SiteGround Vs WpEngine

siteground vs wpengineComparing between cloud hosting and shared hosting plans is quite challenging considering the fact that both of them cater to a completely different market base.

This comparison of Siteground vs WpEngine is created to help you pick the web host which fits into your requirement.

Siteground that provides excellent shared hosting plans meant for developers and business applications is one of the best web hosting companies in the category. On the other hand, WpEngine is an enterprise WordPress hosting provider that provides some of the most powerful plans meant for building any kind of web application on top of their servers.

With built-in scalability and unlimited resource usage, the plans provided by WpEngine come with extra power even for the smallest websites hosted on top of it. Thus its prices also start at much higher rates when compared to traditional web hosting companies.

Siteground also supports dedicated WordPress hosting but also support hosting of other types of web applications and content management systems. This, however, is not the case with WpEngine. They have specially configured their servers to run only WordPress and thus none of the other CMS’s would run on top of their server. Thus it is quite a challenge for custom application developers as all apps cannot be run top of WordPress. Siteground thus allows users to build any kind of app and explicitly supports Joomla and Magento. This allows users to build all kinds of websites ranging from small websites to high resource consuming e-commerce websites. Let’s dive deeper into each of the companies and explore the plans provided by them to understand how they can be ideal for your purposes.

Summary: Siteground vs Wpengine
Comparing Siteground vs Wpengine is not an ideal comparison  because Wpengine offer enterprise-class managed WordPress hosting while Siteground offer unmanaged hosting services.  Siteground also offers cloud hosting, dedicated server & reseller hosting services. On the other hand, Wpengine only deals in managed WordPress hosting services.

So if you've just started a blog or already running a blog/website with moderate traffic, you can go with Siteground without any second thought. Although if you're looking for a more reliable managed hosting services with good server performance, uptime Wpengine is a good option. You'll have to pay more if you're going with Wpengine while Siteground is cheaper.

 

Siteground vs WpEngine: Plans and Pricing

The pricing of the services determines a lot about the organization, consumers and the competitiveness of the web hosting Industry. With such huge competition among web hosting companies and with new companies coming along nearly every day, it becomes quite tough for an established infrastructure organization to price their products and services keeping in mind the competitive pricing provided by their competitors. Among the above two companies, Siteground has the best packages with competitive pricing and features that are not even found in established companies like WpEngine. The plans provided by the companies are:

Siteground

To support the developers and MVP development, has effectively maintained a strategic pricing policy that not only allows the users the necessary flexibility in utilizing server resources but also provides breakpoints in resource usage to help developers overcome the temporary surge in traffic or application usage at peak intervals. However, its plans are cheap enough in comparison to most web hosting companies and comes in 3 distinct types namely:

siteground wordpress hosting pricing

  1. Startup: Priced at only $3.95/month, the plan is ideal for all kinds of websites and supports up to 10,000 page requests every month. Although the number of page requests can go higher or lower, the statistics are only a base measure. Users can host any type of average sized website that can function as a business website, corporate blog, personal blog or any of the numerous types of common website types. There are no restrictions on the type of application that can be hosted on the server, however the amount of resources that can be consumed have a limit. It comes with 10GB storage space and allows users to host only one website. You get all other features at unlimited rates like the number of free email accounts, databases, traffic, CDN along with SSH access to your server. You can also host a small application if you want to but you can only have a single domain with the plan.
  2. GrowBig: The next plan is priced at $7.95/month and comes with numerous additional features along with all the features included in the startup plan. Unlike in the startup plan, you can host multiple websites and have unlimited subdomains. It also comes with unlimited traffic and databases along with free emails as per your requirements. It allows storage space up to 20GB and can effectively handle up to 25000 visitors and much more page requests. It is ideal for a growing website or blog that is continually consuming variable amount of resources over a period of time. You can further optimize the server with the help of the premium features included in the plan like SuperCacher for high speed page caching, Free SSL certificate for 1 year and up to 30 Backup copies that can be used to back up your server configuration in case of failures.
  3. GoGeek: Mainly targeted towards high performance oriented applications and custom apps that can be served directly from the server, the plan comes with numerous advancements that you can hardly find in any other hosting company. It comes with 30GB space and allows you to host multiple websites. Along with all the essential features included in Startup and GrowBig, it comes with numerous additional features like advanced server infrastructure ideal for all kinds of development related tasks, preinstalled GIT and other development features. You can easily build any kind of application and serve them directly up to 100,000 visitors every month. This plan is ideal for most users and it can accommodate multiple websites and apps at the same time. You can also connect your application to servers and services all across the web to further increase your application deliverability. Server side caching and client side cloud flare caching could greatly help you optimize your application deliverability and therefore increate the conversions. It is priced at $11.95/month.

WpEngine

Pricing competitively while at the same time focusing on the numerous features and add-ons is quite hard for any web hosting company in the tough market conditions. Therefore, pricing according to the quality often turns out to be much costlier than the competitive pricing. WpEngine fortunately doesn’t consider much for its competition and therefore sets its pricing according to the quality and services it provides. Being a dedicated WordPress hosting company, it cannot focus on providing cheap hosting packages expecting users to host static website and then compensate the profits in dynamic and high resource consuming plans. Let’s take a deeper look in to the plans and pricing provided by WpEngine and which one would suit your requirements.

