FBA is considering a move to a new web hosting company as part the launch of our net website (coming soon!). WP Engine has been recommended by our web developers. The website paints a pretty picture but I want to reach out to the community to see if anyone here has experience with WP Engine Hosting.
Also, since we will be driving traffic to our website for live-stream, I am interested in learning what web hosting companies are in use by other mega churches across the US.
We switched over to WP Engine last year for our main website and another smaller site. No complaints so far. Havent had any performance issues, slowness, or downtime. We have a seperate team that maintains the site and I dont recall hearing any complaints from them.
The only thing that was kind of different was that WP Engine uses a SaaS version of cloudflare so you dont have any control over the cloudflare rules/workers/whatever if you are used to using those.
I used to work in the web hosting industry about 9 years ago and remember nothing but good things about WP Engine and from everything I can tell they still have a good reputation and great performance.
I switched to WP Engine 3 months ago. It is probably the leader for WordPress hosting. They handle updates (WP, PHP, Themes, and Plugins). They offer staging and dev sites. We have two sites - church and school, so we bought the 3 site package. My biggest concern for security is an out of date plug-in and they take care of that for me. I had to reach out to customer service to make a change to something and they were sharp and fast.
We always hosted our own websites, normally custom code rather than WordPress, but a few wordpress sites, then we signed up for WP Engine and we will never manage our own server again.
We’re a Microsoft 365 shop as well, and have set up Single Sign On and Azure AD auth, so staff managing websites don’t need a password to log in to our WP Engine admin interface, and can even sign in to wp-admin without another password (WP Engine auto-generates the admin account on the site and logs you in automatically, so you still have built-in WordPress user details, it just takes the pain out from logging in).
I highly recommend WPEngine, you won’t be upset you went with them.
We’re ridiculous and have about 15 websites, and it is so nice having a solid system to manage all of that centrally. And Jonathan is right, their customer service is fantastic.