Super Fast WordPress Hosting: WP Engine Hosting Service
Having a website is becoming an essential part of any businesses or organization. Moreover, building your business website on WordPress is the most cost effective way to use Internet for growing your business.
Each website requires a host to be able to be surfed by the public.
The right hosting service is crucial because it can improve user experience, strengthen security, improve search engine rankings and lower any digital advertising spend.
From our experience, WP Engine is the super fast wordpress hosting service. Here are the main features that make WP Engine great!
Fast Loading Speed
Website loads 2-4 times faster when hosted by WP Engine.
Vicki Mills, a web marketing strategist, uses her own website migration experience to compare the loading time between her original website host against WP Engine.
She finds WP Engine loads much faster despite all the tweaks and changes she did to improve her site’s loading speed hosted on the original server.
As Google search algorithm takes loading speed into account, a super fast WordPress hosting service can definitely improve your search engine rankings.
Google has indicated site speed (and as a result, page speed) is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. And research has shown that Google might be specifically measuring time to first byte as when it considers page speed. In addition, a slow page speed means that search engines can crawl fewer pages using their allocated crawl budget, and this could negatively affect your indexation. – Moz
Also, more visitors will abandon the site as the site takes longer to load.
The theory is simple. If you never want to keep customers waiting, why would you want them to wait for your website?
Daily / Manual Backup
Having a hosting service that does daily backup means your website’s information is saved every day, and you can restore your website to the latest version if anything happens to it.
Whenever you are looking to do a major update to your website, it is advised that you manually backup your site beforehand, so that if anything goes wrong, you can restore it to the point before the update.
The manual backup option is convenient in testing out new features as you can roll back the changes without relying on the only daily backup.
WP Engine provides both daily backup and manual backup functions as free features.
It also provides a super simple way to view all the backup checkpoints, and you can restore the website to any checkpoint with one click.
Free Malware Scanning
Websites can be under attack at any time, and in 2012 alone, more than 170,000 WordPress websites were hacked.
Website hosting servers, like personal computers, require regular malware scanning to maintain its health against hacking attacks.
Here is one of our clients who is in urgent need of malware cleaning because other hosting service providers do not offer such feature.
Here is another concerned client asking us for assistance due to her WordPress site being hacked when she was with another hosting provider.
See what she says about WP Engine hosting service.
More Uptime
Most web hosting service will provide a 99% uptime, but if you calculate on an annual scale, that means about 3.5 days of downtime in a year.
Digital Commerce 360 estimated that a 20-minute outage would have cost Amazon roughly $3.75 million. How much is it costing you if your business is shut down for 3.5 days?
Hosting on WP Engine can boost the uptime closer to 99.99%, and that converts to just lower under an hour a year.
However, you may not want to achieve a complete 100% because it will cost you tens of thousands of dollars a month. Managing between cost and uptime is always a delicate balance act.
Quick Support Time
Technical support answers tickets within 30 minutes to get you back online.
There is even direct phone support for WP Engine users with Business Package or higher.
This fast support, along with the daily backup, means that your website will have twice the secure measures against downtime.
WP Business Plan provides additional support and security over the Personal Plan.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network that stores a website’s content in different servers around the world.
Whenever a person surfs a website, the CDN network detects the visitor’s physical location. Consequently, the CDN network finds the closest server to the user and serve the site. This way, we can minimize the loading time.
For example, if you are visiting a German website and it detects that its Netherland server is closer to you, it will fetch the website’s content to you via the Netherland server instead of the one in Germany.
It can cut down the loading speed by half, which means, more improvements to your site’s user experiecne and search engine ranking!
Security Socket Layer (SSL)
Security Socket Layer (SSL) is a security technology that provides an encrypted link between the user and the server ensuring the data transferred are private and integral.
For example, when you are writing an email message, the message is sent via your browser and Internet provider to your email service. If the message is encrypted by SSL, anyone that intercept the message will only see codes, not an email message.
This function is especially important for eCommerce websites as credit card and other personal information are transmitted during the transactions.
Multiple Server Location
Multiple Server Location is the security measure so that multiple servers in different locations can store your website.
If data corruption ever happens to one of the servers, your website can still be online because another server will take its place and continue serving your site.
This also protects against regional server issues like a power outage and assures your website will be online in any situations.
How Much Does The WP Engine Hosting Plan Cost?
Here is a comparison between several recognized hosting provider’s personal level plans.
As you can see, WP Engine hosting plan is superior than the other options with a 93% Score.
However, the basic WP Engine personal plan does not have the CDN function with it, which means your website is not getting all the page speed upgrades that are available.
Here is another comparison of WP Engine Personal Plan, WP Engine Personal Plan with CDN, and The Coding Bull Partnership Plan.
The Coding Bull plan is exactly the same as WP Engine Personal Plan with CDN except it is cheaper.
It is cheaper because we have purchased hosting accounts in bulk from WP Engine, so our clients can have a 50% off on a very power hosting plan.
This is simply a benefit for our clients as our primary objective is helping clients to do what’s best for their business.
Why Are Some Hosting Plans So Cheap? Like at $4.99 / Month?
It is very likely that you are looking at cPanel hosting services, which still work for your WordPress website, but they suck if you want to your website to generate any business for you.
cPanel hosting is a one for all solution.
Managed WordPress hosting tweaks all the server stuff to make WordPress websites load faster and more secure.
To understand all the differences, you can read this article: https://athemes.com/hosting/shared-hosting-vs-managed-wordpress-hosting/
See the following page speed comparison between GoDaddy (cPanel), SiteGround (cPanel) and WP Engine (Managed WordPress Hosting):
GoDaddy – Website Loads After 10.671s
SiteGroud – Website Loads After 10.615s
WPEngine – Website Loads After 4.490s
As you can see, when WP Engine can load a website 2.37 times faster.
What Should You Choose?
To be honest, $400 is not a big expense to any businesses, it is less than a cup of coffee every day.
Sine you are investing a significant amout of money to redesign your website, you should make sure it is secure and can serve the online visitors a smooth browsing experience.