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WPX Hosting Review: Is It Worth Your Money? (2024)

WPX Hosting is without a doubt, one of the more unique hosting companies I’ve investigated.

For one thing, it’s dedicated solely to providing WordPress hosting, but being the best at it.

WPX Hosting homepage

The WPX website is very modern, full of the clean graphic designs like the ones above, and makes a compelling case.

And yet, I noticed some grammatical errors. Plus, it’s not super well known.

So I began to wonder: is this as much of a hidden gem as it portrays itself? Or is this a sketchy host that people should treat with caution?

Well, I’ve investigated that very question, and through that, you can learn whether WPX Hosting is a good option for YOU.

Let’s get started with the pros:

WPX Hosting: Pros

Pro #1: Good performance

Now, WPX Hosting has an uptime guarantee. But I’m not that impressed by it:

99.95% sounds super high, but it’s closer to just “good,” if that makes sense.

When you actually look at what 99.95% uptime means, it’s this:

uptime breakdown

99.95% uptime over the course of a month means over 21 minutes of downtime.

Over the course of a month, it may not seem like that big of a deal. But if you’re running a business, it’s a risky number to have.

You can look at our uptime calculator for more breakdowns of what given uptime scores are.

However, I’ve got some good news:

While I’m not too impressed by the uptime guarantee, I find that WPX usually has much better uptime than it.

So in general, WPX has excellent uptime, and the guarantee is more of the bare minimum than what you actually have to work with.

Now, the other thing that’s important, aside from uptime, is of course response time.

Page speed is absolutely everything these days, so it’s pretty important. And luckily, WPX delivers.

Part of this is thanks to WPX Hosting’s custom-made content delivery network (CDN). But more on that soon:

Pro #2: Overall good features, especially in terms of security

Let me clear something up right now, as it’s very important going forward:

WPX Hosting offers MANAGED WordPress hosting.

So with that said, it has pretty solid managed hosting features.

With that clarified, here are the plans and their features:

pricing

Yep. It’s just these three—there aren’t different sets of tiers for different types of hosting. Just variations of the managed solution.

The main difference between tiers is the amount of resources: the number of sites allowed, storage, and bandwidth.

Other than that, all plans have basically the same features and advantages.

The big one, of course, is the custom Cloud CDN. CDN, or Content Delivery Network, is a way of distributing servers geographically so that data is transferred more quickly.

CDN is great for boosting your site’s performance, especially if you have visitors coming in from all over the place.

Otherwise: staging areas are an incredibly useful tool. They’re more common in managed WordPress hosting plans, and are frequently points of attraction for that genre of hosting.

Essentially, these let you create test versions of your site. You can use it to safely test themes, plugins, all sorts of changes.

Plus, the platform itself is optimized for WordPress and site migrations are free and unlimited.

But like I mentioned, what impressed me in particular were the security features:

Unlimited SSL, DDoS protection, daily malware scanning AND removal, regular/automatic backups, and manual backups.

These are great for anyone, but they’re particularly essential for anyone hosting an important project (i.e., their business). And backups in particular are just plain useful, regardless of security.

Pro #3: Customer support, and the “fixed for you” guarantee

As a company that mostly provides managed hosting, customer support ought to be great.

So is it?

The short answer is: yes!

Representatives can be contacted quickly, through email/ticket or live chat.

Live chat is always present on the site and very responsive:

live chat

Also, a note on the timestamps of the messages: my computer is 3 minutes ahead, so my message was actually sent at 02:22—meaning the representative was very fast in replying.

Part of the reason customer support is good is the aforementioned “fixed for you” guarantee (also known as FFY).

Most hosting companies respond to technical problems your site faces by directing you to support articles, and asking customers to figure it out for themselves. They’ll only help after you’ve tried X things.

Some hosts have more proactive support features, but it’s hardly a given.

The FFY guarantee, as you may have guessed, is that WPX Hosting’s Support Team will simply fix it for you, for free, and as quickly as possible.

However, this isn’t a blank check. The main purpose of the FFY Guarantee is for urgent issues that take down your site.

They’ll handle plenty of other things as well, but there are some natural limitations: if a plugin or third-party software doesn’t work, they can’t really fix it for you. (That’s true for other hosting companies too, by the way).

In addition to the representatives, WPX has a decent knowledge base:

features

The structure of the knowledge base is oriented towards ease of use, and it’s easy to browse articles ‘til you find what you want.

In addition, the knowledge base has a mix of articles that are technical and detailed, and articles that are more accessible.

It’s great to have the options. I do think there could be more technical and detailed articles, however.

But all-in-all: WPX has great customer support.

Pro #4: Plans can be paid monthly

I always make a note of appreciating when hosting companies do this. It’s a growing trend, I’m happy to say.

The default for a lot of hosting companies is to advertise their plans in terms of monthly prices. But when you actually check out, you find that those prices are under the assumption you pay for a year or more up-front.

With WPX, the price is high because it’s a managed service.

But the good news is that one can pay on a monthly basis rather than coughing up a big up-front cost.

As you’d expect, the prices ARE indeed higher if you pay month-to-month:

WPX Hosting monthly pricing

With the first tier, it’s about $4 more expensive a month, or about $48 more a year in total. With the second tier, it’s over $8 more a month, which adds up to $100 more over the course of a year.

