WP Engine Hosting Review 2017
Is WP Engine The Right Host For You?

"Website Hosting Perfected" That simple and very memorable tag line pretty much sums up the WPEngine experience. They solely focus in on one CMS platform: WordPress - The world's most popular CMS, and boy oh boy are they damn good at it.
WPEngine have truly become the masters of WordPress hosting.. They have everything from speed and security all the way through to having THE best customer service team I have ever had the absolute pleasure of dealing with - And trust me, I never normally call it a "pleasure" to deal with any host's customer service team.
Overall Rating
10/10
Detailed review of WP Engine Hosting
WPEngine as a company impresses me, I know I'm late to the party but following them for the last 9 months has provided a real insight into how to train your employees, something I would not normally associate with a website hosting provider. Let's be honest.. How often have you been blown away and utterly impressed by your hosting provider? Could you count that on one hand, I sure can and this prompted this WPEngine review.
Focusing on WordPress only or taking on the world, that is like a comparison of a sniper rifle to a M16 Machine gun. Precision aim and spraying bullets at an insane rate, but not targeted at all. WPEngine has taken aim on a single target and delivered the goods, and some.
I've used many hosting providers in my time and they fall into two distinct categories: One being they get the job done and I carry on with business. The second category is the under delivery of service, and sadly I have had more poor experiences with hosting providers than good. That was my belief until I was put onto WPEngine, I wouldn't say that I have associated the word over delivery with a website hosting provider before, until now!
Pros |
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The best WP hosting bar none |
Incredible performance |
Scalable hosting packages |
Cons |
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No email capacity |
Disallowed plugins |
Per Visitor Pricing Model |
If you're looking to host a WP website and you're the type of character that wants the best of the best then you are definitely in the right place with WP Engine. They are the stand out hosting service that can be scaled to meet the needs of your website. They aren't the cheapest but with hosting you get what you pay for.
InMotion Features
Speed
WPEngine has a very decent uptime recorded with minimal downtime, I think it is on par with other providers sitting around that 99.70% of overall uptime. In 9 months the total downtime hasn't reached 2 hours Im happy with the uptime, and if I wasn't WPEngine would gladly provide me with a free day for the time lost.
I personally have never seen my site go down or had any problems with it slowing down due to peak visitor times.
In comparison, we have reviewed other hosting providers in this price category who boast load speed of 1 seconds (or less). Generally speaking, 3 seconds is the minimum requirement so an average speed that's just a little above that is acceptable without being sparkling.
Food for thought. 40% of people tend to get bored whilst waiting more than 3 seconds and click away. You need to look at optimizing your load speed with InMotion Hosting, just to be sure you don't lose out.
Reliability
WP Engine has near perfect reliability. They have put in place some of the highest quality infrastructure that includes top of the range hardware, software and security. And the reasons why RightMove and Network rail swear by WP Engine.
The figure they put on it is 99.9%. The reality is, you'd be extremely unlucky to have any server downtime at all and for many users they are likely to go through their hold time without ever having server downtime.
They achieve this level of reliability by being very demanding with their data centers, only using the most cutting edge technology, both for hardware and software.

Customer Support
"Providing world class service is one of our responsibilities".
I find it fascinating that the hosting providers that charge more for their products and services, have better customer support reviews and company reviews in general than the cheaper alternatives. WPEngine claims to serve more than 2 million requests daily from around the world, they block 150 million malicious events and transfer 2 perabytes of data monthly. Ok WPEngine we get it, you guys are something unique in the hosting space.
In my experience hosting companies view their tech support teams as a call centre model, this is ass backwards and they should be looked at like an investment area I mean where do most of the reviews generate from? customer support.
Quoting WPEngine here "For us, Technical support is an investment area and not a call centre". They go on to add this "And the people and teams we're investing in support something amazing". I can say that Ive not seen that on a hosting providers website EVER!
The bright side for WPEngine is that they are still growing, and with the processes they have a growth stage wont hurt them . They appear to be genuinely investing in customer support training, and improvement processes to make the service even better.
First you should probably know what hosting package you want
Generally speaking, WP Engine uses a model that is based on the number of visitors you have on the site during a monthly period. It allows you to scale your hosting as your audience grows. It means once you've joined WP Engine you don't need to worry about any changes as your website becomes increasingly more successful.
