Media Temple vs WPEngine – Which WP Hosting Better in 2021?

As WordPress gains high popularity from a rising number of webmasters, many web hosts claim to offer superior solutions for it, including WPEngine and MediaTemple. WPEngine is a managed hosting platform that only focuses on one niche – WordPress hosting. And Media Temple is a multi-functional web host which has a larger business scale.

Honestly, to make a choice between the two companies is not easy for non-technical people. In this case, we have developed this intuitive company comparison in many aspects including reputation, pricing policy, offerings, features, performance, after-sale service, etc. First of all, there is a rating table for WPEngine and Media Temple, which is made from many customers’ feedbacks.

Reputation & Ease of Use

Being established by Jason Cohen and Asron Brazell in July 2010, WPEngine is relatively new to the web hosting market. This company mainly focuses on three WordPress website issues including speed, scalability and security. With some strategic marketing and management, it attracts some developers and freelancers in the WordPress community.

Comparatively, since the first presence in 1998, Media Temple has been in the hosting industry for more than fifteen years. It claims that there are more than 125,000 businesses and people relying on their unique tools for domain registration, web hosting and one-click WordPress installation, etc. In this way, it seems that Media Temple is more well-known than its competitor.

When it comes to the usability, one easy-to-use admin panel, which has graphical icons and intuitive interface like cPanel, is quite necessary. However, neither of WPEngine and Media Temple support cPanel, which makes both of them inconvenient and not user-friendly for common webmasters fond of cPanel admin panel.

Pricing Policy & Offerings

WPEngine offers a total of four WordPress managed hosting plans, which are named as Personal, Professional, Business and Enterprise plan differently. As for the detailed pricing policy, WPEngine rates the mentioned plans at different prices ranging from $29/mo to $249/mo. For the Enterprise edition, webmasters need to negotiate with the hosting company. There is no promotion or discount available on its official site.

In comparison, Media Temple only releases one single WordPress hosting plan, which is named as Premium WordPress Hosting plan. This web host rates this plan at the price of $29/mo, which is the same as the most cost-effective plan of WPEngine. In the meantime, it charges for additional fees of $15/yr for domain name registration.

Although Media Temple offers a 30-day money back guarantee for customers, there are still many items non-refundable, such as domain name registration, renewal fees, setup fees and redemption fees, etc.

When compared with other web hosts charging no more than $20/mo but offering free domain name for managed WordPress hosting, both of WPEngine and Media Temple are not money-saving and cost-effective.

Features & After-Sale Service

Although charging much higher fees than most web hosts, neither of WPEngine and Media Temple supports some important hosting features, such as Cron Jobs, CGI and Ruby on Rails. To make things clear and plain, we select the Personal plan of WPEngine to make a comparison with Media Temple and BlueHost by giving consideration to the price. More well-made information is in below.

Although both of the WPEngine and Media Temple allow people ranging from developers to bloggers to seek for help through online live chat and email ticket, only the latter offers phone call option. However, many webmasters still complain that the after-sale support from the Media Temple is a total nightmare, because it usually takes from several hours to one day to get response to a support request.

Performance

There are an overwhelming number of people’s complaints about the slow loading speed of WPEngine. According to the testing results from our monitoring team, WPEngine server response time averages 400ms, which is a little bit frustrating for people desiring super-fast WordPress hosting service.

Likewise, Media Temple receives many bad remarks on its unstable network and frequently-occurred downtime. Some customers say that they have suffered from numerous incidents with downtime and are forced to pay more fees to upgrade their current servers. From our testing data, the actual network uptime is only 99.53% averagely, which is much lower than many web hosts.

Conclusion

In summary, the managed WordPress hosting services from WPEngine and Media Temple are not recommended for people who are in search for a high-speed, stable, feature-rich, low-cost and helpful solution. In this case, we recommend BlueHost as an excellent option for managed WordPress hosting due to its affordable price, high performance, rich features and helpful after-sale support.