Every service, ranked by real customers

Runs large side projects on WP Engine base plan at a fixed monthly price.

They were charged $480 for a new site, could not edit it until buying a $520 plan, and now can only reach an AI support agent despite 24/7 support claims.

Git-based deployment workflow where updates merge from dev to production is solid for enterprise apps, though adapting to its rigid workflow can be disruptive for agencies.

Kinsta help is nice and available, but overage charges for bot traffic are out of control and they are looking for a new host.

Rolled out a new PHP update across an entire fleet of hosted sites within half an hour of upstream release.

Pantheon communicated far better on its status page than WP Engine during the PHP incident.

Put premium sites on WP Engine expecting better security response; SiteGround patched in an hour while WP Engine lagged and a client site was shut down.

DreamHost patched the PHP vulnerability while the WP Engine site was still not patched.

WP Engine level 1 support knew nothing about the critical vulnerability and gave generic, outdated information hours later.

Chose WP Engine for support and security features but is pissed at the slow PHP patch.

Several of their sites on Kinsta's London data centre were down for hours while waiting for Kinsta's engineers to explain the outage.

Briefly tried Kinsta and was unimpressed: the PHP worker limit made an optimized WooCommerce store struggle, and one yearly sales report made the site inaccessible.

Once lightning fast years ago, the platform has become annoyingly slow alongside longer live chat support wait times.

They have kept a blog on WordPress.com for over 15 years and also built a site on WordPress.org, saying both serve a purpose.

They run multiple sites on the WordPress.com Personal plan with plugins and themes enabled, which has been possible on all paid plans since April 2026.

They moved from WordPress.com to another host a few months ago and had no problem backing up and restoring the site.

They started on WordPress.com in 2015 and moved to their own server around 2018 pretty smoothly using Jetpack.

Ten-year client who lost 27 hosted sites and backups to the same malware infection while over 20 support tickets went unresolved.

Fifteen years of working with the platform and its free sandbox accounts without billing or lock-out issues.

They paid for a year of WordPress.com and regret it after finding database access is limited to higher tiers.

Support quality dropped sharply from helpful and supportive to bot-like, repetitive, and quick to shift blame onto customers in tickets.

Has used Kinsta for years and stays for its 24/7 support.

They host three client sites on Pantheon. Its Git deploy workflow meant the sites did not auto update and were hit by the WordPress exploit, but damage was minimal and easily reversed with a backup restore.

Once a favorite agency host with great Local integration, but 503 errors, sluggish frontend and backend speeds, and stripped resources forced migrating 42 of 52 client sites away.

After the WP Engine acquisition, account reps pushed aggressive upsells using questionable performance data, prompting a full move away from what used to be a favorite host.

Works for basic personal sites, but lacks newer managed hosting features as users are nudged toward WP Engine.

Prefers Kinsta over SiteGround for easier backups, restores and staging and faster sites; uses it for all their sites.

A Rocket.net customer of three years on the 10-site business plan chats with a real human who stays until the issue is resolved.

A user likes Rocket.net's support, which always goes out of its way to help customers.

They left WP Engine for a VPS at under a tenth of the cost, citing high price and poor support. Their tuned VPS runs faster than the WordPress-optimized hosting.

Moved a client from WP Engine at $4,800 a month to a dedicated Kinsta server for under $800 a month, with faster front and back end and a simpler dashboard.

Switched from SiteGround to WP Engine and saw speed improvements with responsive support.

Migration was fast and sites lightning fast, but Kinsta blocks their own VPN access and support told them to accept it or kick rocks.

Switched a ton of sites from SiteGround and WP Engine to Kinsta; support fantastic and servers solid.

Four to five years on Kinsta and loves the service, but its traffic metric counts bots and some months is 10x Google Analytics.

Unimpressed with the support service level on a corporate Drupal site hosted there, prompting a search for a new enterprise host.

Still seeing 5xx errors on a $3,450 a month account and moving to AWS because support cannot analyse logs or give insight.

Moved off WP Engine after a couple of outages and finds it way less stressful since.

About 20 client sites on WP Engine went down with 502 errors, after two similar incidents over the weekend, with about an hour of downtime.

On leaving WP Engine after spending over $100k over the years, the customer service was abysmal and dismissive.

After 10+ years on a P1 account with 100+ sites, mostly gets hit up for upgrades by a revolving door of account managers.

Dashboard access remained unavailable into a second consecutive day of platform outage.

Moved to Rocket.net a few weeks ago and it has been amazing; support connected them to a human right away on a weekend, though it is not cheap ($25 to start).

Six months of hosting delivered zero downtime under their 100% uptime SLA, useful Automattic agency perks, and first-contact human support resolution after passing the initial AI chat bot.

Migrating sites off WP Engine: unbelievably poor server performance and support who blame false causes, charging for things baked into other platforms.

