WP Engine is one of the popular Managed WordPress hosting provider. All details about it will be discussed here in this WP Engine review 2024. It provides 100% Managed WordPress hosting solution. They use the world class servers like Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS). It offers free SSL certificate, 10 free premium themes, free automated migration and daily backups with hosting. Best web hosting WP Engine is now offering 2 Months Free managed hosting for yearly payments.
Introduction
Are you looking for an advanced level hosting for your website, then I have a fantastic web hosting service for you. And that’s a WP engine. If you are an advanced blogger, this article will help you know all about this. As I’ll be talking about some of its features and why also it might be a good fit for your particular situation.
What is WP Engine?
If you are interested in developing your website, you’re probably aware that there are many hosting services available. And some of them range from very “BAD” to “EXCELLENT.”
And just from the start, I have to say that WP Engine falls on the excellent side of things. They have excellent features and a great reputation among enterprises, marketers, and developers.
It also has top-not security, tons of fantastic plugins, and seamless transition of installations from free to paid plans.
Now that’s not to say it’s completely perfect. There are some warnings if you are interested in WP Engine.
But keep on reading as I’m going to go into more details about what those features and benefits are and along with the warnings that I have mentioned.
You want your website to be safe and all of your user data to be protected. Well, if that’s something you’re concerned about, then you’ll appreciate Secure Socket Layer, a.k.a SSL.
SSL certificates guarantee the security of your customer data. And along with those SSL certificates, WP Engine also continuously updates its firewall and daily performs. I will like to say that if you are interested in WP Engine, this is more for the advanced users. You need to learn about this first before you go on using it.
But if you are willing to put your time in, their intensive amount of information can be your guide. Like checklists and a robust knowledge base that help you get started and settle any of those problems as you go along.
In terms of navigation, you will find everything super easy to navigate here. The dashboard is very responsive, and it makes it easy to get things done quickly.
If you have an existing WordPress website, this engine will let you move that pre-existing website with ease and a simple migration plug-in. And that optimates the entire process.
When you are developing a website, it’s essential to have reliable and efficient support. And this engine provides that to you.
First of all, there is no shortage of articles that are available online. If you have any questions, chances are you will be able to find all your answers there. But on top of that, there is support via email ticketing and live chat.
The ticketing support is available 24/7, and you can contact phone support. Even live chat is available for any of your help and needs.
These experts are fantastic at answering any of your questions and making sure that you get unstuck from whatever problem you are facing.
WP Engine Review: Plans & Pricing
Managed WordPress Hosting Pricing:
Plan | Price | Discounted Link |
---|---|---|
Startup | $25.00/month | Get Hosting |
Professional | $49.17/month | Get Hosting |
Growth | $95.83/month | Get Hosting |
Scale | $241.67/month | Get Hosting |
Ecommerce Hosting Pricing:
Plan | Price | Discounted Link |
---|---|---|
Startup | $30.00/month | Get Hosting |
Professional | $62.50/month | Get Hosting |
Growth | $116.67/month | Get Hosting |
Scale | $291.67/month | Get Hosting |
Hosting Packages of WP Engine
Now, as far as the prices are concerned, WP Engine has four hosting plans, and this is going to depend on your particular needs and what level of development you are looking at or getting into.
These plans include Startup, Growth, and Scale
Startup
The startup plan is suitable for a smaller blog or a small website that gets you to one website with three environments. It’ll support up to 25,000 visitors a month. And it has 50 gigs of bandwidth. Amazingly, at no extra cost, you can also get CDN and SSL.
So if you are familiar with hosting and you need to create only one website. Then this $25 startup plan is just perfect for you. The tools will manage your website like a professional and remove manual labor and room for error.
Growth
Now in terms of the growth plan for $95 a month, it is not worth it. The reason is it allows you to host ten websites, and in theory, it should work great for freelancers and small agencies.
But the reality, however, is that there’s a significant downside. You barely get any resources to work with. On the other hand, while working with the Starter plan, 10GB storage for one website. However, with the growth plan, you get ten times the amount of websites but only two times the amount of storage.
So just 20GB of storage space shared between 10 websites is simply not enough. On average, this will allow you to create websites that take up around 2GB of space. But here’s the problem. An empty WordPress website already takes up from 500 megabytes to 1 gigabyte.
You simply don’t have enough flexibility if you want to create something useful.
