If you run a blog or a corporate site, there is a high chance that you might be on WordPress. After all, WordPress powers up to twenty percent of all websites as of October 2013. Even for e-commerce shops, WordPress has begun to grow in popularity.
The very good thing about WordPress, as compared to other CMS (content management system) is that, due to its strong following, it has many plugins that enhances your site. This gives your website various capabilities. And due to it being built on PHP language, it is much easier to extend your website as compared to developing on both Drupal and Joomla.
Even top websites run WordPress
In Malaysia, even Paultan.org, our top Malaysian blog on automotive news runs on WordPress. Worldwide, top sites like TechCrunch, Mashable and ArsTechnica all run on WordPress as well.
The problem with running such a traffic intense popular site like TechCrunch, Mashable and even Paultan is scalability. After all, as your site grows both in size and traffic, the cheap shared hosting that you use will eventually be too slow or it might even crash.
Also, WordPress sites have been subject to massive Botnet attacks in the recent months. Add in SQL injection threats and the priority for WordPress owners to find a good hosting partner becomes very urgent. Without proper security, your website risks being compromised.
On our side, we have been on WP Engine since April this year, when we found out about the benefits of being on WP Engine. Here, we list them out for you, if you are keen to sign up =)
A) Scalability
Being cloud based means your website is scalable. Whether you have one hundred unique visitors or one hundred thousand, WP Engine will be able to scale your site. Even if it is a sudden increase in visitors. If you in a conventional server, your site might just do down from the traffic.
Also, being cloud based ensures you don’t have to migrate servers. It becomes especially painful if your site is a few gigabytes in size.
B) Security
WP Engine partnered Sucuri, the standard in protecting your site against malware and to cleanup your sites. Unlike our local Malaysian providers, WP Engine promises to even unhack your site if it gets hacked. That is basically like having your own IT tech team.
And if you need to restore, WP Engine has about a month of daily restore points for your WordPress installation. This is particularly valuable when your website messed up, or if you need to restore to a previous configuration. The difference with WP Engine’s backup points are that you can have an instant restore point.
This is crucial because, if you ever need to make an adjustment, you can do it and have a peace of mind. The restore point of WP Engine works almost instantly due to WP Engine’s server cluster. Basically you are paying a small amount for server technology that costs so much more if you buy a server cluster.
That in itself has saved our site several times. I could not share with you how many times on our old local Malaysian host that I had to put the site on maintenance mode to upload the restore that would take hours. Right now, we can focus on TechGarage instead of the backend.
Add to this a daily restore point and you have a winner. Not all hosting companies give a daily restore point for you and your precious files.
C) Staging
The Staging site for WP Engine is one of its killer features. Many times when we want to rollout a change on the site, but have to test it out, having a staging site is crucial. Even more so when the staging site sits on a server cluster, which makes us able to copy the live site unto staging with just a click of a button.
And even better, since April 2013, WP Engine added in the ability of copying from Staging to Live! That itself is a genius, as it allows you to copy whatever you have done on your Staging site and move it to your live site.
Conclusion
We here at TechGarage love our WP Engine host due to its speed, reliability and all the advanced features. Even though it starts at USD 29/month, it freed us from troubleshooting the server (happens when you have so many WordPress plugins), and concentrate on TechGarage. Give it a try, you might like it too!
Limited Time Offer Deal of WP Engine
From now until the 2nd of December, WP Engine is offering 4 months FREE. Now that is a great deal, as every month would cost you USD 29. Four free months by WP Engine is really an amazing deal.
Go to WP Engine and key in the coupon, “cyberhostspecial13″. That’s a great deal =)