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I have been using WP Engine for a long time. Mainly because they have good support. But the problem is they have so many caps on everything and I feel like every other month I am getting an email about some overage and then needing to upgrade to a plan that is 2-3x my current one…. Its like we are getting punished for success and the reality is their costs are so tiny for storage and traffic. Just feels like they are always upselling me. What is a good alternative that has good support but you don't have to worry every other week about your bill 3xing or a few hundred dollar charge randomly for site traffic????
I got to know about wp engine in 2014 I think when I worked at a large govt organization and they used it for all their sites (at that time) I didn’t like it from day one.
After trying a large number managed services over the years (like wp engine) as well as shared hosting services, I have come down to the conclusion (as of now at least) that having your own vps (or similar) is probably the best option in terms of both, performance and price.
Back in the day, managing a VPS or dedicated server required a dedicated server admin with knowledge of all those setup commands. But today, with new very advanced panels, security services, caching plugins, and a high competition in server providers, it has become a lot easier to manage one yourself or one of your employees with basic knowledge can do it.
I see some businesses still buying expensive managed hosting and after paying 3-5x price they still face limitations . With having own server or hosting setup, means flexibility, better performance, no limitations and ofcourse much reasonable price.
I always wanted WP Engine…but have never been able to afford them.
We have an agency account with them, they are largely good, but I have noticed recently a tendency for them to try to upsell you on things. For my previous company I just had a VM in Azure and used the Azure CDN to offload larger site assets and it hosted 100s of sites for WAY cheaper, but it did require some maintenance, etc. If you just have a small site there’s really no reason to use either one, they are just pricy. Other companies have cheap WP hosting.
Pressable and Kinsta are good, but I think Kinsta has low usage restrictions too. Pressable seems to be better for that, in my experience.
Same recently their accounts department reached out. Their engineering said we had too much traffic.
WPengine is great. Their support is pretty decent. I really like how their backup and restore and staging sites are so seamless to use. But I’m in the same boat. They do the same thing phone manufacturers do, which is to pick something you will run out of, artificially limit it, and then jack up the prices. It takes the whole promise of cloud infrastructure, that you can scale up as needs change, and keeps all that benefit for WPEngine, while they price gouge business owners.
The other thing I see from them more lately, is that they are using CloudFlare to speed up the front end of sites, which means they can serve faster sites on otherwise under-provisioned servers. So the front end is still fast, but it definitely seems like the editor is slower than it used to be. Certainly your plugin and theme stack can also impact that, but it feels slower on similar setups.
I also manage Linux servers, so I may just get a big droplet at Digital Ocean and provision my own hosting with CloudFlare in front.
If you want to stay at WPEngine without upgrading, you can get around storage overages using an Amazon S3 bucket and LFS. You can get around some bandwidth charges if you use a 3rd party CDN like the hosted ShortPixel option, which is a lot cheaper than 3x your bill.
I won a client web project last year because their WP Engine reps were spamming them about their website storage usage almost twice a week. Small manufacturing company that didnt have an over complicated site but WP Engine annoyed them enough they got fed up and asked for help to migrate away. Which led to a web redesign project too, I’m happy for that lol.
WPE was the best back in the day. Their support sucks now and the service is wildly expensive. Such a shame.
I’m using their enterprise plan. $4500 a month. 🙂
I love Siteground. I’ve been moving all my clients from wpengine over there. They have excellent support, backups, everything that wpengine has and maybe more for a lot less.
I left WP Engine earlier this year because the support got so bad after the pandemic. Happy at rocket.net
I have been very impressed with them. I think they’re worth the money.
The constant upselling is what ultimately sent me away. My “account manager” kept pushing me to upgrade my account, using data and overages as the reason. He came across as sounding like he understood the tech behind it, but ultimately he was just looking for a commission which he did not disclose beforehand. It all felt very sketchy.
I was having some bandwidth issues and a lot of traffic to my site, when I don’t have a very big site and definitely did not get as much traffic as their dashboard was telling me. Their customer support kept tossing me back-and-forth between different people, and never resolved the issue. Ultimately, I switched to a different host and I haven’t had any similar problems that I know of.
Going forward I’m pretty hesitant to sign up for any service if the website hires sales people whose entire purpose is to upsell to existing customers.
At a certain point you have to balance your budget with your tolerance for pain.
For me, shared hosting really isn’t an option. If I can’t manage my services and install software it isn’t really hosting at all.
Managed hosting isn’t much better, sure, there is a little more flexibility and multiple environments are nothing to scoff at. Deployment is hard with anything more than a handful of sites and for anything enterprise or critical, especially in a team environment, I can see the value of the baked in redundancy that comes with good managed hosting.
But I’m cheap.
Spinning up a LAMP stack (or anything else) is trivial with a cloud provider. Linode, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Hetzner; they’re all pretty much the same. The docs are good and if you can follow instructions you can run a secure VPS for less than $20 a month, maybe as little as $5 — that server, properly configured, will host more than a few typical WP small business sites.
Stick Cloudflare (often free) in the middle for some extra protection, and your pretty much set.
But you’ll need to know some stuff; DNS, Apache/NGINX, apt or something similar depending on the server OS, MySQL and PHP versioning, UFW rules, etc. Docs are good, it isn’t hard but it takes a willingness to learn and some time. There is essentially zero support, but configured properly these things pretty much run themselves.
A good middle ground is a deployment service, something like [Ploi](https://ploi.io/). Tools like Ploi hook into your VPS and make it simpler to spin up domains and environments.
WPEngine is far better at marketing than hosting.
They’re still a decent webhost and far superior to godaddys of the world.
However, as they continue to snag venture capital ($500m from silverlake), gobble up competitors (flywheel) and other WordPress products like ACF Pro, and head towards IPO, you can expect their quality and support to continue to disintegrate.
