WPX Hosting Review: They’re Not The Fastest WordPress Host (Shared Hosting With Outages And No Redundancy System)

It’s hard to mention WPX without dropping Matthew Woodward (kills me to even link to this).

What I’m asking you to do is push the “fastest WordPress hosting” marketing gimmick aside (because that’s all it is). He now ranks SiteGround, A2, and Bluehost in the top 6 spots. Almost all his top picks are shared hosting (including WPX) with generous affiliate commissions. There’s no mention of Rocket.net, RunCloud, GridPane, and other hosts who would crush anyone in the list. He also uses a CDN on some hosts (i.e. WPX), but not others. Anyone whose been in the industry long enough knows the tests were designed for monetary purposes with bogus results. Funny thing is, WPX/Matthew call his tests “independent,”  but they’re clearly anything but that.

So let’s talk about what WPX really is.

At the end of the day, it’s still shared hosting with 3 data centers. They don’t clearly list limits (CPU/RAM, inodes, email, unlimited bandwidth) which can lead to misunderstandings and even account termination as shown in their TOS. When WPX had a worldwide outage in 2011, their response was threatening to sue their partner (Steadfast) and expecting a letter from the dead CEO when it was WPX who had no redundancy system in place – not even for their own website.

This is why I don’t recommend WPX anymore.

They do have their strengths: LiteSpeed servers, free XDN, site speed optimization, malware removal, and support is arguably one of the best especially for shared hosting. While a lot of people are happy with them, they need to be more transparent, reliable, as well as professional.

 

1. It’s Still Shared Hosting

Maybe they meant the fastest shared hosting?

I have no doubt they’re one of the fastest shared hosts (above SiteGround, Bluehost, etc). But what actually makes them faster? LiteSpeed, or better hardware? The only “specs” I found are high-spec SSD servers with underloaded servers and LiteSpeed. I don’t understand why they don’t have a table listing all the specs/features of each plan like almost every other host does.

 

2. No Clear Limits On CPU Resources, Inodes, Email, Bandwidth

Most hosts set clear limits on all of these. Even if it means digging through their TOS and policy pages, numbers should be found somewhere.

When I went through WPX’s TOS, all I saw was how they can terminate your account without a refund if you exceed CPU resources (at their discretion). No mention of inode/email limits and you’re left clueless on how much CPU/RAM each plan has.

Their “unlimited bandwidth” on higher plans don’t have numbers. Instead, they have a “reasonable use” limit at WPX’s discretion.

So I went ahead and checked TrustPilot and sure enough, there are reviews about exceeding these non-existent limits. But what surprised me most is the response of WPX’s CEO who blamed the customer when not even the TOS has clear numbers. Make your own judgment.

 

3. No Redis Or Memcached

WPX doesn’t support object caching (Redis/Memcached).

This is a huge disadvantage since it speeds up your site while reducing server load (and is especially good for WooCommerce/dynamic sites). Which means if you installed LiteSpeed Cache with their hosting, you can’t pass the object cache connection test. Normally, you would enable Redis or Memcached in your hosting account, then use LiteSpeed Cache to integrate it.

 

4. Response To Worldwide Outage Was Horrendous

On 8/2/2021, WPX had a major outage (Worldwide, not just Chicago) due to not having a redundancy system, which means there’s a single point of failure. WPX said adding one was too expensive. Thousands of customer websites (including their own) were down for about 5 hours.

How did they respond?

See the Facebook thread here (WPX’s crisis management = 0/5 stars).

The only response during the outage was it would be resolved shortly. Hours went by with no communication, then WPX denied all responsibility and threatened to sue Steadfast’s CEO who died just months earlier, even though Steadfast provided services for BigScoots who had little to 0 downtime because they did have a redundancy system. There was no confirmation WPX would add a redundancy system in the future, no compensation I’m aware of, and it’s unclear whether they have one in place to this date. Their official response also blames it on Steadfast.

WPX doesn’t have a network status page either, so it’s pretty much impossible to track uptimes across all WPX’s servers, but you can find many individual reports of their frequent downtimes.

 

5. Only 3 Data Centers (Chicago, London, Sydney)

If your visitors aren’t geographically relatively close to these locations, you’ll probably experience latency. While CDNs (and XDN) help, this isn’t a replacement for a close origin server.

Chicago, IL (USA)

London (England)

Sydney (Australia)

 

6. Be Careful With WooCommerce/Dynamic sites

I never recommend running WooCommerce on shared hosting because they demand more resources.

I’m not saying it’s impossible with WPX (it looks like they have quite a few WooCommerce customers), I’m just saying I don’t think it’s a good idea. Especially since WPX doesn’t have anything higher than their Elite plan which can still result in 5xx errors if you’re not careful about bandwidth usage. XDN also can’t cache dynamic elements, so that won’t help much.

 

7. LiteSpeed Cache vs. W3 Total Cache

WPX uses LiteSpeed servers, nice!

So why do they recommend W3 Total Cache when LiteSpeed Cache is better? WPX says it has “the best performance with our pre-configured settings and our server’s configuration.” Fair enough, but you’re still missing out on a ton of optimizations that can improve core web vitals.

You can use plugins like WP-Optimize, Flying Scripts, Heartbeat Control, and an image optimization plugin like ShortPixel to do these, but that would be a lot of plugins to install. I have extensive tutorials for both the W3 Total Cache settings and LiteSpeed Cache settings.

