When it comes to WordPress hosting, WP Engine is one of the most popular WordPress hosting providers known today. They provide a hosting service that is known for its performance and excellent security. However, with such excellent performance, the cost of WP Engine gets a little bit to high for everyone else to afford their services. This means that most people are often finding themselves in situations whereby they are looking for other available options to use instead of using WP Engine. The field of WordPress hosting is a diverse field, and therefore it is expected that there will definately be other competing alternatives. There are several other companies that provide the WordPress hosting service just like WP Engine, some with actually very good services and at a relatively cheaper prices.
It is good to note that having this service at a cheaper price does not mean that the quality provided is not good. In this article, we are going to discuss the top seven alternatives that you can use for WordPress hosting if you are not able or do not want to use WP Engine. Here is a comparison table showing these alternatives;
| Host | Basic Pricing | Storage | Traffic(uv/month) | More Info |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SiteGround | $3.95 / mo | 10GB | 10,000 | More Info |
| DreamHost | $16.95 / mo | 30GB | Unlimited | More Info |
| Kinsta | $30.00 / mo | 5GB | 20,000 | More Info |
| WPX Hosting | $20.83 / mo | 10GB | 10,000 | More Info |
| GoDaddy | $8.99 / mo | 10GB | 25,000 | More Info |
| HostGator | $5.99 / mo | Unlimited | Unlimited | More Info |
| Pressable | $45.00 / mo | 10GB | 200,000 | More Info |
SiteGround
SiteGround was established in 2004 and has gradually grown to be one of the best WordPress hosting service providers we have today. This is partly contributed by the fact that they have the best customer support services. They have fairly competitive prices that makes them affordable compared to WP Engine. This, coupled with their excellent services, has sharply increased their number of customers to over five hundred thousand as at the time of writing this article. SiteGround services are also known to be fast, secure and always up to date with current technologies. Technologies such as Nginx, PHP7, HTTP/2, their super cacher and HHVM are known to make it faster and reduce load time. They have their own backup system and gives one a chance to install many more applications with a one click installer.
Just like DreamHost, they use SSDs, known to be faster than the other drives, to process all files and databases. This is even made better by the fact that they have multiple datacenters for you to choose from. If you choose a datacenter that is near you target audience, you can then be assured of faster rendering of data. Security is given priority with SiteGround. They have introduced artificial intelligence systems that are used to prevent brute force attacks. If you do not trust this, they also provide you with an automated backup system that can restore your WordPress website in case you lost it.
Pros
- They provide domain and free email hosting with all their plans.
- Their customer support is known to be among the best. They support their customers through phone, support tickets and live chats.
- They are quite affordable compared to WP Engine which is a bit expensive for beginners.
- SiteGround backs up your website on a daily basis to make sure that you do not lose it in case of an attack.
Cons
- The disk space is limited across all the plans with SiteGround. This is not quite good given that they do not limit databases and domains.
- They seem to be more oriented towards the developer audience instead of generalizing their audience. For example, their top tier plan sells a WordPress staging area and Git integration. Those are incredible features but the average person creating a website will not use those. Not even small developers or agencies use those for many clients.
DreamHost
Dreamhost is one of the best performing WordPress hosting providers. Since it was started in 1997, they have been providing a reliable shared, cloud, managed WordPress, dedicated, VPS and domain name registration and have been recommended for use by WordPress.org. This tells you that you can trust them for your WordPress hosting. They named WordPress hosting as DreamPress, a service that is made only for WordPress users. They have the infrastured designed with latest technologies including NGINX with HTTP/2, Brotli, PHP7 with SSD (Solid State Drivers). For fast provisioning, they provide caching systems such as Varnish caching and object caching meaning that you can fully trust them for speed as well.
When it comes to the pricing, they are relatively cheaper compared to WP Engine. They offer a unlimited number of visitors with a unlimited bandwidth. DreamPress basic plan comes with a 10GB SSD storage which can host a maximum of one website. This plan has WordPress and the most common Jetpack free version pre-installed with a couple of other important installations. Apart from the basic plan, the other plans are installed with a premium version of Jetpack that gives you a good discount with the annual plans.
Pros
- Dreamhost is relatively cheaper compared to WP Engine.
- It is free to install any type of WordPress plugins compared to WP Engine which does not allow installation of caching, backup and broken links plugins.
- Security is guaranteed with DreamHost. They take timely actions against DDoS, firewall, automatic updates and Let’s Encrypt SSL.
- DreamHost creates multiple backups to make sure that you will not lose your site in case of an attack.
