Managed WordPress Hosting Review Archives - Best Managed WordPress Hosting (In-depth Review)

Is WP Engine Best Managed WordPress Hosting? (In-depth Review)

January 1, 2020/0 Comments/in Managed WordPress Hosting Review /by Best MWP Admin

We recently have tested our prototype testing website on WP Engine, which is recognized as one of the best managed WordPress hosting providers.

The results are GREAT.

Our prototype pages size is about 10-15MB including HD images, external video, and self-hosted video. BUT it loaded on WP Engine hosting very fast. We will show the real results in this post.

Also, WP Engine comes with CDN integrated. They have partnered up with MaxCDN(currently, Stackpath). Although we have seen something else results when CDN activated. We will talk about it.

We were eagerly looking forward to testing on WP Engine, Kinsta and FlyWheel. We will arrange a data-driven hosting performance battle between them. Stay tuned.

Here in this in-depth review on WP engine post, we will cover these topics below-

WP Engine Hosting Plan and Features
Inside the Hosting Console(Dashboard)
Inside the WordPress Dashboard
Uptime Monitoring
Speed Testing on Pingdom, GTmetrix
Testing on Google Page Speed Insights
Security
Supports
Pricing
Our Verdicts

WP Engine Hosting Plan and Features

There are 4 different plans- Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.

In the startup plan, you will able to host 1 website and it will cost you almost 30USD per month if you go with the annual payment system. 35USD/month is for monthly payment. It’s pretty expensive.

The 10GB storage is pretty reasonable for a single website. But the monthly visit limitation can be exceeded. Be noted that any bot or spam visit will not be billable.

WP Engine’s infrastructures are built on AWS technology for agile computing in order to high-performance WordPress experiences.

In WP Engine, you will actually have three environments- Production, Staging, and Development. In Production, it will be your LIVE site. In Staging, it will be your mirror site to the LIVE site. This means you can edit and test functions on it rather than making it on the LIVE site to avoid unwanted errors. In Development, you can play with your codes before pushing it onto the staging environments.

Keep in mind that if you are looking for the multisite privilege, you need to buy it as an add-on.

They provide a CDN option with every plan. They call it “Global CDN”. WP Engine is using MaxCDN’s CDN services and their data centers are located across the United States, Europe, and in the Asia-Pacific region.

For the developers, it is really friendly hosting ’cause of its devkit stack including local development environment, SSH Gateway access, push & pull deployments, and other build and debug tools. Plus, you will play with your Git codebase directly on WP Engine.

One more thing you will get is the Genesis framework and themes. Studiopress partnered up with WP Engine a couple of years back. So Genesis lover will love this or you will love Genesis because of its performance, SEO friendly coding, lightness, and other few more things.

Inside WP Engine Hosting Console

WP Engine is using the AWS stacks for faster WordPress services. We are going to show the hosting’s inside looks and functions.

The user panel console is easy for anyone to navigate and do things.

Here are some screenshots we are sharing you should check out.

The home of the console is called the user portal. Basically you will see the glance of all the services like your plan details, Dev kits, activity log, etc.

From the top clicking on the “sites”, you will see the sites list.

After clicking on the sites, you will get into the details of the sites where you can access all three environments – Production, Staging, and Development.

In the production environment what we are showing, you will see all the details such as domain name adding/removing, CDN activation, Backups, access logs, sFTP details, migration, dev tools and many more.

In the domains page, it is where you can add domain names for the LIVE site. For your information, WP Engine doesn’t provide nameservers link. They give you A and CNAME records which can be set in your domain registerer. You can read more about “how to configure the DNS” here.

In the CDN page, if you want to activate CDN for the website, you just need to select the option. Very easy!

You need to wait 10 minutes to see it happen. In this meantime, WP Engine starts copying your static files like CSS, JS, images, videos, etc to data centers all over the world.

In the Backup points page, you can make back up, restore your website data. WP Engine generally makes daily backups. But you can make and download backups anytime.

In the sFTP page, where you can add FTP users. Unlike on the shared hosting cPanel file manager, WP Engine has only the secure file transfer option using sFTP.

You can sFTP users for every environment. Then use any FTP client – Filezilla , CyberDuck etc. to get access to the file manager.

If you are fluent in Github controlling, you can use the Git Push tools. You just need to enter the SSH key first. Here is the procedure

In Utilities page, you will see the cache purging option, Also, if you want, you can set the password in staging or development environments.

Like other hostings, WP Engine provides free SSL for each domain. You can see it on the SSL page.

And finally, you can edit, add, remove whatever you want to with the database. You just need to go to the phpMyAdmin links from the WP Engine user panel.

As we mentioned before, you will get the Genesis themes FREE with the WP Engine plan. In the Themes tab, you will get all the themes. You just need to download it.

Under the tools, you will find some SEO related tools, dev kits, page optimization, security and website management plugin tools. Some are free and some tools are paid.

In Global Edge Security tools, it integrates with Cloudflare to stop DDoS, bot attacks, etc cyber-attacks towards your websites.

You can also check out your page and content performance. Page performance is free. But the content performance is not. In content performance tools, you will actually get the insights from Google Analytics for your WordPress content and authors.

You can add your team members in User tabs easily. Also, you can add your billing person individually.

In the addon section, there are a lot more options for the hosting plan upgrading. Check it out.

We think these options on WP Engine user portal are very easy to use. We saw this easy navigation in every managed WordPress hosting.

Inside the WP Engine Hosted WordPress Dashboard

Like other managed WordPress hosting, WP Engine has its own plugin to control caches, CDN and other optimizations. Here’s the look.

In the WordPress admin panel, under the WP Engine tabs on the top left, there are a couple of options to control over the Cache and CDN mainly. So you can either do it on the user panel or on WordPress Dashboard.

Uptime Monitoring

We monitored the prototype site for a week and there was NO downtime!

The average response time rate is 207ms which is great. Keep in mind, the response time within 1000ms is considered fast.

We saw response time from Europe and East Asia is no more than 250ms.

It indicates that the servers are lightning-fast.

