The Biggest Downside Of WPEngine- Overage Charge & Alternatives

Note: I have updated the article with changes made by WPEngine regarding overage charges until 24th January, 2020.

Downsides Of WPEngine
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When I shifted to WPEngine hosting a few months back,  I shared the complete guide for moving and also added why I love their hosting. If you have missed all these details, here are a few things which you should know:

Note: As of October 2022, ShoutMeLoud is hosted on Kinsta WordPress Hosting.

WPEngine alternatives:

There are two best alternatives to WPEngine at this moment:

  1. Kinsta
  2. WPXHosting

You can read about Kinsta Vs. WPEngine here.

Back to WPEngine Overages story:

Before moving to WPEngine, I was hosted on a private VPS, and one of the freelancer networking guys was managing my server.

The performance was good, but there were few issues related to downtime and site slowness. Moreover, one biggest problem with the freelancer or less known hosting company is accountability.

So I decided to spend $250/month on WPEngine hosting and moved ShoutMeLoud to their server.

Without any second thought, WPEngine delivers what they promised, and so far I’m in love with the quality of hosting and website performance. Though $250/month is indeed a high-price, and any knowledgable guy would recommend going for a VPS or dedicated server.

In my case, I decided to stick to WPEngine, as I don’t want to see even a second downtime for my main blog, and when quality is everything, the price is the least of concerns.

So What’s the problem with WPEngine?

Two of the biggest complaint you will hear about WPEngine is Pricing and customer support.

In the past two months, They have significantly improved their customer support by adding live-chat, but the pricing issue remains the same.

After using WPEngine for more than two months, I encountered one of the biggest pricing issues with WPEngine.

In this post, my goal is to help you understand the problem and some possible solutions to this situation.

WPEngine Overcharged
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First of all, WPEngine pricing is based on the visits and the way they count the visits is different from what you see on your Google Analytics or WordPress.com stats program.

According to ShoutMeLoud Google analytic stats, I get close to 325,000 visits a month, and I opted for WPEngine Business plan which allows up to 400,000 visits a month and is priced at $250.

Last time when I logged into my WPEngine dashboard, I was surprised to see an extra $188 bill for overage visits, and for this month, I was about to cross the threshold of 400,000 visits.

I was quite surprised as, my WordPress.com stats and Google analytics were showing lower than 400,000 visits.

Before I raise my concern to their team, I again had a look at their help page related to visits, and I realized I missed understanding a few important points. Here is what their visits help page has to say:

  1. When a human being first arrives on the site and loads the page, staying there for 31 seconds, that’s a visit.
  2. If that same human then clicks a link and sees another page, that does not count as a new visit; that’s part of the same visit.
  3. If that same human doesn’t have cookies or javascript enabled, still all that should count as one visit.
  4. If that same human loads the site with different browsers, that’s still not a new visit; that’s part of the same visit.
  5. If that same human bookmarks the site, then 11 days later comes back to the site, which is a new visit.
  6. When a robot loads your site, our servers render it just like they would for a human visitor. However, this visit may not represent a value to you, which is why we will not count bot traffic toward your total visits.
  7. If a robot scans 20,000 pages over the course of a month, that’s not just one visit.  It shouldn’t be 20,000 visits, but neither should it be 1. Something in the range of 100-1,000 visits is acceptable.
  8. There are additional cases too where the “right thing to do” is less clear. For example, take the case of a “quick bounce.” Suppose a human clicks a link to the site, then before the site has a chance to load the human clicks “back.” Does that count as a visit? Our servers still had to render and attempt to return the page, so in that sense “yes.”  But a human didn’t see the site and Google Analytics isn’t going to see that hit, so in that sense “no.” Because we need the notion of a “visit” to correspond to “the amount of computing resources required to serve traffic,” we round off in favor of saying “yes.”

Two important points that I missed reading on the same page was:

  • We reset our notion of “unique IP address” every day.
  • Robots have the same few IP addresses, so they will be consolidated within one day, but will count again the next day.

Though everything is well documented on WPEngine help page, I missed reading the point about resetting the unique I.P. Address every day, and even bot visits are counted as new visits after every 24 hours.

ShoutMeLoud is one active blog, and not only Google bots, but there are virtually many good + bad bots which crawl ShoutMeLoud daily, and I realized that added a lot to my number of visits according to WPEngine.

First of all, this notion of counting visits from WPEngine is not only flawed, but it adds a big hole in the pocket of any existing WPEngine users.

As I was considering to move away from WPEngine hosting after knowing how they are counting visits, and certainly this is not a customer-friendly model of pricing, I wanted to see if I could do something to make my WPEngine stats closer to my Google analytic stats.

