Self-hosted WordPress sites need paid hosting services to store the content of your website files. WordPress officially recommends few hosting companies like Bluehost, Dreamhost and SiteGround. But hundreds of premium hosting companies offer dedicated services only for WordPress sites. WPEngine is one such web hosting solution which we will review in this article.
Start building your site with WPEngine managed WordPress hosting.
WPEngine Managed WordPress Hosting
WPEngine provides optimized and fully managed WordPress hosting. They have a special architecture designed for speed that will result in more expensive hosting solution. Unlike many other hosting companies, WPEngine offers hosting services only for WordPress platform. Due to this reason, WPEngine is popular among WordPress community for their dedicated approach.
Pricing Plans
The real goal of WPEngine is to provide WordPress based hosting to the business world with excellent scalability, performance, security and reliability. The development team of WPEngine provides various plans that you can choose. They have data centers in Taiwan, Australia, Germany, Belgium, UK and US. Businesses can choose monthly billing, which is generally more flexible. However, the annual plan offers two months of free subscriptions, which is equal to 16 percent discount.
WPEngine offers three pricing plans – startup, growth and scale. The price starts from $35 per month for the startup plan to $290 per month to the scale plan. If you have custom requirements then get in touch with them to get quote for a premium or enterprise level plan for your need.
Overall Features
All pricing plans are based on number of sites, unique visits and bandwidth. So it will look stringent when compared with plans from other hosting companies. All pricing plans include the below features:
- Free SSL certificate
- Free site migration to WPEngine platform
- Development, staging and production environments for setting up your workflow
- Global CDN with 24/7 support
- GeoTarget option is available as an add-on
Reliability
Reliability is essential because the process of running or migrating a website can be risky. You can reduce the risk of data loss with the automatic backup feature. It is also easy to create backups on demand and restore the backup when needed. You can also download the backups for local archiving. This feature is easy to use and very valuable for people who prioritize on reliability.
Performance
Nowadays, websites should perform well and optimized for speed to get good search engine results. Generally people measure the performance by creating a testing site with default theme. In our opinion, this is ridiculous as the reality will be completely different and depends on individual site. However, WPEngine platform is popular for its performance optimization and reliability. WPEngine comes with built-in tests to check performance. These tests give specific score and you can get various recommendations. It will be easy to assess how each tweak will affect performance. The pricing plans include global CDN with the account; you can configure the CDN to optimize performance.
WPEngine also offers built-in caching technology, with easy to purge option. When you enable the HTML Post Processing feature, you can modify the rendered HTML pages. It’s a great tool that offers various possibilities.
Restrictions
WPEngine has it’s own rule and doesn’t allow certain plugins that causes performance issues with their platform. So, it is important to check the banned plugin list. Especially if you are planning to migrate to WPEngine then we strongly recommend checking with the WPEngine support team to know all supported plugins. It is one of the major advantages of WPEngine, because we can be sure that the platform will work properly.
Support
There’s not always a simple procedure to complete specific task, but the WPEngine support team is there to assist you. There are professional support documents for clients. WPEngine is offering 24/7 live chat support. It is generally quite reliable and client can connect to a customer service staff in less than a minute. The support team should respond to queries quickly with acceptable detail. You can escalate to next level when the issue is not yet fully addressed. This is a notable advantage compared to the competition.
Also you can clarify all pre-sales questions through live chat before purchasing a hosting plan.
Summary
There are many web host solutions out there, but WPEngine is definitely more than decent. The development team strives to maintain proper level of security, reliability and performance. The overall prices of WPEngine can be a bit high, but that appears to be for some good reasons. There are features that can help to maintain the reliability of the website, such as regular updates, automatic backups, custom caching, staging, malware scanning and integrated CDN. Compared to similar solutions, WPEngine can prove useful for people with specific requirements. For people who seek to get the full benefit from WordPress, they should give WPEngine a try.
Pros
- Professional WordPress managed hosting.
- High speed with in-built caching.
- Studiopress theme integration.
Cons
- Pricing based on page views.
- Some of your favorite plugins may be blocked.
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