We first published this post in June 2022, under a headline about a syntax error and a team that kept migrating. We updated it in 2025 with a list of alternatives that put Rocket.net at the top. In November 2026 we have rewritten it from scratch, because four years of moving sites between hosts taught us something the earlier versions did not say plainly enough.
A hosting contract looks like an infrastructure decision. For the organisation paying for it, it is closer to a supplier relationship with an unusually large amount of leverage on one side. The host holds the site, the backups, the DNS habits of the team, and the institutional memory of how everything is wired. Leaving costs money, time and risk. A host knows that, and how it behaves once it knows that is the only thing worth evaluating.
That is the lens for this rewrite. Not which host is fastest on a benchmark this quarter, because they all publish a benchmark where they win. The question we now ask on behalf of every client is simpler: when this supplier has a choice between what is good for the customer and what is good for the next renewal, which one does it pick, and how openly does it tell you?
By that measure, two hosts we used and recommended in earlier versions of this post no longer make our list. One we now recommend first. We will be specific about why, and we will be equally specific about our own interest in the answer, because a post praising a host is worthless if it hides who benefits.
Our Disclosure Comes First
Pressable is owned by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and WooCommerce. The WP Clan is in the Automattic for Agencies partnership programme, and we build on WordPress VIP, which is also Automattic. Automattic is the defendant in the lawsuit WP Engine filed in 2024, which we discuss below. Nobody paid for this post and nobody at Automattic reviewed it, but a reader deciding where to put a company website should know all of that before reading a word of praise from us.
WP Engine: A Pricing Page That Leaves the Important Number Out
WP Engine was the default answer to “where should a serious WordPress site live” for most of the last decade, and its engineering was rarely the problem. The problem is commercial. Since Silver Lake invested $250 million in the company in 2018, the business has behaved like what it is: a private equity portfolio company that has to grow revenue per customer every year.
You can see it on the public plans page today. Plans are sized by monthly visits, the page describes those visit numbers as “estimates only”, and the cost of going over them is not printed anywhere on the page. The only mention is a footnote: “Taxes and overages may apply during checkout.” For a buyer, that is the single most important number in the contract, because traffic is the one variable a marketing team is paid to increase. A supplier that publishes the price of the plan and withholds the price of success is telling you where it expects to make its margin.
Then came September 2024. At WordCamp US, Matt Mullenweg called WP Engine “a cancer to WordPress” and claimed, among other things, that it disables WordPress’s revision history by default, the feature that lets an editor roll back a bad change. WP Engine answered with a lawsuit. Automattic blocked WP Engine from WordPress.org resources, and for a period WP Engine customers could not update plugins the normal way. A federal court ordered that access restored in December 2024, and on 24 September 2026 the judge revived WP Engine’s antitrust claims against Automattic. A jury trial is scheduled for October 2027.
We are not going to pretend Automattic’s conduct in that fight was flawless; a court has found WP Engine’s claims serious enough to go to trial, and readers should weigh that. But the dispute is not why we stopped recommending WP Engine. We stopped because, through all of it, the customer’s position never changed: the site owner was the asset being fought over, and the pricing model still treated growth in their traffic as an opportunity to bill. That is a commercial choice WP Engine makes every day, independent of any lawsuit.
Rocket.net: Fast, Then Sold, and Called Something Else
Our 2025 version of this post led with Rocket.net and its Cloudflare Enterprise integration. The speed claim was fair. What we got wrong was treating speed as the deciding factor for a supplier relationship.
In August 2025 Rocket.net was taken over by Hosting.com, a group backed by the private equity firm Oakley Capital. Deal trackers record it as an acquisition. Rocket.net’s own announcement, dated 26 August 2025, never uses that word. It is headlined “Rocket.net Joins hosting.com” and describes “a strategic partnership”. The founder became Hosting.com’s chief product officer, and Hosting.com’s own managed WordPress product is now powered by Rocket.net’s platform.
Ownership changes happen, and a new owner can be good for customers. What concerns us is the language. When the company that holds your production site changes hands, the customer deserves to be told that plainly, because it changes who sets the prices, the support priorities and the roadmap from then on. Calling a sale a partnership is a choice about what customers should understand, and it is not the choice we would want from a supplier.
