WP Engine - Great mid-tier hosting for small to medium sized businesses using WordPress
August 31, 2017
WP Engine - Great mid-tier hosting for small to medium sized businesses using WordPress
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with WP Engine
We use WP Engine to host our various WordPress sites. This includes our main business site (which also encompasses our company blog) and a couple of smaller marketing sites for individual products. Everything is in-use across the whole organization, but end-users have very little interaction with WP Engine as they're the underlying host and users just interact with WordPress itself.
- High-levels of uptime
- Automated WordPress updates
- Daily automated backups
- Responsive customer support
- Customer support, while responsive, is usually not available outside of business hours (making it difficult to get things done during evening/weekend downtime if help is required)
- Upgrading between versions of PHP on the server can be problematic as it requires support intervention and, in a few cases, migrating DNS records for hosted sites.
- The PHP environments provided are not very flexible. Some modules that might be present on other hosts (or required for certain custom WordPress plugins/themes) are merely unavailable.
- WP Engine keeps our site running, meaning we have more time available to produce payable work.
- In at least one situation, an engineer who didn't understand WordPress stored a file in the wrong directory on the server and an automated update from WP Engine purged the file. It took us several hours to figure out what had gone wrong and to recover the missing file on our end. I would have preferred if putting files in the wrong place were impossible to begin with as that would have saved us time and effort.
- Pantheon and Liquid-Web
WP Engine was cheaper than the alternatives, and our site was already present on their servers. It wasn't so much a choice of WP Engine over another hosting company as it was a choice to stay with WP Engine rather than invest the time required to switch to another provider. All three hosts have quality offerings, and are well worth their disparate prices. That being said, choosing Pantheon or Liquid Web over WP Engine would likely have given us more control over the environment, but would have cost us more financially over time.