Scale
Suppose you are planning to get WP Engine as a freelancer and or an agency. Your best option is to buy the Scale plan or the above. Because with the scale plan, you get 30 websites to host as a business, and you get enough space that is 50GB of storage and 50GB of bandwidth to comfortably share the resources between all 30 websites.
While the $250 a month “Price Tag” might seem insane and honestly, it is if you host one website. But if you look carefully, it’s cheap once you start to scale.
Suppose you are hosting 20 to 30 websites that are around $10 per month per website. And you’re also getting top-of-the-line performance, so your clients won’t be disappointed.
I would say that’s quite a good deal according to the performance.
You need to know that WP Engine doesn’t allow you to buy a domain name. And you don’t get a domain name with any of their plans doesn’t even matter if you even spend $100 or $1000. This shows that this engine isn’t beginner-friendly since you need to buy a domain name elsewhere and then connect it to your WP Engine account.
What To Expect?
It’s a super clean and straightforward design. Creating and managing your sites is also quite an easy task. Simply click the add site button, type in the name you want to assign to the site, and select which group it belongs to. And this grouping tool shows that WP Engine is positioning itself as a service to create different groups for different clients or niches. Think of them as folders where you can put other websites in so you don’t lose track of which websites belong to whom.
Once you are done filling in all of the information, your website will be created automatically. It will have a temporary domain name, for example, ‘xyz.wpegine.com.”
And you will be able to access the WordPress dashboard right away.
Keep in mind that WP Engine, as the name would suggest, only allows you to use WordPress, but it’s a modded version of WordPress which comes with some “Quirks.” For instance, you simply can’t install some plugins because they conflict with the internal systems of WP Engine. It’s not a big deal, and it’s more to keep your site as fast as possible and reduce the risk of failure. These mostly include caching, backup, and email management plugins.
But why do these plans cost $25 per month for just a single website? What are they doing so special that shared web hosting plans getting three separate work environments?
- The live version of your website is called the “ Production.” This is basically what the user sees at all times.
- Then you get the “Staging” website; it’s a copy of your production site. Users don’t see this site. But since it’s a copy, you can test any changes you make here before going live. If something is wrong, you would know beforehand.
- And then there’s the “development environment” where you are making all of the changes. This allows you to work with multiple versions and multiple iterations of your website at the same time.
In contrast, you make all of the changes to the development environment. Then you test those changes on the staging environment. If everything goes well, then you move that to the live version.
Why Should You Use WP Engine?
To get a general idea of how well these $25 per month plans perform. We first need a baseline to compare it to. So I’ve used my A2 Hosting and SIteGround shared web hosting plans. That costs a bit less than the WP Engine, around $15 per month on average.
I have tested the same design on SiteGround, A2 Hosting, and WP Engine by creating demo sites.
SiteGround Vs A2 Hosting Vs WP Engine
SiteGround loaded this site in around 1.8 seconds. A2 Hosting was pretty much the same, coming in at 1.9 seconds. However, WP Engine managed to load this site in 1.4 seconds.
0.4 seconds might not seem like all that big of a difference. But trust me, it’s a big difference!! It’s 22% faster, and that’s with absolutely no users on my website at all. Suppose we would scale the website up to thousands of users, the 0.4% second difference scales together with the user account. So it’s a big deal!!
WordPress Engine manages to offer better performance than shared web hosting plans, even expensive ones in this case. Simply because you’re not sharing resources with other users, you are getting the better, more consistent website performance for a similar cost that the top web hosting plans charge.
Just for fun, I have also sent some bots to my websites to see how well it handles stress. To be exact, I have sent 50 bots for 5 minutes to see if any slowdown happens during the period.
To my surprise, a slowdown did happen, and honestly, I wasn’t expecting this at all. According to the tool that I have been using at the 50 users, my website started to experience issues. Minimal, but still noticeable. This shows that at least the cheapest plan is evaluated quite accurately. And does perform best if you’re getting less than 25,000 monthly visits.
I’ll be the first one to admit that 50 users don’t seem like a significant number. But it’s larger than you would expect because this is 50 users at the same time. You need to keep in mind that users usually stay on your website for seconds or minutes at a time. So, keeping up constant 50 users on your website for all 24 hours. While users keep leaving after like 10 or 15 seconds, it’s quite a significant accomplishment; it needs hundreds of thousands of visits per month at least to keep these numbers.
