The best hosting for WordPress
Finding the best web hosting provider for your website can be difficult.
But if you are an experienced WordPress user, it will be much easier for you to narrow down your choicesWP Engine should be on your list of web hosting options to consider.
In fact, WP Engine is prominently featured on my list of the best web hosting for WordPress. It is the hosting provider we use here at Quick Sprout, and we are very satisfied with it.
Visit the WP engine
Normally $30 per month
Monthly pricing
Free domain and SSL certificate
30-day money-back guarantee
4 months free or 20% off
People who want reliability and quality service go to WP Engine..
"I have reviewed all the different options of the WP Engine plan. I will also explain why WP Engine stands out as one of the best web hosting providers, and I will also address potential drawbacks."
The benefits of using WP engine web hosting
Using WP Engine as a hosting provider definitely has its advantages. I have identified and explained below the main benefits of signing up for one of their hosting plans.
Risk-free trial
Let's be honest: the WP engine is expensive compared to its competitors.
To get the best possible rate, you must commit to an annual contract. Some of you may hesitate to commit for such a long time at a high rate.
Fortunately, WP Engine offers a risk-free 60-day period for its hosting plans. If you are not satisfied with the service, you can unsubscribe and get a refund.
60 days is twice the standard warranty for most providers in the hosting industry.
Furthermore, the fact that WP Engine offers this option is a testament to how they perceive their services. They wouldn't offer it if they didn't think you would be satisfied. That's reason enough to give them a chance to try.
Transparent pricing
I like the fact that WP Engine's pricing is simple and transparent. The same cannot be said for the majority of web hosting providers in the industry.
It is quite common for hosting providers to advertise very low rates, but only apply them to 36 or 48-month contracts paid in full. Upon expiration of these contracts, renewal rates double, triple, or even quadruple.
WP Engine does not do that.
The monthly contracts remain at the same price even after the expiration of your first contract. You can get two months free if you pay in advance for a year, but they will never obligate you to commit for longer.
An exceptional service
As a managed WordPress hosting provider, WP Engine truly stands out from the competition in terms of service. In my opinion, this more than justifies the cost.
You won't have to do anything except manage your website. The WP Engine team will take care of everything at the server level, including security.
WP Engine has hundreds of employees in its support team as well as in its awareness and development team. Other providers with less than 30 employees simply cannot reach this level of technical support.
You will never have to worry about updates, security, your technical stack, or server optimization. All of this is managed for you.
The 24/7 live chat with every plan is also a huge bonus. 24/7 phone support is also free for all packages, except for the "Startup" option.
As a WP Engine customer, I have been impressed by the quick and knowledgeable responses I have received every time I have contacted the support team.
Good performance
As impressive as the features and bonuses may be, a hosting provider is useless if the performance of your website is lacking. This is definitely not an area where WP Engine fails to meet expectations.
Each plan comes with more than enough resources to adapt to the size and traffic volume of websites. This results in high availability rates and extremely fast loading speeds.
As their hosting solutions are designed for WordPress, everything is optimized for maximum performance. Other hosting providers that offer one-size-fits-all hosting for any CMS cannot be as effective in this area.
Security
WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world. This means that WordPress sites are vulnerable to attacks. In fact, in 2019, 90% of all hacked sites were running on WordPress. This figure is up from 83% in 2018.
But WP Engine goes the extra mile to protect your site at all levels. They block over 150 million attacks per day.
One of the reasons why WordPress sites are hacked is because their software is not up to date. You won't have to worry about manually maintaining these updates. WP Engine will take care of them for you to ensure that old software does not make your site a target for malware.
Designed for developers
The WP engine has tools and resources that allow developers to easily host a website. They enable easy and automated one-click configuration for faster deployment.
You will also benefit from an integrated DevKit for the WordPress framework. This results in smoother launches and easier maintenance.
Access to the SSH gateway
Genesis Framework
Reusable dynamic content blocks
Over 35 premium themes for WordPress
Third-party tools for building and debugging
Deployments "push and pull
These are just a few of the specific benefits provided to developers by WP Engine.
Other considerations
The WP engine is not perfect. So, before signing up for any of the hosting plans we talked about earlier, there are some disadvantages and other considerations that you need to keep in mind.
Not for beginners
I do not recommend WP Engine if you are new to web hosting or WordPress. If this is the first website you are launching from scratch, you should look elsewhere.
For the price, you can do better with another provider. But WP Engine certainly isn't trying to please everyone with its pricing structure.
This hosting provider is designed for professionals and experienced webmasters. The tools and benefits it offers to developers are worth it if you know what you're doing and how to use them.
Established businesses running on WordPress should consider switching to WP Engine if they are not satisfied with their current hosting plans.
High entrance fee
As I have already mentioned several times throughout this study, WP Engine has high prices compared to the competition.
Starting at $30 per month, entry-level plans are ten times higher than some of the other hosting options available. If this is not within your price range, you can check out my guide on the best cheap hosting options to find another provider.
That being said, it is worth mentioning again that WP Engine does not increase its prices when renewing your contract. If you compare entry-level plans, the price may not seem significantly higher when you take into account renewal fees and hidden fees charged by other hosting providers.
