Considering hosting your WordPress site at WPX Hosting?
I host the very site you’re reading right now at WPX Hosting, which gives me the chance to share a no BS WPX Hosting review based on real experience:
WPX Hosting is a popular managed WordPress host that, beyond great performance, offers a lot of features to save you time and keep your site secure.
WPX is one of the first few WordPress hosting service provider to enable 1-click SSL installation, HTTP/2 & PHP 7.x by default, and the first to introduce high performance SSD disks to all accounts.
I switched to WPX Hosting after being tired of losing site visitors due to slow loading site. My website speed instantly boosted from 8 seconds to 1.5 seconds and after further optimization (done by free by their team) it sits now well under a second.
See here’s the fact:
Google recommends a time to first bite (or TTFB, meaning the time take by your hosting server to deliver the first byte of data to your reader’s browser) of not more than 200 ms.
Apart from that, page speed is now a ranking factor both for desktop (which has been since 2014 & mobile (since August, 2018), which means you doing everything the other site owner does and if their site is a bit faster than yours, they’ll mercilessly outrank you.
What inspired me to switch to WPX
DigitalGYD was hosted at a cheap hosting provider (I had chosen it because I had no budget when I started) and I was lazy to move on (or say hesitant to pay extra for premium hosting) for a couple of years.
My other sites were hosted at Hostgator (if someone recommends this service to you, beware they’re not your well wishers) and because THEY had vulnerability issues, my sites got hacked, one after another.
Instead of help, I got was upsells worth $700 to get my sites cleaned or keep them suspended. Like Really?
That’s when I researched about hosting services that not only sold but also cared.
Please note: I never recommend products I don’t trust/use myself. Blogging is a serious business and one fake review can ruin someone’s business/money. Unlike other sites that promote everything under the sun for commissions, you will be glad to know that DigitalGYD isn’t one of those sites. You won’t see me promoting Hostgator on this site ever, in fact I’ve a negative review about them to make my readers aware of the scam.
Enter WPX Hosting, the blazing fast WordPress hosting service that:
- Remarkably reduced my website loading time (from 8 seconds to less than a second),
- Managed everything from tech stuff like cache plugin setup, website speed optimization,
- No upsells (every single feature available at WPX is free to use for it’s users)
- Free MaxCDN for all 5 websites in my account worth $79 (more on it below!), &
- Free nightly backups (saving nearly $100s on backup plugin & services) to name a few.
But with that being said, I’m still focused on helping you choose the best host for your needs, not just promoting the place where I happily host my own site.
Ready to read my hands-on WPX Hosting review for 2023?
Let’s dig in…
WPX Hosting Review 2023
WPX Hosting is the #1 most trusted hosting on TrustPilot! (Out of a total of 161 hosting companies)
FYI: Hostgator came last, Bluehost came 158th & Godaddy came 143rd.
As a managed WordPress host, WPX Hosting gives you a bunch of features that go beyond just “hosting your site and making it load fast” (though it does that part pretty well, too).
To get you up to speed with everything that WPX Hosting offers, I want to start with a quick overview of the features. Then, I’ll get more hands-on in the following sections.
With WPX Hosting, you get:
- All the latest technology – PHP 7.X, HTTP/2…it’s all there.
- Managed security – firewalls and malware scans to keep you safe.
- Awesome support – 28 second average response time via live chat.
- Automatic backups – with a 28-day retention policy.
- Easy staging areas – with one-click migration to live.
- Free SSL certificate – to keep your data secure.
- Unlimited free site migrations – WPX Hosting will move all your sites over for you.
- 99.95% uptime guarantee – it’ll be rare if your site ever goes down.
- USA and UK hosting locations – choose the one that’s nearest to your audience.
- Malware fixed for you – if something happens to your site, WPX Hosting will clean it for you.
- DDoS protection – via the Enterprise-grade Incapsula service.
Now that you know what to expect, let’s go more hands-on…
WPX Hosting Speed & Performance Test
Ok, time to put WPX Hosting to the test! For these performance tests, I’m going to use the actual DigitalGYD website.
When writing hosting reviews, a lot of people will test sites with no content and the default WordPress theme, which isn’t a great representation of a live website.
By using my real site for the test, you should have a better understanding of how WPX Hosting will actually perform in a real-world environment.
