WP Engine Review – WordPress Hosting Surpercharged, or a Waste of Money?

With WordPress powering over twenty five.4% of internet sites within the world – and over seventy six.5 million blogs – there’s a high likelihood that you’re progressing to use WordPress for your web site at some purpose.

WP Engine could be a managed net host specifically for WordPress; it’s slightly completely different from ancient shared hosts as a result of it had been engineered and fine-tuned for WordPress – from the bottom up.

People have varied opinions concerning WP Engine: there’s a bunch that believe that it’s well well worth the cash, whereas another cluster believe it’s a waste of cash. Considering that their most cost-effective set up is $29 per month, and may simply go up to $249 per month, it will be tough deciding if WP Engine is that the net host for you. This review can ANswer your questions on WP Engine in an unbiased method that produces it simple for you to come to a decision.

A Quick Overview of WP Engine Hosting Plans

At the time of writing this, WP Engine has three main hosting plans. They are:

The Personal Plan: This is the cheapest plan, and it costs $29 per month. This plan limits you to one blog installation and 25,000 monthly visits. With this plan, you also have a limit of 10GB local storage.

The Professional Plan: This plan costs $99 per month and allows you to host 10 sites with a combined maximum of 100,000 monthly visits total. With this plan, you get 20GB local storage.

The Business Plan: This plan allows you to install up to 25 sites with a combined total of 400k monthly visits. It comes with a local storage limit of 30GB.

The “Personal,” “Professional,” and “Business” plans are hosted in a shared environment. For more advanced, dedicated plans you can email or call their support.

PROS OF USING WP ENGINE

Here are some of the advantages to using WP Engine:

Superfast Hosting: Users and critics alike, one issue everyone agrees concerning with WP Engine is that they're superfast. WP Engine is superfast for thus several reasons, as well as the following:

WP Engine stop users from putting in plugins which will be server hogs – plugins that use all server resource, therefore preventing your website from loading properly and quick – thus speed is sometimes warranted.
WP Engine is intended from scratch with WordPress in mind, so that they have the simplest configuration for quicker WordPress sites.
WP Engine includes CDN with their dearer plans. If you utilize their “Personal” set up, it'll value an additional $19.99 monthly to use a CDN.
WP Engine uses their own in-house, climbable EverCache technology to make sure your website stays on-line and quick throughout traffic spikes.
Built and Tweaked for WordPress: Constant website crashes, very slow websites, web site not functioning properly because of WordPress problems, etc? With WP Engine, you won’t expertise these issues. this can be as a result of WP Engine has been engineered and tweaked for WordPress, thus associate degree upgrade or tweak to your diary won’t crash your server. It conjointly ensures best performance for WordPress sites.

Strict Management, thus you'll forecast Quality Control: WP Engine is extremely strict concerning what happens to sites on their server, even to the extent of disallowing bound plugins that they believe can cause server issues. This policy protects your website from actions you'll take which will crash your server and from the actions of different WP Engine users.

Uptime: WP Engine is extremely reliable once it involves period of time, and plenty of folks testify to having 100 percent period of time with them.

Staging: one among WP Engine’s biggest blessings is their staging environment; this can be primarily a duplicate of your website that's not accessible to the final public. In WP Engine’s staging atmosphere, you'll install plugins, update themes, design your website, and tweak your settings to ascertain however things end up before rolling out the changes to your main website. this may stop lots of issues, as well as server crashes or your website not displaying properly because of changes you create.

Backups: WP Engine Offers instant duplicate and 1-click restore, creating it simple to duplicate and restore your website while not hassles.

Security: WP Engine is extremely secure, in the main as a result of they take regular backups of your website and do regular scans for malware. WP Engine conjointly uses SFTP -- rather than FTP – and that they can mechanically block any information processing that unsuccessfully tries to login to your website 3 times in a very row. WP Engine conjointly offers to mend your website for gratis if it's hacked.

Overage Pricing: whereas WP Engine is quite expensive as a result of they value supported the amount of holiday makers to your website, they remedy the restriction on the amount of visits on their plans with their old system. With WP Engine’s old evaluation, in contrast to with different hosts, your website won’t be mechanically force offline if you exceed the traffic limit. Instead, they’ll charge you old of $1 per additional one,000 guests over your limit, and that they can add it to your next bill.

Support: WP Engine offers support each via phone and email, similarly as via live chat from 6AM – 8PM CT. Their support is managed by WordPress specialists, thus it's reliable.

CONS OF USING WP ENGINE

Here are some of the downsides to using WP Engine, which you should consider before going with them:

WP Engine may be Restrictive: If you’re a standard WordPress user, a drag you would possibly have with WP Engine is their modification. a decent example of this in action is their “disallowed plugins policy.” typically, you must be able to install any of the thirty six,000+ plugins within the WordPress plugin repository on your web log, however it's against WP Engine policy to put in plugins that they believe conflict with a number of their solutions, that use lots of server resource, that send emails through WordPress, or that they believe might create your web log additional vulnerable. Here’s a full list of their disallowed plugins.

How guests square measure Tracked: a serious grievance that users have with WP Engine is however visits square measure half-tracked. This has been a really sensitive topic considering the very fact that WP Engine charges users supported the quantity of visits they get.

WP Engine visit pursuit isn’t too reliable, and you’ll typically notice that it doesn’t correlate with what common analytics services – Google Analytics, Clicky Analytics, etc. – track. this is often as a result of major analytics services track real visits to your web site, however WP Engine tracks each real visits and visits from bots. This was recently remedied once they proclaimed in Gregorian calendar month 2015 that they’ve stopped pursuit visits from bots, however this is often still value noting just in case you notice a small distinction between your analytics information and WP Engine’s traveller pursuit.

Very Expensive: WP Engine is incredibly expensive  compared to different solutions, particularly ancient shared hosts. Their least expensive set up permits just one web log and 25k visits monthly for $29. For the typical blogger, particularly somebody World Health Organization blogs as a hobby, this could be a pricey.

WP Engine will seem somewhat Technical if You’re accustomed cPanel: If your expertise has in the main been with shared hosts, you’ve possibly operated an internet site via cPanel. This won’t be the case with WP Engine, as they need their own special panel.

Lack of Email Hosting/Support: not like with shared hosts, WP Engine doesn't offer you with email support or webmail access. It additionally places a restriction on however your WordPress website may be accustomed send emails, however you'll be able to use Google Apps as a workaround to the present.