These protocols include WordPress updates, security, caching and more. This is a bit of a sneak peek into what WP Engine has to offer, but let’s get into specifics.

Visit WPEngine

About WP Engine

WP Engine aims to provide users with a suite of intelligence, integration, performance, and agility solutions. The goal is to make it possible for users to build and then deploy an online experience of their choosing, whether it is a content hub, an ecommerce website, a campaign site, or something else. WP Engine prides itself on offering solutions for people and organizations of all sizes, from global enterprises to small businesses.

WP Engine was founded in 2010 by Jason Cohen, who “wanted to work on interesting, real problems experienced by interesting, real customers.” WordPress powers 25% of all websites, but the average WordPress user still didn’t know how to secure and maintain their website properly.

This is something Jason wanted to change. He saw a gap between frustrated business owners trying to manage their own websites and hosts willing to go beyond offering servers for them to host their websites on. The solution was WP Engine.

WP Engine is a managed WordPress host, as stated before. It offers scalable cloud hosting servers, an automated caching system called EverCache and servers optimized for WordPress. In terms of reach, WP Engine has more than 70,000 customers spread across over 136 countries., including such companies as SoundCloud, National Geographic, Asana, Yelp and many more.

WP Engine prides itself on being the leading platform for a WordPress digital experience. It calls itself a new breed of traditional tech companies that combines service with software innovation. WP Engine aims to deliver solutions that brands need to create remarkable apps and sites using WordPress, allowing those companies to drive their business.

WP Engine also makes a conscious effort to be diverse as well as inclusive, including a wide range of people who share common values and purposes. Two-thirds of its C-Suite is female, 29 percent of employees are of a non-white ethnicity, and 8 percent of employees identify as LGBTQ. Additionally, 30 percent of employees do not have college degrees.

WP Engine Core Values

One of the core values of WP Engine is to do the right thing. This means doing what is right for the company and the customer. It also includes learning from mistakes and empowering fellow employees, so everyone does the right thing. That empowerment comes from being trusting, sharing results transparently, forgiving honest mistakes, demanding excellence from themselves, being accountable, and acting ethically.

Another core value is being customer-inspired. WP Engine aims to amaze customers with its transparency, expertise, and service. The company is grateful for the role it plays in the lives of customers by improving their reputation and business while delivering peace of mind.

WP Engine also has the value of “where the best gets better,” which includes being challenged by meaningful and interesting work that gets its inspiration from passionate people. WP Engine supports and develops other members of the team, celebrates successes, and nourishes leadership and personal growth.

Another value is being built to last, focusing on long-term investments. WP Engine builds with a focus on profitability and growth, so it is in control of its own destiny. This also extends to building lasting relationships with communities, employees, and customers.

WP Engine “aspires to lead” and is “committed to giving back.” This means that it hopes to achieve a leadership role within the community of those who use WordPress via sharing expertise, active participation, and original contribution. WP Engine empowers its team to participate in and lead programs that are meaningful to their communities, and the company also supports and engages with local communities.

A Focus on WordPress over other CMSs

The focus on WordPress comes from the popularity and usefulness of WordPress when it comes to designing websites. WordPress is an open framework that lets users customize the CMS to meet the needs of their business instead of the other way around. By contrast, a proprietary, closed system would require you to adjust your business to match the CMS.

There are also some striking figures that show why WP Engine chose to focus on WordPress, including the fact that 30 percent of all websites online are built using WordPress. Of the sites that were built with a CMS, 60 percent use WordPress. Additionally, 27 percent of the top 10,000 sites based on traffic use WordPress. There are also more than 100,000 WordPress developers.

What Does the WP Engine Platform Deliver?

The WP Engine platform delivers all the tools users need to create and deliver digital experiences via WordPress. It includes solutions related to performance, integration, agility, and integration. This makes it possible to use WP Engine to create a vast range of experiences. The platform is unified via powerful technology, an ecosystem of developers and partners, and award-winning services.

Creative Agility from WP Engine helps users build, manage, personalize, and publish. Actionable Intelligence focuses on marketing and development. Ecosystem Integration includes expertise and tech innovation. Finally, Enterprise Performance includes the cloud, scale, security, and high availability.

What Is WP Engine’s Creative Agility?

The Creative Agility features from WP Engine aim to deliver what you need to reach market faster and provide innovation. The features are divided into Build, Manage, Personalize, and Publish. Build includes 36 high-quality StudioPress Themes that are easy-to-use. These themes are powered by the Genesis Framework from WP Engine and include built-in security and SEO. This service also includes Auto Migration for the move to WP Engine, Serviced Onboarding to ensure onboarding goes smoothly, Deploy Site to move data between various cloud development environments, and Git and SFTP Connections, so team members can continue building with their choice of development tools.

One Click Staging is another Build element of Creative Agility, providing tools that make it possible to shorten and simplify the development cycles by letting you quickly test changes. The Dev, Stage, and Prod Environments come with all WP Engine sites, so you can quickly create an efficient development workflow. There are Dedicated Dev Environments that are isolated for development and testing. Launch Readiness Assessments give you a personalized prelaunch review with the experts from WP Engine. This looks at best practices and performance via site staging and code compatibility tests.

Moving onto the Manage functions of the Creative Agility feature, WP Engine performs daily automated backups for peace of mind. The platform also takes care of all the WordPress core updates, including automatically taking care of major ones and testing minor updates before it recommends you use them. For scaling, WP Engine lets you add SSL and CDN for transaction security and scaling, respectively, with one click. Manage functions also include multi-site conversion, turning it on or off via the User Portal. This section of Creative Agility also includes controlling the various user permissions, viewing and using the activity log with its published content and updates, and using the SSH gateway. To wrap up the Manage features, WP Engine allows for the simple transfer of ownership of the website and delivers support 24/7, 365 days a year.

Personalization via WP Engine’s Creative Agility includes geotargeting to deliver location-specific content to increase transactions and engagement along with custom functionality and WordPress plugins. The final part of Creative Agility, Publish, refers to the ability to use WP Engine to publish your quality content at a high scale with the CMS that improves creative agility via its ease of use and collaboration.

Overall, WP Engine lets customers build their vision via website experiences thanks to the use of open-source flexibility, unlimited workspaces, one-click tools, and a global developer network. Managing technology and scaling growth are also key aspects of Creative Agility. You can enjoy access to the in-house team of experts on WordPress, quickly make changes using administrative tools, and know that your website always has automatic upgrades. The digital experience platform allows for personalization via geo-targeting and access to the most reliable and safest WordPress plugins. The WP Engine platform makes it simple to publish content for programs, campaigns, or communications, even with multiple authors. This is enhanced by the ability to create content and metadata, as well as customize the editorial workflows.

WP Engine Enterprise Performance

Enterprise Performance from WP Engine refers to the ability to deliver scalability and secure digital experiences that have been optimized for WordPress. These features work for any number of views and relate to Cloud, High Availability, Speed, and Security. WP Engine has best-in-class cloud partners, so customers can access industry-leading architecture and use global data centers plus cloud coverage for quick loading and constant availability. If something does happen, automatic site recovery is there to help. Thanks to the WP Engine proprietary system, you get blazing-fast load speeds to help you stay competitive. The enterprise-grade security rounds out the confidence of Enterprise Performance.

The related Cloud features include the use of Amazon Web Services since WP Engine is an AWS Advanced Technology Partner. This allows for a range of solutions. Additionally, WP Engine uses the cloud to offer global data centers, including in the Asia-Pacific region, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States.

To provide the High Availability that is part of Enterprise Performance, WP Engine has data center redundancy with Amazon Web Services and uptime protection thanks to clustered configurations within dedicated environments, multilayered security measures that are proactive, and a fully managed content delivery network.

To deliver the speed that Enterprise Performance needs, WP Engine is HTTP/2- and PHP 7-enabled. This allows for the latest updates that can serve as many as three times the requests each second, improving conversions, visitor retention, and SEO. WP Engine’s proprietary EverCache reduces the strain on the resources of your website. This solution can move hundreds of millions of hits daily via the system. It has a fully managed global content delivery network (CDN) that sends the local requests to the closest server to allow for quicker loading of content. WP Engine also has a highly scalable architecture that can handle extreme traffic spikes. Overall, customers tend to improve their load times by 27 percent when they switch to WP Engine.

In terms of Security, the Enterprise Performance includes the built-in security of the StudioPress themes. The previously mentioned managed core updates and patches also provide security by ensuring you have the latest version with all the security updates. Security is further enhanced with two-factor authentication and traffic encryption using SSL on every page. WP Engine supplements all this with a proprietary system that dynamically detects and blocks malicious behavior to prevent cyberattacks. It also offers disaster recovery support from its experts and has a dedicated security engineering team that can take care of security audits and code reviews of internal processes and environments.

WP Engine’s Actionable Intelligence

The features that fall under the category of Actionable Intelligence from WP Engine focus on optimizing the digital experience via actionable insights on performance, content, and site traffic. Your marketing team will feel empowered with the new insights that allow them to create engaging content while the development team will appreciate the code-level insights that help them improve availability, site performance, and speed.

In terms of marketing, enjoy content performance insights on authors and specific content. This information is displayed via a visual dashboard which optimizes and simplifies the functionality of Google Analytics for WordPress, easily accessible with your WordPress admin.

Development-related aspects of Actionable Intelligence include Page and Application Performance. Page Performance focuses on improving website speed via a speed performance tool that integrates right into your user dashboard, and it is the first to do so. This lets you view the impact of new features and plugins immediately. Application Performance lets your development teams and IT operations enjoy visibility at the code-level. The result is the ability to troubleshoot issues with applications, regardless of the environment’s complexity.

WP Engine’s Ecosystem Integration

Ecosystem Integration features are divided into technology and service. These are the features that let you leverage the WordPress framework as well as the WP Engine integrated platform to give your brand-new opportunities. Technology-related features begin with Integration DNA, which refers to WP Engine’s ability to combine, integrate, and optimize more than 40 different technologies into its platform. This combines with the company’s building of its own proprietary tools, plugins, and solutions. WP Engine lets you leverage its integrated platform with the guidance and tech you require. You can integrate the WordPress experiences into the MarTech stack via the WordPress REST API for maximizing cross-platform insights and data.

To further Ecosystem Integration, there are more than 40,000 WordPress plugins that you can access, allowing you to build a robust and versatile digital experience for design, security, ecommerce, and more. WP Engine also has technology partnerships with Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Service, and other best-in-class innovators to enhance capabilities and optimize them for WordPress. The open-source code in the WordPress project is constantly being improved thanks to contributions, many of which are from the WP Engine team members.

