WPEngine Review & Pricing - Is This For You? Time To Up Your Game.

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Disclaimer: We may get a small commission from WPEngine, but we have no problem recommending them since we put our own clients on there.

Are you wondering why you should host your site on WPEngine? WPEngine is not for every company. In this blog post you will learn:
1) Whether or not WPEngine is for you
2) See the dashboard of WPEngine
3) How WPEngine can “up your game” so your website performs better
4) WPEngine Pricing (we have a reduced rate for you)

We will go over the main features, but not all since you can go straight to WPEngine and see the latest features there.

Who Is WPEngine For?

WPEngine is for companies that:

Need to have great server-side performance
You want to be on Amazon servers (AWS) or Google Cloud Platform servers instead of web servers like Godaddy/Hostgator/Bluehost
Your website gets you leads
You run a professional blog
You don’t give a damn about paying a higher price
You have a nationwide or worldwide audience

Who is WPEngine not for?
If you’re starting a brand new website, most likely WPEngine is not for you. Why? Because your site has no traffic and you might as well save your money and go with a $1.99/mo web hosting company. The cheapest plan on WPEngine won’t break the bank, but WPEngine is more for a growing or mature websites. For instance, if you own a restaurant and you need a website just because you put your domain on your business cards, WPEngine is not for you. HOWEVER, if you own a restaurant and you have an online menu where people can pre-order breakfast and coffee, then you should consider WPEngine.

WPEngine Dashboard

The reason we took snapshots of the WPEngine dashboard is that WPEngine.com doesn’t show any! What!?

When you log into WPEngine, the 1st thing you’ll notice is that the dashboard doesn’t use the typical cPanel (cPanel is an interface between the user and the server).With WPEngine, they don’t have cPanel! Instead, they have their own custom dashboard.

#1 Feature of WPEngine

Once you set up your site, you’ll have a Production, Staging, and Dev site. I don’t like the word Production. It should be called the Live site. The Dev site is where you experiment with things. The Staging site is where you test everything out before pushing to the Live site. You do NOT get this feature with mid-tier web hosting companies!

You no longer have to make changes to your Live site and worry about breaking something. At Planet Marketing we have a bunch of clients whose website we have to update. Once in a while something goes wrong and a site may go down. With the Dev and Staging feature at WPEngine, it’s not a concern because you can check these issues before pushing to the Production (Live) site. The other day I was making a change to a client’s website whose site is hosted on Rackspace. There was a plugin that conflicted with the new WordPress update and the site broke (500 Error). I had a heart attack, but 1hr 45 minutes later I got the site back up. Then I needed to go exercise to get rid of the anxiety! I completely wasted 4 hours there. You will NOT have an issue like that with WPEngine.

With WPEngine, you get automatic daily backups for all your sites (Production, Staging, Dev sites). The good thing about this is that you never have to remember to do a backup. Also, you can manually backup whichever site anytime you do something “questionable” that may affect the site. If you really want to be extra safe, you can download a backup of your files and database to your computer.
Most web hosting companies charge for daily backups and restoration. We have a client on Bluehost who says backups are not guaranteed.

Feature #2 Daily/Manual/Downloaded Backups for Production/Staging/Dev sites

#3 Feature – Global CDN with MAXCDN/Stackpath CDN

Wondering what’s a CDN (Content Delivery Network)? Basically a copy of your images and static files will be stored all over the world. The end users will get cached content from the server that’s closest to them. If you look at the map below, you’ll see Los Angeles. MaxCDN (now merged with Stackpath CDN) will serve your website faster to people in Los Angeles because the signal doesn’t have to travel far. Any company that gets traffic nationwide or worldwide traffic should have a CDN.

Regular web hosting companies do not include a CDN. It’s normally a service you have to buy separately starting at about $12/mo.

#4 Feature Tech Support

Sometimes you’ll have a question or need help from tech support, especially in the beginning when you start using WPEngine. These guys are AWESOME because they only work with WordPress and are very knowledgeable. If you try using tech support at another company, let’s pick on GoDaddy, you sometimes have to wait 30-45 minutes to chat with someone.

#5 Feature SFTP & phpMyAdmin Access

Any web hosting company will give you access to FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and to phpMyAdmin. At WPEngine, there’s added security to FTP and it’s very simple to set up users. SFTP (Secured File Transfer Protocol) keeps hackers from stealing your login info.

If for some reason you need to make a change within the database, you can use phpMyAdmin. I don’t recommend anyone use this area unless he/she knows what they are doing.

How WPEngine Can Help You “Up Your Game”

Planet Marketing decided that we needed to up our game. We had been at Bluehost for 5 years and Dreamhost for 4 years before that. Our clients are spread across from Bluehost, Hostgator, Godaddy, Network Solutions, and many other web hosting companies. We still love Bluehost, but we needed to look into the future and decided we wanted our website to load from Google Cloud Platform. It was a quick decision: “Should our site load from Bluehost servers or Google’s servers?” Also, with Staging, Daily Backups, included the CDN features, we were sold!

WPEngine Pricing!

ALERT! Pricing is normally $35/mo, but if you use our partner link, it’s $28/mo. The other plans are also discounted!