Website Hosting Questions To Ask!

When hosting your website it is important to check if the website hosting rates include the points I have listed below. You want the new hosting company to give you some free bonuses such as free site migration, free WordPress premium themes, SSL certificates, automated backups and a money back guarantee. Check out what WP Engine offers below …

I personally know that as a business owner the benefits of having each of the features below offers me peace of mind when I run my online business.

16 Benefits Of A WP Engine Hosted Site!

• 35+ Premium StudioPress Themes included for free on every plan type.
• 3 environments on each site – Development, Staging & Production.
• Automated migration plugin.
• GeoIP Targeting and Offsite Backups.
• Global CDN free on every plan.
• Automated backups.
• Automatic core updates.
• Page Performance tool included for free.
• World-Class WordPress security from Global Edge Security.
• WordPress optimized platform.
• PHP 7.3 ready.
• Automated SSL certificates.
• 18 data centers available globally.
• SSH Gateway.
• Fully Optimized WP Engine DevKit.
• 60-day money back guarantee.

What Are The Hosting Website Prices From Wp Engine?

Webhosting Support!

A robust platform is necessary when trusting to place it on your site. However, sometimes things can go wrong, and you need to know that there is a team of experts ready and waiting to address any issues you may encounter as a customer.

Things to consider when evaluating Support can include

• speed of response,
• availability,
• technical knowledge,
• NPS score of 86,
• reputation in the industry, etc.

At WP Engine you have a support team that you can raech out 24/7. The company is based at 310 Edward St, Brisbane, Australia.  You can meet the team by CLICKING HERE and then scrolling to the botom of the page to read about the software engineers behind the webhosting product you wish to purchase.

Pros & Cons List!

Below is a list of what we feel should be taken into account.

Pros!

Why we suggest our clients to take our hosting provided by WP Engine – because its crucial for our business success.

Here are 7 reasons why you should consider migrating your current (or new hosting) webhosting to our servers.

REASON #1

You Will Receive Dedicated Support! Everytime you need help you will get VIP customer service. Everytime you call WP Engine you will get unprecendented support unmatched in the industry. All you need to do is jump onto the LIVE chat on the site and you shall get a live customer service rep help you resolve the tech issue and get your website back on track. There are 200 plus service people on hand all around world to help you. So no matter what part of the world you are someone will help you. And to top it off, the support team doesn’t just help you with your hosting issues. They are also WordPress experts that can help you diagnose issues and recommend site optimizations.

You can access someone in support through the following channels:

• Round the clock live chat support for any sales questions you might have
• 24/7 phone support for sales questions
• User Portal support for any technical hosting or WordPress issues
• A dedicated Billing Support section for addressing your account concerns
• A general knowledge base with articles concerning a variety of topics

Now the Code bases in your site are regularly checked, maintained and updated by WP Engine.

There isn’t any other web hosting service I have found that has given us this level of support before.

PS: The support team boasts a less than 3 minute live chat response time and a strong Net Promoter Score of 82, proving that customer happiness is their main focus.

REASON #2

WP ENGINE Helps You Save Time! Small businesses are very busy running their day to day activities. You may find maintaining code bases for your websites servers too time consuming. By switching over to WP Engine servers you will find deploying your WordPress blog takes very littel time which then allows you to start blogging immediately. You will also save a lot of time in the setup and maintainence of your blog sites.

REASON #3

Search Engine Optimization Improves!  Better website responsiveness. Having a site that is responsive helps with search results. Your SEO for your website will improve as your site will load faster in the search engines. A fast loading site with less downtime gets more visibility and is seen in the SERPS. Google likes fast loading sites. The WP Wengine services provide speed and fast load times for better SEO for search terms.

REASON #4

Helps with SEO Having A Responsive Site! This helps with better performance and customer retention on your site.

Having a responsive site has also helped with SEO rankings. Thanks to the speed and setup of WP Engine’s services, you will see some high ranking blog posts on Google rankings improve.

