WPOven Review – Managed WordPress Hosting

Managed WordPress hosting is in the air, everyone knows the benefits of this wonderful new hosting platform dedicated to WordPress. Few years back, when I first heard about Managed WordPress hosting, there was only a couple of providers but, today Google a single query about Managed WordPress hosting, and you can see over a dozen of providers, who had now already established themselves as the leading providers of Managed hosting for WordPress. One of the new name I just came around, while writing everyone’s guide to Managed WordPress hosting is WPOven.

I was quite impressed by their limitless plans, stuffed with goodness of all the managed WordPress hosting features, and provides a host of unique offerings that comes with affordable price tags, and excellent WordPress support staff, who are always ready to solve issues. It’s a rare combo, which you can’t easily find with the other Managed WordPress host.

On paper, everything seems delightful with WPOven, but I thought how about reviewing their services, and see how a web hosting for WordPress sites, by this India based startup is actually going to perform?

Is it worth the cost or just a yet another WordPress hosting, with bells and whistles to tempt WordPress savvy customers?

Let’s take an in-depth review of WPOven, dive along with me and let’s see how they actually performs.

Quick info about WPOven

WPOven is a relatively very new name in the managed WordPress hosting, founded in 2013, by Vikas Patial and Vikrant Datta. WPOven is a web host for WordPress based websites, based in New Delhi, India and is operated by BaseApp Systems, a startup also based in New Delhi, India.

Disclosure: WPOven has provided me an account, with credits for this review.

About WPOven Managed WordPress Hosting

WPOven provides a VPS backed Premium managed hosting for WordPress sites, you’ll get guaranteed resources since you are allocated with a dedicated VPS, for each plan at WPOven.

Like other Managed WordPress hosting providers, WPoven also offers a completely managed WordPress platform, where you’ll be benefited with the following features

• Automatic WordPress Core updates.
• Built-in server-side caching
• Robust site security
• Daily off-site backup (Amazon S3), with one-click restore
• Site staging
• Daily malware scanning
• Expert WordPress support

Now what’s unique at WPOven?

Along with the typical Managed WordPress hosting components, WPOven has also integrated few of its unique features, which aren’t available with most of the WordPress hosting provider, as of now.

Unmtered Traffic

You might have seen with other top-notch managed WordPress hosting providers, they always limit you with traffic, and charges you extra on each 1,000 extra visits according to your specified plan limit. But, it’s not same with WPoven, they never limit your site traffic, neither they charge you extra for the additional success you had achieved with your site. However, they do suggest estimated traffic for their tiny plan, just to maintain the optimal performance of your site.

Unlimited WordPress installations

Unlike other managed WordPress hosting providers, WPOven never limits you with the number of WordPress installs. You can install as many as WordPress sites, but it’s also not wise to install 25+ WordPress sites on a tiny plan, ain’t it?

Client Manager

WPOven bundles all their plans with an exceptional client manager feature that allows you to managed all your client sites from a single dashboard. If you’re a web agency or even an individual WordPress developer, this white label client manager could be a great solution to ease your work load. With clients manager you can send custom invoice individually, with a fixed or recurring types of payments, and you can add as many as clients you wish, there’s no limit. I’ll write more about this Client manager later in this review.

Turn key recipes

Okay so you heard about one-click site staging and cloning, now how about creating an entire WordPress site within few clicks? Yes, at WPOven you can easily create your own niche site within a click, and you can even create you own recipes, with the available premium themes, and plugins.

Built-in analytics

You’ll get an integrated full-fledged analytics system on your WPOven dashboard. The integrated analytics is very similar to the WordPress Jetpack stats, and it could be a useful feature, if you don’t want use the WordPress Jetpack plugin on any of your site.

WPOven Hosting Plans

At present, WPOven offers 5 different plans, targeting all kinds of WordPress users.

