Comparing WP Engine and SiteGround is very common for those looking for supercharged WordPress hosting with great features and amazing support.
On the one hand, WP Engine – based in Austin, TX – started the managed WordPress hosting revolution and have become an established juggernaut.
On the other hand, you have SiteGround, based out of Bulgaria, with amazing features at an economical price that blows out almost every other hosting company.
Pricing Comparison: Affordable vs Premium
WP Engine Pricing – Premium
WP Engine offers two types of plans, and depending on the plan, you may pay a lot more than you would expect. For their personal plan, it is $29.99 a month, and for the professional plan, you can expect to pay $99.99 a month. Not ideal if you’re just starting out and trying to establish yourself with your online presence.
Remember this: for real businesses, the difference between hosting that costs $10 a month and hosting that costs $50 a month is trivial. But for an upstart blogger it's the difference between starting a site and not. So if you're a growing business, don't pinch pennies here. Look at the whol picture, look at all the features.
SiteGround Pricing – Affordable
If you’re looking to save some money, SiteGround offers a variety of plans that are an amazing value for the features you get.
| StartUp | GrowBig | GoGeek | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intro Price | $3.99/mo | $6.69/mo | $10.69/mo |
| Normal Price | $14.99/mo | $24.99/mo | $39.99/mo |
| Monthly Visits | ~10,000 | ~25,000 | ~100,000 |
| Storage Space | 10 GB | 20 GB | 40 GB |
| Bandwidth | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered |
| Free & unlimited | Free & unlimited | Free & unlimited | |
| CDN | Free | Free | Free |
| Daily Backups | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| On-Demand Backups | No | No | Yes |
| 24/7 Support | Yes, standard | Yes, standard | Yes, Priority |
| SSL Certificate | Free | Free | Free |
| Anti-Hack Systems | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Staging | No | Yes | Yes |
Their startup plan starts at $3.95 a month, with options to extend your plan up to three years. Their Grow Big plan starts at $7.95 a month, and includes plans that can extend up to three years without a price change.
Winner: SiteGround
Looking at price will help you decide which hosting site is better suited for you and your needs. SiteGround offers plenty of options for their plans, and they are not too expensive. SiteGround is the winner of this round.
Customer Support: Both are Excellent
WP Engine: 24/7 USA-Based Support
From the beginning, WP Engine stood out for its custom suppor. They truly believe that customer service is important to their company, and their customer support shows how they operate.
The best part is the little chime as you chat with their rep directly from the hosting admin interface.
They provide disk write protection, disk write limitations, and backups. You can access a knowledge base, email support, and phone service.
SiteGround: Super Fast, Above and Beyond
SiteGround is extremely amazing when it comes to customer support.
Their customer service agents are based all around the world, available 24/7. You can call them 24/7, which WP Engine doesn't offer.
Both companies have excellent customer support, but the edge goes to WP Engine, especially if you need focus on WordPress. WP Engine also includes a knowledgebase you can access if you need to do some checking. If you aren’t crazy about having a knowledge base, SiteGround does offer plenty of information to help you fix any issue with your website.
Winner: Tie
WP Engine vs SiteGround Speed
WP Engine – Focused on Speed
While speed is good for any website, you need to make sure you have a hosting company that doesn’t go too slow. WPE has excellent speed, and pages can load in roughly 1.3 seconds, allowing visitors to pull up the site quickly. This is practical for those that need a hosting site that has excellent response times.
SiteGround – Supercacher Plugin Helps
SiteGround recently upgraded their servers to Google Cloud, and along with their Supercacher plugin, you get pretty good value for their speed and cost.
We like SiteGround as a great balance of speed and value.
Winner: WP Engine
While both companies provide excellent speeds, if you’re for one winner, WPE is the winner. They don’t have as many people bogging down the system, which can make your speed even faster. Since you’re not competing with over 250,000 WPE is going to be just a bit faster than SiteGround.
WP Engine vs SiteGround: Value
WPE – Value is Strong for Businesses
WP Engine is a good value for businesses, because the $35 doesn't make much of a dent. For individuals and hobbyists, it can be expensive.