Kinsta is a bill happily paid every month with absolutely unmatched support.

Has had many WP Engine and Kinsta customers; WP Engine is predatory about pushing upgrades.

Happy Kinsta customer for 8+ years: security, tooling, backups, excellent support and UX.

Uses Kinsta and sleeps at night.

Hosted 200+ sites at WP Engine for 8+ years: excellent support, great tools and decent performance, though pricey.

Kinsta's support is outstanding and unmatched, an insurance policy worth paying for.

Clients with 10-20 sites each on WP Engine find the hosting slow for the price.

They moved two sites from AWS to WordPress hosting, which cloned the sites and let them test before changing DNS.

Kinsta's server UX, API and responsive support are decent but technical skill varies, and object caching at $100 a month feels expensive.

A site in Kinsta's London data centre was moved to Oracle cloud and was offline for over six hours without resolution.

Rotates customer success managers every month and fails to give straight answers about how their WAF is configured.

Kinsta support finally said they cannot whitelist an office IP on their Cloudflare layer, leaving an intranet portal blocked for an hour.

Included Jetpack Complete on the agency plan integrates smoothly and runs much better than on standard third-party hosts.

Likes Kinsta as a host but has had all kinds of issues with DevKinsta on both Windows and Mac.

Moved 200+ sites from Flywheel to WP Engine and finds it better with more functionality in the dashboard.

Loves Flywheel's console compared to WP Engine's and says its support is always outstanding, with sites on the Sydney server.

Kinsta is great but staging sites get 50% fewer resources unless you pay more, causing update issues, so they moved those sites to WP Engine.

Agency says WP Engine has amazing human support, security, WP-CLI, backups, CDN and Local integration, though it is expensive.

Used Flywheel's freelancer/agency plan for small client sites, with backups, CDN, staging and an easy dashboard included.

They use the WordPress.com Business plan for client sites and find it extremely slow and unacceptable, which is why they want to move away.

After years on Kinsta, says support went downhill overnight.

Frequent site slowdowns from exhausted PHP workers led support to pitch a 600-dollar-per-month plan upgrade for a modest 30k-visit site.

They tested WPX and found its performance unimpressive. They benchmarked it against another host and ended up choosing that one.

Their sites on Rocket.net seem fine months after the Hosting.com buyout, though they have not needed support so cannot say if it slipped.

An agency hosts all its clients' WordPress sites on Pressable and has been very happy with it.

They have used WP Engine from the start and value its free malware help, staging and support. Speed is weak even with dedicated server space and image compression does not work well, so they want to switch.

They recently used Pantheon and found its shared databases painfully slow, with pages taking over 10 minutes to load in dev.

Several of their client sites on Pantheon had usage skyrocket from AI bot traffic, which pushed them into a higher tier.

Five years on Kinsta for nonprofit clients: amazing support and zero outages across 50+ websites apart from one Cloudflare-related incident.

Kinsta moved its sites off old hardware, but charges $100/mo for Redis and support is only decent and helpful-ish.

Solid hosting and great support, but the agency plan allows downloading only one backup per week so no daily external backups.

Agency uses Kinsta for some clients and finds them responsive, keen to listen to the community and good to work with.

Two dedicated WP Engine servers in the AU data centre with no speed issue, preferred over Cloudways though pricey.

Performance dropped across WP Engine clients, support got worse and space and bandwidth are limited.

The client was on Kinsta before WP Engine and it was not a good experience.

Agency moved from WP Engine to Pressable and found it rock solid with supportive staff and no upselling account managers.

Pretty happy hosting on Kinsta with excellent support; was not impressed with Rocket.net's dashboard.

Says Kinsta prohibits vulnerability scanning and pen testing even when requested responsibly, making security due diligence impossible.

Runs two agencies with over 400 sites on WP Engine; account reps keep upselling and support dropped from instant agency access to 15-20 minute queues.

Left Kinsta for Pressable for value and has been happy there for several years, a Goldilocks zone.

Happy on a custom Kinsta agency plan with a dashboard that keeps getting features, but notes it artificially limits resources.

Rocket.net support was very helpful but it could not properly run an EDD-powered site, with session and speed issues.

After 15 years leaving WP Engine over a massive drop in support quality outside the top tiers, aggressive upselling and junk-server quarantines.

Switched from WP Engine to Kinsta, support even made changes to boost performance, cut a client's bill by a third and the site runs faster.

Has about 30 sites on a Kinsta agency account, no complaints and great support.

Almost four years on Kinsta with no complaints: always up, excellent feature set, fast hosting and excellent support.

Has used Kinsta for years. Expressed as a plain personal opinion about the hosting provider in a thread about WP Engine alternatives.

Moved from a 17k per year WP Engine plan to a 6k custom Kinsta plan with amazing support.

WP Engine support chat shuts down every time it is used and DNS broke, so they are looking at Kinsta.

