WP ENGINE

In today's fast-paced world the market is filled with cheap hosts offering a fair quality of service. However, if you are looking for a hosting company that concentrates on providing more of a performance-oriented service, you have arrived at the right station! Look no further. WP Engine is a managed WordPress web hosting company that offers fully optimized services. Of course, when compared to its other competitors, WP Engine is not exactly cheap. WP Engine offers a hassle-free hosting platform with fast, robust servers that can tackle almost anything. Your website is always hacker-proof so that your sensitive information is safe with us. Hats off to their super-fast customer service with a knowledgeable team. Along with that they also offer programmed security updates and caching daily backups, single click restore points, free staging area, etc.

WHAT ABOUT WP ENGINE?

WP Engine was founded in 2010, by Jason Cohen and is headquartered in Austin, Texas. Being relatively new to this field of the hosting world, they haven't wasted a second in earning the stellar reputation they now have achieved. Being a serial entrepreneur, Jason Cohen saw there was a need for a specialized WordPress hosting platform and this is when he decided to start WP Engine. WP Engine now consists of over 400 employees. The company has also been recognized with multiple awards for being the Best Place to Work in Austin and for sincerely contributing to the WordPress core and its community. This web hosting company is used by some of the very well-known brands like HTC, SoundCloud, Balsamiq, among many others. Let us see the pros and cons of using WP Engine.

PROS & CONS

Some of the WordPress-specific features offered by WP Engine include: Quick and easy migrations are provided from your previous host. Free SSL (Secure Socket Layers) certificate is provided. It is one of the most important security measures adopted by WP Engine. It supports the building of the staging sites. High-performance tracking along with diagnostic options. Let's get the overall pros and cons of this web host.

PROS

Security Features – WP Engine offers better protection to your sites than many of its competitors. It provides highly advanced security features that are beneficial to all its customers. Faster Loading Times – Servers are well optimized for all WordPress users. Every little detail could be cached at the basic server level, and you are provided with free access to CDN. Reliability – WP Engine has a front-end layer system that can tackle traffic spikes easily without causing your site to slow down. WordPress Expert Support System – WP Engine has a 24/7 available and dedicated customer care service system with an entire support staff of trained experts. Enthusiastic Reviews – They are an incredibly popular hosting platform that receives great and mostly positive reviews for their solid and consistent performance, reliability, and helpful support team. Great Management – It aids in the process of managing your website with features like daily backups, full malware detecting, and scanning, unlimited data transfer, having a staging area, etc.

CONS

Plugins aren't allowed – With WP Engine you are not allowed to install certain kinds of plugins on your WordPress site. The reasons could be either due to their personal conflicts or with duplicate WP Engine's features. At times they also result in a high server load. This may include many caching, backup, among others. Domain Registrations unavailable – WP Engine does not offer domain registrations. They only offer the hosting services, which means that you will first have to register your domains with another company, which is inconvenient to some users. Expensive – When compared to other shared hosting platforms, WP Engine is a bit tight to the pockets, but the services offered by them are worth giving a shot. They also lack an email support system and web chat support system.

WP ENGINE WEB HOSTING PLANS

While WP Engine offers typically a single one type of service that is a managed WordPress hosting platform, it also provides several sub-types of tiered plans you can choose from. These plans are dramatically different from each other concerning some features. These features may include the number of resources they offer, which means it is very easy scaling. Following are the WP Engine Hosting Plans: Startup Plan (costs $30 per month): It is an entry-level tier, which offers its customers with 25,000 visits per month, with a single website, 10GB of space, and a bandwidth of 50GB. You'll also get access to free SSL certificate, global CDN, among other key features. Growth Plan (which costs around $115 per month): This plan is ideal for someone who wishes to increase the traffic support up to 100,000 and get ten sites. You are also promised with a 24/7 phone support system and get access to import your SSL certificates. Scale Plan (costs around $290 per month): This plan is somewhat identical to the Growth Plan. It basically provides you with even more resources, boosts your site count up to 30, and provides around 400,000 visits in a month. Premium and Enterprise Plans: These two are custom plans, which means that you will have to contact them and build your plan. Hence the price of these plans varies from person to person. You will also get access to a lot more additional resources and support, which will help you move your hosting from shared to a dedicated server. None of these plans are cheap but availing these plans will help your site to grow. WP Engine offers just a managed WordPress hosting platform. Hence if you are looking for a hosting platform that will help you build serious business or e-commerce sites, you might want to consider WP Engine. I will be further discussing some important features of WP Engine that stand out from its other competitors in the web hosting market.