REASON #5

Advanced Security Features

WP Engine knows how important site security is, especially for websites that are scaling. That’s why they offer their customers a number of premium security features designed to protect your site’s data.

• Threat Detection and Blocking. Their platform inspects all site traffic, looking for suspicious patterns and automatically blocking malicious attacks.
• Web Applications. Web application attacks that occur in both the WordPress and nginx layer are identified and patched immediately, before they negatively affect your website.
• WordPress Core. WP Engine’s team of experts have the entire WordPress community in mind, whether they use their managed hosting services or not. If a WordPress core patch is developed, it’s pitched to the WordPress community for consideration.
• WordPress Plugins. Plugin installations and updates are not handled by WP Engine, so you maintain control over the design and functionality of your website. That said, WP Engine plugin developers keep an eye out for plugin vulnerabilities so their customers don’t fall prey to malicious activity.
• Automated Patching and Updates. They automatically patches the WordPress core, so you don’t have to worry about vulnerabilities.
• Automatic Backups. Just in case something does happen to your website, WP Engine has a backup of your site that’s easy to restore. In fact, they perform daily backups and have a one-click restore option.

In addition to all of this, WP Engine offers prevention against DDoS attacks, brute force attempts, and JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks. Plus, they are known for working with third-party security firms to perform routine code reviews and security audits to make sure everything is up to speed.

And the best part? If your WordPress site is hacked, they’ll fix it for free.

REASON #6

You’ll acquire a free staging environment and daily backups.
We’ve made good use of WP Engine’s staging functionality to allow updates to themes to be revised before being pushed out to the live site. This allows us to test changes without affecting the live version. The automatic WordPress backups and disaster recovery feature offered by WP Engine is also an essential part of running any site should the worse happen.

This staging enviorment is actually a cloned version of your site so that you can test, stage and create content for the site.

• Easy one-click staging setup in the WordPress dashboard (or the User Portal)
• An independent clone of your website to test themes, plugins, and custom code on without fear of breaking something and experiencing downtime
• The ability to spot an errors in design or functionality before your site goes live
• Local or online setup for your convenience
• Easy transfer of site between staging and live environments

Whether your team works together to create WordPress sites for clients, or you just want to test some things out on your own website, creating, developing, and managing a staging environment with WP Engine’s staging environment is super simple.

Guarantees

Nearly all managed WordPress hosting companies offer customers guarantees of some sort. After all, guarantees are a great way to instill trust in those that haven’t come to know and love a company yet.

They offer the following guarantees:

• 99.95% server uptime guarantee and 99.99% uptime for those with enhanced SLA (excluding Excused Downtime, such as scheduled or emergency maintenance, beta services, and even Force Majeure events)
• while this isn’t perfect, they have a great article explaining uptime, the reality behind the mysterious 100% uptime guarantees, and what questions you should really be asking a potential web host
• 60-Day Money Back Guarantee on all plans except custom ones

You can also make the argument that WP Engine guarantees site security since they will fix your hacked site for free, which for a major attack can cost a business thousands of dollars to diagnose and clean up.

Free access to Genesis Framework and over 35+ premium themes

This is one monster deal if you ask me.

WP Engine recently acquired StudioPress and all customers get access to the Genesis Framework and 35 premium StudioPress WordPress themes are included in their Startup, Growth, Scale, Premium, and Enterprise plan subscriptions. (click the graphic above to get access)

StudioPress themes, powered by the Genesis Framework, make it easy for WP Engine customers to quickly create beautiful, professional WordPress sites. All themes are search-engine-optimized, fast loading with locked-down security features (I know because this site is built on the Genesis Framework).

WP Engine’s acquisition of StudioPress caught many by surprise, why did you decide to acquire StudioPress?

