WP Engine is a website hosting service built to host WordPress for companies of any size, with features such as daily backups, firewall,SSL, and proprietary caching technology.
$29
per month
Pricing
Google Domains
WP Engine
Editions & Modules
.com
$12.00
per year
.net
$12.00
per year
.org
$12.00
per year
Startup
$25.00
*Per Month
Growth
$95.00
*Per Month
Scale
$241.00
*Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google Domains
WP Engine
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
*Pricing for annual contract.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Google Domains
WP Engine
Considered Both Products
Google Domains
Verified User
Partner
Chose Google Domains
Google Domains is focused on domain registration only, instead of providing hosting solutions. So it can be a good option if your client has a server but needs a domain for a new website. Also, as it's only one service, it's much easier to use than other solutions and has …
[Google Domains is] very simplistic and easy to use, so it's very straightforward to register a new domain but it doesn't have some features that other services provide. Also, the integration with other Google Services and domain search tool is amazing.
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.
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.
Google Domains is pretty good at pre-solving email faux pas such as reply all mishaps. Perhaps a built-in email monitoring tool such as knowing when a customer opens up an email would be good. You can get these features with integrations, but what if it was an internal Google product? Might be nice
Email masking was a bit difficult to figure out, but nothing you can't discover with a few Google sessions.
I wish I could see more insight into time zones that my customers are in, or scheduling calls on Gcal with timezone awareness. I know this is super hard to code around though.
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.
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.
When on desktop or mobile, the minimalist design and functionality of Google Domains is welcome. Because we use Google Workplace, the integration is simple. Management is fast and easy, and it offers on-the-go ease. Google is very consistent in its user interfaces and usability, so there’s no wasted time in a new learning curve. And the price is right
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.
I've never actually had to use support because everything has been very straightforward and I have not had a glitch. I have used Google's support for other items so I can only imagine that it's probably the same support which is decent. They do take a while to get back to you.
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.
GoDaddy is great, but what I really like about Google Domains when compared to GoDaddy is the ease of centralization. Our email, calendar, accounts, domain, etc was all handled in one place and that made things really easy. You could also access domains easily and quickly by being logged into your email, instead of worrying about yet another log in.
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.
