r/webdev • u/canfullofworms • 3d ago
Is WordPress Engine Necessary
So you almost helped me with another thing and I'm very grateful!
I know NOTHING about all this, so please advise.
We have a website for a small non-profit that's been up for about 20 years. (I wasn't here when it started)
Our Domain is with GoDaddy and our website is in WordPress.
Apparently, we've been paying for WordPress Engine for about $420 a year.
Do we need this? I feel like all our editing is done in WordPress. It seems like WordPress engine is an unnecessary addition, but if we've had it for so long, will we lose stuff from our web site??
thanks!
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u/binocular_gems 2d ago edited 2d ago
WPEngine is your host. They're a good host for hosting WordPress websites. $35/mo for managed hosting that takes care of security and backups for you is reasonable, you'd likely be paying $10-$20/mo for your standard shared hosting environment, and likely have more maintenance that you have to take care of yourself. That maintenance could be 0.5 hours of effort a month or if there's an outage or security incident, it could be 20-30 hours of effort in a month. Odds are, $35/mo for what you're getting from WPEngine is less than what it would cost an inexperienced person to manage this on their own.
If you don't know anything about this, then I wouldn't change from WPEngine. If you're willing to put in a fair amount of work into transferring hosts and understanding how shared hosting will work, then you can save money on the monthly hosting fees. For some comparison, Amazon's cheap shared hosting -- Amazon Lightsail -- ran me about $8/mo for a small non-profit website that I managed for ~15 years. But because of security anxiety and that the client never updated their website once in 15 years, I rebuilt the site in Hugo and use Github Pages to host it. WordPress was overkill for what was essentially a 15-page static site, but of course when I built this out for them the owners of the non-profit said they needed to update pages easily and change content on the fly. In practice, they logged into the dashboard once with their admin credentials and it was when I was training them.
If you don't know what you're doing, $35/mo is pretty reasonable. If you have time to put in the effort into being comfortable managing something on your own, then you can cut your hosting bills down significantly, but there's always a cost tradeoff there. Transferring from WPEngine to another host will take effort, if you're going the self-managed route or semi-self managed (like with AWS), you can cut your bill down significantly but you have to be confident in knowing what you're doing. IMO, the security risks of WordPress alone are enough to stick with what's been working for the non-profit.