One of the first premium WordPress hosting plans to hit the scene was from WP Engine. Much like Kinsta, this company also specializes in offering managed WordPress hosting (more hands-on, higher level of service, faster speeds) and provides some of the best support in the web hosting space.
How do WP Engine’s plans fare against the competition? One of the strongest selling points of choosing a hosting plan with WP Engine to power your blog, is that they’re a very well-funded company that recently took on a large round of venture capital investment—so they’re not afraid of pushing the envelope to provide their customers with an exceptional experience. Let’s take a closer look at their plans.
Performance
Thanks to the use of CDN and MaxCDN (free on all of their plans), WP Engine offers impressive load times of around 0.582 seconds.
Uptime
WP Engine promises a 99.9% uptime. Interestingly, they don’t believe 100% uptime is possible.
Customer Support
WP Engine provides customer support via live chat for all their customers. However, phone support is only for plans above the Starter hosting plan.
Pricing for WP Engine’s Web Hosting Plans
Depending on your needs, expect to invest anywhere from $22.00/month to $217/month (or more) for the best plans from WP Engine. The great news is that all of their hosting plans come with a 60 day risk-free trial offer so that you can take them for a test run.
WP Engine offers 3 different plans to choose from—and a custom option if their standard packages aren’t exactly what you’re looking for.
The Startup plan comes with:
- Genesis Framework
- 35+ StudioPress Themes
- 24/7 chat support
- Dev, Stage, Prod Environments
- Transferable Sites
- PHP 7.3 ready
- LargeFS
- Global CDN
- Page Performance
- Automated SSL certificates
- SSH Gateway
- 25,000 Monthly Visitors
- 10 GB Local Storage
- 50 GB Bandwidth a Month
- 1 Site Included
The Scale plan adds on:
- Millions of Monthly Visitors
- 100 GB – 1 TB Local Storage
- 400 GB+ Bandwidth a Month
- 25 Sites Included
- Dev, Stage, Prod Environments
- Imported SSL certificates
- 24/7 phone support
- SSH Gateway
Other features included with WP Engine’s plans include:
- Premium WordPress themes
- Ecosystem integration with top names like Amazon, Google and BigCommerce
In short, it’s clear that WP Engine strives to do more than just provide you with a good plan—they actually want your blog to succeed and equip you with a lot of tools, resources, content and support to help make that happen.
And while I’d still recommend that most bloggers opt for Kinsta over WP Engine if you’re committed to a premium WordPress hosting provider (or your blog is growing quickly in monthly readership), it’s worth evaluating all of your options before making a final decision.