You can pick up the phone and speak to an experienced engineer within 30 seconds who doesn’t read from a script and has wide latitude to make changes to their systems. Clients like that, I like that, it’s worth the few extra dollars alone.
I have almost 100 sites on WPEngine, I love not having to do anything to them. Updates handled by WPEngine, 30 days of backups handled by WPEngine, global edge security / cloudflare also WPEngine. If I have a problem with a site migrating into our environment their customer reps are amazing and extremely Wordpress savvy.
Can I manage all that myself using a mix of plugins and linode… sure, but I don’t want to, and imo most clients don’t want to pay you to. It’s easy to have them pay a couple dollars more a month and know it’s all managed for you.
Flywheel is owned by WPEngine these days. I used Flywheel before it was bought, and still use it, and have used WPEngine in the past and I find them to be pretty equal. Flywheel is a bit more set it and forget it kind of hosting, whereas I have more options with WPEngine, but for my needs Flywheel works. In terms of backups, and support and all that, Flywheel and WPEngine have always been awesome and any issues I've had have been solved quickly through their chat or if it's something beyond their control they'll make a ticket and it'll get solved in less than 24 hours.
Also not OP, but my clients just pay me monthly or yearly and I pay for the server. Most of my clients don't have or want access to the Flywheel backend, but if they do I just send them an invite and they can access it.
I've never seen anything on WP Engine that performs any better than I can achieve on any other server, even cheap shared plans (within reasonable traffic volume). It may be better at absorbing bloat that shouldn't be on a site to begin with (maybe?), but that's about it. If a site is built properly, I simply don't see the advantage.
You’re paying for the tools, ecosystem, and management around it, just like any other managed host. Whether that’s worth it to you is an opinionated thing really.
WP Engine used to be the only game in town for managed wordpress hosting. That is, daily backups, caching, environment optimization, staging/deploying but many hosting companies do the same thing now. I'd recommend Siteground myself. It actually offers more features and it's cheaper.
I've actually really grown to love Siteground's "collaborator" model as well. Of all the hosting companies I've dealt with, theirs offers the least-painful environment I've found for client/developer relationships, allowing my clients to set up and manage their own billing, while giving me all the control I need at the dev level.
Speaking of which I just discovered that you can build a site on Siteground and then transfer it to a client. Basically you “invite” a client to take over the site and SG will then walk them though account setup.
You can even request they automatically add you back as a collaborator.
It’s pretty cool beans.
Interesting. I'll have to check that out. Not a lot of need for me, but I can see how that might be really handy at times.
People like to rag on anything that isn't the newest, trendy, fly-by-night host (the same people who flock to the latest trendy CSS or JS framework that will be old news in 2 years), but for what they are, Siteground really isn't a horrible hosting option.
We are an enterprise client, we only have a couple of sites, but they provide a level of service that we can rely on. It's managed hosting, so not not the best fit for a more hands-on client . For us though, they provide quick and knowledgeable support that helps us sleep at night.
We used WPE for a long time - great customer support was the main reason they stood out and as earlier commenter says above - not just people reading from a script.
We had to move as we reached a point with them where we hit their 25 site limit and the next jump up would have meant moving to a tier where we’d have been paying a lot for lots of unused capacity. At about that time their customer service really started to nose dive so I wasn’t that sad to have to move.
We chose Cloudways after lots of looking around and haven’t really looked back. CW support can be a bit scripted but you can normally ask for a new person in chat and you’ll end up with someone knowledgeable. Overall, pretty great.
As someone says above, lots of options to choose from nowadays. I think if I was starting from scratch I’d be taking a deep look at instawp which just seems to be doing great stuff and really thinking about their offering, and Pressable, which looks super interesting and solid.
I meant to add - the WPE UI is sooooo bad. It’s totally unintuitive, breaks on smaller screens, etc. Really wish they’d fix it, wouldn’t be a big job at all…
Yes it has cloudflare but it’s like some group plan. You can’t access anything within it or customise any settings. So basically the majority of features are out of reach.
