t’s no a brainer that having good, reliable web hosting is one of the most crucial aspectsof any growing or established blog.
One of the most daunting tasks that you will face with your blog is choosing the right web hosting company.
There are many great options available, especially when you have a small or medium-sized WordPress blog.
Budget hosting like
Bluehost is sufficient for a smaller blog, but the task gets tedious when your WordPress blog starts growing exponentially and
greater server resources are required to handle your increasing traffic.
In the past, I have tried various hosting companies such as
SiteGround,
KnownHost, and a few others.
But due to the complex nature of my WordPress configuration (40+ plugins & many custom scripts), I decided to move away from these hosts and find a solution that would give me complete peace of mind.
My goal with the new host was to be able to forget about hosting headaches in order to focus on what I’m good at:
Blogging.
With the collection of features offered, and the complete “hassle-free hosting”available for WordPress, I decided to sign up and pay $250/month for their hosting services.
You must be wondering why I would choose to pay that amount of money when I can get a dedicated server for the same price.
This is a reasonable question, and the answer is that, again, I wanted complete peace of mind. I didn’t want to spend an hour a day (or even an hour a week) addressing hosting issues, because based on my experience, I feel very strongly that:
My journey with WPEngine, and what made me ditch the service for good:
Following
a lot of research and making the decision to pay that
hefty $250/month to host ShoutMeLoud, I finally moved to
WPEngine.
The quality of hosting I was promised was up to par, and I had no problem with WPEngine until…
One day they emailed me and told me that I had to pay:
- $223 EXTRA for overage charges.
Seriously?
Overage charges??
And indeed, they deducted that amount of money from my credit card.
This company’s “overage charges” created a big hole in my pocket and will create holes in the pockets of any medium and large publishers who are on WPEngine or any similar hosting service that charges you per “visit”.
WPEngine’s pricing policy is nonsense.
Let’s have a look at how WPEngine counts “visits”:
The following two issues only served to add to my frustration:
- We reset our notion of “unique IP address” every day.
- Robots have the same few IP addresses, so they will be consolidated within one day, but will count again the next day.
When we buy web hosting from any company, we take note of how many visitors they allow within the various packages they offer. I opted for WPEngine’s “Business” plan as it allows up to 400,000 visits/month and my Google Analytics was showing only 356,000 visits/month.
Here is what the WPEngine “Business” plan offers:
Comparing Google Analytics with WPEngine stats:
In the images below, I am comparing stats shown by Google Analytics for the period of15th August-15th September 2014 with WPEngine’s stats for the same period.
First, let’s have a look at the Google Analytics stats:
Now let’s have a look at the stats from WPEngine for the same time period:
Also, take note of the following message:
- “This shows how many visits you are receiving across pages, feeds and static assets (images, JavaScript files, CSS files, etc.). A visitor to your site may access one, two or all three types, but we will only count that as one visit in your overall visitor count. However the breakdown in this section will show you if you are receiving a disproportionate amount of access to your RSS Feeds, or to your images due to hotlinking or their embed in a 3rd party website or email campaign. WP Engine does not charge for visits that have only hit favicon.ico or robots.txt.”
Please note: I have
implemented CloudFlare to ignore bad bots visits, otherwise my charges would be at least 1.5X the charges you see here.
Additionally, I was paying for hot-linked images (or images that were shared on Twitter, my email newsletter, and many other places).
Have a look at the image below, bearing in mind that this is what the WPEngine team notes at the top:
- “Here is a list of your top static referrers. If a large %age of hits here are occurring from a domain that you do not control, your WP Engine visit count will be negatively impacted.”
Essentially, WPEngine hosting is for people who don’t want to look into technical aspects and simply want to focus on their business or their blog.
Their manner of pricing is overkill for a normal end-user like me, and most likely, for you as well.
They could have very easily integrated
CloudFlare with their hosting service, or at least have integrated a measure of stopping bad bots from eating their customers’ money, but apparently, they are a money-hungry company and they
do not have their customers’ best interests at heart.
There is more to it…
When you are
paying over $250/month to a web hosting company, you
expect to have
priority and premium support. Even a low-budget hosting company like
Bluehost (which costs only $6.95/month) offers round-the-clock support over live chat and phone.
WPEngine does not offer live chat support around the clock, and in general, I have not found their support to be of “high-quality” at all.
Here is the summary of his WPEngine review:
No Root access/disallowed plugins:
A plugin like
Broken Link Checker, one of the
best plugins for WordPress blogs for the purpose of checking broken links,
is not allowed!
Having created an alternate solution, WPEngine has disallowed Broken Link Checker.
They do offer alternative solutions like
Integrity and a few others, but they all are
desktop-based solutions and
require a lot of manual work to fix broken links.
The conclusion of my WPEngine Hosting review:
When it comes to quality of hosting, WPEngine can provide decent hosting which can handle a memory-hogging WordPress blog most of the time.
But when it comes to pricing:
- They are DEFINITELY not worth the cost.
In 13 month’s time, I paid $4,621 to host ShoutMeLoud, which is completely not worth the investment.
I could have done the same with a much better host for $1,500.
Here is the screenshot of my paid invoice (notice the extra charges in April thru September):
I would only recommend WPEngine hosting to business WordPress sites or blogs with low traffic requirements.
If you do decide to use WPEngine’s hosting services, be sure to also use
CloudFlare, otherwise you will be paying
significant overage charges.
This overage thing is such a disappointing issue. Not only did it cause me to stop using WPEngine, it’s left me with little respect for the company.
For medium and high-traffic blogs, stay away from WPEngine as it is just not worth it.
This is my personal review of WPEngine. I have shared everything I’ve learned from working with them for a year. Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide if you should host your WordPress blog on WPEngine or not.
If you are a WPEngine customer and would like to share your story and experience, I would love to hear from you in the comments section below.
If you find the information in this post useful, please share it with your friends and colleagues on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.
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