Five More Reasons to Use WP Engine
I don’t exactly keep it a secret around here that I’m a huge fan of WP Engine. I’ve already written about performance, support and how they just make the little stuff easier. I’ve also been working on a guide for my clients (and anyone else interested) to help make transitioning to WP Engine even easier, but I wanted to go through a few of the other things that my favorite hosting company is doing to make my life and the hosting experience for my clients that much better.
#5 Easy Access to Tools from Directly within Your WordPress Install
Right from WP Admin, you can go to the WP Engine tab and access features of your hosting account, from clearing the cache to fixing file permissions to the ever-so-powerful staging feature.
#4 Giving Access to WP Engine’s Dashboard
What you might think of as “cPanel” on other hosts, the WP Engine control panel gives you access to everything you need to manage a WordPress site (including getting stellar support). Best of all, if you need to give different people access to different installs or sections of the dashboard, they make that incredibly easy to do as well.
While it’s very straightforward and easy to use, I’ve written up a tutorial on how everything in the WP Engine Dashboard works.
#3 Staging!
No more breaking your site while you try and update plugins. Gone are the days of manually making an entire backup of your WordPress install on another domain, copying files to your local computer, back up to that new domain, moving the database over…blah, blah, blah. Especially on larger sites with lots of files, that sucks!
With WP Engine’s staging feature, you click a couple of buttons and you’ve got an exact copy of your site, ready for you to test updates, changes, new plugins or just to break for the fun of it, if you’d like.
#2 Backups!
While staging is all and well, sometimes something you do on the live site breaks everything. With WP Engine, you get a backup every single morning, of your live and your staging site, for at least a month (I’ve been told by support that at times they’ll have backups as old as 3 months but can’t specifically verify that’s the case for everyone). A month’s worth of backups though…very few other hosts offer that and those which do often either charge you for it (ahem, NoDaddy) or require you to know how to download and fix everything on your own.
With WP Engine, it’s a simple select and click process from within the dashboard.
#1 Uptime
I monitor 26 sites that I host on WP Engine. Take a look at this report of uptime over the last 30 days:
100% Uptime via WP EngineNot a single one of those sites have been down in months. Does WP Engine guarantee 100% uptime? No. Do they never have problems, again, no. Technical problems happen, but when they do, WP Engine’s support is always there to help, and thankfully it’s incredibly rare that technical glitches cause issues with sites hosted by WP E.
Bonus! 60 Day Money Back Guarantee
That’s a long time! But it really gives you a good amount of experience with exactly what their support is like, whether it’s going to be right for you, etc. Most hosts will give you a month at most. Thanks to WP Engine’s easy transfer process, you don’t really have to lose much time moving to them either, and can keep our site hosted at the old location during this grace period to see if everything’s going to work out.
Plus, they often are giving out 2 – 4 months for free the first year, or a big percentage off your first payment (which if you pay annually, can be a massive amount).
I’m happy to note here that, if you sign up for WP Engine, I do get a handsome sum of that initial payment…but I also host over two dozen client sites and am responsible for making certain they’re always up and running, nights and weekends included, so I wouldn’t be using or recommending WP Engine if they didn’t kill it.
Get WP Engine Hosting from $29 / month!
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