On WP Engine since 2022, repeated limit warnings for bandwidth and CPU with no usage data on the dashboard and pushes to upgrade.

Kinsta is not the cheapest but they have nothing but good things to say.

Moved everything from WP Engine to Pressable with zero regrets.

Migrated 30 sites from WP Engine to Pantheon, a more technical setup they like better.

Got hit by WP Engine's excessive CPU use warnings and is moving all clients to Kinsta.

Kinsta has the best 24x7 tech support of any host used, fast well-engineered sites, outstanding uptime and continually improving hardware.

WP Engine never seemed all that fast or robust.

Migrated to Kinsta and found it genuinely outstanding.

Has never had problems with WP Engine, with great support and 24/7 chat.

A Flywheel customer says it has been awesome.

They started on WordPress.com but were annoyed by the personal plan limits, where nearly every template edit prompts an upgrade. They are moving to a self-hosted build.

Loved Kinsta and its outstanding tech support but finds it expensive and its billing support very bad.

Several good years, then support became worthless, everything got glitchier and they constantly needed bigger plans, so they switched last year.

Moved 40 sites from WP Engine two years ago with a smooth transition, no crazy upselling and top-notch support.

Two and a half years on a client's Kinsta account and now a huge fan: best support they have dealt with and very fast performance.

Sold the P1 plan then escalated to P2 and P3 with rising costs, and now hits memory strain on P3 with about 200 sites.

Moved from WP Engine to Rocket.net a few years ago and has had zero downtime issues.

On a P3 plan and pushed to upgrade again only three months after moving up from P1, so seriously thinking of leaving.

Two WP Engine P1 accounts running about 100 low-traffic sites each, no complaints.

Used Kinsta with Cloudflare for a TV broadcast and handled 45k unique visitors in 20 minutes after Kinsta analysed the site.

They had the same malware infection on WPEngine a month earlier and now suspect WP Engine itself was compromised.

WP Engine support would not help migrate away a site using its LargeFS media offload.

They say a recent emergency migration on WP Engine rotated salts and database passwords and caused them serious trouble.

Two of their WP Engine sites were hacked on the same day through an FTP user that was created and deleted within minutes. They suspect a compromised hosting account, and WP Engine later reset their dashboard password.

Loves Kinsta with no issues and only wants a European host to save a few euros.

They have used Pressable since 2018 and find it very fast and rock solid, with responsive and helpful support. Their only complaint is that Jetpack cannot be removed.

Has a few projects on Kinsta and says the support has been really good.

Used in the past and found the system pretty good with similarly fast websites, though it was on the more expensive side.

They pay about $310 a month on the Scale plan and over the past year saw many 502 errors and a very slow back-end. Support helped with troubleshooting but the problems kept returning and they were pushed to upsells.

WP Engine charges $60/month for 150GB bandwidth and 15GB storage, far above competitors, and does not allow subfolder installs.

A user switched from Bluehost to Rocket.net last fall and hasn't looked back.

A Flywheel customer of 10 years says its support is stellar, caching the fastest they've seen, and daily downloadable backups come included.

A company moved from WP Engine to Kinsta and couldn't be happier: great support and features at half the price at scale.

An agency that preferred Flywheel says WP Engine's first support reply is always a form response telling you to deactivate plugins, even when you already did.

A Flywheel customer of almost a decade, after leaving Bluehost, says it cleans your site for free if hacked.

They moved 15 sites from Pressable to WPX without enough research and then hit a 30GB storage limit and trouble running API scripts. They are now looking for a VPS or dedicated option.

An agency launched a massive client site on Kinsta with a painless migration and launch and zero issues.

Had a great experience with Pressable and clients placed there have not had issues.

Cancelled WP Engine before the 30 days and got a cancellation date before renewal, but they renewed and charged the card anyway.

They moved from GoDaddy to WordPress.com's Personal plan to save money, found building the site painful with an editor worse than GoDaddy's, and are stuck with the domain locked for 60 days.

After moving to Kinsta, asking about security got a brush-off to consult a developer and the control panel shows no sign of breach attempts.

Every Kinsta plan includes Cloudflare enterprise WAF, bot protection, DDoS protection and free hack repair, so no security plugins are needed.

They had a brief outage on WPX that was resolved quickly and say it is the only issue in their 3 years with the host.

A long-time Kinsta user says it has always been their choice but recent price increases leave them disappointed.

Despite community dislike, WP Engine's LocalWP-to-production workflow is smooth and support has always been helpful.

Agency used WP Engine for 12+ years adding and deleting servers on monthly or yearly plans without issue; also fine with Kinsta and SiteGround.

No complaints about WP Engine's hosting environment, which met all technical expectations for ten years.

After cancelling a WP Engine plan held since 2015 and being promised no further charge, they were billed 300 dollars for another year; refund came after complaints.

Moved several clients off WP Engine because of aggressive upselling.