WPX Hosting Review 2024: The Good & Bad (Hands-On)
Considering hosting your WordPress sites with WPX Hosting? In our hands-on WPX Hosting review, we’ll help you decide.
We host real websites on WPX Hosting and have had an active account since 2019. Beyond that, we also ran our own performance tests and took a detailed look at the WPX Hosting dashboard to help you see what’s on offer.
Overall, WPX Hosting can make a great cost-effective option for people who need an affordable place to host multiple WordPress sites, while still offering good performance, fast load times, and quality support.
It’s not the right option for every single site, but WPX Hosting strikes a great balance between cost and performance, while still offering top-notch support and important features like automatic backups and staging sites.
Here’s everything that we’ll cover in our full WPX Hosting review:
Let’s get started!
We Actually Use WPX Hosting to Host Our Sites
When we write our hosting reviews, we always want you to know that they’re authentic and trustworthy.
As such, we think it’s important to note that we do host some of our own sites using WPX Hosting, so we have direct, hands-on experience that goes beyond the test site we set up for this review.
While DesignBombs itself is hosted on Kinsta (learn more in our Kinsta review), we are happy with our experience hosting these other sites on WPX Hosting.
Here’s proof from our WPX Hosting dashboard showing that we’ve had an active account since May 2019:
With that out of the way, let’s dig into our WPX Hosting review.
⚙️ WPX Hosting Key Features
Before we get into the more hands-on section of our review, let’s quickly run over the key features that WPX Hosting offers.
We won’t spend too long here because you can find all of this on the WPX Hosting website – we just want to make sure that you know what to expect.
Here’s the rundown…
- 24/7/365 support via live chat with 30-second average response times
- Custom hosting dashboard
- Host multiple websites, even on the cheapest plan
- LiteSpeed Web Server + LiteSpeed Cache
- Datacenters in the USA, UK, and Australia
- Custom content delivery network (CDN) with 33 global edge locations
- Automatic daily backups with 28 days of secure storage
- Staging sites
- Free SSL certificates
- Free email hosting
- Unlimited free migrations
One unique feature at WPX Hosting is that they also offer free website performance optimizations, which means they’ll help speed up your site.
WPX Hosting also offers a free hack-fix guarantee if anything malicious gets through its built-in security protections.
🚀 WPX Hosting Performance Tests
Performance is the most important consideration when choosing a web host, so let’s kick off the hands-on section of our WPX Hosting review with some real performance tests.
To collect WPX Hosting performance data, we used two tools:
- WebPageTest – this lets us see how WPX Hosting performs for a single visitor. We use a throttled FIOS connection to ensure more realistic load times. We also run nine separate tests and take the median value.
- Load Focus – this lets us see how WPX Hosting performs under scale by mimicking a high-traffic scenario.
To create a realistic test scenario, we imported a full demo site from the popular Astra theme. Then, we ran our tests using LiteSpeed Cache and WPX Hosting’s pre-configured LiteSpeed Cache settings.
In WebPageTest, WPX Hosting performed excellently, with a TTFB of just 0.070 seconds and a Largest Contentful Paint time of under half a second – 0.492 seconds, to be exact.
In Load Focus, WPX Hosting showed a small increase in load times as the number of concurrent visitors increased from 13 to 20, but the response times were still overall quite good.
The average response time was 425 ms and the 90% response time was 611 ms, which means that 90% of the 3,646 total requests (within just a single 60-second period) were under that time.
Overall, WPX Hosting performed well in the tests and WPX Hosting’s performance numbers still stack up well even against more expensive hosts like WP Engine and Kinsta.
If you want fast performance without breaking the bank, WPX Hosting is a great option.
🤗 WPX Hosting User Experience
Like many other managed WordPress hosts, WPX Hosting has opted to create its own hosting dashboard rather than using an off-the-rack solution like cPanel, which is what most other shared hosts use.
Honestly, though, WPX Hosting’s dashboard is probably the weakest part of its hosting offering. While WPX Hosting’s dashboard is functional enough, hosts like Kinsta (our review), Rocket.net (our review), and WP Engine (our review) offer much nicer dashboard experiences with more useful tools.
Still, we don’t think that should be a dealbreaker because WPX Hosting is strong where it counts – performance, support, and pricing that offers stellar value.
Additionally, those other hosts that we listed cost more than WPX Hosting, so you’re paying for that improved dashboard experience. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch!
With that out of the way, let’s take a hands-on look at the WPX Hosting dashboard so that you can choose for yourself.
Main Account Dashboard
The main WPX Hosting account dashboard looks like this:
If you go to the Manage Websites tab, you can access the tools for a specific site:
Site Management Tools
The settings for an individual site are divided into a few different areas. In addition to these settings, you’ll also find dedicated areas for backups and other key tools – more on that in a second.
Clicking the Manage WP button opens a popup where you can install WordPress (if needed) and manage automatic updates:
The SSL button lets you install a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt for that site.
The Logs button lets you view access logs and error logs for that site.
