WordPress is a leading CMS (Content Management System) in the world today. The WordPress site can be hosted on many platforms. Let us compare two platforms in this article: WPX Hosting vs. WP Engine. We will compare these two platforms on the basis of facilities they provide vis-à-vis the price they charge for these facilities.
Most of the WordPress users want their platform to provide them with high site speed, less or almost no downtime, flexibility, security, price, and storage capacity. Clients will base their hosting choice for WordPress on getting maximum facilities for an affordable price.
WPX Hosting vs. WP Engine – A Detailed Comparison
WPX Hosting and WP Engine are two of the leading companies that provide a platform for the managed WordPress hosting. Both companies have their own advantages and disadvantages. Let us look at how their features can be compared.
WPX Hosting Overview
WPX Hosting was established in 2013 by CEO and co-founder Terry Kyle. The headquarters of WPX Hosting is in Sofia, Bulgaria. Since the inception of the company, WPX Hosting has introduced numerous innovations for making it the fastest WordPress hosting company in the world. It has a dedicated team whose only aim is to give its users the best experience while using WordPress by integrating speed, security, and simplicity.
Working tirelessly to achieve the goals of the company, Terry Kyle realized he wanted to give back to the community. He was fond of dogs and was weary of their plight across Europe. Hence the dedicated resources in taking care of these dogs and finding adoptive homes for them. This initiative is called Every Dog Matters and when you host your website on WPX Hosting, you contribute towards its cause. This makes WPX Hosting, a company with a heart.
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WP Engine Overview
WP Engine was established by a young woman, Heather Brunner in the year 2010. She is in the position of chairwoman and CEO of the company to date. The headquarters of the company is in Austin, Texas with offices in San Antonio, San Francisco, London, Limerick, and Brisbane. It serves 75,000 clients across the globe in 130 countries. The company is a proud supporter of women leaders, skills above qualification, as well as a supporter of people of color and of the LGBTQ community.
WPX Loading Speed
WPX Hosting has a winning formula for high speed:
Under-loaded super-spec servers + CDN + SSD + PHP 7.x + Optimised Caching = class-leading performance
To understand the formula, let us look into its variables. The first part is the SSD servers which are owned by WPX and are under-loaded intentionally to give the user a high-speed website. The second component is CDN (Content Delivery Network) is also owned by the company and is free for all its users. There are 26 cloud CDNs located worldwide for the faster transfer of the data. WPX is developing more and more CDNs to add to the network.
The third component which contributes to the speed of the website is the platform on which it is built. WPX uses the latest version of PHP and regularly upgrades it for the benefit of its users. Through various plugins, WPX optimizes the caching which deducts time to load the websites. These all components work together and give the managed WordPress site the best speed possible.
WP Engine Loading Speed
On the other hand, WP Engine also works hard for achieving high-speed standards set by its competitors. The servers used by WP Engines are some of the fastest in the industry. It has partnered with Google Cloud Service, Amazon Web Services, NetDNA, etc. as its technological counterparts to provide high functioning websites to its users. Also, various caching plugins are made available to its users to get faster sites.
Speed is perhaps the most important feature of a website. The search engines rank the websites after taking into consideration the speed with which they can be loaded. A slower website will be lower on the ranking of Google or any other search engine. Hence, companies are obsessed with providing the best speed to its users.
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According to the speed tests conducted by independent reviewers on all the platforms, WPX Hosting stood out as the fastest platform to host a managed WordPress website. They measured the speed of the websites with Pingdom where the site on WPX Hosting loaded in 357ms while on WP Engine loaded in 1402ms. With GTMetrix, WPX Hosting loaded in 0.80 seconds while WP Engine site loaded in 2.27 seconds. Both the tests prove that WPX Hosting is way faster than WP Engine.
Downtime of Both Web Hosts
Frequent downtime of the network affects the performance of any website. WPX Hosting provides its users 99.95% uptime.
On the other hand, WP Engine gives 99.99% uptime to its clients.
Hence, the downtime issues of both the websites are minuscule and we cannot say which platform, WP Engine, or WPX Hosting is better.
WPX Security Overview
WPX Hosting takes the security of the data of its users very seriously. The company assures daily scrutiny of data for any malware removal. It also removes any threat before it reaches the website of the user. WPX Hosting is the most trusted web hosting companies in the world on Trustpilot.com. The company also offers free SSL certificates to all its clients for proving their trustworthiness.
“Fixed for you free and fast” is a service offered by WPX to all its users to help the user to get their site back online if for any reason it has faced issues and become offline. The user can contact the support team and they will reply within 30 seconds and guarantee you the service as fast as possible.
WPX Hosting also offers its users 28-day backups and DDoS protection free of charge for additional security of its users.
WP Engine Security Overview
WP Engine has invested a lot of effort and resources for the security of the data of its clients. It has employed a dedicated security engineering team that reviews codes and conducts security audits of the company’s internal environment and processes. Even though the minor updates are automatically done, major updates are thoroughly vetted by the team of experts for any glitches and patches will be programmed before recommending it to the users.
Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) technology is put to use by WP Engines to add a layer of security for the users. Free SSL certificates are issued to its clients automatically to prove that their website is trustworthy. Hackers and malicious attacks on the sites are detected and blocked before they reach the websites. However, in case a website is hacked, the disaster recovery team will assist the user to recover it within a short time.
The security features of WP Engine are far more elaborate than those of WPX hosting. So we can say that the security of WP Engine takes the cake in WP Hosting vs WP Engine.
WPX Customer Support
Whether you have just started a blog or whether you have a full-fledged online business, there will come a time when you will face some issues which the customer support of your host will need to solve. The user is either too busy or lacks technical knowhow to solve issues related to the website. If he has a strong support system he will not have to suffer for a long time.
