When I first moved my WordPress hosting over to WP Engine I was highly impressed. They were very helpful, support took ownership of problems and site speed was incredible.
As someone that has been in the game as long as I have it is rare to find a hosting company that provided the level of support they did.
But over the past 8 months things have started to go downhill in a serious way.
I have gone from singing their praises, to telling everyone to avoid them.
Here is an example of just some of the things they have done-
If I could write a list of things that a web host should never do – WP Engine has done them all. They are no longer the hassle-free wordpress hosting experts they claim to be.
In this post I will share my WPEngine experience across the last 18 months and above all, apologise to all of the readers that moved their sites over to WP-Engine off the back of my advice.
I am truly sorry about all of the problems you guys have had.
So let’s get down to business and why you should avoid WP Engine.
I should also highlight that it’s very difficult to find an honest wpengine review, because they pay ridiculous affiliate commissions compared to other hosting companies.
So with that said, let’s get down to business with the only honest wpengine review on the web.
What Will I Learn?
If you search around, you will find endless WP Engine reviews that cast them in a positive light. And there is good reason for that…
But not because they are a good web host, it’s because they offer affiliates a whopping $200 commission per sale.
In other words so many people give positive reviews of WP Engine – for the money.
If I can get someone to sign up to the $29 per month plan – WPEngine will pay me a $200 commission!
That is a 589% difference between what the customer spends with WPEngine versus what WPEngine payout to an affiliate which is precisely why there are so many positive reviews for WPEngine.
Especially when competing companies usually pay out in the $60-$120 range.
So if you have ever wondered why it’s possible to find so many positive reviews for WPEngine, well – money talks. Literally.
Let’s get into the meat & cheese of the only honest WPEngine review on the web.
When I first moved over to WPEngine 18 months ago the experience was absolutely awesome.
The support team were passionate about Wordpress and it was clear they were experts at what they did. They knew Wordpress inside out and were able to resolve any issue for you whether it was with a theme, plugin or Wordpress core.
I was amazed with everything and I can’t stress enough just how awesome they were.
Unfortunately setting this standard of awesomeness has ultimately led to my continued frustration and disappointment with them for a number of reasons.
Now the support team are clueless, it’s like a bunch of people that don’t really know anything about Wordpress have taken over and are just typing a script back to you.
Some of the responses they give are comical at best.
(I’ll be sharing them throughout this post).
WPEngine pride themselves on how fast they are, so let’s start with that.
When I first moved over to WP Engine my sites load time improved by 27% which was worth an extra $16,609 per year to me.
This was one of the main reasons I moved to WP-Engine, but over time that has seriously degraded-
To put that in perspective to login and approve 1 comment it would take a total of 2 minutes & 38 seconds.
For every comment on the blog I wanted to approve, it took 54 seconds. That is a serious problem when you get as many comments as I do.
Basically whenever the site has to read from or write to the MYSQL database the server cannot handle it. All of this started in the first week of May 2013.
Ps. You can learn to increase website speed yourself without changing hosts.
Continuing with the trend of database problems I started to get 502/504 bad gateway errors on the front end and back end of the site which started in the middle of May 2013.
As the months went on the problems got worse until 5 months later in October 2013 the site was completely unworkable. This was also the period when their support started to seriously degrade.
Instead of taking ownership of issues and fixing them like they used to, they consistently palm you off with irrelevant excuses & finger pointing.
The 502/504 bad gateway errors were causing a number of issues-
First of all it was taking my readers nearly 20 seconds to load posts on the blog. Even with their bespoke front end caching technology – which causes its own set of problems.
If shaving just 1.848 seconds off my load time was worth an extra $16,609 to me a year, imagine how much money I was losing when load times increased 4 times over to 20 seconds.
Even my $0.99 per month host could load the site in 6.620 seconds.
Secondly, anytime I was trying to write or edit a post I was getting the error…
“Connection lost. Saving has been disabled until you’re reconnected. We’re backing up this post in your browser, just in case.”
This means that my local machine was losing connection with the server and timing out completely. This happened every single time I tried to edit, write or publish a post.
My previous $0.99 per month host didn’t have that problem.
On top of all of the above I had noticed that the Time To First Byte (TTFB) had increased to over 1 second.
This is the amount of time it takes to receive the first byte of data from the server after requesting a URL in your browser.
That is before the Wordpress application, theme, plugins or files start to load. Bear that point in mind throughout this post as those are the things they always tried to blame.
This is also one of the key things that Google uses to determine site speed and search rankings.
Now I should point out when it comes to servers & hardware – I know my stuff.
I usually play dumb with most things to see if people are honest and the WP Engine support team have failed that test at every hurdle.
It was clear to me there was a bottleneck with the MYSQL database somewhere and 502/504 errors are usually because the server has run out of resources to process the request.
These are the things the WP Engine team tried to blame for the huge decreases in site speed and huge increases in 502/504 errors.
The first thing was that outdated plugins will slow your site down. Here is the exact quote-
Which is funny, because the site had been using the exact same plugin versions when it was lightning fast.
But apparently because there were updates available to the plugins that slows your entire site down.
The next thing they tried to blame was that a table in the database was too big. The table was only 50MB in size, the size a budget webhost can handle (see my full A2 Hosting review).
This table was part of the OIOPublisher banner advertising plugin that I use to serve ads on the site that would log stats when a reader loaded a page on the front end of the website.
They blamed the size of the table & the plugin itself, even though the plugin wasn’t getting called on the backend where most of the issues were.
I also pointed out to them that other much bigger blogs used the exact same plugin and were still lightning fast so it was unlikely the plugin was the issue.
I had also been running the exact same version of plugin for months without an issue – so on top of the above, it just didn’t make sense that was the issue.
But it was an easy issue for them to blame. So I did what they asked of me and it should come as no surprise that didn’t fix the issue.
It took them nearly 2 weeks to get to that after opening the initial ticket. What happened to all of the Worpdress experts?
One of the things I continued to ask support was how much actual CPU/RAM resource was allocated to each customers site.
This seems to be a very sticky question for WP Engine – a question I have asked over and over and over again, I even asked the co-founder to his face at Affiliate Summit.
The question either gets completely ignored or answered in a very vague way. If you are a current WP Engine customer ask the question, it’s funny watching them squirm with the answer.
Right from the beginning I had suspected they had overloaded servers and were unable to cope with their rapid growth.
After 2 weeks of going back and to with excuses they finally admitted the server was overloaded and they were going to move my site to a different server to see if that helps.
Problem solved right? Wrong.
When they moved me over to a new server not only was the site still slow, but now I had no access to FTP and users could not login.
Even I was locked out of my own admin area.
This was because when they moved the site to a new server, they proxied over the old IP to the new IP internally so there would be no downtime on the front end which is a fantastic solution – if it worked.
First of all WP Engine installs a plugin called Limit Login. They don’t tell you they have done this, it doesn’t appear in your list of plugins and you can’t change the settings. It is completely invisible to you as the website owner.
So every time a user logged in, because of how they proxied over the IP it appeared that every single user was logging in from the same IP and performing a brute force attack on the site which locked everyone out including me.
Luckily I had the knowledge to get into PHPMyAdmin and manually change the setting in the database to unlock it so at least I could access the admin area of my site.
At the same time I had no FTP access – it took nearly 5 days of going back and to with them to get a resolution. If I didn’t have the knowledge to unblock my admin access myself, I would have also been without admin access for 5 days as well.
As you can see I was starting to lose my patience with them. Even when you told them exactly what was wrong & exactly what needed to change to fix things – they still argued the point.
Until eventually they realised I was spot on with the solution, the first time I told it to them. Never mind the 3rd, 4th & 5th time.
So at this point, the site is on a new server, it is still slow, I had no FTP access for 5 days and if it wasn’t for my manual intervention I wouldn’t have had WP-Admin access for 5 days either.
Then just a few days later-
The blog had just hit the most popular story of the week on Inbound.org which was driving a lot of targeted traffic, if the site was actually online.
It was down for a total of 3 hours during what would of been a record setting day of traffic.
So much for the new server huh!
Less than 10 days later the site was down again reporting the same 502/503 bad gateway issues that were first reported to them over 6 months earlier on May 16th.
Continuing on the trend of excuses, this time they tried to blame the number of comments in the database.
So without my permission the WP Engine team took it upon themselves to clear out all of the spam comments on the live database without taking a backup first.
The problem with that is an awful lot of you guys get flagged as spam when you’re not, so I go through the spam comments manually each month to approve the genuine ones.
Plus after deleting my live data without my prior permission or taking a backup, it didn’t actually fix the problem! I was not a happy bunny.
Then they tried to blame the fact that the site was getting too many spam comments and was slowing the entire server down.
I checked the logs myself and the site was only getting 1-2 spam comments per minute. When I publish a new post I get more genuine comments per minute than that!
Even a budget web host could handle that load!
The solution – install a captcha form to stop all the spammers. Ironically the Wordpress & security experts were unaware I could solve 1,000 captchas for just $1.39 while I’m asleep.
All that adding a captcha form does is inconvenience genuine users, it certainly doesn’t stop spammers.
All they needed to do was put the same time & effort into resolving problems as they put into creating excuses.
At this point over 7 months after opening the first ticket about the speed problems, my patience was exhausted.
I flew half way around the world to Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas to find the WP Engine co-founder Ben Metcalfe and explained all of the issues I have had.
He assured me that he would take control of the problems and resolve them all, not only that but he would give me 6 months of hosting free of charge.
Awesome! I was confident that everything was going to get fixed. Unfortunately the very next morning the site was down for nearly an hour.
After Affiliate Summit was over WPEngine got in touch with me to resolve the issues as quickly as possible.
Here is the full email conversation that we had – notice how they dodge the resource question, again.
At last they had their best guys working on the problem, after 7 months of complaining and flying half way around the world!
I could sit back in confidence knowing that all of my issues would be resolved at long last.
I was wrong.
It turned out that their ‘top guys’ were just as clueless about how servers and Wordpress works as anyone else.
Instead of trying to blame a plugin, this time they tried to blame the .htaccess file
Their top tech guy didn’t understand what basic level .htaccess code did. I don’t think I need to say anything more than that.
During this period I also got a notification they had migrated my site to another server, again.
This time they had identified that the site was using over 50% of the servers resources.
Which is funny because that is precisely what would be causing the 502/504 bad gateway errors I had reported to them 8 months earlier.
And just like the last time they migrated the site to a new server, they failed to check if everything was working properly which it wasn’t.
Giving their top tech guys credit where credit is due, they came back with a list of possible reasons the site was performing so badly.
Well not really, they just installed a free plugin which gives you a basic overview of things.
The same guy that didn’t understand the basics of .htaccess was also trying to blame a plugin called MShots but he couldn’t locate it on my blog.
The reason he couldn’t locate it is because it’s part of Wordpress core functionality straight out of the box.
You would expect a Wordpress expert to know what is a plugin and what is a core Wordpress function.
Anyway we continued to do the dance, but dancing gets very tiring after doing it non-stop for 8 months.
That was the last I heard from support about the speed issues. They didn’t even bother to reply to the ticket after that.
After 6 days had passed and the site continued to be slow and/or unavailable I was getting flocks of complaints from readers. Enough was enough.
I sent this email to the co-founder & the rest of the top brass at WP Engine
Guess what happened next?
Absolutely nothing. Support never replied and neither did the co-founder who had promised to my face that he would resolve all of the issues and give me 6 months free hosting as compensation.
So after 8 months of the same issues, pathetic excuses from support, flying half way around the world and speaking to the co-founder directly the ‘Wordpress Experts’ couldn’t be arsed to reply.
That tells you everything you need to know about the company, the co-founder & how they treat their customers.
Do you trust your business with someone that handles themselves like that?
I noticed a few days later that there was a keyword stuffed link to the WP Engine homepage in my blogs footer.
That was strange because I hadn’t put it there and it wasn’t visible in the footer.php file of my theme.
So how on earth was a link to the WP Engine homepage appearing on my blog?
If you take a look in the very bottom left corner of the screenshot below you can see it for yourself, they did a very good job at hiding it!
How sneaky is that? They were dynamically inserting a keyword stuffed link to their homepage at the server level. I couldn’t manually remove it!
Ben responded pretty quickly and promised to follow up with a call-
I told Ben not to worry and to just give me a call on Monday.
But in true WP Engine style that call never came, even when I followed up via email – that was ignored as well.
What makes this even worse is the fact that genuine businesses that have had their websites penalised or deindexed from Google completely for less than that.
But WP Engine still rank for the target term!
It has taken me over 20 months of hard work to build up my RSS subscribers. It took WP Engine minutes to wipe out 60% of that effort.
That is 12 months hard work building my RSS subscriber base completely wiped out without a blink of an eye from WP Engine.
Around the start of April a reader emailed me to let me know my RSS feed wasn’t working. When I took a look at the source code of the feed I noticed this message-
“The used table type doesn’t support FULLTEXT indexes”
At that time I was actually sat with one of the head developers from the BBC. He took a look at it and told me exactly what was wrong.
Basically WP Engine had changed their MYSQL configuration to disable full text indexing – which my RSS feed relied on to function properly.
They had made this configuration change to the server without any kind of customer notification.
So with that knowledge in mind and confirming that was the issue with a few Google searches I opened a support ticket.
All they needed to do to fix the issue was enable full text indexing on the MYSQL database again. Its a 60 second job for anyone that knows what they are doing.
I told them what the exact issue was and what needed to change for it to be fixed, instead of just fixing it they continued with their usual line of excuses and palming the issue off.
Here is a list of excuses they came up with for that-
The level of stupidity displayed here is beyond what I’m able to put into words. None of those excuses had ANYTHING to do with MYSQL.
They might as well have said your RSS feed is broken because you brushed your teeth this morning.
What they should of said is sorry we changed our server configuration without telling you which broke your RSS feed & wiped out 12 months of your hard work. However we have now re-enabled that for your account.
Here is the full support ticket with them about that issue – which in true WP Engine fashion they just ignored and stopped replying to. At least they are consistent in one thing!
The funny thing is when I eventually moved to my new host and told them about the problem, they fixed it in less than 2 minutes.
Take a guess at what they did to fix it? They enabled fulltext MYSQL indexing on the table. If you don’t know anything about server configs I can’t stress how basic that is.
I wouldn’t like to put a $$$ value on what that specific issue cost me with WP Engine.
It took 20 months to build it to that level and WP Engine wiped out 12 months of that effort without a blink of the eye, which is the WPEngine way apparently!
When I spoke to the WP Engine co-founder at Affiliate Summit he told me they would give me 6 months free hosting as compensation for the problems I have had.
That never actually happened so 4 months after he made that promise I opened a ticket to see what was going on.
Yet again, that ticket went unanswered and was actually marked as solved the next day.
Turns out the co-founders promises are worth nothing. That is the kind of person you are trusting your business with when using WP Engines hosting services.
At the same time I had the ticket open about the RSS feed issue and asking about the co-founder’s promise of 6 months hosting – WP Engine decided to terminate my account.
Instead of taking 2 minutes to fix the problem they created when they changed their server configuration without notification and keeping their promise they decided to just cancel my contract with them.
They didn’t even provide a reason for that. When I asked for the reason they said to see the first communication which didn’t provide a reason. Such is the WP Engine support merry go round.
They did this on the 18th of April with 7 days notice. Except in the UK the 18th-21st was a public bank holiday. They terminated my account with just 3 working days notice.
That was also during a period I was packing and planning to move country. Suddenly I had to drop everything, find a reliable new host and move the entire site.
The knock on effect of that was the time I had planned to spend seeing friends & family for the last time, was spent running around cleaning up their mess.
You would think that once WP Engine terminates your account and your website is no longer hosted by them, that would be the end of the problems.
But they weren’t finished with the clown act just yet!
They terminated my account as promised on the 24th of April 2014. Then on the 25th April they took money from my credit card for the next month of service.
The service they had just terminated. So even though I was no longer a customer with them, they continued to take money directly from my bank account.
Not only that but they actually hijacked the money for 10 days! Given all of the costs of moving to a new host I could have done with that money in my account.
But we have established the WP Engine doesn’t care about their customers or your business so that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
When I was at Affiliate Summit I spoke to a bunch of people about my problems with WP Engine and I was surprised to hear what other people had to say about WP Engine. It wasn’t great!
I also knew that my friend from MyTanFeet was having similar problems with them.
I felt bad because he moved his hosting to WP Engine based on my recommendation.
If you moved your hosting to WP Engine based on my previous advice I can’t stress how truly sorry I am for that!
Here is just some of the feedback I got from my readers about WP Engine when I mentioned the problems in last month’s income report-
As you can see the verdict is pretty much unanimous.
When WP Engine terminated my hosting I was in a desperate situation.
I reached out to some people for advice as I didn’t know which hosting company I could trust and Terry Kyle quite literally saved the day.
Terry Kyle knows his stuff when it comes to SEO & internet marketing.
He also runs WPXHosting which competes directly with WP Engine & his support team took care of everything for me.
Not only did they move the site, they fixed all of the problems that WP Engine couldn’t.
Remember the RSS issue that had the WPEngine team stumped even though I told them exactly how to fix it?
That took them 2 minutes to sort out. They also took care of optimising the blogs load times & setup the CDN for me. It was a truly painless experience during a moment of panic & desperation mid-moving country.
I cannot thank them enough for that! That level of service & support reminds me of the early days of WP-Engine. Take a look at my full WPX Hosting review to learn more.
I’ve also had some amazing experiences with Kinsta lately so I highly recommend you read through my Kinsta review before making any decisions.
So on top of the great service & support that WPXHosting has offered so far, what else do they do offer that WP Engine don’t?
Not only are they cheaper, they offer a huge range of features that WP Engine don’t.
One of the main ones is email support. If you host your site with WP Engine you need to buy additional hosting just for your email! That is not the case with WPXHosting.
I suggest you take a look at my full WPX Hosting review to learn more.
However price & features aren’t everything – one of my main concerns is site speed, after all website speed optimization is money in the bank!
So who is actually faster – WP Engine or WPXHosting? There is only one way to find out!
UPDATED TEST: >Please read my new fastest Wordpress hosting case study for even more tests!
I ran a series of speed tests before the site was moved from WP Engine & then repeated the same tests after it was moved to WPXHosting.
I tested the home page, my top 100 blog tutorial and loading WP-Admin. I chose these pages because they were either the most visited, the most resource intensive or a combination of both.
I also tested each of these pages from the USA & from Amsterdam to make sure the site loaded quickly on both sides of the pond.
I used Pingdom (P) and WebPageTest (W) to test each of the 3 pages from both locations to be 100% confident in the results.
| Page | USA (P) | Amsterdam (P) | USA (W) | Amsterdam (W) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home | 0.846s | 1.970s | 4.178s | 4.279s |
| Tutorial | 5.470s | 6.270s | 26.112s | 21.088s |
| WP-Admin | 2.420s | 2.700s | 5.596s | 6.889s |
| Page | USA (P) | Amsterdam (P) | USA (W) | Amsterdam (W) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home | 0.740s | 1.270s | 4.022s | 4.058s |
| Tutorial | 4.780s | 5.580s | 21.832s | 16.892s |
| WP-Admin | 1.350s | 1.810s | 5.729s | 4.567s |
Using the WP Engine results as a benchmark, the table below shows if WPXHosting was faster or slower.
So if you see -20% that means WPXHosting was 20% faster. If you see +20% that means WP Engine was 20% faster.
| Page | USA (P) | Amsterdam (P) | USA (W) | Amsterdam (W) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home | -12.52% | -35.53% | -3.73% | -5.16% |
| Tutorial | -12.61% | -11.00% | -16.39% | -19.89% |
| WP-Admin | -44.21% | -32.96% | +2.37% | -33.70% |
As you can see, it is quite clear that WPXHosting is considerably faster than WP Engine.
On average WPXHosting is 18.77% faster than WP Engine.
Not only that but WPXHosting only costs me $24.99 a month compared to WP Engine’s $212.00 in March.
WP Engine has a strange pricing system that changes based on how many visitors you have. I was on their $99 a month plan that allows 100,000 visits per month.
After that you pay $1 per 1,000 visitors so I had to pay an extra $113 in March.
And when they say 100,000 visitors they don’t actually mean 100,000 visitors. What they actually mean is 100,000 page requests, which is open to abuse.
For example I could buy 20,000 visitors from Fiverr for $5 and send them to your website. That would cost you $20 but it only cost me $5. Or I could just load up Scrapebox & have full control over your bill.
Either way WPXHosting is 18% faster & 76% cheaper than WPEngine.
Oh and the support team actually knows what they are doing which helps.
I recently published an updated case study to find the fastest Wordpress hosting that takes both WPEngine & WPXHosting through 7 rigerous tests.
The results might surprise you.
It is a shame to see the demise of WP Engine in this manner. Like I said at the start of the article they were one of the best hosting companies I had ever worked with by quite a stretch.
In my corporate career I have dealt with a range of hosting companies from the likes of RackSpace to HostGator – none of them could stand up to the service & support WP Engine used to offer.
In my opinion when WP Engine first started it was a business founded out of passion & innovation. That was clear from the level of support and knowledge displayed when I first moved over.
However I think they grew too quickly over the past couple of years which has caused them major problems.
Now instead of dealing with actual Wordpress experts, you’re dealing with customer service staff that have had minor Wordpress training & fail to understand the basics.
Last year Heather Brunner became COO which probably led to changes in how the company operates. Is it a coincidence the service & support started to degrade shortly after?
Then you have to consider the $15 million investment by venture capitalist firm North Bridge which pushes the focus towards money & profits rather than passion & innovation.
Investors don’t care about your business or your website, they only care about 1 thing – profit. It is also worth noting the passionate co-founder left the company shortly after that investment.
It feels like they have undergone serious cost cutting exercises to the demise of the service & support. I’ve worked in a number of companies where this has happened and it has never turned out well.
WP Engine need to remind themselves of their own values and if they had just followed their own customer support strategy I wouldn’t be writing this post.
There is a certain irony in that!
My advice is if you are a WP Engine customer – move your business away from them as quickly as possible.
My experience with WPXHosting has been awesome so far – hopefully they don’t follow WP Engines lead.
The WPEngine team have published a couple of responses on their blog this week.
The first one was very disappointing and just the usual marketing/PR propaganda with no actual substance or ownership behind it.
Anyone with any experience in marketing & PR will see straight through that.
The second one had a bit more substance to it but still failed to address the majority of issues highlighted.
For example they continue to dodge questions about-
So all in all, the responses don’t really address any of the issues highlighted. Unless you accept ‘growth’ as a universal answer to all of that.
It would be nice to see them take some level of ownership & responsibility for the damage they have done to their customers businesses – I doubt that is going to happen.
I also asked them to refund all of the money I had paid to them & everyone that I had referred to them as an affiliate – they ignored that as well.
There is something else that they do to your website without your permission or telling you.
When you move your site over to WPEngine they make serious WPEngine specific changes to core Wordpress files.
They don’t tell you what they have changed or which files they have made those changes in.
But what this means is when you try to move your site away from WPEngine, you are going to have a hard time getting it to work properly on another host.
I’m currently investigating this further but I will update in due course with my findings.
Added on 28th May 2014
One of the comments from Joseph pointed out that WPEngine are listed as a client of Linode who are a cloud hosting company.
It appears that WPEngine are just renting out cloud servers from Linode and then reselling them as premium hosting.
If you take a look at the price plans you can get an awful lot more bang for your buck than you can with WPEngine.
Not only that but you can have your own dedicated environment that won’t be overloaded with other clients paying a premium price.
After reading about the WPEngine infrastructure you would expect they actually have their own infrastructure.
But it seems that they are nothing but glorified shared hosting resellers with flashy branding and premium pricing rather than the hosting experts they claim to be.
If you want to help, please share this article on your blog
I have taken down the original WPEngine review that I published because it was no longer relevant after publishing this.
However, if you want to check out my original review before all of the problems, just click the link below.
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Hey GLL,Yes WPEngine does have some extra value stuff, but the CDN they include is just a white labelled version of MaxCDN that you can pick up for around $5 per month. The staging area is a great feature of WPEngine there is no denying that, but again you can do that yourself with a subndomain and a free plugin called WPClone – ok that will take 2 clicks to create the staging area vs WPEngines 1 click but its not difficult.The caching system that WPEngine uses is absolutely awful and I had countless problems with it. Not only that but WPEngine makes significant changes to your base wordpress files for them to be compatible with their custom caching system, this means that if you were to ever move away you would need to hire a developer to remove all the extra/changed code they put into your install (TPH did this for me free during the migration but they were disgusted by how far reaching the changes were).I agree that the extra features do justify the extra price. However given how bad the service is and how bad the support is and reading some of the more recent comments here, it makes those extra features useless. If WPEngine actually delivered on the claims they make across their site, this post wouldn’t exist 🙂
Cheers Matt ! I contacted TPH support team to have more info about their service and I think that WPEngine still offers features that are better than TPH and that justifies the price difference.Mainly, with WPE, there is also a very convinient staging area (a test domain), there is a CDN (not included in the 1-domain offer) and all the back-up, security and cache are native and you don’t need an extra plug-in (for me, W3 Total Cache was a total nightmare – although I have to be fair to TPH, they offered to tune it themselves should I become on of their clients).What do you think about that ? How do you cope with it with TPH ?I am really esitating because I had a great experience with WPE (I stopped using their service in May) but I really value your opinion, so I’m in for quite a headache hear ^^Thank’s again for all your help !
The date on the articles is when they were last updated :)But yes this post still holds true and you will see from other comments that people are still having problems. But I am still using TrafficPlanetHosting myself
Dear Matt,I am about to release my new website online. I was going to get a subscription at WPEngine as I already worked with them in the past (following your advice) and I wanted to do so again, because I was satisfied with my previous experience.I visited your website in order to book the subscription via one of your affiliate links and ended up on this article… the question is: is it still up to date ?(A bit out-of-topic here: I find it a bit annoying not to be able to have the actual date of articles on your website, this one is dated 2015 and all screen shot go back to 2013/2014)Which hosting service do you use/recommand nowadays ?Cheers !
BTW, feel free to provide me with an affiliate link or a coupon or whatever, I blindly follow your advice 😉
Great article Matthew 🙂 never considered Linode before. I personally prefer Australian based hosting as I am in Australia. Levation Hosting have great quality VPS plans too 🙂 http://www.levation.com.au/vps-hosting/
Yeah if your in Australia, for sure you are better sticking off with Australian based hosts over any other.
O mine, I also used there services in past and yes they were really good now I am with some other company. But I saw this post and it shocked me really as I saw very good reviews about them in past at this time I don’t know any other review I will now defiantly check the updated review on internet about them as you mentioned in this post. Thank you .
I hope it helps your business 🙂
Good to see you also recommending TPH – we tested out a bunch of hosts before getting behind Terry and what he’s building over there. I moved a site over, and here’s how Google reacted to site load times in Webmaster Tools:- http://thrivethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/tph-google-webmaster-2.pngThe “before” host is a top quality host aswell.Let’s see if Terry and TPH can manage to scale in a better way.
Yeah the TrafficPlanetHosting service is superb!
That would be TrafficPlanetHosting
I am just trying to say in simple way which hosting company is best for my small business except WP Engine
Matt, Great article (novel?) .. you gave WPEngine way too much rope – and they (unbelievably) resorted to repeatedly wrapping it around their necks over and over.I’m curious about one thing, as TPH doesn’t cover this .. (perhaps best asked in your forum – heading there next) how do you cover malware scanning & removal? As a non-developer, I can’t sleep at night unless my sites (over 15 of ’em) aren’t being watched by malware-removal.Brute force attacks, spam , these are easy to deal with, but a tiny bit of malicious code – for a non-developer can be a nightmare!Would appreciate your thoughts .. Lastly – in fairness, I joined WPEngine two months ago, and have had a good experience and the 6 sites I host there are zippy – but you raised important concerns, most importantly how they may be changing core WP files making any migration a challenge.Would appreciate a follow-up on this bit of info – are they doing it, and if so, how to fix this during a migration. I imagine the folks over at TPH might be able to share some insight here.((sorry for the lengthy comment)) love your work!Cheers! Keith
Hey Keith,Hahaha its not the longest post I’ve written ( https://searchlogistics.com/blogging/how-to-start-blog-and-make-money/ )TPH alert you to this, then push you to Sucuri to get a full report and then they take care of it. They also have daily backups (always take your own as well though) In terms of the file changes it was that long ago now I couldn’t tell you, but I know the TPH team had a hard time migrating my site because of it – and these guys actually understand technical things.
Hiya,Just reiterating what Keith asked as I did see any reply. Does TPH protect against malware scanning & virus removal? What about DDOS and other threats. Do their servers offer any protection and are their any other hosts that offer good security. Appreciated. thanks
Hey Matt, I am planning to trafficplanethosting, do you have any affiliate link? I have 5 sites, do you think I should stick to business or pro plan.?Many thanks
Sure you can hit this TrafficPlanetHosting link. If you only have 5 sites stick to the basic plan
Hi Matt: Reading this post after 1+ year after being published I’d like to know how are you doing with your new hosting. I also would like to read an epic post about how to choose a hosting company. I’m a beginner in this SEO thing and I’m hosting in JustHost (the cheapest option), like you recommended in other post. But if I want to upgrade what should I look for? There are so many technical terms and words that I need a glossary to know where to move.
Well, I’m still using it and don’t have any complaints so far so good 🙂 They are the perfect upgrade from JustHost
Thank you for the great post! Matthew we are facing similar issues with WP Engine. After being so tired of running my own dedicated server because of the increase of hacking, especially on WordPress sites.Now I have decided I’m currently looking to move my nonprofit organization to a better host — better than the current BlueHost VPS setup I have going right now.But well thats about how relevant their solutions were! about WP Engine.
I’m not sure what you are trying to say sorry
Hey mate,Did you end up having issues with WP Engine files after the transfer?The TPH transfer go seamless ?
Well it seems that WPEngine make a lot of modifications to the core WP files which makes migrating away from them a nightmare, bit of a scam imo.
Do you know how much is the CDN service at trafficplanet?Thank you
Its included with the hosting I think
Hi.I want to create a site in wordpress using Genesis framwork+theme.I’m searching for 2 weeks now a good hosting company.My site will be minimalist and simple.Max 3000 visitor per month.Best option will be bluehost.com.BUT,I heard a lot of complains,now I have read your post about WPengine.I’m from Romania(an East-European country).Which company do you recommend?Max 30$ per month(without hidden costs)Any help will be appreciated.Thank you in advance.
You could go with TrafficPlanetHosting
Wow this is quite the post. I’ve seen WPEngine advertised quite a bit, but as I noted in another comment I just left you I happen to be good friends with the CEO of a large colocation farm.What’s also interesting is how a lot of these companies just “source” their servers from other companies.In my case I’m literally talking to the owner who not only maintains the servers himself he actually owns them and sets up everything from scratch. I’m not going through hoops trying to understand what exactly I’m getting and where it’s coming from.When I first started out I used Bluehost (Went through Pat Flynn) and it was soo unreal how slow it was, I was probably sitting on a shared box with god knows how many other sites.Now I’m getting it free with 10x the speed and direct access to the person who manages everything and It’s free to boot, simply because we are friends :)I can’t believe how much crap you put up with for months, I would have abandoned them a lot sooner.
Yes I’m pretty sure they use https://www.digitalocean.com/ or similar on the backend but I’m not sure, but it would explain a lot.
Matt,Thank you for the great post! I wish I found it before we signed on with WP Engine. Stability has been a definite problem. In fact we are just coming off a 5 hour outage due to a power loss! My previous $12/month provider was rock solid in comparison. there is no excuse for this. Power loss should not be an issue in a well designed datacenter.Another big surprise with WP Engine is when you learn they do not offer email services or dns hosting. I will definitelly be looking for an alternative.Oscar
Hi Oscar,Sorry to hear that after all this time things haven’t improved. I had the same opinion about my $1/month (at the time) hosting with StableHost
I should of read this article before moving to WP engine. Shocking tech support. Everything you said about tech support is coming true. Going to leave after only two days.
I have to say, I was thisclose to going with WPEngine before reading your post, but after seeing how they react/respond to customers, I think I’m going to pass. You can really tell a lot about a person/company by their responses, and I didn’t like what I was reading from them. It’s like with eBay…I’m not as concerned with the genuine negative feedback as I am with how the seller responds to them. (Take ownership, apologize, and fix or attack and deflect)I’m still in need of a non-shared host with good security though. I’ve set up tests on AWS and DigitalOcean and can configure most things myself, but security is where I am lacking, and why I was almost wooed to WPEngine. Maybe I just need to start reading up on linux hardening and give it a shot myself. I know the risk of hacking is always lurking, but I just want to do all I can to prevent that, and this is why I know I need help in that area.
You could always hire someone to take care of that kind of thing for you
A so long and and helpful post Matt – I’m sure the WPEngine board are cringing!
I have a good relationship with 1 of the higher level staff at WPEngine, who politely informed me I am not well liked within the company 🙂
Hi Matt. Great post. I have a reseller account at hostgator with a lot of sites, but I was starting to get paranoid with everyone saying I could experience problems. I haven’t had any so far, but as I start getting more and more traffic, I don’t even want to test how safe it is! People were recommending Digital Ocean, but not being a developer, I looked over the site and didn’t understand 25% of the terminology! So I was going to switch to WP-Engine and found this page. You saved me a lot of headaches. Gonna try TrafficPlanet. I’d rather focus on web design and SEO than have to learn ubuntu, linux and other fun stuff!
Yes digitalocean is a good solution if you know how to setup cpanel/whm etc – but if you don’t its not that difficult but then you are 100% responsiable for any and all hosting problems – you are your support team.TPH has been very good to me so far and I am still with them, navigate around the blog and take a look for yourself 🙂 Plus they have 24 hour support =D
And Best of British, mate!
Thanks Matt! I’m ditching BlueHost and their VPS after this latest 49 hour blackout (they said they “forgot to turn your server back on after the interruption” verbatim). I’ve narrowed my hosting preferences down to PowerUp (probably not), and either TPH or SiteGround GoGeek (shared plan).I guess I’ll just have to heuristically determine which is best for my nonprofit organization’s multisite installation, although I surely don’t want to get in the habit of host-jumping every month or two.Thanks again!
I was going to sign up for them just now.Lucky for me, I found this site.I use to be with Hostgator till they got bought out by EIG.I then tried out Westhost which was better, but still not really good enough.That is when I decided to use WP-Engine. I had heard good things about them in the past, but their price was a bit steep for me at the time. Then I decided to shell out the extra cash to get better server performance. Thanks again for documenting this. I am looking into Traffic Planet instead.
No problem I hope you find a good home for your sites 🙂 This blog is still with TrafficPlanet to give you an idea on performance (and I have nearly 60 plugins running)
Hey Matt. Thank you for writing this post. Although it’s a year later, may I ask if you still stand by things written in this post, or do you know if things have changed?I’m currently looking to move my nonprofit organization to a better host — better than the current BlueHost VPS setup I have going right now.Do you still recommend TrafficPlanning Hosting over WP Engine and Synthesis? Are YOU still hosting with TrafficPlanning?I’m less concerned about comments and al that, and more concerned with just better speed. All my sites are WordPress (including my nonprofit), and I’m quite experienced at how to handle on-page things and site speed. All of my sites are A-ranked (90%+) in just about every speed testing tool imaginable, but the page load times always add 2-4 seconds to the total time. So pages that should load in 1.5-2.5 seconds take 4-7 seconds to load, due to that server response time / first byte.All of my sites (7 of ’em) run on Genesis and a Genesis child theme.If you’re still following this post, any updates on what you’re doing would be greatly appreciated!
Yes the site is still running on TPH with nearly 60 plugins, have a browse around and you can get a feel for how it performs yourself rather than relying on opinion.While I can’t speak from personal experience on how WPEngine perform right now, what I can tell you is I get endless streams of people approaching me at conferences sharing the same frustrations.
After being so tired of running my own dedicated server because of the increase of hacking, especially on Wordpress sites – I am moving all my new website clients to WP Engine. Read your post ages ago, and it looks like you really have had a terrible time with them. So far, I have nothing but praise for WP Engine. A company that I really respect, WP Curve, who offer quick support for Wordpress problems, highly recommended them, so I gave them a try. WP Engine’s support has been exceptional… have had probably a couple of dozen phone calls to them over the last few months, and every time they have stuck with me until my issues are resolved – it has been a breath of fresh air! One great thing is that I don’t have to worry about security. Previously I was using WordFence, until 20 of my sites running got hacked, even though they all had WordFence. Running iThemes Security helped, but there was still the threat of DDOS. Anyhow – I don’t worry about any of that now, and because WP Engine take daily backups, I could do a one-click restore to many restore points in the past.The only question mark I have at the moment is sending emails from my Wordpress site. They are fine if I only have like 100 emails per day, but I may run in to trouble if a site needs a higher volume than that. Perhaps I’ll just use an SMTP plugin in that case, as most of my clients have average web traffic.Anyhow – just thought I’d write about my experience so far!! As I see you mentioned above… give them time. We’ll see how it goes!
Great to see hear and yes you are right about the problems of running your own dedicated server although Wordpress is vulnerable in most environments. I assume you didn’t have a fully managed dedicated server?With your emails you can look at someone like postmark for example who have a Wordpress plugin.
Thanks for the reviews!
No problem 🙂
I just moved both of my sites, http://sitehostingoptions.com and http://tipsmakemoney.com to WPEngine hosting. I upgraded from shared GoDaddy hosting and I had to practically hold onto my desk because my sites were so fast. That combined with the built in CDN, $99 a month is pretty worth it in my opinion!
Yup – you have the exact same experience as every other person that moves to WPEngine. Give it time :)$99 for shared hosting is ridicolous.
I’ve used WPEngine for years and absolutely love it. Never a single issue.
So I moved my site from Hostgator to WP Engine yesterday and so far I have not seen any speed improvements at all. I was 79/100 speed on Google PageSpeed Insight and now I am around 75/100 on WP Engine. Nothing has changed on my site or plugins. I actually have less plugins when I moved to WP Engine. I talked to their live chat support and he suggested that I add a plugin to help improvement. I asked him why should I add something when WP Engine advertises that they are fastest and charges more for it? Shouldn’t be an improvement without changing anything? If I wanted to add something I would add it on Hostgator and pay less. Funny thing is, the chat window somehow magically crashed. I have been with their chat for last 2 days and it never crashed before but this time when I pushed the guy, it did.
Hi Ron,This is purely down to your misunderstanding of what the Google Pagespeed tool actually does vs what WPEngine actuall does.The Pagespeed tool purely looks at your site, how it is coded, whether it has the right standards to be ‘fast’ – it has next to nothing to do with your host and is 98% down to your theme and the plugins you use.For example you could have 100/100 pagespeed score, but if its hosted on a junky server with lots of sites on a crappy internet connection – it will still take 60 seconds to load.Equally if a site has 0/100 pagespeed score but is hosted on a super mega wow wow fast server – it could load in less than a second.
I’m looking into Traffic Planet. Bulgaria based support chat and email only. That’s a deal breaker for me, I think…
The support is 24 hours a day and always quick to respond and I have them all on Skype as well
Good read, MW!It sounds WPEngine got funding to grow and had to do some hasty short term hires to meet support demands. In my experience, all web hosting support are trained to not accept blame and try to divert blame elsewhere (there’s simply no professional benefit to openly admitting fault). Most customers aren’t as knowledgable as you, so they buy the reasoning and stay on. I’m sure WPEngine will eventually get back on top of things or maybe they are on top today. Afterall, it’s not easy training a person to be sound with WP, because it entails knowledge of WP itself, LAMP, plugins/3rd party items, htaccess, security/malware, etc. So what company did you migrate your webhosting to?
Yeah and the head honcho jumped shipped at that point I believe as well.The professional benefit to admitting fault is your customers trust you and don’t publish things like this.I’m with TrafficPlanetHosting
Yeh I’d agree with this. I think you nailed it when you said they got way too big, too fast and tried to cover it up. When you’re hosting thousands of sites, you can’t give each one personalized attention so they give canned answers. When I first heard of them, I looked at their offerings and came across their list of disallowed plugins, I knew they would be a bad fit—at least for me and my clients.As someone who builds and hosts websites for clients, I can see fault on both sides here—but more so with WP Engine—for stringing the client along for so long. Matthew gave them ample time to make good, which is more than I would have given them if been in the same situation.Every website usually has some unique requirements. It’s good to hear that TPH understands that. It seems to me they fit the mold of what he’s looking for—a “semi-managed” host for someone just enough to be dangerous. That’s more or less what I do with my clients—we take care of their hosting and CMS updates so they don’t have to. If the site gets slow, we look at caching pieces here and there. If you have a lot of dynamic content, it’s harder (read more expensive) to stay fast when you have a lot of traffic—that’s just the nature of the web—but it is possible. There’s no way WPE can take into account every variable and every plugin so they lock it down, like any shared host would do but that flies in the face of what WP is capable.I find it really interesting they’re allowing (and even parsing?) .htaccess files. Allowing .htaccess files in a server config are performance killers, especially for what you were doing it it. The www vs non code needs to go in the server block, not .htaccess; even shared hosts have that as an option in the control panel and that’s not something you want to be doing in .htaccess. So WPE wasn’t really wrong for suggesting it but they really didn’t go into detail about why. TBH I thought Apache wasn’t even in the mix at WPEngine but it must be in some way if that redirect was working for you. I know they run nginx which doesn’t even use .htaccess files so they must be proxying back Apache. Hard to say but it sounds like their caching layer wasn’t really working for whatever reason.
Not just us then, good to know :)Apart from not getting critical updates in a timely fashion (>3 weeks!) their IPs are blacklisted with SpamRats, causing our emails to get flagged as Spam even when they’re sent through a different service.
Sorry to hear that, I guess they haven’t really gotten any better =/
Hello Matthew,Thanks to your deeetailed post, now Trafic planet is the top in my referral list.
Awesome to hear 🙂
Thanks for a great intensive review..saved me joining up !! I did find out that they pay minimum 200 dollars for each new customer to their affiliates..hence they are growing by false recommendations..so looking for somebody else to host my new web site ..which will be in wordpress..thanks again..
Yup and they are hedging their bets with that kind of payout. I’m using TrafficPlanetHosting right now.
I came across the review when starting to evaluate dedicated WP hosting plans for a UK site. The detailed analysis is much appreciated!
No problem at all 🙂
Wow. I just spent forever reading this. I would never mess with you. All this stuff is Chinese to me, and yet I’m one of those annoying people who have to crosscheck and research everything before I buy. You are like the Kung Fu of the internet world. Everyone duck. Anyway, all I have are some articles written and a style of a template I want to use. The only thing I’ve bought is the domain through HellDaddy. Don’t hate… I’m an old school Wix user, done tons of those drag and drop websites for people, which requires no skill, and finally stepping into 2015. I want to go with a host you recommend. Do you think the trafficplanet is too detailed and advanced for a dummy like me? God help me. Can you point me in the right direction for someone with not a fraction of your knowledge? I’m such a beginner that even beginners would laugh. I’m in sales and marketing, and have all the creativity and ideas I need to make a go of a blog. I just don’t have the tech knowledge. Do I need it if I’m just starting out? Be gentle, eh? 🙂
Thanks man. It’s very helpful. I have exactly same experience with WPengine and spent a lot of time on searching for other WP hosting companies. Thanks for the recommendation, I’m migrating my site to Traffic Planet now 😉
Sorry to hear that hope you work things out!
Funnily enough, I came across this post by Googling “wp engine infrastructure,” which probably goes to show how unavailable they make actual tech specs about their servers. I’m currently researching various managed WordPress hosting companies for work and had been leaning toward recommending WP Engine to my supervisor, until I read this post and one other sharing a horrible experience (which came up in the same search, hah). Thank you for sharing!
Glad it helped you out!
Hi Matthew,Thank you for the review!! This review did it. You saved me from spending more money, time and hassle with these guys. I am truly grateful. I have given WPEngine a try as per certain recommendation but now, I will be migrating. I do not know what they do in manipulating data or functions (or else) but it certainly destroyed some AJAX functions of a theme. I tested out the theme on a low-cost test server and it is absolutely fine, working as designed without a hassle. Funny thing is, the imported data from WPEngine caused the same issue on the test server, initially, until I erased them all. Of course, the tech support didn’t help much as they blamed it on theme even after showing them a live working sample. Now, after reading your post I am certain that it had something to do with WPEngine. Very glad I found your site, and thank you again.
No problem sorry to hear you had similar problems
Hi Matthew,I just wanted to say thank you for your post. I’m on the lookout for a new hosting service and was on the brink of signing up with these guys. Luckily I decided to do a bit of due diligence and look through some reviews. Your post was the first I read – it looks like you’ve helped me dodge a bullet. Thanks again!
No problem at all!
Hey MattGood post. Very detailed with the hardware and getting to the root of the problem. I checked pcmag for the best web hosting services and bluehost is a top ten host for 5.99 a month. Go daddy is also a top 10 host with the same ratings and goes for 2.99 a month. Which one is better to start out with? Also down the road is it easy to switch hosting? Are there things I should know now for later if I switch?
You can go with either of those, I tend to launch new sites with Justhost then move them later if needs be which is easy to do.
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you, Matthew!It took 2 hours for me to read your posting. Didn’t want to miss a word. Kekeke. I would not read yours if you didn’t attach any proofs, yeah it could be business competitors of affiliate business things.I am new blogger with a big zero about hosting, coding, etc. So, I am using wordpress.com but planning to have a self hosting soon. I am looking for the managed wordpress hosting for days already. Your article really help me.Before I finished to read the comments, I started a chat with the live support of TPH. Awesome. Fast response and patient (since I said in my way about my need and problems, not using the MySQL or PHP language!)The great thing is they will do much technical things for me without any additional fee. Another one is they only sell domain and wordpress hosting. No shared hosting, no VPS. It make me think:”Great! They will really watch my website!” “They are not business oriented guys!””They are absolutely expert on wordpress since they focus on it!”After finished with the THP, I backed to your blog, read all the comments. Aaand find that you still using THP! It’s really assure me. Hahaha.I am planning to move to THP next month!Thanks again!
Hahaha great to hear you are having a positive experience with them – I will stay with them for a long time to come 🙂
Maximizing the profit for the shareholders, greed, that is the main cause of the problem. We experience this in every part of our daily lives these days. Consolidation of companies, price matching cause once good companies to go down the toilet. They either get bought by larger companies or go bankrupt. Unfortunately it pushes us to the big players like Amazon. At least their service level is something which is predictable. Of course it is much more technical to have a good Wordpress setup especially on their (first year free) micro instances but at least you are the captain of your boat. I’ve published my own configuration of how I use Amazon at http://purdox.com maybe it will help you in your future projects. Cheers,Tony
Handy link thank you 🙂
Yes that is true but they could fix it with a redirect if they wanted to
WHOA! It is a sad thing that WPEngine is “pretending” about infrastructure. I work for a hosting platform and we put it in bold words that we are using Amazon and DigitalOcean for our services.
I think it would strengthen their offering if they said so
I think you should update the article slightly Matthew. I have fully moved but sadly are going to lose 2160 links from forums and websites hotlinking to the image on the CDN wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/ they cant do anything about that as they say “You are not a hosted customer anymore so we can’t do anything about it”. They said it will return a 404 error ofcourse with links pointing to their website. 🙁
Thanks a ton for taking the time to write all this and detail your journey of pain. :)I’m currently looking for new hosting for my clients who use WordPress and it’s a challenge as the landscape is forever shifting. Of course, that’s par for the course, but still; whew!As an aside, I was taking a look at the TPH folks as an alternative and they look great. I also noticed that it looks like you’ve switched your hosting over to Steadfast in Chicago. Did you finally end up getting a dedicated server? How are the folks at Steadfast? Your site certainly loads fast (GTMEtrix gives you an A for page speed, grats! 🙂 )Thanks again for all taking the 16+ hours to write this post!
Hey,I’m still with TrafficPlanetHosting 🙂
Thanks Matthew for the detailed review , I have had the exact same problems. Today was the last straw as I had random https/http duplicate content issues with WPEngine. Random server changes f*** up.Im currently working with the trafficplanethosting team to move all my sites. Thanks again
Sorry to hear that, the TPH guys will look after you though 🙂
Matt, I’m really glad I found this post as I have been looking into WPEngine to host an ecommerce site I’ve been working on. Thanks for providing such an in-depth report on the problems you had and thereby saving myself and doubtlessly many other people a whole sh*tstorm of problems.I’m now looking into Amazon EC2 or even Linode cloud hosting. Best regards from sunny Thailand :-)Sean
No worrys good luck finding a home for your project!