VPS/Cloud hosting is of two types – managed and unmanaged. Managed hosting is suitable for people who are running a money generating website or for people who want to provide a top-notch website browsing experience to their clients. Unmanaged hosting is ideal for developers or companies who have employees with technical expertise.
WP Engine is one of the best-managed WordPress hosting service providers in the world. Although the company was founded in the 2010s, it has managed to get over 500K customers in less than a decade.
Review
Technologies
WP Engine uses the reliable infrastructure of Amazon and Linode. AWS and Linode have several data centers across the world. AWS is used by some of the largest internet corporations. Linode powers 100s of high traffic sites. The servers of Linode and AWS have a great uptime of over 99%. Their network infrastructure is robust and reliable.
Servers under the control of WP Engine are powered by PHP 7.0, Intel/AMD processors, etc. WPE lets users enable an SSL certificate for their website with a single click. Once you enable HTTPS, WPE will serve your site over the HTTP 2.0 protocol. When the SSL certificate is about to expire, it will be renewed automatically.
WP Engine monitors website traffic. If anything suspicious is detected, they’ll block the attack. If you’re running a company, you can prevent your employees from accessing certain features of the dashboard. WPE also allows you to turn on Two Factor Authentication.
Why WP Engine when you can host your website on Linode or AWS?
Linode and AWS provide unmanaged hosting services. You’re given a password and username to log in to the server via a terminal or command prompt. You must install/configure DBMS, web server, application service, firewall, etc manually in command line mode.
Getting started with WP Engine
WP Engine provides the following plans:
Startup: This plan is suitable for WordPress sites that get up to 25K visitors every month. It allows only 1 website and the bandwidth the site can use is 50GB. The Startup plan costs $30/month.
Growth: The WP Engine Growth plan supports 5 websites and it costs $115 per month. The bandwidth is restricted to 200GB. Sign up for this plan if your sites get up to 100K visitors every month (overall).
Scale: This Scale plan of WP Engine enables you to host up to 15 websites that receive 400K visitors overall. The total bandwidth your sites can use is 400GB. It costs $290/month.
Note: If your site gets more traffic than the limit of your web hosting plan, you’ll be charged extra money. Once you buy one of the above hosting plans, log in to your dashboard to enjoy the following features:
Migration
WP Engine provides a plugin through which you can move your sites to WP Engine quickly. This plugin asks you to enter your server’s SFTP username, password, and IP address. You can generate the SFTP user and password through the dashboard.
Free StudioPress themes
StudioPress, one of the leading WordPress theme development firms has partnered with WP Engine. They are providing 35+ premium themes free of cost to the users of the WPE hosting. A single theme costs 59 to 100 USD. If you’re using WP Engine, you only have to pay the hosting expenses.
Environments
WP Engine offers three environments with each of its managed hosting plans – development, production, and staging. The development environment is ideal for testing the theme/plugin before you install and enable it on a live website. The staging environment allows you to preview the changes you or the plugin has made to the site. It is similar to the development environment.
Backup and updates
While updating a plugin or a theme, the database might get corrupted or you may lose some important settings. To prevent data loss, you should back up the site data before updating the WP core, theme, or plugin.
To back up the data, you can either run a MySQL command or use a plugin. The disadvantage of using a plugin is that you won’t be able to restore data if the site has crashed after a failed update. WP Engine automatically backs up your website every day. It also allows you to restore your data.
WP Engine staff will update WP core whenever an update is available. They’ll test the update on a testing server before running it on the production servers.
Click here to get 20% off and 4 months free hosting on buying the yearly WP Engine plan
CDN
Content Delivery Networks speed up your website by serving static content such as JavaScript, CSS files from a server nearest to the visitor. WPE allows users to turn on the MaxCDN service for their sites. MaxCDN is one of the most popular CDN services. It has Points Of Presence in America, Asia, and Europe.
Do you have to pay extra money to use this service?
No, the CDN cost is inclusive of the hosting plans offered by WPE.
What happens when you active CDN?
Your site will load faster.
Multisite support
Enabling WordPress multisite feature manually is not an easy thing to do. WP Engine dashboard boasts an option to set up WP multisite on a server with a single click. When you enable multisite, a single WordPress installation will power all your websites.
Disallowed plugins
WP Engine doesn’t allow 30 to 40 plugins which according to them are RAM hogging, outdated, and MySQL thrashing. If you install the plugin, they’ll be removed automatically. Some of the plugins that are not supported by WP Engine are as follows:
- YARPP, WP Super Cache, WordFence.
- W3 Total Cache, WP DB Backup, BackupWordPress.
- VersionPress, Broken Link Checker, etc.
Do you need a caching plugin?
No, if you’re using WP Engine, your pages are cached automatically on the server. Hence, you don’t have to use a caching plugin.
Support and documentation
The managed hosting service provider offers 24 x 7 support to the customers. If you’re having some serious issues, contact the company’s staff right away. WPE site has a resource section where you’ll find useful tutorials and tips. If you’re facing some basic problem with the server or your site, go through the WP Engine documentation before contacting support. The answer to your question or the solution to our problem might be covered in detail in the WPE documentation.
WP Engine discount
With this special link, you’ll get a 10% discount on your first payment and if you go for the annual plan, you’ll enjoy 3 months of free managed hosting i.e 12+ 3 = 15 months of managed hosting at the price of 12 months.
Final thoughts
WP Engine is one of the best managed hosting services. The company offers three plans which provide free SSL, CDN, daily automated database backups, etc. It is a reliable hosting company. It bundles many features with its plans and offers an easy to use dashboard through which you can manage various settings.
