Name: Pagely.com
Plans: Managed WordPress.
Website: www.pagely.com
Summary: Page.ly is not a managed WordPress web hosting company that I recommend. Their performance and uptime are great, but customer service is all ticket based. My Page.ly review allows other webmasters to leave their reviews down below.
Page.ly or Pagely.com was founded in 2006. They have been in the industry for about 10 years. Much like Media Temple and WP Engine. Page.ly is a managed WordPress hosting business. If you’re familiar with WordPress there is a good chance this company is going to peek your interest. Whenever you sign up for their services you’re never going to have to install cPanel or Plesk because Page.ly handles all the technical stuff for you. You simply define how many WordPress installs you want on your server and then Page.ly does the rest.
There seems to be a ever-growing number of WordPress hosting companies in the online world. I want to provide anyone who is considering Page.ly as much information about the company as I can. Then, you can then decide if Pagely will be right for you.
Page.ly Features
You can only use WordPress with this company. They do not support anything else but WordPress. With Page.ly you can choose from either a shared or VPS server. However, if you do wish to go with an Enterprise plan this is a dedicated server, but you do have to contact them in order to get a quote. I will be going over their shared and VPS plans down below.
Shared Plans
The first plan Page.ly offers is the Starter Plan (which is commonly overlooked) which can usually be found at the bottom of the plans they offer. This plan is meant for 1 WordPress website install which includes 5GB of disk space, 5GB bandwidth, 20GB CDN for $24/mo. Typically, this plan should be able to handle about 400 unique visitors per day without any problem.
However, Page.ly has three other plans under its shared hosting plans that a lot of webmasters decide to take advantage of.
Firstly, the Business plan allows up to 3 WordPress websites for $64/mo. This limits the user into only using the WordPress platform; however, Page.ly includes fully managed updates, CDN, and SSL availability. In addition to the 3 sites, the Business plan allocates 10GB of disk space, 10GB of bandwidth per month, and 50GB of CDN monthly.
The next plan Professional allows up to 10 sites with 20GB of disk space and 25GB of bandwidth with 100GB of CDN for $149/mo. The Professional plan can accommodate services such as WooCommerce, WordPress Multisite, or even a membership site. This plan is especially helpful if the Web sites the user is creating requires these features.
Finally, the last plan is Ultimate. This particular plan allows for 20 WordPress websites, 30GB of disk space, 50GB of bandwidth and 250GB of CDN for $269/mo. The Ultimate plan is the plan right below a VPS plan for a user as this plan is meant to deal with resource intensive websites.
VPS Plans
You are not just limited to shared servers with Page.ly. Virtual Private Servers or VPS is a feature category within Page.ly plans. A VPS is a server which allows the user to have full root privileges. This means the user can customize the hardware with as many software add-ons that they would like in order to run the sites they host on that server.
Page.ly offers four options in this category. VPS-1 ($399/mo), VPS-2 ($799/mo), VPS-3 ($999/mo), and VPS-4 ($1799/mo). Each plan scales accordingly to its price point; however, unlike other hosting services Page.ly’s VPS service limits its servers on the number of sites as well.
VPS-1 and VPS-3 limit users to 35 sites while the others allow up to 50 sites. The VPS servers also come equipped with SSH connection with GIT and SVN. This allows the user to have access to their server with whichever platform they are more comfortable with. In addition to the disk space and bandwidth each plan, Page.ly also lets users upgrade specific parts of their server for an extra price per month. For example, an extra 50GB of bandwidth for an extra $10/mo. Page.ly also gives a lot of support with their VPS servers with an expert support team and handles all kernel upgrades on the server.
No Money-Back Guarantee
When customers sign up for web hosting they want some kind of money-back guarantee. However, Page.ly does not offer any sort of guarantee for getting a refund if you’re not satisfied with the service. A lot of other web hosting companies like Hostgator (45 days), Hostpapa (30 days), and SiteGround (30 days) offer some kind of money-back guarantee. All the risk seems to be on the customers end, which isn’t a smart business move on Pagely.com’s part.
Page.ly Uptime & Performance
Performance
Performance wise Page.ly does seem to get favorable reviews from webmasters that use their service. In fact, this is one thing that webmasters seem to boast about. Wpmudev.org has written an article reviewing their company and they show that their response times for their servers are “blazing fast”. They have reported that sites that had articles on top sites like huffingtonpost.com didn’t have any performance issues at all. I don’t have any issues with Page.ly in terms of performance.
Uptime
Just like performance uptime doesn’t seem to be an issue by most Page.ly customers. Whenever our websites are down webmasters seem to freak out. I have hosted with companies like MochaHost and found this out the hard way. In fact, you can trust that your website hosted by Page.ly will be up as close to 100% as possible. They do have a SLA (Service Level Agreement) that states if your website is down for more than an hour straight you will get a 20% credit to your next months bill.
Page.ly Customer Support
Let me start off with saying what I don’t like about Page.ly and their customer support. They do not have telephone support or live chat support. This is a major flaw in any web hosting company that doesn’t allow their clients to talk to an agent on the phone. Most of the times you can handle little problems that you might have with your websites by jumping on live chat or calling them on the phone. Neither of those are an option with Page.ly. Instead you need to rely on a support ticket.
From the research I have done it does seem like Page.ly does stay on top of their support tickets, and they do provide you with solid advice. However, you are solely relying on someone to answer your ticket request. I would really like to see them add in a live chat feature or at least telephone support.
Page.ly Summary
All and all, I don’t think Page.ly is a horrible company. They have pretty decent performance and their uptime shouldn’t be a problem. Most of their customers don’t seem to be complaining about the quality of service they get with Page.ly. However, since you are paying a “premium” price you should at least get to talk to them on live chat or on the telephone. Other competing companies in the managed WordPress industry have more refined ways of getting in contact with customers support.
I don’t see anywhere on Pagely.com where they offer a money-back guarantee either. Instead, if your server goes down for an hour a month (excluding maintenance) they will give you 20% off your next monthly bill.
If you are really fixed on getting a managed WordPress service I would read my WP Engine review. They are a much better company, but do charge a little extra money. However, if you’re on the brink about deciding you could do away with managed WordPress hosting I would check out my InMotion Hosting Review.
I would like to hear from Pagely.com customers. Please leave a review up above in the user review section. Thanks for reading.