Let’s get started…
First, I ran DigitalGYD through Pingdom, where it loaded in 771 ms from the New York City test server:
Then, to see how quickly WPX Hosting loads for my Canadian friends, I ran it through GTmetrix’s Vancouver test server, where it loaded in 1.9 seconds. It’s normal that GTmetrix is a little higher because of how it calculates page load time:
Ok – so in these one-off tests, WPX Hosting is doing a pretty great job. For USA traffic, I’m well under the one second mark. And it’s not much slower for Canadians.
But what about when there’s some heavier traffic?
To finish things out, I ran DigitalGYD through Load Impact. Load Impact is a neat tool that lets you simulate 50 visitors all visiting at the same time. The goal is to see whether your site loads equally fast for all visitors, or whether it slows down as the number of visitors increases.
As you can see in the graph below, there was zero slowdown in page load times (green line) as the number of visitors increased (blue line) – even that small spike you see is still around 320ms:
So what do all these numbers mean?
Basically, WPX Hosting helps your site load fast.
And there’s a reason for that, too. WPX Hosting uses cutting-edge technologies like PHP 7.X and HTTP/2 to make sure nothing slows your site down.
10 WPX Features That Make Them Better Than The Best
1. Custom Hosting Dashboard (No More cPanel!)
If you’re using (or have used) a cheap shared host, you’ve probably had the “pleasure” of using cPanel to manage your hosting.
Ok, cPanel isn’t that bad. But it’s not super user-friendly, especially for non-technical users.
WPX Hosting, on the other hand, gives you a custom dashboard that’s much more logical:
From the dashboard, you can manage all the important aspects of your site, with none of the confusing options from cPanel.
As I go through some of the specific features below, you’ll see plenty more from this dashboard.
FUN FACT: WPX Hosting recently doubled the bandwidth available to all users, free of cost. When did your current hosting last do it for you?
2. WPX Hosting Security: Free Malware Scans and Enterprise Level DDoS Protection
Because of how popular WordPress is, it’s a popular target for hackers and other malicious actors around the world.
Keeping your site safe and secure can be tough, especially if you’re not a technical user. But with WPX Hosting, you can rest easy because WPX Hosting handles most of your site’s security for you.
You get:
- Application firewalls – these filter most bad actors before they even get a chance to do something.
- Daily malware scans – if something gets through the firewall, the malware scan will pick it up.
- DDoS protection via Incapsula – this protects your site from a distributed denial of service attack (a common tactic). (A service that you otherwise cost you upwards of $299 per month!)
Beyond those proactive security measures, WPX Hosting also offers free malware removal if anything shows up on the malware scans.
As far as I know (& I’ve used a heck-load of them) WPX hosting is the only hosting company that offers free site clean up and restoration if your site gets hacked.
Basically, as long as you keep your WordPress username and password secure, WPX Hosting handles pretty much everything else!
3. WPX Customer Service: Live Chat Responds Within 28 Seconds
See..
The main point of investing in a better hosting is to take the headache off your head…
…so that you focus on what you do the best, i.e., your business!
Right from asking for a custom backup done, to setting up a redirect code or an issue with your site… WPX hosting has got your back covered.
WPX customer service feels like you’ve got a dedicated professional sitting right at the next desk,at your office. Just ask and you get a response.
~ Swadhin Agrawal
Don’t take my word for it… go right now to their homepage and drop a message on the live chat.
Based on independently verified data from LiveChat, WPX Hosting responds in under 28 seconds on average:
Yeah – when you send a message, you get a response in under 30 seconds!
Beyond that, WPX Hosting also offers a Fixed For You guarantee. Basically, if your site ever stops working, WPX Hosting will fix it for you – without making you run through the troubleshooting steps yourself like some hosts do.
Of course, this only applies to hosting issues. WPX Hosting isn’t going to custom code you a plugin or anything, nor should you expect them to.
4. WPX Cloud (Powerful CDN, Free!)
WPX cloud is the world’s fastest CDN service, built from group up by WPX hosting too help users speed up their sites.
Instead of upselling users to get a premium third-party CDN (for an extra charge), WPX hosting built WPX cloud themselves and offer it to all their users (across various plans) for free.
You won’t need any extra CDN services like MaxCDN (they offered this for free when they had not developed the WPX Cloud) or KeyCDN with WPX.
Here are other benefits of WPX Cloud:
- WPX team regularly tweaks and improves WPX cloud to provide better speed (currently it shows 50%-320% speed improvements depending on site & resources).
