A2 Hosting vs. WP Engine

if you're looking for a somewhat cheap web host but don't care about uptime, outages or decent technical support then A2 is ideal

New users to WordPress can rejoice with a very hands-off hosting approach. If 100% uptime is not essential, you can get breakneck speeds with minimal tinkering using their platform. If you need to get up and running quickly and scale as required, the cost-benefit is here, although you need to pay a lot to get the most from it.

Incentivized

• the hosting hardware they provide is decent when you consider the price

• I love the database backups and how quickly & easy it is to restore from an old backup point. This gives me & my clients confidence that any change can be rolled back.
• The built in caching & CDN mean that I have to spend less time worrying about the speed of the server & site. The caching has some side-effects that take getting used to (on-page dynamic PHP code sometimes needs to be moved to API endpoints), but this is true for most caching systems.
• They have really good support for multiple environments. It's very easy to have separate production & staging environments. It's also very simple to deploy from staging to production, making product launches and large scale website copy changes much easier to coordinate.

Incentivized

• technical support
• quality control
• escalating issues to management when needed
• customer service communication
• training their tech support team

• The user interface is not very intuitive, which means new staff members require more training than I'd like.
• The way they manage production/development servers and FTP access is somewhere between nebulous and tragically unique.
• Their premium pricing is surely worthwhile, but it is significantly higher than virtually all of their competitors, without much obvious distinction in feature sets.
• Some very basic features like spinning up a second instance require a PHONE CALL to their BILLING department to enable. What is this, 1990?

Incentivized

Never would I use this service. I canceled 7 accounts I believe so far. [In my opinion] it's a waste.

I was in a situation where I had to bolt Wordpress on to an existing infrastructure that could not support it. If I ever end up in that situation again, please kill me. Other than that reasonably common use case, I don't think it offers a lot of value over robust shared hosting, virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated servers.

[In my opinion] it barely works.

It took very little time to learn their dashboard for managing WordPress sites. Their built-in tools are really well done, and the addition of security and CDN tools is great.

Incentivized

they are only technically available but having someone say hello, i'm here to help, immediately is not real responsive if they actually never address the issue being reported. we don't contact support for the bland greeting, we are actually trying to solve a business process interruption

They are only good if you never update your website and i mean never. Otherwise their main performance diffrentiator is turbo web hosting, their highest shared hosting plan. When caching is working it performs well reducing load times by half, but as soon as you add a new page to the site, the updates don't show up until you clear the cache manually from multiple locations (wordpress a2optimized plugin, cpanel etc..). As they make updates to the turbo hosting A2optimized plugin, they do not test them properly and do not handle customer feedback about them, instead they are in denial and try to immediately convince the customer there is no issue at all! the old developer joke when they don't want to fix feedback: it works on my machine!

[In my opinion] they have the worst customer support. It's awful. [I feel like] they talk over you [and] they blame anything but what is real. [It makes me think] they are uneducated. [When I dealt with them] they never answered why things went wrong. [I feel like] they are nightmares and just hard to deal with. And, [from my experience] they are NOT nice. [I felt like] they act condescending in conversations. They waste so much time over nothing.

Support is generally great. Enterprise support is fantastic, with little to no wait times. I find that chat support can almost always take care of the problem without escalating to a ticket for a higher level of troubleshooting. The chat support for many other hosting providers can only handle basic issues. This is a big bonus for us to get quick and helpful answers.

Incentivized

[In my experience] it was a mess from the start and created problems ever since day one.

For Acquia and AEM the major differentiator was the cost for WPEngine was significantly lower and we could use the more common WordPress CMS. AEM is better for large marketing sites that integrate with the Abobe Marketing Cloud and we didn't feel we could support Drupal on Acquia. AWS EC2 is a viable option if you are going to self support and maintain your own WordPress experts. We felt that the value from WPEngine was they handled the support and the WordPress security patches and knowledge beyond simple theme usage. Pantheon was the closest in matching but we felt with our large installs that the hosting model for WPEngine was more cost-effective than the Container architecture for Pantheon

Incentivized

I believe they do not care about addressing failures when they occur. Starting out with a working service counts for nothing if you can't maintain it, fix issues when reported, and actually take the extra step to prevent them from happening again. You have to care about quality and customer service, and A2 couldn't care less

• they are adequate for a startup looking for cheap site hosting but unreliable for anything beyond

• Positive: We've been able to scale up more easily as adding new sites has been easier.
• Positive: The load speed improvements we saw were immediate and have not let up.
• Negative: Adding advanced security and other tools to a multiple sites is expensive.

Incentivized