WP Engine is a relatively young hosting company, founded in 2010. It’s based out of Austin, Texas, and it was started by Jason Cohen. He now serves as the company’s CTO.
The company offers managed hosting plans for any number of WordPress installs.
WP Engine Plans
WP Engine’s pricing model is slightly different to competing shared hosting providers. It’s based on a combination of factors: the number of WordPress instances, the number of visits per month, and the amount of disk space you need. All plans, except the Premium and Dedicated packages, are based on a shared hosting infrastructure in a Xen virtualized environment.
The Personal plan covers one install, the Professional plan lets you create 10, and the Business plan has capacity for 25. If you need more than 26 installs, WP Engine will discuss a custom pricing for its Premium or Enterprise plans. A CDN is included with all plans except the Personal tier.
These plans assume that your usage is average for the size of your site. If you experience a traffic spike, or your site is very popular, you may need to pay more for additional monthly visits. WP Engine says that one IP address in one 24-hour period is a “unique” visit, and that’s how your bills are calculated. Bandwidth on all plans is unmetered. You won’t get a traditional control panel like cPanel, and there’s no root or SSH access. Instead, you get a web dashboard with access to account controls and phpMyAdmin.
WordPress Features
Because WP Engine is a WordPress-only host, it’s able to offer specialized hosting features that are not always offered by rival hosts. It provides extra control and a degree of automation, without changing the experience for your visitors.
WP Engine gives you a tool to create snapshot backups, which is handy when trying a new plugin or theme. WP Engine also takes its own daily backups, and adds its own menus to the WordPress admin section. All plans include the ability to spawn a staging site, so you can work on a clone of your live site, and then set the clone live if you’re happy with the changes. This avoids messing up your live site if you’re testing something out.
The dashboard supports transferable installs, so you can move a finished site to someone else’s account. This feature is designed for web developers who need to push completed sites to their clients’ WP Engine accounts.
WP Engine does not provide free migrations with new signups, but it does have an automated WordPress importer plugin. This does a good job of transferring content from another server.
Finally, note that WP Engine does prohibit some plugins on its servers. You can ask support if you want to check that all of your plugins are allowed.
Infrastructure and Datacenters
WP Engine’s datacenters are located in the USA, the UK, Belgium, Ireland, and Asia. You can choose the datacenter closest to you and your customers for the fastest page load times.
The host also has its own caching plugin, Evercache, which it claims will load WordPress content 4-6 times faster than rival hosts. Its CDN — available on all but the cheapest plan — is provided by NetDNA.
One quirk of WP Engine is that it prefers customers to point CNAME records at its WP Engine domains, rather than changing nameservers. It recommends that you use CloudFlare for your DNS, as it support CNAME flattening.
If you need help, WP Engine offers support by live chat, phone, and ticket, although the ticket system is more difficult to locate. It also has a library of help documentation to cover frequently asked questions.
Uptime and Money-Back Promises
WP Engine provides a 60-day money-back guarantee. This guarantee applies to core services, and not additional services like domain names or paid migration.
It’s important to remember that other hosts are unlikely to help you to move away from WP Engine, so you’ll need to do this manually if you decide not to continue with its service. You will need to obtain your site backup file, adjust the file structure, and replace some core files. This isn’t a tough job, but just something to bear in mind.
The company guarantees 99.95% service availability. It offers a 5% credit for downtime exceeding 0.05%, providing the customer writes in within 30 days.
Summary
WordPress is one of the most powerful CMS applications on the planet, and has earned its place as the web’s favorite blogging platform. WP Engine takes some of the headache out of using WordPress in a business or corporate context. Jason Cohen believes that WP Engine has been instrumental in promoting WordPress as an enterprise platform, and that is probably why. It handles updates, caching, security, and backups, so you can get on with important business tasks instead.
Remember that migrating out can be trickier than usual, and make sure your site doesn’t rely on any prohibited plugins. For the fully-managed WordPress experience, WP Engine is by far the biggest and best known host out there today.