- 100% free of charge for new & existing users.
- WPX Cloud can handle up to 3X more concurrent traffic.
- 20+ worldwide locations, meaning smooth loading no matter where your visitors are from.
- Speed, additional security, & free upgrade to WPX cloud 2.0, to name a few.
5. Automatic Backups With Lengthy 28-Day Storage
Backups are one of those things that every single webmaster needs to handle. But despite how important backups are, you’ll still find lots of webmasters who ignore backups…until their site crashes. Then they really wish they would’ve set up backups!
With WPX Hosting, you’ll never have that feeling because WPX Hosting automatically backs up your site for you every day. Then, it stores those backups for you for 28 days, which is double what most other managed hosts offer.
You can access all of your backups right from your dashboard. And you can also run a manual backup if needed:
If you need to restore a backup, you can do that from the interface as well. And there’s also this really neat option that lets you choose between restoring:
- Your entire website
- Just your database
6. WPX Staging Sites: To Test New Designs Or Updates Safely
Beyond backups, WPX Hosting also gives you another way to keep your site safe and secure:
Easy staging areas.
A staging area is basically an identical copy of your site that’s in a safe sandbox where no one else can access it.
You can use this area to:
- Test changes to your site, like a new plugin or an update to a plugin
- Develop a new version of your site in private
Then, once you’ve thoroughly tested the changes, you can copy the staging version of your site to the live version to make it public.
To create a staging area, you just click a button and choose which site you want to stage:
Then, you can access your staging site from your dashboard. And when you want to make your staging site live, you just click the Merge To Live button:
7. Free SSL Certificates To Keep Your Site Secure (And Get That Green Padlock)
An SSL certificate is essential for all WordPress sites for two reasons:
- Since July 2018, Google Chrome marks all sites without HTTPS as “Not Secure”
- An SSL certificate and HTTPS just plain make your site more secure, for both you and your visitors
Despite those benefits, a lot of users still don’t use an SSL certificate because it’s too expensive or too complicated to set up.
With WPX Hosting, neither of those statements is true. You:
- Get an SSL certificate for free
- Can install your SSL certificate just by clicking a few buttons
That way, you can be up and running with HTTPS in no time.
Related: Best cheap VPS hosting services for you to try
8. 99.95% Uptime Guarantee So Your Site Is Always Available
Every second that your website is down means lost potential. And when it comes to uptime, the little things matter.
Most hosts offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee – WPX Hosting offers a 99.95% guarantee.
Does that extra .05% matter? Yes!
It might seem small, but it’s a big difference.
Let’s do the math…
On average, there are about 43,200 minutes in a month:
- With another host’s 99.9% uptime guarantee, the maximum amount of time your site can be down in a month is ~432 minutes.
- With WPX Hosting’s 99.95% uptime guarantee, the maximum amount of time your site can be down in a month is ~216 minutes.
That means a generic 99.9% uptime guarantee can end up costing you an extra 3.5 hours of downtime per month! Doesn’t seem like such a small difference now, does it?
9. WPX Hosting Offers Unlimited Free Site Migrations
If you’re currently hosting somewhere else, you’ll need a way to get your existing WordPress sites onto WPX Hosting.
Like a lot of hosts, WPX Hosting offers free migrations. But here’s what’s noteworthy about WPX Hosting’s migration service:
WPX Hosting offers free unlimited site migrations.
Most other hosts limit you to one or two migrations, so this is generous and really helpful if you have a lot of sites.
Plus, as I always say, it’s good to get help outsourced so you can use those hours saved to grow your business.
10. Legacy Pricing: No Price Increase When You Renew
Finally, WPX Hosting doesn’t play games with its prices.
A lot of hosts will sucker you in with a super low price…but that price only applies to your first billing cycle. After that, they jack up the price – usually to double where it started!
With WPX Hosting, the price you see on the website is what you’ll pay – there are no games.
Speaking of price…
WPX Pricing Review: How Much Does WPX Hosting Cost?
WPX Hosting currently offers three plans. For each plan, you can either pay your hosting bills monthly, or you can get a ~20% WPX hosting discount for paying a year up front.
All the plans include all of the features I showed you above – the only difference is in:
- The number of websites you can host
- How much storage space you have
- How much bandwidth you get
Here are the three plans:
Personally, I host DigitalGYD (and a couple of my sites) on the Business plan.