LEVEL 1
PERSONAL
Key features of the personal shared hosting package from WP Engine
- 25K Monthly visits
- 1 Installs
- Shared Server
- 10 GB
The Personal package is perfect for those clients who demand the best but only have a small website right now that has less than 25,000 views a month. You get the same high standards of customer support as all other packages.
LEVEL 3
BUSINESS
Key features of the business package shared hosting from WP Engine
- 400k Monthly visits
- 25 Installs
- Shared Server
- 30 GB
The business package is for those websites that already have a good sized audience of up to 400,000 monthly visitors. You need a server that provides excellence and that gives your audience the best possible experience.
LEVEL 5
ENTERPRISE
Key features of the enterprise hosting Package from WP Engine
- 5 million Monthly visits
- 150 Installs
- Dedicated Server
- 400 GB
The enterprise package is a personalized dedicated server that is designed to provide the most established websites with the hosting support they should demand from their server. Everything for 5 million visitors and more.
What other hosts provide similar services?
The only real competitor to WPEngine is SiteGround - Purely because they offer cPanel access with similar (but worst) loading times and customer support team.
However, if you're looking to host more than just WordPress sites and have access to email, then SiteGround is definitely the host for you.
The only real competitor to WPEngine is SiteGround - Purely because they offer cPanel access with similar (but worst) loading times and customer support team.
However, if you're looking to host more than just WordPress sites and have access to email, then SiteGround is definitely the host for you.
WP Engine Hosting: Other things to know
Average speed, amazing uptime, but noncompetitive pricing...
We've done a cross-comparison analysis of WP EngineHostings performance benchmarks vs the benchmarks of several other hosts in their bracket.
Average Statistics
2.28 secs
Speed
45min
Customer Support
99.9%
Uptime
$
Pricing
Frequently Asked Questions
How is WP Engine priced?
Signing up for the first time with WPEngine you will notice a nice bonus of 2 free months added to your account, this is for annual subscription purchases only but thats a great saving. The additional services you can add are additional websites for $14.95 monthly, this comes with a 48% discount on the second website. They also offer a further Speed boost with using a CDN at $19.95 monthly, please note that CDN's are included in the Pro and Business plans.
Entry level plan is the Personal plan, this allows 1 site instal, 25K visits per month, 10 GB local storage and a free SSL certificate.
Personal Plan $29.00 monthly
Why are guarantees important? Because they are a trust signal. Any hosting willing to put their money where their mouth is and offer some kind of guarantee is worth your attention. 30 days is good standard, and gives you time to experience the hosting, and 90 days (like the option on the business package, is excellent)
I wouldn't necessarily choose InMotion Hosting because of the gaurantee, they have plenty of other strengths but if you are on the fence then allow the guarantee to sway you to give them a try because they've made it worth your time by removing any risk from the decision.
Payment Methods include PayPal, credit card and debit cards.
I want to point out a often overlooked customer value fact, you might think on face value that WPEngine is expensive. Now thats partly correct and lets look at what I mean by this, just how expensive is it for what you have built in.
- Sucuri $16.99 monthly
- VaultPress $29.00 monthly
- VaultPress Blog $19.00 monthly
- MaxCDN $15.00 monthly (Free for WPEngine Pro Plans)
$79.99USDMonthly Total
You don't need to be mathematical whizz kid to work out the winning formula, value delivered to each customer through superior products. The $79.95 monthly price tag is eliminated, when you become a WPEngine customer. That is a bargain and one thing I overlooked at first glance, I thought thats was a bit pricey for website hosting. Doing the maths and Im convinced these guys are the real deal.
What are WP Engine's other features?
Features Explored
I always like to take a closer look at the features , and WPEngine has a host of features, some you won't know are there until you need them.
I really like the click of a button backup and restore function, saves time and is effortless. Now I know how much hassle it is having a lot of websites and having to manually update WordPress patch updates and manage all that. WPEngine takes the cherry here by providing a core system upgrade, one click fix and the option to skip the update until a future patch is available. I just high fived myself! That is very functional.
Migration & Multisite
Easy to use migration services making it a smooth transition when you import a website, also when you need to move your website from your main WPEngine account to a secondary account.
