My experience with WPEngine
chester.id.au
My experience with WPEngine
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Re: My experience with WPEngine
#2We have a similar experience trying to move a large local newspaper in WP (500k+ posts) from our architecture to WPEngine, after over 1200 U$D spend, sadly we rollback to old setup.
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#3Of all the things I've ever written on the blog (and ok, most of the earlier stuff is as tedious as watching the guy who watches the grass grow), it's sorta sad that only the one with the sensationalist title has ever made the front page at HN.
So, while I'm here, go look at my very nice bloggers. I regularly submit their stuff.
Take, for example, this recent extremely intelligent discussion of privacy in the current internet:
http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/10/19/manners-cost-nothing/
Or this discussion of the roots of order/chaos good/evil dualities in agricultural society: http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/10/16/war-and-peace/
This confronting moral conundrum from the Massacre of Srebrenica: http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/10/24/srebrenica-should-the-so...
This discussion of the deadening effect of media laws upon Australian free speech: http://catallaxyfiles.com/2012/10/24/the-deadening-of-free-s...
and so on and so forth.
I am enormously proud of all my bloggers.
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#4For all who are thinking about moving to WPEngine:
Your staging server does not use WPE's caching technology, which your production server will use. WPE will not give you details on how their secret-sauce caching works. This means that things that work on staging will break on production. WPE also refuse to turn off their caching on production, but also refuse to turn ON their caching on your staging server. This means there is no real way to test. Things that work with their staging server, and even work with the standard WP caching plugins, will break in WPE production.
Their solution? Buy another production site to test on.
That website is now moving from WPEngine after having its launch botched by the aforementioned issues, and after not being able to make a basic paywall work with their caching. Once they realised the use case, WPE simply suggested moving elsewhere without making any further effort to accommodate.
I had a similar reaction to the post yesterday by asmartbear as Jaques, but he made the extra effort to actually write the blogpost, so bravo to him. WPE enjoys this sterling reputation that misleads a lot of people into using them, but their comfort zone it seems is limited to vanilla WP installs with little deviation.
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#5For all who are thinking about moving to WPEngine: Your staging server does not use WPE's caching technology, which your production server will use. WPE will not give you details on how their secret-sauce caching works. This means that things that work on staging will break on production. WPE also refuse to turn off their caching on production, but also refuse to turn ON their caching on your staging server. This mea…
> Their solution? Buy another production site to test on.
... wow.
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#6All of these sites have fairly standard themes. All could be hosted, worry-free, at WordPress.com.
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#7I've been hosting a couple WordPress sites on PHPFog (http://phpfog.com) as well as DreamHost. For some reason DreamHost is faster, but the PHPFog UI is much nicer. Both have great support (DreamHosts' is 24/7 if I'm not mistaken) and relatively cheap.
That being said, once you have the sort of requirements that the original poster seems to have, I don't know if any of those companies would be suitable…
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#8All of these sites have fairly standard themes. All could be hosted, worry-free, at WordPress.com.
Not really. WordPress.com's free hosting has limited space, no custom themes, no plugins except a small preapproved set, no ability to run your own ads, and you have to run WordPress's ads for their benefit.
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#9I've been hosting a couple WordPress sites on PHPFog ( http://phpfog.com ) as well as DreamHost. For some reason DreamHost is faster, but the PHPFog UI is much nicer. Both have great support (DreamHosts' is 24/7 if I'm not mistaken) and relatively cheap. That being said, once you have the sort of requirements that the original poster seems to have, I don't know if any of those companies would be suitable…
Dreamhost is, like every shared hosting provider, hit-and-miss.
I used to host Club Troppo there. When it got slow they basically shrugged and said ... it's shared hosting, what did I expect for $8/month?
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#10All of these sites have fairly standard themes. All could be hosted, worry-free, at WordPress.com.
My bloggers have several non-standard plugins and non-standard theme tweaks.
Edit: and oh yes, 2.5Gb of media.
The big kicker is that my migrations can only occur by SQL. Using WXR is fine for any blog that can be turned from XML into PHP objects ... inside the execution-time limit.
Otherwise Wordpress thinks it's just hilarious to silently fail to import anything that doesn't make the execution-time cutoff.
And I don't think I am a big enough fish for wordpress.com to bother to help me do an SQL migration.