Fast WordPress Hosting at WP EngineWe’ve been testing out WP EngineĀ and so far, I’ve been very impressed. It’s managed WordPress hosting which means that they are managing many of the hosting administration that normally you would do. But in reality, it’s the kind of thing that they do that you don’t actually really ever do. Like what? Backup, upgrades, fixes, warnings. Should you keep an eye on this kind of thing yourself? Of course. But do you? Do you back up your family photos and floss your teeth regularly? Yeah, leave this important administrative work to the pros. Oh, by the way, it’s super fast.

Itā€™s time to start update sites to 3.5! As part of our policy, weā€™re going to begin automatically updating all our customer sites soon.

I love the fact that they’ll upgrade WordPress core files as well as plugins for you. We here at Likoma have built several hundred websites, but we don’t manage them so once they’re live and running, it’s up to the new owner to keep things up to date. Do they do it? Maybe 10% of them. What’s the harm? Viruses, hacked websites, error pages, etc.

WP Engine Speed

Huge speed increase when we switched to WP Engine.

Uptime has also been impressive. I find that anything above 99% is acceptable. Some hosts I’ve seen fall around 96% which does add up to some serious downtime. Of course, if no one notices (downtime is in the middle of the night), OK, fine, whatever, but it seems to always happen at launch time, sales special days, and when that big client needs to see your site. So if you’re going to play the numbers, it’s good to have 99%+ uptime on your site.

WP Engine Downtime and Uptime

Uptime was so minimal, I choose to show the downtime graph.

In all, I’ve been very impressed so far. I just love that they do things behind the scenes that you say you’ll do but you know you probably won’t really do. OK, sure, I do them, but I live and breathe websites and WordPress. If you want your site to just be your business and want to focus on what you do best and not if the latest version of your tricked-out plugin will break your theme, let the pros at WP Engine host your site and you’ll be in good hands.