Rocket.Net vs WP Engine Comparison In 2025: Which Is the Best?

Need a comparison of Rocket.net vs. WP Engine?

Rocket.net and WP Engine both offer fully managed WordPress hosting. However, they are expensive compared to regular shared and VPS hosting.

So why fully manage WordPress hosting?

Personally, I don’t like them, but shared hosting is slow because you have to share the same server with hundreds of other people – servers get slow, crash, and restart, causing security issues. More noticeable when your traffic is high.

And fully managed hosting is an ideal option for average users who are afraid to mess with a private web server (VPS or dedicated). There are many such hosting providers, including Kinsta, WP Engine, BigScoots, SiteGround, and many more.

Regular web publishers use WP Engine, but Rocket is specifically designed for modern WordPress users. WPE uses regular SSDs even though it uses Google Cloud as its web server. Read-write speeds on NVMe are faster than SSDs. Web hosting performance affects how fast your site can operate and handle traffic.

WP Engine is more mature than Rocket.net, but Rocket has more features, like Redis PRO, increased monthly visits, complete Cloudflare Enterprise, etc.

I wouldn’t recommend WPEngine or Rocket.net to newbies or small sites. Also, they’re unsuitable for users with a lot of bandwidth or storage requirements.

It may be more practical to compare WP Engine vs. Rocket using charts because their differences are clearly visible.

TL;DR Rocket.net vs WP Engine

I cover the pros and cons of both hosting in detail in the remaining sections. But if you don’t have time to read the whole thing, I’ve put the key points in this table.

Rocket.net Review

I prefer Rocket.net over most of the other managed WordPress hosting I have tried because it is modern and keeps up with the latest developments. It has gained attention for robust Cloudflare enterprise integration with edge caching.

All Rocket plans come with unlimited PHP workers, which is good for big and medium-sized sites that get a lot of dynamic requests. Similar providers, like WP Engine, Kinsta, etc., usually limit PHP workers. Using Rocke.net for my website hosting, I got impressive speed metrics and eye test results. They achieve this by using full-page caching with Cloudflare APO, together with other optimizations.

Rocket web hosting has a magic login feature, which allows users to log into WordPress websites without using passwords.

That said, I don’t optimize websites just for page speed metrics because a site’s naked-eye speed should be the speed that matters without swiping elements into the page speed test tools.

But here are some screenshots of the page speed metrics using Rocket with FlyingPress cache plugin optimization:

The good thing is that there aren’t any restrictions on WP plugins, so you can even use security and cache plugins.

I am not a fan of WP Rocket because FlyingPress is much better than WP Rocket overall. But Rocket-net lets you use the WP Rocket plugin for free.

Rocket-net has a helpful reporting section where you can see things like bandwidth usage, visitor count, IP addresses, and devices. In addition, I like how it displays data like top referrers, cache status, and WAF history.

And – you can view the cache hit ratio and the number of requests handled by the Edge or Origin servers in the CDN section. If you’re running WordPress documents, you’ll need a good web host

How Does Rocket.net Pricing Work?

Rocket.Net is expensive for beginners but is simple to use and works smoothly. The cost starts at $30/m for one site and goes up to $200/month for 20 sites.

If you want to pay annually, you can get two months free. It can be affordable if you have a few sites but pricey if you have several small sites.

It depends on how much bandwidth and storage you need, so the more you use, the more you’ll pay. Even the starter plan offers more than 250K monthly visits, making it thriving compared to similar others. Also, you can try for $1 for the first month, excluding enterprise. However, bandwidth is the real issue.

Rocket offers hosting for small to large sites. They have Level 1 packages for small sites and enterprise hosting prices close to $2000 monthly.

Rocket.Net Cloudflare Enterprise Features

RocketNet is notable for its full integration of Cloudflare Enterprise, and it has become fashionable for most other web hosting companies to implement the same solution. And Rocket.net doesn’t limit staging sites like WPE.

I’ve used Cloudflare Enterprise directly, and most features are unnecessary. The enterprise plan comes with 2,700 Cloudflare rules, and Rocket integrates very nicely with custom rules. Instead of CF APO, they use cache rules to cache entire pages and bypass some functions. That is why most other hosting providers lack full integration with CF Enterprise. They don’t know how to integrate accurately.

