WP Engine Services hosting Benefits and Developer Tools

Onpeaks | WP Engine isn't your typical bare-bones managed hosting provider for WordPress. Instead they are developer-oriented and work hard to provide powerful features and services that you might commonly wish for at WordPress.com or when self-hosting.

In this tutorial, I'll introduce you to the many benefits of hosting your sites at WP Engine and their new automated migration tool that makes getting started with them as simple as it's ever been. Alternately, if you'd like to, you can also watch a recent webinar by WP Engine that covers some of these same issues: Your Workflow, Your Way and/or read their recent white paper (pdf).


I highly recommend the webinar if you want to go into more detail of the concepts I'm reviewing here. Technical Product Manager Taylor McCaslin and Operations Engineer Anthony Burchell do a great (and entertaining) job of explaining the pros, cons and useful scenarios for many of WP Engine's unique and powerful features for developers.

Before we begin, you may want to visit WP Engine to sign up for their service; if at any time in the first 60 days you wish to get a refund, just ask them; satisfaction is guaranteed. They have a helpful pricing calculator to guide you in choosing the best plan for your needs:

Development Environment and Workflow

Vagrant Environment Integration :


Developing your site locally is best practice and to support this, WP Engine is working on a vagrant environment that will allow local testing that can be directly pushed to their production hosting platform. In the meantime, they offer the WP Engine Mercury Vagrant environment, or HGV, which lets you build a site locally and move that site into production without too much disruption—the site will look and behave the same way when moved from local to live.

Mercury Vagrant (HGV) is a Swiss Army knife of sorts. The coolest feature is that you can test HHVM and PHP environments right next to each other. This is great for testing compatibility of plugins and the like with ease. HGV currently has an extremely similar stack to the software stack that WP Engine uses. The main difference is that HGV uses PHP-FPM, whereas the WP Engine stack uses Apache2 and mod_php.

Soon, you'll have a fully compatible vagrant solution for local development with the WP Engine platform.


Test and Share Your Work With Staging Sites


WordPress has always lacked a helpful staging capability. You're often forced to make changes in live production with one hand on the mouse while crossing your fingers with the other.

WP Engine offers built-in staging sites, and they're free. Within your WP Engine account, you can run as many staging sites as you like for no extra cost. A staging site is an independent clone of your live production site that can be easily created to test plugins, themes, and custom code.


Source : WP Engine Offers Discounts