Recently, we have been working with WP Engine for WordPress-specific hosting and can wholeheartedly endorse them. We’ve now become an affiliate as well, so if you click on any of their links on our site and subsequently make a purchase, we will earn a commission. (We only recommend products and services that we have used.)
WP Engine is a WordPress-only hosting platform that uses Google Cloud Platform hardware specifically optimized for WordPress, which makes it super-fast. We recently helped migrate hundreds of sites from comparably priced virtual private servers at Media Temple and the sites tested significantly faster at WP Engine.
WP Engine Plans start at about $35 per month before discounts. This gets you 1 site with production, staging and development environments so you can build on your work-in-progress version of the site on the development environment, show it to your stakeholders on staging and then promote it to production, once approved. Backups of each environment are automatically taken daily, can be taken manually, and can easily be reinstated at any time. Hosting also includes Sucuri security (which we also recommend) and you get automated Let’s Encrypt certs, advanced caching, outstanding support, and a whole bunch of other features too numerous to mention.
There are a few limitations you should be aware of. However, we think these are far outweighed by the benefits. If you are used to cPanel type hosting, this is not that. They don’t provide everything under the sun– most notably there is no email hosting. So, for that you’ll want to use G-Suite or Zoho, or another email hosting service. Also, WordPress revisions are disabled by default (though you can request they turn them on for you.) Finally, certain plugins are disallowed. The full list is here.
But if you can live without those, WP Engine is a solid choice.