Pros & Cons
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- Terrific uptime in testing
- Outstanding customer service
- Daily backups
- Real-time threat detection
- Useful staging area
- Choice of either Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform cloud hosting
- Custom plans available
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- Email isn't included with hosting plans
- Doesn't sell domains
WP Engine Web Hosting Specs
| 24/7 Customer Support | |
| Cloud Hosting | |
| Linux Servers | |
| Unlimited Monthly Data Transfers - WordPress | |
| Unlimited Storage - WordPress | |
| WordPress Hosting |
WordPress is a versatile and popular content management system (CMS) that powers millions of websites. As a result, many web hosting services heavily focus on WordPress, with some, like WP Engine, devoting all their resources to it. WP Engine has high-quality, managed hosting that offers excellent uptime, WordPress-oriented security, cloud-based platform flexibility, daily backups, and other terrific features. It has a few minor downsides, as well; for example, you need to go elsewhere for email accounts and domain names. Still, WP Engine has fantastic plans that make the web host an Editors’ Choice pick for WordPress hosting.
(Credit: WP Engine)WP Engine's WordPress Plans
WP Engine expanded its services since our last review, so it now has four web hosting tiers. Managed Hosting is its base tier, and it features four set plans: Startup, Professional, Growth, and Scale.
The Startup plan (starting at $30 per month) offers one WordPress installation, 25,000 monthly visitors, 50GB of monthly data transfers, and 10GB of storage. New to the tier is the Professional plan (starting at $59 per month) that gives you three WordPress sites, 75,000 monthly visitors, 15GB of storage, and 125GB of monthly data transfers. Moving up the ladder is the Growth plan (starting at $115 per month) that contains 10 WordPress installations, 100,000 monthly visits, 20GB of storage, and 200GB of data transfers per month. The Scale plan (starting at $290 per month) features 30 WordPress sites, 400,000 visits per month, 50GB of storage, and 500GB of monthly data transfers.
WP Engine also offers Atlas hosting plans, for Headless websites. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a Headless website is one that uses WordPress API as the back-end software for data and content management, but lets you use separate front-end tools for your website’s façade. WP Engine gives you a free Atlas trial for you to try in a testing environment, and it supplies you with the full feature set, dev tools, guides, and developer documentation. If you want to put it to use on a website, however, you need an Atlas hosting plan. These start at $49 per month for the WP Engine standard Startup plan, and climb to $399 for the Scale plan. If you need free web hosting or cheap web hosting, you must look elsewhere; WP Engine is a high-end managed WordPress host, so expect high-value custom plans to come at a similarly high cost.
Entrepreneurs that want white-glove treatment should check out Advanced Solutions, which is the most pricey of WP Engine’s standard hosting solutions. It's also the most protected. These plans deliver DDoS protection, priority support, and scalable dynamic traffic, but prices start at $600 per month. Overall, WP Engine has nicely expanded to accommodate a wider range of WordPress hosting solutions. Pressable, a rival managed WordPress host, has a similarly robust hosting suite, but it dramatically escalates in services and pricing.
Each plan comes with many excellent features, including a content delivery network (CDN) for faster page load times, staging environments so you can test site changes in a non-public environment, and WP Engine's own LargeFS software for transferring and storing large amounts of data. Here's another important feature: you can select Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform as your site's backbone, enabling no-downtime scalability and tight security. Cloudways, on the other hand, lets you select one of five cloud-based, infrastructure platforms.
If you run a small business that doesn't require enterprise-class WordPress hosting, we suggest checking out A2, the category's co-Editors' Choice. The Linux-based A2 offers four excellent WordPress hosting tiers (starting at $23.99 per month) that offer unlimited storage and monthly data transfers across the board. The plans top out with the $61.99 per month managed package that includes unlimited databases and websites.
(Credit: WP Engine)E-Commerce and Email Marketing
WP Engine offers an eCommerce Hosting tier, with plan prices ranging from $36 per month (Startup) to $350 per month (Scale). With the eCommerce plans, you get one-click store creation, optimized store themes, WooCommerce template, and automated plugin updates. The Professional, Growth, and Scale tiers also get Instant Store Search, a valuable search tool plugin powered by ElasticPress.
