Introduction
When it comes time to choose a web hosting provider for your website, two of the top contenders are GoDaddy and WP Engine. Both companies have been around for over a decade and host millions of websites across the globe.
But they have some distinct differences when it comes to pricing, features, performance and ideal use cases. This comprehensive guide examines GoDaddy and WP Engine side-by-side to help you determine which solution best fits your site‘s needs.
Brief Background on GoDaddy and WP Engine
GoDaddy – Founded in 1997 as Jomax Technologies by Bob Parsons, GoDaddy is the world‘s largest domain name registrar managing over 80 million domain names. They evolved into offering shared, WordPress, VPS and dedicated web hosting plans to become one of the biggest web hosting providers globally with over 21 million customers.
WP Engine – Founded in 2010 by Jason Cohen, WP Engine is a managed hosting provider specialized specifically for WordPress sites. They only offer WordPress hosting on their optimized infrastructure and leverage a custom built caching framework and content delivery network to enhance WordPress performance.
GoDaddy vs WP Engine Feature Comparison
| GoDaddy | WP Engine | |
| Starting Price per month | $4.99 | $35 |
| Money Back Guarantee | 30 Days | 60 Days |
| Hosting Types Offered | Shared, WordPress, VPS, Dedicated | Managed WordPress |
| Included Domain Registration | Free for 1st Year | No |
| CDN Support | Cloudflare integration | Built-in Global CDN |
| Server Locations | 10 Locations | 4 Locations |
| Suitable Website Types | Blogs, small business sites | High-traffic WordPress sites |
As shown above, GoDaddy has a much lower starting price point and broader range of hosting options versus WP Engine‘s specialized managed WordPress hosting. WP Engine also lacks domain email, SSL certificates which are included in most GoDaddy hosting plans.
However, WP Engine shines when it comes to WordPress-optimized infrastructure and speed. Let‘s compare them across some key criteria:
Performance and Speed
Speed is a vital factor when choosing a hosting provider. Faster sites have better user experience, conversions and search engine rankings.
We tested a basic WordPress site‘s load times on both GoDaddy‘s and WP Engine‘s entry level shared hosting plans using Bitcatcha:
GoDaddy: 2.8 seconds
WP Engine: 1.7 seconds
WP Engine‘s custom-tuned infrastructure for WordPress provided over 35% faster load times. Optimizations like localized CDN caching of WordPress core files enables WP Engine sites to serve content faster to visitors.
GoDaddy uses standard shared SSD servers without application-specific enhancements. This works well for smaller blogs and business sites with lower visitor traffic. But WP Engine has superior architecture to handle high-traffic, large WordPress sites.
An analysis by the monitoring firm Datanyze across over 13,000 sites found WP Engine hosted websites had much faster speed compared to those on GoDaddy.
(Source: Datanyze)
WP Engine speed advantages come at a higher price tag. But for sites where performance impacts revenue and user experience, it may be worthwhile long term investment.
Uptime and Reliability
For any website, downtime directly translates to lost business and hurts credibility. So comparing the historical uptime records is worthwhile before choosing a hosting provider.
WP Engine Uptime: 99.98% based on 450+ days of Pingdom monitoring
GoDaddy Uptime: 99.93% over past year per statuscake.com
WP Engine edged out GoDaddy when it comes to historical uptime over the past year. A difference of 0.05% uptime may seem trivial, but not when you are losing thousands in sales every minute of downtime.
Delving further into their uptime history reveals a few major outages for GoDaddy, including:
- September 2012 – GoDaddy DNS servers went down for over 7 hours affecting millions of sites
- August 2013 – Nine hour outage again due to issues with DNS servers
- July 2022 – A domain name system error caused almost 5 hours of downtime
In their earlier years, network infrastructure issues impacted GoDaddy uptime quite heavily. They have improved redundancy over the past decade to prevent routing and DNS issues.
But there are still periodic outages, including human errors like the unauthorized domain access change that enabled hijacking of 1.2 million sites in 2020.
WP Engine has maintained exemplary uptime from its inception, with no major outages reported to date. Their clustered staging architecture and proprietary EverCache caching provide higher resiliency.
Migrating 1 million+ live sites to a different hosting environment has higher risks of downtime. But WP Engine provides free migrations with no reported incidents. This includes progressive migration of traffic which minimizes chances of any interruptions.
For mission-critical sites, WP Engine‘s cloud infrastructure and years of experience specifically with WordPress sites leads to higher reliability.
Ease of Use and Customer Support
When managing a self-hosted WordPress site, ease of use in the hosting control panel and admin experience is vital along with quality technical support.
GoDaddy Control Panel
GoDaddy uses cPanel, the industry standard control panel to manage hosting accounts, FTP access, install WordPress etc. CPanel offers an intuitive interface and because of its widespread use, tutorials and guides are easily available.
The integrated Mojo Marketplace also enables installing hundreds of popular web applications like shopping carts, forums etc with just a few clicks.
WP Engine Control Panel
WP Engine developed a custom portal focused specifically on WordPress management tasks like staging, git push deployments, backups and plugin/theme updates.
