Looking for the best WordPress hosting provider? Are you trying to decide between iPage and WP Engine? Both iPage and WP Engine allow you to host your WordPress website with ease. While iPage offers a few different hosting options, including cloud WordPress hosting; WP Engine is a completely WordPress-centric managed hosting provider.
In this article, we’ll provide a head-to-head comparison between WP Engine and iPage so you can decide which one is the right solution for your budget and needs.
WP Engine vs. iPage – Overview
WP Engine is a WordPress-centric managed hosting provider. Whether you’re starting a blog or running an enterprise-level business with off-the-chart growth, you’ll find the right hosting solution to meet your requirements.
With every plan, WP Engine gives you premium access to 35+ StudioPress themes for free. They also equip you with a suite for performance and integration solutions to help build and grow your business. It’s also a PCI compliant web hosting.
iPage is a hosting brand owned by Endurance International Group. They’re well-known for their affordable hosting options, starting from as low as $1.99 per month.
iPage was founded in 1998, which now serves over one million websites from across the globe.
They’re an EPA green power partner, which means their data centers are powered by wind energy, reducing carbon footprint to a great extent.
WP Engine vs. iPage – Page Speed and Uptime
Speed is one of the most critical factors you need to consider when choosing WordPress hosting. Even a 1-second delay can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. Not to mention, if you don’t take website loading speed seriously, you’ll be leaving a lot of money on the table.
To analyze the speed and uptime of the hosting servers for our WP Engine vs. iPage comparison, we created a test site on both hosting servers by signing up for their shared hosting plans.
We conducted a few different tests on our test websites:
- Pingdom test to monitor the loading times and availability.
- Load Impact test to analyze the performance of the servers during peak load times.
- Bitcatcha test to determine how the servers would perform in 8 different geographical locations by ignoring the content.
Let’s see the results.
According to Pingdom test, our WP Engine test site only took 582ms to load, which means the site’s faster than 96% of tested sites.
On the other hand, our iPage test site loaded in less than 3 seconds and was faster than 60% of tested websites.
Just like the speed test, it’s important to analyze whether your hosting service can survive a traffic surge. For our traffic surge test, we used a popular testing tool, Load Impact. With Load Impact, we sent up to 100 virtual visitors at a time to our test sites to see how the servers would handle the traffic.
From our test, it’s evident that the number of live visitors doesn’t have any negative impact on our WP Engine servers.
When it came to iPage, the response time was slow when there were about 50 users on the site. After that, the page speed remained stable despite having more live users.
The overall performance of WP Engine was graded A by BitCatcha, whereas iPage was graded C+.
Winner: WP Engine
WP Engine vs. iPage – Ease of Use
Since WP Engine is a managed WordPress hosting solution, you can rest assured that your server will be optimized for high performance without having to handle the technicalities of server optimization. That means you’ll have peace of mind while focusing on what you’re really good at: publishing content and marketing it.
With iPage, the main downside is that it doesn’t offer cPanel. Instead, they offer their own customized version of a control panel which they refer to as vDeck. However, if you’re accustomed to cPanel, which is the most popular web hosting control panel, then there’ll be a bit of learning curve to tackle before using vDeck.
Winner: WP Engine
WP Engine vs. iPage – Features
WP Engine
Below are a few unique features of WP Engine:
- Free access to StudioPress themes: You’ll get full access to 35+ high-quality StudioPress themes without extra cost.
- 1-click tool: You’ll also get a 1-click tool for setting up development, production, and staging environments.
- WordPress core updates: No need to worry about staying up-to-date because WP Engine has got you covered.
iPage
Now let’s take a look at a few features of iPage.
- All basic features: You’ll get a free domain name, free SSL, and a 1-click installer.
- Ad credits: you get free ad credits worth $200
- Only one shared hosting plan: iPage only offers a single shared hosting plan with unlimited site hosting support.
- Drag and drop builder: Build a website the way you want with a website builder.
Winner: WP Engine
WP Engine vs. iPage – Support and Documentation
With their starter plan, WP Engine offers live chat support only. Phone support is provided with their higher plans. And ticket-based support is provided with their custom dedicated server plans.
iPage, on the other hand, provides 24/7 support via phone, email, and live chat. You can also rely on their documentation, which explains everything you need to know about starting a new website.
Winner: iPage
WP Engine vs. iPage – Pricing
The regular price for WP Engine starts at $35 per month. We’ve negotiated a deal with WP Engine, so our users will get a 20% discount on WP Engine, meaning you only need to pay $28 per month.
iPage is well-known for affordable pricing options for their web hosting services. iPage is the best choice for users who’re looking for a cheap-yet-reliable hosting service. Their cheap hosting plan starts at as low as $1.99 per month.
Winner: iPage
Recap – WP Engine vs. iPage
After our comparison, we believe that WP Engine is a better managed WordPress hosting provider. If you don’t want to optimize your WordPress hosting on your own, then you might want to consider WP Engine for hosting your site.
iPage, on the other hand, provides affordable hosting options for websites of all sizes and budget. If you’re already hosted on another hosting provider, you can avail a free website transfer. Best of all, their free site builder lets you create a beautiful site with ease.
You’d also like to check out our comparisons between,
- WP Engine vs DreamHost
- WP Engine vs InMotion Hosting
- WP Engine vs Liquid Web
- WP Engine vs A2 Hosting
- WP Engine vs GreenGeeks
We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress hosting provider on the market. If you liked this article, check out our WP Engine review and iPage review.
