When I switched to WPEngine hosting several months ago, I shared the complete guide for migration and also explained why I adore their hosting. If you missed these details, here are a few things you should be aware of:

Zprohacker is hosted on Kinsta WordPress Hosting.

WPEngine alternatives:

At present, there are two excellent alternatives to WPEngine:

You can read about Kinsta Vs. WPEngine here.

Returning to the topic of WPEngine overages:

Before switching to WPEngine, I was hosted on a private VPS, and one of the freelance networkers managed my server.

The performance was satisfactory, but there were a few issues regarding downtime and site sluggishness. Besides, one major drawback of working with freelancers or lesser-known hosting companies is the lack of accountability.

So, I made the decision to invest $250/month on WPEngine hosting and transferred Zprohacker to their server.

Without any hesitation, WPEngine delivers on their promises, and thus far, I am enamored with the hosting quality and website performance. Although $250/month is certainly a steep price, any knowledgeable individual would suggest opting for a VPS or dedicated server.

In my case, I chose to stick with WPEngine since I don’t want to experience even a momentary downtime for my main blog, and when it comes to quality, cost is of little concern.

So What’s the issue with WPEngine?

The biggest complaints you will hear about WPEngine are pricing and customer support.

In the past two months, they have significantly improved their customer support by introducing live-chat, but the pricing problem remains unchanged.

After using WPEngine for more than two months, I encountered a major pricing dilemma with WPEngine.

The purpose of this post is to help you comprehend the issue and explore some potential solutions to this situation.

Firstly, WPEngine pricing is determined by the number of visits and the manner in which they calculate the visits differs from what is displayed on your Google Analytics or WordPress.com stats program.

According to Zprohacker’s Google analytic statistics, I receive approximately 325,000 visits per month, and I chose the WPEngine Business plan which permits up to 400,000 visits per month and has a price of $250.

When I last logged into my WPEngine dashboard, I was astonished to find an additional $188 charge for exceeding the allotted visits, and this month, I was on the verge of exceeding the 400,000 visit threshold.

I was quite taken aback as my WordPress.com statistics and Google analytics indicated a number of visits lower than 400,000.

Before reaching out to their team with my concerns, I revisited their help page regarding visits, and I realized that I had misunderstood a few crucial points. Here is the information provided on their visits help page:

1. When an individual first enters the site and loads the page, remaining there for 31 seconds, that counts as a visit.
2. If that same individual clicks a link and views another page, that does not count as a new visit; it is considered part of the same visit.
3. If that same individual does not have cookies or javascript enabled, even then it counts as a single visit.
4. If that same individual loads the site using different browsers, it is still not considered a new visit; it is part of the same visit.
5. If that same individual bookmarks the site and returns to it 11 days later, that is counted as a new visit.
6. When a robot loads your site, our servers render it just as they would for a human visitor. However, bot traffic is not included in the total number of visits as it may hold no value for you.
7. If a robot scans 20,000 pages within a month, it should not be considered as a single visit. While it also should not be counted as 20,000 visits, it should fall within the range of 100-1,000 visits.
8. There are additional scenarios where the “correct action” is unclear. For instance, consider the case of a “quick bounce.” Let’s say an individual clicks a link to the site, but before the site has a chance to load, they click “back.” Does this count as a visit? Our servers still had to render and attempt to return the page, so in that sense, “yes”. However, since the individual did not actually view the site and Google Analytics will not register that hit, in that sense, “no”. We prioritize the notion of a “visit” aligning with “the amount of computing resources required to serve traffic,” so we round off in favor of saying “yes”.

There were two important details that I missed while reading the same page:

• We reset our understanding of a “unique IP address” every day.
• Robots utilize the same few IP addresses, so they are consolidated within a single day, but will be counted anew the following day.

Although everything is clearly explained on the WPEngine help page, I overlooked the point about resetting the unique IP address daily, and the fact that bot visits are considered as new visits every 24 hours.

Zprohacker is a very active blog, and not only Google bots, but there are practically many positive negative bots that crawl Zprohacker on a daily basis, and I realized that this has significantly increased my number of visits according to WPEngine.

First and foremost, this idea of counting visits from WPEngine is not only flawed, but it also causes a major financial burden for existing WPEngine users.

