Bottom Line Upfront:
For small to medium-sized businesses on a tight budget, Cloudways is the ideal choice.
WP Engine offers a hands-off experience but comes at a premium price.
For top-notch performance and speed, especially for enterprises, WPX Hosting is the go-to option.
Cloudways vs WPX vs WP Engine: Overview and General Info
Cloudways
Cloudways’ main goal is to provide customers with managed cloud hosting solutions. This allows them to focus on growing their business instead of dealing with hosting issues.
The company was founded in 2009 and is based on the Mediterranean island of Malta, with additional offices in Dubai and Spain. They have high-tech server networks all over the world, which enables them to offer fast and reliable cloud-based hosting for WordPress sites at an affordable price.
WP Engine:
Headquartered in Austin, WP Engine specializes in fully managed hosting and solutions for WordPress websites.
The company was founded in 2010 by Jason Cohen, Cullen Wilson, and Ben Metcalfe. Over the years, they’ve built an excellent infrastructure with data centers in Tokyo, London, and the Midwest US.
As their name suggests, WPEngine focuses solely on WordPress. They have a strong client list and offer great features and fully managed services for WordPress websites. They see themselves as a top platform for WordPress experiences, and that description fits them quite well.
This is the first and only available digital experience platform brought to us by the well-known and extraordinary WordPress.
They work at an exceptional level that is highly dependable, and their speed is incredible.
WPX Hosting:
WPX Hosting, established in 2013, is a reliable choice for businesses seeking managed WordPress hosting. This platform is designed to cater specifically to the needs of dedicated businesses.
What sets WPX Hosting apart is its exceptional speed and an array of excellent features that make managing a WordPress website a breeze. WPX Hosting has one of the most proficient and helpful support teams in the industry.
Cloudways vs WP Engine vs WPX Hosting: Features Comparison
WP Engine, WPX Hosting and Cloudways are managed WordPress hosting providers, and while they offer some similar features; there are also distinct differences between the three.
Let’s compare their features based on the provided excerpt:
Types of Web Hosting
WP Engine: It specializes exclusively in WordPress hosting, offering optimized features tailored to WordPress websites.
Cloudways: Cloudways offers managed hosting for various applications, allowing you to deploy multiple containerized applications on the same server, not limited to WordPress.
WPX Hosting: Offers managed WordPress hosting for medium to larger sites.
Site Migration:
WP Engine: It has a migration plugin that offers everything you need to navigate the site seamlessly.
Cloudways: Cloudways offers WordPress migration plugins free of cost. It helps you migrate your website to a new host quickly with no technical knowledge.
WPX Hosting: The site migration here is completely free but takes 24 hours to complete.
Staging Environment:
WP Engine: WPX Hosting offers a convenient Staging area feature that simplifies website management. With this tool, you can seamlessly integrate your Staging site with your Live site. This integration ensures that any recent blog comments or modifications to your Posts/Pages on the Live Site, made after the Staging version was created, remain intact.
Cloudways: Cloudways’ staging environment enables seamless website testing, providing a secure space to experiment with changes before implementing them on the live site.
WP Engine: WP Engine’s staging environment facilitates safe website testing, allowing changes to be tried out before going live, ensuring a flawless web experience.
Scalability:
WPX Hosting: WPX Hosting has higher plans that can accommodate high traffic.
Cloudways: Cloudways hosting offers exceptional scalability, allowing you to adjust server resources as your website grows effortlessly, ensuring optimal performance during traffic spikes and expansion.
WP Engine: WP Engine’s robust infrastructure excels for enterprise websites, effortlessly handling high traffic loads, from 10,000 to 100 million users. We prioritize high availability and data backup, ensuring uninterrupted site operation.
Containerized Applications:
WP Engine: WP Engine’s Containerized Applications simplify website management. It packs web assets into containers, making it easier to deploy and manage websites.
Cloudways: Their containers are easy to store, manage, and transport your apps in a neat and organized way in the cloud. This makes website management easier and creates quick deployment.
WPX Hosting: Streamlined and secure way to package and run your website software, ensuring faster performance and hassle-free management in the world of web hosting.
Framework Support:
WP Engine: WP Engine is exclusively focused on WordPress hosting, meaning you can only use WordPress for your websites. WP Engine includes the Genesis Framework and more than 30 premium StudioPress themes for free with all plans.