The pricing page tells a similar story in smaller print. Visitors are listed as “Unmetered”, which reads as generous, while bandwidth carries a cap on every plan and the FAQ bills overage at $0.08 per GB, with disk at $2 per GB. Every plan opens at a $1 first month. None of that is hidden, exactly, but the headline promise and the billing mechanism point in different directions, and a buyer with a traffic spike finds out which one is real on the invoice.
Why Pressable Is Now Our First Recommendation
Pressable is not new, and it has been part of Automattic for years. What is new is that it now answers the question we care about better than anyone else in its price range. Four things decided it for us.
The overage price is on the pricing page. Pressable also sizes plans by visits, so it is not a host without limits. The difference is that the cost of exceeding them is printed next to the plans: $1.20 per 1,000 visits and $1.00 per GB of storage. A finance team can model that in a spreadsheet before signing. That sounds like a small thing. Compared with a footnote that says overages “may apply”, it is the difference between a supplier that expects you to plan and one that expects you not to.
The commitments are written down. The plan comparison lists a 100% uptime SLA, hourly database backups alongside daily full backups, staging and sandbox sites in every plan, free migrations, and Jetpack Security included rather than sold as an add-on. Pressable states an average first support response of about four minutes. Those are claims a buyer can hold a supplier to, which is the point of writing them down.
Independent testing backs the marketing. Review Signal’s 2026 WordPress hosting benchmarks placed Pressable in the Top Tier in every price tier it entered, from under $25 a month to the $500-plus enterprise tier and WooCommerce. Pressable published the summary on 29 June 2026; the underlying data sits on Review Signal’s own site. Kevin Ohashi, who runs the benchmarks, put the significance carefully: “It often takes a pretty high degree of confidence in your product to compete in as many tiers as possible.” We would add that entering every tier also means there is nowhere to hide a weak plan.
The incentives line up with the customer’s. This is the part where our disclosure matters, so we will be careful. Automattic makes money when WordPress grows as a platform; a host it owns has less reason to squeeze each site and more reason to keep the customer inside the WordPress ecosystem happy. That alignment is not charity, and it does not make Automattic a neutral actor. It does make Pressable’s commercial interest and the site owner’s interest point in the same direction more often than they do at a host whose owner needs revenue per customer to rise every year.
What We Would Still Check Before Moving
Recommending a host first does not mean recommending it blindly. Before we move any organisation’s site, these are the questions we put to Pressable, or to any host, in writing:
- What exactly counts as a visit? Bots, uptime monitors and preview links all inflate visit counts. Get the definition before the first invoice, not after.
- What does the SLA pay out? A 100% uptime SLA is a promise about credits, not about physics. Read what you receive when it is missed.
- How do we leave? Ask for the export process, backup access and DNS handover steps before you sign. A supplier confident in its service answers this happily.
- Where does the site physically run? For European or Turkish audiences, data centre location affects both speed and data protection obligations.
- Who answers at 2 a.m.? Average response times are useful. What matters is the response on the night a campaign launch breaks checkout.
Pressable answers these well for most mid-sized organisations we work with. For a site with regulated data, a newsroom-scale traffic pattern or a board that needs FedRAMP-style compliance, the right answer moves up a level to WordPress VIP, and we cover that decision in our guide to enterprise WordPress hosting.
What This Means If You Are on WP Engine or Rocket.net Today
There is no emergency. Both hosts keep sites online, and a rushed migration creates more risk than a renewal you are unhappy with. The sensible move is to treat your next renewal date as a decision point rather than a formality.
Pull the last twelve months of invoices and separate the plan price from everything billed on top of it. If the extras are material, or if nobody on your side can explain how they were calculated, that is the conversation to have before you sign again. Ask your current host to put its overage pricing in writing. How it responds will tell you more than any benchmark.
The original version of this post ended by asking readers to share their migration stories. Four years and several migrations later, our own story is short. We stopped choosing hosts by speed and started choosing them by how they behave when the customer has less leverage than they do. If you would like a second opinion on your hosting contract before the next renewal, talk to us. We will tell you if staying put is the right answer.
Last modified: November 4, 2026