The service element of WP Engine’s Ecosystem Integration begins with access to the entire company filled with WordPress experts. These include 14 experts on specific subjects, plus a support team that undergoes eight weeks of training. The service also extends to account management and onboarding, where customers can enjoy excellent hands-on service. WordPress experts are located in the United States and Ireland, which means that you can contact them at any time of the day. The service team is also award-winning, and customers can find more content from the expert team in award-winning publications, such as Velocitize and Torque Magazine.

What Else Should You Know about WP Engine’s Technology?

WP Engine feels that open-source technology is a powerful solution. The WP Engine platform consists of more than 30 different open-source technologies. In the company’s experience, open-source technologies can deliver quicker innovation than proprietary, closed systems.

It is also important to note that WP Engine integrates with technological leaders, like New Relic, AWS, and Google. The platform then optimizes these companies’ technology to use on WordPress.

WP Engine Hosting Plans

WP Engine is a premium “managed WordPress hosting” company that offers premium prices. It has five plans in total with prices starting at $29/month, which is more than your typical shared host charges, although you can get a big discount off these prices using our WPEngine Coupon Code.

It offers two server types, but they both have cloud infrastructures. The first is a virtual private server that uses a shared hosting environment, though it isn’t your typical shared hosting environment. Your site still exists on the same server as other sites, but they don’t share resources as they do in typical shared hosting environments.

WP Engine offers three preset plans, called Startup, Growth, and Scale, each building on the previous one. There is also a Custom option for larger businesses as well as mission-critical sites. If you sign up for annual prepay when you sign up for a WP Engine plan, you get two months of service free. All plans are also risk-free for 60 days.

WP Engine offers three shared hosting plans, Startup, Growth and Scale. Here’s a breakdown of what each plan has to offer:

• Startup
  • $35/Month
  • 1 Install
  • 25,000 Visits per Month
  • 10GB of Local Storage
• Growth
  • $115/Month
  • 5 Installs
  • 100,000 Visits per Month
  • 20GB of Local Storage
• Scale
  • $290/Month
  • 15 Installs
  • 400,000 Visits per Month
  • 30GB of Local Storage

Let’s take a look at these plans in details. It should be noted, before we start, that all plans offer unlimited data transfers and free SSL certificates.

Startup Plan

The Startup plan is designed for those who need the basics to start their blog or small website. It costs $35 per month and is designed for 25,000 visits each month and one site. It includes 10 GB of local storage and 50 GB of bandwidth per month. This plan includes the Genesis Framework; more than 35 StudioPress themes; transferable sites; LargeFS; PHP 7.2 ready; Page Performance; Global CDN; automated SSL certificates; 24/7 chat support; and environments for Dev, Stage, and Prod. If you do not want to upgrade to the next plan but need a few more features, you can add on WordPress Multisite, additional sites, Content Performance, and GeoTarget.

Growth Plan

The Growth plan is designed to appeal to growing businesses and costs $115 per month. It includes five sites and is designed for 100,000 visits per month. Local storage is 20 GB, and there is 200 GB of bandwidth per month. In addition to the features of the Startup plan, the Growth plan also adds imported SSL certificates and 24/7 phone support. It offers the same add-ons.

Scale Plan

The Scale plan offers the best value at $290 per month. It is designed with site and capacity limits that let companies scale their experiences. It also includes 15 sites and accommodates 400,000 visitors per month. The local storage increases to 30 GB, while the bandwidth increases to 400 GB per month. The available add-ons are the same as with Startup and Growth plans.

Custom plans are ideal for mission-critical sites or larger businesses. They provide a dedicated environment with high performance, the quickest support response, and managed onboarding. You need to talk to a sales specialist to get pricing since it depends on your company’s needs. Custom plans include 25 sites and millions of visits per month. The local storage can be between 100 GB and 1 TB with a bandwidth of more than 400 GB per month. In addition to all the included features of the other plans, the Custom plan adds WordPress Multisite, Content Performance, GeoTarget, consultative onboarding, a relaunch readiness assessment, and SSH Gateway.

The other server type is a dedicated VPS. It’s only available on the higher-end plans as it gives you access to your very own cloud server.

WPEngine Pricing

Compared to many of the other WordPress hosting websites you find online, WP Engine is a bit more expensive, but the company makes up for this in terms of what that price buys you. When you look at the actual total value of WP Engine plans, accounting for the included features and services, the value becomes great. At a bare minimum, taking care of WordPress updates and doing QA on your installation every month will take a half-hour. If you convert this into what you would pay a developer to take care of those actions, that already gives you the price of the Startup plan from WP Engine. To further make the value apparent, consider potential lost visitors from downtime or speed issues, neither of which will be a concern with WP Engine. You must also factor in the security features of WP Engine and what they would cost separately.

WP Engine Support

To ensure that all customers of WP Engine get the best possible customer support, the company trains all support team members for eight weeks. That training is followed up with continuing education. This ensures that every member of the support team has the necessary skills to deal with the most common issues as well as more complex problems. WP Engine also continuously measures its quality and skills to determine when more training is necessary.

WP Engine provides its customer support 24/7, every day of the year. There are customer support teams in both Ireland and the United States, allowing WP Engine to provide round-the-clock customer service. The three global support locations let WP Engine provide service to its 70,000 customers.

For an idea of how favorable ratings of WP Engine’s customer service are, consider the company’s awards. The support team has earned the Stevie Award four different times. The team also has a world-class Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 82. Additionally, consider that there are about 200 service experts available on your schedule, allowing for one-to-one live support. Due to the vast number of service experts at WP Engine, the average live chat response time is less than three minutes, letting you deal with any issues quickly.

One of the unique things about WP Engine is that its service team does more than answer questions specific to hosting. The team will also assist you with WordPress. When you need help troubleshooting a problem, the WP Engine support team will not only fix the problem but actually work with you to diagnose it. The team then provides specific recommendations that help you optimize your websites. User reviews of WP Engine customer support are typically high, stating that the support team has an extensive knowledge base, no doubt due to the extensive training. There are numerous stories of the support team problem-solving while on the fly.

WP Engine offers several tiers of support, but they’re all available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year. Live chat support is available on all plans. Phone support is available on the Professional plan and higher, and dedicated ticket support is reserved for Enterprise accounts. However, if you have a lower plan and support is not able to resolve the issue you’re having via live chat or phone, they’ll create a ticket for you.

There are several support options for WordPress novices. This includes having a staff filled with over 100 WordPress experts, all of whom are ready to help you tackle any problem. It also includes one of the most extensive knowledge bases any host offers. It uses a highly accurate search function and includes articles on every step of the process of running a WordPress site with WP Engine.

You’ll have access to “strategic account management” services on Premium and Enterprise plans. The service is included in Enterprise plans, but you’ll need to pay an additional price to take advantage of it with the Premium plan. It’s essentially a consultative service designed to “proactively plan your success.”

The WPEngine User Portal

WPEngine customers get access to their own user portal, from here you are able to manage all aspects of your account, your WordPress installs, you can view visitor stats for your sites, check the page performance, add users and manage your account. This is what the main dashboard homepage looks like:

If you click through to the “Installs” page, this is where you can manage all the aspects of each site you have with WPEngine. The page shows you a graph with your monthly visitors, bandwidth, storage usage, WordPress version and your IP address. On the left you have links for setting up things like redirects, backups, SFTP users, Git, SSL, Utilities and the site migration service. You can also click through with shortcuts to your WordPress admin area and the phpMyAdmin for your site.

There is another tab called “Page Performance” which will allow you to run a test on your site and see how it is performing speed-wise, if you click through and run the report you will receive an email once it’s complete. The report will show you how long the site takes to load, the size in KB and it will give you some recommendations on how to improve the score.

Here you can see I tested a default installation of WordPress with no posts and the default theme, no plugins installed and just using the WPEngine caching system. You can see it to 0.70 second to load and the report offered 3 suggestions to speed the site up even further.

WPEngine Speed Tests

WP Engine makes a point of its speed, and it does actually live up to this reputation. Those who use WP Engine for their WordPress hosting can let you know that even with custom theme files, images, forms, widgets, plugins, and ads, websites hosted on WP Engine run quickly. This comes from the features WP Engine offers specifically to enhance speed, such as caching and the use of a stack that is more advanced than the ones used by typical web hosts. If you do ever experience speed issues with WP Engine, the support team has a reputation for figuring out where the problem came from and helping you deal with it to get your website back up to being incredibly quick.

Of course with any hosting company, having a fast-loading site is essential these days – research has found that  “a 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.” and more importantly “40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load” Source.

WPEngine prides itself on the speed of it’s servers and in my testing I found this to absolutely be the case, they were the fastest host that I tried out using a default WP install with the default WP theme.

Here you can see the results of the Pingdom test, a load time of 345ms is very fast and there is also room to improve this by concatenating HTML, JS and CSS files as well as other small tweaks to improve load times.

And here are the results of a LoadImpact test, running from Dublin Ireland to the hosting location in California USA.

The results were :

• Minimum response time: 777 ms
• Maximum response time: 1.32s

If speed of your site is important to you, which it should be, then WPEngine are definitely among the very best, if not the best.

Genesis Framework

In addition to all of the services related to WP Engine, those who sign up for a plan get access to the Genesis framework as well as premium WordPress themes. This access alone has a value of more than $2,000 but comes free with any WP Engine plan. You can browse the available StudioPress themes before purchasing a plan. Because of the vast options available, you can sort the choices by category (business, ecommerce, enterprise, lifestyle, magazine style, photography, or real estate), features (accessibility ready, color styles, custom header, HTML5 markup, or mobile ready), or layouts (one, two, or three columns).

The Genesis Framework lets you easily and quickly build websites using WordPress, with security and an SEO foundation. It is Gutenberg-ready, letting designers and developers create a reusable module for content and design, so end-users can customize and combine the modules to fit their needs. The Genesis Framework also includes plenty of theme options, a theme customizer, custom page templates, featured content widgets, mobile responsiveness, and customizable headers.

The Pros of Hosting with WP Engine

Hosting with WP Engine comes with a number of advantages and disadvantages, but we’re going to focus on the ones that will likely to hold the most influence over whether or not you choose to use this service. Let’s get into it.

EverCache

WP Engine is a managed WordPress host, and the number of built-in services it offers gives you a clear indication of what that actually is. One of those services is EverCache, WP Engine’s very own caching system. It caches your site at the server level, negating the need for a dedicated caching plugin that only caches your site at a PHP level.

This system is included with every new install. It detects when your site needs to be refreshed and does so automatically, though you can also set this setting to manual. You can also ask support to implement special caching rules if you wish.

CDN Services

CDN services are available for all plans thanks to WP Engine’s partnership with MaxCDN. The service costs $19.95/month on the Personal plan, but it’s included free of charge in the Professional and Business plans.

Premium and Enterprise customers are expected to pay $0.12/GB after using up their first 1,000GB, which is included free of charge.