- They provide SSH, cron job and GIT access which makes life easier for developers.
- Their customer support is readily available through email, forums and knowledge base.
Cons
- If you have a site with a different host and want to migrate it to DreamHost, it will cost you up to $99. This is quite expensive since most of the other WordPress hosting providers do this for free. You can however have the migration done manually.
- Although there is support through knowledge base, forums and emails, the live chat feature is only available after purchasing a plan with DreamHost. Furthermore, their phone support gets a little bit tricky with a callback link on your DreamHost control panel. This actually costs on the basic plan. This is not a good feature considering that almost all the other WordPress hosting alternatives have a customer support number that you can always call for free.
Kinsta
Kinsta is a very popular alternative to WP Engine for WordPress hosting whose plans are all backed by Google cloud infrastructure. What does this mean? It means that Kinsta easily controls some of the most important hosting features such as speed and uptime. Kinsta servers and empowered by Linux technology, Nginx, MariaDB and PHP7.0+. All the plans with Kinsta come with an automated scalability which allows all sites to stay up and running even when there are issues with traffic spikes. This makes sure that you will not have to worry about an outages that might be caused by a shortage of resources.
Kinsta gives you an opportunity to choose from up to eighteen different datacenter locations which a a pretty large number of locations compared to what other WordPress hosting providers have. Moreover, they will not charge you an extra amount of money for choosing a certain location unlike WP Engine which will charge you. Kinsta is also popular with the fact that they provide most of their add-ons for free. Most of these other providers charge a lot of money when you choose to add an extra add-on.
Pros
- They have a rapid response team that is available all through to help any of their customers from any undesirable event.
- Their plans are integrated with free let’s encrypt SSL for a secure HTTPs connection. This can be turned on and off through a single click.
- They provide a free backup service. You can choose to schedule automated backups or manually backup your website when you want to.
- Kinsta comes with an in-house dashboard that is very easy to use. It also has a multi-user feature that is very important when running a project with a team.
Cons
- Although Kinsta have value for money, they are not a cheap option for a beginner. If you do not have a lot of traffic, it would be a little bit expensive to use Kinsta.
- They do not register domain names, meaning that you will be forced to have your domain name registered with a different service provider. They do not also provide email hosting.
- Kinsta usually not allows you to install any backup or caching plugins, except WP Rocket version 3.0. You can find list of banned plugins here. They provide server-level caching themselves.
WPX Hosting
WPX Hosting was started in 2013 as Traffic Planet but renamed in 2016. They offer WordPress hosting service plans as well as domain registration services. Their pricing structure is one of the best you can find today. For example, if you are a beginner who wants to set up a number of small projects on a fast hosting, then you can choose their smallest plan that allows you to host up to five websites with 50GB bandwidth and a total of 10GB storage. They will even allow you to choose a datacenter either is the US or the UK, depending on which of the two is closer to your target audience. This is hosted on SSD servers and a guaranteed uptime of 99.95% is offered. All this is on their smallest plan.
WPX hosting are also very cautious when it comes to security. They offer a free unlimited SSL certificate and an automated backup process for all accounts. They also provide scanning processes everyday that looks for any vulnerabilities and detects any viruses that might have attacked your website. If you already have a site developed and would like to migrate it to WPX Hosting, they will do this for free unlike WP Engine which charges a lot of money for site migrations.
Pros
- Unline WP Engine, WPX Hosting is one of the WordPress hosting services that has not disallowed the installation of any plugin. They even recommend the best plugins you can use for security, backup and caching.
- They have expert level support that is available all through and makes sure that their users always get the help they are looking for within the shortest time possible.
- They offer domain name registration and unlimited customized email accounts.
- Compared to the leading managed WordPress hosting services like WP Engine, WPX Hosting is more affordable. The price is lower and you get more for your money in terms of the number of sites you can host.
- It is fast, secure and reliable.
Cons
- It has a higher starting price points for plans. If you don’t need all the power and benefits of high-performance WordPress hosting, then a high-quality shared web host like SiteGround might be a better value option for your requirements.
- They do not have many interface features compared to their competitors.
GoDaddy
GoDaddy is one of the most popular hosting providers available today. When it comes to WordPress hosting, Godaddy’s managed service is standard. This means that from setup, software updates and security patches, their team handles almost all the aspects that are involved in the maintenance of your WordPress hosting platform. They are however not keen on handling plugin updates for you, but the support team will be available to help with anything that you ask them to help with. With Godaddy WordPress hosting, you can be assured of getting single click site migration for free, automated updates to the WordPress core and of course free backups.