So don’t get me wrong, it’s still cheaper to pay in bulk for a year, and if you can afford it, you probably should.

But having this more flexible option allows businesses to enjoy high quality managed hosting, without investing too much and committing themselves to a long period of time.

Pro #5: WPX Hosting runs its own servers

Believe it or not, even much larger and more famous hosting companies don’t run their own servers directly.

Some of them use third party servers. Others are part of conglomerates, and the parent company runs all the servers.

This isn’t necessarily bad in and of itself: it can streamline things and ensure decent standards are maintained at a large scale.

However, it can also make more room for oversights, and typically reduces the amount of care put into the servers.

In the case of third parties, it also adds more uncertainty. It raises the number of entities involved in carrying your info and supporting your site, which inherently raises risks.

WPX running its own servers directly means that you’re pretty much just dealing with one entity—the same one you’re already demonstrating trust in by paying them for hosting services.

Plus, it can mean a higher degree of quality is guaranteed. And in this case, it does.

Pro #6: Easy to use

This shouldn’t be a very surprising point, but it still needs to be stated.

WPX Hosting is easy to use in general, but especially because it’s a managed WordPress solution.

Just so we’re on the same page, here’s what “managed hosting” means to WPX Hosting:

WPX Hosting kb

Overall, you can see why this makes things easier for you.

But even aside from that, WPX Hosting has a very simple and streamlined platform. Just as how the main website has a generally simple layout, so is the user interface.

WPX Hosting Review: Cons

Con #1: The “managed” part does NOT cover plugin updates

First, let’s take a look at the whole list of what isn’t managed:

WPX Hosting kb

That’s a lot of things. But don’t worry too much about it:

Most of the things on this list are NOT usually included with other managed WordPress hosting packages. So I don’t have serious qualms there.

What I take issue with is the last point: theme and plugin updates.

Don’t get me wrong, the reasoning used is great. WPX Hosting used to carry this out, but found that it caused too many issues, mostly because users wouldn’t have updated WordPress or PHP versions.

The issue is that this is a major component of managed WordPress hosting with most other platforms.

So much so, that it’s usually a given that plugins and themes will be updated automatically, ALONG WITH WordPress versions.

Con #2: Pricey

WPX Hosting con

Let’s be very clear here:

The price is NOT that high when you take into account that it’s for a managed hosting product. So why do I mention it?

Because some people may be looking or hoping for more typical shared hosting prices, which are much lower.

Again: the price is not that high proportionate to what is being offered. But it IS high if you want the most affordable WordPress-friendly hosting.

You can check out our list of the best WordPress hosting here—it includes options that are not managed, but still “friendly” to WordPress.

Con #3: Storage could be higher

This isn’t a major complaint. Most sites aren’t going to be using that much storage anyway. 1GB is a lot more than most people think.

And if you’re using a single site, 10GB is plenty for most people—unless you’re hosting tons of storage-heavy content, like video.

However, it still should be higher. Plus, if you crunch the numbers on it, it affects the other features of the plans: namely, the amount of sites allowed.

Let me show you what I mean. For a refresher, these are the basics of what the three tiers offer:

WPX Hosting con

If you took full advantage of the first tier, and used all five of the websites allowed, you’d only have 10GB to use between them.

Which means just 2GB per site.

The second tier is even worse in this respect:

Although the storage doubles, to 20GB, the amount of allowed sites triples. Meaning if you ran 15 websites, you’d have roughly 1.33GB per site. You can do the math on the third tier.

Note: I’m not saying that you HAVE to use an equal amount of storage on each site. For example, on the first tier, you could have one site taking up 5GB and 4 sites taking up less than 1GB each.

Now, like I said, it’s not going to be a major issue for most customers.

Many people who are running large numbers of sites from a single hosting platform are servicing clients or running projects that don’t take up much space.

But the point is that storage doesn’t OVERALL track consistently enough with the max number of sites.

Do we recommend WPX Hosting?

So, after all the points I’ve discussed above…what’s the verdict?

I DO recommend WPX hosting.

But, it should go without saying that certain things about WPX mean it’s not for everyone:

The biggest one is price. If you just want WordPress-friendly hosting in general, you can save money by looking at cheaper hosting plans.

Again, it’s not that WPX Hosting is particularly expensive, just that it’s managed hosting. And if you don’t want managed hosting specifically, WPX isn’t for you.

Otherwise, people who want managed hosts that automatically update WordPress plugins and themes should look elsewhere too.

Aside from those exceptions, however, WPX Hosting is a great managed WordPress host. It performs very well, has a lot of features—including great security perks—and great customer support too.

So what are you waiting for?

Happy Hosting!

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Sep 08, 2020

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I recently migrated my websites to WPX Hosting. It is really fast and lets you load pages in less than a second. I am impressed with the quality of their service and the level of customer support. Their hosting plans come with all common features like daily backups, free SSL, staging, and others. A lightning-fast, custom CDN (WPX Cloud) is a notable feature of WPX Hosting. With more than 25 global data centers, it lets your serve pages faster to the end-users. Free malware scanning and enterprise-grade DDoS protection will protect you from cyberattacks and malicious code infections. Even though expensive, it's worth your money. Hence it is the best place to host your business websites with peace of mind.