Cloudflare vs WP Engine

• When you need a FREE and EASY TO SETUP SSL certificate on your page (if you don't have the locked locker icon when opening your page, you need it)
• When you want to obfuscate your webpage's IP (any connection will give the Cloudflare's IP)
• You need to speed up the connection for static content (it will not help database connections or dynamic content)
• IF your DNS isn't good (Cloudflare's DNS is amazing, quick, easy, and works pretty well)

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• 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.

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• There is a huge jump in price between the mid-tier and enterprise solutions which is hard to justify for smaller businesses, or companies owning many small businesses.
• It is difficult to convert from a CNAME installation back to a DNS based one
• Setting up page-level caching with web workers is counterintuitive for simple websites

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• 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.

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• Uptime: With Cloudflare's website protection, we have avoided panic-inducing outages and downtime.
• Reduced hosting load: Cloudflare's CDN allows us to use smaller servers and greatly diminish bandwidth usage.
• Reduced domain renewal cost: Most of our domains could be transferred to Cloudflare, where domain renewals are as cheap as possible.
• Increased total website cost: All of Cloudflare's features aren't free, and they increase our monthly overall website cost. The protection and other features are helpful, just not free.

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• Substantial lost time. After my "You have failed me for the last time" moment with WP Engine, I spent the week of October 22nd, 2018 migrating all our client sites to Kinsta - an emerging leader in Managed WordPress hosting.
• Untold losses in unrealized revenue based on poor site performance.
• Untold losses in brand damage to multiple clients whose sites were compromised.

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