Is It Time to Consider Your Hosting Options?
Things are really heating up in the WP Engine vs WordPress drama. If you own or manage a WordPress site, you should consider the impact this very public legal battle can have on your business…especially if your site is hosted at WP Engine.
But First, What’s the Difference Between WordPress and WP Engine?
What is WordPress?
WordPress is an open-source content management system. This means, the code is open and anyone can view it, change it and use it how they see fit. This is the beauty of open source. However, it also means that it needs to be closely managed by a centralized authority to ensure that bad actors don’t try to take advantage of the product for their own benefit. It’s a balance that is managed by the incredible team at WordPress led by CEO, Matt Mullenweg.
WordPress is the most popular product of its kind on earth. In fact, WordPress presently powers around 40% of the entire internet. It is used by many of the leading website development agencies and is now included in the curriculum at many technology educational institutions. It is also constantly being improved. That is one of the amazing benefits of open source technology. The pace of innovation is proportionate to the size of the community that supports it (vs private companies where innovation moves at the pace of their internal R&D budget). This model has been successfully supporting software innovation for decades.
What is WP Engine?
Every website needs a place to live. And that’s where hosting services like WP Engine come into play. WP Engine is not WordPress. They are a hosting company with a bunch of servers that are pre-configured in a very specific way to host and server WordPress websites fast and securely. They are a private company that has raised $250M in funding led by Silver Lake. WPEngine says that its platform powers around five percent of all internet visits. That’s a big piece of the entire internet and thus a conflict with WordPress is concerning for a lot of website owners.
WP Engine is one of many WordPress web hosts. However, WP Engine is a bit different than your average host. WP Engine ONLY supports WordPress websites as well as WooCommerce – the top ecommerce plugin for WordPress. They have constrained their hosting environment in ways that other hosts don’t – blocking certain plugins, disallowing certain 3rd party integrations and creating a custom interface for managing the site and server that deviates from the norms seen with other hosts. And they have their own firewall, CDN (with CloudFlare), backups and other systems to help secure and maintain WordPress sites. WP Engine has essentially created their own tight little version of WordPress that they manage under the label of hosting. On the surface, there is nothing wrong with this. That’s the nature of open source software. But, it has created tension with the core team at WordPress.
Now, What Happened?
WordPress CEO Matt Mullenweg made the claim that WP Engine is infringing on WordPress and Woocommerce trademarks. This is understandable given the amount of times “WP” and “WordPress” are mentioned in WPEngine’s website and marketing. Mullenweg even went so far as to say that WP Engine is a cancer to WordPress due to their large amount of profit they have made off the open-source product and due to their lack of contribution back to the WordPress community – much of which are 3rd party developers who volunteer their time and passion to improving the product. Whether any of his claims are legally enforceable remains to be seen.
It got even worse when Mullenweg decided to ban WP Engine from accessing WordPress resources. In retrospect, that move kind of backfired. The innocent users and their WordPress sites were getting caught in the middle of this tech tug-of-war. Realizing the unintended fallout, he lifted the ban after just a few days.
To add to the drama, WP Engine responded by suing Matt Mullenweg for “extortion and abuse of power.” This building tension between a major web host and the WordPress product itself is undoubtedly going to set a precedent for how 3rd party companies can and cannot use “WordPress” and “WP” in their own brand and messaging. It will also set a precedent for how much power and control centralized organizations have over other open source products. For example, Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP are also open source software. Ironically, these four products form the L.A.M.P. stack which powers the majority of servers that run WordPress websites. Thus, this lawsuit has far reaching implications beyond just the WordPress product itself.
Pros and Cons of WP Engine
So, now maybe you’re considering your hosting options and want to know a bit more about the pros and cons of WP Engine. We’ll try to be as unbiased as possible as we don’t want to add fuel to the fire. WP Engine is a solid web host. But, like any product or service, it is not a perfect fit for everyone. Here is our take on some high-level pros and cons based on our experience working with websites hosted on WP Engine.
Pros
- Stellar Customer Service: Their support team is generally top-notch. When you run into issues, they’re there to help.
- Managed Hosting: They don’t just update their server software and hardware, they also do “threat detection and blocking, daily backups, regular WordPress updates, caching to boost page speeds, and more.”
- Speed and Security: With such a tightly managed infrastructure, they optimize for performance and keep security tight.