I asked them a few questions, which will help any existing WPEngine user or anyone who is planning to purchase hosting from WPEngine:

Q. CDN: If I serve my images using CDN powered by WPEngine will that be counted as visits?

Ans. Any request that hits CDN instead of the server does not count as a visit. So CDN is a helpful tool as well. But if these hotlinks pre-exist the enabling of CDN, it’s a tougher issue to address. Again, because CloudFlare is at the DNS level, it’s a simple, comprehensive solution.

Q. I see that WPEngine counts bad bots as visits too, do you have a solution for blocking these bad bots/spam/scrapers bots?

Ans. You can use Cloudflare to filter the bad bots at DNS level.

Q. Why does Google Analytics show a much lower visitor number?

Ans. The number of visitors in Google Analytics is always going to be considerably lower. If you type the question into a Google search, you will see many people out there with various hosts are experiencing the same thing. The reason being is GA tries very hard to provide information only on human visitors that matter for Ad Traffic and will not include any visitors that have JavaScript disabled on their browsers.

A unique IP is counted as unique in an entire month while our system looks at unique IPs on a per day basis. They also will not include Google bots or various other bots in their visitor’s count. GA is used for marketing/advertising purposes, and that is why it works so hard only to count what they believe to be human visitors. Our server stats monitoring tracks all unique visitors because, from a server impact standpoint, a bot or a human is still pulling data down from the server and using CPU resources in the process.

Q. Is there a problem or something wrong with the GA implementation?

Ans. Absolutely not. They have a specific purpose, to try and show you how many human visitors have come to your site. Our own stats has a specific purpose to show from a server impact perspective how much data is being transferred over our servers

Q. Also wondering if you could look into my above question related to WordPress.com stats program? Is it also flawed? or they work differently than yours?

Ans.  I wouldn’t say those stats are flawed. It’s just a tool that’s designed more for advertising purposes, for example, to measure “reach”. A good way to get stats that accurately reflect the traffic that actually hits the server is to see the stats (like “Daily Usage CSV”) available in your User Portal.

WpEngine cons
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  • Update 15th October 2015: WPEngine announced that they have removed bot traffic from the overage calculation. I hope one day they would eliminate counting bot visits as usual traffic.
  • Update May 2016: WPEngine do NOT count “image visits” towards traffic charges.

How to lower down WPEngine Bills?

First of all, despite liking everything about WPEngine, I hate the way they are over-charging their customers. I always considered WPEngine to be a customer-centric company, and they have implemented many great features like Website security, free DNS, Website backup, Staging area, and many more to give significant features to their customers. But, sadly they have not implemented any measures to block the bad bots from accessing your website. None the less, they are charging their customers for such visits, which doesn’t even matter.

WPEngine team, if you are listening to this, I would love to see you implementing such features in your future iteration.

Anyways, to sum everything in simple words:

  • WPEngine charges for bad bots visits.
  • They reset their visit counters every 24 hours for human and for bots.
  • They will charge you for hot-linked images or images visits from Google image search.
  • They don’t have any server level implementation for blocking bad bots visits

Now, after going through all this; I had a choice to move away from WPEngine, or keep paying the price. But, there is no fun leaving something which is good, and without making an extra effort.

So first, I tried finding a few .htaccess codes to block bad bots visits. Alas! I couldn’t find any updated list of bad bots, so .htaccess was not a viable option. For now, I have implemented Cloudflare CDN, and will see how WPEngine stats show the difference.

If it all works out, I will be happy to stick with them, else there is no thought on saying Goodbye to WPEngine.

So, if you are an existing WPEngine customer, I highly recommend you to implement Cloudflare CDN which is free (Also suggested by WPEngine staff), and it will help you to lower down your hosting bill.

Is WPEngine a good hosting company or bad?

There is a very thin line between deciding anything as bad or good.

My part of the job is to share my experience, and regarding hosting quality WPEngine is par excellence, but in terms of pricing, it’s not affordable for everyone. Their price is justified when you are running a business based WordPress site.

In my opinion, any busy site will usually face the issue of high-bill on WPEngine hosting, as busy websites usually get more bot visits, more hot-linked images due to copy-paste posts.

Undoubtedly, it might not be a very cost-effective solution for a busy website, whereas a mid-size WordPress website will not face such an issue.

It’s important for any existing WPEngine users to know how they are charging, and count visits. Moreover, you should implement measures like Cloudflare CDN or any custom solution to block bots visits to keep your limited hosting bill in check.