Tiny – $19.95/mo – A decent plan for the starters with all resources, and is suggested to easily handle 25,000 visitors a month. You’ll get a dedicated VPS with 10 GB Storage, 1 TB bandwidth, and 512 MB of RAM.

Micro – $29.95/mo – The micro plan is a preferred plan for grown up WordPress sites, it’s suggested for sites with 50,000 monthly traffic. At $29.95 monthly charge, you will get 1 GB RAM, 20 GB storage and 2 TB monthly transfer limit.

Personal – $39.95/mo – With Personal plan, you’ll get freedom to create unlimited sites, unmetered visits, and the VPS specs include 2 GB RAM, 40 GB SSD storage, 4 TB data bandwidth, plus SSL support.

Professional – $79.95/mo – If you run a high traffic WordPress site, and your monthly hosting budget is below $100, then you should look for this plan, as it comes with 4GB RAM, 80 GB SSD storage, 8 TB data bandwidth, WordPress multisite support, SSL support, and you’ll also get access to the client manager feature.

Business – $149.95/mo – This plan cloud be a perfect choice for tiny web studios, and individual WordPress developers, who creates sites for their respective clients, with client manager billing and managing your client sites will be a breeze. Further it has SSL support, and you can also deploy WordPress multisite under this plan. The VPS specs includes 8GB RAM, 160 GB SSD storage, and 16 TB data bandwidth.

Agency – $299.95/mo – The best solution for running multiple high traffic sites, or if you run a full-fledged web agency, with several small and large clients, then look no other than Agency plan. It comes with 16 GB RAM, 320 GB SSD storage, 32 TB data transfer, WordPress multisite support, SSL support, and a bundled Client manager.

Rest all  the plan at WPOven comes with same set of features running NGINX and Varnish, atop.

WPOven Review – First impression

The dashboard

Once you sign up an account with WPOven, the first time you login to your account, you’ll be presented with this simple dashboard, similar to the WordPress Dashboard, in this area you can see the initial stats of your sites, that includes total no of sites, unique visitors, visits and page hits or page views. The account overview section shows a quick glance of your entire account, such as total no of servers, sites, your recipes, tickets and account credits. The event area logs and displays every single activity within your account, be it sign up, logging in to your account, creating server, setting up server, restarting server, etc. It think it’s a handy feature, to keep an eye on your account.

Creating a server

Before I could do anything in my account, I was always prompted to create my first server at WPOven. Since, I already have $40 credits in my account I wasn’t required to add any funds in to my account. You can define any name to your server, choose the hosting plan according to your budget, I had chosen the Personal plan with my server. WPOven offers you choices of three data-centers to deploy your first server, US (Texas), Europe (UK), and Asia (Japan,) you can select the nearest server location targeted to your audience. I had chosen US region server location for this sever.

Once you choose to create your first server at WPOven, it’ll took nearly 5 minutes to automatically setup that server, for the first use.

Managing the server

You can access to the server insights by using the manage option, it gives you a complete overview of your entire server statistics and usage. The second tab, shows you the backup status of your server, in case if anything goes wrong, you can restore your entire server from this panel. The third, history tab shows all the parameters related to your hosting, for up to 2 weeks, that includes server load, CPU, RAM, storage, and network history.

Under the advanced tab, you can get your sFTP credentials to access your server site files over any secure File transfer software. The last billing tab shows your billing cycle, available credits, and here you can also upgrade your server by adding more credits to your account, and clicking on the Re-subscribe button.

Creating site at WPOven

To create your first WordPress site, you can choose “Sites” option from the left navigational panel. In the first step, fill up the form, and change the language if you want to install WordPress in any other language, since this is a new site, the setup will directly jump to the fourth step, and click on the “Add site” button. Within, a couple of minutes WordPress will be automatically installed on your site, and the site will be ready to access, even if you had not configured your domain yet.

