WPX Hosting Review: How Good Is This Host In 2024?

Welcome to my WPX Hosting review.

WPX is a WordPress managed hosting provider that claims to offer superior performance compared to other providers.

But is it the fastest? And does it make sense for your sites?

In this review, I’m sharing my personal experiences as a WPX customer since 2014. Way back when it was called Traffic Planet Hosting.

So, no – this isn’t your typical hosting review!

I’ll break down the key features, pros & cons, pricing, alternatives, and everything else you need to know.

WPX Hosting features

Let’s kick off this WPX Hosting review by looking at their key features.

Here are a few of the more obvious features you’d expect:

• 1-click WordPress installs.
• SSD storage.
• Free SSL certificates (via Let’s Encrypt).
• Unlimited site migrations to WPX.
• Staging area creation.
• Several different server locations (USA, UK, Australia).
• DDoS protection.

Now, let’s take a look at some of the other WPX Hosting features that I especially like and/or require a bit more explanation:

Free CDN (XDN by WPX)

WPX Hosting includes a free CDN. If you haven’t heard of the term before, it stands for Content Delivery Network.

Here’s how they work:

Usually, the further a visitor is away from the physical location of your website’s server, the longer it takes for your website to load.

A CDN provider, once activated on your website, will serve your website’s assets from a location closer to the visitor. This means you reduce latency and improve page load times.

Currently WPX’s CDN is available from 30+ global locations and can be enabled with a few clicks from the dashboard.

You’ll need to be using WPX’s nameservers or update your DNS using the CDN’s IP addresses within your account.

Responsive customer support + free site fixes if your site goes offline

One of the fundamental issues I’ve faced with a lot of hosting companies, particularly budget hosts, is their handling of support – they don’t seem too interested in fixing sites when they’re broken.

With WPX Hosting, they’ll fix your site for free if it goes offline. But in general, they’re always quite keen to get issues resolved.

Most of my issues have been resolved by live chat within a short amount of time. Issues rarely get passed to email ticket support. But even then, issues are solved quite fast.

And I like that they don’t tend to answer support queries with links to huge knowledge base articles & expect you to fix problems yourself. They’ll actually help.

Malware recovery

A good malware recovery service could cost anywhere in the region of $200+ per year if you were to buy it separately. 

WPX Hosting includes it in their offering. Fortunately I haven’t had to use this service and I hope you don’t need to use it either.

But should the need arise – they’ll recover your site from malware.

Automatic backups + manual backups

WPX Hosting will automatically backup your website each day and save those files for 28 days.

You can also choose to backup your sites manually. This is good practice to do before any update to ensure you don’t lose any changes if anything goes wrong.

Automated backups are a standard offering for most managed WordPress hosting companies these days.

But there’s an important reason I’m mentioning this feature in more detail – best practice.

While it’s nice that web hosts offer automated backups as part of their offering, and I highly recommend that you make the most of this feature whenever possible, you should never rely on them.

Best practice is to have a third-party solution for backups. Redundancy matters. I use BlogVault for this because it runs backups incrementally to avoid slowing my sites down. But there are plenty of WordPress backup plugins you could use.

I haven’t had any issues with WPX Hosting’s backups for any of my sites. But I’ve worked with companies that have had issues with other hosting companies.

So – play it safe.

Free speed optimization

Very rarely will you find WordPress hosting that will optimize your website and speed it up for free.

I still haven’t taken advantage of this offer. It’s only a fairly recent addition to their offering.

If you want to take WPX Hosting up on this deal, open up a support ticket and ask them to optimize your site. They’ll run some tests to find out what’s slowing down your site, make some tweaks, and provide some additional recommendations for you.

Other companies charge anywhere from $100-200 and up for this service.

Usage based pricing

There’s a pricing trend in the WordPress managed hosting space where they price via monthly unique visitors. But what they consider to be a “unique visitor” resets daily. 

Personally, I’m not a fan of this pricing strategy because it can lead to expensive hosting bills due to overage charges. Larger businesses can absorb these costs no problem but I’d prefer not to waste money on hosting services when I don’t have to.

WPX Hosting doesn’t do that. Their pricing plans are based on resource usage instead.

Should you run into issues, you could use Cloudflare to offset resource usage. But I’ve never come close to hitting the bandwidth limits on my WPX Hosting account. 

How fast is WPX Hosting?

I’m sure you’ve read countless hosting reviews that publish page load time tests.

Instead of testing a development site that gets zero traffic and hardly any plugins installed, I’m going to do things differently for this WPX Hosting review.

