What is BionicWP?
BionicWP is a managed WordPress hosting provider. It prides itself in providing superfast hosting and openly advertises that the sites hosted with BionicWP perform stupendously fast in Google PageSpeed Insights.
The company is quite new in business with only 1500+ websites hosted on their platform. They started their operational journey in June 2020. They have a host of stunning features that you usually expect out of any managed hosting provider.
BionicWP is a new kid on the block, and it is sending out ripples in the world of managed WordPress hosting. They are quite funny in the way they have put up their website and described their services. That kind of resonates with you at a personal level.
Yes, they are technically sound and that is why they are out their offering hosting services, but they will make it sound as if they are just as novice as you (and me) are. But behind all those fun representations is the commitment and promise to excellence.
Are they really that good?
Let us find out!
A Quick List of Pros and Cons
No service can be perfect. There must be a set of advantages and disadvantages when you try out any service. BionicWP is no different. Here is what I found out about this hosting provider (and may be that will help you with your decision):
The Pros
- State-of-the-art security features.
- Daily backups.
- Uses Google Cloud Compute (C2) servers.
- Page Speed guarantee.
- Highly optimized for speed and WordPress.
- Promise to clear hacks and malware scans.
- Friendly interface.
- Super-friendly customer support.
- 30-day free trial.
- Transactional emails.
The Cons
- Quite expensive.
- Root access to the server.
- Extra cost for essential addons.
- No moneyback guarantee.
Okay, now that you have a quick glance at what to expect out of BionicWP, let me walk you through the whole review in as much detail as possible.
It Is New – Keep That in Mind
BionicWP is a new hosting company that started only in 2020. If that is a concern, you should not be working with this company until it gets a good foothold in the business. But do not forget that every company needs to start somewhere, and they are doing well. In fact, they have garnered over 1500 users in a year. That is a good start.
There are certain things that should work in your favor when you try to migrate to BionicWP. First thing first, they are powered by Google Cloud Platform that is one of the most reliable cloud hosting providers in the world.
Bionic also offers strong security features that are a must for keeping your WordPress site safe and secure. You can always try them out.
Features Offered by BionicWP
The Free Stuff
There are a few free things you get with Bionic WP:
- Free SSL – this is offered through “Let’s Encrypt.” Everyone gives this. No big deal.
- Free Migration – they will migrate your sites for free ensuring that the migration is flawless.
- Free Backups – they also offer 30-day free backups for all your sites. All backups are offsite backups.
Hack Guarantee
They give a guarantee that they will clean up your site after it gets hacked or injected by malware. This is something that various other hosting companies like Kinsta, Flywheel, etc. offer.
Google Cloud Compute
They are powered by Google Cloud Compute servers. Those servers are extremely fast and reliable. Even a big brand like Kinsta relies on Google C2 servers for their hosting.
Linode
Google Cloud Platform is not the only cloud provider. If you do not want Google Cloud Platform, you can select Linode. That is totally up to you.
Staging Environment
They will allow you to create staging environment with a single click. That is beneficial when you want to make changes to your website without impacting the user experience.
Weekly Speed Monitoring
They will monitor your website speed every week. If something is not right, they will fix the issue right away.
90+ Score in Google PageSpeed Insights
They guarantee to give your website a 90+ score in Google PageSpeed Insights. However, you need to understand that it will cost you money. They will not do it for free.
Malware Scanning
They will run malware scans every day to ensure that your website remains secure. If they find anything, they will remove it.
WAF
They have a WAF or web application firewall in place that will keep out bad bots and cyber criminals. You do not need to get WAF separately.
Updates
They will update the WordPress core, themes, and plugins for you, so that you do not have to worry about those things anymore.
High Performance CDN
They offer a high performance CDN with their plans. The minimum CDN bandwidth you get is 50 GB. It is dependent on your selected plan. If you consume more than the allocated CDN bandwidth, you must pay for the extra consumption.
Auto Scaling
The company has autoscaling feature that will allow your website to handle sudden increase in traffic. Autoscaling will provide your site with additional resources like RAM, CPU and PHP Workers. Do not forget that auto scaling is not free. You must pay for additional resources.
Content Edits
They offer unlimited content edits (30-minute edits). However, those edits do not include creation of new content, editing image or graphic, writing custom codes, etc. And guess what? It is not free.
Server-Side Caching
They have server-side caching available. You do not need to use a caching plugin, but you can always use one.
Try Before You Buy
They have a try before you buy feature where you get a free trial. Yes, that is a fancy name! They offer a month-long free trial. Unfortunately, they do not have a moneyback guaranteed.