EXPERT CUSTOMER SERVICE

WP Engine provides the best customer care service. Though the toll-free cannot be used by people who haven't yet signed up at least for the Startup plan, the team is very helpful and kind. The customer service provided by WP Engine is widely known for its availability pattern of 24/7 for 365 days. Their well-informed and excellent team of workers provide high-quality service in solving all their customers' problems. They would check and keep on rechecking with you to be absolutely sure of the fact that their customers or clients have no existing doubts or problems. They take time out of their busy schedule for a single customer to solve their residual doubts. They would not hesitate for a minute before lending their help out to anybody and everybody. They offer their service through chat, call, as well as mails, whichever one you are comfortable with. So, once you have become a member of WP Engine, you will be able to enjoy their customer care service fully.

HIGH ENOUGH UPTIME

Your website uptime should be one of the most important features for you to choose an appropriate hosting facility from a wide range of them. While working with your clients or while you are working on your own website, if somehow the site slows down suddenly, your viewers or customers might get in trouble finding or accessing the products or services from your site. This will result in a bad name of your website or service and you might instantly lose a handful of customers. Trust me, the last thing you want in your business is losing clients. Hence, WP Engine understands your problem and swiftly deals with web host uptime. When I came up with the result of a short test on how well the uptime is for WP Engine, the results were astonishing. In my opinion, after using so many web hosting services, this WP Engine has proven to be most stable off other hosts within the same price range. In fact, not once did it go down while I was conducting the test, which was for straight two weeks. I would suggest you not to hurry and avail WP Engine as soon as possible, but if you do, this might be one of 'those' factors you should concentrate on.

EXCELLENT SECURITY FEATURES

For those who are new to this platform, you must know that to sell products through a website that you build, you will require the SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate. Having this certificate would mean that all your data from your website and sensitive information will be secured with them. Also, WP Engine provides this to their customers for free. Additionally, it also detects and scans malware daily. And they have a firewall that gets updated daily and helps in blocking threats and they perform repairing of any damage of your site for free, caused due to hacking of it somehow.

E-COMMERCE AND EMAIL MARKETING

WP Engine is only useful for WordPress users as they do not perform on other hosting platforms. Hence you have to plug into the CMS library and using its e-commerce tools. There, you can get your hands on some useful plug-ins from Shopify, WooCommerce, among other companies. Along with that, you get several marketing tools. Companies like Drip, DirectIQ, and Mailflow provide you with few plug-ins from WordPress that allow you to get leverage customers' email addresses for earning some amount.

PREMIUM WORDPRESS THEMES ARE AVAILABLE

Having recently acquired one of the most popular theme companies for WordPress, which is StudioPress, you can now choose from a wide variety of themes and interesting frameworks. Along with getting all 36+ premium StudioPress themes, you also get access to the famous Genesis framework. And subscribing to this premium theme section is free for all WP Engine customers (which must cost around $2000- and you get that for FREE).

ABSOLUTE GUARANTEE FOR MONEY BACK

People who avail of services from WP Engine to build their websites are provided with a period of generous 60 days for their money-back guarantee. After subscribing for one of the plans, within 60days you can cancel your account if you are not happy with the service they provide. With that, you get a full refund within a few days of canceling the account. However, this particular option is applied to the Personal, Professional, and Business plans only (not the Custom Plans).

WP ENGINE PERFORMANCE LEVEL

For this review, I had, yet again, personally held a series of tests to judge its performance level compared to others. I opened my WP Engine platform and created a dummy website and filled it with some matter. For your information (the beginners especially) I used the Twenty Seventeen theme (which is the default) for all this. Much like the Uptime results, the performance level was above average than its other competitors. Hence you can consider this as one of the other important factors to decide from.

ABOUT WP ENGINE SPEED

I tested this feature with the Pingdom tool, and all the effort was worth it. In a single go, my site is loaded within a second, and for a server located anywhere around the globe, it is considered super-fast. An analysis recorded that WP Engine's speed is, in fact, faster than 96% of all other sites. Well, there you go with another positive point to focus one.

CONCLUSION

Let us be practical and place the fact without sugar-coating it that WP Engine is not at all cheap. But even being pricey, it provides you a quality managed WordPress hosting platform. Doing business with WP Engine is like having an army of web host experts with you for managing and fixing issues and assuring a smooth performance. If your requirement is well optimized, uber-fast loading quality with a secured network, be ready to spend some hefty amount and make this useful investment. I personally am very happy with WP Engine's performance. It provides premium quality support for the price. The only problem I have faced so far is the inability of the functioning of IonCube on its new PHP 7. Other than that, everything else is fine. It is purely 'drama-free', unlike other hosts. To sum it up, everyone should try this web hosting at least once in their business time.