WPX Hosting Cons: Just Consider This…
Like I said at the beginning, the fact that I actually host DigitalGYD at WPX Hosting means that I don’t see many cons.
The only reason I might say WPX Hosting isn’t for you is the price. It’s not that WPX Hosting is overpriced. It’s just that, depending on your needs, WPX Hosting might be “too much host” for you.
Personally, I think it’s worth it to pay for the great performance and time-saving features like automatic backups, staging, etc.
But if you’re on a really tight budget, you can still find decent shared hosts that are a bit cheaper – you just might sacrifice a little performance and features.
WPX Hosting vs WPEngine Hosting
WPX Hosting Review: My Verdict
After reading my WPX Hosting review, I hope you have a better idea of why I made the decision to host DigitalGYD at WPX Hosting.
First off, I love that my site loads in less than one second for most visitors. You just can’t beat fast page load times for offering a great user experience.
And beyond that performance, WPX Hosting also offers tons of other features to keep your site safe and save you time.
The security features, alongside automatic backups and easy SSL and enterprise level DDoS Protection makes sure your site is safe.
The staging area and custom dashboard save me time when I’m working on my site.
And to top things off, the 28 second average response time for live chat means that you can always get help when you need it. Not to mention, the “fixed for you guarantee” where they’ll help you fix your sie with all hosting related issues, hacks etc with no extra cost or upsell.
If you’re interested in getting started, click here to head to WPX Hosting. And remember – WPX Hosting will migrate unlimited websites for you, so the transition should be pretty easy!
Amazing review. you have written a great review. I am very glad to read it. I was looking for best web hosting and I think I have found it. if the service would be good then I will definitely recommend my readers. thank you for sharing.
Regards
~Arron
Hey Swadhin,
Thank you for taking the time to review our service. We are happy to have you with us.
If you need anything, don`t hesitate to contact us. We are 24/7 ready to assist.
All the best,
WPX Team
Hello Swadhin,
Great Review. I am currently on Namecheap hosting and you know my blog traffic is growing rapidly and it affects my blog performance. I will definitely consider moving to WPX hosting for best performance.
Hey Swadhin, must say you’ve written an excellent article; even though I currently don’t need hosting, yet by the end of this article I felt like I should be getting WPX Hosting; that good of an article you’ve written my friend.
Just for test purposes, I opened few pages on your websites and even on Ankit’s masterblogging.com (it’s hosted on WPX too), and pages on both of your site loaded quickly.
For test sake, I also checked your site on Pingdom and GTMetrix and the loading times ranged between 1-2 seconds between both the services; so I must say WPX Hosting is doing a lot of things right.
While ending your article you did say that WPX hosting is costly; but if you see it this way that multiple bloggers happen to work on multiple sites, so even for the $25 plan; say one hosts 5 sites on the hosting, then the cost of each site comes down to $5/month; which most of us put into shared or VPS hosting, while you get the same from a managed hosting. (You can add this point in your article too ;-) )
Last but not the least, major hosting company suck; the ones that are owned by EIG suck the most with their limitations and terms and conditions.
Anyways, once again great article from you! Keep it up!
Hi Swadhin,
Today I checked numerous blogging websites, and without a doubt, yours stands out from others for a reason.
Your site loaded very fast, which led me to read this article.
A top-notch review that everyone needs to know before they decide to buy a hosting package.
The one thing that I hate online is waiting for the site to load more than 3 seconds. If I really want something, I can wait for more than 5, but that’s it. Otherwise, I go back to google results and check another page that loads faster.
The problem with these sites is that they don’t change their hosting company. Yes, it’s okay if you start with a shared account, but once you gain traction to your website you should definitively move to a cloud-based company such as WPX.
Have you tried other cloud-based hosting companies such as Kinsta and WPEngine? What was your experience with them?
At one of my niche sites, I use WPEngine which is pretty good at speed and security, but I need to move to another site and I will probably choose WPX Hosting.
Again, great post.
Regards,
Melos
Selecting the right hosting for the blog is always a difficult task. Everyone claims to be number one and best, so for a newbie (or even an experienced person), it becomes quite difficult to decide the right host.
I also switched to WPX hosting last week and I am 100% satisfied with the support and hosting.
Let’s see how the experienced in the future would be. :)
Nice review.
Agreed, with so much noise about each being the best, it’s hard to choose. I am glad I came to know about WPX (most blogs in our niche use this!).
Thanks for the appreciation.
-Swadhin