Page Speed Tests for WP Engine Hosted Website

Generally, we test our prototype website on Pingdom, GTmetrix and Google Page Speed Insights. But there are other tools out there that you can definitely use. We will update our page speed testing later.

We have tested our testing website homepage, an inner page which was built on one of our favorite Enfold theme.

The pages are stuffed with high-resolution images, self-hosted video and external video(youtube). The home page site is approximately 14 MB. We actually loaded the page intentionally to see how it goes with the hosting.

One more thing before we go through the results. Don’t get fooled or disappointed seeing load time scores. ‘Cause our testing pages are totally non-optimized and there are many things to do to improve its scores.

For example, in GTmetrix results, sometimes the load time will take longer than it expected but you should look at its Response time, TTFB, First Paint, DOM load time, etc.

For instance, if you see a website response time is less than 1 sec and TTFB, First Paint and DOM load within 3 sec. You can feel great. Be noted that it depends on location, your device configuration, and internet speed sometimes.

Well, we made our testing on both with CDN and without CDN. The results are definitely different.

See the results below we got so far.

Pingdom Speed Test

At first, we headed to Pingdom speed testing. For your information, Pingdom tests web pages from 5 different locations- Japan, Germany, USA(Eastern & Western), and Australia. We tested both CDN and without CDN. The difference is pretty countable. Like we got more than 50% less load time. One thing we noticed is it took much time to be effective than we saw on after activating Kinsta CDN.

Let’s see the results.

Here is without CDN results.

We saw the results from Eastern USA is faster among all. ‘Cause the data center is located in Central USA(Iowa). It is pretty convincing and we are glad about that.

Besides, the other places’ result is just fine. We saw a better load time in Europe(Germany) than in Kinsta. In contrast, we saw better results in Australia’s location in WP Engine. The results we found from East Asia are around 5 seconds that is good without CDN and optimization comparatively.

Surprisingly, the long scrolling page (No editor but HD images and external, internal video) loaded very fast, less than a minute (678ms)! We were just blown away!

Now let’s check out the results after activating the CDN.

Then here is our “with” CDN results.

After the CDN activation, it took some time to propagate around the world. It’s okay.

We saw significant changes after CDN except for Australia. We are not sure why it happened. We assumed the data center wasn’t ready at that time.

Honestly, we saw better results in Kinsta. In Kinsta, we saw the average results better than in WP Engine. Check out Kinsta results here.

Here is the video of the Pingdom tests.

Without CDN

with CDN

GTmetrix Speed test

After Pingdom, we tested our default website on GTmetrix. Before we start showing the results, GTmetrix depends on various criteria to get you results. You should notice its Timings and Waterfall. You can learn more about it here.

We tested it both in CDN and without CDN.

Here’s the with and without CDN results.

The results appear in pretty complicated. For example, without CDN results in Mumbai, India is slightly better than with CDN. Again, don’t get convinced negatively seeing the results. You should have to look deeper inside the Timings and Waterfall section. As we mentioned before that our pages were totally RAW, non-optimized. Actually there were a lot of JS/CSS blocking dilemmas.

If you are good at optimizing the WordPress site, then you will see the difference. Although there are a few good optimization plugins out there. We like WPRocket.

Here we are sharing some screenshots of the slowest and fastest load time data.

Here are the GTmetrix videos

without CDN

With CDN

Google Page Speed Insight Test

We tested on Google PSI and the score we got without optimization is pretty good. It was 76/100. It could be more than 90 out of 100 if the site was optimized. The things we noticed are First Contentful paint, First Meaningful paint and First input delay.

The First contentful and meaningful paint appeared within 600 milisec. That’s fast! The speed index showed 2.9 sec. Good!

Here are the results

In Google Page Speed Insights, you will actually get the page speed suggestions. Try to complete the opportunities which will increase the score.

Another thing is Google AMP. It will make your mobile version faster. You can check out this plugin.

WP Engine Hosting Security

They take the security very seriously that you don’t need to worry even in a little bit. Cause WP Engine blocks every bad request coming to your way. And most importantly that bad requests won’t be counted as a visit. So if somebody wants to DDoS you, that should be no worries for you.

Other than blocking threats, WP Engine secuirty experts are always ready to neutralize attacks by making a quick patch of any affected plugins.

Plus, there is always a backup has been made every day. If a bad thing happens, you can easily restore it with the previous backup anytime.

Tech Support

WP Engine’s support is AWESOME. They respond within a minute. Yey!

You need to select the “Live chat” option from the top tab. You can start a ticket as well. Plus, you can directly call them. Although, not all plan subscribers will get phone support opportunities. Check out WP Engine hosting plan.

WP Engine Pricing

WP Engine is expensive but premium tier WordPress hosting. The site performance will tell you, practically.

There are 4 hosting plans – Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.

For instance, In Startup, you need to pay 35 USD(if you want to pay monthly). In this plan, you will able to host 1 Website. You will get 10 GB cloud storage, 50GB bandwidth, 25000 monthly visits, and other features. This plan is good for small websites like personal blogs, new digital agencies, etc.

You can visit the WP Engine website for other plans pricing and details.

WP Engine has a 60-days money-back guarantee. So feel free to test this hosting. We hope you will like it.

If you are not sure about which hosting is right for you. You can read our hosting suggestions.

Our verdicts

WP Engine is for you if you are looking for a premium-level hosting service. It has better technology to scale your website performance, valued countable visits stopping bad requests, faster CDN, super-responsive tech support and many more.

We are impressed. One thing could bug you is its price. BUT when you get better service, price shouldn’t be the issue at all.

Let us know about the WP Engine service below in the comment box.

Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting (In-Depth Review 2020)

December 2, 2019/0 Comments/in Managed WordPress Hosting Review /by Best MWP Admin

We have looked inside one of the best premium WordPress hosting providers in the world, Kinsta.

Yes, it is EXPENSIVE. But you won’t regret after seeing its performance.

It is one of our most anticipated managed WordPress hosting reviews.

And Kinsta didn’t fail us. That’s why we are hosting our site on it.

Although there are other managed WordPress hostings (A2, DreamPress) impressed us. BUT we have our reasons. We will discuss what hosting fits for whom someday.