Interface and Use
When you first signup for the service, you will be greeted with their interface which looks kind of funky. You will land directly into your account dashboard, and this is what the dashboard looks like:
There is more there in that dashboard. It is just a partial screenshot of the entire dashboard.
Here is the remaining part of the dashboard:
The dashboard includes the average speed insights, but that becomes active only when you add a domain to your account. Until then, the area will remain inactive.
Adding a new site with BionicWP is simple. You need to start by clicking on the “+New Site” button you see on the top of the dashboard.
Remember that the dashboard you see before you add a site does not yet give you a server. You must select it when you try adding a site. At that point, you can decide to perform a fresh WordPress installation, or you can go for a site migration.
This is what you will see when you click on that “+New Site” button:
On the right side you will see the addons that you can use. The billing information segment will show you the exact cost. Of course, if you are using the free trial period, you can see that everything is set as “free.”
On the left, you can add your site name, select the server provider, and select the server region as well as the database type. Ignore that small robotic icon that you see there. It is created by RoboForm browser extension I added to Chrome. If you do not have that extension, you will not see that.
What you will notice is that you just cannot launch a site until you add a credit card. You can remove all Addons except the Advanced Security addon that costs $2.50.
And that really sucks! I do not get the point of forcing people to add credit cards before even they decide to use the service.
Once you add a card and then add a site, you can move forward. After you add your site, you will see the application dashboard that looks like this:
The application dashboard is clean and well organized. On the top you can see several menu items.
The updates tab will show you the list of all updates available. You can update everything at once or you can selectively update whatever you want to update.
The domains tab is where you can add your primary domain. The backups & clone tab is where you can access all your website backups. You can even create a whole clone of your website.
The site operation tab is where you can perform several functions like restarting PHP, restarting NGINX, resetting permissions, and clearing cache.
Finally, you will have the addons tab is where you can enable or disable certain addons like unlimited edits, transactional emails, NitroPack (that helps to achieve amazing speed), and CDN.
Overall, the dashboard is highly optimized, and you can navigate with ease. You will never need a degree in nuclear physics to figure out how to operate it. In fact, BionicWP gives you one of the most well-designed interfaces to work with.
The Addons
There is a total of five addons available. All that speed comes at a cost. The addons include the following:
- Bionic Speed – This addon will give the high speed that you need. It will cost you $9 a month per website.
- Weekly Form Checks – If you have forms on your website, this hosting provider will check the forms every week and find out whether they are working as intended or not. If they do not work as intended, they will fix it. This will cost you $1 per site per month.
- Transactional Emails – They will allow transactional emails powered by Mailgun. You will get 5000 emails a month at the cost of $1 per site per month.
- Unlimited Edits – That’s content edits for $20 per site per month. That is way too much.
- Advanced Security – This is meant for keeping your site safe and secure using 3rd party malware scans. It will cost you $2.5 per month per site. There is no way of turning this feature off. It will be present.
Pricing
There are no separate pricing plans available as you get with other hosting companies. They have a unique way of giving you the price. It all depends on the number of sites you want to host with BionicWP and the number of addons you want to use.
Here is a quick view of what you need to pay for 5 websites with all addons selected:
That is a lot!
What is weird here is that for each site you get a fixed number of visitors – 20,000. So, if you want to add 2 sites, the maximum allowed visitors will be 40,000. Anything beyond that will be charged extra. Also, for every site, the maximum disk space you get is 5 GB, the maximum CDN bandwidth you get is 50 GB.
That is outrageous!
Honestly, I feel that this pricing policy is not going to take them far. Compare this with Liquid Web and they will allow you to host 5 sites with unlimited traffic but 3 TB bandwidth for $79 a month. They will even throw in 250GB of free CDN bandwidth, free WAF and iThemes Security Pro plugin for free to give you malware and bot protection.
Conclusion
I do not see how BionicWP is an excellent choice. That promotion of amazing speed is nothing but a piece of trash! You can achieve amazing speed even when you are not using BionicWP. Such high pricing against a promise of high speed is unacceptable.
And content edits for $20 a month? I will rather edit my contents – FOR FREE! How long does it take to add an edited paragraph or perhaps a contact number? Why on earth will you even want to pay $20 for something so trivial?
You want WAF, CDN, etc.? Why do not you check you Rocket hosting? They give you protection from Cloudflare Enterprise!
I DO NOT recommend BionicWP. It is just baking on your fears of slow site to give you the same level of hosting that other managed hosting providers will give, but for a very high price. We recommend Chemicloud WordPress Hosting instead.
