Category: WP Engine

Pressable vs WP Engine

Recent contentiousness aside, I figured it would be helpful to compare Pressable and WP Engine, to hopefully determine which is the superior managed WordPress hosting provider.

Differences between Pressable and WP Engine

Rather then list how Pressable and WP Engine are alike, it would be easier to focus on how they are NOT alike.

With the price for 1 website being almost identical, the deciding factor for most will be the differences in features, limits and support.

A list of what I see are the major differences between Pressable and WP Engine:

Pressable is owned by Automattic. WP Engine is an independent company, not affiliated with Automattic or the WordPress organization.
Pressable offers 20 GB of storage. WP Engine offers 10 GB.
Pressable gives you 30K visits per month. WP Engine gives 25K.
Pressable does not appear to meter bandwidth. WP Engine provides 75 GB per month.
Pressable backups are hourly and daily. WP Engine backups are daily.
Pressable includes 1 staging site. WP Engine includes 1 staging, and 1 development site.
Pressable’s Service Level Agreement is 100%. WP Engine’s SLA is 99.99%.
Pressable offers email service through a third party. WP Engine does not offer email.
Pressable comes with Jetpack Security. WP Engine provides security services, but no specific plugin or directly comparable services.
Pressable offers a 30 day money back gurantee. WP Engine gives you 60 days.

Overall a lot of wins for Pressable and a few wins for WP Engine.

Forget features, it’s about support

When evaluating a web hosting provider, technical differences rarely matter. It’s the quality of support, and investment in the platform that will determine your satisfaction with a web host. Good web hosts prioritize support, while alo making investments in their technology to create growth and sustainability.

WP Engine WPEngine

WP Engine SSH

WPEngine offers SSH gateway access on all their WordPress hosting plans. With SSH access, developers can build securely with WP CLI, MySQL command line, bash, and Composer.

A WP Engine customer can set up and manage SSH access via the Customer Portal.

How to Set up SSH Access Keys at WP Engine

Keys can be created, or added via the WP Engine Customer Portal.

Direct link to the SSH key management interface: https://my.wpengine.com/profile/ssh_keys

How to Connect to SSH at WP Engine

The connection format for SSH is as follows:

ssh environment@environment.ssh.wpengine.net

Replace “environment” with the name of your WordPress environment at WP Engine.

After connecting successfully the first task is to change to the root directory of your install. Any changes made above the root dir, are reset or removed each day. To do this, type the following command:

cd sites/environment

WP Engine WPEngine

WP Engine Reviews

Website hosting reviews are… difficult. The very nature of the business; tech service, high volume, low cost means that reviews for the large providers like WP Engine will be mostly positive, making determining “the best” hosting provider for you… difficult.

Where & How to find WPEngine Reviews

Before this post I don’t even know where I’d go to find reviews for web hosting as I haven’t “shopped” for quite a few years (more on that later). Quite obviously I “Googled” it, and here’s what I found:

Reddit – The first result (non-personalized results) is a 2023 thread on Reddit comparing WPEngine to Digital Ocean. Overall the reaction from the community was mostly positive, with several comments stating you pay for the “added features” rather than pure hardware or speed. While not a perfect, direct comparison, comparing WP Engine with traditional shared hosting like Digital Ocean is valid.
Trustpilot – Skipping over individual reviews, I recognized Trustpilot not because of quality but rather they’ve been around for years and seemingly host many reviews. WP Engine scores a respectable 4.8 / 5 stars. To add to their legitimacy, WP Engine includes their Trustpilot rating in the footer of their marketing emails.
WP Engine vs – Typically when I search for reviews, I use the “versus” or “vs” trick in Google. You let Google autocomplete tell you what the competitors are by using the following format: “wp engine vs” and then look at the autocomplete list Google provides.
PC Mag – While technically this is an individual review (which I mostly skipped) PCMag seems to make a good effort to review the major hosting providers and provide recommendations. WP Engine makes their recommendation list for WordPress hosting. The only cons were no email or domain registration service.

My Personal WP Engine Review

Reviews are typically positive for almost any product, or service. It’s when things go badly, or become challenging that the quality of the service is tested.

In our 7+ years of being a WPEngine customer I can honestly say the quality of the team is superb. When we first moved our client assets to WP Engine it was transformative. Managed WordPress hosting is now commonplace, but the support and technical team behind WP ENgine is what continues to set them apart.

Cloudflare WP Engine WPEngine

WP Engine and Cloudflare

WP Engine and Cloudflare are what I would consider close technology partners. WP Engine’s Advanced Network uses Cloudflare to protect, optimize and improve speed for their thousands of WordPress customers.

For those of you new to the concept of Cloudflare, it’s a DNS and proxy service that sits between your website and users. This layer in between, allows Cloudflare to offer optimizations that improve the speed, and security of your website.

Cloudflare and WP Engine

Our web firm has been a Cloudflare customer for many years, and consider them valuable protectors of our WP Engine client family. Not only does Cloudflare provide easy, centralized DNS management, their proxy, firewall and optimization features are valued essentials.

Links explaining more the relationship between WP Engine and Cloudflare:

Cloudflare Case Study: WP Engine

WP Engine: Cloudflare Best Practices

WP Engine Solution Center Resource: Cloudflare

WP Engine WPEngine

WP Engine Status

WP Engine maintains a status website located here: https://wpenginestatus.com/

It uses a separate / distinct URL from the main website, which allows WP Engine to report on status and outages from a siloed system, unaffected by outages to their main infrastructure.

Other Ways to Check WP Engine Status

Another useful tool for checking WP Engine status would be the following website: https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

The first thing I do when encountering a possible outage is to visit “Down for Everyone” and verify that it isn’t, just me.

The second thing I do, once I’ve verified it’s not just my terrible connection (thanks Comcast) is login to the WP Engine User Portal, and start a chat with the helpful support agents who are happy to solve any issues.

In the almost 10 years I’ve been a WP Engine customer, I’ve probably visited the WP Engine status page less than 6 times, and mostly out of curiosity. Personally I find most “status pages” lack the detail I require or don’t accurately report “micro” outages.

Backups for the two sites above include Twitter/X and Hacker News where outages to major Internet providers are reported and discussed.