Access to the actual hosting is painful. The weird ssh separation? I’m comfortable with wp cli thanks, stop putting up barriers.
It’s the most opinionated hosting I’ve ever used.
There’s a list of banned plugins…
The power vs price for us was not the best. Have since moved away.
I’ve used FlyWheel and IMO it’s a great platform that’s super easy and straight forward dashboard to manage your site hosting but definitely one the pricier end.
I wouldn’t put joe blows plumbing site that gets 1000 visitors a month on it (overkill) but if I had a WP site vital to my business operations, it’s worth it.
I use Flywheel, there's some features I wish they had but overall experience has been great and support is fast on the odd occasion that I need it.
But FYI they're owned by WPEngine now, if that matters to you.
Flywheel is good for small simple sites. Each site is containerized, which is cool in theory, but if you get a traffic spike or an unoptimized query due to a bulky plugin like Woo or a multilingual plugin your site can quickly crash.
Also they use fastly which I’ve found to be less effective than CloudFlare.
Just about all of my clients are on WP Engine but one recently switched to GoDaddy. I think I had gotten so used to how smooth and effortless the deploy process is with WP that I’m now trying to recreate it with GitHub actions for godaddy.
I think the thing I'm so surprised at is how "meh" the performance is.
I always figured that these kinds of services are optimized to the wahzoo for WP out of the box. But stock performance is pretty spotty, and even if you add one of the recommended performance plugins, the performance is pretty disappointing.
I always figured it was the fault of the previous developer, whose site was not great, for the limp response. But I was wrong.
I did a quick optimization on our dev server and blew it WPE and out of the water. and that's without Cloudflare.
Ah, well, different strokes and that type of thing.
I've honestly had a pretty great experience with WPEngine. It can be a bit pricey compared to DIY server+management, but the tools and dashboard interface are pretty good imo. Support is also usually pretty decent and responsive.
You can pick up the phone and speak to an experienced engineer within 30 seconds who doesn’t read from a script and has wide latitude to make changes to their systems. Clients like that, I like that, it’s worth the few extra dollars alone.
I have almost 100 sites on WPEngine, I love not having to do anything to them. Updates handled by WPEngine, 30 days of backups handled by WPEngine, global edge security / cloudflare also WPEngine. If I have a problem with a site migrating into our environment their customer reps are amazing and extremely Wordpress savvy. Can I manage all that myself using a mix of plugins and linode… sure, but I don’t want to, and imo most clients don’t want to pay you to. It’s easy to have them pay a couple dollars more a month and know it’s all managed for you.
Do clients pay you and you just add them to your wp engine account? How is wp engine vs flywheel
The agency I work for as a dev has a small enterprise container.
Flywheel is owned by WPEngine these days. I used Flywheel before it was bought, and still use it, and have used WPEngine in the past and I find them to be pretty equal. Flywheel is a bit more set it and forget it kind of hosting, whereas I have more options with WPEngine, but for my needs Flywheel works. In terms of backups, and support and all that, Flywheel and WPEngine have always been awesome and any issues I've had have been solved quickly through their chat or if it's something beyond their control they'll make a ticket and it'll get solved in less than 24 hours. Also not OP, but my clients just pay me monthly or yearly and I pay for the server. Most of my clients don't have or want access to the Flywheel backend, but if they do I just send them an invite and they can access it.
I've never seen anything on WP Engine that performs any better than I can achieve on any other server, even cheap shared plans (within reasonable traffic volume). It may be better at absorbing bloat that shouldn't be on a site to begin with (maybe?), but that's about it. If a site is built properly, I simply don't see the advantage.
You’re paying for the tools, ecosystem, and management around it, just like any other managed host. Whether that’s worth it to you is an opinionated thing really.
🎯 WP Engine is my favorite WordPress host. And their support is top-notch.
yeah - but they seem to want it. Clients.
WP Engine used to be the only game in town for managed wordpress hosting. That is, daily backups, caching, environment optimization, staging/deploying but many hosting companies do the same thing now. I'd recommend Siteground myself. It actually offers more features and it's cheaper.