Finally, the Settings button opens another popup where you can make a few tweaks:
- Enable WordPress multisite
- Change PHP versions.
- Manage PHP modules
- Turn off WPX mail service for this specific domain
- Automatically force all HTTP requests to HTTPS
You can also click the Send an Optimization Request button to request that WPX Hosting optimizes your site’s performance, which is a nice feature that you won’t find at a lot of hosts.
Backups
WPX Hosting automatically backs up your site every day and stores those backups in a safe location, which gives you peace of mind when it comes to your site’s data.
In addition to the automatic backups, you also have the option to create a manual backup when needed.
For both types of backups, you can restore a backup with just a few clicks.
You can access a site’s backups from the Backups tab:
WPX Hosting will store your sites’ automatic backups for 28 days, which is a pretty good length. A lot of other managed WordPress hosts will only store backups for 14 days.
Staging Sites
WPX Hosting offers staging sites on all of its plans.
Staging sites offer a duplicate copy of your site that’s in a safe sandbox so that you can test changes and make updates without affecting your live site.
However, WPX Hosting treats staging sites differently than most other hosts because staging sites actually count against the website limits of your billing plan.
For example, the entry-level billing plan supports five websites. If you already have four live websites and then you want to create a staging site for one of those sites, you would now have maxed out your plan’s limits with five websites.
When you create a staging site, you can choose the live website that you want to duplicate:
Once you create the staging site, it will show up in your site list and you can log in to WordPress:
If you want to automatically apply the changes from your staging site to your live site, you can use the Merge to Live button.
One nice thing about WPX Hosting’s merge to live feature is that it won’t fully overwrite your live database. Instead, it will keep any new posts or comments that were added to the live site after you created the staging site. It will, however, overwrite other areas of your site, though you’ll need to manually activate any new plugins or themes.
When you use the merge feature, it displays a detailed popup to let you know what’s happening:
File Manager and Database Manager
One nice feature that WPX Hosting’s dashboard has is an in-browser file manager tool that lets you browse/manage the files and folders on your server without needing to connect via FTP.
While this feature is standard in cPanel, not all managed WordPress hosts offer it in their custom dashboards.
Here’s what it looks like:
For database access, WPX Hosting offers phpMyAdmin, which is what pretty much every other host offers.
Email Mailboxes
One notable advantage that WPX Hosting has compared to a lot of other managed WordPress hosts is that WPX Hosting still offers free email hosting to help you create a custom email address like you@yoursite.com.
You can create and manage these email mailboxes by going to the E-Mail Boxes tab:
If you use a host like Kinsta or WP Engine, you’ll need to use a third-party email hosting service to create a custom email address.
Final Thoughts on WPX Hosting’s Dashboard
As we mentioned earlier, WPX Hosting’s dashboard is probably the weakest point in its entire offering.
As you can see after browsing the screenshots, it is functional enough. You can still access key features like backups, SSL certificates, staging sites, and so on.
However, the interface can feel a bit unwieldy and unintuitive at points.
Additionally, WPX Hosting just flat out doesn’t offer as many useful tools as some other managed WordPress hosts. Though, to be fair, those other hosts usually cost more money.
📞 WPX Hosting Support Review
Offering quality support is one of WPX Hosting’s strong points, and it’s something that you’ll see a lot of WPX Hosting customers rave about (positively, that is!).
WPX Hosting’s support is available 24/7/365 via two channels:
- Live chat – this is accessible from anywhere in the WPX Hosting dashboard and it’s powered by the LiveChat service, which has a pretty nice user experience. You’ll generally get a response in well under a minute, which is pretty dang fast.
- Ticket – if you prefer this approach, it is an option, but we think live chat support is a better option most of the time.
Notably, WPX Hosting does not offer phone support on any of its plans.
This isn’t that uncommon in the managed WordPress hosting space, so it’s not necessarily a downside. WPX Hosting is also very responsive over live chat, so you can get in touch quickly in urgent situations.
However, it might be something to consider if you’re the type of person who likes to get someone on the phone.
💰 WPX Hosting Pricing Review
Pricing is one area where WPX Hosting really stands out against the competition, especially when you consider its stellar performance.
Basically, WPX Hosting can offer similar performance levels to more expensive hosts, which means that you’re getting a lot of value from your plan.
Another big advantage of WPX Hosting’s pricing is that even the cheapest plan supports multiple sites, which you won’t find at pretty much any other managed WordPress host. This can make it an especially good value if you want to host multiple sites.
Remember, though, that WPX Hosting counts staging sites as “websites” when it comes to billing limits.
WPX Hosting Pricing Plans
Currently, WPX Hosting offers three different plans.
WPX Hosting doesn’t mess around with the promotional bait and switch that you’ll find at a lot of hosts – the price you see is what you’ll pay both now and when you go to renew.
For all of the plans, you can pay monthly or you can pay annually and get two months free.
Here are the prices if you pay monthly:
And here are the prices if you pay annually:
You can also save 50% on your first month with our exclusive WPX Hosting coupon code.
