Review: Why I Changed My Hosting To WPEngine

Everyone brings different skills and personalities to their online business. My skills are in marketing, and they are not in tech.

In this post you’re going to see why I now believe that if:

a) You run WordPress sites that generate over say $200 of revenue a month, but with traffic below perhaps a million uniques a month.

b) Your skills are in marketing like me, not tech.

that WPEngine (aff) is the best value for money hosting solution you can get right now. You will shortly see that I haven’t arrived at this solution lightly.

I’ve just transferred all of my sites over to it, and I never thought a hosting company could give me any form of happiness, let alone the level of happiness that I’ve since attained.

Here’s how and why this view of mine developed.

Background: Oh Hostgator…

Since I started online in 2005 I’d used Hostgator as my primary host. I’d dabbled with different solutions over the years, mainly for PBNs, and small individual projects, but had never veered far.

I had a dedicated server with HG since maybe 2009. At one stage we even had 3 dedicated hosts with HG, paying about $1200 a month.

This offered some small reprieve from the worst things about Hostgator (and companies like it) that people complain about with cheap shared accounts. On dedicated, you have better security than shared, and if you know how, you can get slightly better support.

But mainly, I just stuck with it because it’s all I knew. For an entrepreneur, I’m surprisingly resistant to change on certain things. I tend to see the amount of work involved in a change before I imagine the benefits.

Finally, and most after chatting to my friend Bill (who you can hear from on this episode of the podcast) I came to understand the full extent of how bad hosting companies like HG are, compared to what’s available in 2016.

Those interested can read more here about this company called EIG who now own Hostgator and, well, most of the major web hosts online, why they are producing such low quality, and why they are to be avoided for the time being.

What’s WordPress Hosting?

For those who don’t know, it’s a relatively new form of web hosting company that, as the name suggests, works only with WordPress. This means they can focus on being amazing at hosting WordPress sites, with all the intricacies that entails.

Example: At various times with Hostgator, I’d find out that one of my sites had gone down.

I’d talk to Hostgator support, and after much back and forth, learn that some plugin had started throwing an error, which went crazy hogging server resources, until it used up all that site’s allowance in my account, and the site went down.

When I’d start asking which plugin it was, and which file, they could only ever paste me lines from an error log file who’s meaning I didn’t understand.

With WordPress hosting, no such thing should happen.

They manage the updates of your WordPress core. They manage plugin updates. And when something weird does happen, and you ask them about it, they know what happened because… they only work with WordPress. They can specialize.

Actually something like this already happened in my first month of using WPEngine. I had a runaway plugin one day. The site didn’t go down, it just slowed way down this day. I talked to their support (more on which later) who immediately told me what the issue was, and recommended a solution, which I took and the problem was immediately fixed.

As you’ll see below, hosting WordPress sites with a WordPress managed host is a very different hosting experience.

Advantage #1: Security

Since I started this blog post, I’ve recommended two close friends switch to WPEngine after bad hackings took their sites down, costing big money and time to repair.

Security is a huge challenge for new entrepreneurs. When you’re trying to keep costs low, you choose the cheapest hosting you can – which usually means shared. That is, you buy space on a hosting account that’s shared with a whole lot of other people – and you hope for the best. It doesn’t always go well.

I once lost an entire income stream because I was sending Adwords traffic to a landing page, on a blog that was hosted on a shared account. The site got hacked, so Adwords stopped running my ad… then they killed the quality score of my whole site so I basically couldn’t send traffic to that site… then they killed my whole Adwords account because I looked like someone who was sending traffic to a hacker website.

It sucked.

I’ve had others bad experiences too, with sites getting organic traffic being hacked, struggling to get the site back, losing rankings and income. What’s worse, basically anyone I know who has been making WordPress sites long enough has had problems with hacking. And the more exposure your sites get, the higher the chances of catching a hacker’s attention.

Most of us know this, but managing our own site’s security is among the most boring of human pursuits.

You know you have to keep WordPress up to date. But sometimes you just forget.

You know you have to get rid of old plugins…

You know you have to hide certain WordPress files…

And a bunch of other tasks, but when you’re focused on creating quality content and getting your new site noticed, you just don’t prioritize that stuff.

When you have managed WordPress hosting, they prioritize security for you.

I just saw this post on WPEngine today called “15 Ways To Harden Your WordPress Security” and it’s basically just a list of security things that WPEngine does to improve your security if you’re a customer.

Practically speaking, it means hosting with WPE, I’m much less likely to get hacked, and in the worst case that I still do, they fix it for free.

The peace of mind this gives is no small advantage. As entrepreneurs we stress about enough things as is. Having one less is nice.

Advantage #2: Speed

Site speed is still a ranking factor. According to most experts, it’s more of a factor now than it was.

Depending on the package you choose at WPE you’ll be able to utilize their CDN (content delivery network) as part of the service, to speed up your sites.

What’s a CDN? No way am I the right person to explain that to you. This explanation is simple and quick. Bottom line is CDNs make your site faster and user experience better.

Smarter people will tell you that just having a CDN doesn’t necessarily speed your site up.

What I do know is that my sites load faster now, according to speed tests than they did before we switched.

More than that, I love that WPEngine makes speed a focus. They let you run speed tests on individual sites and pages within your hosting dashboard…

They also give recommendations for improvements based on each test.