Unlimited Means Unlimited
Not just a buzz word, they provide unlimited space. The downside is they charge per batch visit see above features.
GeoIP
Great for clients that need to know where the visitors are coming from. You could use this to serve different content to visitors of various continents, if you require to serve specific legal notices for visitors form set countries you can do this using GeoIP. Visitors can be directed to the web content displayed in their language with no loss of traffic. You can control this with short codes.
The way it works is by providing you with visitor geo location data, the data set specifically is outlined in the below container.
1) Continent:
2) Country:
3) Region (State):
4) City:
5) Postal Code:
6) Latitude:
7) Longitude
8) Location:
LargeFS Support
Fully automated content transfer to S3, large files will be 301'd directly to the WPEngine S3 for a fast browse for your visitors. This is completely transparent and helps improve the speed at which your content is displayed. Only for largeFS.
What can you tell me about WP Engine's caching?
Using the WPEngine EverCache system the secret sauce in the service. EverCache takes care of your caching needs automatically, you can manually set rules for cached pages but it is doing the work for you from the word go.
WordPress core patching is a very beneficial feature, this is a time saver. Your website is backed up before core updates take place, in the off chance that something goes wrong WPEngine will rollback your website to the time before the patch update. You can control these manually from your control dashboard or leave it automated.
What are the cons of WP Engine?
Now apart from the obvious being pricing (as it can be expensive for a new site) what would make it on to a list about drawbacks from using WPEngine?
The list in this section is more annoying than it is negative, and it depends on how you use the website. It will also vary depending on what you are used to from other hosting providers. My review comes from an ecommerce website, nothing crazy, just a total of 90 pages for a small online store.
- LACK OF EMAIL
- DISALLOWED PLUGINS
- VISITS PRICING MODEL
Emails are not provided as part of your WPEngine hosting subscription, what a bummer this is the main drawback for me. They do however allow for a variety of third party email providers with easy integration and connectivity.
WPEngine themselves as a company recommend and use Google Apps for their email.
They also suggest Zoho as an alternative to Google Apps.
Some additions that are not deal breakers are not having an affordable SSL available, the one offered is quite expensive at $199.00 yearly and their is no ability to use Lets Encrypt - A Free SSL Provider. This one is more of an annoying problem, for ECommerce (larger sites) you might, like me, find some caching problems when using WooCommerce. To have the caching problem fixed you can arrange to run through the exact problem with customer support - Unlike most hosts however, they'll actually do it for you rather than trying to instruct you to do some insane technical development job.
I am continually impressed by WPEngine as a company, I know this is the section of the review that talks about the cons but I don't have anything else that detracts from the positives - And the negatives really aren't that bad at all.

Somewhat Embarrasing
I was reading up on the people that make the company tick for this review, I wanted to give a in-depth insight into the company that has made me take a closer look at my website hosting provider as a legit business.
I decided not to, I found Technical engineer Mark Kelnars bio a little strange that it was set to default text.
On further looking into both Mark and Stephen's extra activities, and I saw just how busy they keep themselves. These two guys have a hectic schedule of meet-ups, speeches and workshops.
Look at the picture lets use this as a con because they left the default text in his bio.
What kind of security features are there?
I found this out through a friend who had her website hacked, If you contact support they will arrange to help you get everything back as it was completely restored. Now you might read this and think "But how did the hack take place in the first place?" that would be domain level not on the server level. I think this is a selling point for non technical minded for sure. Included in the daily backup is a scan for malware, taking that extra step to provide value to their customers.
Another security benefit using WPEngine is the access or more so the restricted access, most FTP access is FTP but WPEngine uses sFTP over a secure tunnel or SSH. If you don't have a good password management system and continually forget passwords and locked out of your account maybe WPEngine is not for you, if you fail the log in attempt 3 times you run the risk of having your IP blocked not good and definitely not productive. The only way to get access to your website is by contacting support for assistance, this is very useful but not very functional.
WPEngine automates your backups, running a daily copy you don't have to think about it. Backups are stored on the WPEngine server and they keep another copy on an Amazon S3.
Fair Usage Policy is not really the type of policy WPEngine uses, they instead go for a unlimited bandwidth offer but you have a monthly visitor allowance. This removes the fair use policy and instals more of a credit system for sites that attract large volumes of traffic.
Who is WP Engine for?