Before we start let us tell you the KEY things that make actually the difference. CDN and Google Cloud Platform.

Kinsta teamed up with KeyCDN and used Google cloud computing platform to run their services on cutting-edge technology.

These two collaborations actually make WordPress site a blazing fast.

We will show you the page speed results before and after activating the CDN.

Let’s get into our review criteria one by one.

Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting Plan and Features

There are 4 types of hosting plans- Starter, Pro, Business, Enterprise. AND custom hosting.

Business and Enterprise plans have sub plans like Business 1 Business 2 etc.

We have purchased the starter plan to check out its performance.

Price is expensive BUT it’s too good. We will tell you our impression in the Pricing section.

The main features of CDN and Google cloud computing platform come with every plan. There is no discrimination.

The actual difference between all plans is WordPress installs, storage, number of visitors, CDN bandwidth, free migration, and other features.

Our starter plan has 5 GB SSD storage which fine for a single website. Also, the backups and staging files are excluded from the total disk calculation.

According to Kinsta

All of our servers utilize lightning-fast persistent SSD storage on Google Cloud Platform with built-in redundancy to ensure data integrity. Backups and staging environments are excluded from total disk calculation.

The starter plan’s monthly visitors are limited to 20k. If you are running a portfolio or a small blog, the fixed visitor numbers will be enough.

Although you can buy if you hit your plan visitors’ capability for $1 / 1,000 visits which is reasonable.

With every plan, you can choose a data center from 20 different locations in the world. Also these locations can mirror your site data when you activate CDN feature.

Regarding CDN, the Kinsta and KeyCDN partnered up to boost up delivery of your assets (images, JS, CSS) around the world. With the starter plan, we got 50 GB CDN bandwidth. Cool for the small site!

Now, the most important feat of Kinsta, Google Cloud Platform, which comes with every plan. It will ensure your website data security and of course, the speed. Cause Google Cloud is the top tier cloud computing platform in the universe.

Free SSL installed on every plan. Besides, you can import your custom SSL cert in Kinsta.

You can select the PHP version. The PHP 5.6, 7, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 are available within the MyKinsta dashboard. By default, it has PHP 7 activated.

There are automatic and manual options. And the backup data is not calculated to its SSD storage threshold limit.

For the developers who love the command line, there is SSH activated so it allows you to use WP-CLI, Composer, and Git to automate your workflow.

Inside the Kinsta Hosting Dashboard

Kinsta is running on the Google cloud platform which is well-configured with Nginx, LXD containers, PHP 7.3, and MariaDB for lightning speed.

Let’s have some looks into the hosting environments.

In hosting dashboard default page you will see summary of Visitors, Site resource usage, Billing etc.

Then in Sites tabs, you see the details about your website.

For the first time when you set up the site, you will be opted to select a data center. we have selected Mumbai, India. It’s better to select the nearest location.

You don’t need a domain first. Your site can be installed on one of Kinsta’s subdomain. When the site will go live, you just need to perform setup in Kinsta DNS. Kinsta is one of the best premium DNS service provider.

You will see Kinsta CDN option to activate or deactivate it. After activating, it takes a few minutes to complete the CDN set up. Then could take a couple of hours to be effective. Cause in this meantime your site data will be mirrored to data centers around the globe.

You can take back up. Generally, Kinsta takes backup every day. Besides, you can make backup manually.

Regarding the staging site, you are allowed to create it. So you can make tests before going live.

You can’t browse files from file manager like on A2 or DreamHost. You will have to use sFTP or SSH to get access.

Kinsta doesn’t let you create email addresses. That’s the only con. Although they suggest using Google’s G Suite.

Inside the Kinsta WordPress Dashboard

There’s no plugin stuffing in Kinsta. Just there’s a caching plugin built-in. Even you can’t deactivate or delete it. It is in the file directory.

You just need to clear the cache when you want to. No big deal.

Uptime Monitoring

We monitored the uptime for a week and it was great. EXCEPT for a 10-minutes downtime.

We looked into the root cause analysis. It was a server-side maintenance issue. Probably it happened to my data center.

The average response time is 778ms. It means GREAT.

We saw response time from the Scandinavian countries took around 1000ms. That is no BIG deal.

So we can tell you Kinsta has better response rate so your site can load faster.

Page Speed Tests

We have tested us test pages with CDN and without CDN on Pingdom, GTmetrix and Google PSI.

Without CDN, we have got an average result. Although we got a pretty good result when we tested pages near the data center, Mumbai.

With CDN it was VERY FAST. Blazing FAST.

A 14 MB size page which contains a 10 MB self-hosted video and some high-resolution images just loaded less than 3 seconds!

That’s the integrated power of the Google Cloud Platform and KeyCDN content delivery.

Let’s check it out.

Pingdom Speed Test

We have tested our default pages without CDN and with CDN to see the difference.

We got a very significant difference.

Here are the test results without CDN

As we see the page load time is better in Asia region cause the data center we selected is located in Mumbai, India.

Without CDN it is an average result.

BUT when you have the privilege to activate CDN, then why so worried?

Here is the result after activating the CDN

The page load time after activating CDN is superb!

They all loaded within 3 seconds. If your page is under 1 MB, just IMAGINE!

We believe it will be less than 500 ms.

We were interested to look inside every result.

Check out the details results.

After enabling the CDN, it took a couple of hours to be effective.

Check out our video tour inside the Pingdom results.

GTmetrix speed test

After testing on Pingdom, we have tested our pages on GTmetrix.

As you know GTmetrix follows different criteria to generate the results.

We checked both with CDN and without CDN

Let’s check out the GTmetrix results.

Here is our with/without CDN results

We looked into both CDN and without CDN results to check the real performance.

Here we are gonna show you the fastest and slowest results of our default Home page.

You can check out our page speed testing process here.

Here is our fastest result (without CDN). It was definitely Mumbai, India. Cause the data center is located there.

We see the TTFB loaded within 16ms!

The first paint and contentful paint loaded within 0.5 seconds.

The DOM loaded within 0.6 seconds.

Then, other resources loaded within 2.2 seconds.

