Top WPEngine Alternatives

Good: $29 Entry Point Plan, "Staging Area” (website cloning & testing function), “One Click” Restore Points, premium caching (Evercache), Offers a "Free Restoration" if Data or Blog is Compromised

Bad: Questionable CDN (Entry point plan does not have CDN; Higher tier plans use MaxCDN located in USA, europe, and asia)

Overall: WP Engine offers a lot of flexibility in their hosting plans that will appeal to both large and small organizations.

WP Engine is a highly managed WordPress hosting platform that will appeal to a wide array of bloggers and businesses.  The company was founded in 2010 and now offers a hosting solution to more than 20000 clients. Most of the clients include high traffic blog owners and enterprises. They have offices in four locations in the US and UK.

Being all-in-one WordPress hosting solution, the company offers firewalls and malware scanning, 1-click restore points, Evercache technology, and free resolution in the event that a WordPress install is hacked or compromised. Here is the detailed overview of various feature company offers.

Key Features

WP Engine offers Evercache technology, fully-managed content delivery network (CDN) provided by "edge" servers, unlimited support, open-ended scalability, free WordPress backup with 1-click backup, automatic WordPress core updates, and free hack resolution in case of compromised server.

WP Engine has robust and advanced features perfect for power users, chief among them is "Staging Area"; allowing developers and designers to deploy new pages, develop plugins, development or change themes, and view them "real time" WITHOUT changing your website and "publishing" until satisfaction.

Different Packages

WP Engine offers three packages, and one open-ended custom solution. Their first package is their "Personal" package, which small organizations will find to be ideal. The "Personal" Plan includes 1 WordPress install, 25k visitors per month, unlimited data transfer, and 10GB of storage. Their second package is their "Professional" plan. The "Professional" Plan includes 10 WordPress installs, 100k visitors per month, unlimited data transfer, and 20GB of storage. Their "Business" plan is designed for users with more robust requirements. The "Business" Plan includes 25 WordPress installations, 400k visitors per month, unlimited data transfer, and 30GB of storage.

Security

Security conscious customers can find solace in WP Engine as they actively block tens of thousands of known attacks and update their core system daily in order to prevent new threat vectors. WP Engine also offers free (daily) backups, free restoration, and will help restore any data that is lost if a WordPress installation is ever hacked or compromised.

All plans of WPEngine come with firewall protection to avoid nasty website visitors as well as Malware scan.  They regularly scan website’s code for malicious attacks and if there is anything compromised on server level, then they also guarantee to fix it themselves. This could be a huge relief for bloggers who are not highly tech savvy.

There is also option for site owners to use WPEngine’s own SSL or install a third party SSL certificate to strengthen security.

Scalability

Usually blog owners who want to optimize the speed of their website require installing one cache plugins to serve pages faster and optimize the overall speed of the website. WPEngine’s EverCache feature automatically caches WordPress sites along with database caching as well as object caching.

For customers looking at upwards scalability, WP Engine offers robust possibilities with advanced CDN and the ability for dedicated IP(s). Additionally, they can serve millions of visitors per month, and still offer unlimited storage and unlimited storage for their "Premium" plans. Large customers need to contact WP Engine for a quote, though can be assured of their ability to serve a massive quantity of traffic. It should be noted however that they require additional fee to use CDN for personal plan subscribers.

Developer Tools

A developer working for client’s sites can get advantage of various developer tools offered by WPEngine. One of these tools includes Git version control. Developers can edit or write code in git repository and push the changes live or in the staging area. This feature providers various flexibilies to developers. Git version control is integrated to Wordpress by default on all the plans.

Conclusion

WPEngine is a right choice for most blogs when it comes to WP Hosting. There are plenty of features which set the standard in the market. The only problem however is their costly overage charges ($1/1000 visitors on top of allowed monthly visits) and users on the internet are unhappy with their pricing model for this. That being said, if your website receives a stable traffic and likely not to see any spike in website traffic frequently then WPEngine is the right choice.