How Not Knowing WPEngine Makes You a Rookie – Facts, Uptime, speed and Scalability.

What to expect from WP Engine Hosting:

WPEngine is a fully managed WordPress Web Hosting provider that is designed for optimal performance of your WordPress blog.

These guys are dedicated to wordpress hosting and have enterprise-grade managed WordPress platform, not hosting anything else. A

nd they are wordpress experts themselves.

It is a hassle-free WordPress hosting designed for speed, scale, security, and support. It is not your usual hosting provider, the price ($30) is way too much to begin with, but why should you be bothered to still use WP Engine?

WPEngine is a fully managed WordPress host that takes care of the three big main issues when it comes to wordpress: Security, Scalability, and Speed. Moreover, WPEngine does these things along with excellent customer support.

WordPress Experts

WP Engine is managed by a team of WordPress specialists. From the founder up to the support staff, the team is filled with WP experts and specialists. These guys are relatively new, but within a short span of time, they have grabbed big clients like Foursquare, Geekwire, HTC.

Secured hosting environment

Site upgrades and malware scans are done automatically and backups are done daily. The company guarantees that your site is hacker-free and you don’t have to worry about site security. In case your site is hacked, they will fix it.

• WPEngine has setup a segregated environment so that each customer’s data is isolated and protected against any unauthorized access.
• Backup tapes are maintained such that when it is backed up, each customer’s data is kept logically separate from other customer’s data
• On a quarterly basis, WPengine conducts in-house vulnerability scanning for all infrastructure, servers, databases and applications
• External penetration testing performed at least once per year by an independent, qualified vendor
• All server/computing equipment are physically secured in an isolated facility and electronic access controls are setup to prevent unauthorized access
• WPengine has employed security consultants to harden and secure IT systems and security baselines are implemented

Speed and Scalability

Speed and scalability both factors in when you are talking about a popular blog. Scalability issue comes up when you get these sudden spikes of traffic. Imagine your blog post being featured in a super popular site? Or the sudden surge in traffic from social media(stumbleupon for example)? You always worry if the server can handle the traffic without failing and the traffic could being the server/site down as well.

WPengine has a solution and has created EverCache to handle Scalability and Speed issues. WPengione’s proprietary software, EverCache, can handle hundreds of millions of hits per day and you need not worry about traffic spikes.

We all know very well that Page Speed is a big ranking factor for Google’s algorithm. And they have a good reason for it. Gone are the days where we talk about page load time in seconds. We are now talking about blazing page load speed in milliseconds. Readers are so used to high speed that they expect a good site to load when they hit enter. Hence Google added pagespeed factor as part of it’s algorithm.

The optional fully managed CDN makes sure the page speed is not affected while it handles all traffic surges. Your site content is cached by data centers around the world and hence the reader will content from the closest server location, thus resulting in excellent speed. WP Engine is proven by their customers to be insanely faster than most hosting providers in the market. Hosting plans, except Personal plan, has CDN(Content delivery network) included. This means servers will have lightning speed. This is also a big plus for your site as Google has considered site speed as one of ranking factors for website.

So two issues are handled simultaneously by Evergreen. Most popular bloggers, who have high number of readers, depend on WPengine for this reason alone.

Support from WordPress Experts

When it comes to wordpress support, you need a wordpress expert. Your theme or plugin can break or cause issues and these guys can be big help here. They will help you track down and troubleshoot WordPress issues.

Site migration assistance

One of the biggest hassles of switching hosts is moving your site files and data. This is a good reason alone for many not to swtich hosts even when they are  not happy. WPEngine can take care of your site migration. But it is not free.  You may contact them prior to site migration and they will give an idea how much it costs and time it takes to perform the migration. But overall, existing customers have said nice things about site migration.

ECommerce and WPEngine

For high-volume Ecommerce stores, WPEngine is a hot favorite, especially since it is a managed platform. WPEngine provides 3 options for Ecommerce stores.  WooCommerce, WP e-Commerce and MarketPress. To maximize performance, WPEngine uses EverCache for Ecommerce stores as well.

Here’s an useful article about WooCommerce Hosting.

Price Plans:

WPEngine offers 4 price plans:

Personal plan: $29 per month. Can host one WordPress Blog. 25 K visitors / month. 10 GB storage. Unlimited Data Transfer. No CDN in this plan, but available for an additional $20 per month. EverCache included. This option is best for bloggers, designers and developers who have high traffic wp blogs and who want more than a typical shared hosting package.

Professional plan:  $99 per month. Can host upto 10 WordPress Blogs. 100 K visitors / month. 20 GB storage. Unlimited Data Transfer. CDN and Evercache included in this plan.

Business plan:  $249 per month. Can host upto 25 WordPress Blogs. 400 K visitors / month. 30 GB storage. Unlimited Data Transfer. CDN and Evercache included in this plan.

Enterprise plan(Custom plan):  ? per month. 25+ WordPress Blogs. millions+ visitors / month. 30 GB storage. Dedicated environment. Call them for this custom plan and cost.

The Drawbacks

• Not for start-ups. WP Engine is costly for start-ups and even more expensive if you want to host multiple sites. If your wp blog has low to medium traffic, you might want to consider  shared wordpress hosting plans than WP Engine.

• No email hosting. WP Engine does not provide any email hosting services. But you can always ask for a dedicated email hosting provider to setup your email accounts.

You may also want to learn more about  best performing Content Delivery Networks (CDN)