Rackspace Email presents what the vendor describes as a reliable, cost-effective solution for small business email hosting. Hosting services start at 25GB, and services include email migration, spam and virus protection built-in, an upgrade to include archiving, and 24x7x365 support.
$2.99
per month per user
WP Engine
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
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.
If you need a trusted email hosting platform, Rackspace is definitely the way to go. Not only is it simple to use, but the help they're willing to provide is also outstanding. Whether you're upgrading (or even downgrading) a service, or have concerns over any use cases, they're great at providing assistance and being diligent to understand your needs. If you only require a simple email for only a few people, it may not be the way to go, but it's hard to beat the price they offer (and the clarity on that pricing as well).
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.
Honestly, if it wasn't for the way in which ticket updates are shared, it would be a ten. They provide excellent support, from sales to technical to even migration services. I've always gotten my questions answered clearly, by someone who is human. If answers were displayed via email as well, rather than just a notice that I needed to login to see a message, it would be even better.
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.
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