This is good because most of your website traffic goes through Cloudflare CDN servers instead of the hosting server. Using rocket-net, you don’t need WordPress security, cache, image optimization, or any other plugin. And it’s not just for CDN or security reasons; you’ll get helpful enterprise features, such as:

• Argo Smart Routing: Argo can significantly reduce latency and improve speed handling requests through Cloudflare’s network (using the fastest routes).
• Image Optimization: RocketNet enhances images and removes attributes without losing quality using Cloudflare Polish and Mirage image optimization. You do not need to use image optimization plugins.
• More Protection: Enterprise plans come with more security measures. Your website is secure both by the host and CDN—secure without plugins.
• Load Balancing and Prioritized Routing: Cloudflare’s load balancing is a subscription-based feature that supports various mechanisms for traffic distribution. The result is lower latency and faster routines on each server. Prioritized routing helps reduce traffic overload, peaks, and outages.
• Various caching: There are more caching features with Rocket, tiered cache, and full-page caching. Also includes various server-side caching layers.

Rocket.net also utilizes Cloudflare Enterprise to extend security features such as SQL-XSS prevention, malicious files, directory traversal, unauthorized access, anti-spam, etc. (FlyingCDN, for example, uses Cloudflare Enterprise).

Provide protection against the most common threats to your WordPress site. Also, the server has an Imunify firewall and detects real-time malware.

You can see what’s happening with your website’s security in real-time—find detailed info about the incidents on the website.

Pros:

• No limits on PHP workers.
• High-quality customer service.
• All plans include unlimited monthly visits.
• Modern hosting infrastructure and enterprise CDN.
• Enhanced security with Cloudflare Enterprise’s firewall.
• Full-page caching with Global TTFB under 100 milliseconds.

Cons:

• No email hosting.
• Seven server locations.
• It can get expensive if you need a lot of bandwidth.
• Users need to clear the cache manually after changes.

WP Engine

WP Engine is a mature, managed WordPress hosting company. It is a big name, but it’s slow, especially for heavy websites. Marketing makes it pricey—instead of focusing on quality, they focus on marketing.

WPEngine has a list of disallowed plugins; most are banned because they’re large or have vulnerabilities, but Rocket hasn’t banned any plugins or themes.

Catch how much it costs to host one site on WPE with 100,000 visits a month almost $100/M. For that price, I can host multiple websites with unlimited visitors on a cloud VPS like Vultr.

I think WP Engine is overly expensive – and the cost is due more to its brand and marketing tactics than to the quality of its service.

However, many other reputable providers still offer more competitive rates. Almost all web hosts use trick marketing strategies – but WPE’s marketing is too fancy for me. And scheduled maintenance isn’t included in uptime guarantees.

There is usually a safe and reliable configuration on managed hosts. Most blogger publishers recommend them because they pay big affiliate commissions.

Compared to VPS, WPEngine is like shared host—it’s popular with novices but hated by techies. But it’s a long-running managed hosting service.

Pros:

• Offers more bandwidth than Rocket.
• It uses Google Cloud infrastructure (SSD).
• Good customer service and tech support.
• An established WP-managed hosting service.

Cons:

• No Redis.
• Strict limits on server resources.
• Instead of quality, they focus on branding.
• Old stacks like SSD, Memcached, and Apache.

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Managed WordPress hosting is usually shared hosting, but it often uses Google or Amazon servers – this is why they limit your disk space, bandwidth, etc. Despite their limitations, these hosts perform better than typical shared hosts.

VPSs give you more flexibility because the resources are reserved for your site. You can do things a little differently and tweak certain things. For this reason, I recommend that you host most of your websites on a virtual private server. You can run your development websites on cheap VPSs like Starlight and Webdock.

In The End…

Rocket.net definitely wins when it comes to features compared to WP Engine. And both use Cloudflare, but Rocket.net uses Cloudflare Enterprise with more settings, such as smart routing, and full-page caching.

While WP Engine uses Memcached, Rocket uses Redis PRO as its object cache. Rocket uses LiteSpeed as the PHP handler, while most others use FastCGI.

When you’re looking for a good web host, you see many sites saying some are rubbish and not worth it. On the other hand, there are tons of happy customers.

Others have really positive reviews and suggestions, but they’re garbage. Many people opt for cheap hosting with discounts. But I think you can trust your own experience with hosting firms.

Changing your web host, like moving from shared hosting to a fully managed host like Rocket.Net, will increase speed.

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