#1 WP Engine Alternative: Faster, Smarter and Better (Winner Always)

Are you looking for a faster and more powerful WP Engine alternative for your business? Then you came across the right destination. Powered by steadfast infrastructure and innovative technology, not just our hosting fast, but in terms of performance and reliability, it’s world-class.

Our managed WordPress hosting platform is capable to handle MASSIVE amounts of traffic with no page views or visitor limitations. Let us explain what makes us a better choice than WP Engine.

Introduction

WP Engine is a famous WordPress-only managed hosting solution provider, that started its operations in 2010. The technology is solid, as they are focused on it and WordPress expertise. They come with dedicated solutions for normal WordPress sites and WooCommerce sites with lots of upselling add-ons.

Another hand, Stromonic is one of the fastest-growing WordPress hosting companies, in business for the last 5 years. Especially known for its performance-oriented solution, scalability, and ability to handle the high amount of concurrent connections in real-time.

Every day we talk with WordPress users and business owners who are looking for a WP Engine alternative for their website, that offers best-in-class performance, next-gen security, and VIP support for their growing demands and we truly believe our solutions have the ability to fulfill the needs.

How Stromonic Compares to WP Engine in a Nutshell

Before we deep dive into a detailed comparison between Stromonic and WP Engine, let’s overview a major difference between us.

Stromonic is exclusively powered by its own Cloud, by removing all third-party infrastructure dependencies. We own our hardware, routers, switches, and networks. It means we have full control over our infrastructure and its performance. Also, we are using LiteSpeed cache technology on our all servers, which significantly improves the website performance and speed.

When it comes to service uptime, Stromonic guarantees 99.99% uptime along with SLA (means if rarely downtime happens we will compensate for the inconvenience), but WP Engine does not have an uptime guarantee or SLA. This means you can experience unexpected downtimes if you have decided to host your website there.

WP Engine’s infrastructure is powered by Google Cloud and AWS Cloud. This means they are renting public cloud solutions for their clients, public clouds are the servers where lots of other companies are sharing the same node, it’s just virtualized with KVM and nesting. The public cloud is known for inconsistent performance, as it’s shared with others, so a noisy neighbor can affect the performance and stability. Even the network is shared with thousands of others, so the network performance will also be not reliable.

Let’s look at some key differences between Stromonic and WP Engine:

• Stromonic has developed an in-house CDN (content delivery network) along with multiple global POPs. Our CDN is specially designed and crafted to boost performance for the websites hosted on our platform, where WP Engine is utilizing third-party Cloudflare CDN which is known for global disruptions and outages.
• Stromonic usages 3rd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs for its platform, which is significantly faster in terms of a benchmark than WP Engine’s 2nd Gen Google’s C2 servers.
• Stromonic’s servers are powered by the latest generation premium NVMe SSD drives. Its read/writes speed is 2000MB/s means any kind of installation or update which require storage (like plugin/theme install/update) will be executed in nanoseconds. Whereas WP Engine’s servers are powered by SATA SSD drives, which read/write speed is only 600MB/s, plugin/theme installation or updates will require more time as compared to Stromonic.
• At Stromonic, we do not have any monthly visitors restrictions or limitations, because we believe your success should not look like a burden on your hosting bill, but WP Engine does have monthly visitors limitations in their all plans so that they can upgrade you to the higher plan time to time.
• Stromonic guarantees you 99.99% uptime along with Service Level Agreement (SLA), which means the company will composite if the server goes offline in any rare case scenario. Where WP Engine, unfortunately, does not commit any uptime guarantee and SLA.
• Stromonic has integrated email hosting on its platform free of cost, as we believe everything should be under the same roof as a hosting company it’s our responsibility to fulfill all your website-related requirements, whereas WP Engine does not offer any email hosting, so you will require to buy email hosting somewhere else and configure the SMTP client from your end ALONE.
• At Stromonic we do not have any PHP Workers limitations on our plans, your website should feel free to execute any script, but WP Engine does have hidden PHP Workers limitations.
• Our databases are using the latest version of MariaDB which is the upgraded version of MySQL. MariaDB comes with lots of improvements like faster database execution, database modification, and more power to handle the load. But WP Engine database is built with MySQL which is not fast as MariaDB.
• Stromonic’s all plans do support WooCommerce websites, as we do not limit WooCommerce plugin on lower plans, but WP Engine’s normal plans do not support WooCommerce, you will require to purchase a costly plan which will support WooCommerce.
• We at Stromonic developed a Real-Time CloudScanner on our platform, which will automatically scan for malware, viruses, and trojan files. During any file upload to the server, it will automatically scan the file. Any kind of suspected file will be isolated within seconds into a separate place for further verification. On the other site, WP Engine does not have any such options, so there are higher chances of getting your website malware affected.
• All our managed WordPress hosting plans do support WordPress multisite, but WP Engine does not support multisite on their basic plans.
• We at Stromonic, have multiple support channels including instant Live Chat, Ticket System, and Phone calls. But WP Engine only offers Live Chat support which could be annoying for some users who run on a busy schedule and don’t want to wait for someone’s reply.
• Stromonic offers Redis object cache free of cost for your all websites, which could be enabled within a few clicks from your control panel, but WP Engine offers Redis as an addon with setup cost and recurring cost.
• We at Stromonic are using LiteSpeed Enterprise Cache technology for our platform, it is significantly faster than Apache and NGINX-based web servers, LiteSpeed also comes with in-built DDoS protection and the capability to handle large amounts of concurrent visitors. Where, WP Engine is using Apache for their platform, which is much slower and does not comes with any DDoS Protection and large traffic handling capacity. Apache servers are usually known for their poor performance.
• Our website migration tasks are managed by certified system admins, apart from migration they also take care of your website’s PHP settings, optimization, DNS changes, etc, which can not be done by an automated migration plugin by WP Engine.
• We have developed WAF (web application firewall) security system on our platform to protect WordPress installation from Bruteforce login attacks, SQL injection attacks, or Cross-Scripting attacks, but WP Engine does not have such a WAF protection system.
• Our platform can automatically scale our infrastructure during load and high traffic and can spin off when not required. This will make sure, your website will load fastest in every situation. WP Engine does not offer any such situation, continuous high load at your website can cause service suspension at WP Engine.
• Our smart security system is running 24/7 to detect any possible vulnerability on your websites, if we found such it will instantly notify our system admins and you, to resolve the issue as soon as possible, our system can even automatically patch the vulnerability with the latest update if smart updates are enabled. WP Engine does not offer such solutions.
• Stromonic offers debugging support to its all clients, to detect slow-performing plugins, themes, and hooks or to detect the root cause of any code-level issue. But WP Engine does not provide any debugging support.
• We not only offer WordPress installation on our platform, but also you can also deploy Node.JS or Python applications on your hosting account with us. This is not something that WP Engine offers.

