If you’re a WordPress user, you need a dedicated WordPress hosting service to expand your website and make it commercially viable. The market is crowded with different providers offering a range of services at varying price points. However, not many people know that I’ve been using WPX Hosting for LaunchSpace for the past couple of years.
So, what makes WPX Hosting a good option for startups? What are its most essential features? Most importantly, how much will it cost you? Let’s look at WPX Hosting and see why you need to consider it if you’re looking for a hosting provider.
What is WPX Hosting?
In the 2010s, a typical hosting package often promised unlimited bandwidth and storage. However, websites hosted on those platforms back then collapsed as soon as they experienced traffic spikes. In addition, not many hosting providers offered 24/7 live support, and they did not design the usual hosting user experience for online business owners.
Terry Kyle co-founded WPX Hosting in 2013 as a reaction to his current hosting provider’s lack of customer service and long loading times. It has since overtaken the likes of Kinsta and WP Engine as the WordPress hosting provider of choice for many online businesses. As of 2021, they are ranked #12 in TrustPilot’s list of web hosting solutions, with an average rating of 4.8 stars and overwhelmingly positive reviews.
WPX Hosting customers are happy with what they’ve been getting. But let’s dig deeper into their product and see whether or not it’s worth considering for your startup.
What do you get with WPX Hosting?
If you’re considering changing hosting providers to WPX, you need to know what to expect from the provider. WPX offers best-in-class features that are standard across pricing plans. Here are some of these features.
Quick page load times
Every WordPress hosting provider claims to have quick page load times, but straight-up speed tests alone don’t tell the story. To get a concrete idea of your website’s possible performance, you need to check whether a hosting solution performs well with image-heavy websites and plug-in heavy websites. You also need to know if it passes Review Signal benchmarks (math, string manipulation, loops, SQL) and can handle hundreds of simultaneous visitors.
Matthew Woodward recently performed those tests and found that WPX blows the competition out of the water, consistently placing first. For example, WPX clocked in at 0.91 seconds, 1.45 seconds faster than WP Engine in the image-heavy website test. In the load impact test where Matthew simulated 500 real users accessing a test site simultaneously, WPX was 3.199 seconds faster than WP Engine and more than 100 seconds faster than Amazon EC2.
24/7 customer support
If you’re running an ecommerce website, you want your website to recover from a technical issue fast or risk incurring massive losses. You need a web hosting provider that can help solve your problems right away, regardless of the time or day of the week. However, many hosting providers do not offer 24/7 support or are simply unable to solve issues.
WPX stands out from the competition because it has a dedicated customer support team online around the clock year-round. The team also answers customer concerns quickly. While WPX does not have phone support, their live chat support has an average response time of 30 seconds. WPX Hosting also responds to service tickets within 5 minutes.
Free content delivery network (WPX Cloud)
Part of the reason WPX can load pages quickly is its content delivery network (CDN). WPX has CDN hosting servers scattered in worldwide locations, a network called WPX Cloud.
While your website resides primarily in a server within your region, WPX maintains copies of your website on the cloud, allowing users to reach your site anywhere without a significant drop in loading speed. If one server goes down, your website visitors can access a copy of your website stored on a separate server instead.
Free SSL certificates
Your site visitors are understandably worried about the safety and privacy of their data. SSL certificates can help restore your customers’ confidence and encourage others to visit your site as well.
Not all SSL certificates are created equal, though. Google, for example, recently announced an SSL initiative called Lets Encrypt. Under the initiative, Lets Encrypt certificates will be free, but integrating them into a website will require implementation.
WPX Hosting takes this a step further by offering free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates and creating automated software to automatically add those certificates to all of your sites hosted on WPX Cloud.
Daily backups
Backups are important, especially if you run a business. If something goes wrong, you’ll want to ensure that you can quickly restore your site to its original state.
Many web hosts provide daily backups, but WPX Hosting offers full daily backups. This means that even if your site gets hacked or suffers some other sort of disaster, you can still restore it to its previous condition. WPX stores your daily automatic backups for 28 days, which means you can restore previous versions quickly. If you prefer doing manual backups, the WPX Hosting backup tool is easy to learn and use.
Malware scanning
While many WordPress hosting providers use affiliate links or a coupon code to get users to download a security plugin like Sucuri, WPX users don’t have to do anything to keep their website secure. WPX scans its servers for malware every day at no additional cost. You may even receive an individual site audit if WPX Hosting detects suspicious code on your website.
Enterprise-level DDoS protection
Aside from making malware scans part of its standard hosting plan, WPX Hosting has also partnered with Incapsula to protect its customers from DDoS attacks. While an Incapsula “small business” account costs $299 monthly, WPX Hosting offers free enterprise-level DDoS protection, starting with the Business plan. It also has an uptime guarantee of 99.95% availability.
Unlimited site migrations
If you’re looking for a host who understands how difficult it is to migrate a website to another platform, then WPX Hosting is an excellent choice.
After creating a WPX Hosting account, you create a support ticket for the migration team, including your hosting account details and WordPress credentials for the sites you wish to migrate to the WPX Cloud. WPX Hosting will then take care of the rest. Migrating your site to WPX Hosting usually takes up to 24 hours, depending on the number of pages to be migrated, and it is also free.
Their migration service can also move your site from one domain name to another (for $98).
WPX Pricing
In contrast to other hosting pricing models where the lowest-tier plan means fewer features, WPX Hosting offers the same set of features for all its plans. Starting with the Business plan, WPX bundles free malware scanning and removal, free offline site fixes and site speed optimization, 99.95% uptime guarantee, DDoS protection, and automatic backups. The difference, though, lies in the number of websites you can host.
The Business Plan ($24.99/month) lets you host up to 5 websites on 10 GB storage and 100 GB bandwidth. The Professional Plan ($49.99/month), on the other hand, lets you host up to 15 websites on 20 GB storage and 200 GB bandwidth. Finally, the Elite Plan ($99.00/month) can accommodate up to 35 websites on 40 GB of disk space and unlimited bandwidth subject to reasonable use restrictions. Of course, you’ll get much better deals if you subscribe to a yearly plan.
WPX Hosting Review: Final Verdict
There’s a reason WPX Hosting has a lot of positive reviews on TrustPilot. They’re good at what they do and offer value for money compared to other hosting companies.
I’ve been using WPX Hosting for some time now, and I have not encountered any significant issues with their uptime, customer support team, or UX. I don’t imagine myself shifting to another WordPress hosting service in the near future. If you’re a startup looking for a full-service web hosting provider, I highly recommend WPX Hosting for its top-of-the-line features, reasonable hosting pricing rates, and ease of migration.
Final Thoughts
For more useful tools for WordPress website owners, check out our FormCraft review. You may also check out our landing page builder comparison to improve your conversion rates. If you’re an affiliate marketer, our comparison of affiliate marketing tools might be helpful too.
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