Liquid Web vs. WP Engine

Posted on by Don Pepper

Considering WP Engine for Managed WordPress Hosting?

Considering WP Engine? Check out Liquid Web!WP Engine is a popular destination for premium-priced WordPress-only hosting — it is, after all, the company’s sole focus and their only product. On the surface, that’s a terrific selling point. But upon closer inspection, you may decide that their solution simply forces you to make too many compromises.

WP Engine limits the number of visitors your sites can have (as few as 25,000 per month), and won’t allow you to use any plugin that they’ve disallowed. If your favorite plugin, a component required by your preferred theme, or a plugin you track down (or create) to solve a specific issue falls out of favor, then you’re out of luck. Most of WP Engine’s more affordable plans rely on shared hosting — a limited, one-size-fits-all solution which forces them to go to great lengths to ensure (and enforce) compatibility. In a shared environment, any single site’s resource usage or traffic could negatively impact the dozens or hundreds of other sites on the same server; hence the need for restrictions on resource usage and plugins. Compounding the issue is the fact that when you don’t own your own data centers, troubleshooting and resolving issues with the servers themselves can be more difficult, expensive, and time-consuming.

Liquid Web has been a leader in the web hosting industry since 1997, serving tens of thousands of customers using WordPress — and every other platform imaginable. That experience has allowed us to engineer and optimize our network and power infrastructure, as well as construct data centers from the ground up.

Rather than simply adopting a popular platform and figuring out the rest moving forward, we’ve taken everything we’ve learned in our mission to perfect the art of web hosting and applied that knowledge to the world’s No. 1 CMS. Liquid Web’s Managed WordPress plans put your sites on equal footing with some of the biggest companies in the world — using the same class of hardware and powered by the same rock-solid infrastructure — with no need to compromise.

Liquid Web vs. WP Engine:
Managed WordPress

Liquid Web is the world’s most loved hosting company for a reason. Our industry-leading web hosting solutions are built on best-in-class hardware and verified by independent testing to consistently outperform competitors. We don’t limit your sites to a subset of available plugins, and we don’t punish you for success by charging overages whenever the number of visitors to your site grows. See for yourself how Liquid Web compares to WP Engine:

 

Liquid Web Logo

wpengine
Full Control of Your Server Yes No
Shell Access Yes No
Choice of Streamlined Dashboard or cPanel Interface Yes No
Fully Supported Migrations Yes No
No Limit on Number of Visitors Yes No
Use Any Plugin or Theme You Choose Yes No
Free CDN Tier Included with All Plans Yes No
Disk Space At Least 100 GB As little as 10 GB
Wholly Owned Data Centers Yes No
100% Network Uptime Guarantee Yes No
100% Power Uptime Guarantee Yes No
On-Site Support Team Yes No
24/7/365 Support for WordPress and Your Server Yes No
24/7/365 Support by Phone, Live Chat, or Email Yes No

Nobody Includes More Than Liquid Web

Every Fully Managed server at Liquid Web is engineered for peace of mind, with a full suite of performance, reliability, and security solutions included at no extra charge.

CloudFlare® CDN

CloudFlare CDN includedWe provide full management for one of the world’s most popular CDNs, and full support when your site is added to CloudFlare through our interface. CloudFlare will not only speed up your site, but also provide a further boost to security.

Built-in Backups

Built-in backupsLocal backups are always included at no extra charge. For an extra layer of backup protection, you can add our Guardian backup system, which uses replication, synchronization, and point-in-time snapshots.

Enhanced Security

Enhanced Security includedSecurity is paramount, which is why we include ServerSecure™ with every Fully Managed server. Your server will be protected by a range of proprietary security enhancements to block unwanted access and keep your data secure.

DDoS Attack Protection

DDoS Attack ProtectionWe provide free basic protection from small volumetric DDoS attacks with every server on our network. Best of all, it’s always on and ready to go. For larger and more sophisticated attacks, comprehensive protection and mitigation is available.

The World’s Most-Loved Hosting Company

Nobody delights customers more than Liquid Web. Our Net Promoter Score (NPS® ) of 74 puts us among the world’s most loved brands — and makes us No. 1 in the hosting industry. What makes us special? Our customers say it best:
“Our company, PlanetGuide.com, has been designing and hosting websites for over 20 years, and I must say that the team at LiquidWeb has been the most helpful, knowledgeable, caring, and responsive sys-admins that we have ever dealt with. Please know that you hard work is appreciated on this end!”
— Brett Bauman

“At the end of the day, as a sales rep, it is your job to make a sales pitch and sell a product, but I felt (Ron and Mark) were both very genuine in their efforts to assist me and help me find a solution that works for me. As a whole, anytime I speak to a rep from Liquid Web, no one sounds robotic, which I appreciate (it surly helps that y’all don’t outsource sales or support).”
— Chase Morgan

Backed By World-Renowned Heroic Support®
and the Best Guarantees in the Industry

Liquid Web has more than 500 experienced administrators, engineers, and technicians — a third of them fully certified by Red Hat or Cisco — on-site and available to assist with any issue 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days per year. You’ll also find that our SLAs are the best in the industry: Initial Response Guarantees of 59 seconds or less by phone or LiveChat and 30 minutes or less by email. Should we ever fail to miss the mark on any of our guarantees, we’ll credit you 1,000% of the time we missed it by.
Heroic Promise
24/7 Heroic Support®
It’s easy to say you have the best support, but we have the numbers to back it up. Our Heroic Support® ranks No. 1 in customer satisfaction.
59-second Phone and Chat Initial Response Guarantee
59 Second Initial Response Guarantee: Phone and Chat
We’re committed to answering your call or connecting to your LiveChat within 59 seconds.
30 Minute Email Initial Response Guarantee
30 Minute Initial Response Guarantee: Email
HelpDesk tickets receive an initial response via email within 30 minutes, guaranteed.
100 Percent Network Uptime Guarantee
100% Network Uptime Guarantee
All major routing devices within our network will be reachable from the global Internet 100% of the time.
100 Percent Power Uptime Guarantee
100% Power Uptime Guarantee
By owning — not leasing — our infrastructure, we can guarantee that power to your rack will always be online.
30 Minute Hardware Replacement Guarantee
30 Minute Hardware Replacement Guarantee
Any hardware exhibiting a fault will be replaced within 30 minutes of identifying the problem.

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