WPX Hosting Review Summary
WPX is our top recommended affordable managed WordPress hosting in 2024. WPX recorded an average TTFB of 329 ms, ranking #3 in the fastest TTFB, and also secured 100% uptime, making it both faster and reliable. It also recorded 32 ms in the load handling test, one of the top scores in the category. Their customer support is the fastest and most knowledgeable and can solve the most issues in a jiffy. The downside is the inconsistent TTFB both in USA and global locations, making the site load slower for first-time visitors. Another downside is their dashboard which doesn’t offer a good user experience like on the level of WP Engine or Kinsta.
WPX Hosting Pros
WPX Hosting Cons
Starts at $24.99/month
My Personal Experience with WPX
WPX Hosting Pricing
WPX plans start at $20.83/month, providing customers with three plans based on the number of websites, storage, and bandwidth.
- Business: $20.83/month, 5 Websites, 15 GB Storage, and 200 GB Bandwidth.
- Professional: $41.58/month, 15 Websites, 30 GB Storage, and 400 GB Bandwidth.
- Elite: $83.25/month, 35 Websites, 60 GB Storage, and Unlimited Bandwidth.
WPX did a commendable job by offering five sites hosting in their starter plan, which should be their major selling point. Because their competitors like WP Engine and Kinsta used to offer only one website on their starter plans.
WPX pricing is value for money. There is nothing to complain about regarding pricing to features offered.
How does WPX Hosting compare to competitors?
| Hosting | WPX | WP Engine | SiteGround | Cloudways | Kinsta |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TTFB | 329 ms | 414 ms | 409 ms | 332 ms | 378 ms |
| Uptime | 100% | 99.98% | 99.99% | 99.99% | 99.99% |
| Datacenter | 3 | 10+ | 7 | 65+ | 25+ |
| Global CDN locations | 33 | 300+ | 10 | 300+ | 300+ |
| Email Hosting | ✔ | ❌ | ✔ | ✔ | ❌ |
| Price per month | $24.99 | $30 | $19.99 | $11 | $35 |
WPX Performance Tests
Speed Test
WPX recorded an average TTFB of 329 ms in the last full year. It was third fastest TTFB host out of all the 16 hosts we’ve tested so far.
Uptime
Based on 12-month data, the WPX site recorded an uptime of 100%. This is a vast improvement compared to last year’s record.
The company had its biggest outage lasted for more than five hours, and all the sites hosted on its US data center went down. After that outage, several outages happened for the rest of the year, from September to December 2021 as seen below.
There were similar downtimes that happened till March 2022, but later, the downtimes disappeared. In the last two years, WPX offered 100% uptime as tested by our tools.
Load Testing
In load testing, WPX recorded an average response time of 32 ms to handle 500 concurrent visitors. The response time is impressive with all the requests passed with no timeout or network errors.
Global TTFB
The WPX site is tested for global TTFB from 40 locations. It recorded an average TTFB of 621 ms, which is quite average. This is probably due to their XDN having a high TTFB for first time visitors.
Core Web Vitals
When search engines put more emphasis on user experience, it is essential to test the Core Web Vitals of a hosting service to check how well it can help sites provide their users with a good user experience.
My WPX site recorded a ‘Largest Contentful Paint’ of 514 ms, ‘Cumulative Layout Shift’ of 0.07, and a ‘Total Blocking Time’ of 0 ms, which means a decent user experience for any site hosted on this platform.
WPX Features
Control Panel
WPX offers a simple to use control panel with direct options for most important features like creating staging sites, managing backups etc.
My only concern is that, the control panel is slow most of the times. Most of the WPX competitors are miles ahead and have a great control panel.
For some examples, it will take more than five clicks to create a staging site, while the same can be done at 1-2 clicks in any other managed WordPress host. On the top of these clicks, there will be a loading loop delay happening on every page for at least 20-30 seconds. Overall, it was an ok kind of experience with the WPX control panel.
Security
WPX Security is highly reliable many security features like enterprise-level DDoS and malware protection. While doing our load test, we sent 0 to 500 visitors to the site. After some time, WPX sent an email indicating there might be a DDoS attack and sent its procedural emails with Do’s and Don’ts. I was happy with this proactive approach.
Backups and Restores
WPX has a easy backup system with automated daily backups on all plans, and every backup is stored for 28 days before deletion. Users can restore any backup copy within 28 days, which is straightforward.
Data Center Locations
WPX doesn’t have a huge list of data center locations but it offers to host your site from three data centers located in USA(Chicago), UK (London) and Australia (Sydney).
WPX CDN
WPX has a built-in CDN named XDN, and it is free for all plans. However, the CDN has a bandwidth limit based on different plans.
The CDN has 33 global edge locations. The company offers HTML edge caching so that the page can load faster than a site with a traditional CDN setup (with static caching alone). As dicussed earlier, their CDN is not good for first time visitors and can cause a increased load time. This is evident from the Pingdom TTFB graph and global TTFB tests.
Staging
Staging is handy for designing changes before deploying them to the live site. WPX provides a staging feature on all plans. However, there is a strange limitation that I never find on other hosting services.
The overall site size should not be larger than 4 – 5 GB; then, the staging site can’t be great, and it may fail. If you are an agency or managing a big site, you need to make sure you comply with this rule, or else there is no possibility for you to use the WPX staging site feature.
Email Accounts
While many hosting services offer email hosting as an additional paid feature, WPX lets you create email accounts for free on all plans and for as many sites as your plan supports.
You can configure your email accounts with any of the local email clients, or use them through webmail.
WPX Hosting Support
WPX has a reliable support system in place, which has a good track record so far. The support team has dedicated and competent executives to help customers with their technical queries and issues through 24×7 live chats and tickets. The company averages a 30-second support response, which means you will get connected to an agent instantly.
Conclusion
Is WPX Worth it? Yes. WPX hosting comes at an affordable price for a Managed WordPress hosting service. It has got an excellent performance, good customer support with pro active security. They lack a good control panel, and their servers are not really faster for new users. Apart from this kind of issues, WPX is really worth for its price. If you are on a budget and compromise on its downsides, WPX will be a value for money for you.