IONOS a provider of cloud infrastructure, cloud services, and hosting headquartered in Germany, boasting more than eight million customer contracts. They provide individual web services including SSL certificates (provided by GeoTrust True BusinessID) , domain registration services, website hosting, and managed hosting services supporting WordPress, VPS hosting, and ASP.NET hosting.
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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.
Reasonable pricing (SSL certificate for only $30! vs the usual $99), ease of use on the backend and/or dashboard, and reliable customer service, all make this a win in my book. And, of course, you can't beat the free private registration that comes with each domain purchase. I've been recommending 1&1 to all my clients for domain purchases for years.
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.
The email system has not impeded out mail flow in any way, and we do not notice the delays we sometimes see with other systems that include spam/junk mail filtering.
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.
Rackspace I find to be too pricey for the service they offer. Pagely is very much WordPress oriented. I've had downtime with both that I haven't experienced with 1&1.
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
The scalability of the email solution far exceeds our needs and would be suitable for organizations not looking for an enterprise sized multipurpose solution (O365, Google Workspace, etc).