wpengine managed wordpress hosting plans

  1. Personal: Priced at $29/month the plan is ideal for all kinds of websites ranging from normal blogs and corporate websites to portfolio websites and other application oriented websites that require high performance oriented server architecture. You can host only a single website on this plan but can handle up to 25k visitors. The plan comes with 10GB storage and 60 days’ money back guarantee that should be enough for you to try and test your website on the production environment. You can upgrade the servers to higher plans in case you need more resources. Along with the resources users get unlimited data transfer and also the flexibility to build any kind of website or application along with custom themes, plugins and other features ideal for their requirements.
  2. Professional: Priced at $99/month, the plan comes with 20GB local storage along with 10 WordPress installs and 100k visitors. You can easily host up to 10 websites with unlimited data transfer. The plan is ideal for growing websites and applications that require higher resources and also features that are not generally available with smaller plans. You can expand on the resource consumption and therefore host high performance oriented websites that are highly customizable. You can also create WordPress based social networks on buddy press or forums ideal for all kinds of purposes.
  3. Business: Priced at $249/month, the plan comes with 25 WordPress installs and therefore is ideal for all kinds of websites. You can host up to 25 websites along with subdomains and therefore create a huge network of websites that can serve numerous purposes. With up to 400k visitors per month and 30GB data storage, servers allow you to host any kind of website or WordPress based application as per your requirements. It is ideal for business users and is therefore mostly used by large corporate websites and blogs that often get millions of visitors every month. You can also customize the server configuration along with numerous other allowed optimizations to further speed up your production.
  4. Premium and Enterprise: Meant for custom server configurations, these plans are not for the average customers. They are specially designed and configured to suit user requirements and may often cost more than the traditional cost of website hosting. You get up to 150 WordPress installs and the ability to customize the plans as per your requirements.

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Siteground vs WpEngine: Performance and Reliability

When it comes to performance, Siteground has always had the record of maintaining an excellent server performance benchmark over the years. You may find numerous negative complaints about WpEngine but there are only a few instances where Siteground has failed to deliver upon its promises. With an excellent hardware infrastructure and high performance servers always ready to maintain failover measures, it has attracted thousands of customers from its competition. WpEngine although has the major markets and provides all kinds of services to its customers, it lacks significantly due to its resource allocation method.

wpengine wordpress hosting performance

Moreover, it is nearly impossible to predict the amount of resources you can actually use. As other hosting customers are allocated the same unlimited features, someone may use more than the server can handle. Eventually, you will end up with failed database connection, bandwidth usage, space constraints and numerous other problems that no one can foresee. On the other hand, Siteground provides exact resource usage for each client with strict limitations on each of the features allowed to the customers.

siteground wordpress hosting performance

This helps you greatly in measuring and controlling the resources utilized by your application. Let's dive deeper into each of the individual performance metrics to deeply analyze how each of the companies can be ideal for your requirements.

Server Performance

When it comes to server performance, Wpengine definitely fares better than Siteground. Siteground provides SSD drives in each of its plans and the performance increment due to the hardware optimization is quite significant. You can easily install additional applications to improve performance and thus further optimize your application to suit your requirements. WpEngine also has one of the largest data storage infrastructures in the world, however as most of it is distributed among numerous locations, the performance metrics vary widely across geographies.

The variable resource allocation on the server further complicates things for the user. You can easily build a large scale application on top of servers from both the companies but running them with high performance while meeting resource consumption targets are the biggest challenge of all. This is perfectly handled by both Siteground & WpEngine. Both of the hosting companies provides their plan based upon number of visitors your website receives.

Page speed

Page speed is perhaps the most important characteristic of any web server. Without necessary improvements to the server software and powerful hardware, it is impossible to maintain a proper page speed in any development or production environment. Although WpEngine has a decent page speed for most web applications, it fails when the applications grow in size or resource consumption increases significantly over a short period. However, the SSD drives in Siteground can handle literally anything the user can throw at it. Due to their enhanced server architecture the applications running on top of the server is highly optimized and the caching mechanism in the business plans further improve page speed for the apps. In one of our tests, the Business plan in WpEngine performed at 1.57s while the GoGeek plan at Siteground performed at 2.36s.

Wpengine Page Speed Test Report

wpengine page speed test

Siteground Page Speed Test Report

siteground wordpress hosting speed test

Server Uptime and Downtime

Downtimes are the worse things for any web application. Users can handle web application page speed but if the server isn't available any type of website can easily lose its audience within minutes. If it is a business application, the downtimes hurt the organization even worse. Without any built-in measures to handle downtime, it becomes impossible for any hosting company to maintain continuous uptime. Siteground and WpEngine perform equally in terms of server uptime due to their large scalable server architectures and replicated data storage all across the world. Both have had an excellent record of up to 99.98% server uptime over the last year.

Wpengine 30 Days Uptime Report (Total Uptime: 99.99%)

wpengine uptime

Siteground 30 Days Up Time Report

siteground uptime

 

Siteground vs WpEngine: Conclusion

Therefore, as we noticed in numerous circumstances, Siteground fares better than WpEngine because they're offering good service in very affordable pricing. Be it in terms of page speed or server performance, Siteground definitely has a solid server architecture that allows the organization to provide excellent services to its clients. You can easily rely on the company’s provided plans to host any kind of web application and if your resource consumption grows beyond the allocated limit, you can either control your resource consumption or upgrade to the next best plan. Due to their cloud architecture, you can also have immense control over the specific type of resource you consume. Therefore, you can easily consume more bandwidth without having to upgrade to a higher plan. Although we can not ignore Wpengine as well, they're also very reliable and has a good customer base. Although their plans are a bit costlier as they only offer Managed WordPress Hosting plan. So if you've budget you can go with Wpengine else Siteground is a good option to host WordPress websites with small to moderate traffic at affordable cost.