This is a major issue with the economics of service providers going public. I get that it’s the way things work, and I get that people want to make money and building a company is hard work… but when a company goes public, the shareholders become the customer and the customers become the product.
This is somewhat sustainable with product-based businesses, but service-based businesses are notoriously problematic when publicly traded as they will scavenge every nickel and dime from their customers and cut every corner possible because the only goal is to increase share value.
Anyway, I’ll get off my soapbox. I’m probably preaching to the choir anyway.
I loved WPEngine and was one of their first customer’s. But the metered pricing was bullshit. I hate any saas that bills based on page views. They’re easily gamed and with any website under constant attack, you can easily blow through low limits without trying. In the end, I got my own dedicated server and haven’t looked back.
Their hosting is nice but it’s a huge pain to migrate a site away from them, so it’s a hard no for me. Most of my clients are on a couple of InMotion VPS servers or SiteGround.
I have an agency account with them, we primarily use them for larger clients and it just feels like they are constantly hitting me up to spend more. With their lack of add on for additional storage and what feels like low bandwidth it’s not a great fit so when I have the time I’ll look into alternatives. I was running self managed vps so I loved the idea of WP Engine.
Siteground for the win. Their support is top notch.
Like others, I’ve slowly migrated all my sites out of WP Engine for the exact same reasons: slow customer service, restrictions, lack of advanced tools available on other platforms. Plus it was getting really expensive. Now I pay 1/4 of what WP Engine was charging me, for a comparable list of features on [SupportHost](https://supporthost.com/it/a340), a decent Italian provider that has served me well over the last 3 years.
I use ovh they rule.
Good information to give would be your current traffic size, what an acceptable bill is, and if available, the url.
WP engine kinda blows now. Been having better luck with cloudways
Have you blocked AI bot traffic?
Got the same thing a few weeks ago. Their sales rep was really pushing for an upgrade, needed to this to be resolve ASAP, before end of week, bla bla bla.
We told them that we aren’t upgrading anything. They stop sending emails and the site stays the same, same plan and everything lol
It might be time for you to move onto your own VPS – like Linode, Digital Ocean, Vultr, etc. With a server management tool on top (eg [Runcloud.io](https://Runcloud.io), CyberPanel), to make management of your server and sites simple, you really don’t need to be paying all that extra money to WPEngine.
I’ve been trialing Cloudways for the last year and they’ve been as good as WPE or Liquidweb.
WPE puts some stuff in your wordpress installation, so you have to clean that out when you move.
We moved for the same reason. WPE support was fantastic. Super friendly. Willing to help with almost anything. But their limits were too limiting and their expenses too expensive.
do you offload your media to a cdn? that helped me with one of my client’s hosts
Just moved another client away from wpengine, like GoDaddy its a money pit for things that are free elsewhere.
WP Engine are fucking cancer.
Just adding another acknowledgement that I also get spammed with upgrades. Always something over the cap and I’m going to move away too, just need to find the time as we have about 50 sites with them. It’s a shame but if we know this, their competitors do too.
If caps are what annoys you, the wordpress.com’s Business plan is only limited by space for $300/year.
Move to WPX asap.
WPEngine has 100% gone downhill. They cap memory limits for their $500/year plans at 512mb per website, and I have had to consistently hit them up because of other websites on the shared servers that are going through memory leaks and crashing my own websites. I no longer reccomend them to any of my customers/partners.
i agree. It’s way too expensive. The only reason i’m still there is because of phone support. I hate chat support and I’m not technical enough to do everything on my own. Strange that they don’t have much competition for 24/7 phone support. Yes, i know that some offer phone support during working hours (9-5) but when i was researching other options, i didn’t find any other place with 24/7 phone support. If anyone knows of a better alternative, let me know.
Wetopi is a Managed WordPress Hosting where you can increase or decrease the needed resources as you go.
I’ve been working on multiple projects on WP Engine. A few years ago, it was an excellent hosting service; now, it’s OK. As for alternatives, I recommend Nexcess and Cloudways. They are not perfect, but certainly not bad.
But please avoid Kinsta. This is the only big hosting limiting plugins you can use. I had a lot of issues with that.
If you have a good admin/DevOps nearby (or can find one) and want to save some costs, consider VPS options from Hetzner, Digital Ocean, or Amazon EC2. They offer much more resources for the price (especially storage) but require some initial configuration and support.
Heztner also offers some management options (https://www.hetzner.com/webhosting/), but I’m not sure how good they are.
Recently, we have moved a few big stores from WP Engine to Amazon and are very happy with that.
And the last thing. I suggest setting up a Cloudflare account. It won’t increase your storage, but it can block some garbage AI bots.
I’ve recently had all my clients move away from them (3-4 client sites were hosted there, I don’t manage hosting).
Of those 3-4, one was a large e-comm store who’s site actually went down during their busiest period due to load, even after having a call and talking to their marketing team about the upcoming event.
Unfortuantely, this caused a lot of stress for my client who were promised the site could withstand concurrent traffiic up to 100K. The site dropped out once traffic hit 10K, just 10% of what was promised.
It also turns out, that WPEngine hadn’t set them up on an e-commerce plan, and blamed that as to the reason why the site went down. That makes sense, right? The e-commerce plan will have caching set specifically to handle heavy loads on e-comm specific sites – but that plan had been requested by my client in the first place but never actioned by WPEngine.
After fighting for weeks, WPEngine finally offered compensation, but only for half of the yearly cost of hosting. I believe my client is still fighting for at least the other half.
I recommended they move to Kinsta or Pressable.
I moved a long time ago to a cheap provider Greengeek and noticed no difference LOL. WPEngine is a rip.
[rocket.net](http://rocket.net) bro. I have never seen such a good hosting ever.