WPX Hosting boasts one of the best support team in the world. The team is not only experienced in WordPress but is also well trained to deal with clients. The support team of WPX always talks to clients without using much jargon so that any layman will understand them. Additionally one of the main benefits of WPX customer support is its extraordinarily low response time. They have been known to answer live chat within a span of 30 seconds. Any tickets raised are also solved within 5 minutes.
WP Engine Customer Support
WP Engine, on the other hand, also supports its customers 24/7/365. The client can either chat with them online, email, or call the support helpline number. However, phone support is not available to all its clients. Only high-end clients are given this support. Either way, the user will get access to the highly knowledgeable support team.
The customer support of WPX Hosting is faster than its counterpart WP Engine. Hence, we will suggest you should go for WPX Hosting if customer support is one of your criteria.
Some Other Factors You Should Know
We have already looked at the major features that differentiate both the web hosts. However, there are little details that matter to the hosting of the website on both the sites. Let us look at them and determine which host is better.
Domain Name Registration
WPX Hosting offers to install WordPress on your domains. In contrast, WP Engine does not offer domain registration to its users. The user will have to register a domain from another company which might be inconvenient.
Staging
WPX Hosting allows the staging of your website so that you know how it will look once you upload it. However, the staged website is calculated in the total number of websites for your plan. On the contrary, WP Engine gives its user 1-click staging for the website and it is not included in total websites.
Money-back guarantee
WPX Hosting offers its clients a 30-day money-back guarantee while WP Engine offers a 60-day money-back guarantee. However, the guarantee in WP Engine is limited to some plans only.
cPanel
While both WPX Hosting and WP Engine offer custom cPanel to its users, WP Engine offers a secondary custom control panel to its users called the “User Portal” for facilitating their work.
Migration
WPX Hosting provides free unlimited migration within 24 hours to all its sites hosted on WPX. WP Engine does not offer free migration which is needed if you are transferring your host provider.
Pricing & Features
Let us now move towards the part where we compare the prices of the facilities provided by both the companies. There are many features that are provided free of cost in both companies regardless of the plan chosen by the user. Let us look at these features for our reference.
Features of Both the Web Hosts
WPX Hosting Features
- The strong support system with a guarantee to address your query within 30 seconds 24/7/365.
- Access to high-speed custom CDNs located in 26 global edge locations.
- Free unlimited site migration to WPX within 24 hours
- Free and unlimited SSL certificates
- Free access to staging areas so that you know how your site will look once it is online.
- Free Email
- Liberty to take manual backups anytime you want for free.
- Automatic backups every 28 days
- DDoS Protection to all its users
- Daily malware scanning and its removal.
- PHP 7.x
- A 30-Day money-back guarantee
- A guarantee of 99.95% uptime
- 1-Click WordPress installation
- You can choose from the USA, UK, and Australia locations.
WP Engine Features
- Genesis Framework
- 35+ StudioPress Themes
- 24/7 chat support
- Dev/Stage/Prod Environments
- Transferable Sites
- PHP 7.4 ready
- Evercache
- LargeFS
- Global CDN
- Page Performance
- Automated SSL certificates
- SSH Gateway
Plans and Pricing
WPX Hosting as well as WP Engine provides different plans to different types of users so that the client can optimize their use. Let us have a short description of the plans offered by both companies.
WPX Hosting Pricing
WPX Hosting offers three types of plans to its users: Business, Professional, and Elite.
Business Plan
Business Plan costs the user $20.83 per month if you pay yearly and $24.99 per month if you pay monthly. This plan gives you access to 5 websites, 10 GB disk storage, and 100 GB bandwidth. This plan is perfect for you if you are just starting your online venture.
Professional Plan
Professional Plan is for a user who is already established in the online business. The price of this plan is $41.58 per month if you pay yearly and $49.99 if you pay monthly. This plan offers the use of 15 websites, 20 GB disk storage, and 200 GB Bandwidth to its users.
Elite Plan
This is the highest plan offered by WPX Hosting. The price of this plan is $83.25 per month if you pay yearly and $99.00 per month if you pay every month. It allows the user access to host 35 websites, 40 GB storage, and unlimited bandwidth. It is for big corporations that need huge resources.
WP Engine Pricing
WP Engine offers four types of plans for the users to choose from Start-up, growth, scale, and custom.
Start-up Plan
This is the plan that offers 1 website, 10 GB storage, 50 GB Bandwidth per month, and 25,000 visits per month. It costs $25.00 per month or $300 for a year. It is ideal for business start-ups.
Growth Plan
This plan is perfect for you if you are in the growing stage of your business. It gives you access to $95.83 monthly or $1150 per annum. This plan offers the user 10 websites, 20 GB storage, 200 GB bandwidth per month and up to 100,000 visits a month.
Scale Plan
If you require high resources for your business then you can opt for a scale plan. It will provide 30 websites, 50 GB storage, 500 GB bandwidth every month and 400,000 visits per month.
Custom Plan
This is the plan for mission-critical sites and large businesses. It offers the fastest support response from the company and high performance from the dedicated environment. It includes 30 websites, 100 GB – 1 TB storage, 400 GB + bandwidth per month, and millions of visits per month. You can customize this plan in accordance with your requirements.
Conclusion
Your WordPress site can be managed and hosted on many platforms. In this article we discussed which company offers better features and plans to host your managed WordPress site: WPX Hosting or WP Engine. Both platforms had some advantages over the other. However, when you are choosing a platform you can only choose one. Hence, it is imperative that we give you a clear winner.
WPX Hosting, according to us, is the best hosting site among many others because of its unparalleled speed and impeccable customer support. We would also like to iterate that WP Engine gives you good value for your money but is a bit pricier than WPX Hosting. So, choose according to your needs and your budget.