Finding the right web host for a big business website is much more difficult than finding a hosting platform to make a blog or a personal website.
When you’re about to make an app, a large membership website, or a massive magazine or news website like HuffingtonPost, you have to be very careful to pick the right host that can handle the server load and traffic spikes without any hiccups.
Pagely boasts as one of the top choices for managed WordPress hosting, but their hosting comes with pretty expensive pricing plans starting at $299 per month.
Is Pagely really worth the price? In this review, we put the popular hosting platform under the magnifier to see if it truly lives up to its claims.
The New & Improved Pagely
Back in 2009, Pagely launched the company as an affordable managed WordPress hosting platform. The company used to offer hosting plans starting at around $20 per month.
However, with other popular platforms offering managed hosting plans at competitive prices, Pagely couldn’t keep offering the same quality of hosting and compete with the rivals at the same time.
As a result, the company recently made a major shift in its hosting services. Pagely is now targeting big businesses instead of small business websites and blogs. The company now offers more advanced managed WordPress hosting plans with impressive technologies and features at pricing plans starting at $299 a month and ranging up to $20,000 a month.
As you can probably guess from those price tags, Pagely is no longer a hosting platform for the average WordPress user. Some of Pagely’s clients include Disney, VISA, TimeInc, Comcast, and Panasonic.
Pagely now offers managed hosting in 3 categories: WordPress VPS, Enterprise Hosting, and Elite Publisher hosting.
So, what do you get with this $299 a month WordPress hosting service? Let’s find out.
Hosting Fully Powered By Amazon AWS
Pagely hosting is now entirely powered by Amazon Web Services. As an Amazon advanced technology partner, Pagely also gets access to powerful Amazon technologies that gives the platform “near infinite amount of resources”.
This also gives Pagely more freedom to provide better scaling for high-end WordPress apps and service-based businesses.
New Advanced Atomic Dashboard
Pagely also introduced a brand new user interface for hosting account management called Atomic. The latest updated version of the Atomic dashboard is much simpler and beginner-friendly than the previous version.
It’s now easier to find the important functions and features, like PressFormance stats, manage and create new apps and websites, setup DNS and CDN, SSL certificate management, and even submit a support ticket directly from the dashboard.
Reliable Servers With Load Balancers
Thanks to the scalable power of Amazon AWS, Pagely claims to be able to handle any kind of traffic spike you can throw at it. Each Pagely hosting plan offers the same level of flexible and powerful hosting on a scalable stack.
With Pagely Enterprise plans, you also get to choose either to build your website on a single node or on a load balanced pair.
PressDNS & PressCACHE For A Speedy Website
Pagely hosting is fully optimized with a set of in-house WordPress technologies. PressDNS and PressCACHE are two of the special tech that works together to provide better website and app performance.
PressDNS and PressCACHE work as a combination to route requests at the DNS level and to provide better geo-balancing and geo-routing.
PressARMOR & PressFORMANCE To Protect Your Website
Pagely has invested heavily in security to protect their hosting network. PressARMOR is a series of in-house protection systems Pagely has developed to protect their customers. Which includes a web app firewall, DDoS protection, malware scanning, as well as cleaning and restoring infected websites without additional charge.
PressFORMANCE is another set of services that make things easier for you to manage your WordPress website. It includes site performance audits, testing as well as analytics and reports.
Pagely Website Speed Test ( 945s)
It’s difficult to test the hosting platform and put it through a realistic stress test without having a high-traffic website or app hosted on Pagely. But, we wanted to test the performance speeds to find out how fast the servers really are. So, we setup a simple WordPress demo website to do a speed test.
First, we tested the website loading speeds from Europe using the Pingdom Website Speed Test. The website loaded in just 945 milliseconds.
The test from North America scored 1.08 seconds speed.
Pagely Website Load Test (100ms)
We used LoadImpact to do a basic stress test by sending 50 virtual concurrent visitors to our demo website at the same time to see how well the servers can handle the traffic.
The results were a bit questionable. As you can see, the green line represents the server load time and the blue line represents the number of active visitors at the time.
As the server load increased with the number of active visitors, there were quite a few spikes in load times. The average load time was clocked in at around 100ms.
Customer Support Test (9mins)
Fast and responsive customer support is a must for a web hosting company. Pagely claims to offer 24/7 support via its support tickets system. We tested Pagely technical support response times by creating a support ticket and asked help setting up WordPress on a subdomain.
It took less than 9 minutes for a Pagely customer support representative to respond to our support ticket. And they even offered to setup the website for us, which was very convenient.
Limited Live Chat Support
Live chat is the most engaging and effective way of communication available today. When you have an issue with your high-traffic and big brand website, you obviously want to find out what went wrong immediately. Live chat is the way to do it.
Unfortunately, this is where Pagely also fails. The platform’s live customer support is not available 24/7. It’s only available between 8-5PM (PST) and from Friday through Monday. With support tickets taking forever, having limited live chat support is a big disappointment.
When a company charges $299 a month for web hosting, live 24/7 customer support is expected. Although, the company does offer phone support with select hosting plans.
Pricing Plans
Pagely offers managed WordPress hosting in 3 different categories.
- WordPress VPS Hosting: Pricing for this category starts at $299 per month for a single-node server with a shared database and for hosting up to 15 sites. The highest pricing plan offers a 2-node server for hosting 60 sites at $2299 per month.
- Enterprise Hosting: Pricing for this category starts at $2500 a month with a promise of 99.9999% uptime and 211ms average response time.
- Elite Publisher: This pricing plan is for the top publishers, brands, and SaaS startups. Pricing starts at $20,000 a month.
Pagely also has another pricing plan in the works called Serverless hosting, which aims to provide hosting on a serverless AWS stack at a pay-as-you-go pricing system. This plan is currently in Beta.
Is Pagely The Right Choice For You?
At $299 per month, Pagely is definitely not the right choice for building a simple WordPress magazine or a blog. For those of you who are looking to make a new blog or a small website, there are way better and cheap managed WordPress hosting platforms out there.
However, if your goal is to build a massive community website, a high-traffic support forum, or a big corporate news website, then Pagely is worth your consideration.
Since Pagely provides many useful technologies along with fully managed hosting service, you’ll be able to manage your website without having to worry about the technical aspects of server management.