Performance

With a cloud infrastructure and built-in caching and CDN services, WP Engine’s servers are optimized for performance. Jerry Low of Web Hosting Secret Revealed even reported experiencing a 50% drop in page load times immediately after switching his site over to WP Engine’s servers. He also maintained an uptime average of at least 99%.

Security

WP Engine implements several security measures to protect your site, including scanning for malware, using an advanced firewall and placing limits on the processes allowed to write to your server’s disk.

Developer Features

Staging environments come with every plan. A staging environment allows you to create a copy of your site and install it in an isolated location on your server so you can run tests or play around with your site without breaking its live version.

WP Engine also offers transferable installs. This means developers can use their own WP Engine accounts to begin working on client projects when their clients aren’t ready to purchase their own accounts. They can transfer the sites over to their clients’ accounts when they’re ready.

 Resource Center

WP Engine’s Resource Center includes articles, case studies, e-books, infographics, white papers, videos, and webinars. These cover a vast range of topics and are designed to help anyone who uses WP Engine find the information and tools they need to enhance their website or other aspects of their company. You can search the hundreds of resources based on the role they provide information for (including agencies, developers, entrepreneurs, freelancers, marketers, and site owners), resource type, or topics. The topics include WordPress as well as uptime, SEO, security, scalability, performance, marketing, entrepreneurship, and ecommerce.

Solution Center

The Solution Center offers a range of solutions that are designed to enhance the website you create with WP Engine. You can look at featured solutions or focus on experiences, technology, or expertise. Some examples of solutions include those that make it easy to build a native app, translate, search, increase speed, create lead capture forms, use SEO, and more. Solutions are divided into site setup, development, speed, security, marketing, design, ecommerce, enhance, content, site elements, education, and service companies.

The Cons of Hosting with WP Engine

There are many advantages of hosting with WP Engine, but it does have its drawbacks. For starters, WP Engine is an exclusive WordPress host, which can pose a problem for those who don’t use WordPress exclusively or developers who want to work with one host but many content management systems.

We also need to mention the drawbacks that come with using a managed WordPress host as opposed to a typical host. There are many plugins you aren’t allowed to use on WP Engine’s servers due to its use of a built-in caching system and security measures. These plugins include WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, Wordfence, WP DB Backup and more. You can view the full list here.

What Awards Has WP Engine Earned?

WP Engine has earned several accolades over the years. The Austin Business Journal named the company one of the Best Places to Work in Central Texas in 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017. In 2014 and 2015, the Austin American Statesman named WP Engine one of the Top Workplaces in Austin. In 2016, it received an International Business Award as a Gold Stevie Award Winner. In 2017, WP Engine earned a spot on Fortune’s list of the 100 Best Workplaces for Millennials and a Recognize Good award for Ethics in Business & Community.

The team members behind WP Engine has also earned many awards over the years, showing their passion. Heather Brunner won a CEO Award from the Austin Business Journal in 2015, the title of CEO of the Year as a Chamber of Commerce Award in 2016, and the title of Entrepreneur of the Year for Central Texas from Ernst and Young in 2017. Jason Cohen earned the Techflash Titans award in 2014 from the Austin Business Journal and the Entrepreneur of the Year honor in Central Texas from Ernst and Young in 2017, which he shared with Heather Brunner.

WP Engine Security

Most of the security features from WP Engine are part of the Enterprise Performance solutions mentioned above. Essentially, WP Engine takes care of all the steps you would have to take yourself if you were to run your own WordPress site. This includes ensuring that your install and plugins are always up to date to keep out cyberattacks, taking care of automatic backups, and even conducting code reviews in conjunction with top security firms.

Conclusion

WP Engine offers hosting for those who run WordPress websites, along with an expansive list of added services. Every single WP Engine plan includes value-added features, such as the Genesis Framework, and plenty of themes.

Plans also include extra services, such as automated SSL certificates, 24/7 expert support, and Global CDN.

WP Engine is a great host, but it’s not for everyone. Its prices start at $35/month ( less if you use our coupon code ), which could make it expensive if you are running a hobby blog or website which is just for fun. However if you make money from your site or it is for your business and up-time, speed and reliability are important factors then you will honestly not find a better WordPress host.

It’s especially a great host for WordPress novices who need servers as powerful as these. You won’t need to worry about installing or configuring caching or security plugins nor will you need to worry about maintenance. Everything is taken care of for you.

Ready to give WP Engine a try? Click the link below to learn more and receive 30% off your first payment.

Visit WP Engine

Managed WordPress hosting is ideal for people who want the best for their WordPress-based website as they have a hosting framework in place which has been optimized for WP sites and they also provide extra features for this CMS such as automatic backups, security measures and expert staff on hand who know how to deal with any issue which arises.

In this post we will be taking a closer look at Cloudways and what their hosting offering is like for WordPress users.

About Cloudways Hosting

Founded in 2011, in Mosta on the European island of Malta, Cloudways has fast become one of the major players in the managed cloud hosting industry.They have over 30 members of staff distributed between their office in Malta, UAE and Spain and have helped thousands of people around the world host their WordPress based websites.

Cloudways allows users to deploy, monitor and manage high-performance website and application for scalable expansion on different top-tier cloud infrastructures. They aim to make your site perform well for both your users and search engines with no down-time and facilities to cope with large spikes in visitors.

Cloudways Plans & Pricing

Cloudways operates a little differently from other hosting providers in the fact they offer a choice of different cloud infrastructures. When signing up you are able to choose from the following options: DigitalOcean, Vultr, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Live Platform and Kyup.

Each option has slightly different pricing and specifications so you can choose the one which best suits your needs. The cheapest option is with Digital Ocean from just $7 per month and the most expensive option is with Amazon and costs $360.24 so you see there is a wide variety of options to suit most budgets.

Click through the tabs to view a run-down of the pricing and features for each provider.

[symple_tabgroup]

[symple_tab title=”Digital Ocean”]

Here are the prices of DigitalOcean cloud servers:

• $7/mo [512MB RAM, 1 Core Processor, 20GB Storage, 1TB Bandwidth]
• $14/mo [1GB RAM, 1 Core Processor, 30GB Storage, 2TB Bandwidth]
• $34/mo [2GB RAM, 2 Core Processor, 40GB Storage, 3TB Bandwidth]
• $70/mo [4GB RAM, 2 Core Processor, 60GB Storage, 4TB Bandwidth]

Here are the features for these plans:

• Unlimited Apps
• Free SSL Certificates
• 24/7 Customer Support

[/symple_tab]

[symple_tab title=”Vultr”]

Here are the prices of Vultr cloud servers:

• $11/mo [1GB RAM, 1 Core Processor, 25GB Storage, 1TB Bandwidth]
• $23/mo [2GB RAM, 1 Core Processor, 40GB Storage, 2TB Bandwidth]
• $44/mo [4GB RAM, 2 Core Processor, 60GB Storage, 3TB Bandwidth]
• $84/mo [8GB RAM, 4 Core Processor, 100GB Storage, 4TB Bandwidth]

Here are the features for these plans:

• Unlimited Apps
• Free SSL Certificates
• 24/7 Customer Support

[/symple_tab][symple_tab title=”Amazon Web Services”]

Here are the prices of Amazon cloud servers:

• $88.04/mo [3.75GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 4GB Storage, 2GB Bandwidth]
• $36.04/mo [1.75GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 4GB Storage, 2GB Bandwidth]
• $180.44/mo [8GB RAM, 2 vCPU, 4GB Storage, 2GB Bandwidth]
• $360.24/mo [16GB RAM, 4 vCPU, 4GB Storage, 2GB Bandwidth]

Here are the features for these plans:

• Unlimited Apps
• Free SSL Certificates
• 24/7 Customer Support

[/symple_tab]

[symple_tab title=”Google Cloud Platform Live”]

Here are the prices of Google cloud servers:

• $70/mo [3.75GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 20GB Storage, 2GB Bandwidth]
• $34.17/mo [1.70GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 20GB Storage, 2GB Bandwidth]
• $135/mo [7.5GB RAM, 2 vCPU, 20GB Storage, 2GB Bandwidth]
• $255.36/mo [15GB RAM, 4 vCPU, 20GB Storage, 2GB Bandwidth]

Here are the features for these plans:

• Unlimited Apps
• Free SSL Certificates
• 24/7 Customer Support

[/symple_tab]

[symple_tab title=”Kyup”]

Here are the prices of Kyup containers:

• $75.23/mo [2GB RAM, 2 Core Processor, 40GB Storage, 2TB Bandwidth]
• $21.11/mo [1GB RAM, 1 Core Processor, 20GB Storage, 2TB Bandwidth]
• $128.5/mo [4GB RAM, 2 Core Processor, 60GB Storage, 2TB Bandwidth]
• $255.89/mo [8GB RAM, 4 Core Processor, 80GB Storage, 2TB Bandwidth]

Here are the features for these plans:

• Unlimited Apps
• Free SSL Certificates
• 24/7 Customer Support

[/symple_tab]

[/symple_tabgroup]

Hosting Features

Cloudways provide a service not seen on other similar hosting companies with a very high level of customization, options and scalability. Due to cloud based nature of their service, your website will be distributed around different servers on the platform which means if one server should become un-available their system which switch to a different server to carry on serving your website to visitors – this avoids any downtime which is unavoidable with most other typical shared hosting platforms.

When signing up for Cloudways you can choose an infrastructure provider based on different things like pricing, specifications and so on. You can then configure your hosting options which best meet your requirements for your website.

Here is a run-down of the main features you will get if you choose Cloudways.

• Multiple Cloud Infrastructure
• Multiple Apps Support
• Multiple Data Centers
• Dedicated Environment
• SSD-based Hosting
• CloudwaysBot
• 1-Click (Free SSL, Cloning, Backup & Restore, Scaling, and Domain Mapping)
• Team Collaboration
• Staging Area & URLs
• Git Deployment
• Server Settings
• Platform Level Firewalls
• SSH & SFTP Access
• Real-time Monitoring
• ThunderStack
• Multiple Databases
• Multiple Addons
• PHP-7
• Security Patching
• CloudwaysAPI
• Varnish UI
• Two-Factor Authentication
• Cron Job Manager
• Projects
• Elasticsearch
• HTTP/2
• IP Whitelisting

Cloudways Hosting Support

Cloudways offers a number of ways to get customer support should you need it at any point. They have a detailed knowledge base which you can veiw on their website which should be your first starting point, it contains lots of detailed guides to help you most matters including things like account and billing functions, database help, help for different content management systems, caching and performance, backups, staging, cron jobs and many more. In fact, it’s one of the best knowledge bases I have seen at a hosting company.