One of the drawbacks to being the premium provider is that you charge like a premium provider. WPEngine may not be for you if you own a lot of domains, the price is quite high but for the level of performance and service you get what you pay for. If you do own a lot of websites you could consider identifying your most profitable sites, and moving the ones that are not to another less expensive hosting provider.
I would say that for people just entering the digital space that the entry price per month would not be best suited, you should look to crawl before you run like Usain Bolt. My thoughts are that this is tailored more towards people that have had some experience online.
WPEngine is NOT for anyone that is using any other content management system than WordPress, simply put if you are not using WordPress for your website this is not for you. Anyone that has a lot of custom coding on their website, you might find WPEngine not suitable for you as they remain firm with the framework. They must provide a reliable and premium service by preserving the integrity of their hosting plans.
Jason Cohen
Founder
"WP Engine's managed hosting platform provides the performance, reliability, and security required by the biggest brands & agencies in the world, while remaining affordable and intuitive for smaller businesses and individuals"
Hosting Perfected
What a very bold claim to make, but can they back it up? Keep reading.
I took a journey into getting to know my host for this review and I found what they call WPEngine Labs, super cool and again i'm impressed by the level of effort put in. When a brand and Ill call WPEngine a brand, dedicates resources to continue to innovate and lead the market you know its something special to be a part of. What WPEngine Labs is about is innovation and making the overall product better.

Not only have they dedicated a website and team to the continued innovative development of the product, they have dedicated a leadership team. Leadership teams get things done, the team at WPEngine Labs is no exception constantly pushing forward making changes & creating a better host.
What are people saying about WP Engine?
Well the biggest sign of social proof of quality is showcasing your clients openly, when your client portfolio includes a website speed testing platform you know you have something special. WPEngine also provides services for project management software Asana and business directory powerhouse Yelp! That is enough social proof right there for me to decide ok these guys mean business.
Its hard to find negative reviews for premium providers of services, I am a firm believer that the price tag weeds out the cheapskates. That being said I have found a negative review that still had some positive notes contained within. Looking at the images below its hard to not want to work with WPEngine they have a very premium product that delivers results.



As a provider of digital services you have more risk of having reviews seen opposed to being a provider of physical services, as the bulk of your dealings with customers will be online. The impressive thing I noted from the above complaint, was the he mentioned positives in his bad review. Seeing a 2 star review is bad for business, but if you can achieve bad review status with highlighted positive notes then you my friend are doing good business. I tip my hat to the people at WPEngine, you are doing good things.
After reviewing DreamHost and WPEngine I am impressed with the reviews both have received, very well done to them on delivering amazing quality of services.
Tutorials & Knowledge Base
Things I have come to use more so than customer support recently is the knowledge base provided by the hosting companies.
WPEngine provides a very comprehensive library in their knowledge base, that should assist answering some even advanced troubleshooting.
Topics covered:
- Learn The Platform
- Site Setup
- Make My Site Faster
- Troubleshooting
- Enhance My Site
- Manage My Account
The CPanel is well designed and pretty intuitive. It can be a little overwhelming if you're new to website hosting, but most of the options are on the default option and you could well live the rest of your life ever needing to understand what they do. If you are new the best bet is to use the knowledge base to master the basic tasks you need and to not worry about the rest. If a problem arises,use the customer support.
Conclusion
"A good hosting option for people that plan to scale and want to stay with one host!"
I wasn't on the WPEngine train until recently, having now seen what my colleagues were raving about I have my boarding pass. The experience has been enjoyable, my two customer support queries were answered within 24 hours. I had clear instructions were to find the helpful tutorial, and it was embarrassingly enough my own blindness that was the cause of the problem.
My website runs fast and causes me no reason to check it daily, I am happy with the service and for the price and peace of mind I like it.
Taking the service on face value I really liked browsing their website, I wasn't cornered into a pop up frenzy of buy now! messages and had complete control over my check out journey. Rarely do you take a checkout journey that isn't cluttered with Buy Now! or Discount Bundle and these "This deal will never be seen again when you exit this page" type marketing. Refreshing and enjoyable.
I was looking forward to test driving a premium product after hearing the rave reviews of friends, and I was not let down speed elegance and support everything I was looking for. A very well earned 5 stars from me.