WP Engine: The First Ten Months

Edit – 2019-2020: We now offer our own hosting in our own high-end server at affordable pricing compared to competitors, with free SSL, daily backups (on-site and off-site), and unlimited bandwidth.

 

Original blog post from 2014:

Back last summer I realized the time had come to search out a new web host. While my previous host had good performance and was simple to manage, they didn’t really “support” WordPress. What I mean by that is while they gave a good foundation for running WordPress, when I ran into some issues between the WordPress and the server configuration they couldn’t, ahem wouldn’t, help me. From their perspective, WordPress was my own app and supporting it was my responsibility. I’m not a server monkey, nor do I aspire to become one. It was time for a change.

So after comparing features, performance, user experiences and prices from several managed WordPress hosts, I decided to give WP Engine a shot. So, in August 2013, the official change was made and here is some of what I’ve experienced and learned in the ten months since then.

They Have Solid Hosting

a2 noahI host our church’s website and a few months ago, my pastor wrote a review of the movie Noah that went a bit viral. The church actually received about a year’s worth of traffic in a week because of the review being shared so much on social media. Never once during the traffic surge did we lose the site or have a slowdown. It just kept on displaying and doing so very quickly.

In terms of performance, they’ve done well. My sites are typically up 99.99% each month according to Pingdom. Pages typically render in around a second or less from the cache. In reality though I had the same results using Rackspace’s CloudSites, but with that system, I had to test and discover what caching plugins worked best with their hardware and constantly monitor it.

With WP Engine, they have all that set up ahead of time for me. And it just works. I spent the time I would have been tweaking server settings, optimizing my theme and plugins for fewer HTTP requests and smaller file sizes.


Staging Sites Rock

One of WP Engine’s best features is what they call a “Staging Site.” Basically you can copy your site at any time to a “staging area” where you can test out new themes, plugins or anything else without affecting your main site.

I’ve been working on a redesign of our church’s site using our new Kerygma theme. To set it up, I just clicked the copy from Live to Staging button in my WordPress dashboard, logged into the staging site and started setting everything up. Once I’m finished and everyone signs off on the new site, I just have to click the copy from staging to live and that’s it. Nice and simple transition.


Consistent Improvement

It’s only been ten months, but WP Engine has been steadily making things better too. One of the issues Brian Krogsgard warned me about was their caching causing trouble with e-commerce sites. When I first set up our store, I had to request several URL’s to be excluded from the cache so they would work properly.

Now they have developed a script on their servers that will automatically detect an e-commerce plugin and automatically exclude the appropriate URL’s without the user needing to make any requests. You can still have any URL excluded that you’d like to, but now no action is needed from you in order for the caching to work with your e-commerce site. Brilliant!

I recently received an email from the company apologizing for longer support times than they would like to see. The letter also explained how they were going to address the problem. Personally I hadn’t run into any issues with waiting too long for support, even with my requests made the week before the email was sent out. They are very concerned about customer happiness and are continually refining their interactions with customers to make them even better.


What’s Less Than Stellar?

No web host is perfect and there are some things I’d love to change about WP Engine. My first bad surprise had to do with traffic. Their pricing is based on visitors to your site. I looked at the breakdown, added up the traffic that Google Analytics reported across the sites I was hosting and felt I’d comfortably come in under the wire.

I was wrong. Way wrong. Google Analytics doesn’t report on the spam bots that are constantly attacking WordPress sites. But, they are there and they do count towards your total number of visitors.

So, instead of having around 50K visitors per month which I what I expected, I was having around 160K visitors per month. There were twice as many bots as there were people. If they were legitimate visitors, I’d be delighted to pay for the overages (it’s only $1 per 1,000), but paying for “visitors” that contribute nothing but spam just feels wrong.

With Rackspace, I paid for usage so this wasn’t an issue, but at least there it was based on bandwidth and the amount of processing required. That’s a better measure of what I really used. I would suggest WP Engine swapping to a more legitimate metric that users will likely have measured prior to signing up.


So that’s my first ten months with WP Engine. Overall it’s been good. I’ve recommended them to quite a few folks now who use them too and are happy. You can give them a try today. They offer a 60 day money back guarantee so if you don’t end up liking them, you’re not losing anything.

4 Comments

Peter R June 4, 2015

I wonder how this compares to the GoDaddy WordPress hosting package? Have you heard any comments about that hosting package?
https://www.godaddy.com/hosting/wordpress-hosting.aspx?gclid=Cj0KEQjw7r-rBRDE_dXtgLz9-e4BEiQATeKG7AgcHeMU-YtcDnJgaE1KDLvjYczR7_PwSAmFv54cO5kaAk7P8P8HAQ&isc=hos1gbr23&cvosrc=ppc.google.godaddy%20wordpress&matchtype=e&ef_id=U73JrwAAARZn60yd:20150604180828:s

Their wordpress hosting seems hard to beat. Ethics is the only thing GoDadddy, I think they are cleaning up their act.

Cheers, PR

Reply

    Bill Robbins June 4, 2015

    Good question Peter. I do set up WordPress fairly often across web hosts and I’ll say GoDaddy’s is pretty easy to use. For a beginner who isn’t comfortable with technical tasks, GoDaddy’s one stop shop is pretty hard to beat in terms of usability. You can get a domain name and hosting and have it up and running without much trouble. That’s quite a bit simpler that WP Engine where you’ll have to register the domain elsewhere and then configure your DNS for WP Engine’s servers. It’s not hard, but it can be daunting for some.

    So set up is good at GoDaddy. They also allow for a decent max file size on uploads; I believe it’s around 64mb so they must have a reasonable amount of server resources available for each site.

    I haven’t used their tech support so I can’t speak to that. It might be worth a try if you’re looking for a new WP host.

    If you don’t mind getting your hands dirty a bit, Digital Ocean is also a good option. I host my support site with them so that theme update requests don’t count against my WP Engine visitor allotment. The servers are very fast and you can set them up just about any way you want to.

    If you find a host that you really like, let me know,
    Bill

    Reply

Jeannie Hill October 28, 2014

Looking for a new WP theme and webhost. Wonder if you work with either Genesis or Thesis?

Reply

    Bill Robbins October 28, 2014

    Just to be clear here, we’re not WP Engine ourselves. It’s a hosting company that we’re using to run our own sites. They do allow you to bring your own themes so you’re welcome to use Genesis, Thesis or any others.

    Reply

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