Of course you can always contact the support team who provide 24/7/365 live support for its clients with a numbers of different options. Cloudways currently offers:

• Ticket
• Live Chat 24/7
• CloudwaysBot

The Pros of Hosting with Cloudways

Cloudways is one of the most versatile cloud hosting companies on the market. They offer a lot of different options and features so just about anyone should be able to configure the service to meet their website’s needs. Some of the pros of choosing them are as follows:

• Free Trial
• 24/7 Support
• Lowest Prices
• Advanced Caching Technology
• Multiple Cloud Infrastructure

Security

Security is and will remain a headache for website owners but hosting with Cloudways ensures that they are safe with the included security features of Cloudways, such as: Platform Level Firewalls, Security Patching, Two-Factor Authentication, HTTP/2, and SSH & SFTP access.

ThunderStack

Cloudways offers you state-of-the-art technology solutions to meet the most demanding website’s requirements with technologies that comprise of Varnish, Memcached, Apache, Nginx, PHP-FPM, and Redis.

Breeze Free WordPress Cache Plugin

Cloudways has recently introduced a free WordPress cache plugin called as Breeze.

Breeze is lightweight, quite simple and does not have many configuration options, or at least they are not complex like other cache plugins. It has five sections of configuration, just by configuring one of the sections, you will have the plugin fully-functional.

The UI itself describes each option in detail so you know exactly what each option does. What makes it fantastic is that it works great in its minification settings. So just the install the plugin and improve site loading.

The Cons of Hosting with Cloudways

Just like any other cloud hosting provider, Cloudways does have its cons. Let’s take a look at them.

• Email isn’t included with hosting
• No domain registration
• No Phone Support

Who is This Host for?

As you can see from this review, Cloudways is for just about everyone – with such a wide range of hosting options, features and choice of platforms to host your website on you can tailor it for most sites and budgets. It’s suitable from anyone from small personal bloggers, to web developers who need somewhere to host their client’s websites right up to large scale eCommerce stores and other enterprise businesses who absolutely need reliability and scalability from their hosting company.

Visit Cloudways

About A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting was founded as a “modest startup business to serve a few clients” under the name Iniquinet in 2001, though they often state they were founded in 2003. This is because they adopted the name A2 Hosting in 2003 as a tribute to the company’s hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

A2 Hosting offers everything a WordPress developer needs, from shared hosting plans for amateur sites to dedicated hosting plans for professionals. It was even one of the first hosts to support PHP 5 in mid 2004.

A2 Hosting is also a self-credited “green host” who’s partnered with Carbonfund.org, an organization whose primary object is to combat climate change. Their “green” plans are intended to help the environment by being as carbon neutral (reducing one’s carbon footprint) as possible. They do this in a few different ways, including recycling old servers, using telecommuting and planting three trees for every hosting plan sold in a given month.

Let’s take a look at the standard plans A2 Hosting offers.

Pricing

A2 Hosting offers a wide variety of hosting plans as well as several different pricing tiers per plan. Let’s take a look at them.

Shared Hosting

A2 Hosting has two different sets of shared hosting plans. One is hosted on Linux servers, and the other is hosted on Windows servers. The prices are more or less same, but the plans do differ slightly.

Here are the prices for these plans:

• Linux Lite – $7.99/Month
• Linux Swift/Windows Lite – $9.99/Month
• Windows Swift – $11.99/Month
• Linux Turbo – $18.99/Month
• Windows Turbo – $21.99/Month

A2 Hosting’s Turbo servers increase page load speed “20 times” the amount they load with the host’s regular servers. It does this by allowing fewer users to be on the same server, including a technology called A2 Optimized, which is powered by APC/OPcache and Turbo Cache, using less CPU and memory resources than Apache, handling connections more efficiently, and providing enhance stability.

Here’s a rundown of a few of the features included with these plans:

• 1-Unlimited Number of Websites
• 5-Unlimited Databases
• Unlimited Storage in a RAID 10 Array
• Unlimited Data Transfers
• Free SSL Certificate via Let’s Encrypt
• Anytime Money-Back Guarantee*
• 25-Unlimited Email Addresses
• 24/7/365 Support
• Supports CDN Services via CloudFlare
• Multi-Platform Support**
• 1-2 CPU Cores at 2.1GHz
• .5-2GB of Physical Memory
• 4-8GB of Virtual Memory
• cPanel & Plesk Control Panel***

*You’ll receive a full refund if you request a refund within your first 30 days of hosting. You’ll receive a prorated refund for unused months of service if you request a refund after 30 days.

**A2 Hosting supports WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, CubeCart, B2evolution, phpBB, BlogEngine (Windows servers) and SMF as well as ecommerce platforms Magento, OpenCart, PrestaShop, AbanteCart (Linux servers) and DotNetNuke (Windows servers).

***Linux servers use cPanel while Windows servers use Plesk Control Panel.

VPS Hosting

A2 Hosting offers three different VPS hosting plans, which are Unmanaged, Managed and Managed with Root Access. The Unmanaged plans are much cheaper than the Managed plans, and the Managed and Managed with Root Access plans are identical in terms of pricing.

Here are the prices:

• Unmanaged Entry – $5/Month
• Unmanaged Mid – $10/Month
• Unmanaged Top – $15/Month
• Managed Power+ – $49.99/Month
• Managed Prestige+ – $69.99/Month
• Managed Pinnacle+ – $99.99/Month

Here are the features of the Unmanaged plans:

• Your Choice of Linux OS
• 20-50GB of SSD Storage
• 1-4 CPU Cores
• 2TB of Data Transfers
• 512MB-1GB of RAM
• Root Access
• Anytime Money-Back Guarantee (same guarantee as Shared Hosting plans)

Here are the features for the Managed and Managed with Root Access plans. They include more resources than the Unmanaged plans allow, and you have the A2 Hosting team taking care of security, software, hardware, the network and more. Here are the features:

• 4-8GB of RAM
• 75-150GB of SSD Storage
• 2-4TB of Data Transfers
• 4-8 vCPUs
• Free SSL
• Anytime Money-Back Guarantee

Reseller Hosting

Similar to their Shared Hosting plans, A2 Hosting offers two sets of Reseller Hosting plans for Linux and Windows servers. The features are more or less the same for each plan, but the prices are different.

Here are the prices for the Linux servers:

• Bronze – $19.99/Month
• Silver – $27.99/Month
• Gold – $36.99/Month
• Platinum – $61.99/Month

Here are the prices for the Windows servers:

• Bronze – $21.99/Month
• Silver – $29.99/Month
• Gold – $38.99/Month
• Platinum – $63.99/Month

Here are the features for these servers:

• 30-200GB of SSD Storage
• 400GB-2TB of Data Transfers
• 40-100 Accounts
• Free SSL
• WHM Control Panel & Plesk Control Panel*
• Free eNom Reseller Account
• Anytime Money-Back Guarantee

*Linux servers use the WHM Control Panel while Windows server use the Plesk Control panel.

Cloud Hosting

A2 Hosting’s Cloud Hosting plans are simple. There are only three pricing tiers:

• Start – $15/Month
• Medium – $20/Month
• Ace – $25/Month

Here are the features for these plans:

• 512MB-1GB of RAM
• 10GB-25GB of HDD Storage
• Unlimited Inbound Data Transfers
• 2 CPU Cores
• 600MHz CPU Speed
• Anytime Money-Back Guarantee

Dedicated Hosting

A2 Hosting’s Dedicated Hosting plans are similar to their VPS Hosting plans in that they’re either unmanaged, managed or managed with root access. Let’s take a look at the prices:

• Unmanaged Sprint – $119.99/Month
• Unmanaged Exceed – $199.99/Month
• Unmanaged Mach – $299.99/Month
• Managed Sprint – $169.99/Month
• Managed Exceed – $249.99/Month
• Managed Mach – $349.99/Month

Here are the features for these plans:

• 8-16GB of RAM
• 2x500GB-2x1TB of Storage
• 10-20TB of Data Transfers
• 2-12 CPU Cores
• Free SSL (managed only)
• Free cPanel Control (managed only)
• Anytime Money-Back Guarantee

A2 Hosting Support

A2 Hosting prides itself on providing top notch support for all it’s customers with a number of different options available to you. They offer phone support with a Toll-Free USA and Canada number as well as local phone numbers for the UK/Europe, Brazil, Australia and India.

They also provide a live chat service, email and also a comprehensive knowledge base with lots of detailed guides.

The Pros of Hosting with A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting is one of the most versatile options available in the web development industry. They offer a little something for everyone, so let’s take a moment to focus on what they can offer for you.

Support

A2 Hosting offers support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year via phone, live chat and a ticket system.

Wide Variety of Plans

A2 Hosting is a traditional web host, so they have something for everyone, whether you’re a first-time blogger who needs a cheap hosting plan, a developer managing several client sites or a large business.

Anytime Money-Back Guarantee

A2 Hosting already offers a generous 30-day, money-back guarantee, and they’ll also refund you after 30 days for any months you haven’t used in your hosting plan, yet.

Developer Friendly

A2 Hosting supports multiple platforms as well as numerous developer tools, including multiple versions of PHP, several different programming languages, MySQL, Apache and more.

Security

A2 Hosting protects yourself from malware with a free HackScan tool. They also have KernelCare for rebootless kernel updates, brute force defense, dual firewalls and more.

The Cons of Hosting with A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting is a wonderful host, but it does have its faults. Let’s take a look at them.

No Details on Server Capabilities

Choosing a hosting plan can be difficult with A2 Hosting, especially if you have an existing site you need to travel or expect to grow quickly. This is because the sale pages for these plans do not feature information on how much traffic each plan can handle. All they feature are information on the hardware and software available with each plan, which can make it difficult to make an educated and informed purchase decision.

Who is This Host for?

This host is technically for everyone, but it’s definitely geared toward developers or those who like to tinker. It’s also great for bloggers or small-sized business owners who don’t mind getting their hands dirty with code and tech. It’s not completely technical, but it may be over the heads of inexperienced users.

If you’re an amateur blogger or business owner who needs an alternative to other popular WordPress hosts or a professional developer, be sure to check out this host yourself to truly see what they have to offer.

Visit A2 Hosting

About Kinsta

Kinsta was founded by experienced WordPress user Mark Gavalda on December 1, 2013. The company had humble beginnings, but they now have enough business to support two headquarters in Los Angeles and London as well as employees located all around the world.

Kinsta’s infrastructure is powered by Google Cloud Platform, a cloud-based hosting infrastructure offered by Google. The company made history in April of 2016 when they became the first managed WordPress host to run exclusively on Google Cloud Platform and LXD containers, giving them a way of offering servers higher in quality than what most hosts are able to offer.

Speaking of which, it should be noted that Kinsta is a host geared toward high-end businesses that need a lot of server power. This is not a host for an average blog or website, and it’s definitely not a host for amateur or first-time bloggers.

Pricing

Kinsta offers eight pricing tiers available in two different plans as well as a third plan for those who need something a little different or extra. You may be caught off guard by the prices at first glance, but keep in mind this host is meant for large-scale businesses.

