WP Engine Introduction
As a company, WP Engine is solely focused on providing WordPress hosting. Unlike more general hosts, its hosting is managed; in other words, customers are supported and assisted with WordPress, and much of the maintenance and upkeep is handled by the WP Engine team.
WP Engine is based in Austin, Texas and was co-founded by Jason Cohen and Ben Metcalfe. Metcalfe had previously worked for the BBC, developing its online blogging system. The company was founded in 2011 and turned over $1m within its first 12 months.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine offers four WordPress hosting plans, although the Premium plan isn’t defined; it’s more of a custom plan that can be tailored on demand.
On the other three managed WordPress plans, bandwidth is unlimited, but customers are limited to a certain amount of storage and a certain number of visits each month:
● The Personal plan includes a single WordPress install with up to 25,000 visits per month.
● The Professional plan includes up to 10 installs and 100,000 visits per month.
● The Business plan includes 25 installs and 400,000 visits per month.
Visits are defined internally by WP Engine, and its system might surprise you; in fact, the company warns that statistics packages (such as Google Analytics) may provide visitor counts that do not match its own figures. Essentially, a visit is a unique IP address within one 24-hour window.
Note that visits from bots and crawlers are counted against your visitor limit, as are partial page loads.
WP Engine Uptime/Downtime
Although not clearly stated in the ToS, WP Engine does guarantee 100% uptime. Customers are credited 5% of their monthly bill for each hour of downtime they experience. It’s not clear whether credits have to be claimed manually. There is a service level agreement (SLA) document which defines this in more detail.
There’s no information about uptime history on the website, but looking back through the blog, it seems that WP Engine has been adversely affected by Amazon’s EC2 outages in the past. There is a system status blog and RSS feed.
The company uses data centres in three cities: Texas, Tokyo and London. Customers can choose which data centre they wish to use. If a customer wants their existing site to be moved to a different data centre, the team can do this without cancelling their plan. All data centres are locked down, and WP Engine staff do not have access to the facilities at all.
Servers are automatically scanned for viruses and hacks, and WP Engine has two security firms auditing their system for exploits. Within the control panel, users can create backups (‘Restore Points’) and roll back their WordPress instance whenever they like. In addition, users can also create complete clones - useful for backstage testing - and download their entire database at any time. Automatic backups are taken daily and retained for 60 days.
Each WP Engine customer’s WordPress installs are separate. They are all hosted on different databases with different security details, minimising the risk of hacks. Customers can also request complete hardware separation, although this comes with a hefty price tag.
WP Engine Support
WP Engine support is primarily provided via a knowledgebase - the ‘Support Garage’. The topics are quite comprehensive, although some basic concepts (such as the uptime guarantee) aren’t defined.
In addition, there’s a password-protected ticketing system; clients can sign in using their email address, Twitter account, Facebook login or Google account.
Telephone support is only provided between 9am and 6pm, CST, although the company says emergency calls are taken 24/7. It’s not clear what would count as an emergency, though, or whether calls are actually answered out of hours.
All support staff are described as WordPress ‘experts’. They promise to proactively defend each customer’s WordPress install against hackers, and they fix any hacking-related problems for free.
WP Engine in the News
Mixergy published an interview with WP Engine co-founder Jason Cohen when the site turned over its first $1m:
http://mixergy.com/jason-cohen-wpengine-interview-2/
WP Engine Control Panel
WP Engine isn’t a normal hosting service, so it doesn’t have an ordinary control panel like cPanel or Plesk.
Most site admin is carried out through the WordPress dashboard, as you’d expect.
There’s also a secondary custom control panel, the User Portal, where most account-related tasks are performed. This includes creating backups, adding new WordPress installs, creating redirections and so on. There’s quite a lot of information in the Getting Started section within the Support Garage knowledge base.
WP Engine Extras
WP Engine doesn’t offer the traditional array of advertising and marketing vouchers, but it does offer a few bonuses that will appeal to advanced WordPress users.
● On the Professional plan and above, WP Engine throws in a content delivery network (CDN) service. This is designed to improve page loading times without the need for WordPress cache plugins. This is a paid extra on the Personal plan.
● On the Business plan and above, customers can opt to have a dedicated IP address assigned to their account. This is also available as a paid extra on the Professional plan, but it is not available on the Personal plan.
WP Engine Money Back Guarantee / Cancellation Policy
WP Engine offers a 60-day money-back guarantee; there doesn’t appear to be a catch or cancellation fee.
WP Engine Summary
Compared to ordinary shared web hosting, WP Engine is expensive. However, it’s tailor-made for people who rely on WordPress. For many people, the extra investment will be worthwhile, if only to ensure their WordPress install is secure, speedy and well-supported.
There’s no 24/7 support with WP Engine, and the ‘visits per month’ model could be difficult for some people to get to grips with. However, if you’re looking for a host that can help you make the most of WordPress (and support you when something goes wrong), you’ll be in safe hands with WP Engine.
WPEngine overall is a good host. They do their best to keep Wordpress sites fast with their agressive caching and by limiting plugins that'll suck site performance. Their support is also pretty knowledgeable, which can help. My biggest complaints with the whole setup is that they don't support htaccess files and their CACHING is way too agressive and only need for the most basic of sites. If you have any dynamic pieces of content in your site I would stay far away from WPEngine.