Stromonic is Designed for Performance and Scalability

At Stromonic, our motto is performance and auto scalability, we understand how crucial it is for your business to succeed online. That’s why we have developed our platform in such a way, that it can automatically spin up during sudden load and offer the same quality of performance during such situations without the need to worry about anything.

Our full control over hardware and network is providing us the flexibility to customize our platform for best-in-class performance. Instead of being open-source and cost-cutting, we have decided to use flagship-level enterprise solutions for our platform which allowed us to offer a more secure and premium-class environment for our users.

WP Engine another hand, is using Google Cloud’s restricted and non-flexible infrastructure, and for their hosting stack, they are utilizing the majority of open-source solutions. So, the users of WP Engine may not experience top performance due to its infrastructure limits and open-source hosting stack.

Web Performance Benchmarks

In order to perform the benchmark tests, we have installed WordPress along with by default installed themes and plugins. Also, we have imported the same demo content on both websites to create a real-life scenario.

For this test, we are going to use the KeyCDN’s performance test tool, and the below Time to first byte (TTFB) comparison is based on the results of the tool. Let’s compare the results (lower is better).

As per the result, Stromonic has won 9 out of 10 location TTFB tests by beating WP Engine.

Now let’s compare the uptime history of our platforms. Stromonic has a publically available system status page, and WP Engine also does share uptime records publically.

As you can see, Stromonic has better uptime records than WP Engine. Since our inception, we do not have any downtime history.

Last, we are going to run load testing using the K6.io tool, we will send hundreds of HTTP connections within 1 minute and check the server response time.

In this test again Stromonic won by delivering a faster server response time as compared to WP Engine. Also, the tool does not observe any HTTP connection failures while running the test for Stromonic, but during the WP Engine test, many HTTP connection failures are recorded.

Stromonic’s auto-scaleable platform can spin up the resources for your website during load, which will make sure your website will load at its best in any situation. This made us unique among our competitors – no matter what, your website will run smoothly with Stromonic.

As Stromonic response time is faster than WP Engine, it means our server-side cache technology is more advanced than WP Engine, which caches your website and displays from the cache even without touching the server resources when next time the same user visits your website.

Stromonic is Safe and Secure

At Stromonic security is top-most important for us. That’s why we have taken lots of security measures, to offer a secure and hack-free environment for our all customers.

All the websites hosted on our platform are secured by Layer-7 DDoS protection, an advanced web application firewall, hardware-level firewall, Fail2Ban protocol, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certification, 2-Factor Authentication, real-time CloudScan, and many more security features.

