InMotion Hosting presents itself as a web hosting company that boasts the latest enterprise building tools, technology, and professional expertise to speed business growth. They state their 24/7/365 U.S.-based customer service experts respond to call, chat, or email anytime. Offering what they describe as a fast and easy website hosting and technology solutions with all the essential features a small business or a brand new website needs to be at its best, InMotion states their…
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WP Engine
Score 8.9 out of 10
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WP Engine is a website hosting service built to host WordPress for companies of any size, with features such as daily backups, firewall,SSL, and proprietary caching technology.
For VPS hosting, they're the only host I use or would recommend. They have a budget friendly approach and the resources advertised are accurate. I was disappointed (and unfortunately surprised) to see the I/O limitations of 1MB/s imposed on their shared reseller hosting. It's not advertised but really does cripple shared reseller hosting as nearly any activity on the site immediately starts affecting performance.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Their team was always responsive, helpful and eager to support us whenever we needed their help. Additionally, they followed up each time they supported us to see if the applied fixes to our problems satisfactorily resolved our issues. In all, their support was top notch.
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.
As part of my search for a solid re-seller friendly hosting company, I also seriously considered Siteground. Inmotion Hosting provided a better pricing model, so I went with Inmotion. In the following years, I came across Cloud Access through Joomla's launch program. Their website management tool was awesome, and I recommend individual Joomla users check them out if they want to launch with this awesome CMS. I've yet to experience their customer service, so I'm not sure how it fares.
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
