When looking at website performance, it is important to have a solid foundation. With your web site, that foundation is your web host. Thus it should be no surprise that we recommend having a solid web host if you want a fast site, but which one to choose? We’ve covered several hosts elsewhere, but in this article we’re going to look at Rapyd Cloud and see how it compares to one of the most popular hosts, WP Engine. WPE is our current top recommendation, and where we’ve hosted this site for 8+ years.
I first tried Rapyd when they were using the V1 dashboard, but more recently was able to give things a more thorough test drive on their V2 dashboard, which is a very nice improvement. The three most important things I look at are Performance, Support, and Reliability, so let’s start there. I’ll share my experience with their dashboard and other areas after we’ve covered the most important bits.
Performance
Rapyd Cloud was founded in January 2024, with a focus on hosting for BuddyBoss sites, which tend to be very dynamic. New content is being posted frequently, and most users are logged in, such that you can’t take as much advantage of page caching like you would with most web sites. With that as their starting point, I cloned several sites over to Rapyd to see how they performed.
Now, most hosts can use page caching, server-based or plugin-based, to appear speedy to your visitors. That works great, so long as you don’t have a lot of logged-in visitors. So to really compare raw horsepower, I installed Query Monitor to see how long it was taking to generate pages on our live site at WP Engine vs. the site cloned at Rapyd. Keep in mind, this is while logged in as an admin user, so there’s about as much overhead as you can get.
On the live site, Query Monitor reports anywhere from 700ms to just over a second, depending on the page. The clone site’s fastest time was around 300ms and topped out just short of a second. So that’s it, right? WPE sucks eggs and we should move right now! No, not really, keep in mind our live site is getting hundreds of thousands of hits every month, and thousands of sites doing update checks for our plugins also. I tested our site on a fresh WP Engine server with no load, and it was within 100ms, which gives Rapyd only a slight edge. At any rate, we’ll give Rapyd a 10/10 on performance, and WP Engine a 9.9.
Support
When I first tested Rapyd, it was using their V1 dashboard, which had some oddities, but the V2 dashboard is much better. Well… most of the time. One of the things that came along with V2 was the ability to host multiple sites on a single subscription, and I suspect they wanted to get that out the door ASAP. So it shipped with some rough edges, most of which have been fixed, and a couple remaining glitches are being worked on still. Nothing major, and I do wonder if some of the glitches were related to my account being setup to cancel at period end.
I never asked that, and I don’t know if I would have gotten an answer. See, they have nice chat support, once you get past the requisite AI chat bot. But when something is fixed, it is sometimes difficult to find out how/why. On the good side are a couple examples. First, we needed the PHP SOAP extension for one of our plugins to operate. It took a few hours, but their engineers dug in and got it installed for us. I was honestly surprised it didn’t take days, but they were willing to be flexible and that’s worth a lot.
Another example was on a separate testing site I setup, the theme importer kept throwing a 500 error. I reported it to support, and after looking at the PHP error logs, I thought it was a bug in the import plugin. I figured they would tell me to go talk to the plugin developer, but lo and behold, there was a system configuration issue with PHP sessions. They fixed that, and then it worked like a charm! On the one hand, that stinks to have a configuration error out of the box, but kudos to them for tracking it down and fixing it.
On the flip side, in one case there was an alert about a malware file that had been cleaned on my dashboard. Shockingly, it was on all 3 of my sites! When I first asked about it, they simply assured me my site was clean and not to worry about it. When I came back to it a week or two later, I had to push for quite a bit to find out that it was actually a known problem with the V2 dashboard and there hadn’t been any malware at all.
I mentioned before that I tested both Rapyd dashboards, and these were at two separate times. Unfortunately, my subscription lapsed (remember it was set to cancel), and my test site was removed. When we got things up and running, it had been nearly two weeks, and I asked if there was any possibility that they could restore my previous testing site. I didn’t expect much, but they pulled it off, and got the site fully restored from an archived backup!
From what I’ve seen, I believe they would resolve any issue that came up, and their support really is quite good. But they need to do a better job communicating when they are working on things, and if you’re at all like me, on explaining what was wrong and how it has been fixed. I’d give them a 8/10 on the Support front. Perfect support doesn’t exist, but in my experience WP Engine has them beat on with a 9/10.
Reliability
I’ll break this one down into three categories: uptime, security, and backups. Admittedly I only used their service for a little over 3 months, and I didn’t actively monitor it, but I never had any issues with downtime. My site was always working, and their monitoring page shows zero outages over the last 3 months. We’ll give that a 10/10 on uptime.
