A2 Hosting vs WP Engine

It’s the service that stores your website's files and makes them available for the world to see on the internet.

Yes. If you want a website, you need a place for it to live online. A hosting plan provides that secure space on our servers.

On a hosting plan your site sits in its own isolated container on a managed server, with dedicated CPU and RAM, and we run everything. A managed server of your own gives you the whole box: all the resources are yours, still fully managed by us. Most sites start on a plan and move up when they outgrow it, on the same platform, with the same team, and no re-platforming.

Yes — our plans are built to grow with you. You can upgrade easily and without downtime, all the way from shared hosting to a managed server of your own.

Yes, all plans come with our integrated email solution, so you can create professional addresses using your domain name.

No. The control panel is intuitive, and Orbi plus our in-house team are on hand 24/7. Developers can still reach advanced tools like SSH, Git integration and custom cron jobs.

Yes. All our plans include robust security features like SSL certificates, DDoS protection, and automated backups to keep your site safe.

Some of our plans do. Just check the features of each plan to see which one fits your needs. check plan specs for the site limit.

These are fully managed servers, which means we take care of all the patching, security updates and server management for you. You'll access everything through cPanel, so you can focus on running your site without worrying about what's happening behind the scenes. And if you ever decide you'd like full root access and direct OS control, our unmanaged dedicated or cloud options would be a perfect fit for that.

On shared hosting, resources are spread across many customers on the same server, so performance can vary depending on what everyone else is doing. With a Managed cPanel Server, all the RAM, CPU and NVMe storage are dedicated entirely to you. You'll still get the same familiar cPanel interface, but with the added benefit of full isolation, predictable performance and resources that are yours alone.

There's no limit on addon domains or websites within a single cPanel account, so you can host as many sites as you need. If you'd prefer separate cPanel logins for different clients or projects, whether that's for isolation, independent quotas or white labelling, you can easily add extra cPanel accounts through autoscale licensing. These are charged at the transparent cPanel pass through rate, so no markups or surprises.

We take care of everything on the server side for you, including initial provisioning and configuration, OS and software patching (cPanel, CloudLinux, Monarx and more), firewall setup and maintenance, 24/7 server level monitoring, daily backup configuration and website migrations. Essentially, we keep the engine running smoothly so you can focus on your sites. Things like application code, CMS plugin updates and content are yours to manage through cPanel, giving you full control over the stuff t

You can upgrade to a larger plan whenever you need to, and we'll handle the entire move for you. No migration headaches on your end.

A VPS is a virtual private server: a virtual machine with its own operating system and its own dedicated CPU, RAM and NVMe storage, running on shared physical hardware but isolated from every other server on it. Unmanaged means you run the software side yourself: the OS, updates, security and whatever you install. We run the hardware, power, network and data centre underneath it.

If you are looking for an easy upgrade from your Shared Hosting account and want to continue using an intuitive control panel like cPanel, we recommend that you select a Managed VPS account. Our expert support team can even seamlessly migrate your existing website into a Managed VPS for free! If, on the other hand, you are an experienced developer who is comfortable working with command line and want root access so you can fully customize your server, an Unmanaged VPS would be a better option fo

Error logs are necessary for most WordPress troubleshooting. You can access the most recent 24 hours of PHP/Apache error logs in two different ways: how to access WordPress error logs.

We’ve outlined two methods for resetting your password, a traditional method and a method directly from the database: two ways to reset a WordPress password.

Here you will find a comprehensive list of WP Engine platform settings. Please reach out to our 24-hour Support team with any questions.

This article will cover how to import a database file into your WP Engine environment.

Follow this link for detailed instructions about how to update WordPress URLs.

Follow this link to learn more about how to solve problems when updating WordPress URLs.

Follow this link to learn more about understanding the WP Engine Error Logs.

Learn more about WordPress Backups and Restoring your website.

Learn more about copying to staging.

Learn more about common errors that WordPress users face and how to resolve them.

Learn how to purge your site cache in this detailed article.

Learn more about Improving Cacheability for WordPress websites.

Yes, learn more about how WP Engine works with LargeFS: Configuring Unlimited Storage with Amazon S3.

WP Engine will make the services available 99.95% of the time, excluding any excused downtime. The WP Engine SLA amends the agreement between WP Engine and customer and addresses the uptime guarantees in relation to the services we provide to you and your remedies for our failure to meet such guarantees.