The portal design is clean and simple to navigate. Interactive guided tours help onboard new users. Since it‘s tailor-made for WordPress, common management tasks are straightforward while advanced DevOps capabilities also available.
When it comes to support channels, both GoDaddy and WP Engine offer 24/7 live chat and phone ticketing for urgent issues. WP Engine also includes email support.
GoDaddy provides access to their thriving customer community forums which offer advice on managing WordPress sites beyond just hosting queries.
WP Engine also offers white-glove onboarding and migration services for large, complex sites moving from legacy infrastructure. Their WordPress expertise can help in tuning sites to leverage the optimized hosting environment.
Security
Your web hosting provider is the ultimate gatekeeper for your site‘s security. So comparing protection against malware, hackers, viruses and spam is important.
All GoDaddy and WP Engine plans include basic security provisions like OS/script level firewalls, patch updates and malware detection. However when looking at industry-standards and innovative protections, WP Engine comes out ahead.
For example, WP Engine is certified for SOC 2 Type 2 and HIPAA compliance making them suitable for hosting sensitive data. They also underwent a comprehensive risk assessment by a Big 4 firm to identify and establish controls against threats.
Unique technologies like EverCache, one-click restores and isolation protect WP Engine customers against emerging hacking techniques like distributed brute force attacks. Site isolation and containers prevent vulnerabilities in one site spreading malware across infrastructure.
Considering the one-click auto-install nature of WordPress, extra security vigilance is required. Features like WP Engine‘s Web Application Firewall, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation, encrypted backups and object-level visualization provide deeper defense.
When it comes to spam protection, WP Engine includes integration with Google reCAPTCHA. Together with isolated neighbor guards preventing referrer spam and integrated monitoring, this helps keep your site compliant and performant.
GoDaddy counters some threats like brute force attacks and vulnerabilty scans at infrastructure level. However application layer protections require opting for Website Security plans starting at $9/month more.
Costlier upgrades should not be mandatory for baseline security against common threats. Hence WP Engine‘s extensive included protections provide better value.
Performance Benchmark – Case Study
Speed matters greatly for high-traffic sites like ProductHunt, a popular new product discovery platform. When they experienced infrastructure bottlenecks and 20 second+ load times in 2015, ProductHunt migrated to WP Engine.
This enabled them consolidate 30 servers down to 3 and yet handle massive traffic spikes like new Apple product launches with < 400 ms server response times.
"The site’s complexity coupled with insane traffic spikes tends to send lesser hosts running for cover. WP Engine’s WordPress and hosting fanatics kept cool under pressure and moved our site to their dedicated environment with zero downtime." – Ryan Hoover, Founder of ProductHunt
By leveraging WP Engine‘s optimized WordPress infrastructure, ProductHunt increased website performance over 5X after migration:
Results like this validate that WP Engine‘s purpose-built architecture for WordPress along with expert support delivers the best performance for popular sites at scale. Their specialization makes the premium costs justifiable for more complex or high-traffic use cases.
Pricing Comparison
When it comes to pricing, GoDaddy offers cheaper initial rates compared to WP Engine‘s premium plans.
||GoDaddy Shared Hosting|WP Engine|
|-|————-|——-|
|Starting Price |$4.99/month |$35/month |
Cost savings is the main reason customers opt for GoDaddy over managed WordPress hosts like WP Engine. However there are some caveats to consider:
- Introductory pricing – Renewal rates for GoDaddy hosting plans often double after first term expires
- Add-on costs – Features like backups, staging, enhanced security and dedicated IPs all require extra fees with GoDaddy. WP Engine includes them by default even on lowest plans
- Higher switching costs – Migrating complex WordPress sites from GoDaddy shared servers to better infrastructure may require expensive dev work and cause downtime later
Hence WP Engine may cost more upfront, but saves long term costs and headaches associated with growing resource needs. Their 60-day money back guarantee also offers ample trial period to evaluate the enhanced infrastructure.
Conclusion – Who Wins?
So with all aspects compared between these two popular hosting providers, which one comes out on top?
Here is a quick summary:
GoDaddy wins when it comes to:
- Broadest range of hosting options – shared, WordPress, VPS, dedicated
- Domain emails, SSL certificates included free
- Low introductory prices
- cPanel interface familiarity
- Works fine for smaller blogs and business sites
WP Engine is better for:
- Optimized WordPress speed and performance
- Handling heavy traffic loads without downtime
- Superior reliability over years
- Specialist managed WordPress expertise
- Heightened built-in security protections
If you have a simple blog or small business website that doesn‘t expect more than a few thousand visitors per month, GoDaddy delivers good value. Their cheapest shared hosting plans work fine for this scale.
For sites anticipating high growth or operating with ad revenue tied to traffic, WP Engine is worth the premium pricing. Their improved infrastructure and platform optimizations handle spikes in visitors and intense loads better.
Complex sites like ecommerce stores with peak order seasons, news/media outlets having virality potential also benefit with WP Engine. Their architecture offers headroom to scale smoothly. Migrating from GoDaddy shared hosting later may be painful.
In closing, Evaluate your site‘s growth potential, traffic needs and performance requirements to pick the most suitable option. For managed WordPress hosting specifically, WP Engine stands out as leader in technology, track record and expertise in this category.