We are pretty convinced about the results as our site data is located in the Mumbai data center.

Here is our slowest load time result (without CDN).

It was London, UK, far away from the data center.

The TTFB loaded within 0.7 seconds or 700 ms.

The first paint and contentful paint loaded in 2.7 seconds which is average.

The DOM loaded within 3.3 seconds.

And all resources[external and internal] loaded up to 16 seconds. It actually depends on the testing location internet speed, website structure like how your CSS, JS is represented.

You can check out our in-depth video on both results.

Now, we are showing the results after we activating the Kinsta CDN.

We are going to show you one of the fastest results.

In GTmetrix, we emphasize on Timings sections results.

Here is our fastest score after CDN activation.

The TTFB loaded within 0.7 seconds or 700 ms. The first paint and contentful paint loaded in 1.2 seconds which is average. The DOM loaded within 1.3 seconds.

Here is our slowest score after CDN activation.

The TTFB loaded within 16 ms. The first paint and contentful paint loaded in 0.8 seconds which is great. The DOM also loaded within 0.8 seconds.

So it appeared that the Home page in Mumbai loaded in 8.2 seconds. BUT actually it loaded far better than it appears.

So again in GTmetrix, you should go HARD on the load time. Better look into the Timings tab to see how fast it could load.

We have looked into every test for every page (Home, Long Page, and Store).

Check out the videos.

Google PageSpeed Insights Result

Google PageSpeed Insights score actually don’t indicate the final page load time. It shows the first contentful and meaningful paint time, first CPU idle time, First input delay time(FID) etc.

Well, here are Google PageSpeed Insights scores before and after the CDN.

Both results look GREAT.

This is because the data center might be located in the same place.

So, we can tell you that Kinsta can stun you with its performance.

Kinsta Hosting Security

Kinsta assures with its iron-clad security to prevent your website from getting hacked or attacked.

Kinsta continuously monitors for uptime, DDoS attack detection, software-based restrictions, SSL support, and hardware firewalls.

That means your site will be monitored and secured 24/7.

Kinsta actually checks your site’s uptime in every 2 minutes. That means they will check 720 times per day. That’s awesome. You don’t need to buy any ping testing website subscription!

They make a backup every day. Just in case you made mistakes or got hacked. Then Kinsta can easily reinstate your site within minutes.

As they monitor your website every day, just in case you got hacked or attacked, their WordPress experts will immediately jump in and FIX as soon as possible.

Kinsta WordPress Hosting Support

We have got great hosting support from Kinsta experts.

You can connect them via Chat, Phone Call(not included in starter plan).

As we are on the Starter plan, we have not the phone call privilege.

So tried the live chat option when we felt like to need some help.

There are always 6 people online for you. We got the response within 3 minutes which is GREAT.

Besides, Kinsta has a great knowledge base(resources) to get to know every detail about Kinsta.

You can also get updated with Kinsta system and data center status.

Pricing

Kinsta is pricey. BUT you won’t be disappointed.

WHY?

Because of its superb performance.

Kinsta WordPress hosting price starts from 30 USD per month. That is called the Starter plan where you can host only one WordPress website. If you buy for a year, you will get 2 months FREE.

We recommend if you are an agency, then buy their Business plan.

Also, you can make a custom order if you need more.

Kinsta has “30-day money-back guarantee” coverage.

What are you waiting for?

Buy Kinsta Hosting Today

Conclusion

We are totally pleased with Kinsta. We are hosting our website on it.

Is Kinsta hosting best for you?

Yes, if you care for SPEED, then Kinsta is for you.

If you have a lot of visitors like 1000k per month, then it will be very expensive like 600 USD per month.

We also haven’t seen any downtime after CDN activation. Because of its 20 data centers.

Kinsta is expensive BUT great for business.

We were very excited cause Kinsta uses Google Cloud Platform in its hosting architecture. So it was one of the most anticipated hosting providers we wanted to review.

AND finally, we have been using it for months!

We like it because of its CDN option which is limited 50 GB though.

Although there’s a CON. You can’t create an email address. We can deal with it using Google Suite or using another email hosting.

Let us know what do you think about Kinsta. Feel free to write in comment box.

DreamHost Managed WordPress Hosting (Data-Driven Review 2019)

August 27, 2019/0 Comments/in Managed WordPress Hosting Review /by Best MWP Admin

We’ve tested another managed WordPress hosting, DreamHost.

We bought a DreamHost managed WordPress starter plan hosting that didn’t come with CDN enabled.

BUT the results are pretty promising.

We are satisfied with its “Extreme Speed with Built-in Caching” as it says on DreamHost official website.

DreamPress runs on Openstack platform which is a free and open-source software platform for cloud computing.

Here is our data-driven review of DreamHost managed WordPress hosting AKA DreamPress.

Let’s jump into our default process to get you the real uptime, page load speed data to make you believe about the hosting performance.

DreamHost Managed WordPress Hosting Plan and Features

DreamHost has main features like other managed hosting.

DreamHost is running on very high-performance cloud server architectures. That gives your site a speed boost even you do not activate CDN.

You will get a free domain for one year once you signed up. That’s pretty good.

DreamHost has visitors limitations but NO bandwidth restrictions. You can offer any size of data on your site.

They offer “Wp website builder” option. It will help you build a beautiful website and it has a drag-and-drop editor.

They have free “Let’s Encrypt” SSL installed. So you can easily earn your visitors trust about the credibility of your website.

They have a very easy built-in caching function in WordPress. You just need to do the 1-click purge. No complex functions at all. The caching function has advanced multi-layer technology which optimizes your page speeds.

You can make a staging site to test your themes, plugins just doing 1-click. No hassle.

$299/year worth Jetpack plugin is included in the DreamPress Plus and Pro plan. You will get Jetpack Image CDN, Video CDN. Also, Jetpack will protect your site from malicious login attempts.

You can add email accounts. This privilege comes often with managed WordPress hosting though.

According to the DreamHost website, they call their managed WP hosting is DreamPress.

There are three plans- DreamPress, DreamPress Plus, and DreamPress Pro.