	W3 Total Cache	LiteSpeed Cache
Delay JavaScript	x	✓
Critical CSS	x	via QUIC
Remove unused CSS	x	via QUIC
Load CSS asynchronously	Pro	✓
Preload links	x	✓
Preload images	x	✓
Lazy load videos	x	✓
Lazy load Google Maps	Pro	✓
Lazy load HTML selectors	x	✓
Host third-party code locally	x	✓
First time visit optimization	x	Guest Mode
ESI (edge side includes)	x	✓
Database cleanup	x	✓
Gravatar cache	x	✓
Heartbeat control	x	✓
DNS prefetch	x	✓
Image compression	Pro	via QUIC
WebP	Pro	via QUIC
Add missing image dimensions	x	✓
Low quality image placeholder	x	via QUIC
Price	Freemium (Pro: $99/year)	Free

 

8. XDN vs. QUIC.cloud

XDN was the secret weapon that helped win speed tests done by Kevin Ohashi and Matthew Woodward (so does that mean they will be testing with Cloudflare Enterprise on other hosts)?

XDN is free, has 34 PoPs, and caches static and dynamic/HTML resources.

QUIC.cloud CDN has a free and standard plan. While their free plan only uses 6 PoPs, the standard plan uses 70 PoPs with DDoS protection. Both the free and standard plan include HTML caching and page/image optimizations like critical CSS, unique CSS, and LQIP. Which makes the paid (standard) plan much more robust than XDN both in terms of speed/security.

But of course, feel free to test them out yourself.

 

9. Day To Day Support Is Still Good

While support is usually something you have to experience, WPX has one of the best support teams which is reflected in their TrustPilot reviews.

You can reach someone in 30s via live chat or open a ticket. They have a fix for you guarantee that says if you run into a technical issue affecting normal operations of your site, they will fix it free. Their Live Chat profile has a 99% satisfaction rate, 41,000+ ratings, and 25s response time.

 

10. Free Site Speed Optimization

WPX comes with 1 free site speed optimization, then $139 after that.

On the surface, it looks like a good deal considering you get the following optimizations, although WPX says there is usually a backlog for several days. I’ve never used it so feel free to share your experience in the comments if you have. Although if you use my W3 Total Cache or LSC tutorial, you may not need to do this. Who knows, maybe they have some special tweaks.

 

11. WPX Dashboard

WPX uses their own custom dashboard.

It’s easy to use especially for basic things like email, backups, SSL, staging, and FTP. But some people think it’s oversimplified and lacks features. Beginners shouldn’t have any problem navigating the dashboard, but some advanced users may find they don’t have as much control.

Staging usually works fine, but there have been a few error reports in Facebook groups. They only let you create 1 copy, in which case you would need to use something like the WP Staging.

 

12. Pricing + Bandwidth Calculator

You can get 2 months free if you sign up for 1 year.

Most hosts make you sign up for 1-3 years with a cheap intro price, then renews and gets about 2.5x more expensive. It’s nice WPX has flexible monthly pricing if you want to try them. Each plan also comes with free site speed optimization.

WPX Plan	Websites	Storage	Bandwidth	Monthly	Yearly
Business	Up to 5	10GB	100GB	$24.99/mo	$20.83/mo
Professional	Up to 15	20GB	200GB	$49.99/mo	$41.58/mo
Elite	Up to 35	40GB	“Unlimited”	$99.00/mo	$83.25/mo

 
To learn which plan is best for you, use their bandwidth calculator. Enter your website’s average page size, monthly visitors, and average page views. WPX will recommend the best plan for you.

 

13. WPX Alternatives

Rocket.net and Cloudways Vultr HF are similarly priced and faster than WPX.

Both are cloud hosting with NVMe storage and Redis. Both also have Cloudflare Enterprise which can make a big improvement to TTFB between Cloudflare’s large network of 270+ PoPs, Argo Smart Routing (specifically good for dynamic sites), and other optimizations. Rocket.net is faster than Cloudways (and who I use) but storage/bandwidth are lower. It really depends on your budget and whether you’re willing to pay for the absolute fastest load times. Rocket.net also has a perfect TrustPilot rating and no PHP worker limits with even better support than WPX.

	WPX	Cloudways Vultr HF	Rocket.net
Hosting type	Shared	Cloud	Private cloud
CPU/RAM	Not listed	1 cores + 1GB RAM	32 cores + 128GB RAM
Storage	SATA	NVMe	NVMe
Storage (GB)	15	32	10
Object cache	x	Redis Pro	Redis
Server	LiteSpeed	Apache	Apache + Nginx
PHP processing	FastCGI	PHP-FPM	LiteSpeed
Limits on bandwidth (or monthly visits)	200GB	1TB	50GB + 250k visits/mo
CDN	QUIC.cloud or XDN	Cloudflare Enterprise	Cloudflare Enterprise
CDN PoPs	73	270	270
Full page caching	✓	Coming soon	✓
HTTP/3	✓	✓	✓
WAF	✓	✓	✓
Argo smart routing	x	✓	✓
Load balancing	x	✓	✓
Image optimization	✓	✓	✓
Compression	Brotli	GZIP	Brotli
CDN price	$.01 – $.04/GB	$5/mo	Free
CPU limits	At their discretion	Average	None
Cache plugin	LSC or W3TC	Breeze	x
Email hosting	Limited	x	x
Major incidents	Worldwide outage	None	None
Free migration	5-35 sites free	1 free	Unlimited free
Renewals	Monthly	Monthly	Monthly
TrustPilot rating	4.9/5	4.6/5	4.9/5
Monthly price	$20.83	$18 (with Cloudflare Enterprise)	$25
Specs	View specs	View specs	View specs

 

Cheers,
Tom