WP Engine specializes in WordPress hosting, so as you'd expect, you should tap the massive CMS plug-in library for e-commerce tools. You can find useful plug-ins from Shopify, WooCommerce, and other companies. There are numerous email marketing tools, too. Drip, DirectIQ, Mailflow, and many other companies offer WordPress plug-ins that let you leverage customers' email addresses to make money.
The WP Engine Experience
As you may have surmised, WP Engine only offers WordPress-based shared and dedicated hosting. If you're looking for more traditional shared, VPS, or dedicated hosting, you should look elsewhere. Our review roundups are an excellent place to start.
WP Engine is a managed hosting environment specifically designed for WordPress installations, themes, and plug-ins. In fact, you don't need to install WordPress as you do with most other web hosts; the content management system comes preinstalled. It was refreshing to open our introductory email, view our login credentials, and then get started without any additional setup. In terms of creating content, WP Engine functions as any other self-hosted WordPress installation. It's a breeze to create posts, pages, and galleries.
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WP Engine also automates many functions with the eCommerce hosting tier and higher, including daily site backups and plug-in updates. It also features proprietary Evercache technology that combines caching and proxy servers to make pages load quickly.
WP Engine doesn't offer email, nor does it register domain names. You have to sign up with a third-party company for electronic mail, and you need to register a domain name at NameCheap or another dedicated URL registrar.
(Credit: WP Engine)WP Engine's Security Features
If you're looking to sell products via your website, you'll want a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate. It safeguards the data sent from a customer's computer to your site's servers. Fortunately, WP Engine includes one, free of charge, with your hosting subscription. Considering that some web hosts make you buy an SSL certificate, we tip our hat to WP Engine for tossing one in for free.
In addition, WP Engine performs daily malware scans and has a firewall—one that's updated daily—to block the latest threats. The web host also offers real-time threat detection, enterprise-grade firewalls, and free hacking remediation by WordPress-trained security experts.
(Credit: WP Engine)WP Engine's Excellent Uptime
Website uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service. While your site is down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services—and they might not come back. We take web host uptime very seriously.
For this testing, we used a website monitoring tool to track our WP Engine-hosted test site's uptime. Every 15 minutes, the tool pings our website and sends an alert if it is unable to contact the site for longer than one minute. We look at the data for the most recent 14 days for each site's review. In our latest tests, WP Engine proved incredibly stable. WP Engine did not go down a single time during that two-week testing period. As long as it keeps on this course, you can count on it to deliver a rock-solid web hosting experience.
WP Engine's Customer Service
We contacted WP Engine several times during testing—early morning and midday—to get a sense of its support team's effectiveness. We called to discover how to install new WordPress themes, and then used the web chat to contact a representative who would explain SSL certificates. The team answered both questions, and a few miscellaneous others, accurately and quickly, after short wait times.
WP Engine has upped its support since we last reviewed it, extending its 24/7 customer support to all clients via telephone and chat. This is a great improvement over the tiered phone support offered previously, in which only Growth and Scale customers had 24/7 phone support previously, while Startups had a 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. (CST) window for calls. WP Engine offers a healthy 60-day money-back guarantee.
WP Engine Is Worthy WordPress Hosting
WP Engine offers valuable and potent WordPress hosting options alongside accessible and helpful customer service, reliable uptime, flexible plans, and powerful, cloud-based platform flexibility. If you have a serious, WordPress-powered project in mind, WP Engine is an excellent web hosting service that should be on your radar. Provided you don’t mind turning to a third-party for a domain name and email, WP Engine covers all of your WordPress-related bases. If you want lower-cost, non-enterprise-class WordPress hosting that includes email and domain names, A2 is our other top pick for WordPress hosting
Building your first site? Check out our essential primers on How to Build a Website and How to Get Started With WordPress.