Some of the Stromonic security features include:

• We backup your all website files daily at night, and store them in a secure location. So you don’t have to worry about data loss anymore.
• 2-Factor Authentication is available on our platform, which can be enabled with Google Authenticator for best-in-class security.
• All your websites are protected by Later-7 DDoS protection technology. Our system will automatically identify the DDoS attacking IP and ISP and blacklist them before reaching to your website.
• We monitor your websites every 5 minutes, which means 288 times a day. If we notice any time-out error, our system admins will be notified instantly.
• A real-time CloudScan security system is in place on our platform, which scans all the files on our platform 24/7. Any virus or malware will be automatically removed from our platform.
• Hundreds of internet service providers with high-risk scores and a bad reputation are blacklisted on our network. This minimizes the risk of hacking, spamming, brute force attacks, and other illegal activities.
• We only support the Secured Version of FTP (called SFTP), plain FTP connections are not allowed as this can leak your FTP password to a third person.
• Free SSL certificates by Sectigo and Let’s Encrypt are available for your all websites.
• We offer a 100% hack-fix guarantee if your website got infected with virus/malware while hosting with us.
• Our security system can detect vulnerable plugins, and themes and can patch them automatically.

WP Engine has the basic security features, like SSL and thread detection, and the majority of their security features are PAID and available as addons with extra fees. But they don’t have Layer-7 DDoS protection, WAF protection, or real-time CloudScans which is available at Stromonic.

Stromonic is Developer-Friendly

We at Stromonic love developers! As the majority of our team members are developers, we have designed and developed multiple WordPress projects, so we understand the requirements of developers better than anyone else. That’s why while developing the Stromonic platform, we have integrated all the features that developers are love to use.

Let’s have a quick look at our developer-friendly features:

• Stromonic’s platform offers SSH Access, along with Terminal and WP-CLI access on all managed WordPress hosting plans.
• Our Git feature allows you to easily host Git repositories on your hosting account.
• Apart from WordPress, our platform also does support Python, Node.JS, and Ruby applications.
• One-click WordPress cloning, staging, and smart auto-updates are available.
• All latest PHP versions along with major extensions are available in the dashboard.
• GUI-based File Manager is available to make your life simpler.
• Cron Jobs is also available to schedule any script to perform any task.

Stromonic’s team members are actively engaging with the WordPress community and developers to understand their requirements and implement them on our platform.

Optimized for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads

We at Stromonic, do support WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads plugins on our all-managed WordPress hosting plans. Our stable and reliable platform is customized to handle this kind of resource-intensive plugin without any issue.

Our latest-generation AMD EPYC CPUs and NVMe storage servers come with high read/write and I/O scores, so any kind of script executions will be performed in nano-seconds from plugin installation to updates. Also, our CDN will cache all your website’s images, and static files and will serve them from the nearest data center to your visitors.

Also, our Redis cache technology will speed up your website page load time, as it will temporarily store information in server RAM that would usually sit in a database. We offer Redis cache free of cost to our all clients.

Let’s overview our smart cache features and the ways they could help your online store or file downloading site:

• Our smart cache will automatically exclude My Cart, Checkout and My Account pages from our cache mechanisms to show always up-to-date data.
• Our Redis cache will speed up your website performance by storing database information on server memory.
• Our enterprise CDN will cache your website’s all static files and will server them from the nearest data center to your visitor.
• The website cache will be automatically cleaned when product pricing, image, or other important information gets updated.

WP Engine’s cache is basic and does not contain such many features. Their WooCommerce plans are expensive and the basic plans do not even support WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads.

Dashboard for Powerful Site Management

Our dashboard is easy to use, and build with easy-to-use in mind. From WordPress installation to Management, we have it all on our dashboard.

The dashboard contains all the required features to build or manage your website efficiently. Some options are File Manager, Git Control, Email Accounts, Cron Jobs, AWstats, Backups, Addon Domains, and many more.

Let’s see some dashboard features and options which make us a better WP Engine alternative.

• One-click installation of the latest version of WordPress from our client area dashboard.
• Detailed analytics of your website visitors by easy-to-understand AWstats tool.
• Business email address on the same dashboard, which could be integrated into your local email app or website via SMTP client.
• Daily website backups and easy restoration to full or partial files from our dashboard.
• Access to Cron Jobs to set up schedule performing scripts.
• phpMyAdmin option to directly access all database tables or texts.
• PHP version changer option, so you can change your website’s PHP version.
• SSH, Terminal, WP-CLI, and Git access for more advanced users.
• Easy one-click SSL installation button to install a free SSL certificate on your all websites.
• Node.JS, Ruby, Python application manager along with all major versions.

