Google Compute Engine vs. WP Engine

You can use Google Cloud Compute Engine as an option to configure your Gitlab, GitHub, and Azure DevOps self-hosted runners. This allows full control and management of your runners rather than using the default runners, which you cannot manage. Additionally, they can be used as a workspace, which you can provide to the employees, where they can test their workloads or use them as a local host and then deploy to the actual production-grade instance.

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

• Scaling - whether it's traffic spikes or just steady growth, Google Compute Engine's auto-scaling makes sure we've got the compute power we need without any manual juggling acts
• Load balancing - Keeping things smooth with that load balancing across multiple VMs, so our users don't have to deal with slow load times or downtime even when things get crazy busy
• Customizability - Mix and match configs for CPU, RAM, storage and whatnot to suit our specific app needs

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

• Built-in monitoring via Stackdriver is quite expensive for what it provides.
• Initially provided quotas (ie. max compute units one can use) are very low and it took several requests to get an appropriate amount.
• Support on GCE is limited to their knowledge base and forums. For more hands-on support provided by Google, you must pay for their Premium services.

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

Its pretty good, easy and good performance. Also, interface is very good for starters compared to competitors. Infra as Code (IaC) using Terraform even added easiness for creation, management and deletion of compute Virtual Machines (VM). Overall, very good and very easy cloud based compute platform which simplified infrastructure, very much recommend.

Incentivized

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.

Having interacted with several cloud services, GCE stands out to me as more usable than most. The naming and locating of features is a little more intuitive than most I've interacted with, and hinting is also quite helpful. Getting staff up to speed has proven to be overall less painful than others.

Incentivized

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

Google Compute Engine works well for cloud project with lesser geographical audience. It sometimes gives error while everything is set up perfectly. We also keep on check any updates available because that's one reason of site getting down. Google Compute Engine is ultimately a top solution to build an app and publish it online within a few minutes

Incentivized

It works great all the time except for occasional issues, but overall, I am very happy with the performance. It delivers on the promise it makes and as per the SLAs provided. Networking is great with a premium network, and AZs are also widespread across geographies. Overall, it is a great infra item to have, which you can scale as you want.

Incentivized

• The documentation needs to be better for intermediate users - There are first steps that one can easily follow, but after that, the documentation is often spotty or not in a form where one can follow the steps and accomplish the task. Also, the documentation and the product often go out of sync, where the commands from the documentation do not work with the current version of the product.
• Google support was great and their presence on site was very helpful in dealing with various issues.

Incentivized

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

Google Compute Engine provides a one stop solution for all the complex features and the UI is better than Amazon's EC2 and Azure Machine Learning for ease of usability. It's always good to have an eco-system of products from Google as it's one of the most used search engine and IoT services provider, which helps with ease of integration and updates in the future.

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

It works really well with other Google Cloud services, making it easy to build scalable solutions across different teams and locations.

Incentivized

• With Google Compute we don't have the overhead of managing our own data centers reducing costs and reducing the staff needed to manage systems.
• As I said earlier, Google's costs are ~1/2 of AWS, so we are able to see a ROI much faster.

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