I’m going to show you the page speed data for a site that would more fairly resemble that of the average user.

Here are a few important notes about the WordPress site that I’m testing:

• It’s a live site that gets traffic.
• I’ve been slacking on optimizing the site – it could be improved significantly.
• I’m testing a blog post rather than the home page.
• The site is running Kadence theme.
• WP Rocket is installed with mostly default settings. Not WPX Hosting’s recommended settings.
• The site has a few resource intensive plugins that I should probably swap out.
• You’ll see both desktop and mobile pagespeeds – not just the one that looks best.

My point is that most WordPress websites are not perfectly optimized. They have flaws. Most site owners aren’t going to be getting 100 pagespeed scores.

And that’s exactly why I’m showing you test results from one of my more ‘flawed’ sites.

I’ll also go beyond static “one-shot” PageSpeed tests and show you a concurrent user load test. This test will show how response times change as concurrent users increase on the website.

So, let’s take a look:

Desktop page speed tests

Mobile page speed tests

Overall, not bad for a flawed website. Mobile page speed is weaker than I’d like but I’ll get round to fixing that.

Besides, weak Core Web Vitals don’t seem to be holding the site back at all. It’s ranking well against some significant competitors in the music space. 

And sites like Forbes and Business Insider struggle to get past a mobile page speed of 50

Note: If you’re looking to speed up your own website, remember that WPX Hosting offers free website performance optimization. I haven’t used it yet but they know their servers best.

Also, NitroPack is a great “quick-fix” for WordPress performance issues. When Colin wrote his review for Blogging Wizard, his tests showed some pretty impressive page speed improvements based on their lower ‘automatic’ optimization settings.

Concurrent user load test

I used Loader.io to measure the response times of WPX Hosting’s server as concurrent users increase.

Budget hosting companies tend not to do too well on these concurrent load tests. WPX Hosting isn’t a budget web host so it should perform well.

The test ran for 1 minute and scaled to 40 concurrent users. 

I purposefully went for a number of users that would be far more than most WordPress sites would get – particularly smaller ones. This was to make sure that WPX Hosting could handle brief traffic spikes without response times getting out of control.

The average response time for my WordPress site was 131ms and peaked at around 250ms which is pretty good.

And with further optimizations to the site, these results would be even better.

WPX Hosting pros and cons

What’s good about WPX? And what’s not so good? Let’s take a look:

Pros:

• Great for beginners – The dashboard is very easy to navigate. If you want to eliminate any technical hurdles, this makes WPX Hosting a solid option.
• Great performance – I wouldn’t go as far as to say that WPX is the fastest WordPress managed host out there, they aren’t. That said, they do offer excellent performance.
• Near perfect uptime – Looking at my uptime tracking, my sites on WPX Hosting have had very few issues with downtime. And only one significant bit of downtime in the past 8+ years.
• Responsive customer support – Some hosts don’t seem too fussed about fixing problems. WPX Hosting is different. You can speak to someone on live chat within minutes usually. And in most cases, they’ll be able to fix the issue. If they can’t, you’ll get transferred to email support which is slower but still quite fast usually.
• Free CDN – WPX Hosting have their own CDN called WPX XDN and it operates from over 30 locations over the globe. You can activate it within a few clicks within your dashboard.
• Automated backups and staging site creation – This is quite typical of most web hosts but it’s important regardless.
• Free malware recovery – If your site gets hacked or loaded with malware, WPX Hosting will fix up your site for you. No need to pay extra to a company like Sucuri.
• Email hosting included – Unlike a lot of WordPress managed hosts, WPX Hosting offers email hosting. While it’s basic and I would recommend an external provider for added redundancy, it’s still useful to have and saves paying out extra money.
• Pricing is based on bandwidth – I’m not a fan of the visitor based pricing other WordPress hosts do because it gets expensive fast. That’s not an issue with WPX Hosting because their pricing is usage based. Even on my higher traffic sites, I didn’t max out on my bandwidth usage.

Cons:

• Shared hosting with limited resources – WPX Hosting’s page load speeds are very good, but it’s still just shared hosting. You do get dedicated resources and this means servers aren’t oversold like with some shared web hosting providers. Higher plans offer more resources.
• Limited numbers of PHP workers – PHP workers are what allow your site to conduct dynamic tasks. The more you have, the more dynamic tasks your site can handle. Unfortunately, you don’t get many with WPX, regardless of your plan, which means it’s not a good option for running an ecommerce store.
• Limited scalability – WPX Hosting isn’t a good fit for high traffic sites. If you require more resources than their highest plan, you’d need to move to a different web host. For most bloggers and content creators, this likely won’t be an issue but it’s worth being aware of this.