On some web hosts, you get security that is, well, worth what you pay for it, nothing. I won’t name names, but shared hosts have gotten bad about bundling free versions of security scanners and firewalls so that they can upsell you and make some commission on it. One that Rapyd includes is Monarx, and if you do a little reading, you’ll find similar stories with that. I can’t say whether Monarx is good or not, because I have no malware on any of my sites, but the fact Rapyd includes the full version is a bonus. There’s no upsell, you get the full deal right out of the box.
If that’s not enough, Rapyd has a WAF add-on for $4/month which gives you top-notch protection with Patchstack. Patchstack has become one of the biggest names in security for WordPress, and they go out of their way to help plugin and theme developers triage security vulnerabilities, for free. While Monarx can clean up a mess, Patchstack makes it nearly impossible for a hacker to ever get through.
I tested out the backups feature a couple times, and it worked flawlessly. I was a little nervous at first as they offer limited backup space. However, their backup system is incremental, so each fresh backup only stores changes from the backup before, and so the included backup space stretches pretty well. One can also take backups on demand, which is essential in my book. I do wish they didn’t have a limit here though, as that’s one reason we’re sticking with WPE. We may never need more space, but I don’t want to have to think about that.
On reliability then, I give them a solid 8.5/10, subtracting for limited backup space, charging extra for a WAF, and the false alert about malware on the dashboard. Hopefully they fix the latter soon, and then I’d give it a 9.
More or Less?
These are in no particular order, just a few more notes that I made as I kicked the tires a bit. One of the things I appreciate with both Rapyd and WPE is the ability to use server-based cron. They make this optional, so if you want to stick with the default wp_cron that is activated only when folks visit your site, you can do that. I prefer the server-based style, and it’s great that you can enable it with one click.
I use WP Engine’s Git Push to roll out updates for our site, and I love that it has built-in sanity checks to help catch some coding issues. Naturally, it can’t catch everything, but it’s nice to have some double-checks. With both hosts, I can use SSH, but WP routes everything through an SSH Gateway, which has some quirks. For example, it’s impossible to run a long job with WP-CLI, because your session will time out. At any rate, I can login via SSH to use Git to deploy updates on Rapyd, but there are no extra checks, it just pulls down the code, and off you go.
On small touch I appreciate (no idea if WPE does this or not), is that Rapyd disables the 2 default plugins that come with every WordPress installation. Won’t name names again, but if you’ve installed WordPress recently, you know who I’m talking about! Another nice ability with Rapyd is that you can modify some PHP variables right from the dashboard. Naturally, you could also break your site this way, but it’s handy for those who know what they are doing.
Unfortunately, that also points out a weakness in the Rapyd dashboard, which is that some things are not easy to find. Instead of a menu item, you click on a hyperlink within some text to get to the PHP settings. Likewise, on the V1 dashboard, it was not easy to access staging sites, but they’ve made that much simpler on V2.
Which leads me to my last critique of Rapyd. On WP Engine, I mentioned using the Git Push tool to deploy changes from my staging site (hosted on a VPS with SpinupWP). On Rapyd, you can push your live site to staging at any time, but you cannot push changes from staging to live, at all. You could use Git like I do, or you can use a plugin like WP Migrate (very slick). WP Engine, on the other hand, has the ability to push changes both directions, and you can choose what you are pushing, just files, or both files and database. WPE also has the Local tool, which gives you a whole lot more flexibility in that area.
I’ll give Rapyd one last shoutout on the security front. If the support team ever needs to access your actual account, they can only do so if you give them permission. You browse over to the support area of the dashboard, and click a button, and choose how long they can access your account. Very nice, and you can revoke it right away when they are done!
Last Thoughts
So, would I recommend Rapyd Cloud? Well, they aren’t for everyone, they make that very clear with their pricing. Since I wrote this, Rapyd introduced a new $35/month Starter plan for a single site, which is similar to WP Engine’s starting price. At that price point, Rapyd is a solid value, with well above average support and best-in-class performance. I love that they offer Patchstack, and that puts their reliability on the top shelf, though it ought to be included in the standard pricing. Uptime is one thing, but keeping your site safe from hackers is vital in today’s world.
If you’re just setting up a personal blog, or a hobby site, go find something cheaper (but not too cheap, or you’ll likely regret it). Otherwise, if you’re serious about building WordPress sites, or running a site for a business, do your future self a favor and pick a well-rounded web host like Rapyd Cloud. One of the best parts is they give you a free trial to test things out for yourself. When you’re ready to upgrade to a paid plan, use code EWWW to save 10% on your first billing cycle.