👍👎 WPX Hosting Pros and Cons
To recap what we’ve discussed in our WPX Hosting review, let’s summarize the pros and cons of hosting your WordPress sites with WPX Hosting…
👍 Pros
- Excellent performance thanks to LiteSpeed and the built-in CDN. Plus, the WPX Hosting team can even help optimize your site to further improve its load times.
- Affordable prices (for the performance that it offers), especially when compared to other managed WordPress hosts.
- High website limits for its plans, which is great if you need to host multiple sites – even the entry-level plan supports five websites.
- Excellent support via live chat and ticket, with 30-second average response times for the live chat support.
- No arbitrary visit limits like you’ll find at a lot of other hosts – you’re billed based on the actual bandwidth that your sites consume.
- 28 days of backup storage for its automatic backups, whereas many other similar hosts only store backups for 14 days.
- WPX Hosting still offers free email hosting, which many other managed WordPress hosts don’t offer.
👎 Cons
- The hosting dashboard could do with some improvement, as the interface can be a little unintuitive at points.
- The hosting dashboard could also benefit from more tools to match what other managed WordPress hosts offer.
- WPX Hosting counts staging sites against your billing plan’s “website” limit (but at the same time, WPX Hosting’s website limits are way above average, so this isn’t a big con when compared to other hosts).
- There’s no option for phone support. While we don’t see this as an issue, some people might view it as a con.
❓ WPX Hosting Review 2024 FAQ
As we near the end of our WPX review, let’s run over a few common questions you might have…
What type of hosting is WPX? Is WPX Hosting shared?
WPX Hosting is shared hosting. However, WPX Hosting avoids overloading its shared servers, which is how it’s able to offer much better performance than your average cheap shared host.
Where is WPX Hosting based?
WPX Hosting is based in Sofia, Bulgaria as a business (though the founder is Australian). However, you get multiple options to choose the location of your site’s hosting datacenter – USA, UK, and Australia.
Is WPX Hosting cloud hosting?
Unlike a lot of other WordPress hosts, WPX Hosting opted not to use cloud hosting from providers like AWS and Google Cloud. However, WPX Hosting does offer its own content delivery network with 33+ global endpoints.
🤔 Should You Use WPX Hosting WordPress Hosting in 2024 and Beyond?
Now that we’ve covered everything about WPX Hosting, let’s finish out our WPX Hosting review with some recommendations for when you should use WPX Hosting, along with when a different host might make a better option.
Use WPX Hosting If…
Overall, WPX Hosting makes a great option if you’re looking to host multiple websites and you want solid performance without breaking the bank.
WPX Hosting’s combination of above-average website limits and good performance (for the money) makes it a very good value for people who are hosting somewhere between 2-5 WordPress sites.
Remember, WPX Hosting counts staging sites as websites. So if you want to use a staging site, you can’t fill up your plan with five live websites.
At $25 per month, you’ll pay a fraction of what you’d pay to host multiple sites at hosts like Kinsta and WP Engine. But at the same time, WPX Hosting can still hang with those other hosts when it comes to performance.
If you have more than the five websites that the entry-level plan supports, WPX Hosting’s higher-tier plans are still very affordable when compared to the competition.
If you do want to use WPX Hosting, make sure to use our exclusive WPX Hosting coupon code to get 50% off your first month.
Use Another Host If…
There are a few situations when you might want to consider a different host…
First off – if you only have a single low-traffic WordPress site, you might want to consider a host like Rocket.net or Kinsta instead.
For a single site, these hosts are priced similarly and they offer a much nicer dashboard experience as well as slightly better performance. Check out our reviews:
- Rocket.net hosting review (you can also save with our special Rocket.net coupon code)
- Kinsta hosting review
If you have multiple sites and/or high-traffic sites, these hosts will cost a lot more than WPX Hosting, though.
Visit Kinsta | Visit Rocket.net
If you’re more of a DIY-type person who doesn’t need top-notch support, you might want to consider Cloudways, which is another affordable option to host multiple websites without sacrificing performance. Cloudways might even be cheaper than WPX Hosting, for the same level of performance.
However, Cloudways is a little more complicated and it doesn’t offer anywhere near the same level of support as WPX Hosting. So if you’re not a very technical person, we recommend skipping Cloudways and staying with WPX Hosting.
You can read our full Cloudways review here and save money with our special Cloudways coupon code.
Finally, if you’re on a super tight budget, you might want to consider an even cheaper shared host like GreenGeeks.
While GreenGeeks doesn’t match the quality of WPX Hosting, it is still an adequate product that’s even cheaper than WPX Hosting. Like WPX Hosting, GreenGeeks uses LiteSpeed server on all of its plans and offers better performance than other budget shared hosts.
However, if you can swing WPX Hosting’s price, we’d recommend it over GreenGeeks because WPX Hosting is still a step up in terms of performance.
You can read our full GreenGeeks review here.
Do you still have any questions about WPX Hosting or our WPX Hosting review? Let us know in the comments!
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