Cloudways: Cloudways, being more application-agnostic, allows you to host various frameworks and applications, not limited to WordPress.
WPX Hosting: WPX Hosting provides robust framework support, ensuring compatibility and optimal performance for popular website frameworks like WordPress, making it easier to build and maintain a successful online presence.
Cloudways vs WPX Hosting vs WP Engine: Performance
I conducted the speed tests and used several tools to run tests on server performance. My team used two tools for testing the page speed: Pingdom and Load Impact.
In terms of performance, WP Engine stands out with exceptional speed and reliability. WPX Hosting also offers solid performance, while Cloudways provides reliable server speed.
Here are my tests:
Cloudways
Cloudways has built-in solutions like Memcached, Varnish, and Breeze to make your website load faster. They also offer the CloudwaysCDN (content delivery network) for a fee, which stores a cached version of your website on servers around the world for faster delivery.
Cloudways boasts impressive performance with a focus on ensuring a high level of uptime for your website.
Over six months, it was up and running 99.98% of the time, which is fantastic. In terms of speed, it’s as quick as top-notch servers, with an average response time of just 229ms, leaving typical shared hosting (usually 400-600ms) in the dust.
I picked the Cloudways site to check with Pingdom and Load Impact. Here is the result of my findings:
- London: 0.96 seconds
- San Francisco: 0.672 seconds
- Sydney: 2.20 seconds
WP Engine
WP Engine has its caching solution called EverCache, specially designed for WordPress websites. The good thing is, WP Engine’s global CDN is free, giving it an advantage over Cloudways‘ similar but paid service.
With WP Engine, you can choose from over 20 locations offered by Google Cloud or Amazon Web Servers in the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia. However, some data centers are only available with a Premium or better plan.
The load time for the following locations was:
- London: 0.92 seconds
- San Francisco: 0.56 seconds
- Sydney: 2.39 seconds
Similarly, the average response time for WP Engine was 0.83 milliseconds with 59 ms as minimum and 1.38 seconds as maximum.
WPX Hosting
When I ran tests for my WPX Hosting site, the results were even better.
Here are the findings of my test:
- London: 0.84 seconds
- San Francisco: 0.49 seconds
- Sydney: 1.39 seconds
For the speed tests, the average response time was 28 ms, with a minimum of 21 ms and a maximum of 48 ms.
Winner: WPX Hosting
Cloudways vs WP Engine vs WPX Hosting: Ease of Use
The Control Panel is like the command center for your hosting account. It helps you handle different tasks.
WPX Hosting
WPX has its custom Control Panel. It does many of the important things that a regular cPanel does. But WPX’s Control Panel is easier to use, move around, and look better.
One big reason people like WPX’s custom Control Panel over the regular cPanel is that the default cPanel can slow down the servers.
WP Engine
WP Engine also has a custom cPanel- User Portal.
You can find it at https://my.wpengine.com/. With the User Portal, you can do lots of stuff in one place. You can manage websites, get login info for SFTP, work with databases, create sites, and see billing details.
Plus, you can use it for CDN, Git push, and Site Migration and see stats about your website’s environment. The User Portal is easy to use and neater than cPanel. But it has more cool features than cPanel.
Cloudways
Cloudways comes with a renowned cPanel. This all-in-one interface empowers you to have complete command over your website, enabling the management of domains, databases, files, and much more from a single location.
Cloudways goes the extra mile by offering multiple features tailored to simplify WordPress site management, while also boasting impressive customer support.
Winner: WP Engine
Security
When you’re getting ready to host a website, it’s crucial to think about how secure the hosting service is.
WPX Hosting
WPX is all about keeping things safe, and they’ve got some strong security measures in place. They do things like scan for and remove malware, protect against DDoS attacks, filter out email spam, and provide free SSL certificates to keep your site secure.
WP Engine
WP Engine is also serious about security. They’re dependable when it comes to keeping your site safe.
WP Engine offers its proprietary firewall, along with a malware scanner and disk write protection. This combination prevents malicious code from embedding itself into your website’s file system.
They review the code, make sure your website’s core is up to date and patched, use Multi-Factor Authentication for added security, encrypt your site’s traffic with SSL, watch out for threats and block them, and have a plan for when things go wrong with disaster recovery measures in place.