Depending on what you need for your website, you may consider other features more valuable. WPE has 10 or 20 GB of diskspace on their plans, includes their own panel, and provides excellent customer support. While that may be good, you should also consider the hefty price tags along with the plans.
SiteGround – Amazing Value
If you’re looking for the most bang for your buck, SiteGround certainly provides a lot of special features for your plan. They include a cPanel, 10 or 20 GB of diskspace, and a free domain. Include their customer support, and SiteGround is an excellent choice. Not only do they include a lot of features, but their prices are extremely competitive.
SiteGround is the #1 value host anywhere.
Winner
While everyone determines value differently, based on the number of items you get with SiteGround, it offers the best value. You get a lot more for your money, and you don’t need to shell out too many shekels for the base features. That alone makes SiteGround the winner for the value column.
WP Engine vs SiteGround: Features
WPE
The feature section for WPE is ideal, but only for WordPress users. They have a lot of features you won’t find with other hosting sites. You will have access to programs that are exclusive to WordPress, caching technology, SSL and CDN ready, and propriety caching technology. Not bad for an exclusive hosting company.
SiteGround
SiteGround offers plenty of features, including features that are suited for WordPress. Their plans include emails, site transfer or setup, one-click installation, and 24/7 customer support. Their domain names are also free for life, making it practical for anyone.
Winner
Both hosting sites are good for WordPress users, and you may have a hard time deciding which site would be better. Both choices are good, and this round doesn’t have a clear winner. It is a tie, but that’s okay to have a tie here. Both companies offer excellent features that will make your website pop.
Downtime/Uptime
WPE
When you’re running a website, you need a hosting site that provides excellent uptime. WPE has shown some inconsistencies for the last quarter, but WPE proclaims a 99.9% uptime. In February of this year, they did experience significant downtime for a week, but there are many factors that can cause downtime.
SiteGround
SiteGround also guarantees 99.9% uptime, and for the last quarter, the numbers have proven it. They did experience more outages than WPE, but those outages were short lived. Once again, it could be due to the number of customers that they have on their servers.
Winner
Everyone with a website needs a strong uptime, and both companies do provide 99.9% uptime. While things such as maintenance and downtime can hinder a website, there may be many factors. Depending on if you can handle more short downtime periods, or fewer, but extensive downtime periods, one may be better than the other. This round is a tie.
Who is it for?
Marketers
When you’re marketing, you need a hosting site that works well nearly 100 percent of the time. SiteGround is the better option, even though they can experience frequent downtime periods, but they don’t last long. Not only that, but you will have a domain name that will last forever, which is a nice feature you need if you’re planning on branding. Not only that, but their competitive prices will make any marketer fall in love with SiteGround.
Developers
Developers love using WordPress, since you can use just about anything you want to enhance your website. There is built-in caching and staging available with WPE, and includes daily backups, allowing you to save all your work. Though it can be more expensive, you will still get quality with WPE. WordPress is easy to use through WPE, and if you’re a developer, using WPE will help you more than SiteGround. Though SiteGround does offer plenty of excellent options, there are more things that are better for developers through WPE. You should determine how you need to use the options available to ensure WPE is right for you.
Small Business Owners
Since small business owners may not have plenty of time to get their website up and running, SiteGround is an excellent choice for them. It is easy to set up a website, you’ll have excellent uptime, lots of great features, and doesn’t need to be constantly updated. As a small business owner, you can get everything set up, and let it go. Allowing the hosting site to handle the more technical stuff can save a small business owner more time.
Ecommerce Companies
Ecommerce companies are huge, and having a hosting site that allows them to cater to their own customers is huge. WPE is an excellent choice for ecommerce companies, because the website can cater to specific markets, and there are more options an ecommerce company needs to stay competitive. However, if they find that there is too much downtime with WPE, SiteGround is an excellent alternative. Not only that, but they are cheaper than WPE, don’t need as much attention, and uses different caching levels. This is excellent if your ecommerce company is trying to get their products to more people. Neither one is a terrible decision, and it can come down to the price of each hosting company.
Last Updated on May 23, 2021 by Joe
