WP Engine

WP Engine is located in Austin, Texas and was founded by Jason Cohen in 2010. They serve 200 million requests each day that they continuously tune for speed, scalability and security. Thousands of bloggers from huge websites to small company home pages use who care about SEO and customer experience use WP Engine.

WP Engine Main Features

WP Engine offers managed WordPress hosting and currently has over 60,000 customers in 120 countries. Their main hosting features include:

• Technology: Their WordPress hosting is built on EverCache, their architecture delivers fast, reliable and scalable hosting.
• Expertise: WP Engine offers around the clock customer support from highly trained, on-site WordPress hosting experts.
• Enterprise Grade Security: Proactive instead of reactive WordPress security that keeps your data and website secure.

WP Engine Plan Features and Prices

WP Engine offers 5 different WordPress hosting plans. All of their plans include the following features:

• A 60 day money back guarantee for a full refund on 3 plans, this excludes their Premium and Enterprise plans.
• Free automated migration allows you to migrate your WordPress website to their platform with just a few clicks.
• The WP Engine free SSL certificate will improve your website’s SEO with a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate.
• Unlimited data transfer.
• 24/7 chat support.
• Staging.
• Shared environment.
• Transferable installs.
• PHP 7 ready.
• Large FS.

Comparing Three WP Engine WordPress Hosting Plans

Personal

Professional

Business

$29 per month

$99 per month

$249 per month

25k visits per month

100k visits per month

400k visits per month

1 installs

10 installs

25 installs

10 GB local storage

20 GB local storage

30 GB local storage

$19.95 per month CDN

CDN included

CDN included

Imported SSL certificates

Imported SSL certificates

24/7 phone support

24/7 phone support

Multisite ready

Multisite ready

Their business plan includes more options as well. Their Premium and Enterprise plans include many more options and features. For the Premium and Enterprise plans, customers must call WP Engine for a price quote.

WP Engine Security Features

WP Engine has several levels of security that can keep your website secure. A secure website not only protects your data or hacker attacks, a secure website is also faster since bogus requests are taking up much of your website resources. Other security features from WP Engine include:

• Managed patching and updates: WP Engine ensures that your WordPress site is running the most current version of WordPress; they automatically upgrade your installs whenever minor patches are released. When a major update is released, WP Engine thoroughly tests it before recommended it to their customers, and will help you with your upgrade.
• Real-time security threat detection: WP Engine blocks millions of attacks each and every day. The attacks they block include DDoS and brute force attacks, plus there are thousands of rule sets that are specifically set for WordPress identify and prevent attacks before they happen.
• Enterprise grade infrastructure: They run a combination of firewalls to protect your websites from outside attacks, as well as network analysis monitoring tools to prevent any malicious behavior within the network.
• Security audits and code reviews: WP Engine conducts periodic code reviews and security audits of all internal environments and processes. They also conduct frequent proactive vulnerability scans and perform penetration testing.
• Unhacking services for free: With all of their security measures in place, if you still get hacked or compromised, WP Engine will fix it for free.

WP Engine Pros

WP Engine is fast and has excellent uptime. Offers unlimited monthly data transfers and daily backups plus malware and virus scanning.

WP Engine Cons

WP Engine does not sell domain names or include email, customers will have to get their domain names elsewhere.

WP Engine Coupons

• Risk-free 60-day Trial at WP Engine
• Pre-Pay for WP Engine Hosting for 1 Year and Get 2 Months Free at WP Engine

Pantheon

Located in San Francisco, Pantheon is a website management platform for both Drupal and WordPress that offers high-performance hosting for Drupal and WordPress sites. They also include a comprehensive toolkit to help customers launch faster.

Pantheon Features

Pantheon has great website hosting features for both Drupal and WordPress hosting that includes:

• Toolkit: Customers will get expert support from real developers.
• Fast hosting: The average website that is re-launched on Pantheon, is 2.47 times faster.
• Drupal hosting: With their built in workflow, and no server management offering the highest performance possible.
• WordPress hosting: With fast speed, excellent uptime and scalability, Pantheon is one of the best WordPress hosting sites.
• Manage security: Secure infrastructure, encrypted channels and more.
• Smooth scaling: This allows for millions of page views without affecting performance.
• Performance monitoring: All of their sites come with a free New Relic pro plan. This gives you code level visibility into your sites performance.

If you are an agency, there are even more free features. Pantheon is great for anyone, but especially good for those that build WordPress sites for a living or manage several websites.

Pantheon WordPress Features

Pantheon offers a great platform for WordPress hosting and developing. They have many options including the option to start from scratch or archive importer. Starting with the core allows you to choose from WordPress, Drupal 7 or Drupal 8. A few of their WordPress hosting features include:

• Developer Dashboard: A dashboard for master view of all of your Drupal and WordPress sites.
• One Click Core Updates: you can update WordPress with one click to make sure you stay on top of security and website performance.
• Automated Backups: Automatic weekly and daily backups of your websites that are stored in redundant offsite locations.
• Advanced Caching: Varnish and Redis are built into the platform to provide high-speed edge caching and application caching.
• New Relic APM: All sites come with a New Relic APM Pro for free.
• Automated Sysadmin: You no longer have to worry about server maintenance as Pantheon automates sysadmin work so you can focus on WordPress development.

Pantheon offers the same great features with their Drupal hosting.

Pantheon Pay-per-Site plans

This Pantheon plan is not tied to physical servers, VMs or VPSs. You pay per site based on the features and resources you need. Customers never pay for development environments; you only pay when you go live.

