants a great deal of tools to work with plus more features, WP Engine may not be a great choice for them. If that’s you, try out HostGator instead because they have that and a lot more on top.
WP Engine pricing plans many not be attractive to many users but then that’s pretty much the case for dedicated WordPress hosting. Pressable, a WP Engine alternative, as well as other alternatives such as Pressidium and Pagely also have prices in the same range too. But looking at the kind of security you get from WP Engine, that easily justifies the pricing.
And with the rate at which WP Engine has been expanding, there’s a lot more to look up to. So let our WP Engine review act as your reference to finding the best WordPress hosting provider.
Have Your Blog Up & Running In 20 Minutes or Less!
Get My Free Step-By-Step Guide Will Get Your Blog Up & Running 20 Minutes Or Less