WP Engine hosting offers robust infrastructure options for a range of customer sizes and traffic needs. It contains more than 200,000 installations of WordPress and serves billions of hits and thousands of terabytes of data each month. Each account is dedicated with a high level of performance and uptime so you can easily decide what is right for your business.
Security, Speed & Scalability
Every WP Engine account is designed to utilize the same robust software technology and ensure the best performance for the customers.
Secret Sauce
WP Engine handles web traffic by its sophisticated front-end system (also known as “secret sauce” layer). Each layer is developed with thousands of code rules which are continually audited to fine-tune WordPress delivery.
This secret sauce layer also evaluates browser requests for security and decides if they are valid and should be served, or if they are malformed and represent a potential risk. If a malformed request resembles a common attack footprint it will automatically be blocked by WP Engine security protocol. When a valid request comes in it will be served by WP Engine caching system or web daemons directly.
Bulletproof Server
Generally on a hosting server static requests such as images, JavaScript, CSS stylesheets are continually served by backend resources. However, WP Engine serves this content from its robust front-end layer system. This helps reduce server load significantly making it capable of handling traffic spikes easily (without any loss in performance).
Evercache
EverCache is a special server software which can serve common pages (such as home pages and feeds), on average, 4-6 times faster, than other, non-WP Engine servers. EverCache has been fully integrated into WP Engine WordPress environment to refresh cache automatically and intelligently as needed. Users also have an option to purge it at any time. Since Evercache is so powerful and managed automatically by WP Engine, there is no need for site owners or developers to install any caching plugin.
CDN
A CDN or Content Delivery Network is a network of hundreds of caching servers, positioned all around the world, which can store a local copy of your site’s content, and can instantly serve this content to visitors in that particular region. Normally, the content stored on a CDN includes your site’s static files such as images, JavaScript, and CSS stylesheets. When a request comes in it automatically determines which of these world-wide servers is physically closest to the requesting browser, and the content is delivered from that location rather than your site’s server.
This makes content load faster because it’s closer to the end-user, and now your site can scale dramatically because the traffic is being served from an expansive global network of servers that can share the traffic load.
WP Engine has partnered with NetDNA to offer a robust, enterprise CDN as part of its service. Every account can take advantage of using a CDN and WP Engine handles all of the configuration for you. No extra plugins or settings are required. Customers can use WordPress as they normally would, and WP Engine automatically changes static file links to use your CDN’s resources. By doing this, your content will begin being served from the CDN with no other modifications needed. WP Engine also intelligently notifies the NetDNA CDN servers when to clear the CDN cache upon local changes and updates to your site.
Performance Shared Hosting
WP Engine shared hosting plans offer an incredible amount of performance at an affordable price point. These plans are built on a Xen virtualized environment with robust hardware hypervisors. WP Engine host machines include redundant power and disk arrays and can handle significant amounts of CPU, network IO, and disk throughput.
Shared plans run on virtualized instances which are designed to achieve the optimal cost/performance ratio. This multi-tenant environment is designed with a strong security environment in place, so one WP Engine customer cannot intrude on another’s user-space. Host machine utilization is constantly monitored and always runs with a large amount of available overhead in place to ensure customer sites can scale during traffic spikes.
Dedicated Environment
WP Engine premium plans feature a custom environment for each user. This environment, while also based on Xen virtualization, is reserved solely to a single WP Engine customer, and is not multi-tenant with others in the WP Engine ecosystem.
Other benefits of Premium plans:
- Increased CPU/Disk/Memory performance
- Ability to run security/performance testing as needed
- Ability for a larger degree of environment customization
- Scalability: multiple servers per account
Premium plans are great for organizations where resource isolation, performance, and scalability are key priorities in their WordPress hosting requirements.
Top Level Hosting Power
Enterprise plans offer WP Engine’s top level of WordPress-hosting power. These configurations are capable of serving upwards of 50 million visitors a month, and are built with high-performance, multi-node virtualization. Enterprise clusters offer an incredible amount of performance and strong redundancy while being able to handle extremely large traffic needs.
Other benefits of Enterprise plans:
- High availability, redundant Load-Balancing and Firewalling technology
- Multiple web nodes for high levels of concurrency
- MySQL replication (Master-Slave) with multiple slaves and high-performance IO
- Database sharding
- Top-of-the-line, high-core-count, Intel Xeon processors used in hypervisors
- Separate memcache servers for object and transient caching
If you want to learn more about the WP Engine architecture/plans feel free visit their homepage here.