JetRails headquartered in Des Plaines is a managed hosting at scale provider supporting Drupal, WordPress, as well as ecommerce solutions (Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce).
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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.
Hosting is a complicated thing to get right, JetRails is well suited at understanding a client's business case and technology needs in order to match them with the right solution at the right price. Finding a great hosting partner is very difficult, as in most cases one gets treated like a number or just another customer. The JetRails team takes a personal interest in the success of their clients and in the success of JetRails as a whole.
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.
The usability of JetRails comes down to the team, the people at JetRails are entirely the reason we continue to work with them and focus on the future with them. The people are insightful and interested in our and our clients' success. Sure the fact they use cutting edge technology helps, but it wouldn't mean much without the personal touch to match the specifications to the clients' needs perfectly.
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.
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.
We used HostGator in the past when our website was still small and fairly new. Easy to set up, but nowhere near the level of complexity, details, and help from actual human beings that JetRails provides.
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
