WPEngine Managed WordPress Hosting

WP Engine is a Premium managed WordPress hosting company. It is one of the first companies we started covering too.

Why WPEngine is one of the Best

Around 2016 a number of (other) much cheaper and older hosting companies started adding the branding words of ‘managed WordPress Hosting’ to some of their own packages. They offered some WordPress focused benefits like backups and staging sites.  Many did not last. Running a good Managed WordPress Hosting company requires lots of technical know how and hard work. WPEngine shines in this area.

Other Managed WP Hosting companies do not come close to competing with WPEngine.

That’s where that ‘premium’ word comes into play, plus WPEngine is just really good at managed WordPress Hosting. They are hands down the easiest hosting company to recommend based on overall results & reliability.

They were one of the first of two Premium managed WordPress Hosting companies.  We initially met their team at a BlogWorld around 2010 years ago.

A couple things we love about WPEngine…

  1. They are fast, bottom line, no doubt about it.
  2. They offer one of the easiest to use ‘1 click staging’ tools and they offer it standard on all their plans plus its easy to setup many other staging installs through changes they made in 2017.

While their speed is excellent, they are a Premium hosting company.  Their prices used to set the upper limits of the scale in managed WordPress hosting.

Generally speaking, the price is worth it. That goes double for sites that receive regular development updates or marketing updates. The backend of the site (the wordpress editor) runs fast as well.

New LOWER Prices for WPEngine

What’s Changing in January 2020? 

  • Startup plan: Price reducing from $35/mo to $30/mo (or $350/yr to $300/yr for annual plans). 

  • Growth plan:  Price remains the same at $115/mo with an increased amount of included sites. The Growth plan will now include 10 sites vs 5.
  • Scale plan:  Price remains the same at $290/mo with an increased amount of included sites, increased storage and increased bandwidth limits.  The Scale plan will now include 30 sites versus 15
  • The Premium and Enterprise plans remain unchanged.
  • Note: On January 22nd, all current customers on Startup Plans will be converted to the new price on their monthly or annual billing renewal date, and new customers will receive the pricing and entitlements described above. 

TIPS! – Essential to be happy with WP Engine 

Run your domain name through a free Cloudflare account… no gripes, no delays, do it.  (Do it with any host for that matter, but with WP Engine Cloudflare is essential to reduce overages.  You can upgrade your Cloudflare plan to a paid plan if you like, but not essential.)

WPEngine now offers a CDN standard on all plans, so some of the overage complaints stemming from images in years past is a thing of the past.

 

Dig in and learn more about WP Engine

WP Engine faqs

Yes. Sometimes.

In general, WP Engine often offers a discount that provides 2-3 free months of hosting if hosting is paid at least 1 year in advance.

Right now WP Engine is offering a 3 month discount if you use the following code when you sign up for an annual plan. You can grab the current discount code from our Agency Partner Program page .

The discount on a Monthly plan is far less (about $3.50 – $29 depending on the size of the plan) as compared  to an Annual plan( where the discount is $105 – $870 off! depending on the size of the plan. )

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Yes.

WP Engine offers one of the easiest to use 1 Click Staging tools we have seen so far.

The Staging site that is created is virtually a copy and a working copy at that of your entire site, running on a different sub domain url.  You won’t have to edit anything in mysql, nor will you have to play with the hosts file, setup a domain yourself or anything else.

When you are done testing something out on Staging, if you like you can push those changes into your live site.  There are several options available that enable you to only update files, such as theme or plugin files that have changed or been added, or only update database tables or both.

There are a few limitations.

The copy of the live site into the staging site usually only includes the most recent 12 months worth of images from the media library, aka /uploads/ folder in WordPress.  If you want more images in your staging site, you will need to transfer these via SFTP.

Plus, to our knowledge WP Engine does not offer the equivalent of a ‘File Manager’ as might be found on other hosts that use cPanel.  This means that you cannot easily copy files on the server from one site (live site) to another (staging site).  You will have to download and re upload.

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The number of domains depends on the plan, sort of.  Specifically WP Engine counts things based on the number of WordPress installs.

Ancient WordPress History – Usually one WordPress install is done for one domain.  But occassionally, especially in the old days of WordPress, it was not uncommon for a domain to have multiple WordPress installs running in different folders on the same domain.  Sometimes multisite, um sites still do this creating different sections within a single site on a domain.

1 WordPress Install Personal Plan

The entry level ‘Personal Plan’ only allows one domain.