Managing sites

I was impressed by the individual site dashboard at WPOven. At a quick glance, you can not only check all the WordPress related details in fact, the dashboard also displays all the installed plugins, themes, their versions, and also highlights, which of them are active. This efficient dashboard, eliminates the need to login in to your WordPress site, every time when, you require to check any of such details. However, it would be even better, if WPOven could manage to add the functionality to enable or disable plugins/themes, right from this single dashboard.

The second “Statistics” tab displays the entire traffic stats of your individual site. It’s similar to Jetpack’s WordPress Stats, but it shows way much more traffic details in comparison to the Jetpack stats. It displays the total no of visitors in a month (you can see the traffic details for any month by selecting the drop down), traffic sources, visit duration, URLs visited, search terms, a global county wise traffic graph, and lastly a referrer chart.

The third tab is for backups, it lists all the latest backups of your site, for your information, WPOven generates nightly backups for your individual WordPress sites. In case if something goes wrong, you can reverse the un-expected by restoring your site to any previous date with just a single click from this tab. If you want to download the latest copy of your site, then you can click on the Download button at the top of the panel, and it’ll give you the options to download the complete site backup, files backup (WP-content) or just the database, choose accordingly.

Inside the tools tab, you’ll get few quick tools to manage your site, and fix the simple issues, such as a database manager, a clear cache button to flush your site cache. Will be helpful, if you had done minor theme tweaks or any changes in the CSS, lock/unlock file permission, and a button to restart your server services.

The last advanced tab, provides you SFTP credentials to access your site files, and you can also change the current SFTP password using this tab. If you want to delete any of your WordPress site, you can do the same from this tab. Be sure, once a site is deleted then, it can’t be recovered.

Staging your site

I found the site staging feature at WPOven very basic, once you click on the “Stage” button inside the individual site dashboard, it’ll almost instantly (I guess, it depends on the size of files and database of a site) create a staged version of your existing site, where you can freely test any plugin or theme with the clone version of your site.

But unfortunately, as I’ve seen with other Managed WordPress hosting providers such as MediaTemple, you can’t sync the stating site with the live version of your site. So, if you had successfully test or modified anything on your staging site, then you’ve to redo it again on the live version of your site, instead of simply pushing the “sync to live site” button.

Update : WPOven site staging feature is now upgraded with the ability to easily sync your staging site to the live version of your site, all you need to do is to select your stage site and then sync it with your desired live site.

Recipes

One of the most exciting features at WPOven are Recipes, no doubt they are deliciously yummy. Using Recipes, you can create your entire ready to launch WordPress sites with a single click. Initially, WPOven had included several themes from the popular theme houses such as Eleganthemes, Appthemes, Woothemes etc and similarly they had also added few popular plugins such as WordPress SEO by Yoast, Contact Form 7, a video plugin, WooCommerce, Coming soon plugin, post ratings and page navi.

Now with the combination of the above themes and plugins, they had created several ready to install recipe, such as Magazine site, Portfolio site, Blogging site, Video site, e-commerce site, Coming soon Page, One Page Resume site, Ideas site, Directory Listing Site, Coupon Site and Classified Ads site.

Recipes can be greatly helpful for several small web agencies or individual site makers, who can quickly create simple niche sites for their clients with Premium themes, almost instantly, saving time and money, both.

You can clone and edit any of the existing recipes, as well as you can also create your own recipes by adding any of the listed plugins and themes.

The only drawback I found with Recipes is that you can’t include your own or external themes and plugins to create a completely new Recipe, according to your usage and needs.

Client Manager

WPOven has done a great a job with the addition of Client Manager, no matter if you run a small or large web agency or even if you’re a WordPress developer, the client manager would be a boon to your business. You don’t need to maintain several excel files with the list of your clients, their FTP passwords etc. The built-in client manager greatly eases your work, where you can add an unlimited number of clients, maintain their profile for the easy billing.

Once you list all of your clients inside the Client Manager, you can click on the “invite,” button to automatically send an email to their respective email address with login credentials, and a link to your custom login panel, hosted on a desired location on your site.

