WP Engine Review: Secure, Fast, Not For Everyone

In the past few months, we have heard a lot of good and interesting things about WP Engine. For those of you not familiar with this hosting service, WP Engineis all about managed WordPress hosting. The service is designed to offer clients a fast and secure experience. Prices are
fairly affordable unless you have more than a few websites. Even the Business Plan, which goes for $249 a month, entitles you to 25 WordPress installs, 400k monthly visits, unlimited data transfer, and 30GB local storage. I have to warn you that if you are moving to WP Engine from a VPS or dedicated hosting account, you are going to be in for a few surprises. WP Engine does offer lots of great features, but it also keeps you from breaking things by applying certain restrictions.

I am a big fan of cPanel and WHM. I have been using them for a long time and have no trouble figuring things out in those environments. WP Engine has a very interesting user interface. You can add domains, enable CDN, backup your website, handle Git pushes, access phpMyAdmin, and go through your error logs when you click on the Install link. The
Home page shows you how many visits you have received.

What’s neat about WP Engine is the fact that it makes many boring tasks easy. For instance, you really don’t have to struggle to add a new redirect rule or access your backup files from a couple of days back. If there are any errors, you can easily go through your logs to make sense of them. Want to create an exact copy of an install with the same content, widgets, and settings as an old site? No problem. These are all features that work great for folks who really don’t want to get their hands dirty when it comes to bringing their new sites online.

I do have a few problems with WP Engine. But speed was never one of them. The sites you host on WP Engine will be fast. Will they be as fast as a website that has a $1M annual budget in addition to plenty of advanced servers and web experts to rely on? Probably not. But that’s not the point. WP Engine provides faster speed with multi-server clusters, custom in-RAM caching, and fast hardware. The downside? There are certain pluginsyou won’t be able to install & keep, including W3 Total Cache. Kiss those database intensivegoodbye as well. You do have the option to enable your CDN to get an even better performance.

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