GoDaddy recognizes that many WordPress users are new to web hosting, so one of their main features is the library of tutorial videos. WP101 is a membership-based, commercial package of WordPress tutorials, and GoDaddy customers get access to up to twenty of the tutorial videos for free. However, we can say that GoDaddy is not enough for large scale businesses and organizations that have high customizations, performance needs and security requirements. It is best suited for small businesses and individuals.
Pros
- It comes with automated WordPress setups, backups and regular software updates.
- GoDaddy provides an automated scanning and removal of malware to make sure that your site is secure.
- It uses SSD disks known to be faster than the rotating disks and their servers use load balancing techniques.
- If you purchase an annual plan, you get to register a domain name for free.
- It is very easy to use even for a beginner or people who do not have experience using WordPress hosting. Their customer support is also readily available to help their customers with any of the issues they might be facing.
Cons
- On all of GoDaddy’s WordPress Hosting plans, you are severely limited on the number of websites and the storage space you are getting.
- They are more focussed on individuals and small companies and therefore not reliable for large scale businesses and organizations.
HostGator
HostGator is one of the oldest and most established hosting providers and perform pretty well when it comes to WordPress hosting. The brand is owned by Endurance International Group (EIG) who also owns Bluehost, Justhost, and iPage among others.They are respected due their consistent reliability and their large number of servers. It well known as a shared hosting provider but still very good at providing VPS and dedicated options for those who need scalable sites. They are however a little bit expensive compared to their competitors. This is because they are known to be more reliable with a support team that can be relied on for simply everything.
Their plans come with the most common basic features as well as an unlimited disk space, free templates and a very easy to use control panel. You can add extra features depending on your needs. HostGator has nearly limitless options and control available for their server, however, they require a little more knowledge than beginner-focused web hosts. If you need to host multiple sites, their wide array of offerings make them a great choice. Their plans are quite affordable, with the lowest plan starting at $2.75 per month. This plan comes with unlimited bandwidth and free SSL certificate. The renewal rates may be a bit higher than this.
Pros
- They provide a 99.98% uptime which is much better than the industry average. This assures you that your website will rarely be down.
- Their support is always available throughout the year. They offer support through phone, live chat and email.
- Hostgator gives you a 45 day money back guarantee for you to effectively test their offers without a hurry to see if they fit your requirements.
- They are very serious when it comes to security. For any of their premium plans, you will enjoy automated daily database backups, automatic malware removal and a free SSL certificate for processing website transactions.
- HostGator will happily assist you with relocating an existing website over to their services for free but only during the thirty days of initial sign up.
Cons
- Their automated backups costs up to $15 annually when there are other hosting plans that do this for free.
- They employ pricing tricks to display the prices available on their website. Those prices are available only when you buy the service for three years. It gets very expensive if you decide to buy for a year or even a number of months.
Pressable
Pressable is a WordPress hosting service provider that was started in 2010. They are one of the best alternatives to WP Engine that you will find today. This is supported by many reasons among them the fact that they are a little bit cheaper and provides up to sixty thousand monthly visits compared to WP Engine that provides only twenty five thousand. This is even complimented by the fact that you can freely host up to five domains with Pressable with unlimited disk storage compared to WP Engine’s one domain limitation and 10GB disk storage. If you were to take their high end package, then you could be able to host over one hundred sites.
Pressable comes with built in caching techniques that render data to visitors rapidly by use of cached web pages. This means that you do not have to install any third party caching plugins as Pressable will take care of this for you. Website performance is also boosted by server side optimization to make sure that your website is fast and reliable to your target audience.They also perform automatic nightly scanning for detection and removal of the malware and have a firewall application to secure your site. The company experts take care of all of the WordPress updates, so you focus on work. Daily backups and SSL are added for free on all of the plans.
Pros
- There are no additional costs with performing automated backups as well as with installation of an SSL certificate.
- They have included a jetpack premium package for free on all of their plans.
- It comes with a collaborator tool that proves handy to provide access to team members instead of creating multiple logins.
- It is relatively cheaper compared to its competitors and very easy to use.
Cons
- They do not have a basic customer support channel such as live chats or phone support. This is not good at all especially when a customer is faced with an urgent issue.
- They offer only a fifteen day free trial with no money back guarantee.
Conclusion
If you like WordPress and have been thinking of getting a managed WordPress hosting service, then this list gives you some of the best options you will find in the market today. WP Engine is without doubt one of the best, but going through this list, you will realize that there are better alternatives that you can use, with some providing better features and at relatively cheap prices. Choose one of these alternatives and get started with managed WordPress hosting.