WPX Hosting pricing and plans

WPX Hosting offers three pricing plans. Each available monthly or yearly with a discount. 

Here’s a rundown on what’s included in each one:

Business ($24.99/month)

• Up to five websites
• 15 GB storage
• 200GB bandwidth

Professional ($49.99/month)

• Up to 15 websites
• 30 GB storage
• 400 GB bandwidth

Elite ($99.99/month)

• Up to 35 websites
• 60 GB storage
• Unlimited bandwidth (subject to a reasonable use policy at WPX Hosting’s discretion).

All plans also include free malware removals, free speed optimization, free daily backups, staging sites, unlimited site migrations, unlimited SSL certificates (free via Let’s Encrypt), free site fixes (if your site goes offline), a 99.95% uptime guarantee and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

It’s also worth noting that higher plans have increased server resources. But, WPX Hosting doesn’t publicly advertise them on their pricing page. Support will tell you what they are if you ask them.

For example, Professional plans get 2 CPU cores and Elite plans get 3 CPU cores.

In addition to these plans, dedicated WooCommerce plans are available from $34.99/month. These plans support fewer sites but offer higher amounts of resources overall given the resource-heavy nature of hosting WooCommerce sites.

Alternatives to WPX Hosting

If the needs of your website don’t align with WPX Hosting and you’d prefer to consider a other web hosts, check out these alternatives:

• Cloudways | (Our review) – This is the web host I use for my high traffic sites. Just choose which cloud service and how many resources, and you’re good to go. You can upgrade server resources easily. Due to the dashboard being more complicated, I’d recommend this host to those who have existing experience with web hosting.
• WP Engine – This is the brand most people think about when the topic of managed WordPress hosting comes up in conversation. They offer high performance and entry-level plans that are more affordable than most.
• Kinsta | (Our review) – Kinsta is a popular managed WordPress host that powers sites like Flippa and Drift. I use them to host some of the WordPress sites in my business. It’s pricey because they charge based on visits (not usage) but it’s extremely good. Excellent performance and support.
• Liquid Web – Liquid Web offers tailored web hosting plans to suit general WordPress sites, and WooCommerce sites. What’s particularly nice about Liquid Web is the high availability of PHP workers. In fact, you’ll find it advertised on their WooCommerce plans.

Final thoughts

Let’s wrap up this WPX Hosting review with some final thoughts.

WPX Hosting offers affordable managed WordPress hosting. Their offering is ideal for beginners that want solid website performance, without additional costs or complications. Or anyone that wants to upgrade from budget web hosting while keeping costs under control.

The included CDN, malware recovery, and beginner-friendly dashboard are all great features. Malware recovery is a feature lacking from budget hosting companies – it’s one of the reasons why it’s worth paying a bit extra to WPX Hosting over hosts like Bluehost.

WPX definitely isn’t the fastest WordPress hosting company out there but they do offer very good site speed. And uptime for my sites has been excellent.

What’s particularly nice about WPX Hosting is their pricing. A lot of WordPress managed hosts will price based on unique monthly visits. And in the small print, they state that they rest what they perceive to be unique visits every 24 hours.

This can lead to some huge hosting bills.

But WPX Hosting doesn’t do this. They price their plans primarily on bandwidth usage which I believe to be a more fair way of doing things.

That said, they’re not the best fit for everyone. For example, I do not recommend WPX Hosting for ecommerce sites. The number of available PHP workers is just not enough for WooCommerce. And it’s not an ideal fit for high traffic sites either – there’s no option to scale beyond their Elite plan.

This is why I moved Blogging Wizard to Cloudways – I needed the ability to easily scale server resources to match the site’s traffic growth. And I didn’t want to pay too much money for it either.

However, I still host a number of my smaller sites with WPX Hosting. Because the additional functionality that’s included (CDN + Firewall + Malware removals) helps to keep the operating costs of these sites low. And their customer support, in my experience, has been excellent.

So, I feel safe knowing that I don’t have to pay attention to these small sites running on WPX Hosting – they’re getting the job done. And will fix them if anything goes wrong.

But will WPX Hosting be a good fit for your WordPress website? That depends on your needs. Beginners and owners of small sites can’t really go wrong. And there’s always that 30-day money back guarantee if it turns out that WPX isn’t the web host for you.

I hope you found my WPX Hosting review helpful.

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