Cloudways
All the hosts integrate SSL certificates into your dashboard.
You can activate them on the correct tab to ensure that your website is protected with a padlock. This is crucial, especially for online stores, as SSL certificates encrypt users’ data to prevent theft. Even for regular websites, having SSL protection can help you rank higher in search engines.
Cloudways regularly updates its servers with security patches to remove vulnerabilities and provides a dedicated firewall for your website’s protection.
Winner: WP Engine
Cloudways vs WPX Hosting vs WP Engine: Customer Support
Cloudways
For Cloudways, you can buy the Advanced Support add-on to get priority support or the Premium Support add-on for direct phone contact and a dedicated Slack channel.
WP Engine
WP Engine has more than 100 WordPress experts who are ready to help you. They offer customer support all day and night through live chat for everyone. You can call them 24/7, except if you have a Personal plan. If your problem can’t be fixed immediately through chat or phone, the support team will make a special request to help you.
For big business customers, they have email support around the clock. They even have a special team called Customer Experience Operations that’s always working to make your experience with WP Engine better.
WPX Hosting
WPX Hosting offers 24/7 support through live chat and a ticket system.
Their knowledgeable team provides expertise, friendly assistance, and quick responses for all web hosting needs, making them a reliable partner in online success.
Pricing Comparison Cloudways vs WP Engine 2023
Three of them offer unique pricing structures, and I wanted to see how they are compared based on the information provided.
WP Engine Pricing
With WP Engine, they have three main plans for their managed WordPress hosting. What’s nice is that all plans give you access to the same features, but the higher-tier plans come with more resources, which is pretty cool.
The Startup Plan caught my eye, offering one website, 10GB of storage, 50GB of bandwidth, and up to 25,000 monthly visits. And guess what? They even have a sweet deal where you can get two free months of hosting with a prepaid yearly plan!
Cloudways Pricing
Now, let’s talk about Cloudways. What I found interesting is that they give you the flexibility to choose your own infrastructure from various cloud providers, which is pretty neat. The pricing and resources vary depending on the infrastructure you select.
For instance, if you opt for DigitalOcean’s servers, you can get a plan that costs significantly less than WP Engine’s Startup plan.
It even has unlimited websites, 25GB of storage, 1TB of bandwidth, and unmetered monthly visits! But here’s the catch – if you go with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers, the cheapest plan costs more than WP Engine’s Startup plan. Plus, it only offers 20GB of storage and 2GB of bandwidth, with additional data transfer billed separately.
WPX Hosting Pricing
WPX Hosting provides three pricing plans:
- Business Plan ($20.83/month): Ideal for starting blogs, offering super-fast and reliable WordPress hosting. Allows hosting of up to 5 websites with 50 GB bandwidth, 10 GB disk space, and dedicated RAM and SSD servers for improved loading times.
- Professional Plan ($41.58/month): Offers flexibility for hosting up to 15 sites. Includes 100 GB bandwidth, 20 GB disk space, and dedicated RAM and SSD servers. Comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
- Elite Plan ($83.25/month): Suited for high-traffic websites, hosting up to 35 websites with unlimited bandwidth, 40 GB disk space, and dedicated RAM and SSD servers. Also includes a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Verdict on Cloudways vs WPX Hosting vs WP Engine
As I said earlier, Cloudways, WPX Hosting, and WP Engine are great and will help make your life easier and smoother.
Most have similar features, but they differ in pricing and, most importantly, in immediate recovery management. I believe that a hosting solution should have some disaster management plan.
You should look into pricing because if a platform offers all of the features you require at a lower cost, you should go for it and begin using that platform. Website migration is also available on all three platforms, which is fantastic.
If you are on a tight budget and require hosting for small and medium-sized businesses, Cloudways is the way to go.
WP Engine excels in providing a hands-off experience, handling everything for you. However, this convenience comes at a premium price, with higher fees compared to standard hosting services.
If you need extremely fast servers with top-notch performance, WPX Hosting is the best choice, and enterprises trust it.
Quick Links:
Cloudways has been a lifesaver for me. I have been burned by so many other web hosting companies and Cloudways never let me down. It is one of the few companies that really know how to do things right, from their pricing to support services- they’re just perfect!