WP Engine Announces Availability of Compute-Optimized Instances for its platform in the UK and Western Europe

After rolling out access to Google’s Compute-Optimized Virtual Machines (VM) (C2) in August, WP Engine is now offering the new hardware to customers in both the UK and Western Europe.

Existing customers on WP Engine’s platform served out of GCP’s London data center will be converted over at no charge, and we’re adding a new data center for customers located in Eemshaven, Netherlands.

As a reminder, the new compute-optimized VMs (C2) offer high per-thread performance and memory speeds that can provide a 40% performance improvement over previous Google hardware. The major difference with the new C2 instances is that they run at 3.8 GHz instead of 2.2 or 2.8 GHz, allowing PHP and MySQL execution to happen at that 40% faster rate.

Customers who move to WP Engine from other platforms typically see an increase in performance. With this new infrastructure in place, customers’ web pages are loading even faster, providing a growing list of impressive, real-world results. 

BoardingArea.com, a popular business travel website, experienced far more than a 40% drop in its server execution time, seen across the multiple web properties it migrated over to the new hardware. Here are results from just a couple of the sites they migrated over last month:

As seen above, server execution improved significantly as soon as the migration was complete, giving BoardingArea a massive performance boost that translated into faster page speeds and better end-user experience. 

“When our account team at WP Engine told us we’d see up to a 40% increase in performance by switching to the C2 VMs on Google Cloud, we were excited to see the results,” said Denny Butts, Director of Project Engagement, at Frequent Flyer Services. 

“Once we were switched over to the new VMs, which was quick and seamless, we actually saw a 69% increase in performance. We were blown away. In addition to the immediate improvements in speed and performance we’re seeing across our sites, we also feel like we now have cutting-edge infrastructure in place that future-proofs our sites, and gives us a really solid foundation to keep building our business.”

In addition to the speed enhancements provided by the new C2 hardware, there is another important benefit—when migrating or creating a WP Engine account, customers will have the option to choose the Netherlands GCP data center. This choice will dictate where that account’s data is stored and European Union-based companies will likely appreciate having their data stored in the EU. WP Engine remains the only WordPress digital experience provider to offer this high-performance hardware to its customers. 

If you’re a current WP Engine customer and would like to find out more about accessing C2 hardware for your sites, contact your account representative. If you’re new to WP Engine, contact sales today to find out more about our plans and pricing, so you can begin taking advantage of this newly-available hardware as well.