WP Engine Review

Company Information

WP Engine is a WordPress-exclusive web host. Unlike other general hosting companies, WPEngine only provides Managed WordPress hosting, so the company has built its technology and solutions specifically catering to wordpress based websites and apps. Since the hosting service offered by WP Engine is a fully managed service, the updates and maintenance of wordpress core is handled by the company team of experts in addition to providing customers complete support for wordpress related issues.

WP Engine was co-founded by Jason Cohen and Ben Metcalfe in the year 2010. They have raised over $18 million in funding from North Bridge Growth Equity and Silverton Partners and other angel investors including Eric Ries and strategic investment by Automattic. The company is currently headed by Heather Brunner as CEO and Jason Cohen as CTO, has over 300 employees and is headquartered at Austin, Texas. WPEngine also has offices in San Francisco, San Antonio and London.

The company focuses squarely on providing solutions to improve the performance, security and scalability of wordpress websites, and hence has garnered tremendous response from web hosting customers who value these over price. It has fast emerged as a market leader in managed wordpress hosting segment.

WP Engine Hosting Plans

WP Engine offers 5 managed wordpress hosting plans. Each plan includes unlimited data transfer but is capped at the number of wordpress installs allowed, website visitors per month and amount of disk storage capacity.

1. Personal

This plan is for customers who intend to run only one website or test out the hosting service by WP Engine. It comes with 10GB local storage and allows a single website with up to 25K visitors every month.

2. Professional

This plan includes up to 10 wordpress installs and is popular with small to medium level organizations having steady traffic flow. The total number of visitors on all running websites is capped at 100K per month, beyond which you will be charged extra. 20GB disk storage is provided with this plan.

3. Business

If you have been growing and experience high traffic levels, Business plan is what you should opt for. This plan allows up to 25 wordpress installs and 400K visits/month with 30GB local disk storage. It is also quite popular with developers and marketers who use it to host their customer websites.

4. Premium

This plan is designed for growing businesses with over a million visitors per month. It allows a total of 150 wordpress sites and can be tailored to custom demands. It uses dedicated resources to provide high performance and scalability.

5. Enterprise Grade

This plan is for mission critical websites and applications. It uses server clusters to deliver ultimate reliable, secure and powerful wordpress solutions. It has provision for up to 1TB storage and 5 million monthly visitors and can be customized according to your specific needs.

Since the WP Engine plans and pricing is based on the number of monthly visitors to your site, it s important to understand what constitutes a visit. They have clearly stated their formula for calculating site visitors to your websites. Any bot or crawler traffic and image traffic is not counted towards total visits. In case the total monthly visits exceed the limit set by the plan, the customer is charged extra for the same by the company.

WPEngine Hosting Features & Capabilities

When you choose to host your wordpress website with WPEngine, you don’t need to care about managing the updates, backups and site security etc. All technical aspects associated with WordPress are managed by WPEngine expert professionals. These include updates of wordpress software and any plugins & themes that you use, website backups, loading speed of the website, security of wordpress, themes & plugins like malware scan and fixes etc.

Lets take a closer look at features provided by WP Engine and how they are useful:

EverCache

EverCache is WP Engine’s proprietary caching system and is regarded by experts as one of the most scalable wordpress caching mechanisms available as on date. Since, all websites hosted on WPEngine have EverCache integrated into wordpress, you do not need any other caching plugins. The cache is refreshed automatically when required and serves content to visitors at very fast speeds.

Content Delivery Network

WP Engine uses NetDNA content delivery network as part of their service. This is included in Professional and above plans. Personal plan customers need to pay an extra charge of $19.99/mo for CDN service.

Dedicated IP Address

Business plan and above customers get a dedicated IP Address free of cost, while on Professional plan this feature is available as a paid extra.

One-Click Staging Sites

WP Engine offers an exclusive feature of staging sites. This is particularly useful for developers and geeks who often like to experiment with themes and plugins. The staging feature allows you to create an independent snapshot of your website with a single click of a button. You can then test your changes on this cloned version and when you are ready to go live with the changes, you can roll this version to live website. You can create as many clones as you like to test your changes or redesign your website. Each wordpress installation will have its own staging site.