A major focus for WP Engine has been, and continues to be, around contributing to the WordPress community. In fact, it’s another one of our values – Committed to Giving Back. Our commitment in time, money, writing, coding and thought leadership totaled more than $1.7 million in 2018 so far. The StudioPress acquisition is the next level for us in these community giveback efforts. As WP Engine moves from strength to strength, we have the resources to help the Genesis Framework to grow and flourish. In fact, 15% of all our customers are using Genesis, with 25% of our largest customers utilizing it. As a company, it’s a framework we are already very familiar with.

In the words of our founder, Jason Cohen, “We see an opportunity to invest in Genesis to evolve and continue to serve the community that relies on it. This will include investing in the engineering efforts behind the framework, investing in the creation of new themes
and investing in the economy of the framework and the partners who make products that support and rely on it.” With that in mind, we believe that the acquisition will benefit both WP Engine and the WordPress community and truly exemplifies our aspirations as a company to give back.

~ Robert Kielty – Affiliate Manager at WP Engine

Cons!

There are so much great things about WP Engine however I must add that I picked up a few cons thats needs to be mentioned in case you considering selecting a package. Before you buy check to see if this may make you get another hosting service provider. After all you want the best package to suit your business needs.

WP Engine does have its drawbacks, as even the best things in life do.

Let’s take a look at see if they are things that will cause you to want to go with another managed WordPress hosting provider.

CON REASON #1

WP Engine offers only web hosting o their customers. This means they don’t offer domain registrations. You will need to get your domain registered with either GoDaddy, NamesCheap or HostPlus. This can be rather inconvenient for many people.

PS: I rather separate my hosting and domains out to different providers.

Then get the domain DNS pointing to WP Engine for webhosting.

There isn’t free email included in the package. Adding to that, you cannot host your email services with WP Engine. Though some people prefer to host their emails on third-party platforms just in case the host servers go down, others will not like this.

You’ll need to get separate email hosting, for example G Suite (previously Google Apps) from $5 per month per email address, or Rackspace from $2 per month per email address.

CON REASON #2

Disallowed Plugins! WP Engine is convinced its infrastructure has everything you need to keep your site secure and running fast. As a result, they have compiled a list of Disallowed Plugins that are known to cause an issue with their internal services.

The problem with this is that many people like to have control in the WordPress dashboard over things like site security, backups, image optimization, and even site speed using a caching plugin.

And, while WP Engine claims they handle all of this for you, some people may not be ready to relinquish all control and give up using their favorite plugins hoping that WP Engine has them covered at all times.

CON REASON #3

No C Panel!

Again, while maybe not a complete deal-breaker, many people looking for a hosting provider are used to and prefer the traditional cPanel for managing their accounts and websites.

WP Engine, however, has a proprietary User Portal that seems intuitive to use.

But for those that don’t want to deal with something new, the User Portal might turn them away from using them.

Adding to that, the User Portal does display the number of visitors, bandwidth and storage you’ve used, which seems like a good thing right?

Well, it is until you realize that all the hosting plans available have visitors, bandwidth, and storage caps, which not all hosting providers (managed or otherwise) do.

CON REASON #4

Front End Complicated (Person opinion). I found the front end a bit confusing to naigate through. Help files are available but I had to search a bit to ge all my answers. Though I am pleased to say its all there if you are willing to read up on the subjects you need.

However I have to say, when you sign up and get access to the “backend” everything is very well laid out, simple and easy to understand. Check the site out to see for yourself!

That said, their plans are priced a bit on the high side, which is not helpful for those on limited budgets. However, for those that plan to scale their business in the near future, or are already generating a lot of revenue, the high price is worth the services they provide and the peace of mind that their site is safe and always running.

If you’re looking for a very premium managed WordPress hosting provider, I suggest you give WP Engine a look. With features such as

• the built-in EverCache solution,
• the Page Performance Tool,
• automatic daily backups,
• security monitoring, and
• CDN services

You’ll never have to worry about your ability to scale and provide site visitors the best experience possible.