The main differences between the three plans are monthly visitors, SSD storage, Support, Jetpack license, and CDN.

We purchased the 1st one to test. We also wanted to check how DreamPress works without CDN.

We think 30 GB SSD storage is fine to any small website even after taking backup daily.

The 100k monthly visitor limitation is very reasonable.

One thing is missing, CDN.

The $79.95/month for DreamPress pro where you can host only one WordPress site which is a little pricy. We will discuss its pricing according to its performance later.

By the way, if you are low on money, you can try their shared hosting for WordPress.

Inside the DreamPress Hosting Environment

Unlike typical cPanel, DreamHost managed WP hosting has a different dashboard.

In the dashboard, you can manage your WordPress site easily. You will able to install a new WordPress site. There are WordPress resources on the dashboard.

In the managed WordPress section, you can add a custom domain. Also, you can create and restore a backup. And most importantly staging site which can be built with a 1-click.

You can browse the file manager using webFTP. It also has different looks but superbly easy to handle.

You can manage email accounts in one place which is not possible mostly other top managed WordPress hosting providers.

In the dashboard, you can see where is your data center located. Our website data center is located near Portland, Oregon, USA.

You can manage your database using phpMyAdmin. Although you can’t add a new database.

You can able to use other dev tools like WP-Cli and other server-side tools. You can also see site statistics there.

So we can tell you that it is not a very unfamiliar hosting environment. As everything is in one place, it will be easy.

Inside the WordPress Dashboard

We looked into our WordPress site setup in DreamPress which was installed on one of their temporary subdomains.

We were very interested to see their Caching purge plugin. Earlier in this post, we learned about this.

Well, we checked the plugin settings. It’s just simple purge setting plugin that you don’t have anything to change. Very simple but effective, we must say.

Then we looked into plugins list. DreamPress stuffed with some plugins like Yoast, VoltPress, OptinMonster and DreamHost’s own Purge and Backup plugin which is called “DreamObjects Backups”.

Uptime Monitoring

We have monitored the uptime for 14 days and there were 3 outages(total 5 minutes).

The uptime for 15 days was 99.95% which is good.

We found the reason behind the outages in Pingdom root cause analysis report. It was some server maintenance.

DreamHost provides response rate average 2000ms. That’s pretty high. But it didn’t slow the site down.

We saw the response time from the USA was much lower than in other places in the world. Cause the data center is located in the USA.

The built-in caching plugin takes care of the speed issue. We assume that if we used the CDN, then the page load time would have been faster.

Page Speed Test

We have tested its page loading speed on our default web pages.

All pages are heavily stuffed with non-resized images, self-hosted video, 3rd party video(i.e. YouTube), slider, parallax etc.

We have tested on three different testing platform- Pingdom, GTmetrix and Google PSI(Page Speed Insights).

Results are good. Again, we didn’t use CDN or any image optimizer. Just wanted to see the RAW results.

Let’s dive into the test results.

Pingdom Speedtest

We tested the page speed in four different locations- USA(Eastern & Western), Australia, Europe, and Eastern Asia.

We saw that our default Home page was loaded in less than 4 seconds in USA and Europe. Without the CDN this is good. Although DreamPress is running on cloud architecture.

We assumed that it would be good if the web pages were well-optimized.

Here is the Pingdom test video with DreamPress.

GTmetrix Page Speed Test

After Pingdom speed test, we headed to GTmetrix.

Just for your info, GTmetrix has a different algorithm to calculate data. The total page speed time can be ignored. You just have to look into its “Timing” tabs to see the real results.

Here are our GTmetrix test results-

We saw our default home page loaded in less than 5 seconds in Dallas, USA.

And the longest page load time was 11.2 seconds which was tested in Mumbai, India.

So we were interested to see the real load time for these two locations.

Here are the results-

As you can see in the USA result, the connect time in less than 200ms which is superb.

Then the TTFB is 1.4 seconds. The Time to First Byte which indicates the first visible response of the HTML form of the website.

According to GTmetrix

Time to First Byte (TTFB) is the total amount of time spent to receive the first byte of the response once it has been requested. It is the sum of “Redirect duration” + “Connection duration” + “Backend duration”. This metric is one of the key indicators of web performance.

The first paint and contentful paint comes in 1.9 seconds. It means the home page’s first meaningful contents rendered in the browser in 1.9 seconds. The FCP result is average, NOT BAD.

The DOM loaded in 2 seconds. Looks like there is no stylesheet blocking JS execution. That’s why DOM interaction and DOM content loaded time same.

Onload time is 2.5 seconds. That means all downloadable components like JS, CSS are loaded in 2.5 seconds.

On the other hand, In Mumbai, India, where our DreamPress hosted Home page loaded in almost 10 seconds.

The TTFB is 1.8 seconds. It’s good.

But the FP and FCP are 3.5 seconds. The FCP result is SLOW. We understand it happened because of data center location. But it can be improved using CDN.

The DOM interaction and DOM content load time in 3.6 seconds. It’s pretty much lengthy.

Also, the Onload time is 9+ seconds.

According to GTmetrix

Onload time occurs when the processing of the page is complete and all the resources on the page (images, CSS, etc.) have finished downloading. This is also the same time that DOM complete occurs and the JavaScript window.onload event fires.

It can also be improved by minifying JS, CSS. Using CDN can be useful as well.

Here is the video of GTmetrix tests in detail. Have a look.

Google Page Speed Insights Result

We checked the Home page on the Google PSI. It scored 66% without optimizing. Although the score is based on a few metrics, improvise those things the score will be going UP.

By the way, we saw both contentful paint and meaningful paint scored in 0.9 sec.

We may ask a question why this is different on Google PSI than on GTmetrix test.

In Speed Index, it shows the site loads in 5.4 seconds which is an average result.

We checked the CPU idle time is good. Means it is the amount of time the page responds to users.

First Input Delay time is 140ms which is an average score. 0 to 100ms is considered as fast.

Time to Interactive time is also average. The time is 2.7 seconds. It means the page took 2.7 seconds to be interactive.

Security

DreamHost offers your security things with some security layers. DreamSheild is its malware removal tool that protects sites from malware and other vulnerabilities using real-time monitoring and automatic fixes.