WPEngine alternative: Kinsta managed WordPress hosting & this is where I’m currently hosting ShoutMeLoud & ShoutMeHindi.

However, if overage charge is becoming a problem for you, you should try out WPXHosting. They don’t have such limitation and offers high end customer support. 

If you are an existing WPEngine customer, I would love to hear your review and opinion regarding their pricing plans, and if you have faced any issue with their over-charging, I would love to hear your story.

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

22 thoughts on “The Biggest Downside Of WPEngine- Overage Charge & Alternatives”

  1. Rafael

    Hi. Everything you mentioned is true. I currently use WP Engine to host the website stluciatimes.com (we use their Agency plan for US$250) and the next tier up is a whopping US$600. That sucks. There’s no mid plan to help customers ease their way into another upgrade. In any case, we’re looking to get another host.

  2. Matthew Barnes

    I used to be with WPA Engine in the early stages of my blog. Just like you I found out the hard way about overage. It took me a while, but I left them for a much better host at getflywheel.com They never charge for overage and their pricing is great.

  3. Sam

    Thanks Harsh! I had heard bad things about their visitor terms, though not sure how much this issue has been cleaned up since posting this.
    Seeing how much high praise you have for WP Engine, apart from their price, I was wondering what your thoughts are on WPX Hosting. They seem to offer a lot more in terms of features yet are cheaper than WPEngine. Would you consider a review? They seem very closely matched, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts!

    Thanks again!

  4. Tom Nunamaker

    We use Sucuri website firewall (Signup link) to block malicious bots and attacks and secure our backend with whitelisted IPs. It’s very affordable and extremely effective.

  5. Greg

    Wp Engine is awesome. They are billing you for traffic they have to serve. It costs them money, so it costs you money. Ban the ones you don’t want to come.

  6. Jesus Rico Vargas

    Hello @Harsh Agrawal,

    Thanks for the post.

    However, I want to make a contribution: WPEngine officially announced on his blog, from October 15, 2015, which no longer take into account the “bots” in their overage calculations.

    Here I leave the link …
    https://wpengine.com/blog/bot-traffic-removed-from-overages/

    A big hug from Bucaramanga, Colombia.

  7. Matt

    I really like WpEngine so far but this visit counting issue does concern me. One of my sites shows over 100 times more visits than my google analytics. WpEngine shows over 8,800 visits while my analytics shows only 65 sessions. That’s a HUGE difference! I really hope WpEngine is paying attention and fixes this, or I will most likely also need to move to a different provider in order to avoid the overage charges.

  8. KEVIN S

    I’ve been looking at using wpengine but am now thinking twice. Can anyone comment on what is a good ‘wordpress oriented’ hosting provider?

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      @Kevin
      Depending upon your budget. After WPEngine I used two hosting & dependning upon your budget you can get any one of these.

      CLoudways (Get Digital ocean server if you buy from them)
      Kinsta hosting (They are complete value for money if you need to host more than 3-4 sites)

  9. Katie Keith

    We’re a WordPress web design agency and use WP Engine for our clients’ hosting. They are absolutely fantastic for most of our clients – fast, reliable, good support, excellent backups and staging sites – but make it very difficult for larger websites with high traffic. It also makes it harder to offer WP Engine as a ‘white label’ service as not many companies charge in this way, so it’s pretty obvious which hosting company we are using if we pass on the overage charges to our clients. I don’t like charging for hosting in this way but WP Engine give us no choice.

  10. Chris

    Why did you automatically jump to a $ 250 service when WP Engine has other lower cost hosting plans?

    I and my clients have used WP Engine since 2012 and while there are some issues (as with any host), WP Engine is far from a poorly typed and general statement “crap.”

    WP Engine support is above standard compared to other hosts I’ve used since 1996 when I co-located my first server. Since then I’ve left co-location behind and relied on managed servers and the occasional VPS.

    Where WP Engine really makes life easier for devs and consultants is the daily and anytime, instant backups as well as instant installation cloning, and the ability to push a live site to staging in a couple minutes to do testing ro create the next version–and then push staging to live in minutes.

    Since others, who know everything believe WP Engine is crap I won’t go into how well my client’s sites work with WP Engine’s CDN, caching and cache exlusions, AWS CloudFront and AWS S3, nor will I talk about how well it’s been working with advanced DDOS protection via CloudFlare.

    BTW my main client’s sites at WP Engine handle in excess of 20 million hits per month, and yes they do sometimes pay overages on their dedicated, managed WP Engine server, but those three figure costs pale in comparison to the AWS S3 bucket costs each month, and other expenses they carry with their multi-million dollar revenue business hosted on WP Engine. And I know they’re one of the smaller businesses hosted on dedicated servers at WP Engine.