Here’s a quick rundown of the features every plan offers before we talk about individual prices and features:

• Choose from Three Multi-Regional Data Centers
• Unlimited Pageviews*
• Unlimited Visitors*
• 1,440 Daily Uptime Checks per Site (one for every minute of the day)
• Automatic Daily Backups
• CDN Ready
• Automatic Scaling
• HTTP/2 Support
• Free SSL with Let’s Encrypt
• SSH
• WP-CLI
• Git
• Staging Environments
• One-Click Site Clonings
• WordPress Multisite Support
• Premium DNS Management
• PHP 7 or HHVM
• 24/7 Ticket Support

*Kinsta’s servers run on a cloud-based infrastructure, giving them the ability to scale and use more resources as needed. This is why an unlimited number of pageviews and visitors are allowed on every plan.

Business Plans

Let’s break those large-scale businesses down to small, medium, large and enterprise-sized chunks. With that done, we can accurately say Kinsta’s Business Plans are ideal for small to medium-sized businesses or developers who manage no more than 20 websites.

Here are the pricing tiers for these plans:

• Business 1 – $100/Month
• Business 2 – $200/Month
• Business 3 – $300/Month
• Business 4 – $400/Month

Here’s a rundown of everything available in these plans:

• 1-20 WordPress Sites
• 5-40 GB of SSD Storage
• 50-400 GB of Server Bandwidth
• 1-4 Free Site Migrations
• 4-6 PHP Workers

Enterprise Plans

Going back to the “chunks” of large-scale businesses we created in the last section, if Kinsta’s Business Plans are suitable for small to medium-sized businesses, their Enterprise plans are ideal for large to enterprise-sized businesses. This is mainly due to the amount of bandwidth these servers can handle.

Let’s start with the pricing tiers:

• Enterprise 1 – $600/Month
• Enterprise 2 – $900/Month
• Enterprise 3 – $1,200/Month
• Enterprise 4 – $1,500/Month

Here are the features these plans offer:

• 40-100 WordPress Sites
• 80-200 GB of SSD Storage
• 600-1,500 GB of Server Bandwidth
• 5 Free Site Migrations
• 8-16 PHP Workers

Custom Plans

Kinsta offers custom plans for those who need a specific set of features that aren’t available in the stock plans.

Kinsta Support

Kinsta offers support 24/7 via an online messaging system. Some of you may be put off by the fact that they don’t offer phone support, but they have good reasons not to – we’ll give you a quick summary.

First of all, support requests typically revolve around issues with websites, be it server issues or WordPress-related issues. The support staff need to be able to know what type of server you’re running in an order to help you in most cases, which means they need to be able to identify you. It’s much quicker to have your name and customer information pop-up in a messaging app than it is to go back and forth in a phone conversion. A messaging system also makes it easier to share screenshots and links both ways.

As far as support staff goes, Kinsta’s customer service team is full of WordPress experts who work with WordPress core on a daily basis, so they’re more than capable of solving your problems.

The Pros of Hosting with Kinsta

This is a higher-end managed WordPress host, and it’s definitely a high-quality host. Let’s talk about the advantages you’ll experience if you choose this host.

The Cons of Hosting with Kinsta

Not every host is perfect, and Kinsta is no different. Let’s talk about the disadvantages you may experience if you choose to use this host.

Who is This Host for?

Let’s wrap up this post by talking about who this host is for, which we’ve mentioned multiple times throughout this review. This host is for large businesses who have six and seven-digit monthly visitors and receive huge spikes in traffic on a regular basis. This is especially a great host for e-commerce sites. It’s also a host for businesses who need to be live 24/7/365. Lastly, it’s a host for developers who build and manage WordPress sites for large-scale businesses.

Visit Kinsta

We’ll also go over pricing, support and Flywheel’s best and worst features, so without further ado, here’s AlienWP’s review for managed WordPress host Flywheel.

About Flywheel

Flywheel was founded in 2012 with the intention of improving “the lives of the millions of web designers & developers worldwide that build sites on the WordPress platform.” Designers and agencies are their target customers, so you can expect a lot of developer-friendly features with this host.

The company currently has a team of just under 100 people, and it seems to be always expanding to handle the over 50,000 customers that choose to host their sites and customers’ sites here. Let’s get into things.

Pricing

Flywheel offers several pricing tiers in three main plans. Most individuals and companies will use one of the Pay-Per-Site plans while developers will most likely be interested in the Bulk plans. There are also custom plans available for those with sites too traffic-heavy or unconventional for stock plans.

It should be noted that all plans are powered by VPS environments. This is a different type of shared hosting. In a typical shared hosting environment, all sites run on the same hardware. In a VPS environment, all sites exist on the same server, but they each have their own virtual environments. This means they can’t impede on each other’s space or use each other’s resources as they can in a typical shared hosting environment.

Pay-Per-Site Plans

These plans are for single installs, meaning they only allow you to host one site. Every plan comes with an included SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt. CDN services are also available, but you’ll need to pay $10/month for the lower-end plans.

Here are the prices for these plans:

• Tiny – $15/Month
• Personal – $30/Month
• Professional – $75/Month
• Custom – Custom Pricing

Here are the features for the first three plans:

• Monthly Visitor Limit Between 5,000 and 100,000 Visits
• Between 5-20GB of Disk Space
• Between 250GB-1TB of Bandwidth
• Multisite Support (Personal Plan & Upward)*
• Staging Environments (Personal Plan & Upward)

*Multisite support costs an additional $10/month on the Personal plan. It’s included with the Professional plan as well as custom plans.

Speaking of custom plans, this type of plan can support millions of monthly visitors with custom amounts of disk space and bandwidth. CDN services are also tailored for your account with this type of plan.

Bulk Plans

These plans allow you to run multiple WordPress installs. They’re ideal for developers, be it freelancers or agencies. SSL certificates are included in these plans as are staging environments. The rest of the features are dependent on the pricing tier you choose.

Speaking of which, here are the pricing tiers:

• Freelance – $100/Month
• Agency – $250/Month
• Custom – Custom Pricing

Here are the features the Freelance and Agency tiers offer:

• 10-30 Maximum WordPress Installs
• 150,000-600,000 Maximum Monthly Visitors
• 40-120GB of Disk Space
• 4-8TB of Bandwidth
• CDN Services*
• Multisite Support**

*CDN services are available on every bulk plan, but you’ll need to pay $10/month with the Freelance tier and $8/month with the Agency tier.

**Multisite support is available on every bulk plan, but you’ll need to pay $10/month with the Freelance tier and $8/month with the Agency tier.

You can also use the custom pricing tier. Similar to the Pay-Per-Site pricing tiers, this tier allows you to create a custom pricing plan that allows you to use more than 30 WordPress installs, millions of monthly visitors, custom amounts of disk space and bandwidth, CDN services, and multisite support.

Custom Plans

These custom plans differ from the custom pricing tiers available in Flywheel’s stock plans. These plans are entirely custom and tailored to your needs. Customers using custom plans must have sites that receive at least 100,000 visitors every month. They can support well over 5 million visitors per month.

Use our Flywheel coupon to get a 20% discount on hosting plus 2 months free.

Flywheel Dashboard

The Flywheel website has a beautiful design and their dashboard is no exception. Once you are logged in you are greeted with a welcome page which prompts you to create your first WordPress website.

If you hit the “Create a New Site” button you can install WordPress with a few clicks, simply choose your login details and a temporary domain and then you can choose to either pay now, let your client pay or add it to a bulk plan. There is also the option of a completely free site migration if you currently host somewhere else – just click that option and they will move the site for you.

Flywheel Support

Flywheel offers support in the form of a ticketing system, phone and a live messaging app. Standard support is available Monday through Friday between 9AM and 5PM CDT while “emergency support” is available 24/7. Emergency support is available if you’re a current customer and are experiencing an outage.

Many reference Flywheel’s support hours as a disadvantage despite the quality of the support. The service is marketed toward designers and agencies, so you’d expect Flywheel to use what has become the industry standard of offering 24/7 support for all customers. This is because 9-5 M-F support hours could conflict with the developer’s own 24/7 support structure. They can’t always solve their customers’ problems 24/7 if they can only get hold of the host’s support during set hours on weekdays.

Other than that, Flywheel offers a support team full of WordPress experts as well as a well-built knowledge base filled with articles you can use to help yourself through a lot of issues.

The Pros of Hosting with Flywheel

Flywheel is a great web host, but let’s get into specifics so you can get a better understanding of what makes them a great host.

Pricing

With a starting price of $15/month, Flywheel offers among the cheapest managed WordPress hosting plans available in the industry, and without foregoing quality as well!

Developer Friendly

Flywheel offers reseller hosting, staging environments, an application called Local that allows you to develop WordPress sites locally, the ability to clone sites with one click, the ability to create a demo site for free and more.

Security

Flywheel offers round-the-clock security that actively scans for malware and removes any it fines. These services are included with every plan.

Optimized for Speed

Flywheel’s infrastructure runs on an architecture that’s optimized for speed. This includes the built-in CDN and caching services mentioned below, but it also includes the fact that it uses VPS servers and Nginx over Apache.

Nightly Backups

Flywheels backs up your site on a nightly basis and creates restore points you can use with one click.

Built-In CDN Services

Flywheel maintains a partnership with MaxCDN to give you access to high-quality CDN services at a low price (or free!).

Built-In Caching Services

Flywheel offers caching services at the server level. This means you don’t need to worry about installing, configuring and managing a CDN plugin as this type of plugin only performs caching on a PHP level.

Transfer Payment to Your Client

Flywheel is a service marketed toward designers and agencies who build websites for professional clients. This is why they’ve included a feature that allows you to transfer billing to your client.

The Cons of Hosting with Flywheel

There are a couple disadvantages of hosting with Flywheel, so let’s go over them briefly.

No Priority Support

We’ve already mentioned the limitations you may experience when dealing with Flywheel support, but we haven’t mentioned the lack of priority support, yet. It’d be a nice feature to add to the higher-end plans or even the Bulk plans at the very least.

Can Seem Too Restrictive to Some

Flywheel is a managed WordPress host, which means your host performs a lot of tasks you’d typically need to perform yourself. This includes security monitoring, caching and more. As such, Flywheel warns against using certain plugins, including most security, caching and backup plugins. This can be a problem for those who are used to being in complete control of their sites.

Who is This Host for?

This host is marketed toward designers and agencies who develop WordPress sites for professional clients, but the amount of features it handles for you and its low price structure make it an ideal host for a blogger or business owner in charge of their own website. If either of these describe you, I highly recommend checking this host out and using our coupon code for a 20% discount on hosting plus 2 months free.