I had tried to create a bunch of dummy client profiles, along with their respective websites and I can definitely say, it’s a flawless system to manage all your clients. The built-in billing system is neat, comes with simple option to instantly generate the fixed or recurring billing invoices for your individual clients.

You can keep an eye on all the invoice’s status, whether they are due or paid. You can send the invoice to your client, whenever you want, all with a single click.

The client manager is purely white label, you can freely customize it with your own branding, custom invoice, add your own panel logo, URL, name, address, etc. Personalize everything according to your needs to make the entire system appear, neat and professional.

You can can always generate a preview, prior to saving the panel and invoice settings. Here is a sample invoice copy.

I also wanted to test the custom client panel, to use everything from the client’s point of view as well, but since this review has already gone too long, I would like to skip that part for now.

The WPOven Performance Test

Okay so, I had already talked enough about the “oh-so amazing” features that comes with WPOven hosting but, you must have questions about the actual site performance? how is the site load time? how does the built-in caching improves the overall site performance? let’s test them out.

Link to this test

First stock WordPress website speed test, with Varnish on.

Second stock WordPress website speed test, with Varnish on.

Link to the second test

Here is the performance result of the stock WordPress install, on a testing domain, with the default WordPress 2015 theme, integrated caching (Varnish) on, and only two plugins installed, Akismet and WPBase cache.

With the surprising results of the first test, I thought let’s conduct a second test, and the second time results were even better. For your convenience, I had added the link to each of the test results.

Website speed test with Varnish disabled

Link to this test

First stock WordPress website speed test, with Varnish disabled.

Link to this test

Second stock WordPress website speed test, with Varnish disabled.

Now you want to see, what magic does Varnish (built-in cache) does to the WordPress site?

Here I had conducted website speed tests, with Varnished disabled

Both the website speed test results, almost remained same, but did you notice the big difference Varnish adds to your site speed? I am sure, you can’t achieve such performance rich results with any cache plugin, such as W3 Total cache plugin, WP Supercache etc.

Tip : (You can easily disable Varnish with the bundled WPBase cache plugin, inside the WP admin dashboard’s settings menu.)

However, with WPOven’s managed WordPress hosting you are allowed to use any cache plugin of your choice, as they will definitely help you with improving the Pagespeed score of your WordPress site.

Testing site speed with dummy content

Okay the above site speed results were fantastic, but my test site has no content yet? let’s add a lot of dummy content to the test site, thanks to the FakerPress plugin. I had generated 50 fake posts, and 50 pages within under 5 seconds. Did I mentioned, the back-end WP Admin experience is almost snappy?

Link to this test

First speed test with dummy content, 50 posts, 50 pages.

Link to this test

Second speed test with dummy content, 50 posts, 50 pages.

The results of both the test were almost same, pretty impressive for a site with stock WordPress and zero optimization.

Testing site speed with loads of content, heavy database

A WordPress site with 50 posts and 50 pages, I don’t think we can call it a site with lots of content. Therefore, I decided to make the test site content heavy, around 2,000 dummy posts.

With FakerPress, I tried to generate around 500 more dummy posts all in a one go, and guess what? my test site at WPOven, had gone timeout, but it didn’t crashed. When, I did a refresh the plugin has generated nearly 373 dummy posts. I would say, the performance of the server to process this much of content all at once, isn’t bad overall.

Then I further tried to add another 300 more posts, and it processed all of them in a single go in just 5-6 seconds, without any timeout. I repeated the process until, the post count reached till 2000 posts.

I had also installed total 9 plugins, 7 plugins were activated that includes Akismet, Contact Form 7, Disqus Comment System, FakerPress, WordPress SEO by Yoast, WPBase-Cache, and WPtouch Mobile plugin. While 2 of the plugins, Jetpack and WooCommerce remained inactive.

I even went ahead, and changed the front page to show the latest post count from, 10 to 15.

Link to this test

First site speed test with dummy content, 2000 posts, 50 pages and 7 plugins. Database size: 18.95 MB.