However, once you have surpassed the Starter plan, the prices are not even comparable to those of other shared web hosting options. The WP engine is expensive.
Specific to WordPress
This should be clear enough, but I had to mention it to avoid any confusion.
If you do not use WordPress, you cannot consider using WP Engine as a host. This alienates anyone who uses a different CMS to manage their website.
Excess fees
I briefly mentioned it earlier, but I want to talk about it in more detail. WP engine plans have traffic limits.
Normally, a hosting provider will give you an approximate indication of the amount of traffic your plan can handle. If you exceed this number, it will have an impact on the performance of your website.
But WP Engine takes a different approach. Instead of reducing your website's resources to harm your performance, it simply makes you pay an extra fee for exceeding your limits. Depending on your plan, you will pay an additional fee of 1 to 2 dollars for every 1,000 monthly visits to your site that exceed your limit.
This can be costly, considering the drastic jumps in traffic limits between plans.
For example, let's say you are on the growth plan, paying $115 per month for a maximum of 100,000 monthly visits. As your business grows, you may start receiving 200,000 visits per month, which would cost you an additional $200 per month. At this point, it would be more cost-effective to upgrade your plan, even if you haven't yet reached the limit of 400,000 visits for the next level.
The structure of these overage fees could force you to upgrade to a higher plan from the start to avoid these additional charges.
Compare web hosting plans from WP engine
WP Engine offers you four hosting plans:
New business venture
Growth
Scale
Personalization
All plans include over 35 StudioPress themes, 24/7 chat support, free site transfers, an SSL certificate, and a global CDN. Below is a detailed review of each offer, including price, features, and benefits.
Startup
The Startup hosting plan is ideal for a blog or a small website. It includes all the basic hosting features you should need to accommodate up to 25,000 visits per month.
The starting rate is $30 per month. But if you pay in advance and sign up for an annual contract, you will receive two months free.
Your website will have 10 GB of local storage and 50 GB of bandwidth per month. This is quite good when compared to other entry-level hosting plans on the market.
This is a basic plan with a simple pricing, but WP Engine gives you the option to add some additional features during the payment process.
Although they may seem appealing, you can ignore them. I really can't justify the extra costs for a entry-level plan. A small personal blog with less than 25,000 visitors will not need these supplements to function properly.
If you have to start something, improving the security of the website would be my only recommendation.
Growth
We see a significant increase in prices between the Starter plan and the Growth plan. But you will also benefit from many additional resources.
The growth plan starts at $115 per month.
It includes hosting for 10 WordPress sites, 100,000 monthly visits, 20 GB of storage, and 200 GB of monthly bandwidth. These features make the growth plan an attractive option for expanding businesses.
Another major difference between the Startup plan and the Growth plan is the level of customer support. With the Startup plan, you are limited to 24/7 live support (although this still applies to a basic hosting plan).
But growth also comes with 24/7 phone support. This is a huge advantage for those of you who prefer to call and speak to an agent rather than chat online.
Even if you only expect 40,000 or 50,000 visitors per month, you will need to upgrade to the growth plan. WP Engine charges additional fees for exceeding monthly traffic limits, but we will discuss this in more detail later.
Scale
As its name suggests, the Scale plan is intended for websites that have exceeded the limits of other plans.
For $290 per month, your plan can accommodate 400,000 visitors per month. You also get 30 GB of storage, 400 GB of bandwidth, and hosting for 15 websites.
These resources are sufficient to ensure the proper functioning of your site, even in the event of an increase in the number of visitors and a rise in traffic.
The features of the Scale plan are actually quite comparable to those of the Growth plan. The main difference lies in the ability to handle more traffic and the additional resources needed to support it.
This plan is ideal for large websites and WordPress users who want to host multiple sites on one plan.
Personalization
WP Engine offers custom plans for business websites. With up to 1TB of local storage and over 400GB of bandwidth per month, custom plans can accommodate millions of monthly visits to your site.
Here is a side-by-side comparison of the plans to give you a perspective.
As you can imagine, only a small percentage of websites would be interested in the personalized plan.
For a higher price, the plan comes with some free add-ons that are normally paid add-ons for other plans. These add-ons include WordPress multisite, GeoTarget, and content performance.
To obtain pricing for customized pricing solutions, you will need to contact a WP Engine sales specialist. They will handle the details with you to determine the resources your website needs.
Conclusion
WP Engine is arguably the best managed WordPress hosting provider on the market today. Although it may not be for everyone.
I only recommend WP Engine to advanced WordPress users and professionals. The high entry price is not worth it for new sites or small sites.
I would only consider using the WP engine if you were willing to sign up for the growth or scale plans. The Startup plan is probably too basic to meet your needs.
In terms of service, it is difficult to find other providers that match the level of excellence set by WP Engine. As a satisfied customer of WP Engine, I am happy to also recommend this hosting provider to you.
Normally $30 per month
Monthly pricing
Free domain and SSL certificate
30-day money-back guarantee
4 months free or 20% off