If you’re a developer who prefers being in complete control of your sites, you may want to look elsewhere, such as these hosts:

• SiteGround
• DreamHost
• InMotion Hosting
• Bluehost

Let’s find out.

About DreamHost

DreamHost was founded by four friends in a college dorm in 1997. They shared a love for technology and open-source software and found a way to turn their passions into careers.

Today, DreamHost hosts over 1.5 million websites built by over 400,000 web designers, developers, content creators, small business owners and entrepreneurs in over 100 different countries.

They’re a multi-level host, which means they offer a variety of different server types ranging from typical shared hosting environments to scalable cloud hosting environments. They’re also a multi-application host and support such applications as WordPress, Joomla, Zen Cart and phpBB.

DreamHost Pricing

DreamHost offers four different hosting types:

• Shared Hosting
• Managed WordPress Hosting
• VPS Hosting
• Fully-Managed Dedicated Hosting

Shared Hosting

DreamHost offers a simple pricing model for its shared hosting service, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. More on that in the cons. It also offers a 97-day, money-back guarantee, which gives you three whole months to decide whether or not this is the host for you.

As far as pricing goes, shared hosting offers one plan with three tiers:

• Month-to-Month – $10.95/Month
• 1-Year – $9.95/Month
• 3-Year – $7.95Month

It also offers the following:

• Free Domain with 1-Year and 3-Year Plans
• Free Domain Privacy Protection Included
• Free SSL Certificate with Let’s Encrypt
• Unlimited Storage
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Unlimited Domains

Use our Dreamhost Coupon to get Shared hosting for just $5.78 per month.

Managed WordPress Hosting

This is one step above shared hosting. Your website, as its name suggests, shares a server with other websites in a shared hosting environment. Managed WordPress hosting works as a VPS solution in that your server is installed in an isolated area of a shared hosting environment.

This also comes with a 97-day, money-back guarantee, and its pricing structure looks like this:

• Month-to-Month – $19.95/Month
• 1-Year – $16.95/Month

You’ll get a free domain if you pay annually.

VPS Hosting

Here’s where things get amped up. VPS hosting is still shared hosting, as stated before, except your website exists in an isolated environment in which websites are not able to drain resources from other websites.

The cheapest plan is $15/month and comes with the following specs:

• 1GB of RAM
• 30GB of SSD Storage

The most expensive plan shoots all the way up to $120/month and comes with the following specs:

• 8GB of RAM
• 240GB of SSD Storage

Both plans support an unlimited number of domains and bandwidth. You can also add an optional MySQL VPS server to your plan, which gives your database its very own server.

Fully-Managed Dedicated Hosting

This plan is meant for developers and enterprise businesses. It gives your website its very own server, and you can even use it as reseller hosting. Prices are configurable as you can pick and choose which specs you want or need, but this is the cheapest option:

• $149/Month – Paid Annually
• Quad-Core CPU
• 1TB of HDD Storage
• 4GB of RAM

Here’s the most expensive option:

• $399/Month – Paid Month-to-Month
• 12-Core CPU
• 64GB of RAM
• 240GB of SSD Storage

DreamHost Support

DreamHost offers support 24/7, and all of its support agents are employed by the company. None of them are outsourced from low-quality services. You can contact support through the DreamHost Control Panel. Unfortunately, phone support is not available.

DreamHost also has a status page you can refer to if your website goes down and you aren’t sure what the culprit is. You can also get help from the knowledge base or community forums.

The Pros of Hosting with DreamHost

There are many advantages and disadvantages that come with hosting with DreamHost, but we’re going to take a look at the advantages first.

Simple Pricing

DreamHost’s shared hosting and managed WordPress hosting plans offer simple pricing, and they even allow you to pay on a month-to-month basis while most hosts make you pay for a year upfront at least.

100% Uptime Guarantee

A 100% uptime guarantee seems ambitious, but DreamHost backs it up by reimbursing you if your site falls below this percentage. More specifically, “Customer will receive DreamHost credit equal to the Customer’s current hosting cost for 1 (one) day of service for each 1 (one) hour (or fraction thereof) of service interruption, up to a maximum of 10% of customer’s next pre-paid hosting renewal fee.”

DreamSpeed CDN

DreamHost offers its very own CDN service. It’s not free, but it is pretty cheap. It costs $0.12/GB in the United States and Europe and $0.19/GB in the Asian-Pacific and Oceanic regions. There are no monthly commitments.

Partners with Popular Services

DreamHost partners with a number of different services to offer its customers more without all the hassle. This includes such popular services as Cloudflare, WordPress and OpenStack.

Security

DreamHost offers several levels of security. This includes DDoS protection, a built-in malware remover, free SSL certificates through Let’s Encrypt, free domain privacy protection, HTTP/2 for nginx offerings and mod_security as a firewall for Apache.

Cons of Hosting with DreamHost

Here are the disadvantages of using DreamHost, as promised.

No Scalability for Cheaper Hosting Types

DreamHost’s pricing for shared hosting and managed WordPress hosting are simple, but they can be too simple for some. Some users, such as first-time bloggers, don’t need the power of a server capable of hosting an unlimited number of websites when they’re first starting out, and yet, they’ll be expected to pay for it if they choose DreamHost.

You also can’t move up if your site begins performing poorly. Your only option is to upgrade to managed WordPress hosting if you’re on shared hosting and VPS hosting if you’re on managed WordPress hosting.

No cPanel

DreamHost doesn’t use cPanel as most hosts use. Instead, they use their very own system called the DreamHost Control Panel. It does all of the same stuff, but it requires users to learn an entirely new system.

No Mention of Server Capabilities

DreamHost doesn’t offer different tiers for its shared hosting or managed WordPress hosting plans, but it still would be nice to know how much traffic each type of hosting is capable of supporting. This would allow you to make an educated decision of what type of server to host your website on.

Few Developer Features

DreamHost offers very few features for developers. There’s no WP-CLI inside of WordPress, no staging feature and a lack of support for popular applications, such as Magento, OpenCart, and PostgreSQL.

Who is This Host for?

This host is for bloggers, entrepreneurs, small businesses and enterprises, to put it simply. However, because this host only has one shared hosting plan and one managed WordPress hosting plan, I can only recommend this host for medium-sized bloggers and above.

A $10/month server capable of hosting an unlimited number of websites is overkill for small bloggers who don’t plan on growing quickly. You’re better off going with a host that offers several shared hosting plans with the cheapest being a few bucks a month.

This host is also for developers looking to resell hosting plans to their customers. This, as mentioned before, is offered in the fully-managed dedicated hosting plan.

Do the above descriptions match what you’re looking for in a host? Click the link below to give DreamHost a try and receive a discount of up to 50% as well as a free domain with your order.

Visit DreamHost

Let’s find out.

About Bluehost

Bluehost was founded by Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth in 2003. The company was founded in Provo, Utah, a hotspot for tech companies and one of the “Best Places for Business & Careers,” as stated by Forbes.

The company has been a recommended host by WordPress since 2005, and it’s been supporting WordPress and the open-source community for over 10 years. It offers several different types of hosting and several different tiers per type of hosting. These types include shared hosting, managed WordPress hosting, VPS hosting and dedicated hosting.

They also support other content management systems, such as Drupal and Joomla, but let’s talk about what this host offers in depth as well as who it’s for.

Bluehost Plans

Bluehost offers a wide variety of hosting types and plans, but we’re going to focus on the most popular ones:

• Shared Hosting
• WordPress Hosting
• VPS Hosting
• Dedicated Hosting

They’re also backed by a 30-day, money-back guarantee. Let’s get into it.

Shared Hosting

Bluehost offers three tiers for shared hosting as well as plans for 1 year, 2 years, 3 years and 5 years. Prices can be as low as $2.75/month depending upon which tier and plan you choose. The monthly rate for the cheapest tier at 1 year is $4.95/month.

You can host one website on the cheapest tiers and an unlimited number of websites on the other two tiers. The same goes for storage in that you’re allowed a maximum of 50GB of storage on the cheapest tier and unlimited amount of storage on the other two tiers.

All plans include unlimited bandwidth, free SSL certificates and free, 1-year domains. You’re allowed between 5 and an unlimited number of parked domains, between 25 and an unlimited number of subdomains, and between 100MB and an unlimited amount of email storage.

WordPress Hosting

Bluehost’s WordPress hosting is managed and hosted on a VPS server, which means your website is still hosted in a shared environment but in its own isolated area.

It offers 4 tiers that can be as low as $19.99/month when you choose the 36-month plan. The cheapest tier on a month-to-month plan costs $39.99/month.

Bluehost is transparent about how much traffic each tier can handle. They range from 100 million visits per month to an unlimited number of visits per month. This is handled by between 30GB and 240GB of storage and between 2GB and 8GB of RAM.

All plans come with one domain and one IP address. They also come with CDN and security services from Bluehost’s partnership with SiteLock. You’ll receive different levels of SSL certificates depending on which tier you choose.

WooCommerce is also offered as a separate type of hosting from Bluehost. It has three tiers, and the cheapest tier goes as low as $6.95/month if you choose the 36-month plan. The 1-year plan costs $14.95/month.

VPS Hosting

Bluehost offers 4 tiers of VPS hosting. Prices range from $29.99/month to $119.99/month. Here are the rest of the specs:

• Between 2 and 4 CPU Cores
• Between 30GB and 120GB of SSD Storage
• Between 2GB and 8GB of RAM
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• 1 Domain
• Between 1 and 2 IP Addresses

Dedicated Hosting

There are three tiers for dedicated hosting. Prices range from $109.99/month to $209.99/month. Here’s the rest:

• 1TB of Storage
• Between 4GB and 16GB of RAM
• Between 5TB and 15TB of Bandwidth
• 1 Domain
• Between 3 and 5 IP Addresses

Bluehost Support

Bluehost offers two different levels of support, and they’re both available 24/7. They are live chat and phone support. They’re also broken up into three different departments:

• General Support Questions
• VPS and Dedicated Hosting
• WordPress Assistance

There are also plenty of issues and questions you’re probably able to find the answers for yourself, in which case, Bluehost has created a knowledge base filled with articles meant to tackle common issues and questions.

Lastly, Bluehost has a dedicated status page you can reference should a problem occur with your website and you want to ensure it isn’t a widespread issue with Bluehost’s servers.

Pros of Hosting with Bluehost

Let’s talk about Bluehost’s best features before getting into what disadvantages it has.

Cost-Effective Hosting

Bluehost is one of the most cost-effective hosts in the industry, especially when you choose their 36-month plans. There are also several additional ways you can save, such as our coupon, which gives you access to a discount as high as 65%. Learn more here.

Multiple Ways to Host

Bluehost offers multiple ways to host, which means it’s able to support a wide variety of businesses. First-time bloggers can choose shared hosting while large businesses can choose dedicated hosting. There’s something for everyone.