As I was considering switching away from WPEngine hosting after learning about how they count visits, and certainly this is not a user-friendly pricing model, I wanted to see if there was something I could do to make my WPEngine stats align more closely with my Google analytic stats.

I inquired about a few things from them, which will be helpful for any existing WPEngine user or anyone planning to purchase hosting from WPEngine:

Q. CDN: If I serve my images using a CDN powered by WPEngine, will those visits be counted?

Ans. Any request that hits the CDN instead of the server does not count as a visit. So, the CDN is also a useful tool. However, if these hotlinks already exist before enabling the CDN, it becomes a more challenging issue to address. Again, because CloudFlare operates at the DNS level, it provides a straightforward and comprehensive solution.

Q. I notice that WPEngine considers bad bots as visits as well. Do you have a solution for blocking these negative bots/spam/scrapers bots?

Ans. You can utilize Cloudflare to filter out the negative bots at the DNS level.

Q. Why does Google Analytics display a significantly lower number of visitors?

Ans. The number of visitors shown in Google Analytics is always going to be considerably lower. If you search the question on Google, you will see that many people with various hosts are experiencing the same issue. The reason is that Google Analytics strives to provide information only on human visitors that are relevant for Ad Traffic, and it does not include any visitors who have disabled JavaScript on their browsers.

A unique IP address is considered unique for an entire month, while our system looks at unique IPs on a daily basis. Additionally, they do not include Google bots or other bots in their visitor count. Google Analytics is primarily used for marketing and advertising purposes, which is why it puts in significant effort to only count what they believe are human visitors. Our server statistics monitoring tracks all unique visitors because, from a server impact perspective, both bots and humans consume data from the server and use CPU resources in the process.

Q. Is there an issue or any problem with the implementation of Google Analytics?

Ans. Absolutely not. Google Analytics has a specific purpose, which is to provide you with an estimate of how many human visitors have come to your site. Our own statistics have a specific purpose to show the amount of data being transferred over our servers from a server impact standpoint.

Q. I’m also curious if you could investigate my previous question regarding the WordPress.com stats program? Is it also flawed, or do they operate differently from yours?

Ans. I wouldn’t say those statistics are flawed. It’s just a tool that is primarily designed for advertising purposes, such as measuring “reach”. A good way to obtain statistics that accurately reflect the traffic hitting the server is to view the available stats (such as “Daily Usage CSV”) in your User Portal.

• Update 15th October 2015: WPEngine declared that they have eradicated bot traffic from the overage calculation. I desire that someday they would eradicate counting bot visits as regular traffic.
• Update May 2016: WPEngine do NOT take into account “image visits” towards traffic fees.

How to decrease WPEngine Expenditures?

First and foremost, in spite of preferring everything about WPEngine, I detest the manner in which they are excessively charging their customers. I always considered WPEngine to be a customer-centric company, and they have executed numerous remarkable features like Website security, free DNS, Website backup, Staging area, and many more to provide significant features to their customers. But, regrettably they have not implemented any steps to block the bad bots from accessing your website. Nonetheless, they are billing their customers for such visits, which are not even significant.

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

Anyways, to summarize everything in simple terms:

• 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 delighted to stick with them, else there is no thought on saying Goodbye to WPEngine.

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

Is WPEngine a good hosting company or bad?

There is an extremely fine line between determining anything as bad or good.

My part of the undertaking is to share my experience, and concerning hosting quality WPEngine is exceptional, 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 point of view, any bustling website will typically encounter the problem of a steep bill on WPEngine hosting, as busy websites generally receive more automated visits, and a greater number of externally linked images because of posts that are copied and pasted.

Undeniably, this may not be a very economically efficient solution for a busy website, whereas a medium-sized WordPress website will not experience such a problem.

It is crucial for any existing WPEngine users to understand how they are billed, and keep track of the number of visits. Furthermore, you should implement measures like Cloudflare CDN or any tailored solution to prevent bots from visiting in order to keep your hosting costs within the set limit.

An alternative to WPEngine is Kinsta managed WordPress hosting, and this is presently where I am hosting Zprohacker.

However, if the charge for exceeding limits is becoming problematic for you, you should consider trying out WPXHosting. They do not have such restrictions and provide superior customer support.

If you are a current WPEngine customer, I would appreciate hearing your evaluation and viewpoint regarding their pricing plans, and if you have encountered any problems with their excessive billing, I would be interested in hearing your story.