Likelihood to Recommend 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).
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros the hosting hardware they provide is decent when you consider the price Read full review 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. Read full review Cons [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. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Never would I use this service. I canceled 7 accounts I believe so far. [In my opinion] it's a waste.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Usability [In my opinion] it barely works.
Read full review It took very little time to learn their dashboard for managing WordPress sites. Their built-in tools are really well done, and the addition of security and CDN tools is great.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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
Read full review Performance 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!
Read full review Support Rating In my opinion they are unresponsive, rude, incompetent, and untrustworthy to boot.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating [In my experience] it was a mess from the start and created problems ever since day one.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Scalability 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
Read full review Return on Investment [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. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots