WP Engine Review - Simply the Best WordPress Hosting

3 mins

Finding the best WordPress hosting can be a daunting task. There are millions of hosts out there that do a “good” job of hosting all types of sites but what if your site starts to take off and you want performance, price and support for a reasonable price?

That's when shared hosting stops being a good idea. Since 2008, this site (CMS Critic) had run on HostGator's business shared hosting plan. It did the job reasonably well with minimal downtime but lately, I started to see that their support guys were deactivating my site if my traffic got too high or the load on their shared hosting CPU became too much. That's when I decided it was about time I moved this site to a proper host and search out some truly solid WordPress hosting.

I started the search by reading through the various forums out there and, unfortunately, 90% of the sites I encountered appeared to be fake review sites that provided no meaningful or honest suggestions as to what service might actually be the best out there. I took it upon myself to use some of the more popular webmaster forums instead of simply trying to Google for the term ‘best WordPress hosting' as this was turning up nothing of value.

In my research for the best WordPress hosting solution, I discovered an option that intrigued my quite a bit, a company called WP Engine. What caught my attention specifically, was the fact that Automattic, the company behind WordPress, actually invested $1.2 million in their WordPress hosting business. I don't think I've ever seen them invest in a WordPress hosting provider before and that was pretty much close to what sealed the deal for me that I should give these guys a try. So I did.

Today, I am running 100% of this site on WP Engine's WordPress hosting.. and I love it.

WP Engine is staffed by WordPress geeks who know their stuff and getting support when I needed it was quick and easy. I opened a ticket and was able to explain the issue without having to explain WordPress or how it works.

Add to this the fact that their system automatically set up caching on my site and migration was done from Hostgator to WPEngine in less than 6 hours (including file transfer time!). That's pretty darn good considering this site has almost 1,000 articles and pages on it plus tons of media.

Another awesome feature that I fell in love with is their plugin that ties the hosting into my WordPress dashboard. From here, I can create an entire staging site with a single click. This makes a complete copy of my site that I can work on without having any impact on my production site. This, for me, was a huge bonus that I actually didn't know about until after I signed up for their plan.

WP Engine also curates plugins and lets you know the ones that work best with their system and which ones not to use to get the maximum output from you site. You just can't get this kind of expertise anywhere else. During the migration of my hosting from Hostgator, I didn't even need to use their support staff at all, I just used their extensive articles on migrating and followed them with ease.

What did I get with my WordPress hosting package through WP Engine?

A crazy fast site.
Unlimited data transfer.
Automatic daily backups.
The ability to back up my site by creating a restore point with a single click.
Managed upgrades.
A Firewall.
Malware scanning.
CDN services (although I have found I don't need them).
WordPress experts available to answer my questions.
The ability to create a staging site to develop on without impacting production.
Amazing support from people who know WordPress really, really well.

I seriously can't rave about these guys enough. If you are in the market for the absolute best WordPress hosting available, then you need to take a look at these guys. I did and I couldn't be happier. Did I mention that you get a 60 day money back guarantee? Good luck getting that from another WordPress hosting provider.

Check them out here: WP Engine – They simply offer the best WordPress hosting I know of.