WP Engine WordPress Hosting Review

WP Engine is serious hosting. In fact, I usually don’t recommend them to anyone who’s just blogging for fun or isn’t running some sort of business online. Dreamhost and Hostgator are actually a lot cheaper and are pretty solid choices when it comes to more “hobby” cases.

Where WP Engine does shine though – is for medium to higher end needs – and for serious blogs or sites that need speed, reliability, and security. Since I run a number of high traffic sites, I went ahead and moved the largest one to WP Engine.

It’s a pretty demanding site and I’ve hosted it with WPE for about 6 months now (about 20 GB of transfer / 20,000+ pageviews per day so it’s pretty resource intensive). They’ve been near flawless – at least when it comes to site performance. The site has not had any downtime, even in times of traffic surges.

I have had a few hickups on the customer service front along the way though. And I did have an issue with backups not running properly (which tech support ended up fixing). So is it a panacea for hosting? Certainly not – as you will invariably have some kind of issues with any host. However – the part that matters the most to me – having the site up and running constantly & securely – WP Engine has been rock solid. 

3 reasons to host your WordPress site on WP Engine:

• Uptime and site load speeds are stellar (which also really helps SEO)
• They take advanced security measures to make sure your site is hackproof
• You get what you pay for

See this article for a more in-depth review of the service and this one for another person’s (similar) story of finally outsourcing everything that it takes to actually take care of your WordPress installation so you can focus on blogging or running a successful site instead of dealing with the technical side of things.

You can also run this speed test if you’re hosted somewhere else right now and want to see how much faster your site would be on WP Engine. Usually you’ll see drastically reduced loading times. This is because WP Engine employs a lot of engineers who are experts at WordPress and speed and scalability. They ONLY host WordPress sites and keep the servers and databases optimized for performance.

One more thing – if you end up going with the $99 per month (or higher) plan, please make sure they turn on CDN (content delivery network). When I first signed up I assumed it was going to be activated automatically, and only a few months later I realized that it wasn’t the case – that I had to specifically ask them to do it. If you don’t know what a CDN is or want to know why it makes a big difference, read this post on SearchEngineLand.

So if you’re running any important sites on WordPress and you’re looking to have a lot less headaches with your hosting, I suggest giving WP Engine a shot.

To Sign up with WP Engine click here.