    My other client sites and my personal sites are on WP Engine accounts that are all less than $ 100 a month each.

    WP Engine is not crap.

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      @Chris

      I started with $250 plan as my site gets about 600,000+ page views a month. You can see traffic & monthly report here.

      First of all you said “BTW my main client’s sites at WP Engine handle in excess of 20 million hits per month, and yes they do sometimes pay overages on their dedicated, managed WP Engine server, ”
      And you are saying your client sometimes pays overage charges. Well, I don’t blame you for this, as you might be one of those end users who needs only peace of mind, and probably you bumped into WPEngine first. After WPEngine, I have tried 2-3 hosting, and all of them are above managed WordPress hosting. I pay 50% less than what I was paying, get superior support quality & since you are here at ShoutMeLoud, you can see how the fast site responds. And feature like Staging is so common now a days, even a shared hosting like Siteground also offers it. So no big deal there.

      I completely agree that WPEngine makes life easier but it works only if you have a site with fewer traffic, and you are not charged on per user basis. I would wait for you to try some other managed hosting that doesn’t charge for overage and when you save your 50% of the monthly bill, I would love to hear your opinion then.

  11. Kirtiman Sharma

    The cloudflare article you mention in your post is for general implementation not with WP Engine. Could you write a specific article on cloudflare implementation or just the features you recommend to use while on a WP engine hosting and have their CDN on.

  12. Sean Winn

    I’m using WPengine for about 3 years now and I’m very happy. The prices are high and I’m getting over the 100k a month so I also added cloudflare to kill some unimportant traffic.

    If you install Cloudflare for your WPEngine Service, there is one thing that even the support is not really sure about: https://www.maxcdn.com/one/tutorial/how-to-use-cdn-with-cloudflare/

    WPEngine is using MaxCDN as their own CDN. So I would like to know if we also have to add these rules in the tutorial above, because piratically we are also MaxCDN users.

    What do you guys thing?

  13. Shan

    I wish I had found this post before I wasted a few months and loads of dollars on overage fees at WPengine.
    It’s nearly a year later and nothing has changed in the way that they address this issue or warn customers about it.
    Their support staff is dismissive and their suggestions on how to combat the situation are not remotely helpful.
    The most recent idea from a ‘senior’ support staffer was to use googles webmaster tools to restrict how much google bots crawl the site. The problem is, you can’t actually do this if CDN is enabled, which they recommend you use. The worst.

  14. Lawrence Tam

    so I too was a bit shocked with the overage and counting bots, I came from the HostGator Dedicated hosting and never had to worry about that.

    The bigger thing was
    – speed
    – uptime

    I have yet to install cloudflare or CDN as I’m using their smallest package but compared to what I was spending with Hostgator dedicated it’s still a very good deal.

    I had a discussion with WPengine about having ONE point of failure, if you use cloudflare and if that service were to go down. They seem to recommend it and it’s something I will want to implement within 30 days (been testing speeds WITHOUT CDN to get a good picture of speed as some users say their site got slower with cloudflare)

    I have some 4 different speed tests going from hostgator dedicated linux -> WPengine’s smallest package without CDN or cloudflare.

    so far pretty happy but like you stated… want to reduce bot traffic.

  15. Jared

    Thanks for the article. A month with Wp-Engine and while the performance is great and support, the overcharge definitely hurts. I’ll try and implement some of the suggestions you offered here.

  16. Sumit Chhikara

    Cloudflare is a nice cdn. You just need to change the nameservers given by cloudflare. I used free version of cludflare and it blocked lots of spam bots. Paid version can offer you far better service.

  17. OKay Marketing

    Thanks Harsh! I too was wondering about this… I had CloudFlare implementation on my list of things to do at WPEngine, but now I am going to bump that up to top priority.

    Thanks for the heads up.

  18. Rajeesh Nair

    Of course I can’t afford to pay $250/month as of now.. But its always a good thing to know which are the best options to go for? Either VPS or WPEngine or Dedicated Server, when the traffic rises and bandwidth will become a thing to be concerned..

    Let us know how it went after the changes and implementing CDN on your blog.

    1. alan

      Bro please believe me,wpengine is a piece of crap.
      They are acting like apple,by just charging a vps available for 50$ at 250$ .and they say they are giving awesome support.
      Hostgator guys are well known wp experts and they kinda know all possible wp problems and they fix them also,with huge respect towards us.I really don’t get what people want as support from hosting company,,which hostgator , bluehost and other companies cannot give.are all these rich wpengine paying guys talking to that awesome support 20 hours a day..

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