One extremely important feature when it comes to performance is choosing the physical location of the server where your website files are being stored. WP Engine has servers all over the world. Seven places, to be exact!!
Having your website files stored closer to your users will reduce the distance the information needs to travel. And will load your site faster for that user. And this isn’t some noticeable speed increase. Sometimes having the server in the right location can mean seconds shaved of loading speeds.
Extra Features
Now, I’ll be talking about the juicy features of why you should buy this engine for $400 annually. And I will also be saying whether they are necessary or good enough for you!!
The GES or Global Edge Security is mainly used to reroute and sort traffic and defend against DDoS attacks.
A DDoS attack is when someone sends many bots to your site to make thousands of requests per second—effectively draining your website resources. So it either starts loading incredibly slow or crashes altogether.
So, remember in the above how I previously ran into issues with 50 bots on my website at the same time?
Well, just imagine that a billion times worse!!! Because these attacks can last for days, and you’re getting hundreds of thousands of requests on your website every single millisecond!!! And the worst part; they are not even that hard to do. Anyone can easily mess with your website.
Global Edge Security makes sure this doesn’t happen by blocking bots, changing your IP addresses using a firewall to sort through real traffic and fake traffic.
Is it mandatory?
Not unless you are running a profitable website. Competitors and ransom seekers all have the ability to take a crack at your site. Such extra security tools like these are highly recommended if you are running a profitable website.
The other tool that you can purchase is called the “ Smart Plugin Manager.” This effectively works as an auto-updater for your site. It takes care of all the updates for your site automatically. But if you have only one site, then this tool is not worth your money.
WP Engine Reviews
Company | Review |
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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- Is WP Engine the same as WordPress?
WP Engine is a WordPress web hosting. They offer managed plans that are optimized for the platform. It’s evident if you are looking for cheap plans, then WP Engine is not an idle option for you. So you need to know about this software before you go for purchase.
- How does WP Engine work?
This is a top web host category and is preferred by many users. Managed hosting simply means the company looks at all of your website security. But cheap or shared hosting can keep you hanging mostly when you get a lot of traffic, or someone tries to hack your website.
- Is WP Engine good?
WP Engine is one of the best option you can have. And it indeed is helpful to many users. The reason it’s so popularity, is it’s handy for advanced bloggers who want to develop and enhance their websites. But always make sure that you know thoroughly about the prices before you move on purchasing, as these don’t come in cheap.
- Is WP Engine free?
You’ll get four months of free hosting. But then you have to choose a price plan for your desired website. The prices vary depending on the type of plan you choose.
- How many employees do they have?
They have approximately 900 employees as this is one of the leading companies. So, there are highly qualified workers who are there 24/7 to provide you with assistance. Moreover, they are highly reliable and will provide you with the genuine pieces of information you need.
- What happens if I go over my monthly limits?
You will have to pay between $1-2 per extra 1,000 visits. The value depends on your plan and on how much you go over our limit. Suppose, you’re often going over the limit. In that case, unfortunately, there is no other choice but to upgrade to the next tier, and you can’t purchase more traffic in advance, for example, when anticipating a big seasonal spike.
- Is it possible to cancel my plan?
Yes, definitely. It’s effortless to cancel your plan as you will get a 60 days money-back guarantee. Moreover, it’s not that complicated to cancel your plan as their priority is customer satisfaction!
- Is WP Engine worth it?
Yes, it’s one of the best you can get. The services they provide are authentic and highly beneficial. However, it’s highly recommended for those who are advanced bloggers. But if you are freshers, then you should go Hostinger instead of it this at the beginning.
How to Buy Hosting on WP Engine?
- First go to WPEngine.com and click on “Get started“.
- Select a hosting plan you like ($25 is cheapest).
- Choose a domain if you want to register new.
- Check all the package details and make payment.
- Create account with Name, Email and Password.
WP Engine Support
WP Engine has 24×7 customer support and live chat facility. A dedicated team always ready to provide instant support to the users when they need.
WP Engine Review: Final Words
There are a lot of cheap hosts available that can provide you with decent services. But if you are looking for a high functioning and reliable service, WordPress Engine can be one of the best options for you.
This provides impressive speed, security and is perfect for advanced users. So you really shouldn’t be having any issues regarding this engine.
If you like this WP Engine review 2024, please share it on Facebook and Twitter. And if you are a WP Engine user, please leave a comment in below telling what is the good side of this hosting provider. Get 2 months free hosting on WP Engine.
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