We offer hosting solutions for WordPress websites and businesses of all sizes, from SMB to enterprise. We also offer eCommerce hosting and advanced solutions with customizable packages. See which hosting plan is right for your needs.

If you’re experiencing a technical issue on your website, please reach out to our 24-hour Support team and give us the opportunity to help you resolve it. Per our terms of service, account cancellations require a 30 day notice via our cancellation form.

WP Engine provides everything a WordPress website needs. Learn more about our award-winning hosting platform.

WP Engine is the most trusted enterprise platform for WordPress. Learn more about our enterprise hosting plans.

It’s free to migrate a site to WP Engine. Our automated migration plugin makes it simple.

Yes! Here’s the information needed to do a manual site migration.

It’s easy to launch a site with WP Engine, here’s how.

It’s possible to test your site on WP Engine after migrating without changing your DNS, just by editing a file on your computer.

This guide will take you through the process of exporting your database from your previous host, so that you can then migrate it to WP Engine.

Once you’ve downloaded your wp-content folder from your previous host, you can easily upload this folder or zip file to our Support Team so we can help you with this step of the manual migration process.

Learn more about transferable sites and environments.

Learn how to manage user roles on WP Engine.

The billing menu in your User Portal provides access to several plan-related functions, such as invoices, modifying billing info or changing your plan level.

Our pricing is partially based on the number of monthly visits to your site, we’ve provided as clear of guidelines as possible about which visits are considered billable.

When your number of visits exceeds your plan limit (here’s how we count visits), we charge you a small overage for each 1,000 visitors over your limit. If you are on a Startup, Professional, Growth, or Scale plan, the overage is $2 per 1,000 extra monthly visitors.

The WP Engine User Portal enables users to make many adjustments to their plans through upgrades, downgrades, and add-on features.

Follow this link to learn more about WP Engine’s Automated Migration plugin.

Yes, we recommend following this link to update plugins automatically with Smart Plugin Manager.

Follow this link to see our list of essential WordPress eCommerce plugins.

Follow this link to see the top 10 WordPress plugins on WP Engine.

Yes, follow this link to learn more about creating geographically customized content.

When hosting your WordPress site on WP Engine, you may need to connect directly to your website’s file system. On other platforms you may already be used to using FTP. At WP Engine we use SFTP which works the same, except it uses a layer of encryption for security and is restricted to a secured port. Read more about using SFTP on WP Engine.

Once you’ve downloaded your wp-content folder from your previous host, you can easily upload this folder or zip file to our Support Team so we can help you with this step of the manual migration process.

Git is a powerful development tool which enables developers or a development team to securely push code changes from their local machine to their site on WP Engine with the benefit of version control. Read more about using Git Push on WP Engine.

Here’s how to setup and connect to SSH Gateway. SSH, also known as Secure Shell, is the method of connecting from your computer to the web server where your site is hosted.

SSL/TLS certificates enable visitors to connect to your site with HTTPS, a secure protocol for exchanging information on the Internet. See more information on SSL (secure sockets layer) certificates.

Click here to learn more about adding SSL to your WP Engine site.

Yes, learn more about how to upload 3rd Party SSL Certificates.

Learn more about securing all URLs with SSL.

Learn more about obtaining free SSL Certificates with Lets Encrypt.

While we manage many parts of your website hosting, default email functionality on WP Engine is limited. Normal emails, such as password resets, will not typically have any issues sending. However, for robust email functionality, monitoring and scalability, we highly suggest utilizing a 3rd party email host.

We typically recommend using a 3rd party transactional mail provider such as Mailgun, Gmail, or Sendinblue. These services allow you to send emails from a specialized mail IP and will include a higher level of customization, such as more robust logging. See our full list of recommended email providers.

Learn more about DMARC Policies for Email Deliverability.

Learn more about sending Email Blasts on WP Engine.

Yes! With a dedicated security team specializing in WordPress behind it, our platform’s enterprise-grade technology automates threat detection to block 72M attacks daily while keeping your website vulnerabilities up to date. See more about WP Engine security protocols.

Yes, learn more about WP Engine’s enterprise-grade security.

Learn more about how to handle the WordPress update process.

Multisite for WordPress is a feature that allows you to create a “network” of subsites within a single instance of WordPress. Learn more about multisite for WordPress.

/support/what-is-wordpress-multisite/#Custom_Main_Site_DomainFollow this link to learn more about how to Add New Sites and Map a Custom Domain.

Follow this link to learn more about changing your Multisite Primary Domain.

Follow this link to learn more about Enabling Multisite on your WordPress website.