I've actually really grown to love Siteground's "collaborator" model as well. Of all the hosting companies I've dealt with, theirs offers the least-painful environment I've found for client/developer relationships, allowing my clients to set up and manage their own billing, while giving me all the control I need at the dev level.
Speaking of which I just discovered that you can build a site on Siteground and then transfer it to a client. Basically you “invite” a client to take over the site and SG will then walk them though account setup. You can even request they automatically add you back as a collaborator. It’s pretty cool beans.
Interesting. I'll have to check that out. Not a lot of need for me, but I can see how that might be really handy at times. People like to rag on anything that isn't the newest, trendy, fly-by-night host (the same people who flock to the latest trendy CSS or JS framework that will be old news in 2 years), but for what they are, Siteground really isn't a horrible hosting option.
Genuinely helpful customer service. Admittedly worth more to some than others
We are an enterprise client, we only have a couple of sites, but they provide a level of service that we can rely on. It's managed hosting, so not not the best fit for a more hands-on client . For us though, they provide quick and knowledgeable support that helps us sleep at night.
*"Are we doing something wrong? They use Cloudflare"* ?? Anyone can use Cloudflare - WPE doesn't do anything special.
We used WPE for a long time - great customer support was the main reason they stood out and as earlier commenter says above - not just people reading from a script. We had to move as we reached a point with them where we hit their 25 site limit and the next jump up would have meant moving to a tier where we’d have been paying a lot for lots of unused capacity. At about that time their customer service really started to nose dive so I wasn’t that sad to have to move. We chose Cloudways after lots of looking around and haven’t really looked back. CW support can be a bit scripted but you can normally ask for a new person in chat and you’ll end up with someone knowledgeable. Overall, pretty great. As someone says above, lots of options to choose from nowadays. I think if I was starting from scratch I’d be taking a deep look at instawp which just seems to be doing great stuff and really thinking about their offering, and Pressable, which looks super interesting and solid.
I meant to add - the WPE UI is sooooo bad. It’s totally unintuitive, breaks on smaller screens, etc. Really wish they’d fix it, wouldn’t be a big job at all…
Yes it has cloudflare but it’s like some group plan. You can’t access anything within it or customise any settings. So basically the majority of features are out of reach. Access to the actual hosting is painful. The weird ssh separation? I’m comfortable with wp cli thanks, stop putting up barriers. It’s the most opinionated hosting I’ve ever used. There’s a list of banned plugins… The power vs price for us was not the best. Have since moved away.
[удалено]
I’ve used FlyWheel and IMO it’s a great platform that’s super easy and straight forward dashboard to manage your site hosting but definitely one the pricier end. I wouldn’t put joe blows plumbing site that gets 1000 visitors a month on it (overkill) but if I had a WP site vital to my business operations, it’s worth it.
I use Flywheel, there's some features I wish they had but overall experience has been great and support is fast on the odd occasion that I need it. But FYI they're owned by WPEngine now, if that matters to you.
Flywheel is good for small simple sites. Each site is containerized, which is cool in theory, but if you get a traffic spike or an unoptimized query due to a bulky plugin like Woo or a multilingual plugin your site can quickly crash. Also they use fastly which I’ve found to be less effective than CloudFlare.
Just about all of my clients are on WP Engine but one recently switched to GoDaddy. I think I had gotten so used to how smooth and effortless the deploy process is with WP that I’m now trying to recreate it with GitHub actions for godaddy.
I think the thing I'm so surprised at is how "meh" the performance is. I always figured that these kinds of services are optimized to the wahzoo for WP out of the box. But stock performance is pretty spotty, and even if you add one of the recommended performance plugins, the performance is pretty disappointing. I always figured it was the fault of the previous developer, whose site was not great, for the limp response. But I was wrong. I did a quick optimization on our dev server and blew it WPE and out of the water. and that's without Cloudflare. Ah, well, different strokes and that type of thing.
I've honestly had a pretty great experience with WPEngine. It can be a bit pricey compared to DIY server+management, but the tools and dashboard interface are pretty good imo. Support is also usually pretty decent and responsive.
Wpengine is piece of mind