Functionally, it means each time you make a tweak to your layout, or add a plugin, you can quickly do a speed check, and compare it against your past results to make sure nothing slowed down.

Even after finishing a post you can check the speed of that URL to make sure it’s in line with your norms… then you can tweak it if not.

Advantage #3: Support

Ohh the support…

I’ve contacted WP engine probably 10 times with small issues, since I signed up.

I’ve never waited more than a few minutes for a live chat reply. That’s no exaggeration either. This is what their live chat looks like at time of writing, in the middle of a US workday…

And I’ve never closed a chat without the issue I inquired about being fixed.

Their support goes above and beyond.

I’ve asked them to help me with things that shouldn’t be their job. Maybe it’s late at night and your developer isn’t going to reply quickly… whatever. They haven’t let me down once.

And they’re newbie friendly too. Sometimes something has gone wrong. I don’t know how to describe it properly? “This page is showing some weird code all of a sudden” is the kind of technical descriptions I’ve throw at them without them blinking an eye.

Advantage #4 Backup Management

Sometimes you break something on your site. And the experience I used to have contacting Hostgator in these moments was always fearful. Maybe they had a backup, maybe they didn’t. How old was the backup? And once they sent me a link to the backup file, what was I going to do with it?! (Email a developer, that’s what)

WPEngine not only manages your backups internally, they offer you 1 click restore points to any of them.

This means if I break something, I can fix it… or at least prevent it affecting revenue… immediately, and myself.

I like this.

What I Worried About

The reason I put off changing hosts for so long is that my only experiences of ever moving a site from one place to another were… lacking in fun. Let’s put it that way.

The Faff of Transferring

Especially transferring from a Cpanel host (what your host probably is) to this new managed WordPress thing… I just didn’t know what to expect.

Turns out it’s all pretty simple. You install their WordPress plugin on your existing site, and it sucks all the details over to your WPEngine account.

A change of nameservers and you’re pretty much done.

I won’t overplay it: I did get some help from a friend for the first one, and had a few back and forths with live support to make sure everything was set. But after that it clicked and subsequent sites were easy to move.

It’s not exactly fun work, but you only have to do it once.

Limits On Traffic

I didn’t like this idea when I was considering joining. And plenty of people don’t like it.

“Why do I get punished for being successful?”

A: “You don’t get punished for being successful. You get punished for using more resources, IDIOT.”

(Yep, that’s me having a fake conversation with an imaginary person. It’s late here. Forget it.)

Truth is, I picked the plan that corresponded with the traffic I was getting, with about 100% room to grow… and it was fine.

The cost saving was still huge compared to my dedicated accounts at Hostgator.

What About Email?

I always used Cpanel email addresses for sites, and I was familiar with them and how they worked.

WPEngine doesn’t host email so you need to get a separate provider. You still have an @yourname.com email address, it just gets managed elsewhere.

This is another thing I didn’t understand that put me off from transferring for a while.

Turned out the solution was easy enough. I now use a free service called Zoho, that you connect up through your domain registrar, instead of your host.

It’s only a few steps to set up (configuring mx records… which may sound complicated but it’s mainly just copy/pasting. Zoho has a good tutorial on it too) and once it’s done, the email client is actually really cool. You can create multiple email addresses per domain name and manage them from one central account.

Did I mention it’s FREE?

Bottom line: The email part was a change of habit but I lost nothing, and gained quite a lot with the new setup.

Plugins Disallowed?

This was another thing I was concerned about. WPEngine doesn’t allow you to run certain plugins because of risks they might pose to security and speed across their servers.

At first I thought this was a bummer, especially because I read that some Related Post plugins were on the list.

This turned out not to be an issue at all.

It actually alerted me that I should change to a different related posts plugin (I use Yuzo now but there are other good options too) and all other plugins on the list I didn’t need or wasn’t using anyway. I could uninstall some like backup plugins, and caching plugins because WPengine takes care of those things for you.

When I Wouldn’t Recommend It

I tried to be specific at the start of this post in saying that I think WPEngine is the best choice for you if:

a) You run WordPress sites that generate over say $200 of revenue a month, but with traffic below perhaps a million uniques a month.

b) Your skills are in marketing like me, not tech.

There are another couple considerations too:

If you run a WordPress site AND…

something else on the domain, or on your current host itself… maybe your CRM, something to do with your payment processor…. something else for your landing pages or e-commerce store, or whatever…

Anything that’s not WordPress has to be managed differently and you might consider it too much hassle.

I ended up transferring some of my assets in this category to Siteground, who I’ve also been really happy with.

Point is just that if you host lots of sites and stuff that isn’t all WP, you’ll have to decide whether that extra separation and effort is worth it.

If you do lots of in depth development…

Some developers have said they don’t like WP engine because of the way they restrict access to their environment. Apparently they don’t allow SSH access. This has never affected me but it may affect you.

If you have only one site that gets more than say 50,000 uniques a month…

There’s another managed WordPress hosting service that’s picking up steam called Kinsta. The main advantage with them is that they don’t restrict traffic. With the single site install, you get unlimited visitors for $100 a month. Some people have said they think it’s much better than WPEngine, but as with any web hosting question, debate rages.

Bottom Line

For a digital business, your hosting is like the land a house is built on. You don’t pay attention to it until your house starts sinking.

Having a higher quality web host is protecting the asset your business rests on.

For security, speed, and ease of management, I’ve been so happy with WPEngine and I now excitedly recommend it to others.