WP Engine Review: At The Top Of Its Class In Managed WordPress Hosting?

When it comes to Content Management Systems, WordPress is second to none in popularity. It has a user interface that does not require any skills in programming, is web-based and can be accessed from any computer, and is favored by search engines.

Blogs, music sites, celebrities, politicians, news outlets, and authors all use WordPress. From small businesses to Fortune 500 companies, this CMS has been found to be of great value.

Needless to say, the popularity of WordPress as a CMS platform is off the charts. Many web hosts have emerged to specialize in products and services that cater to the platform.

I started with 1 WP site for my business, and as it grew together with my line of brands, I eventually started managing more and more sites. As my business grew, I had less time to handle my sites which are why I opted to get the services of WP Engine which is a managed WordPress hosting platform.

WP Engine is at the top of its class in WordPress hosting. Its clientele spreads across 120 countries, and all 30,000 of its customers have enjoyed the technology, innovation, and expertise that it provides.

TECHNOLOGY, EXPERTISE, AND INNOVATION

The world-class architecture that this platform offers keeps your site fast, scalable and secure. Any help needed by the clients is ensured with round the clock support and technology is up to date and top of the line with a dedicated engineering staff.

Highly Scalable Architecture

Nobody likes slow websites. At this day and age, the attention span of the common person is as short as ever. In a recent study by Microsoft Corporation, the average human attention span has dropped from 12 to 8 seconds between 2000 and 2015. According to the study conducted by Microsoft, people get easily distracted while viewing multi-screens.

Taking this into consideration, if your visitor is also viewing other competitor sites, they would most likely take their business with faster sites. You do not want to lose out on the competition because of poor performance.

WP Engine has a unique front-end technology that makes your site run four to six times faster than other environments. This is because of the masterfully designed rules that WP Engine audits and adjusts for maximum performance as frequently as possible.

With a highly scalable hosting architecture, you are sure to have a fast, reliable website.

Backup and Recovery

Things happen. Either you may accidentally erase a file, change something and be unable to change it back, or after doing layers of stuff you just want to go back to how things were a day before. There are a lot of fortuitous events that may happen to your business or your site. This is why backup and recovery are both important.

With snapshot backups, you can experiment with changes and not worry if the result will ruin your site. WP Engine gives you the capability to take snapshot backups that take only seconds to create. It is like saving your game before battling a big boss. Your snapshots create restore points in cases you may want to undo the changes.

Daily backups are also created in a geographically separate site. Your media library and large files are all backed up and replicated three times. Furthermore, with the Hot Standby feature, in cases like there is an outage in the data center, your site will not be compromised. Because of the redundant backup system, your web traffic can be routed to where your backup is located.

Highly Secure WordPress

Security should not be taken lightly. You can put all your worries away with the world-class security that this platform provides. The world’s largest brands trust WP Engine with their security demands. Data loss, hacker takeovers, and performance eating bogus traffic and requests are all weeded out with WP Engine’s high-class security.

With the platforms intrusion detection and prevention system, malicious behavior and attacks from JavaScript/SQL-scripts and XML-RPC attacks are detected and blocked. Even suspicious IP addresses are blocked.

Bottomline is if in case your site still gets attacked or hacked, WP Engine will fix it for free.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Whatever infrastructure needs you have, WP Engine has it. The platform offers an array of infrastructure options for a variety of sizes and traffic needs with billions of hits and terabytes of data handled by the platform each month.

Small and Medium Sized Business – These are shared plans that offer tremendous performance at an affordable price. Shared plans are built on a Xen Virtualized environment which is the most secure and fastest infrastructure virtualization solution available in the market. The multi-tenant environment setup by the platform, customers cannot intrude on each other’s user space with the strong security environment setup.

Premium – Premium plans offer customer environments exclusively for each customer which offer a high degree of customization. These plans are fit for organizations that prioritize performance, scalability and resource isolation.

Enterprise – These plans offer top level hosting. If your company gets over 50 million visitors per month, the performance that WP Engine provides can handle your traffic needs. Enterprise clusters include redundant load balancing and firewall technology, multiple web nodes, separate Memcache servers, high-core-count Intel Xeon processors.

WHO BENEFITS FROM WP ENGINE?

I started with a small apparel shop, and now my business has grown. With 6 WordPress sites, I find WP Engine a valuable partner as I focus on the business aspect and let the team worry about the technical stuff about my website.

I can do it on my own, but I chose them because they can do it better and it saves me a lot of time. There are plans for all types of businesses from personal accounts, to small and medium-sized businesses to enterprise plans for Fortune 500 companies.

To understand who can benefit from this platform, it is better to know what the plans are.

Personal Plan – This plan is for customers who want to test the platform out or who just has one site to manage. This is usually for marketers, developers, and anyone who wants to be free from managing their WP site and focus on their business or mission

Professional Plan – This plan is for those who manage just one site but with heavier and steadier traffic, marketers who run websites for their clients, and business owners or individuals who manage several smaller sites

Business Plan – This is for businesses that need higher traffic, higher storage and lots of sites.

Premium Plan– This is for growing businesses that need their sites up and running all the time. This plan includes over 150 installs.

Enterprise Grade – This plan offers clustered solutions with multiple servers and intelligent load balancing technology.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF WP ENGINE?

After going through what WP Engine has to offer, it is important how these features affect your business.

Speed – Site speed can be equated to conversion. Your visitors prefer fast sites. Remember that the average human attention span is at 8 seconds, which is a second shorter than that of a goldfish. A faster website will convert more. Every second it takes for your site to load negatively affects your conversion. Also, the speed of your website also affects your SEO and crawl rate.

Security – Compromised security means a compromised business. Either data loss, hacker attacks, unexpected events, or even because of your personal errors, security compromises mean a loss of time and money. Ensuring that your website is safe is already a good takeaway from a sales pitch. Having a support team and guarantee of free service in case you get hacked is an even better assurance.

Support – Personally, this is what I appreciate the most with WP Engine. They go the extra mile to help. While other companies outsource their support, WP Engine has an in-house support team that is ready to help you.

Backed Up System – I can do whatever I feel may be good for my site. I experiment, try out new things and see how the website would work and feel. Things like this do not worry me because everything is backed up. I take snapshots to make sure I can turn back to my previous setup. My site does not experience downtime because of the redundant backup system.

PRICING AND PLANS

Whether you are setting up a simple blog for personal use or your company needs professional WordPress managed hosting to free you from a tremendous amount of work, WP Engine can scale to meet your requirements. All plans are risk-free for 60 days.