TIP! Need just 2 domains?  It is possible to order or add on a second domain for an extra $14.95 per month.  Both domains will also have the ability to create staging accounts or sub domains. Although these domains will have to split the available number of visits for the Personal plan which is 25,000 visits.  That is not a whole lot of visits and visits are not measured the way Google Analytics measures unique visits so do be very very careful.

Up to 10 WordPress Installs Professional Plan

The Professional Plan allows someone to have as many as 10 domains.  These domains will have to split the available number of visits, which is 100,000 visits.  That averages to 10k visits per domain, which is not very much.  This is probably a fit for people that have one semi popular site and several other sites that get very little traffic.  From our experience we would categorize a site as semi popular if it has about 15-20k pageviews per month although that is a very rough estimate and we can’t be held responsible or liable if you try to use that to gauge your own potential activity.

Up to 25 WordPress Installs – Business Plans

The Business Plan allows someone to have as many as 10 domains.  These domains will have to split the available number of visits, which is 400,000 visits.

Enterprise Plans for everything else +25 or millions of visits

In general, everything else is usually going to fit under an Enterprise Plan, but if you have a specific exception or strange situation, you should talk to WP Engines pre sales people first.

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Nope!

You will probably need to source a separate email plan, maybe something like Google Business Apps or Microsoft Office 365 email.

We use Google Business Apps ourselves.

Google Business Apps starts at $5 per user per month and Microsoft Office 365 starts at $3.99.  Both include other tools and storage in addition to email hosting.

If you have a really old Godaddy account already, you might be grandfathered into their old email hosting options.  These can only be viewed when you are logged in to an existing/old account.  Officially they have discontinued their old email hosting plans which cost significantly less, offered many more email accounts, but didn’t offer the types of document and file sharing capabilities.

Plus we think that the spam fighting tools on the newer services of both Google Business Apps and Microsoft Office 365 are far superior.

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Yes.

They do offer managed WordPress hosting services.  In fact, their service might better be described as Premium managed WordPress hosting services both due to their price points and target markets and also for the mostly full service solutions they offer including 1 click staging, some of the faster servers in the managed WordPress hosting arena, and close attention to backups and security.


No.

WP Engine does offer a migration service, which is managed through a third party.  It runs for about $300.

They do offer a guide to migrating your own site in the form of several very well crafted blog articles.  The guides are solid and anyone that has moved a site, worked with a DNS propagation or WordPress in general can probably manage them.  But unlike some competitors they do not offer either a free migration or free migration tool.


Yes! (Sort of new)

Starting in 2018 WPEngine started offering free CDN services to new hosting packages and gradually migrated all remaining existing hosting plans to the free CDN service too. This happened at the same time as they made updates to their pricing plans.

How to enable to Enable the CDN on a WordPress site Powered by WPEngine


No.

SSL certificates are not available with their personal plans currently.

SSL certificates are available with their Professional plans and higher.  They can be purchased via WP Engine for $49 for standard SSL and $199 for wildcard SSL certificates.  These renew yearly.


 

If we have missed something important to you, or if some of our information is dated, we would love your feedback on how we might update our information or answer your questions more completely. Please contact us or leave a comment to make this happen!


Developer Friendly

  • Supports Github and Subversion and more, documentation for integrations and workflows available
  • See on demand 37 minute Webinar from WPEngine (no sign up required, you can watch at 1.25x speed to get an overview) Topics include:
    • Agile development with WordPress
    • Git based workflows
    • Working with multiple environments
    • How to automate your work
    • Demo

Agency Friendly

  • Supports Dev and Staging installs so that the Marketing team can work on copy on one or more installs while the development team is simultaneously working and testing code elsewhere (many many configuration options)
  • Genesis Framework and StudioPress child themes available for free for WPEngine accounts. Child themes typically cost $99 each, great value add here.

WPThemeSpeed by Softduit Partners is an Agency Partner with WPEngine

We have been a partner since the Agency Partner program launched. Before that we were an Affiliate of WPEngine dating back to the launch of their Affiliate program. WPThemeSpeed is primarily a web development agency, and promoting hosting plans is not our primary business. Working as an Agency Partner is a better fit than working as an affiliate.

If you want to explore pricing with WPEngine you will find a nice discount off the first billing cycle if you sign up through us.

That said, we’d be even happier to help you get started, establish or migrate your site(s) and explore some of the best practices for running a website on their Managed WordPress platform.

 

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