For your information, it is not FREE. You need to pay just $3/mo per site.

DreamHost sets up a firewall by default. So it protects you from malicious web attacks.

Besides, its file managing system has SSH security feature. So there is no chance to hotlinking or remote file snooping.

Support

DreamPress support is good. They let you contact through Live Chatting, Phone Call and Submitting Ticket.

We tried to get connected via the “Chat with an agent” option. And we were number 2 in the queue!

We got help within 2 minutes and the hosting tech guy was very resourceful.

So we can tell you the DreamHost managed WordPress hosting support is fast enough.

Pricing

DreamHost managed WordPress hosting has three plans – DreamPress, DreamPress Plus, and DreamPress Pro.

The pricings are different based on monthly or yearly.

If you buy monthly, you will have to pay 19.95 USD/Mo. But If you plan for a year, then 16.95 per month.

Please be noted that you can host one domain only with each plan. So it’s little bit pricy.

Unlimited CDN is only included with DreamPress Plus and Pro plans. We think it should be added with every plan.

DreamPress offers 30-days money back guaranty. SO you can buy without worry.

DreamHost offers a full refund on DreamPress hosting fees if your plan is canceled within the first 30 days of opening the account.

Get Started

Conclusion

After testing its uptime and page speed test, we can tell you that DreamPress is a good managed WordPress Hosting if you want to host one domain.

As it is running on Openstack cloud computing, it is pretty fast without enabling CDN and optimizing web pages.

It is a bit expensive but it worths to buy for.

Let us know in the comment box what do you think. Also, share your experience with DreamHost managed WordPress hosting.

A2 Managed WordPress Hosting Review 2020 (Features, Uptime and Speed Test)

August 23, 2019/0 Comments/in Managed WordPress Hosting Review /by Best MWP Admin

Recently we have picked A2 hosting’s managed WordPress plan.

Honestly, it has amazed us with its speed.

At first, we were not sure about its Plesk server performance. BUT the results we got are really GREAT!

Here is our in-depth review of A2 managed WordPress hosting.

Let’s have a look into its Plesk cPanel and the real data about its uptime and page speed.

A2 WordPress Hosting plan and features

We looked into their website to check their WordPress hosting plan. Actually, they have two kinds of WordPress hosting plan. One is Shared WordPress hosting and another one is Managed WordPress hosting.

What’s the difference between these two?

Well, hosting’s operating system is the main fact. Shared is run on Linux based cPanel whereas Managed is run on Windows Plesk server.

Besides, the Shared hosting plan is not “Turbo optimized”. We believe it is some terms to boost the speed. Let’s see!

In the Shared hosting plan, you will have to perform the “Do-It-Yourself WordPress”. Means you need to install manually(of course it has installer like other cPanel). The Backups, Site staging is not available.

As per the A2 managed WordPress hosting plan says it is 20x faster than the Shared plan. Besides, you can take the backup, make a staging site for your production site.

We were excited to test the managed plan. So we bought the Managed WordPress hosting plan.

Here are some notable features of the managed hosting plan.

Unlimited Transfer(No limit!)
Free SSL, SSD & CDN
Turbo (Up To 20X Faster)
Powered by Plesk
Site Staging
Easy, Automated Backups
Free Jetpack License
Free & Easy Site Transfer
Anytime Money Back Guarantee

Inside the A2 Managed WordPress Hosting Backend

A2 Plesk control panel is pretty identical to the well-known Linux cPanel control panel. Despite the different looks of the dashboard, the essential features are there and you are good to use it.

You’ll have the Plesk control panel where you’ll have access to your websites, email, file manager, databases, and statistics!

Check the screenshot below.

Generally in managed hosting the file managed comes restricted and only can be accessed through sFTP.

But in A2 managed you can browse files with full privileges like what you get in cPanel file manager.

The WordPress site data will be in “httpdocs” folder.

Have a look at the file manager.

As you can add unlimited subdomains and install WordPress on them. You will able to add unlimited databases.

So if you want to make a staging or dev site, you can easily select a database manually or create automatically while setting up a new WordPress site.

The Easy-To-Use staging site allows you to test changes and updates before you take them live.

Like cPanel, you can also access databases using phpMyAdmin. You can also make database backup easily.

Regarding email addresses, you can create unlimited email addresses according to A2 hosting plan.

You can check your statistics about how much storage left or how much bandwidth you already used.

The bandwidth is unlimited. No restriction!

You will have a dedicated WordPress control page where you can manage your sites.

You can scan the site for malware or other security flaws. Have a look at the Plesk WordPress control panel.

WP-CLI is pre-installed so you can manage your WordPress sites with the command line.

So you will get all the useful feats in a single place. We can tell you that the A2 Plesk control panel is no different.

Check out the backend video tour.

[check the video]

Inside the WordPress Dashboard

Well, it is not all about their superfast LiteSpeed server, there are a couple of things in their WordPress setup.

A2 Optimized and A2 Fixed W3 Total Cache

These two plugins actually making the differences.

A2 Optimized tunes up the site speed doing whatever it takes by minifying CSS/JS, compressing HTML (incorporating with W3 Total Cache plugin) and resizing images(they used Eww image optimizer plugin).

We saw two significant features in the A2 Optimized plugin.

Turbo Web Hosting
Memcached Database and Object Cache

What do these two features do?

As per the A2 optimized plugin

Turbo Web Hosting servers compile .htaccess files to make speed improvements. Any changes to .htaccess files are immediately re-compiled.

Turbo Web Hosting servers have their own PHP API that provides speed improvements over FastCGI and PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager).

To serve static files, Turbo Web Hosting servers do not need to create a worker process as the user. Servers only create a worker process for PHP scripts, which results in faster performance.

Turbo Web Hosting servers have a built-in caching engine for Full Page Cache and Edge Side Includes.

And Memcached Database and Object Cache

Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.

Uptime Monitoring

The response time is great. As we know that within 1000ms is considered fast.

The average response time is about 900 ms. It can be scored within 400 ms in the USA.