Personal

Professional

Business

Elite

$25/ month per site

$100/ month per site

$400/ month per site

Call for a quote

Best for small sites with a single developer.

Best for sites with more complex technical needs.

Best for teams with multiple developers or larger sites.

Best for mission critical or very large sites.

Up to 10k monthly page views

Up to 100k monthly page views

Up to 500k monthly page views

Millions of monthly page views

Each Pantheon plan has their different features including running https for an additional $30 per month with all plans except Personal plan, where it is not listed as a feature.

Pantheon Agency Plans

Personal

Professional

Business

Elite

$25/ month per site

$100/ month per site

$400/ month per site

Call for a quote

Best for small or simple sites where you are providing maintenance for your client.

Best for more complex sites or clients that may need support from Pantheon

Best for large sites or clients with their own developers on staff.

Best suited for clients who need guaranteed uptime and 24/7 on-call support.

Pantheon also has plans for large organizations including their Enterprise, Pantheon EDU+ and Priority Enterprise Support.

You can try Pantheon for free with a free account and you only pay when you go live.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy was founded by Bob Parsons in 1997 as Lomax Technologies and changed their name in 1999. They are the best known domain registrar and web hosting company and today, they have more than 13 million customers worldwide and they are the world’s largest domain registrar.

GoDaddy Services

GoDaddy offer the following types of domain website services:

• Domain Registrar: You can find the perfect domain name for your website and also list your domain name for sale.
• Website services include do it yourself with their website builder, WordPress websites and also professional website services like website design, logo designs and eCommerce websites.
• Hosting services: GoDaddy also offers web hosting for dedicated servers, virtual private servers and dedicated IP for your websites, WordPress or Blogger websites.
• SSL and Site Protection: Customers can also get SSL certificates, code signing certificates and SiteLock website security.
• Online Marketing includes marketing tools to help your website get noticed on the internet with search engine visibility and email marketing.
• Email tools like domain based email and online bookkeeping.
• Customers will also get their award winning GoDaddy 24/7 customer support.

GoDaddy Features

With GoDaddy you can get great features that include:

• The best names for your website with hundreds of domains to choose from.
• Web hosting with industry leading fast load times, cPanel or Parallels Plesk and guaranteed 99.9% uptime.
• 50GB of secure online storage.
• Get a professional email address
• The ability to sync email across all computers and smartphones.
• Linux cPanel that is 2 times faster.

GoDaddy Offers the following services and features with their domain registration:

• Simple domain setup with no technical skills needed.
• Quick simple tools that allows you to forward your domains to an existing website.
• Up to 100 sub domains allowed
• 100 professional email aliases
• Real time monitoring that assures you that you are always up and running
• Privacy protection
• Business protection
• Certified domains

GoDaddy Plans

Even though GoDaddy is best known for their domain searches and registering a domain name through them, they also offer web hosting plans. Their web hosting plans include:

• Web hosting
• WordPress hosting
• Dedicated IP
• Premium DNS

They also include a wide range of servers like cloud servers, cloud applications and virtual private servers.

GoDaddy WordPress Hosting

GoDaddy also offers four different WordPress hosting plans with the following features:

Basic

Deluxe

Ultimate

Developer

$3.99 per month

$4.99 per month

$7.99 per month

$13.99 per month

1 website

1 website

2 websites

5 websites

10 GB SSD storage

15 GB SSD storage

30 GB SSD storage

50 GB SSD storage

25,000 monthly visitors

100,000 monthly visitors

400,000 monthly visitors

800,000 monthly visitors

SFTP access

SSH/SFTP access

SSH/SFTP access

SSH/SFTP access

One-click staging site

One-click staging site

One-click staging site

The above plans all include a free domain with a 1-year plan. The above prices will renew at the regular higher price.

GoDaddy Other Hosting Plans

• Economy is best for a basic website that includes 1 website, 100 GB of storage, unlimited bandwidth, free email and a free domain with an annual plan for a current sale price of $3.99 per month.
• Deluxe is perfect for multiple websites that offers unlimited websites, storage, bandwidth and free email plus a free domain with their annual plan for a cost of $4.99 per month.
• Ultimate is best for the most complex sites and heavy traffic. This plan offers unlimited websites, storage, bandwidth and free email plus a free domain with their annual plan. This plan starts at $7.99 per month.

Customers can choose from either Linux or Windows plans. Their Windows plans include the following features:

• All plans utilize Windows Server 2012 R2
• 24/7 security monitoring and DDoS protection
• 1-click setup for GoDaddy registered domains
• 1-click install of 50+ free applications including WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and more
• 200MB MSSQL database storage
• Flexible, easy-to-use control panel.

GoDaddy also carries virtual private servers (VPS), dedicated and cloud server web hosting services.

GoDaddy Website Builder

GoDaddy also offers a website builder that you can try for free. This website builder is designed for Google, social media and success. You can also hire an expert website designer to design your website for you. All customers have to do to hire an expert is to call them for a free consultation.

GoDaddy Domain Registrar Features and Prices

GoDaddy is best known for the great domain registrar services. GoDaddy is the world’s leading domain registrar with over 14 million customers and 63 million domains under their management.

It is known that to get noticed on the internet, it is best to have a great domain name and that includes the extension. GoDaddy has hundreds of domains to choose from including all of the new extensions.

GoDaddy Coupons

• 15% Off Sitewide at GoDaddy
• 15% off orders over $75.00 at GoDaddy
• Get 20% off shared hosting at GoDaddy