WPMU DEV offers hosting plans as part of the Agency plan subscription. This is amazing news for customers, as it’s a free addition to the lost list of features that WPMU DEV already provides for its standard $82.50/m. In this review, I’ll explain the features of the new hosting package, how it compares to existing options, and a brief overview of premium WPMU plans in general.
Sign up for WPMU DEV Hosting
You can sign up and try WPMU DEV hosting free for 30-days. With this, you get unlimited access to all WPMU premium plugins, unlimited site management from a centralized dashboard, site performance tools, and more.
Let’s look at what this means in more detail.
Table of Contents:
Pricing
When you sign up for a WPMU DEV Agency package for $82.50/m, it now comes with in-built $144 credit per month for hosting, and you get $12 in credit every month. This is sufficient to cover a single Bronze hosting package as seen here:
But you can also purchase the Silver package and pay the difference. Or you can host three sites on the “Quantum” hosting plan that’s only available to Agency members.
This gives you tremendous flexibility in your choice of plans. What’s mind-blowing to me, is that this credit is free for existing users. It’s a massive value upgrade, that will completely change the web hosting industry when it comes to VPS-like hosting plans.
Not Ordinary Shared Hosting – VPS Hosting
You can see that each plan has a specific allocation of RAM, CPU, and bandwidth, with a corresponding price. These resources are guaranteed. It’s not like shared hosting where the resources are distributed amongst many customers, and where you suffer if one of them misbehaves.
This is 100% containerized hosting. The resources in each plan belong to you. No one else can use them, and there are no limits to what you can do. WPMU DEV includes an estimated traffic number for each of these plans on its site, but these are just their best guess for how much traffic each plan can handle. They don’t restrict you in any way.
In short, this is just like VPS hosting, even if they don’t call it that. The underlying hardware is DigitalOcean droplets.
How Does the Price Compare to Other Providers?
To compare with other hosting providers, we shouldn’t look at shared hosting prices, since WPMU DEV offers dedicated resources. Let’s instead compare it to the HostGator VPS plan. On their website, Hostgator shows the discounted price for the first billing cycle, but the real price is very different as shown in the screenshot below:
WPMU both delivers more and charges half the cost. It doesn’t help that the HostGator VPS is terrible value for money. Crazy stuff. Reading their product announcement, WPMU says that they rely on DigitaOceans’ infrastructure, which makes sense. I’ve always considered DigitalOcean to be one of the most cost-effective ways of spinning up a VPS. But for WPMU to take the raw service and build this kind of value hosting on top of it, is beyond amazing.
CDN Built-In
If that wasn’t enough, their hosting also includes a CDN baked into the product via StackPath’s network. Normally, a CDN is an additional extra feature you must purchase separately from hosting. The fact that WPMU DEV can provide this free with their hosting plan is a pretty big deal.
StackPath has EDGE servers in 45 different locations around the globe. It annoys me a bit that they have nothing in Africa (yet), but that’s because Africa’s bandwidth costs are famously over the top.
Additional Benefits of Membership for $82.50/m
So far, we’ve just looked at the cost of hosting vis a vis other providers. What I haven’t mentioned yet, is that the subscription beings a host of other benefits that by themselves would be well worth the money. This is what WPMU DEV has been doing for all these years. These benefits include:
- Premium plugins
- Unlimited WordPress site management (even from other hosts)
- 24/7 security, plus clean up
- Marketing tools like e-mails lists, and more
Managing Unlimited Sites with “The Hub”
In the list above, you’ll notice that point No. 2 is about a feature that allows you to manage unlimited websites from a single location. This is called “The Hub” and is one of the great selling points of a WPMU membership.
It’s a centralized location from which you can manage all your WordPress installations – even if those sites are not hosted with WPMU. It’s a bit like WordPress’s own Jetpack-enabled dashboard, but with even more functionality.
For example, every member gets 10GB of free storage, which they can use to back up their WordPress sites regularly. From this Hub, you can scan your sites for security breaches, and evaluate performance metrics.
White Label Reports for Clients
You can also show off all the maintenance you’ve done for your client’s site by generating reports that are “white-label” – meaning that you can put your branding on them. This gives a very professional look and keeps clients updated about what’s happening on their site.
Bottom Line
The recent addition of web hosting to WPMU’s subscription package is a massive power-up for the service. The hosting itself is well worth the subscription fees, which also include full access to premium plugins and the Hub. This move is sure to shake up the web hosting industry. It’s exciting to see where it goes from here!