Git Version Control

Git is an open-source version control system. WP Engine provides integrated version control on their hosting environment using Git-Push-to-Deploy feature. So developers can now create custom code, plugins, themes etc. using Git and then deploy their applications using git-push-to-deploy capability thus providing version control using wordpress.

Managed WordPress Patching & Updates

WP Engine automatically updates all minor wordpress patches on you websites. When any major update is released, the team of experts thoroughly tests it, before rolling it out to the customers for upgrade.

Automated Backups

WPEngine takes daily backups of your website (filesystem, database snapshot and all media) and stores them at a redundant geographically separate location. This ensures your data is never lost.

1-Click Restore

WP Engine gives you the option of restoring any backup copy of your website with just a plain click of a button. The restored version is generally ready in less than a minute. Also you can create any snapshot backup of your website within seconds, which can be used as restore point later on if you wish to undo the changes.

LargeFS

WPEngine gives you the ability to integrate your Amazon S3 account with their platform so you theoretically get infinite storage for your media by syncing all files to Amazon S3 bucket.

GeoIP Look-Up

Wp Engine offers GeoIP lookup service that can be set up to dynamically serve different web content to different visitors based on their specific geographical location. So customers no longer have to depend on external third-part services for this functionality. But this service is available for free only on Business plans and above.

Multiple Data Centers

WP Engine has multiple datacenters in 3 different cities across the world –

1. Texas, US
2. London, UK
3. Tokyo, Japan

When you signup, you have the option of choosing one of these locations. If you later wish to move you website to another location, you need to contact the customer support team who will do this for you free of cost and without any need for cancelling your account.

WP Engine Speed & Uptime

Website speed is highly important from several perspectives – rankings on Google and other search engines, visitor satisfaction, revenue generation etc. So a faster website is always desirable.

WP Engine claims that websites run 4 to 6 times faster on their proprietary front-end technology, which they continually adjust for achieving maximum performance. They serve content using custom solutions like WP Engine EverCache and CDN to ensure blazing fast website load times.

The company uses a highly scalable architecture with HA load balancing and firewalling, and database replication features. These ensure minimum downtime for your websites even during traffic spikes. WP Engine is so confident of their system performance that they promise a service availability of 99.95% as part of their SLA. In case they fail to meet this service availability for any month, customers receive a 5% monthly fee credit for each hour of downtime.

WP Engine Security

WPEngine is highly committed to taking care of security requirements. They employ best methods from testing update patches before rollout, real-time security threat detection software, blocking malicious attacks and IP addresses of hackers/spammers, customer separation at the kernel and filesystem level, proper server configuration, continual network monitoring, automated backups to physical security of the datacenters. They promise to fix your website for free, if it is still hacked.

Customer Support

WpEngine provides support to the customers via email, ticketing system, phone and live chat. The ticket system is accessible via User Portal all round the clock, but live chat option is only available from 6am to 8pm Central Time. 24/7 Telephone support is available only on Professional and above plans.

WP Engine claims that all their support staff is WordPress experts. So they can very accurately fix your issues and provide help on anything related to wordpress or hosting.

The User Portal on their website contains a vast knowledgebase of useful information on setting up your website and troubleshooting any common problems. All details related to managing your hosting account with WP Engine are also included in a separate section.

Money Back Guarantee

WP Engine includes a 60 day money back guarantee. Their cancellation policy is pretty simple. To unsubscribe to their services, a customer simply has to log in to User Portal and choose to ‘Cancel account’ under Settings page. The company maintains a copy of your website for 30 days from account cancellation. They suggest that you download any backups of your installations before cancelling the account. The company requires you to provide a reason for cancellation of hosting service.

No Email Hosting

It is important to know that WP Engine hosting package does not include any email features. So customers need to host their own email accounts to use their domains name with email address. WPEngine recommends that customers use Google Apps service or Zoho Email service. Although, you may choose to use any other service or email hosting for the same.