I am looking for the best server to host our WordPress website. The website is a blog website which publishes articles each day. It is a multilingual website(8+ Languages) that uses WPML for the multilingual functionality, and it has more than 23000 posts in total. Also, we are publishing at least 20–30 articles a day, and we have 150–300k monthly traffic. We are also using some plugins to implement custom ads, SEO, cache, and security. We also have multiple authors and users who are working together at the same time (publishing, translation, feature implementation, and all). Based on the ranking of our posts and articles, the traffic will vary.
Currently, the website is hosted on the WP Engine, and they have a limit on the autoload data, which is 800 kb. Our autoload data is almost around 1.5–2 MB, and the data is mostly from the WPML side. The WP Engine has a known issue regarding its autoload limit. If the autoload data is higher than the WP Engine limit, the performance of the website will decrease. Currently, we are facing the same issue on our website. Due to the large database and its data, we are experiencing very slow loading on our WordPress dashboard, and publishing a post is taking more than 12 seconds. Sometimes updating or publishing a post fails due to 504, and 502 server errors. So translating or publishing a post takes too much time. In the future, We are also planning to add more languages, users, and articles. This plan will lead to an issue in the future on WP Engine, which is why we are looking for a good server that can handle the website very smoothly.
The website itself has a total size of 22GB (including files and databases). Also, we have two other websites (staging and development to check and test new features), that have the same size. So we are using a total of 90-100 GB in total for all the websites. We have a daily backup option in WP Engine, and it is not counted on that 100 GB because the backup files are stored on a different server of WP Engine free of cost. In WP Engine, they say they have a platform to block attacks and malicious activities on the website and server, and till now we have not faced any issues based on security. We haven't faced any downtime but we are experiencing too much slowness on the admin side and the requests are getting terminated. We are already paying a lot of money to WP Engine each month (appx 3K $ per month) and we are not happy with the performance. We didn't face any kind of downtime or security threats till now on WP Engine. However, we are not happy with the performance. Also, they(WP Engine) are forcing us to upgrade the server which costs more than 5K $ each month. If we are getting that much performance and visitors, we may go with the upgrade but the current performance is very slow and we only have 150-200k visitors each month as per GA. They are saying the current plan can handle 3 Million visitors and any kind of WordPress website without any issues and high performance, but we are not getting that. if we will go with the upgrade, I think they will do the same thing on there also and force us to upgrade to the next plan. I think this is a marketing strategy of putting slowness on the server and asking us to upgrade if you need more performance.
I would be grateful if anyone could share some suggestions regarding the best hosting and what we do next, like migrating to a VPS/Dedicate or upgrading to the next level on WP Engine.
Thanks in advance!
