A2 Hosting vs. Liquid Web vs. WP Engine

Never would I recommend this company to anyone. [In my experience] they are total nightmares to deal with and depend on. You can't depend on them at all. Plus, [I feel that] they lie and manipulate the search queries based on lies (they do NOT have radio hosting yet they have ads saying that they do).

Liquid Web is suitable for serious users who have high end web applications or critical business oriented websites. cPanel and WHM comes out of the box with almost every server you buy. And if you don't have time to manage your own server, Liquid Web will suit you well. Their support is awesome. They help beyond the scope of the support. I had to migrate almost 25 big sites to another Liquid Web server, the support guys made it so easy for me.

Incentivized

I am an enterprise user of WordPress and host over 7000 sites with WPEngine. Areas that I think they are well suited for include customers that need enterprise-level support and uptime and have more complex needs than a simple blog. They also manage scale well with a variety of isolated install options that you can scale up or down depending on your contract needs. They also provide premier support for enterprises and have highly knowledgable Technical Account Managers that provide a significant value add. If I were to look at where it isn't as appropriate for usage I would focus on the low-end needs and say while they do support small sites, there are options out there for cheaper hosting that lack the support a WPEngine gives you.

Incentivized

• the hosting hardware they provide is decent when you consider the price

• Customer Service — Amazing support, if needed.
• Site Speed — Our website sped up by 50% just by moving our hosting to Liquid-Web.
• Knowledge — We've learned a lot as an organization by following the Liquid Web blog.

Incentivized

• I love the database backups and how quickly & easy it is to restore from an old backup point. This gives me & my clients confidence that any change can be rolled back.
• The built in caching & CDN mean that I have to spend less time worrying about the speed of the server & site. The caching has some side-effects that take getting used to (on-page dynamic PHP code sometimes needs to be moved to API endpoints), but this is true for most caching systems.
• They have really good support for multiple environments. It's very easy to have separate production & staging environments. It's also very simple to deploy from staging to production, making product launches and large scale website copy changes much easier to coordinate.

Incentivized

• [In my experience] customer service is awful.
• [From what I've seen] they don't care about clients.
• [In my situation their] first reaction is always to blame it on the unmanaged factor.

• The tutorial area is excellent, but perhaps they could add video tutorial.
• Chat conversations should be added automatically to the client portal.

Incentivized

• I'd like to see WP Engine offer their own monitoring solution. When I say monitoring, I mean specific use cases that may end up being something you could script. This would keep customers from having to pay for additional services like Pingdom, New Relic, etc.
• I would like to see some proactive analysis done by WP Engine on their customer sites - at least on their home pages, and offer up suggestions. This kind of goes along with the other example.
• Finally, it would be nice to see a "lighter" offering, perhaps a plan that costs $49 for those who want to host only a few sites, or even 1 site.

Incentivized

Never would I use this service. I canceled 7 accounts I believe so far. [In my opinion] it's a waste.

I was in a situation where I had to bolt Wordpress on to an existing infrastructure that could not support it. If I ever end up in that situation again, please kill me. Other than that reasonably common use case, I don't think it offers a lot of value over robust shared hosting, virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated servers.

[In my opinion] it barely works.

From the onboarding and in the days afterward, it was very easy to get into the platform and begin creating important websites and configuring user options. The interface is easy to navigate, and the platform pages load quickly. Since the platform is built for Word plus press, it has features including backup, staging, maintenance mode, and direct WP-Admin login to make configuration and site management faster. We have never had any issues on the billing side of the account.

Incentivized

they are only technically available but having someone say hello, i'm here to help, immediately is not real responsive if they actually never address the issue being reported. we don't contact support for the bland greeting, we are actually trying to solve a business process interruption

They are only good if you never update your website and i mean never. Otherwise their main performance diffrentiator is turbo web hosting, their highest shared hosting plan. When caching is working it performs well reducing load times by half, but as soon as you add a new page to the site, the updates don't show up until you clear the cache manually from multiple locations (wordpress a2optimized plugin, cpanel etc..). As they make updates to the turbo hosting A2optimized plugin, they do not test them properly and do not handle customer feedback about them, instead they are in denial and try to immediately convince the customer there is no issue at all! the old developer joke when they don't want to fix feedback: it works on my machine!

In my opinion they are unresponsive, rude, incompetent, and untrustworthy to boot.

Support is generally great. Enterprise support is fantastic, with little to no wait times. I find that chat support can almost always take care of the problem without escalating to a ticket for a higher level of troubleshooting. The chat support for many other hosting providers can only handle basic issues. This is a big bonus for us to get quick and helpful answers.

Incentivized

[In my experience] it was a mess from the start and created problems ever since day one.

We evaluated Kinsta and WPEngine. Both offer great platforms but the lack of solid phone support and the substantial difference in server resource allocation made Liquid Web a clear winner.

Incentivized

While we still use GoDaddy for some services, WP Engine definitely has been a major upgrade for our WordPress hosting. In addition to faster load speeds, WP Engine has been more adept at allowing us to manage a high number of websites without straining the system. We have never used Network Solutions for our own hosting needs, but when we do interact with them on behalf of our clients, their systems always seem to be clunky and hard to use, and they often overcharge customers by selling them products they do not need.

Incentivized

I believe they do not care about addressing failures when they occur. Starting out with a working service counts for nothing if you can't maintain it, fix issues when reported, and actually take the extra step to prevent them from happening again. You have to care about quality and customer service, and A2 couldn't care less

• [In my experience] they have upheaved my entire business many times by not having working servers.
• [I feel like] they have inconvenienced us many hours with tech calls over stupid things.
• [In my opinion] they have wasted so much time and man hours.

• Liquid-Web has made it easier for me to take my focus away from handling constant server issues to being able to focus on my actual job in managing our websites. While there may not be a concrete number for this scenario, being able to perform my tasks more efficiently definitely helps company growth in the long run.

Incentivized

• WP Engine reduces our time investment and upkeep costs which increases our margins.
• WP Engine simplifies site management with a built-in development server, which saves us headaches.
• WP Engine itself is positioned as a premium service, which allows us to use their branding as a tool to close sales.

Incentivized