3 reasons why doing so could be a costly business mistake.
Buyer beware . . . Anyone willing to do a little research will soon find that signing on with WP Engine or CPanel may be worst business move that they could make.
Any group that’s maintaining or hosting numerous websites is getting a poor value by using WP Engine. However, if you’re agency that only hosts a few websites, WP Engine may be a good bet for you.
Cost Savings
The number one reason not to use WP Engine/CPanel is cost savings. If you use WP Engine, CPanel, or another WordPress host, you simply are not going to make as much money. These companies charge you for additional licenses, and mediocre support as you grow. Usually that means that the more websites you host, the more that will come out of your pocket.
Let’s take a look at real life example. We’ll call the customer “Agency X.”
Agency X used WP Engine for hosting. Twenty of their customers did E-Commerce with dedicated on WP Engine.
Each customer was charged $700.
WP Engine refused to budge on their pricing, so the customers opted to pay the agency less.
Agency X charged $100 per customer for updates and maintenance.
Therefore, those 20 customers brought Agency X $2,000 of total revenue.
What should they be doing?
This is exactly what Agency X did. They placed their 20 customers on 2 ultra-high-performance, cloud servers.
They then elected to charge their e-commerce customers for hosting and support. (Instead of WP Engine charging the customers directly.)
Agency X charged their e-commerce customers $500/month (as opposed to WP Engine’s $800/month).
Their total revenue rocketed to $10,000.
That’s five times the revenue that Agency X made when they were using WP Engine. And that’s only the beginning. Agency X should have charged their customers more.
While generating greater profits, they also gained security expertise, and unrivaled speed.
Speed
Why is speed important?
Just recently, Google changed its metrics to incorporate speed. Speed now affects your SEO score. If your SEO is great, but your website it slow, you still won’t make it to the top of the list.
As technology evolves, speed will be more important than ever. Unfortunately for many, WP Engine and CPanel just won’t cut it.
WP Engine and CPanel use the same stack which utilizes nginx and apache as a web servers with HTTP accelerator engines (like Varnish). These engines and servers traditionally cache on a PHP level and store their cache on a disk, which is slow.
Using Google Speed Score, American IT Partners see a 30 – 40 point Google Pagespeed improvement over the WP Engine and CPanel’s stacks. The reason why it’s so fast is because it does full page caching and has full Redis support. The cache isn’t on a disk when serving large influxes of users. It’s all in memory. What does all that mean? Lightning speed. Speed that can bump you to the top of the list, provided you have excellent SEO.
Value
WP Engine and CPanel are an incredible waste of value. Why is that?
- They do not provide security experts to advise you or assess your risk. What happens when problems arise with configuration? Security? Using WP Engine or CPanel, there is no channel for you to handle it. They have a standard security playbook, but no live person who can delve deeper and tell you what the actual problem is.
- They sort customers into categories. For example, if you do e-commerce, they will tell you that you require dedicated. However, that’s not always necessarily the case. Ultimately, you’re probably going to be charged more than you should be.
- Load Capacity. When agencies switched to American IT Partners, they decreased their webserver load by 80% compared to the leading industry panel vendor (Dedicated CPanel, in this case).
So, why is load capacity important? You can place more customers onto less servers. Quick math breakdown: If you’re paying for one server, as opposed three or four, you just cut your agency’s fees by a quarter.
- Neither WP Engine nor CPanel provide the control and flexibility that agencies need.
Have you ever wanted to choose between single or multi-tenancy? Do you want one website on one host, and one hundred websites on another host? Do you want to set up Git Push/Pull for your developers? WP Engine does not allow this flexibility and control, whereas some open-source platforms will.
How many websites do you maintain? Do you make any money on the hosting? If you’re like most agencies, you could make more if you hosted websites as well as maintained them. You can do it cost effectively and have scalability, security, and flexibility outside of wpengine and other hosts.
If your agency values speed and cost savings, then best find an alternate vendor, and avoid the C-Panel and WP Engine.
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