Scalability

Different types of hosting is great, but Bluehost’s tiers are what make it truly great for different types of businesses. If you’re a first-time blogger, you can choose the cheapest shared option and upgrade to a more premium one when your website needs it.

The same is true for Bluehost’s other types of hosting.

Includes or Offers a Lot of Extra Services

Bluehost is a big company, which gives it the ability to partner with a number of different services and offer a number of different extra services itself. This includes free domains, free SSL certificates, security through SiteLock, CDN services and more.

Cons of Hosting with Bluehost

Here are the cons of hosting with Bluehost, as mentioned before.

No Suitable Plans for Enterprises

Bluehost offers several different types of hosting, but its VPS and dedicated hosting only offer as many as 4 CPU cores and 16GB of RAM whereas other hosts offer servers with as much as 12 CPU cores and up to 64GB of RAM.

This puts limits on how successful businesses are allowed to grow before they need to pack up and move to hosts with servers capable of powering their massively large, high-traffic websites.

It also puts limits on the types of clients developers using Bluehost are able to take on.

Is This the Right Host for You?

Bluehost is not a host for everyone due to its server limitations. However, there are a wide variety of individuals and businesses that are suited for this type of host. This a popular host among bloggers, and its shared hosting and WordPress hosting plans are more than capable of powering even the most traffic-heavy blogs. There’s even a cheap option for first-time bloggers.

This isn’t a host for enterprise businesses, but small businesses and startups, including small to medium and even some larger eCommerce sites, will find enough speed, space, reliability, and security with Bluehost. If you are looking for managed WordPress hosting for larger sites, check out our guide here.

Ready to give Bluehost a try? Click the link below to save 65% on your purchase or check out our dedicated page for a Bluehost Coupon Code.

Visit Bluehost

We’re going to break down the services and features this host offers to give you a chance to see whether or not this is the right host for you. Let’s get started.

About InMotion Hosting

InMotion Hosting was founded in 2001 and currently has a customer base of over 300,000 domains. The company has maintained a 3/3 star rating on CNET since 2003, and it has an A+ rating from BBB.

This is a multi-platform host, as stated before. It supports a wide range of CMSs, which include, of course, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, PrestaShop, OpenCart and Magento.

It’s also a multi-level host in that it offers a wide variety of server types, from typical shared hosting plans to cloud hosting and even reseller hosting plans. Let’s talk about these plans in depth.

InMotion Hosting Plans

Not only does InMotion Hosting offer a variety of different server types, it also offers multiple plans for every server type it has. Let’s talk about its shared hosting plans so we can learn a little more about this. It should be noted, however, that all plans come with a 90-day, money-back guarantee (excluding dedicated hosting plans), free 24/7/365 support, unlimited email accounts, free SSL certificates and free backups.

The regular prices for shared hosting plans range from $7.99/month to $15.99/month, as you can see in the image above. These prices may be lower at times depending on whether or not InMotion Hosting is offering a promotion. You can also gain access to an exclusive 40% discount when you use our coupon code. Details here.

Here are a few highlights from the list above:

• Free Domain
• Unlimited Disk Space
• Unlimited Monthly Transfers
• Unlimited Email Storage

InMotion Hosting also offers three VPS hosting plans, which gives you access to cloud hosting for as little as $44.99/month. The servers run on Linux, and these are the specs its cheapest plan has:

• Number of CPU Cores – Unlocked
• RAM – 4GB
• Storage – 75GB
• Bandwidth – 4TB
• IP Addresses – 3

There are also six dedicated hosting plans, each of which come with a much shorter 30-day, money-back guarantee. These plans start at $189.99/month and go as high as $589.99/month. What’s dedicated hosting, you ask? If VPS hosting is for growing business, dedicated hosting is for enterprises.

There’s also reseller hosting for as little as $27.99/month, which is a plus for developers.

InMotion Hosting does market WordPress hosting on its site, but these plans are no different from the shared hosting plans.

InMotion Dashboard

When you signup to Inmotion Hosting, you are given access to their Account Management Panel ( AMP ) which is your dashboard to access all the features of your hosting account.

From here you can manage your account by changing payment details, transferring domains, updating your contact information and purchasing additional services. You also have a section for each hosting plan you own, which gives you access to a lot of powerful features. You can access cPanel and WHM from here as well as changing your root password, you can purchase SSL certificates, change your hosting plans and so on.

One excellent feature is the “Account Technical Details” link which gives you easy access to all the info you will need about your hosting – IP addresses, username, password, nameservers etc. This is really useful to have all listed in one place that you can refer to as needed.

InMotion Hosting Support

InMotion Hosting offers “premier support” for all plans free of charge. This support is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year. It comes in a variety of different formats, including phone, live chat and email. You can also seek help from other InMotion Hosting customers in the company’s community-driven Q&A section.

Support agents are even based in the United States, and they’re prepared to help customers of all experience levels. This ranges from business owners with zero experience in web design to professional developers using InMotion Hosting to power client websites and projects. Beginners even have access to New Account Specialists.

Support can be accessed via the account management panel and includes a number of option. I normally use the live chat option and have always been connected to someone within a few minutes who have solved my issue quickly. Inmotion offers some of the best support that I have come across, so if this is important to you then they are worth checking out.

InMotion Hosting also offers a managed hosting service you can add to your account for a premium price. This service helps you with things like ensuring your server has the best security available and helping ensure your site is optimized.

This add-on is priced based on the number of maintenance hours you want your server to have:

• 1 Hour/Month – $40/Year
• 2 Hours/Month – $70/Year
• 3 Hours/Month – $100/Year

Inmotion Speed Tests

Something else you need to bare in mind with a hosting company is the speed of the service, slow hosting is no good – it will cost you conversions, deter visitors and can even have an effect on your search engine rankings – faster sites place higher in the results due to lower bounce rates and possibly a Google algorithm ranking factor nowadays.

Here I carried out a test using Pingdom using a new WordPress installation and default theme, as you can see it had a load time of 875ms which was faster than 91% of other websites – a very good result for a shared host.

Next, I tried a LoadImpact test, running from San Francisco to the hosting location in Los Angeles USA.

The results were :

• Minimum response time: 1.2 s
• Maximum response time: 4.94 s

Inmotion has very good results for a shared hosting company so your site should load nice and fast with them.

The Pros of Hosting with InMotion Hosting

There are a number of different positive elements that come along when you choose to host with InMotion Hosting, but we’re going to focus on a select few, starting with the amount of diversity that exists within its plans.

Wide Range of Plans

InMotion Hosting offers something for everyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re a small-time blogger or an enterprise-level ecommerce business. You’ll find a plan that comes with a server capable of handling your site.

This variety also gives you plenty of room to grow.

Security

InMotion Hosting offers several layers of security. This includes the free SSL certificates and backups we already talked about, but it also includes advanced DDoS protection, various firewalls depending on the plan you’re on as well as a 99.9% uptime guarantee that makes you eligible to receive a free month of hosting if your average uptime performance falls beneath 99.9% within a 30-day period.

Unlimited Domains and Email Storage

InMotion Hosting allows you to rely on fewer services by allowing you to register an unlimited number of domains, create an unlimited number of business email accounts and store an unlimited number of emails.

Developer Features

InMotion Hosting is developer friendly. They offer reseller hosting, WP-CLI for WordPress, the ability to work with SSH and develop with PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Ruby, Perl, and Python as well as the ability to use a number of different content management systems.

The Cons of Hosting with InMotion Hosting

There are a few disadvantages that can make your hosting experience with InMotion Hosting appear limiting. Let’s go over them.

No 1-Click Staging Option

You can technically create a staged version of your site on your server, but it involves following a number of different steps inside of cPanel. Other hosts, on the other hand, allow you to create a staged version of your site with one click.

No Built-In CDN Services

Many hosts partner with CloudFlare or MaxCDN to make enabling a CDN for your site as simple as can be. InMotion Hosting supports CDN services, but it doesn’t have any built in.

Limited Information on Server Capabilities

This host has a number of different plans that each have a number of different specs, but they don’t let you know how much traffic each plan can handle.

Databases Limited for Cheaper Plans

The cheapest shared hosting plan only allows you to have two databases. This limits the number of additional websites you can create on your server, which means any budget project that requires WordPress multisite, which creates a subdomain for every additional site you create, is out of the question.

The bright side is that it prevents certain accounts from hogging too many resources on the shared server your site is on.

Who is This Host for?

The short answer is “everyone.” That’s the benefit of choosing a host that offers a wide variety of plans and multiple levels of hosting. It allows you to start out small with a cheap shared hosting server and upgrade to a cloud server when you need to. In my experience Inmotion has some of the best Customer support I have experienced – I found it to have fast and accurate replies and quick resolutions to any queries or issues I experienced so if you are a beginner or someone who needs help from time to time they are highly recommended.

Inmotion are one of the best shared hosts around so give them a try.

Visit InMotion Hosting

It also offers several plans optimized for WordPress. Let’s examine how well this host is able to power your WordPress site as well as other sites in general.

About Media Temple

Media Temple was founded in 1998 in Los Angeles, where its headquarters is currently located. The company hosts over 1.5 million websites in 100 countries from over 125,000 customers, customers that include Adobe, CBS and Samsung.

They offer several different types of advanced hosting options, which include shared hosting that falls somewhere in between typical shared hosting and VPS hosting. They also offer managed WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting and AWS cloud hosting.

Media Temple also offers separate AWS cloud hosting and managed WordPress hosting plans for enterprises. They also support over a dozen additional apps, including ZenCart and Drupal.

Media Temple Hosting Plans

Media Temple offers several different types of hosting, but we’re going to focus on these ones:

• Shared Hosting
• Managed WordPress Hosting
• VPS Hosting
• Dedicated Hosting
• AWS Cloud Hosting

Shared Hosting

Let’s talk about what “shared hosting” means when it comes to Media Temple before we dive into pricing. This is because its pricing may make you raise an eyebrow at first glance, but the prices reflect the fact that Media Temple’s shared hosting differs greatly from the shared hosting most hosts offer.

It’s not VPS hosting where your site shares the same hardware as other sites but has its own isolated area to keep its resources safe, but it also isn’t the same as cheap shared hosting environments where your site has a high likelihood of going down if another site hosted on the same server uses up too many resources.

It’s powered by what Media Temple calls “the Grid,” which is a clustered architecture “built around shared clusters of high-quality server hardware, networked together to make the most efficient use of resources.” These servers are also powered by LAMP, or Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl and Python.

Sites are also stored on SSDs rather than HDDs, and you’ll perform administrative tasks using the Grid Control Panel.

As for pricing, shared hosting has three tiers, which range from $20/month to $150/month. They all have different limits on the maximum number of websites and databases you’re allowed to create, ranging from up to 100 to up to 2,500.

