Item: WordPress VIP
Rating: 10
Author: Gyles Seward

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Elementary Digital is a dedicated WordPress agency operating in the EMEA region. We work with clients looking to create and manage Enterprise-level WordPress websites. The concerns often with WordPress are centered around security, scalability, and performance, which for those who work in WordPress (and the organizations that use it) are not issues. However, one of the key considerations for these concerns is hosting and this is where WordPress VIP steps in. Effectively it's hosting from the organization (Automattic) that develops WordPress and its hosting is closely aligned to the development roadmap of WordPress itself. This, of course, provides great peace of mind for organizations, working directly with the CMS owners and being first in line to ensure security is paramount allowing for scale, reliability, and most important performance.

Pros and Cons

Security - class leading security, ensuring sites are protected and operate hassle free
Scalability - provide patches and updates first before the market place
Reliability - up to 99.9% up time, with a fantastic track record
Performance - hitting the high notes for Core Web Vitals and ensuring WordPress is operating at its peak performance

Smaller packages - which typically only operate in the Enterprise space, could offer more cost-effective solutions for smaller organizations

Return on Investment

Enterprise - providing a true enterprise hosting solution for organizations that ticks all the boxes (especially for IT Directors)
WordPress best practice - learning and aligning development methodologies to VIP's best practice
Updates - first to receive updates about WordPress ensuring we keep our clients updated
Belief and confidence - in the VIP hosting framework ensure our clients are getting the best service

Support Rating

Obviously very knowledgeable about WordPress, both from a hosting and framework point of view. A very friendly, approachable team, and because of the global reach someone is always available.

Performance

To date, we've not had any issues and our clients are happy/settled with the hosting. The demands of clients are well managed and the hosting lives up to the performance requirements with ease.

Ease of Use

Their management dashboard is improving as they as an organization develop, albeit still some work to do to be as good as some of their competitors. Overall though with some understanding, it's straightforward to use and provides us with what we need.

Alternatives Considered

In the competition noted WordPress VIP is the only true enterprise dedicated to WordPress hosting. Their hosting framework is 100% geared up for providing enterprise organizations with the infrastructure needed.

Key Insights

Do you think WordPress VIP delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with WordPress VIP's feature set?

Yes

Did WordPress VIP live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of WordPress VIP go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy WordPress VIP again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Amazon Web Services

Likelihood to Recommend

At this moment in time, WordPress VIP is excellent for large, enterprise organizations looking to use WordPress as their CMS. The legacy trust issues around WordPress are dispelled when using WordPress VIP and it provides a true enterprise service with excellent infrastructure, performance, and protection. As the cost of licenses for established enterprises, CMS continues to increase and without justification through additional functionality, WordPress is being adopted more often and with VIP you have the perfect package for hosting an enterprise website.

Users and Roles

15 - The business functions that predominately use WordPress VIP are DevOps and our engineers. Although the account management and project management teams work with and consult on the use of WordPress VIP. From a performance point of view the digital marketing team benchmark website speed against Core Web Vitals and reference the speed of WordPress VIP against other hosts.

Support Headcount Required

15 - We have a dedicated team of WordPress engineers (developers) who will support the framework from a front and back end point of view. The DevOps team will support WordPress VIP from an infrastructure point of view. The skills required are familiarity with WordPress and hosting infrastructure. VIP uses a high quality code approach so our in-house Q&A team are conscious of best practice in code as well.

Business Processes Supported

Speed - ensuring WordPress websites achieve or better core web vitals
Security - delivering the highest, enterprise grade security for WordPress website
Scalability - providing a framework from which multiple iterations of WordPress can be scaled

Innovative Uses

Intranet - using it to power organisation intranets
Multi -site - stemming multiple instances of websites off a single instance
News room - integrating with third party newsroom systems

Future Planned Uses

Ecommerce - more effective hosting of Woocommerce
Headless - hosting headless websites
Third party connectivity - build off headless push content to multiple channels

Likelihood to Renew

It's true enterprise ready hosting framework providing unparalleled hosting infrastructure for WordPress. Where an organisation has high load needs, but with stability and scale VIP delivers. It provides complete peace of mind that the hosting, security and scalability are taken care of and organisations can focus on developing out their website strategies.

Products Replaced

Yes - Existing legacy on-premise hosting infrastructure. Had to replace it as the solution was not suitable for a business to scale and for security. WordPress VIP provided a cloud based framework that allowed for greater flex when growing the business.

Key Differentiators

Cloud Solutions
Scalability
Integration with Other Systems

WordPress VIP is the pinnacle of WordPress hosting. It's built by WordPress for WordPress. The cloud first approach allows for infinite scalability and out of the box coding methodologies ensure a WordPress website is fit for purpose when launched.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

No, it was about finding the best WordPress hosting solutions available. Our criteria covered are they enterprise, can they handle volume and scale with us.

Enterprise WordPress hosting from the people that build Wordpress

Overall Satisfaction with WordPress VIP