WP Engine Review – Is WP Engine WordPress Hosting Provider worth your money?

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Web hosting providers are worth dime a dozen. There are countless hosting providers that offer you some really great deals for bargain prices. Most of the hosting providers support PHP hosting out of the box while there are some other providers that support a whole host of platforms like Ruby on Rails, Python with Django and more. It all boils down to selecting the hosting company that offers great hosting for their platform. As WordPress is one of the most popular and most widely installed CMSs, there are some hosting providers like WPEngine, Flywheel etc. that cater only to customers that want to host their WordPress sites. As one of the most popular WordPress hosting providers, WPEngine really shines above the rest. Lets take a look.

wpengine wordpressFirst things first…

As mentioned earlier, WPEngine exclusively provides hosting for WordPress based sites only. If you are looking forward to hosting your website that is not running on WordPress, then you can skip this article J

WP Engine Control Panel

WP Engine Control Panel is especially designed to make sure that you only get the required information on your WordPress based website and nothing more. On a traditional Hosting Control Panel, you will see bunch of stuff that you may not even use ever. Things like BoxTrapper, Webmail, Web templates, Spam Assassin which you can find on the control panel of some other hosts like Bluehost or Hostgator are rarely used. On WPengine, you can check out stats like Overages , Total visits, bandwidth usage stats etc. You can also install wordpress on new domain right from the admin dashboard. Although this feature is also available in cPanel based dashbords via installer software, WPEngine definitely makes it a bit easier.

wpengine-control-panel

WPEngine Speed Review

WPEngine is built for those who are conscious about speed. In this competitive age, if you are website takes aeons to load, you can lose customers without your knowing. So, for your peace of mind, its very vital that your hosting provider offers speed and no downtimes. If you are not happy with your current hosting provider because of speed issues, WPEngine’s cloud hosting platform will definitely win your heart as they offer very good speed and give you the ability to manage your resources. WordPress is not built to scale out of the box so if you have a sudden surge of visitors to your site, chances are that your site will start chocking and will load slowly to some users. WPEngine uses MaxCDN(content delivery network) and has a built in caching system to make sure that your site never experiences downtime. WPEngine beats most of the traditional hosting providers in speed benchmarks.

WPEngine Caching

WPEngine uses a technology for caching called EverCache. Its a scalable WordPress architecture and is the tool that enables WPEngine to serve millions of website visitors everyday across the many thousand websites that run on their servers. WPEngine claims that they were able to serve upto 15,000 simultaneous visitors on a single website for one of their clients as well as serve upto 100 million visitors across all their sites in a span of 12 hours without any hitch. So, with WPEngine, you won’t need to install any caching or minification plugins as they take care of all that for you.

WPEngine also offers Object caching which you can turn on for extra speed boost.

Automated Backups and Disaster Recovery

You never know when you might make a blunder and need to recover your website from a backup. WPEngine offers snapshot backups which will allow you to restore your site to an earlier “good” version within a matter of minutes. Snapshots basically are restore points and if you want to undo any action you can just pick a snapshot and make it the current live version. A snapshot includes your content(database), themes and plugins. And I you want, you can also download it to your hard drive. WPEngine takes daily snapshots so you can just pick a date of the snapshot and click to restore. How cool is that?

They have on-demand as well as automatic daily backups and all the backups are stored in a heavily redundant and geographically separate location.

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WPEngine Review – Multiple Server locations (US, UK and Tokyo, Japan)

You can also choose to host your site on a server location other than the US. This can be hugely beneficial if your target audience resides outside the US and where or nearby WPEngine’s servers are available. Currently, WPEngine has servers located in US(Midwest), London(Europe) and Tokyo(Asia). Each of their servers are identical in terms of hardware and configuration.

60 day Risk Free Trial of WPEngine

This is not particularly a feature but if you can try WPEngine risk free for 60 days. You need to pay for their service at the beginning though and if you are not satisfied within 60 days, you will be refunded in full.

WPEngine’s Staging Area

WPEngine offers an awesome staging tool that allows you to test your WordPress site before deploying. This may not be that useful for everyone but for some, it can come in real handy. You can install all the plugins, tweak your themes and make sure everything is working perfectly before deploying it.

WPEngine Security from Hackers and Malicious tools

WordPress is not the best platform out their for security. Every now and then we come across blog and forum posts on hacking woes related to wordpress. WPEngine’s security environment gives you a peace of mind and makes sure that your site is protected from your exploits.

Disk Write Limitations on WPEngine

WPEngine has a disk write protection system. If a malicious code embeds itself to your website and attempts to write to the file system, it will leave the door wide open for hackers. WPEngine’s environment limits the processes that can write to the disk and even if you are using a theme or plugin with a vulnerability, it is hard for them to get exploited.

Disk Write privileges

This ensures that Generic PHP code and any other file in that process hasn’t been given write privileges.

Developing WordPress Sites with Great Flexibility on WPEngine

Here’s a great slide prepared by the folks at WPEngineUK. This will show how you can  harness the power of WPEngine to build highly customizable WordPress based websites.

Other WPEngine Features

Domain Management Tool

The Domain Management tool on WPEngine allows you to manage your primary domains as well as domain level redirects.

Custom Redirect Rules

You can manage individual redirects directly from WPEngine. It can come in real handy if you need to add 301 redirects to your old URLs and point them to new ones.

Error Logs

If you need to check your Error Logs, you can check those directly from WPEngine’s dashboard without downloading the log files and peeking int them.

PHPMyAdmin

Although not exactly a special feature, WPEngine allows you to access PHPMyAdmin right from its dashboard.

Site Migration

Site Migration is very easy with WPEngine. Within 15 minutes to half an hour, you can transfer a WordPress website and get going with it.

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Some Tweets about WPEngine

WPEngine Coupon Code

Its always great to have that little discount on your purchase isn’t it? If you really want to try out WPEngine, you can simply visit this link and use the coupon code WPE20OFF, to get an instant 20% discount on your first purchase. You can use this for any subscription plan on WPEngine.

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WPEngine Support Review

I don’t need to tell you how much customer support is important for any company to thrive and make a good impression on their customers. WPEngine truly excels on the customer support front. Their support is exceptional and there are multiple ways in which you can seek for help from their support staff. They basically have WordPress Wizards on their team who would do everything in their capacity to help you and provide you expert advice and support.

All in all, WPEngine is one of the best wordpress based hosting providers out there. If you value peace of mind and want a solid hosting system that takes care of your headaches and ensures speed and security, look no further than WPEngine.

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