Yes, to ensure there is no beating around the bush - Never Settle is an affiliate with WPEngine's WordPress Hosting. However, I'll also say that in a web of oversaturated blog posts we'd write this regardless. Why? Because one, we're only affiliates of products we personally use on our own sites, and two, we believe they are the best player in the game for WordPress hosting.
If you run a website your hosting is as critical as a mammal having oxygen, yet most of us are gun-shy to spend more than $10 a month to run our entire business, all the while willing to pay over $100 a month to watch cable. #Paradoxal?
While there are a few good hosts out there we've personally found WPEngine to be the best for WordPress hosting. Now if you're running something outside of WordPress there are a handful of other options we'd also highly recommend. For the sake of this post, we'll focus on WordPress hosting.
For us in our journey, we were one of those people who balked at the idea of spending more than $10 per month on our hosting. We saw all hosting as equal, or rather a commodity, in which the lowest price wins since the commodity is the same. After having our site down for over 10 days with our previous host despite working day and night with their support to get it live again we realized not all hosts are created equally. That's when we switch to WPEngine.com after doing extensive research. That was over three years ago and since then we couldn't be more pleased.
From both a developer or customer side the features and service they offer are unparalleled for the price. The main reasons we love and use WPEngine are:
- Transferable Installs: The ability to generate a client site free under our own hosting until the client is ready to go live at which time we simply transfer the whole site to their account.
- Ability to Copy a site from one install to another: This runs right in line with our NS Cloner site cloning tool we've developed. There are thousands of reasons to copy a site - when it's in WordPress Multisite we use the NS Cloner and when it's a single site and doesn't have any advanced site copying needs that the NS Cloner would do we use WPE's copy tool.
- Staging environment for every site: We're no longer in the wild west and simply deploying changes to live won't cut it in 2017. While there are many ways to setup a staging environment, having one out of the box with your host is a simple luxury and time-saving treat.
- Performance & Support: If we had to pick a host personally for any one feature set this would be it. At the end of the day we need our site to run flawlessly and if we run into any hiccups we need a team willing to help us fix the issue. With WPE using PHP7 and many other new technologies, we haven't found a faster host nor a support team as friendly as WPE.
You don't have to use WPE, but certainly, do your homework before choosing your next host. If you're running a business online, especially an eCommerce business online, it's one of the most important decisions you will make.