Has WPEngine billed you for overage charges? Do you want to know how the hosting provider calculates your monthly visitors? Well, then, you’re in luck!
Here we discuss the finer details of WPEngine overages, including some tricks to help reduce your bandwidth usage. We’ll also share some of the best alternatives to WPEngine at the end of this article.
But first, let’s learn exactly how WPEngine overage charges work.
What are WPEngine Overages for bandwidth?
WPEngine puts a bandwidth cap on all its hosting plans. Depending on your plan subscription, they allow you to have only a specific number of monthly visitors.
When you exceed your plan’s total unique visits limit, they charge you a $2 overage fee per additional 1000 visits.
However, their method of counting page visits could be more straightforward. You’ll find a huge discrepancy when comparing your unique monthly visitors calculated by Google Analytics with WPEngine’s calculations.
Here are some important things to remember about how WPEngine calculates your traffic count:
- It considers both human and bot visits, including the ones from bad bots.
- The host resets the visit counters after every 24 hours for all visits.
- WPEngine’s traffic calculation includes image visits from Google searches and hot-linked images.
- It doesn’t block bad bot visits through any server-level implementation.
WPEngine’s method of counting website visitors is flawed and leads to poor customer experience. Moreover, this faulty practice makes the host much more expensive for its existing users.
As to whether the bandwidth limits are reasonable for user experience, we have compiled a cap list for you to see the numbers yourself.
Here are the maximum monthly visits allocated to different WPEngine plans:
| WPEngine plan | Number of sites | Monthly visits |
| Lite | 1 | 5,000 |
| Startup | 1 | 25,000 |
| Professional | 3 | 75,000 |
| Growth | 10 | 100,000 |
| Scale | 30 | 400,000 |
| Dedicated Custom | 30+ | 400,000+ |
We don’t like seeing caps on the unique monthly visitor count because they are not in your control.
However, when such limits are placed, you can at least lower your consumption to optimize how many visitors you can serve with your existing resources.
For instance, improving caching and reducing your web page size can help minimize bandwidth consumption.
WPEngine: What happens when you exceed visitor limits?
You will incur WP Engine overages when you exceed visitor limits. The host charges an overage cost of $2 for every additional 1,000 monthly visitors.
This overage rate remains the same across all plans, including Lite, Startup, Professional, Growth, and Scale.
Let’s take an example to calculate your total hosting expenditure if you incur WP Engine overages. If your website receives 45,000 unique monthly visits on the Startup plan, you’ll have 20,000 visits beyond the plan limit.
So the host will charge you 20 X $2 = $40 in addition to your plan’s base price of $24 for the month. It makes your total monthly hosting expense $64—which is way too high!
How to reduce WPEngine bandwidth usage?
You must take precautions and optimize your monthly bandwidth consumption to stick with the WPEngine hosting.
We recommend using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Cloudflare to prevent WPEngine overages. It filters all bad bots at the DNS level.
So your website will stop unwanted visitors, like spam bots and scrapers, that consume a considerable part of your monthly bandwidth.
It is also relatively easy to set up a CDN to your WPEngine account. The host offers an integration setup with Cloudflare directly from within your account dashboard.
What do users say about this bandwidth limitation?
We scoured the internet to find existing WPEngine customers facing overage issues, and here is what they have to say:
As seen above, many WPEngine users are dissatisfied with the host because of overage charges. The company needs to take some strong action to retain its loyal customers.
It can either do away with the visitor cap and set only bandwidth limits or, at least, bring its visitor calculation to par with Google Analytics.
Best Alternatives to WPEngine
WPEngine is a good hosting provider, but its expensive plans and overage charges might force you to look for an alternative. So, here are some of the best alternatives to switch from WPEngine for your growing website:
Cloudways
Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform from the tech giant Digital Ocean. Compared to WPEngine, it is definitely a budget-friendly option. You will get the best value in terms of price and performance with Cloudways.
The host provides specific bandwidth with each of its hosting plans. It also doesn’t set any visitor cap like WPEngine so you won’t incur any overage charges here.
WPX Hosting
WPX Hosting is a European WordPress hosting provider with a worldwide presence. Though WPX has similarly-priced plans to WPEngine, it offers many more server resources.
Like Cloudways, WPX also sets a bandwidth limit instead of limiting the maximum number of visitors your website can receive. As a result, the company doesn’t charge any overage fees.
Conclusion
WPEngine is a fantastic hosting provider offering good support and excellent backups. It is reliable and fast and allows one-click staging to test changes before making them live.
But, the host limits your monthly website visitors—which is a significant problem for larger websites receiving high traffic.
This practice makes it difficult to offer WPEngine as a ‘white label’ service to your clients, as not many hosting providers charge you based on your visitor count. So if you pass on the overage charges to your clients, it becomes pretty apparent which host you are using.
That is why we recommend going for a host with no overage charges, like Cloudways and WPX Hosting.
Do you have any further WPEngine-related queries? If yes, share them in the comment section, and we’ll address them as soon as possible.
FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
Does WP Engine use CDN?
Yes, WPEngine offers Cloudflare CDN support to store all your website content on the cloud. However, you should set it up yourself if you want to reduce your bandwidth usage.
You can easily do that since the host offers an integration setup with Cloudflare directly within your account dashboard.
