All systems operational
Two managed WordPress hosts, built on two different ideas. This page compares how they are put together: what your plan is measured on, whose machines it runs on, and who picks up when something breaks. It is not a table of prices that would be wrong by next quarter.
Your plan is bandwidth and storage. Get written up somewhere, run a campaign, have a good Black Friday, and the invoice at the end of it looks exactly the same.
Our own hardware in our own racks, in the UK and the US. Nothing is rented from a public cloud and re-sold to you with a management layer on top.
No investors to return capital to, so nothing forces a price rise that has nothing to do with the cost of running your site.
Structure rather than scorecards. Every row below describes how each platform is built, because that is the part that still reads true in a year.
How this was put together. Everything in the FastCow column is what we sell and can be held to. Everything in the WP Engine column describes their published model rather than ours to define, is taken from their own documentation, and is theirs to change at any time. Check wpengine.com for their current position. Last reviewed August 2026. Spot something out of date? Tell us and we will correct it.
A visitor ceiling turns your best week into a billing event. The campaign lands, a post gets picked up, a product goes out of stock in four hours, and the thing you notice afterwards is an overage line.
FastCow sizes plans on bandwidth and NVMe storage instead. Those are the resources your site genuinely consumes, and they move with what you publish rather than with how many people happen to read it. Traffic spikes cost you nothing extra; they are the reason you built the site.
If your traffic settles somewhere your plan no longer covers, you hear it from a person before you see it on an invoice. Moving up a tier is a conversation, not an automatic charge.
We would rather you moved for a reason that holds up. Three cases where we would tell you to stay where you are.
If your team builds every site in Local, ships through their deployment workflow and lives in their dashboard, that is real muscle memory. Moving hosts means giving some of it up.
Decoupled WordPress front-ends served from their headless platform are a genuinely different product. FastCow hosts WordPress extremely well; it is not a headless application platform.
The Genesis framework and StudioPress themes come from inside that business. They run fine anywhere, but the people who make them are on the other side of this comparison.
Our engineers do the move by hand on every plan. You approve it on a preview URL before a single visitor is affected.
Your current bill and a month of traffic. We will tell you which plan actually fits, and say so plainly if moving would not save you anything.
We copy the site across and hand you a temporary address to go through it on. Your live site never stops serving from where it is now.
Once you are happy, update the records we give you. DNS propagates, the SSL issues itself, and the switch happens without an outage.
We will tell you which plan actually fits, what it would cost, and whether moving is worth your time. If it is not, we will say so.
Can’t find what you’re looking for? Our team is happy to help, any time.
Talk to us →No. Our engineers copy the site across and hand you a temporary URL to check it on. Your live site keeps serving from your current host the whole time. You only change DNS once you have signed off on the copy, so the switch is a nameserver change rather than an outage.
No. It is the same WordPress install, moved as it is, with the database, uploads, themes and plugins intact. The only things that usually need attention are host-specific plugins that exist to talk to your old provider’s caching layer, and we point those out during the migration.
FastCow plans are sized on bandwidth and NVMe storage rather than a monthly visitor count, so a busy week does not trigger a per-visit overage charge. If your traffic settles at a level your plan’s bandwidth no longer covers, we will tell you and move you to the plan that fits.
Yes. FastCow does not maintain a list of plugins you are not allowed to install. If a plugin is genuinely doing damage to a site we will tell you what we are seeing and why, but the decision about what runs on your site stays yours.
That depends entirely on your traffic and how many sites you run, which is why this page does not print a price comparison that would be out of date within a quarter. FastCow plans start at $25 a month and renew at the rate you signed up on. Send us your current bill and traffic figures and we will tell you honestly whether moving saves you money.
