Transcript
Hey there, David Risley here of Blog Marketing Academy.
I’m here to talk about WP Engine. Now, this is a managed WordPress Hosting Environment. And what I’ve actually been doing for the last, twelve, several hours; I spent a few hours on it yesterday, is transitioning many of my main WordPress sites over to WP Engine. So, I’m actually officially making a hosting change. The Blog Marketing Academy is now hosted with WP Engine and I’m in the process of moving my Tech site over to WP Engine as well.
Why WP Engine? I know that there are some people who are looking at a company like WP Engine and they’re kind of curious if they should use it and if it’s worth it. I was hosted with “Servant” before. Now, Servant is a company that does dedicated servers and they do VPS and I’ve been very happy with Servant. I don’t have any problems with Servant and I’m still going to keep my Servant account open, by the way, because I have some things that don’t use WordPress that I want to keep over there. And I still like to have a very flexible environment because the thing about WP Engine is that it is WordPress, exclusively. So, if you’re site is not using WordPress, you’re pretty much SOL when it comes to site like WP Engine. I mean, you can just tell by the name, right? “WP Engine”.
But when it comes to WordPress, man alive, these people will have it down! The site is faster than hell, I love the fact that I don’t have to worry about caching plug-ins anymore because it’s all built in, I don’t have to worry about making sure that my back-ups are working because it’s all built-in, I don’t have to worry about my own private – what I used to call “sandbox” which is basically a copy of my blog that I could screw around with and not have it be out there in the public; all that is built right in to WP Engine; all I have to do is literally hit a button, it creates a staging area; I can play around… and then when I’m happy with it I just hit another button and it just goes live with the whole darn thing! It does not get any easier than that.
So, all these things I used to have to do myself, I no longer have to do. I don’t even have to upgrade WordPress anymore because they do it for me. It’s like having a little bit of an IT guy on my staff whose their job is just to make my stuff work. And it’s just incorporated into my hosting bill.
So that’s the main reason why I moved over to WP Engine. Because it’s fully managed, dedicated to WordPress which is pretty much what I use. And rather than hiring some guy who’s just their job is to keep my site up, if anything ever got hacked, it’s their job to fix it; WP Engine does all that. It was cheaper to do it this way.
That’s the story why I switched to WP Engine.
Now, do I recommend it to you? Here’s the thing… I definitely recommend WP Engine to you. However, I’ll be honest… if you’re just starting out, if your site is literally just brand-spanking-new, WP Engine might be a little overkill. It is a little bit more expensive than a standard HostGator or Bluehost style hosting account because it’s not a standard shared hosting environment. I mean, it’s a share but it’s just set up differently. So, therefore, the plans are more expensive than if you went over to Bluehost. So, if you’re just starting out and you literally have just a handful of visitors a day, Bluehost is perfectly fine.
And would I recommend HostGator anymore? I don’t know if I would. I’ve been recommending HostGator on the site and it’s mainly I want to recommend something that it’s going to be on the price range of a majority of my readers. But the thing is, ever since HostGator got acquired a while back, I’ve been hearing more horror stories about HostGator. People getting hacked and just things not going right. And I’ve heard some people say that their quality of support has gone down. I’ve not personally used HostGator in well over a year, so I don’t have the recent experience with HostGator. I was just trusting that it was good then and it should still be good. But when I started having people that I know who’ve been using HostGator started complaining and one of them is actually a good friend of mine who was with HostGator and who’s now moving to WP Engine; I’m like, “okay, I think I need to stop recommending HostGator” because I don’t want to recommend anything to people that might be problematic down the road.
So, if you’re just starting out I think you should go with Bluehost. I know that they’re owned by the same company as HostGator but I’ve not heard any of the problems with Bluehost. And that says something. I mean, reputation says a lot. But my personal favorite is definitely WP Engine at this point. I’ve only been with them a day or so since I’ve been making this video but I’m really happy with the company, so far.
I’ve contacted their support people twice yesterday using their real time chat. Both of them knew exactly what they’re doing, they were extremely fast. One guy he says, “Okay, this might take a little bit longer to do in chat, how about I just simply give you a call.” And within about five minutes they called my phone and I was talking to their support guy, we got the whole thing worked out. So their support has been awesome. And that’s one of the things I love about a good hosting company.
Anyway, that’s where I’ve gone; WP Engine, and that’s about it. I definitely recommend that you check it out. And I will have links inside the toolbox, up on the header on blogmarketingacademy.com, and down at the bottom because I’m going to make everybody know that I’m hosted with WP Engine.
I’m a Content Marketer, I’m in the business of helping. Those of you guys with blogs, use your blogs effectively and there’s no doubt that many of my readers don’t know how to do all the upgrades, all that stuff with WordPress, WP Engine takes care of it for you. They don’t know how to tweak WordPress for performance; WP Engine takes care of that for you. I really think that WP Engine is going to be a really good fit for most of my readers. As long as you’re willing to pay a little bit more to not have to worry about all that stuff. If you really are the do-it-yourself type and you just want to pay like the absolute bottom-barrel pricing for everything, go to Bluehost, because I don’t think they’re going to let you down, either. Okay?
If you sign up for your WPEngine account through this link, you can also go to this page and select any bonus you want and we’ll hook you up.
That’s about it. Talk to you soon.
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