Managed WordPress hosting is one of the several types of services available for the WordPress ecosystem. It is costlier than shared plans and comes with many useful features that users of shared servers can only add/enable on their site by purchasing expensive plugins/themes or tweaking the server configuration files to get the most out of the server. Several companies offer managed WP hosting services. Below, we’ve compared the plans, features, and pricing of two popular managed hosting service providers – WP Engine and Cloudways.
WP Engine has launched four managed WordPress packages – Startup, Professional, Growth, and Scale. The Startup plan of the firm supports the hosting of 1 website and provides 10GB of storage memory. It supports 25000 visitors/month. The WPE professional package lets its buyers host three websites and provides 15GB of storage memory. It supports up to 75k monthly visitors.
The Startup and Professional servers are priced at 25 dollars and 63 dollars per month. The Growth and Scale managed WordPress hosting plans cost 115 and 290 dollars per month. They support the hosting of 10 and 30 websites, respectively, and offer 20 and 50GB of storage memory. These two packages support 100k and 400k visitors per month. In addition to these four plans, WP Engine has also introduced a custom subscription that lets users host 30+ websites that have traffic of more than 400k.
Cloudways has introduced four managed packages in these five categories – Linode, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, AWS, and Vultr. The price of the servers depends on the platform you choose. For instance, the AWS and Google cloud plans would be priced 2 or 3 times higher than the plans of Linode, DigitalOcean, and Vultr. CW lets users buy a Linode, DigitalOcean, or Vultr VPS with 1GB to 8GB RAM.
The server with 1GB RAM is priced at 12 dollars and is equipped with a 1-core processor. It has 25GB of storage memory. The server with 2GB RAM will cost you 24 USD/month. It comes with a single-core processor and 50GB to 60GB of storage memory. The 4GB RAM server features a 2-core processor and contains an 80 GB storage disk. Cloudways has priced it at 50 dollars/month. The VPS with 8GB RAM ships with a 4-core processor, and 160GB storage memory, and it costs between 90 to 100 dollars per month. The Cloudways AWS and Google Cloud plans are priced between 33 and 275 dollars.
Premium themes
In 2019, WP Engine bought one of the top WordPress theme development companies – StudioPress and made the templates launched by StudioPress a part of their packages. No matter what WP Engine hosting plan you buy, you’ll get access to 10 premium StudioPress WordPress themes at no additional cost. CW doesn’t offer free premium WordPress themes with its plans.
Website migration
Cloudways offers a free migration service wherein its support staff will move the website from the old server to the new server for free. WPE will give you a plugin through which you will be able to move your website any time of the day or night.
Staging
The Staging platform of web hosting companies lets users test any script/plugin/theme on the server before they use the product on a live website. It is nothing but a replica of your live website that you can play with. WP Engine and Cloudways support staging.
Server level caching
The servers of the two firms will improve the website’s performance by caching the pages or website files in real-time. CW caching stack is powered by Memcached, Redis, and Varnish. WP Engine lets users clear the page, object, network, and local caches from its dashboard.
Applications
Cloudways supports WordPress and many other popular applications such as Drupal, Magento, and custom-built apps that were written using Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails, etc. WP Engine supports the WordPress content management system only.
Updates and security
WP Engine staff will update your WordPress core automatically whenever a new version of WP is launched. They’ll also update PHP. Cloudways users must update WP and PHP on their servers manually. Its staff will only update the OS and its packages. Both hosting firms let their users activate two-factor authentication. For those who are not aware, 2FA makes your account more secure. When you enable it, the chances of your hosting account getting hacked are low. According to WP Engine, their infrastructure is SOC2 compliant, and the uptime of their servers is 99.99%. Cloudways servers are auto-healed i.e. If the server has encountered some issue, it will be restarted automatically.
Closing words: As the hosting infrastructure of WPE is SOC2 compliant, WordPress websites hosted on WPE seem to be safer than those hosted on Cloudways. CW plans are cheap, but they don’t provide free premium WP themes like WP Engine.
