Basically, you’re asking two different web hosting provider where DigitalOcean does deliver unmanaged VSP cloud hosting and WP Engine provide managed WordPress Website Hosting.

Hence, you’ve basic knowledge of UNIX and handling server with Terminal, then you can go straight to DigitalOcean. Cheaper and reliable with fully customize and full control cloud hosting. You can do pretty much everything on your server as well as performance optimization.

Unfortunately, if you’re not tech savvy, then you can subscribe WP Engine (an expensive WordPress Hosting). Yet, they will handle everything from their server including CDN and caching. Thus, your performance will be top notch at all time.

In addition, you may check my previous post regarding WordPress tips here;


Why DigitalOcean, Unmanaged VPS Hosting?

DigitalOcean does promote simplicity at scale!

Why?

Their cloud computing platform was build with simplicity at the forefront architecture. So managing an infrastructure is easy, whether your business is running one virtual machine or ten thousand. They could get out of your way so team can build, deploy and scale cloud application (not WordPress only) much faster and more efficiently.

You can read more about DigitalOcean on my next post as well : Four Reasons Why I Love DigitalOcean

Designed for Developers Like Myself

  • Build better apps much faster
  • Predictable pricing
  • Easy to use control panel
  • Available API to manage their infrastructure
  • Secure and reliable
  • Deploy and build any web applications and not strict to WordPress Website Development only.
  • Clearly unmanaged VPS hosting
  • Pre-built apps available
  • Deploy to any of their 8 global datacenter regions around the world
  • Easy to scale with their block storage, object storage, load balancers and floating IPs
  • Secure network and available cloud firewalls for your apps

And much more! Surprisingly, my website does hosted on their VPS cloud hosting. Fast, secure and scalable when I need it.

Love it!!

WP Engine for Managed WordPress Hosting - Zahid Aramai

Why WP Engine, Fully Managed WordPress Web Hosting?

As said “WP Engine is your catalyst for creating and delivering breakthrough digital experiences on WordPress that drive your business forward faster.“.

WP Engine were build to equips you with suite of agility, intelligence, performance and integration solution. Thus, you can build and deploy a range of online experiences from their managed WordPress Hosting platform to eCommerce extensions. Their platform is unified by powerful technology, ecosystem of partners and developers, and award winning services that expand the value you gain from all solutions.

How good is their support team?

  • Top Notch Customer Support – Less than 3 minutes average live chat response time.
  • Almost 200 service experts on their live consultative support 24/7/365.
  • They don’t answered your questions but help you with your WordPress as an extension of your team.

Perform support team from WP Engine - Zahid Aramai

What else you could benefit from their Managed WordPress Hosting?

  • Easy Migration – Free, one step migration with the WP Engine plugin makes it seamless to move your site with no downtime.
  • Accelerate your development process – WP Engine helps your teams increase productivity with features and tools like Dev, Stage, and Prod Environments, SSH Gateway, and Git integration.
  • Launch consultation – For their Premium+ customers, they use code compatibility tests to make performance optimization recommendations for a stress-free go live.
  • Automatic core updates – They automatically update sites when a new security or maintenance version of WordPress core is released to keep you up to date.
  • High Performance Infrastructure – Their partnerships with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform provide you a range of enterprise-grade solutions that deliver lightning fast, scalable, highly available and secure experiences.
  • Server monitoring – They constantly monitor their global servers and adjust as needed so you get strong uptime and backups if any servers go down.
  • Leave it to the WordPress experts – WP Engine ensures your hosting is properly configured for your business and offers real-time security threat detection, free Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificates, our EverCache proprietary caching technology and a global CDN.

Conclusion of WP Engine vs VPS (DigitalOcean)

If you did ask my opinion, I will choose DigitalOcean over WPEngine where I can save tonne of money, fully control of my server and custom performance tweak to my website needs. 

zahidaramai-single-image-selfie-round

Zahid Aramai, Malaysia Freelance Website Designer

Zahid Aramai do help more than 500+ business owner's WordPress Website and currently he's doing an experiment with React Framework for headless WordPress. He rentlessly develop, design and manage client's website as well as fixing WordPress bugs. His #1 goal will always be to meet clients needs and business objective.