WP Engine Introduction
WP Engine is a relatively young hosting company, founded in 2010. It’s based out of Austin, Texas, and it was started by Jason Cohen. He now serves as the company’s CTO.
The company offers managed hosting plans for any number of WordPress installs.
WP Engine Plans
WP Engine’s pricing model is slightly different to competing shared hosting providers. It’s based on a combination of factors: the number of WordPress instances, the number of visits per month, and the amount of disk space you need. All plans, except the Premium and Dedicated packages, are based on a shared hosting infrastructure in a Xen virtualized environment.
The Personal plan covers one install, the Professional plan lets you create 10, and the Business plan has capacity for 25. If you need more than 26 installs, WP Engine will discuss a custom pricing for its Premium or Enterprise plans. A CDN is included with all plans except the Personal tier.
These plans assume that your usage is average for the size of your site. If you experience a traffic spike, or your site is very popular, you may need to pay more for additional monthly visits. WP Engine says that one IP address in one 24-hour period is a “unique” visit, and that’s how your bills are calculated. Bandwidth on all plans is unmetered. You won’t get a traditional control panel like cPanel, and there’s no root or SSH access. Instead, you get a web dashboard with access to account controls and phpMyAdmin.
WordPress Features
Because WP Engine is a WordPress-only host, it’s able to offer specialized hosting features that are not always offered by rival hosts. It provides extra control and a degree of automation, without changing the experience for your visitors.
WP Engine gives you a tool to create snapshot backups, which is handy when trying a new plugin or theme. WP Engine also takes its own daily backups, and adds its own menus to the WordPress admin section. All plans include the ability to spawn a staging site, so you can work on a clone of your live site, and then set the clone live if you’re happy with the changes. This avoids messing up your live site if you’re testing something out.
The dashboard supports transferable installs, so you can move a finished site to someone else’s account. This feature is designed for web developers who need to push completed sites to their clients’ WP Engine accounts.
WP Engine does not provide free migrations with new signups, but it does have an automated WordPress importer plugin. This does a good job of transferring content from another server.
Finally, note that WP Engine does prohibit some plugins on its servers. You can ask support if you want to check that all of your plugins are allowed.
Infrastructure and Datacenters
WP Engine’s datacenters are located in the USA, the UK, Belgium, Ireland, and Asia. You can choose the datacenter closest to you and your customers for the fastest page load times.
The host also has its own caching plugin, Evercache, which it claims will load WordPress content 4-6 times faster than rival hosts. Its CDN — available on all but the cheapest plan — is provided by NetDNA.
One quirk of WP Engine is that it prefers customers to point CNAME records at its WP Engine domains, rather than changing nameservers. It recommends that you use CloudFlare for your DNS, as it support CNAME flattening.
If you need help, WP Engine offers support by live chat, phone, and ticket, although the ticket system is more difficult to locate. It also has a library of help documentation to cover frequently asked questions.
Uptime and Money-Back Promises
WP Engine provides a 60-day money-back guarantee. This guarantee applies to core services, and not additional services like domain names or paid migration.
It’s important to remember that other hosts are unlikely to help you to move away from WP Engine, so you’ll need to do this manually if you decide not to continue with its service. You will need to obtain your site backup file, adjust the file structure, and replace some core files. This isn’t a tough job, but just something to bear in mind.
The company guarantees 99.95% service availability. It offers a 5% credit for downtime exceeding 0.05%, providing the customer writes in within 30 days.
Summary
WordPress is one of the most powerful CMS applications on the planet, and has earned its place as the web’s favorite blogging platform. WP Engine takes some of the headache out of using WordPress in a business or corporate context. Jason Cohen believes that WP Engine has been instrumental in promoting WordPress as an enterprise platform, and that is probably why. It handles updates, caching, security, and backups, so you can get on with important business tasks instead.
Remember that migrating out can be trickier than usual, and make sure your site doesn’t rely on any prohibited plugins. For the fully-managed WordPress experience, WP Engine is by far the biggest and best known host out there today.