After i interviewed the co founder and Ceo of WPEngine, Jason Cohen, i decided to contact some of his staff and learn more about why the company behind WordPress, Automattic, invested $1.2m in them.
I didn’t find out the answer to that question so i’ll have to ask WordPress but i did find out something else which i never knew about them.
WPEngine Don’t Host E-mail
I was really fired up after spending so much time looking into WPEngine and then had to look for a solution.
What do you do when the company hosting your WordPress site doesn’t provide hosting for your domains email accounts?
I contacted Austin at WPEngine and he told me this:
We’ve chosen to focus on providing amazing managed wordpress hosting, and letting Google (et. al) focus on doing email
I wanted to try out WPEngine’s 60 day free trial so i had to learn how to configure my email to get delivered to Google Apps servers rather than WPEngine’s.
So i decided to write a tutorial which you can use to setup Google Apps for your email management.
WPEngine doesn’t host email because they focus purely on hosting WordPress sites for speed and security.
And then i read this on the WPEngine blog.
Expert Help Is Expensive
Experienced WordPress programmers are in high demand right now. (If you know of any, please, introduce them to us — we’re hiring.)
They can charge correspondingly high rates. Many of the consultants we work with charge $200 an hour for assistance with setting up and tweaking WordPress sites. If you need to have a consultant perform maintenance on your website for only 5 hours a year, that is $1,000, almost triple what you’d pay for hosting with WPEngine for the year.
If you switch to WPEngine in the next week, we’ll throw in two hours of our experts’ time to assist you in the transition, including getting your site up and running, configuring it to work best with our systems, and optimizing it for speed.
Source: WPEngine
We’ll do (warning, geekery incoming) CSS/JS optimizations, stage your content to a CDN, code profiling, hotspot analysis, and even give you advice about better alternatives to any slow plugins you might be using.
If geek is Greek to you, just trust us, it will be faster than you’ve ever seen it. A commodity hosting provider chugs along with 10,000 sites running a variety of software on a single server: we just do WordPress, and we do WordPress *right*.
Check your sites speed here and get access to the best team in our business, just like you built the best team for your business.
Regards,
Jason Cohen
Founder, WPEngine
Brad Dalton
@wpsitesdotnet
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Brad,
Thanks for the information on this company. I met the other co-founder, from Great Britain, I believe his name is Ben, at the WordCamp Miami recently. Sharp guy and nice guy. If you have a large company that is going to have a lot of traffic then WPEngine is definitely the way to go. Everyone that signed up at WordCamp for WPEngine account got a free account for life. You cannot beat that. I’ve been meaning to move my site to their servers. They seem like a great company and they are rock solid. And I would recommend them.
The only reason I didn’t make the move is that my current host has 24 hours support and the support has been great for the last several years. I am a night owl, so I need night time support. WPEngine said they have night support for emergencies, but I don’t want to be bothering people for routine questions.
Also, my current hosting company recently upgraded their servers and I am shocked to discover that my previously SLOW site now loads in 0.854 seconds according to my Alexa toolbar. Alexa says my site is “Fast” and faster than 77% of the sites out there. And it’s been there for over a week at that speed.
I would like to test it on the speed test site at WPEngine one of these days.
Definitely WPEngine if you have a big company with lots of traffic or even if you are a smaller site and don’t mind the monthly fee and NOT having 24/7 service (and that will probably change it time, too, hopefully).
Brad, thanks for all the great posts!
Sincerely,
Jupiter Jim
Hi Jim
Jason Cohen is the founder of WPEngine.
Sounds like the WordCamp attendees got a great deal!
I would recommend using Google Analytics site speed as it gives you an average of your site speed rather than at the time of the test like most tools.
This is what Google will judge you on rather than a one off test on your homepage
Its the average speed you need to keep an eye on and make sure it stays below 5 seconds at the highest otherwise you loose page views.
You can also test for individual pages as well and find which ones are loading to slowly
I’ve found Alexa isn’t very accurate for speed, links and traffic figures
Thanks for the comment
Price for one website feels a bit too high but if it really does what it says then 10 website options could be great choice.
Will give this service a try. Will see if it can deliver better than Cloudflare, which is a bit different but is still there to make website load faster.
Hi Steven
WPEngine come in at a price point between a Pro shared account and VPS, both of which won’t speed up your site anywhere near the speed WPEngine can.
I have tried all and have been unsatisfied with both Pro shared and different levels of VPS.
WPEngine is the only host WordPress has invested in and the only host that only hosts WordPress that i know of.