Here are a few additional features:

• Between 20GB and 500GB of Storage
• 1 Domain & SSL Certificate on All Plans
• Free for 1 Year
• Up to 1,000 Email Inboxes on All Plans
• Between 1TB and 5TB of Scalable Bandwidth
• Global CDN on Some Plans
• Malware Detection & Removal from SiteLock on Some Plans

Managed WordPress Hosting

Managed WordPress hosting has four tiers that range from $20/month to $499/month. You can host between up to two and up to 100 sites on these plans, and storage limits range from up to 20GB to up to 1TB of SSD storage. They can also handle between up to 250,000 and up to 5 million monthly visitors.

Here are a few additional features you’ll enjoy:

• Two Staging Environments
• Developer Tools
  • Git Version Control
  • WP-CLI
  • SSH/SFTP
• Automatic Core Updates
• 30-Day Backup & Restore
• Security Monitoring
  • 24/7 DDoS & Intrusion Protection
  • Malware Detection & Removal

VPS Hosting

Media Temple offers three types of VPS hosting. The first is self-managed VPS hosting where, you guessed it, you manage everything yourself and run everything from the command line. Plans start at $30/month, and you have the option of choosing between Ubuntu, Debian and CentOS.

The second is managed VPS hosting where some parts are managed by Media Temple and you run everything from a control panel. Plans start at $55/month, and you can choose between Plesk® Onyx or cPanel® & WHM® 11.5.

The third option is fully-managed VPS hosting, which is a great option for businesses. Everything is managed by Media Temple, and plans start at $254/month.

Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting from Media Temple is aimed at enterprises as plans range from $2,000/month to $2,699/month. These servers can handle using up to 10TB of bandwidth per month with 128GB of RAM and dual multi-core Xeon processors.

AWS Cloud Hosting

AWS Cloud Hosting is an entirely different beast powered by Amazon Web Services. This type of hosting is targeted toward agencies, large businesses, content creators and developers. Plans for this type of hosting feature custom pricing.

Media Temple Support

Support is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year for all customers. It’s available in every form imaginable, whether it be live chat, phone, a ticket and even Twitter.

Media Temple also offers community support via forums, a knowledge base as well as a status page you can use to check whether or not things affecting your site are happening to the entire server.

The Pros of Hosting with Media Temple

Let’s go over the advantages you’ll experience if you choose to host your site with Media Temple.

Optimized for Larger Businesses & Developers

Media Temple offers some of the most advanced and powerful servers of any hosting company. Many of their servers are optimized for larger businesses, especially media sites storing and streaming thousands of media files. It’s also a great option for developers as its servers can handle the large sites developers’ clients need, and some plans have developer-friendly features.

Optimized for WordPress

Media Temple offers several different options and features for WordPress users and developers. It also offers a staging feature developers and advanced WordPress users can use to build new sites and test changes to existing ones without risk.

Developers can also run certain tasks with the command line with WP-CLI, and all WordPress plans come with automatic core updates with the option to delay these updates for as long as 30 days.

Security

Media Temple offers several layers of security that vary depending on what type of hosting you’re using and even what plan you’re on. For starters, many plans offer malware detection and removal via SiteLock as well as 24/7 DDoS protection. You also have the option of adding a CDN to your site.

Cost Effective for Medium Businesses

Media Temple may not be cost effective for bloggers, but their shared and managed WordPress hosting plans are cost effective for medium-sized bloggers and businesses.

The Cons of Hosting with Media Temple

Media Temple offers a lot of features, but it does have its disadvantages. The first one touches on the last point made in the pros.

No Options for Small Businesses

Small businesses and bloggers, especially first-time bloggers, don’t have many options when it comes to Media Temple. The cheapest plan can power as many as 100 sites while most businesses only need one.

No cPanel

Media Temple does not use cPanel. It uses its own control panel called the Grid Control Panel, requiring you to learn an entirely new control panel before you get on with building your site.

Who is This Host for?

We’ve already touched base on this a few times, but this host is for large businesses, especially enterprises, and professional developers who build powerful websites for these types of businesses. The cloud hosting plans, for instance, are ideal for media companies who need to store and stream thousands of media files.

If you’re a developer who builds websites for these types of clients or a blogger or business owner with a high-traffic website, give Media Temple a try with our coupon code, which gives you access to a 20% discount on managed WordPress hosting plans when you use code ALIENWP20 at checkout. Learn more here, or use the link below to get started.

Visit Media Temple

Let’s take a closer look at this host.

About SiteGround

SiteGround was founded by a handful of university students in 2004. They’ve now grown into a host with over 400 employees that powers over 500,000 domains.

This host offers several different levels of hosting, including shared hosting, WordPress hosting, cloud hosting, dedicated hosting and reseller hosting. It also supports other popular applications, including Joomla, Drupal, Magento and PrestaShop. It even offers hosting optimized for Joomla.

Let’s talk more about the plans this host offers.

SiteGround Pricing

SiteGround offers several different types of hosting as well as several tiers per type of hosting, but we’re going to focus on the main types of hosting most folks considering SiteGround will likely choose.

Shared Hosting

SiteGround’s shared hosting differs from the shared hosting offered by other hosts. Sites in a SiteGround shared hosting environment run in a cloud-based infrastructure commonly known as a virtual private server, or VPS hosting. This means your site still shares the same physical resources (hardware) as other sites, but it has its own space due to the magic of cloud-based servers.

SiteGround offers three tiers for shared hosting, and prices range from $9.95/month to $29.95/month, but you can use our link to receive a 60% discount that drops these rates down to $3.95/month to $11.95/month. No code required.

The cheapest option allows you to host a single website that can handle as many as 10,000 monthly visits and allows up to 10GB of SSD storage. The most expensive tier allows you to host an unlimited number of websites that can handle as many as 100,000 visits per month and allows up to 30GB of SSD storage.

These plans also come with the following features:

• 30-Day, Money-Back Guarantee
• Free SSL via Let’s Encrypt
• cPanel & SSH Access
• Unlimited Number of Email Accounts and Databases
• Free CDN Service via Cloudflare
• Free Setup & Transfer
• Free Daily Backups
• HTTP/2 Enabled Servers

WordPress Hosting

SiteGround’s WordPress hosting plans mirror its shared hosting plans, including the pricing. This is because its WordPress hosting plans are also hosted in a VPS-hosting environment, but they also include features typically offered by managed WordPress hosts:

• 1-Click Installer
• Automatic Core Updates
• WP-CLI
• SuperCacher for Server-Level Caching
• Staging
• Git Pre-Installed

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is a step up from WordPress hosting. It’s fully managed, and comes with four tiers, though you can also get custom pricing by configuring your own plan. This is because this type of hosting comes with specific specs for its servers. These have the ability to max out with the following specs:

• 16 CPU Cores
• 16GB of RAM
• 200GB of SSD Storage

Therefore, prices range from $80/month to $420/month.

Dedicated Hosting

SiteGround offers three dedicated hosting tiers that range from £147/month to £275/month. These servers are powered by between 4-core and dual 6-core CPUs, between 4 and 16GB of RAM, and between 500GB and four 500GB HDDs. The two cheapest tiers use SATA II drives while the most expensive tier uses SATA III drives.

You can also choose your data center location based on region:

• United States
• Europe
• Asia-Pacific

Enterprise Hosting

SiteGround also offers custom-built servers for enterprises. This level of hosting doesn’t come with ready-made plans. SiteGround asks for information about your business as well as how much money you’re able to allocate for hosting every month before configuring a server for you.

It does, however, offer two data centers, one in Chicago and one in Amsterdam, and replicates your data between each.

SiteGround Support

SiteGround offers 24/7 support through such forms as phone support, live chat support and ticket support. All support shifts are overstaffed, which is why SiteGround’s response times for support are instantly for phone, instantly for chat and within 10 minutes for tickets.

Its support system also has an in-house, issue-tracking and load-balancing system that allows it to optimize the way it handles support requests. It also offers CMS-specific support, such as WordPress-related support.

Another level of support it offers is a large knowledge base filled with helpful articles.

The Pros of Hosting with SiteGround

SiteGround is quickly becoming one of the most recommended hosts in the industry, and for good reason, too. Let’s talk about a few of those reasons.

Scalable Hosting for Growing Businesses

SiteGround offers several different types of hosting and several different plans per type of hosting. It has enough variations to suit beginner bloggers and enterprises alike. This gives you or your client the ability to start with a cheap server and upgrade to one capable of handling your growing site when you need it without having to go through the hassle of researching for and changing hosts.

Optimized for WordPress

SiteGround is one of few hosts that ensures its servers and services are optimized for WordPress. They offer separate versions of their shared hosting plans and cater them exclusively to WordPress, even offering services typically only found in more expensive plans offered by dedicated managed WordPress hosts.

WordPress developers can even joy using WP-CLI, staging and having Git pre-installed.

Security

SiteGround protects your site in a variety of different ways. This starts with having every new server use PHP 7 complete with the latest security fixes by default and continues by running Apache in a chroot environment via suEXEC.

SiteGround also uses sophisticated IDS and IPS systems to protect your site from malicious attacks. Shared servers are also protected by a firewall via ModSecurity. You can also step up DDoS protection by enabling the free tier of Cloudflare for your account via cPanel.

The Cons of Hosting with SiteGround

Let’s go over the disadvantages of hosting with SiteGround.

Limits on CPU Usage for Shared Hosting Plans

The biggest problem with this con is the fact that it isn’t disclosed anywhere on the site. It’s not even disclosed on the shared hosting sales page despite the fact that it’s a problem many customers run into as they receive notifications from SiteGround once they surpass their CPU allowance.

SiteGround states you’ll receive this notice when your server is producing an unusually high number of executions, which SiteGround explains typically occurs when something irregular happens on your website or when your site receives a peak in traffic.

They’ve written a tutorial that explains how to reduce the number of executions happening on your site, but many customers state the only viable solution is to upgrade to the GoGeek plan, which reportedly doesn’t have a strict CPU allowance.

Limits on Storage

SiteGround’s limits for storage on shared hosting plans are 10GB, 20GB and 30GB. It’s true that no host can truly offer “unlimited” everything, but the limitations for storage on these plans could be strict depending on your requirements, for example if you host a lot of large files or backups.

Who is This Host for?

This host is suitable for a variety of different individuals and businesses. Beginner bloggers and WordPress users will do fine on one of the shared hosting/WordPress hosting plans while large businesses will find the cloud and dedicated hosting plans to be better suited for them.

There are even plans for enterprise-sized businesses, as mentioned earlier, and if you’re a developer, you’ll love the reseller hosting SiteGround offers as it’s designed for developers who maintain their clients’ sites on a regular basis.

If you fall into the first category we mention and are ready to give SiteGround a try, use the link below to gain access to a discount of up to 60% on WordPress hosting.

Visit SiteGround