We first published this guide in August 2024. In November 2026 we rewrote it completely. The earlier version listed seven hosts, rated almost all of them “High” on everything, and told the reader very little they could use to make a decision. This version is shorter on names and longer on what actually separates them.
Every enterprise hosting shortlist looks the same on paper. Each vendor scales, each is secure, each has a CDN and a support team that answers in minutes. A comparison that scores them on those terms ends up with a column of identical ratings, which is exactly what our own 2024 version of this page did. It was not wrong. It was useless, because it compared the things every vendor sells and skipped the things that decide what the next three years cost.
For a large organisation, the platform’s raw performance is rarely the risk. The risk is the contract: how the price moves when traffic grows, who owns the supplier and what they need from it, what is written down about uptime, and how hard it is to leave. Those are the questions a CFO or procurement lead will ask eventually. It is cheaper to ask them before signing.
Our conclusion in 2026: for most mid-sized and growing organisations we now recommend Pressable first. For genuinely enterprise requirements, such as regulated content, newsroom-scale traffic or formal compliance obligations, we recommend WordPress VIP. We no longer recommend WP Engine or Rocket.net. The reasons follow, and so does our conflict of interest.
Our Disclosure
Both platforms we recommend are owned by Automattic. The WP Clan is in the Automattic for Agencies partnership programme and builds on WordPress VIP. Automattic is also the defendant in an antitrust lawsuit brought by WP Engine, which a federal judge allowed to proceed in September 2026, with a jury trial set for October 2027. Nobody paid for this guide, and nobody at Automattic reviewed it. You should still read our recommendation knowing where we stand.
The Comparison That Matters
The table below uses only what each host publishes on its own pricing and plans pages as of November 2026, plus ownership facts from public announcements. Where a host does not publish something, the table says so, because a missing number is itself information.
| Host | Owner | Enterprise entry point | Overage terms, as published | Uptime commitment, as published | Our 2026 view |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress VIP | Automattic | Custom contract | Negotiated in the contract | Set in the contract | Recommended for enterprise |
| Pressable | Automattic | Premium plans from $350/month | $1.20 per 1,000 visits, $1.00 per GB storage | 100% uptime SLA | Recommended first for most organisations |
| WP Engine | Private equity backed (Silver Lake, since 2018) | Enterprise via sales; Business plan $400/month | Not stated; footnote says “overages may apply” | Not stated on the plans page | No longer recommended |
| Rocket.net | Hosting.com group (Oakley Capital backed, since 2025) | Enterprise plans from $649/month | $0.08 per GB bandwidth, $2 per GB disk | Not stated on the pricing page | No longer recommended |
Read across the overage column and the difference is plain. Two suppliers print the price of growth next to the plan. One prints a bandwidth rate while advertising visitors as “Unmetered”. One leaves the number out entirely and refers the buyer to checkout.
WordPress VIP: When the Requirement Is Genuinely Enterprise
WordPress VIP is the right answer when the organisation’s requirements go beyond hosting: security review on every code deployment, compliance obligations, editorial workflows across many brands, and traffic events where a minute of downtime is a board-level incident. Forrester’s 2025 Wave for content management systems credited VIP with “superior content compliance capabilities, including FedRAMP certification”, which matters to any buyer with public sector or regulated work.
The evidence we find most persuasive is customers publishing their own numbers. ADWEEK reported 100% uptime through the Super Bowl LIX broadcast in February 2025, an 82% year-on-year rise in pageviews, and, in the words of its Director of Project Management, “zero 500 errors”. Recurrent Ventures migrated seven brands in eight months. We read those three cases in detail in Enterprise WordPress at Scale: Three Publishers, Three Metrics.
The trade-off is cost and discipline. VIP is priced by contract, and its code review process slows teams that are used to editing a live server. For an organisation that needs that discipline, it is the point. For one that does not, it is overhead.
Pressable: Enterprise Behaviour Without the Enterprise Contract
Most organisations that ask us about “enterprise hosting” do not need VIP. They need a supplier that behaves like an enterprise supplier: predictable pricing, written commitments, and service that holds up under load. That is what Pressable does well.
- Published overage pricing. $1.20 per 1,000 visits and $1.00 per GB of storage, stated on the pricing page so finance can model growth before signing.
- Written commitments. A 100% uptime SLA, hourly database backups alongside daily full backups, staging and sandbox sites in every plan, and free migrations.
- Security included. Jetpack Security on the Signature plans and a Jetpack Complete licence on Premium plans, rather than sold as an add-on.
- Independent results. Review Signal’s 2026 benchmarks placed Pressable in the Top Tier in every tier it entered, including the $500-plus enterprise tier and WooCommerce, according to Pressable’s summary of the results published in June 2026.
Pressable is not unlimited, and it is not VIP. It does not run VIP’s mandatory code review, and a site with heavy compliance obligations will outgrow it. For a growing organisation that wants to stop being surprised by its hosting invoice, it is the best balance we have found.
Why WP Engine and Rocket.net Left Our List
WP Engine still runs capable infrastructure. Our objection is commercial. Its plans are sized by visits that the page itself calls “estimates only”, and the price of exceeding them is not published. For an organisation whose marketing team is paid to increase traffic, that leaves the most important line in the contract unwritten. The 2024 dispute with Automattic, in which WP Engine customers briefly lost normal access to WordPress.org updates until a court restored it, showed how exposed a customer can be when their supplier is in a fight. We set out the full reasoning in our account of why we kept migrating hosts.
Rocket.net earned its reputation for speed. In August 2025 it was taken over by Hosting.com, and its own announcement described the sale as “a strategic partnership”. A supplier that holds production sites should describe a change of ownership plainly, because ownership decides pricing and priorities from then on. Its pricing page advertises “Unmetered” visitors while every plan carries a bandwidth cap with a published overage rate. Each element is defensible on its own. Together they describe a supplier whose headline and invoice are telling different stories.
Kinsta, Pantheon, Pagely and Pressidium are serious platforms that appeared in the earlier version of this guide. We have removed them from the ranking because we have not run enough recent client work on them to stand behind a verdict, and a guide like this should not rank what its authors have not lived with.
Five Questions to Put in Writing Before You Sign
Whichever host makes the shortlist, these are the questions we put to every supplier on a client’s behalf. A good supplier answers them quickly and in writing. A slow or vague answer to any of them is worth more than a benchmark chart, because it shows you how the relationship will feel on the day something goes wrong.
- What is the overage price, and what counts as a visit? Ask whether bots, monitors and preview links are counted.
- What does the SLA pay when it is missed? An uptime promise is only as useful as the credit attached to it.
- Who owns the supplier, and what happens if that changes? Ask for notice and exit terms on a change of control.
- How do we leave? Export format, backup access, DNS handover and the notice period, in writing.
- Where does the site run? Data centre location affects speed for your audience and your data protection obligations.
What We Would Do in Your Position
Start from the requirement, not the vendor. If you have compliance obligations, many brands on one platform, or traffic events your board watches live, scope WordPress VIP. If you need dependable, predictably priced hosting for a serious site, start with Pressable. If you are on WP Engine or Rocket.net today, there is no need to rush: take the last twelve months of invoices, separate the plan price from everything billed on top, and make the next renewal a decision rather than a formality.
If you would like a second opinion on a hosting contract or a VIP scoping exercise, talk to us. We will tell you when the cheaper option is the right one.
Last modified: November 4, 2026
