WP Engine

The plans page lists Essential from $28/mo, billed annually as $336 upfront, and Business from $400/mo, billed annually. Enterprise has no listed price. A footnote says first-year pricing and coupons are for new Essential customers only, and that renewal pricing is subject to change, but we didn't see a renewal price on the pages we read. Prices are in US dollars, and the page says taxes and overages may apply at checkout. The overage page charges $2 per 1,000 extra monthly visits, naming older plans such as Startup and Growth.

The terms say you sign with WPEngine, Inc., a Delaware corporation at 504 Lavaca St., Suite 1000, Austin, Texas. The privacy policy and the data privacy addendum name the same company. The About page says WP Engine was founded in 2010 in Austin and has more than 1,000 staff. We didn't see a company registration number on the pages we read, or a separate company for EU or UK customers.

The footer and contact page link to a status page at wpenginestatus.com. The page needs JavaScript, and our reader couldn't see its components or incident history, including on individual incident pages. The SLA promises 99.95% uptime, or 99.99% under the Enhanced SLA, with service credits you claim through support within 30 days. The plans page lists the 99.99% SLA on Business and Enterprise, but not on Essential.

Support is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, by chat in the User Portal, starting with an AI assistant that can hand you to an agent. The plans page lists 24/7 chat on Essential, chat and phone on Business, and priority support with an account team on Enterprise. The support phone number is shown inside the User Portal. We didn't see a stated response time; the help article says requests are handled in the order received. That article still uses older plan names, such as Startup and Premium Plus, when it says who gets phone support and can open tickets.

We didn't see a money-back period: the terms say fees are not refundable except where the terms say so. Plans renew automatically, monthly or yearly, and you cancel with 30 days' notice through a cancellation form in the User Portal, which only the account owner can submit. On an annual term, the remaining fees become due if you end early, unless WP Engine breaches the agreement and doesn't fix it within 30 days. Renewals are at then-current rates, and the terms say you'll be told of an increase before the date you can opt out.

Every environment gets an automatic daily backup, and you can add manual backups from the User Portal. The help article says 30 days of backups are kept, while the plans page says 30 to 60 days and the managed hosting page says "60-day backups". You restore yourself from the Backups page, and you can download a full or partial ZIP, including the database, for up to 7 days. We didn't see whether restores cost anything. The terms ask you to keep your own offline backups as well.

Domains on the newer Advanced Network get SSL automatically through Cloudflare, and domains on the older Legacy Network can add a free Let's Encrypt certificate that renews itself. User Portal login uses multi-factor login, by email by default, with authenticator apps, Okta Verify and security keys as options. The security page lists a managed firewall, DDoS mitigation and automated malware detection and removal, and support runs a deep malware scan when a site shows signs of infection. Advanced firewall and CDN protection is an optional add-on called Global Edge Security.

The help center lists 13 Google Cloud, 9 AWS and 8 Azure locations, including London, Frankfurt, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland and Ireland in Europe. The location is set when you create your first site, and shared plans default to the nearest Google Cloud region; moving later is a support request. Some locations may cost extra or need a higher plan, and AWS and Azure are for Premium plans only. A Data Privacy Addendum covers the GDPR and UK GDPR, forms part of the agreement, and uses EU standard contractual clauses with the UK addendum.

The plans page gives visits, storage and bandwidth per plan, mostly as ranges: Essential covers 25,000 to 400,000 visits a month, 10 to 50 GB of storage and 75 GB of bandwidth. It says the numbers are estimates only. We didn't see CPU or memory for any plan, only that Essential is a shared environment and Business is isolated. We didn't see "unlimited" used for resources. A version of the plans page linked for monthly billing names the middle plan Core and lists 1 to 30 sites on Essential, with extra sites at $20/mo.

You can download a full backup ZIP of any environment, including the database, from the User Portal, and copy files over SFTP, or with rsync and scp over SSH. WP Engine doesn't sell domains or run DNS, so your domain stays with your own registrar. Cancelling needs 30 days' notice, and the help article asks you to download a backup first, as content is deleted once the plan ends. The terms say WP Engine can't help with migration after termination. We didn't see a fee for leaving.