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Finding the right web hosting company is one of the things that worries web developers the most. If you can’t find the right one you will always remain entangled in server issues, downtimes and problems with your website. Similarly changing your web hosting company is not as easy and light the burden as most of the websites suggest. If you have a WordPress blog, your best bet would be to go for a web host that is specially designed for the WordPress, and offers customized and managed WordPress hosting.
About WPEngine
WPEngine, as the name suggests, is a web host that focuses only on managing WordPress websites. The idea behind WPEngine is to provide as fast and as effective service to WordPress clients as possible. With its dedicated servers and quality servers that specially manage WordPress, they are able to provide very high speed and reliable performance.
WPEngine was founded in 2010 and has established a good reputation among the WordPress community since then. In this review I have discussed some of the features of WPEngine and compared it with BlueHost which is my favorite regular web hosting company.
WPEngine Features at a Glance
Just after its foundation in 2010, WPEngine became very famous with the WordPress users. It now hosts some 75 million WordPress websites. So what are the reasons for its success? We discuss it hereunder.
EASY WORDPRESS INTEGRATION
Although most of the other web hosts will install in just a couple of minutes, they will take a lot of time every now and then integrating with different WordPress plugins and apps. This will cost you unnecessary loss of time. The good thing about WPEngine is that it is specialized to run with your WordPress blog, which means that it is compatible with all running plugins and easily installs every app on your WordPress website. WPEngine is fully compatible with the latest version 3.5 of WordPress, and also has full support for MySQL 5 and PHP 5.
HIGHER SPEED
It’s not uncommon that people who have shifted their websites to WPEngine have experienced great increase in speed. Search the web and you will learn that a lot of WordPress users have experienced huge improvements in speed after transferring their websites to WPEngine. According to a testimonial at the official website by Phil Simon, author of The Age of the Platform, “My site loads ridiculously fast, my page views are up, and my business is seeing the results. I rest easy at night with the level of support. My only regret: that I didn’t move to WP Engine sooner.”
WPEngine delivers the lightening fast speeds through the EverCache technology. It delivers website to search engines and users at blazing fast speeds. Speed does matter! A random visitor wouldn’t click on another link if the homepage of your website has taken too long to load. You may lose a potential customer because of slow loading times. Likewise, Google also incorporates the speed and loading times while assigning ranks to page. If your website loads faster, your SEO rating will automatically improve and your visibility will improve simultaneously.
FASTEST WORDPRESS ARCHITECTURE
With WordPress being the sole focus, WPEngine is able to deliver the single most effective solution for WordPress. With their specially designed WordPress architecture you wouldn’t need to configure any caching plugins anymore. EverCache is the most scalable WordPress architectures ever designed. It is able to handle a lot of traffics and showed no drops in speed even when 15,000 visitors were simultaneously accessing the website. The propriety systems built-in EverCache technology are able to handle millions of hits through the server system, so you can be sure your visitors will not be disappointed ever!
SAFETY OF YOUR DATA WITH REGULAR BACKUPS
Developers of WPEngine want their customers to “sleep easily at night”. So they have included the backup and restore option with all of their plans without any extra charges. This is one of the reasons why WPEngine costs a lot more than other web hosting service providers. One backup is created and saved everyday and you can decide to move back to that particular checkpoint even when you have modified your theme, created new posts, installed/uninstalled new plugins etc.
PREVENTS CRASHES WITH SECURITY UPDATES
WPEngine regularly check for new WordPress plugins and fine-tunes its servers specifically for those plugins to achieve strong reliability and compatibility. So all your compatibility issues can safely rest in peace. Moreover, WPEngine also ensures security by specifically disallowing certain plugins that cause conflict between different apps and plugins and cause your websites to unexpectedly crash. Regular attempts are also made to scan for any potentially intruding software and hacking attempts at your website. This prevents your website from hacking, hence also enhances the security of your data.
What are the Bad Things about WPEngine?
Learning about the many great features as explained above was all well and good. But you shouldn’t just blindly accept the good things without overlooking the bad things, right? So to take an idea of any potential weaknesses and downsides, let us compare WPEngine Personal version with the ever-satisfying hosting provider BlueHost’s VPS plan.
Although WPEngine is professionally and specifically designed for WordPress blogs it becomes clear from the above picture that it lacks in features compared to BlueHost. Moreover it costs way more than all other hosting providers. BlueHost’s Shared plan costs $3.95/month and offers Unlimited storage and data transfer. VPS plan of BlueHost is rich in professional features and more suited to WordPress users. So BlueHost is more effective.
Learn More About Bluehost Here :-
WPEngine Hosting Plans
WPEngine Personal is the most basic web hosting plan of WPEngine. The details of all plans are as under.
The rates are highly inflated as WordPress hosting can be easily obtained at less than $10 a month. This is one of the reasons why beginners and starter bloggers do not prefer WPEngine despite its benefits.
Even with the most expensive plan you get to install only 25 WordPress and 30 GB Limited Storage. This would certainly limit a web developer’s creativity and discourage the website to operate at its full potential.
Furthermore, not having email is a big turn off, for me at least. People largely depend on email for online communications. It is surprising and astounding to learn that WPEngine does not provide email support with any of its packages. So if you want email services you will have to pay extra bucks for obtaining it from a third party service provider.
Customer support of BlueHost is a lot better than not just WPEngine but most of the web hosting providers. WPEngine, on the other hand, laks in customer support program and responds to customers with only the Business hosting plan. That, I think is not fair.
Conclusion
Based on the above discussion, we may conclude that WPEngine is very expensive compard to its counterparts. Although it provides blazing fast speeds, BlueHost is able to surpass it with its high performance virtual servers each with a dedicated processor and memory capacity. BlueHost also guarantees a 99% uptime, whilst there is no such promise from the WPEngine.
If you can overlook the pricing factor, WPEngine is pretty good at dealing all WordPress related stuff. It is lightening fast, complete managed, user friendly, and provides regular backups free of costs. You can also try WPEngine free of cost for 2 months. Try and let us know how you feel in the comments section.
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