- Agency Approved: They’ve got a good rep within the agency community (many of whom are WP Engine resellers). 1.5 million websites are hosted on their infrastructure! Though, to put it in perspective, that’s still a small slice of the 810 million WordPress sites out there.
Cons
- Hosting Constraints: They can be a bit strict with respect to which plugins you can install and how your site integrates with third-party applications. For most people this is a moot point. But, for some larger sites with custom applications/integrations, this can be a deal breaker.
- Limited Resources: Compared to competitors, they offer less in terms of storage, bandwidth, CPU, and RAM. You might feel the pinch as your site grows.
- Legal Battles: They’re currently in a very public spat with WordPress.org. Not exactly confidence-inspiring.
- Past Security Breach: Back in 2015, WP Engine had a credential exposure incident. While that’s a while ago, security lapses are hard to forget.
Implications for Your Businesses
So why should you care about this tech beef? Well, if your website relies on WordPress (and there’s a good chance it does), this feud could have ripple effects on your site’s performance, security, and even the ability of your site to receive updates. As we’ve already seen, WP Engine (and all the sites it hosts) got banned for a brief period of time.
When two major players in the WordPress ecosystem start throwing legal darts at each other, small businesses can get caught in the crossfire. So, we’ve written this last section to help smaller businesses consider their options. Sometimes getting out of the crossfire is the only way to mitigate your risk.
How to Find a Great WordPress Host
So maybe now you’re rethinking your hosting situation. That’s understandable in a situation like this. Here are some tips on how to research WordPress hosting providers.
Do Your Own Research on WordPress Hosting Providers
Don’t just take the first Google result and call it a day. Dive deep:
Read Reviews: See what real users are saying. Look for trends in complaints or praises.
Check Their SLA: The Service Level Agreement tells you what uptime and support you can expect. It might be hard to find on their website so you may have to ask for them to provide it via their live chat or sales department.
Test Customer Support: Shoot them an email or call to see how responsive they are.
Understand the Plans: Make sure you know what you’re getting in terms of resources (bandwidth, CPU, RAM, storage space, etc) and any limitations.
By the way, we’ve got a whole article on the Most Secure WordPress Hosts if you want to check that out. And yes, WP Engine is included in our list.
Understand the Different Types of Hosting Plans
It’s easy to get lost in the hosting jargon. Here’s a brief summary:
Shared Hosting: You’re sharing resources with other websites. It’s like renting a highrise apartment. It’s affordable, but you don’t have much room to grow as operations expand…and some apartments are much smaller than others.
VPS (Virtual Private Server): A step up. You get a portion of a server’s resources. More control, more power. But, this is like sharing a chunk of the building with another group of larger tenants. You’re still a bit constrained.
Dedicated Server: The whole server is yours. Maximum control and performance within the limits of that single server’s hardware and connection to the internet.
Cloud Hosting: It’s similar to a dedicated server except without a physical location and additional IT costs. The single biggest advantage of cloud hosting is that your site can be served from multiple locations giving it more resilience to heavy traffic spikes and localized outages.
Side note on SSD hosts: We also strongly recommend looking for hosting companies that use SSD (solid state drives). These are more expensive (so only the best companies use them). But, they have a much lower failure rate which helps to further protect your site from data loss or downtime.
Sign Up for a Plan with WordZite
If you don’t have the time, money or resources to vet all of your options, you may want to consider WordZite’s security and performance services. The biggest benefit to working with us is that we are hosting and technology agnostic. We work for you – not a hosting company, not a plugin provider. So, we’re able to assess your situation from both a technology and strategic standpoint and provide you with some options to consider.
As long as your website is on a top-tier host (and not some mismanaged old server sitting in a company closet), we can help take care of the hosting, backups, updates, firewall, CDN, speed optimization, security scans, uptime monitoring, notifications and much more. We take the hassle out of WordPress security and maintenance. You’ll never again have to worry about downtime, security breaches, or limited resources. And best of all, we can move your site to a different host with ease should a situation like this arise.
Imagine never having to think about hosting again. Sounds nice, right?
Wrapping up
The internet is a wild place. When organizations like WordPress and WP Engine flex their corporate muscles, things happen. But instead of hitting the panic button, take this as a nudge to review your hosting situation and security measures before it becomes a problem.
If you need a hand or just want to chat about your options, feel free to contact WordZite. We’re here to help.