Link to this test

Second site speed test with dummy content, 2000 posts, 50 pages and 7 plugins. Database size: 18.95 MB.

I have to say, WPOven has done a pretty commendable job with tuning their servers for speed, you can see how a content heavy WordPress site, still loads fast with 2000+ dummy posts. In the first test, the site loaded in under 1 second, while in the second test it took a bit more time to load, with 1.30s, still not bad since I had done zero site speed optimization and also there’s no CDN configured yet. I you’re going to use WPOven hosting with CDN then, no doubt your site is bound to fly.

Support at WPOven

While, I was reviewing WPOven, I barely had any issues with their entire system, everything was glitch free and even if I got stuck somewhere, then the knowledge base at WPOven is filled with such helpful articles.

However, I’ve got few issues while configuring my domain with my account, and within 10-30 minutes, (sorry, I  couldn’t notice the actual time, since they don’t add time stamps to their tickets) I’ve got a well described reply to my ticket.

Furthermore, I’ve noticed that if you had any trouble while using any thing in their system or fixing something on your own, then they are always keen to do the things on your behalf.

The only thing, that I had missed with the support at WPOven, is the presence of live chat support. Now a days, almost all host provides live chat support, it’s really handy if you need any answer regarding your account, if you’re unable to find something in the knowledge base, then instead of creating a ticket and waiting for the support person to reply your query, it’s better to instantly connect with support agent over a  dedicated live chat system.

Conclusion

I am already using multiple Managed Hosting services from various providers, and I can definitely say that WPOven has managed to keep themselves stand out from the crowd, with their unique offerings, powerful servers with limitless hosting, and needless to say expert support, who acts more like a hosting partner rather of just being a hosting provider.

If you run WordPress based sites, and looking for affordable managed WordPress hosting with no limits, I would recommend you, just give them a try, after all WPOven offers 14 day risk free trial. If you’re un happy with their services, just post a support ticket, get your entire refund, and take your WordPress site, elsewhere.

FAQs related to WPOven WordPress Hosting

What does unlimited WordPress sites means?

With unlimited WordPress sites means, there’s no limit on installing any number of WordPress sites on your sever at WPOven. You can set up as many as WordPress sites with any plan.

However it’s strongly suggested to keep the no of WordPress sites, in accordance to your server capacity.

For instance, it’s fairly okay to install five WordPress sites on any plan but, it’s necessary to keep the site limit low on your server, to maintain the optimum site performance.

Does WPOven charges for extra traffic?

No, WPOven never limits traffic on your site, you’re free to drive, as much as traffic on your site, but be sure that you’re using the right plan.

Do I need any cache plugin with WPOven hosting?

Definitely not, WPOven comes integrated with server-side caching, that doesn’t requires you to install any third-party cache plugin. However, they never stop you with using one.

Each WPOven installation, comes bundled with WPBase plugin, a simple cache plugin, also owned by WPOven.

What is WPBase cache?

WPBase cache is a very basic plugin, that allows you to enable, disable and flushing the server-side caching (Varnish.)

How to migrate my site at WPOven?

WPOven, offers free WordPress site migration for up to 1 sites. If you’ve many sites, then you’ll be charged extra.

Alternatively, if you want, then you can also do the migration task on your own.

Does WPOven support WordPress multisite?

Yes, with Professional, Business and Agency plan.

Wrapping up

Alright, let’s wrap up this review, while I was writing this review I tried my best to keep this review unbiased. However, you might feel that I had over appreciated something, or may be even underestimated some feature at WPOven, but that’s my point of view, and naturally your views could be different.

Feel free to let me know your views on this detailed review article in the comments below.

P.S. If you’re already using WPOven WordPress hosting, or if you had used them in the past and you’re not agree with my views in this article, then please don’t hesitate to add your personal reviews and experience with WPOven hosting, it’ll be highly helpful for the readers.

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