WP Engine Review – Should You Buy This WordPress Hosting or Not?

If you are a WordPress user like me; then it’s obvious to wonder of at least 1 hosting company that can offer top notch speed, scalability, security and support for all your WordPress needs so that you can invest most of your time and mind in generating content for your readers rather than troubleshooting your hosting servers and worrying about its issues. If you are wondering how? Then let me take you to a journey with WP Engine Review.

Introduction

Although WP Engine is a relatively modish company that offers fully managed WordPress hosting solutions but it has still managed to grow hurriedly and currently hosts more than 75 million WordPress sites. Yes, those lavish huge numbers have been consummated by this vogue company in just 1 year. WP Engine has also been able to pick and host some high profile sites including WPMU, WP101, Soundcloud.com. The company also received an investment of 1.2 million USD from the founders of WordPress itself.

Alright, enough of the accolade. It’s time for us to dig deep and find some answers to our WP Engine review including:

• What benefits it can provide to the customers like us?
• Does it have any drawbacks?
• How are its customers feeling after using its services.
• And finally – Should we buy it or not?

WP Engine Hosting – Benefits?

Rocket Fast Speed - The most important features that WP Engine lives by being their ability to double your site’s speed and reduce response time. And of course company stands tall in this.

While checking their customers’ sites I found that their response time was relatively less compared to other sites and navigating from one page to another was a breeze. This has been made possible by the company’s own in house cache system – EverCache. EverCache is WP Engine’s secret cache system that makes every WordPress site incredibly fast and scalable. Here is a screenshot of what 1 of their customers shared on their Facebook wall.

It would be wise to say that:

WordPress Site becomes 988 Horsepower with 1-cylinder WP Engine.

Staging Area – Well this one is my favorite. It’s the option which no other hosting provider provides you till now. With staging area you can actually test and try your new plugins and themes or even edit your PHP code files without deploying it on your live site. Thus eliminating all chances of site crashing and code breaking. The staging area creates a duplicate copy of your original site on a subdomain which you can use to test your code live but separated from your original site. Your real site never gets affected.

Assistance in Site Migration – If you already have a WordPress site running, you can request for the migration assistance and let the WP Engine team handles the headache of your website file transfers. Although the service is not free and may cost you a few bucks.

Besides the above benefits, there are some other benedictions too that are common with all major hosting providers including unlimited bandwidth, daily backups, firewall, malware scanning, money back guarantee and few more.

WP Engine Hosting – Drawbacks?

No 24 X 7 Support - I left my first host Godaddy only for this single reason. Whenever I faced issues with Godaddy, I have to write an email and then wait for the next 4 hours to seek a support reply. What if your site goes down? You can’t afford to write an email and keep yourself waiting. You need some support guy at that very moment to look into the matter and bring your site live. Yes, WP Engine does provide Email and Telephonic support but again its not 24 X7 and  not on the weekends too. And this is what happens when you don’t have a 24 X 7 support:

No Email Hosting – With no email hosting, I mean to say that you need to use some external email provider for your emails like Google Apps or Zoho Mail. Well this is not much of an issue for me as I personally use Google Apps for all my sites. But if you don’t want to spend extra money on emails, this could be considerable.  Of course you can try a free service like gmail or hotmail as a free alternative if branding is not much of an issue for you. The bottom line is there is no webmail bundled with WP Engine.

Excluded Plugins – WP Engine has a list of few popular banned plugins that you cannot use when hosted with them. This includes W3 Total Cache, Broken Link Checker, Backup Buddy, YARPP. While W3 Total Cache is not required as WP Engine provides in house caching methodology. Last three are banned as these plugins impacts your site’s performance the way they index your site .

Pricing

WP Engine currently offers 4 different packages as per your need. Well you might read at other WP Engine Review posts that the pricing of WP Engine is pretty costly but I distinctly deny this. I think it’s pretty reasonable.

The speed that WP Engine claims to provide to your website is otherwise only achievable if you are on a VPS. And if you compare the VPS starters of some other top companies, their VPS plans start at above $20. The fully managed VPS from top companies – Inmotion Hosting and Hostgator costs you around $29.00 and $39.00 respectively. So there is hardly any difference in the price structure.

The only catch is while the other VPS allows you to host many sites whereas WP Engine allows you to host only 1 site.

Know More about Pricing and Plans here.

What Customers Are Saying?

Now I have told you its benefits, its drawbacks and its price as well. Why not look at any of the other reviews and testimonials of its few major customers.

There’s loads of options out there and my business partner and I tested several of the key players in the market. Ultimately we went with WP Engine. ~ WPMU.ORG

After hosting several high traffic WordPress sites it’s a relief to come to WP Engine. ~ SOUNDCLOUD.COM

You can check out more testimonials and reviews about WP Engine here.

WP Engine Alternatives

After reading this WP Engine Review; Incase, you are unable to make up your mind to go with WP Engine Hosting, you can check out my other post about: Best Web Hosting Services Providers 2013.

Conclusion

Well, alone I don’t fit in a position to conclude anything. It’s up to all readers and users to decide and rate and review WP Engine. Although I feel the need of 24 X 7 customer support and email hosting should have been there and should be included ASAP.

Another quick recommendation for WordPress beginners, new WordPress users or multiple sites with little traffic; I would suggest to grab some cheap plans from Inmotion Hosting or Bluehost.

You can grab a ticket of WP Engine if:

• Money is not an issue for you.
• 24X7 Support is not a concern for you.
• 100% Uptime is your top-priority.
• Fast response time is must for you.

If you find yourself adequate with all the above options, site speed is your top concern, then you should unmistakably buy WP Engine Hosting. WP Engine should be your first choice. Don’t wait any moment. Go grab it right away.

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