We haven’t used any CDN like Cloudflare, MaxCDN yet. So the result is satisfactory. Although Cloudflare is integrated and free. You just need to configure. That’s why they call it in the plan “free CDN”.

Well, we checked A2 MWP hosting uptime for the last 15 days and we got a downtime. That lasts around 20 minutes.

Then we prompted to check what happens actually. The root cause of the downtime was 500 Error. “database connection error”. That means it was the server-side issue. There might have been scheduled system upgrade or something wrong.

We understand the outage. It happens to all web hosting providers. No big deal.

Page Speed testing

We have tested our prototypes pages- Home, store and a long scroll page. Except for the Store page, both pages are heavy.

Although the Eww Image Optimizer plugin which is pre-installed compressed the images. The webpage size is around 6-7 MB.

Again, we didn’t configure any CDN yet. So the speed will NOT be the same in other places in the world.

We have tested the A2 hosted site in Pingdom, GTmetrix and Google PSI.

Let’s check it out.

Pingdom Page Speed Test

Here are our test results of the Pingdom speed test. As usual, we test our Home page and a long scroll inner page in 5 different locations- Eastern Asia, Australia, Eastern USA, Western USA, and Europe.

We have checked the fastest and slowest page speed test data.

We checked our prototype home page in the Western US region. The result is 1.2s. We assume the 6.5 Mb size home page loads within 1.2 sec to 2 sec. That’s super.

We saw that within 1 second the first contentful paint appeared which is top-notch despite there is a slider containing heavy size images. Then load fully within 2 seconds.

Then we have checked out the slowest page load time data. The location was Australia. It was more than 5 seconds which is not good. But we accept it cause the CDN is not activated yet.

As we see at the page load film strip, the first byte received within 2.5s but the first contentful paint is 2 seconds late which means it was an average performance. To be reckoned as the fast loading web page, the first contentful paint should be under 1000ms.

We believe that activating CDN on this site will do the job.

Check out our Pingdom uptime monitoring and page speed data in the video below.

GTmetrix Page Speed Test

Then we tested our pages in 6 locations in the world with GTmetrix.

The results are pretty the same and we are satisfied as the CDN is not still activated. We will let you know after configuring Cloudflare.

Let’s have a look at the Page Load Timings in a location. Let’s say it is the USA.

As you see in the image the TTFB(Time to first byte) is triggered within 200ms! Which is GREAT.

Then the first contentful paint triggered in 1 second which considered fast load time.

Then the DOM and other contents loaded within 3 sec. Superb!

Here’s the video of GTmetrix results. Check it out.

Google PSI data

At last, we tested our home page which is heavy enough to check hosting’s page loading ability.

The Google PSI results are also GREAT.

Both contentful and meaningful paint found within 800ms.

That is a really great result.

The page speed score can be boosted by optimizing a few things.

A2 Hosting Security

A2’s “Perpetual Security” measures help prevent you from getting hacked!

That’s why your account includes free HackScan Protection to help block hacks before the damage done.

According to A2 hosting…

KernelCare rebootless kernel updates, brute force defense, a dual firewall and a number of other security features are already in action to keep your site secure.

Their Reinforced distributed denial of service (DDoS) Protection saves your site even from the most sophisticated distributed denial of service attacks.

A2 Hosting Support

The only way to get help from the A2 experts is the ticket. But they response superbly quick. We got useful help on certain topics in less than an hour.

Besides, you can enrich your knowledge with their knowledgebase.

Also, check yourself about the network status.

This is is how you can open a ticket to get help. Relax they are fast to reply and very resourceful.

FYI, always include your support PIN to get supports faster

Pricing

A2 managed WordPress hosting is a little bit pricy but it worths to buy for.

Here is their current pricing

You will get a promotional price which is insanely 60% off!

Although you need to buy at least 3 years plan.

If you are a blogger or small business owner, then buy the 1-site or 3-site plan.

The unlimited plan should be GREAT for developers or agencies.

Buy managed WordPress hosting when you care for the page speed which will help you get SEO boost in real quick.

You can try it completely risk-free with “Anytime Money Back Guarantee”.

Get Started

Conclusion

After testing our default Homepage, Long page, and Woocommerce Store on Pingdom, Gtmetrix, and Google Page Speed Insights, we are very convinced with A2 managed WordPress hosting.

Adding a CDN network will certainly boost the page load time up. No doubt!

Because A2 ensures the speed using their fine-tuned SwiftServer platform complete with speed-enhancing features like solid-state drives (SSDs), Cloudflare Servershield CDN and LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress.

Uptime is OKAY. We didn’t get fully 100% uptime though.

Despite not having chatting option their Support is swift and agents very helpful.

Let us know what do you think about A2.

Also, feel free to drop your hosting related queries below in the comment box.

GoDaddy Managed WordPress Hosting (In-depth Review 2020)

August 20, 2019/0 Comments/in Managed WordPress Hosting Review /by Best MWP Admin

GoDaddy is a web host and domain register giant. They have been providing top class hosting services along with the world’s largest domain register title.

We have been testing its managed WordPress hosting. The results we got are amazing. As they say, they are “blazing fast”. Yes, they are correct. But some conditions may apply.

Here we are going to show you inside the GoDaddy MWP environment and make you believe with the real uptime and speed results.

GoDaddy Managed Hosting Plan and Features

Currently, GoDaddy is offering four WordPress hosting packages called Basic, Deluxe, Ultimate, and Pro 5+.

GoDaddy provides almost the same benefits to all package but the package differences are based on storage, visitors and some extra features like free SSL, reports, etc.

We have tested our prototype WordPress site on the Pro 5+ plan. We are going to show you the inside dashboard and tech features lately on this page.

As per the GoDaddy, the MWP hosting benefits are here:

99.9% uptime promise and money-back guarantee
CDN Boost for faster load times of up to 50% (New)
High-performance load-balanced servers
Free 24/7 support
Built-in signup forms powered by Gravity Forms ($59.00/yr value)
Automatic WordPress core software and security updates
One-click migration tool
Access to thousands of free themes and plugins
For beginners: Pre-built sites and drag & drop page editor
Latest version of PHP 7
SFTP access (Deluxe and Ultimate plans)
Free Microsoft Office 365 email for one year with the purchase of annual plan
Temporary domain name
Automatic daily malware scans
Free daily backups with 1-click restore

Inside the GoDaddy Managed WordPress cPanel

We have checked the top managed WordPress hosting environment’s dashboards. GoDaddy has one of the simplest User interface and experience. Here is the hosting cPanel. Have a look!