Try our feature-rich and easy-to-use dashboard for your websites. Don’t forget our 45-day long-term money-back guarantee, so you can try risk-free.

Super Hero Support for WordPress

At Stromonic, we take our customer support seriously. We do understand, that it’s crucial for your business to succeed online. Our founding team members are WordPress developers, they have completed hundreds of WordPress projects, designed customized themes, custom plugins, etc.

So we know every piece of code of WordPress. This gives us the ability to offer fully managed support for your WordPress website, from plugin installation to debugging, we will help you with everything. That’s the level of support we are providing.

Our support channels include instant live chat, telephone support, and a ticket system. Whereas WP Engine only offers chat support, which could be annoying for some users who don’t want to wait for someone and find the ticket system more relevant.

Support engineers of Stromonic (we call them Support Hero) have extensive knowledge of WordPress as well as Server Administration, which helps them to quickly understand the issue and resolve them which is related to server end settings. Apart from English, our support engineers also can speak all international languages. Just initiate a conversation and see their skills.

We are receiving appreciation from our clients every day for being so best at our support. 97% of our customers close their chat session happily after satisfying with our support. And we mostly resolve an issue within 10 minutes.

Growth Suite Program

Stromonic has a special partner program (called Growth Suite) for developers, designers, and web agencies who are developing their clients’ websites with WordPress. Joining our Growth Suite means your all clients’ website performance, speed, security, or hosting-related issues will be managed by our end.

Our Growth Suite comes with lots of benefits, let’s have a look:

• Up to 10% to 30% off on retail prices, after joining our Growth Suite Program. The more you sell, the more will be the discount.
• We provide support to your end clients as well. So you can focus on what matters to you most – your business.
• A personal account manager will be appointed for your growth.
• We will regularly take backups of your all clients’ websites and will keep the backups in a secure location.
• Provide your clients an enterprise-grade CDN (content delivery network) for super-fast website loading speed at no extra cost.

Our client area dashboard lets you allow to create sub-accounts with customizable access privilege, so you can share dashboard access with your developers, SEO manager, or even clients.

Free Migrations from Real People

We at Stromonic, offer lifetime free website migration from any other platform to us. Our migration experts are specially trained to perform migration from different kinds of servers, and control panels. If you are moving only 1 website or 1000, be rest assured that all website migration will be smoothly migrated to our platform without any downtime.

If you are a current WP Engine client, and actively looking for a WP Engine alternative, then there is Good News for you. Our migration experts will help you to migrate your all websites from WP Engine to Stromonic within 24 hours – no matter what.

After website migration, our support experts will help you to optimize your website for faster performance, integrate CDN for worldwide caching, to scan your all files if your website is malware-infected.

Lightning Fast Content Delivery Network

At Stromonic, our all managed WordPress hosting plans come with a premium content delivery network (CDN). Our CDN has 93+ global POPs around the world and it supports the HTTP/2 protocol.

All the static files (including images, CSS, JS, and HTML codes) will be cached by our CDN and stored around 93+ global data centers (we call them POPs in CDN terms), and the cached version of your website contents will be shown to your visitors from their nearest POP. This way, our CDN will significantly reduce the latency and make your website faster than ever before.

This will also reduce the consumption of bandwidth usage of your hosting account, as well as reduce the load of the server. Apart from the static file caching, our CDN can also optimize your website images and videos before showing them to your visitors, this feature is available as an addon and can be enabled by contacting our support team.

Highest Paying Affiliate Program

Stromonic is one of the fastest-growing managed WordPress hosting companies in the industry, with a low churn rate and very high conversion rate, our affiliate program is the perfect choice for all affiliate markers.

We are proud to offer one of the highest-paying WordPress hosting affiliate programs with true profit sharing. You can easily earn between $30 to $180 per sale by recommending our service in your network. The most powerful opportunity to earn a passive income.

Our affiliate program is in-house developed with no-third party integration, we focused on simple UI/UX with no clutter.

Whereas WP Engine’s higher price and lots of upselling services make them less attractive to buyers. On the other hand, Stromonic’s prices are pretty affordable and the conversation rate is higher than WP Engine. Join the affiliate program which is easy to sell.

End of The Battle

We at Stromonic in a mission to change the WordPress hosting industry. Our team members are continuously testing out the latest technologies in our lab and pushing them to our managed WordPress platform. Also, the feedback from our customers is evaluated case-to-case basis and implemented on our platform after development.

If you are looking for a better WP Engine alternative, then at Stromonic we have everything for your needs. We are so confident that you will fall in love with our service, that’s why we offer a 45-day money-back guarantee. Ready to move your website from WP Engine? Let our migration experts do the migration task.