One WordPress Engine You Ought to By no means Drive
It’s no brainer that having good, dependable website hosting is without doubt one of the most important elements of any rising or established weblog.
One of the daunting duties that you’ll face together with your weblog is selecting the precise website hosting firm.
There are a lot of nice choices obtainable, particularly when you may have a small or medium-sized WordPress weblog.
Price range internet hosting like SiteGround is enough for a smaller weblog, however the process will get tedious when your WordPress weblog begins rising exponentially and better server assets are required to deal with your rising site visitors.
Prior to now, I’ve tried numerous internet hosting corporations reminiscent of SiteGround, Cloudways, Kinsta and some others.
However because of the advanced nature of my WordPress configuration (40+ plugins & many customized scripts), I made a decision to transfer away from these hosts and discover a answer that may give me full peace of thoughts.
My objective with the brand new host was to have the ability to overlook about internet hosting complications as a way to give attention to what I’m good at:
Running a blog.
That is once I discovered about finest managed WordPress Internet hosting, and I stumbled upon WPEngine.
With the gathering of options provided, and the whole “hassle-free internet hosting” obtainable for WordPress, I made a decision to enroll and pay $290/month for his or her internet hosting companies.
You should be questioning why I’d select to pay that amount of cash once I can get a devoted server for the identical worth.
It is a cheap query, and the reply is that, once more, I needed full peace of thoughts. I didn’t need to spend an hour a day (and even an hour per week) addressing internet hosting points, as a result of primarily based on my expertise, I really feel very strongly that:
My Evaluation of WPEngine, and what made me ditch the service for good:
Following plenty of analysis and making the choice to pay that hefty $290/month to host ShoutMeLoud, I lastly moved to WPEngine.
I shared my expertise of transferring to WPEngine right here.
The standard of internet hosting I used to be promised was as much as par, and I had no drawback with WPEngine till…
Sooner or later they emailed me and informed me that I had to pay:
- $223 EXTRA for overage expenses.
Severely?
Overage expenses??
And certainly, they deducted that amount of cash from my bank card.
This firm’s “overage expenses” created a giant gap in my pocket and can create holes within the pockets of any medium and enormous publishers who’re on WPEngine or any comparable internet hosting service that expenses you per “go to”.
WPEngine’s pricing coverage is nonsense.
Let’s take a look at how WPEngine counts “visits”:
The next two points solely served so as to add to my frustration:
- We reset our notion of “distinctive IP tackle” every single day.
- Robots have the identical few IP addresses, so they are going to be consolidated inside someday, however will depend once more the subsequent day.
Once we purchase net internet hosting from any firm, we pay attention to what number of guests they permit inside the assorted packages they provide. I opted for WPEngine’s “Enterprise” plan because it permits as much as 400,000 visits/month and my Google Analytics was exhibiting solely 356,000 visits/month.
Right here is what the WPEngine “Enterprise” plan presents:
Evaluating Google Analytics with WPEngine stats:
Within the pictures beneath, I’m evaluating stats proven by Google Analytics for the interval of Fifteenth August-Fifteenth September 2014 with WPEngine’s stats for a similar interval.
First, let’s take a look on the Google Analytics stats:
Now let’s take a look at the stats from WPEngine for a similar time interval:
Additionally, pay attention to the next message:
- “This exhibits what number of visits you might be receiving throughout pages, feeds and static property (pictures, JavaScript information, CSS information, and so on.). A customer to your web site might entry one, two or all three varieties, however we’ll solely depend that as one go to in your total customer depend. Nevertheless the breakdown on this part will present you in case you are receiving a disproportionate quantity of entry to your RSS Feeds, or to your pictures because of hotlinking or their embed in a third social gathering web site or e mail marketing campaign. WP Engine doesn’t cost for visits which have solely hit favicon.ico or robots.txt.”
Please word: I’ve carried out CloudFlare to disregard dangerous bots visits, in any other case my expenses could be a minimum of 1.5X the costs you see right here.
Moreover, I used to be paying for hot-linked pictures (or pictures that had been shared on Twitter, my e mail publication, and plenty of different locations).
Take a look on the picture beneath, allowing for that that is what the WPEngine staff notes on the high:
- “Here’s a checklist of your high static referrers. If a big %age of hits listed here are occurring from a website that you don’t management, your WP Engine go to depend can be negatively impacted.”
Basically, WPEngine internet hosting is for individuals who don’t need to look into technical elements and easily need to give attention to their enterprise or their weblog.
Their method of pricing is overkill for a standard end-user like me, and most certainly, for you as properly.
They might have very simply built-in CloudFlare with their internet hosting service, or a minimum of have built-in a measure of stopping dangerous bots from consuming their clients’ cash, however apparently, they’re a money-hungry firm they usually don’t have their clients’ finest pursuits at coronary heart.
There may be extra to it…
When you’re paying over $250/month to a website hosting firm, you count on to have precedence and premium assist. Even a low-budget internet hosting firm like Bluehost (which prices solely $6.95/month) presents round the clock assist over reside chat and telephone.
WPEngine does not provide reside chat assist across the clock, and typically, I’ve not discovered their assist to be of “high-quality” in any respect.
Matthew Woodward has shared his story on this detailed submit which is certainly price a learn.
Right here is the abstract of his WPEngine evaluation:
No Root entry/disallowed plugins:
WPEngine doesn’t provide root entry, and their checklist of disallowed plugins is baseless.
A plugin like Damaged Hyperlink Checker, one of many finest plugins for WordPress blogs for the aim of checking damaged hyperlinks, shouldn’t be allowed!
Having created an alternate answer, WPEngine has disallowed Damaged Hyperlink Checker.
They do provide different options like Integrity and some others, however all of them are desktop-based options and require plenty of handbook work to repair damaged hyperlinks.
The conclusion of my WPEngine Internet hosting evaluation:
Relating to high quality of internet hosting, WPEngine can present first rate internet hosting which may deal with a memory-hogging WordPress weblog more often than not.
However in terms of pricing:
- They’re DEFINITELY not price the price.
In 13 month’s time, I paid $4,621 to host ShoutMeLoud, which is totally not well worth the funding.
I may have finished the identical with a a lot better host for $1,500.
Right here is the screenshot of my paid bill (discover the further expenses in April through September):
I’d solely suggest WPEngine internet hosting to enterprise WordPress websites or blogs with low site visitors necessities.
When you do resolve to make use of WPEngine’s internet hosting companies, be positive to additionally use CloudFlare, in any other case, you can be paying vital overage expenses.
This overage factor is such a disappointing subject. Not solely did it trigger me to cease utilizing WPEngine, it’s left me with little respect for the corporate.
For medium and high-traffic blogs, avoid WPEngine because it is simply not price it.
That is my private evaluation of WPEngine. I’ve shared every thing I’ve discovered from working with them for a yr. In the end, it’s as much as you to resolve in the event you ought to host your WordPress weblog on WPEngine or not.
I’ve not too long ago discovered Kinsta or WPXHosting to be a greater internet hosting than WPEngine when it comes to pricing and providing.
In case you are a WPEngine buyer and would love to share your story and expertise, I’d love to listen to from you within the feedback part beneath.
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