Here is how you can easily manage your WordPress site.

Basically, you will have two sites (one is your production, another is staging site). Although every WordPress site will be set up on a temporary domain first as you can see ours on GoDaddy testing. You can add your main domain later. Also, you can just install the staging site by 1-click. Keep in mind that WordPress core, Themes and Plugins update will be executed automatically. Sometimes that could trigger unexpected error though.

Currently, PHP 7 is set by default. You can change to version 5 if you want.

You can’t browse the file manager like shared hosting cPanel. GoDaddy uses a secure file transfer protocol. So you will get an sFTP/SSH credentials. You need FileZilla to get access.

Recently, GoDaddy added CDN features to boost the page load time. This means your content will be cloud-hosted around the world. It really works fine for us. We saw the page load time reduced by 50%. That’s really awesome! We will show the evidence in the speed testing review.

Regarding database access, you can easily log in to phpMyAdmin easily.

GoDaddy WordPress hosting’s backup and restoring plan is great. GoDaddy takes backup every day. Just in case, your data disaster or you got hacked, just 1-click restore files and database features will do the job for you.

Take a video tour inside the GoDaddy managed WordPress hosting.

Uptime Monitoring

We have used Pindom’s service to monitoring the GoDaddy hosting uptime. We actually saw amazing results with NO downtime. Here is our data for 7 days.

The average response rate is 405ms which is GREAT. Generally the response rate 0-1000 ms is considered FAST.

We sneaked into the Pingdom test results log. We saw the response rate within the USA is under 200 ms where the ping from Europe is a little bit higher. Although that can be negligible.

Page Speed Performance

We have tested a few pages on different locations using Pingdom. The results are fine now. Before activating the CDN option, it was really taking time.

Check out our Pingdom and GTMetrix data below.

We have tested a home page, a long scroll page and WooCommerce shop page with a single product as well in different locations in the world. All of them are heavy loaded non-optimized pages. For example, the home page size is around 9MB.

We noticed heavy page load time at the initial stage which was 7 sec. Later after we activated the CDN features, the page load time reduced by 50%.

Pingdom Page Speed Test Data

We have tested our non-optimized prototype home page which is around 9 MB in Western US, Europe, Australia, and Asia region.

The average result is satisfactory. We see the page load time is after CDN activated is GREAT, reduced by approx. 50%.

Also, we have tested our another prototype long scroll page which has full-size images. The page size is 4MB and the page load time is 422 ms!

Have a video tour to inside the Pingdom tests.

GTmetrix Page Speed Data

We also checked the website on GTmetrix. Our tests were made for six different locations in the world with unthrottled internet and CPU speed.

The results we got are pretty same. Although GTmetrix shows different page load time based on the testing desktop internet and caching conditions.

Here is the data.

We looked into the tests and what we discovered is the Time to First Byte (TTFB) is less than 100ms in some cases. The First Contentful Paint triggered within 450ms. That’s considered fast. Also, the DOM and page onload time completed within 3 seconds.

Check out the GTmetrix results in the video.

Google PSI Data

We checked the site on Google Page Speed Insights. Despite our prototype website and its pages are not optimized, we got 76 out of 100. But the speed test data metrics results we saw are satisfactory.

The first meaningful paint and contentful paint both within 700ms which is considered fast.

Time to interactive data is average. Because our site is not optimized. So you will have some things to do.

The FID(First input delay) within 200ms is average.

Support

In GoDaddy, you can get support 24/7 from their experts. We have had a lot of chat, phone calls which turned out a good result most of the time.

Their phone support is open 24/7. You may have to wait on their busy day. But the weekend is pretty faster to get a support agent.

Their very popular chat support opens All Day Mon – Fri (US time). Most of the time you may have to wait BUT we know some proper time to get engaged with.

Try contact at the Morning(US time), you will be #1 to get a support agent.

We have tested at the EST 5 PM. We got the #1 place.

That’s awesome!

When you talk to them, you need to remember your GoDaddy secret PIN code to be verified it’s you.

The support tech guys are very polite and resourceful.

Apart from the phone call or chat, GoDaddy has great numbers of a resource like a community forum, blog, and knowledgebase you can use anytime.

Security

GoDaddy MWP hosting always monitors security issues. BUT if you want them to remove malware or fix the hacked site, you need to PAY!

Besides, you can’t get access to regular web hosting cPanel. Rather you will get secure FTP login and SSH(Secure Shell) privileges.

You will automatically get your data backed up every day. So in case if your site gets hacked or damaged, you will easily able to restore by just 1-click.

In WordPress, Godaddy automatically installed Sucuri Plugin for security. It will block unauthorized login attempts and file protection. Also, it will harden the security firewall.

Pricing

GoDaddy WordPress hosting is not that pricy like Kinsta or WPEngine or other top WordPress managed hosting providers.

You will get 30% discount on their SALE season. Currently, as of 23rd August, the Basic plan starts from 6.99 USD. Although you need to buy 3 years if you want this 6.99 USD per month offer.

For a year plan, the cost will be 9.99 USD per month.

The price is very affordable. Visit this link to buy Godaddy WordPress hosting.

Conclusion

Well, GoDaddy is good. Not that high to meet our expectations, but good when you host one small or medium size site.

We saw in the tests that page size is matter. GoDaddy performs very well even when the page size is around 10MB or plus. So, you need to optimize the page very well.

Their CDN makes a huge boost to its customers recently. We are very very pleased with the result. You will get the most out of it if your site is worldwide.

GoDaddy support is top-notch. We are pleased with their tech guys and support agents’ dedication and skills.

Again, the pricing is very reasonable comparing the top tier MWP hosting provider.

Let us know what do you think or any questions in the comment box below.