Pros
ConsThe details
WP is one of the best web hosting services for WordPress website owners who want to take a hands-off approach to website management. Its excellent performance, uptime, and real-time threat detection make it a go-to tool for managed hosting. We break down its main features.
Speed
The loading speed can make or break a visitor’s experience on a website. Fortunately, WP Engine renders pretty well in this regard. It combines SSD technology, custom NGINX extension, and a built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN) to ensure web pages load quickly.
CDN delivers the site’s content to visitors based on their location, while the NGINX extension prioritizes human requests over bots giving visitors a better experience. This feature is available on all WP Engine plans.
What’s more, you can track the site’s performance from the dashboard, monitor each website’s speed, and analyze the historical data. This feature also helps you evaluate the impact that new plugins or features have on the website in real-time.
Uptime reliability
This feature is why businesses and individuals prefer WP Engine to other web hosting services despite its premium price. The hosting service boasts 99.95% server uptime reporting only 4.5 hours of downtime in a year.
In fact, it emerged as the top winner in our uptime test, which proved that the 99.95% server uptime feature isn’t a marketing gimmick. The sites we hosted also loaded quickly, clocking a mere 2.17 seconds, which is a few seconds shy of Google’s recommendation for the best SEO results.
Customer support
When it comes to customer support, WP Engine goes over and beyond.
Apart from its responsive 24/7 live chat support and ticket system, customers can access high-quality articles and videos, which you’d only expect to find in a paid training course.
The service also touts many features that make your experience on WordPress a breeze. One striking feature is the user portal section that shows the amount of storage, visits, and bandwidth used during that month.
Also, there’s a Users section for adding and removing users while assigning roles to team members. This entire section is super-intuitive, allowing even the newest users to navigate all the parts without much supervision.
Value
We noticed WP Engine web hosting service plans are at the high end of the spectrum right off the bat.
Its most basic plan, the Startup, costs the same as mid or high-tier plans of other providers like A2 Hosting and SiteGround; it only gets more expensive from there.
Well, there’s a silver lining if you make annual payments- you enjoy a 20% discount.
Despite the high cost, WP Engine provides value regardless of the plan you subscribe to. The Startup Plan ($35 p.m.), for example, has 10 GB of storage, 50 GB of bandwidth and supports 25,000 visitors per month.
Its Growth Plan ($115) supports 100,000 monthly visitors, 200 GB of bandwidth, and 20 GB of storage, while Scale ($290) provides support for up to 30 websites with 500 GB of bandwidth and 50 GB of storage.
Unless you have a relatively large organization, you hardly exhaust all such features; but if you do, a $2 charge applies per thousand extra visits.
Safety
This is one web hosting service that takes the safety of its users seriously.
This is evident from the number of safety features included. It has a disk-writing protection program, built-in firewalls, secure SSH FTP and access, and a strict policy of the type of plugins allowed and those not allowed.
It also has free SSL certificates and support for the latest MySQL and PHP versions. What’s more, you can activate multi-factor authentication for additional security. You’ll be asked to confirm your login attempt through your phone.
Final verdict
This web hosting service is the best for those who don’t want to do all the work when hosting a website. It also comes in handy for professional web designers, medium and large publishers of WordPress websites as it takes off loads of work that come with optimizing a website.
However, if you run a small website or a blog with a few visitors every month, its price might be a little steep; it’s best to look for a cheaper hosting service.
