No clever, witty intro here. We’ll only say that this recommendation is based on a combined multiple decades worth of experience with web hosting companies.
And based on that experience WP Engine is, far and away, the hosting company we most recommend for website owners who use WordPress. Here are 7 reasons why…
1. Awesome Customer Service
If you have an issue with your website, you want it fixed. And want it fixed fast!
Here, WP Engine – without a doubt – delivers better than any web hosting company we’ve worked with.
From multiple experiences over the years, we can tell you that the WP Engine Support Team is top-notch. They’re professional, pleasant, and highly competent.
When you call, you won’t have to wait long to speak with someone. And you pretty much always get someone who can solve your problem. It’s been a rare situation where we’ve had an issue that had to be escalated to someone else.
The team is US-based, they don’t rush to try to get you off the call and they sound genuinely happy.
In fact, over the years, we often have the same people helping us when we call. It just seems like many people on their team like working at WP Engine and stay with the company for the long haul.
2. An Impressive Toolset From the Get Go
Cheap web hosts are cheap for a reason. They skimp on support, quality, and what they give you with your hosting plan. And they make a lot of money by nickel and diming their customers to get additional features.
WP Engine doesn’t do that. Here you’ll get an impressive set of features from the minute you sign up.
This includes things like daily backups of your site (which is a HUGE deal, by the way), an SSL certificate for your site, a live environment plus a staging/development environment for testing, etc., and a bunch of other great features. Some of which we’ll cover below since they deserve to be mentioned separately.
Yes, they cost more per month compared to the cheap web hosts, but they 100% deliver on the value.
3. Amazing Help If You Get Hacked
Speaking from personal experience (multiple experiences, actually), getting hacked sucks. Trying to find and remove malware or malicious code from a website is really hard.
It can take days, weeks, or even months to clean up a site fully and cost a boatload of money. In some cases, you’re better off just starting from scratch with a new site build.
If your site gets hacked, most web hosts leave you high and dry. Their attitude is “it’s your fault, not ours.”
But no matter whose fault it is, WP Engine will help you if your site gets hacked.
First, because they include site backups, you can often just have them roll back your website to the last good known version of it before the hack occurred.
But also, that staging/development environment we mentioned can be super helpful here if you need to cleanse a site of spam, malware, or other nastiness.
Either way, the WP Engine support team will help you get your site back to how it was before the hackers got a hold of it.
4. They Proactively Watch Your Site, Plugins, etc.
WP Engine keeps a close eye on what’s happening with the sites they host. They proactively look over them – blocking bots, monitoring for bad traffic, etc.
And they even have an automated system that goes through looking for, and removing, malware.
They also are monitoring the plugins you have on your WordPress site. Plugins are a common source of vulnerability that hackers exploit.
WP Engine will let you know when they find out-of-date plugins on your site. Especially ones that have known security issues. WP Engine will shoot you an email letting you know about the issue so you can go in and update the plugin. That’s something most other hosts don’t do.
There’s another benefit to this proactive monitoring. Like with many other hosts, your website on WP Engine will likely be on a shared server with other websites.
That has the potential to put your website at risk. Because if your site is on a shared server with a site that’s affected by malware, bad traffic, spam, etc. that can have a bad effect on your site.
We’ve had situations with other hosts where one of our sites has gotten penalized by Google because of issues with other websites on the server.
That’s not going to happen at WP Engine because they are actively monitoring things and take care of malware or nefarious traffic before it can affect your site.
5. They Focus On What They’re Good At
WP Engine knows WordPress. They specialize in WordPress. And they’re really good at hosting and maintaining WordPress sites.
Unlike other hosts who try to be all things to all people, WP Engine just focuses on one thing and they do it really well.
6. Easy To Use Back End
WP Engine created its own back-end software that you’ll use to manage your server. It is very specific to managing a WordPress site, is easy to navigate, and is well made.
And there’s just enough where you can do things on your own (even if you’re not a techie!) but there’s not too much where it’s overwhelming.
Plus a lot of the stuff for managing a WordPress site just happens automatically. That way you don’t have to worry about it and can focus on other things.
7. It’s Like Having a Techie On Your Staff
This overlaps with some of the other things above but is worth pointing out separately.
Managing a website/server can be a challenge. Especially for those who are not techies.
If you run into issues with hacking, malware, a site crashing due to a traffic spike, etc. you are largely on your own with most web hosting companies. (Or they’ll charge you an arm and a leg to help you. Remember their motto – “It’s not us, it’s you.”)
With WP Engine, it’s like you’re hiring a techie to be on your staff. They’ll help you troubleshoot issues with your site. In fact, we’ve even had situations where they’ve fixed the issues for us – even when the issue wasn’t their fault at all.
The amount of heartache and money this type of support and service can save you over the years is totally worth the $30 or so a month they charge for hosting.
It’s Not For Everyone – 4 Situations Where WP Engine Might Not Be the Best Option
As much as we love WP Engine web hosting, we know it’s not the right choice for everyone. There are some situations where another option may make more sense.
1. You Don’t Use WordPress
One is if you don’t use WordPress. They still may be able to host a non-WordPress site but it’s not their specialty. You may want to go somewhere else in this case.
2. You Have Multiple High Traffic Websites
If your business has multiple websites and/or has a ton of website traffic, you’ll need more than WP Engine’s basic hosting package.
And if you need a beefy, dedicated server (or more than one), WP Engine can get pretty expensive. Don’t get us wrong here… they do a great job with dedicated servers. But you’ll pay for it.
For example, we were pricing hosting for a situation where we needed dedicated servers. WP Engine was going to be around $10,000/yr for this. But we found a solution using DigitalOcean hosting for a little under $4,000 a year.
Now you do NOT get the same level of support with DigitalOcean hosting. But, if you have the technical expertise to manage your own web server, you can save a lot of money and still get good hosting using an option like that instead of WP Engine.
3. You Need the Cheapest Option
Sometimes you just need to get the cheapest hosting option you can find. In that case, we suggest using Siteground. They offer the best service and support of all the cheap hosting companies we’ve found.
4. You Run an eCommerce Site
Lastly, for eCommerce, it’s hard to go wrong with Shopify. There are definitely good WordPress eCommerce options out there. But, for ease of use and functionality, we usually will recommend Shopify for eCommerce sites.
Bottom Line
But, bottom line, we recommend WP Engine web hosting to about 95% of the non-eCommerce businesses we talk to. Based on years of hands-on experience with websites, we can confidently say you can’t go wrong with WP Engine.
If you need a top-quality web host for your site, sign up with WP Engine here.
