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My experience with WPEngine

chester.id.au

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Re: My experience with WPEngine

#11

Post by the_bear »

jacques_chester wrote: post #9
sgdesign wrote: post #7

I'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?

I had the exact same experience, but I was paying for their VPS service. I believe it was over $30/month, and it went down all the time with very little traffic. Dreamhost is a tempting host for a new site because it's so easy to set up, but I think you save time and headaches in the long run starting with someone else.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#12

Post by mmahemoff »

sgdesign wrote: post #7

I'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…

Are you on Dreamhost VPS or plain-old shared hosting?

I had to migrate my WordPress off Dreamhost shared hosting as it was too slow and blowing their CPU limits. That was around 2006 and I'm sure a lot has changed.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#14

Post by troels »

dangrossman wrote: post #8
saltcod wrote: post #6

All 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.

What about the paid plan?

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#15

Post by dangrossman »

troels wrote: post #14
dangrossman wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What about the paid plan?

You get a little more storage space, a little bit of CSS control, but you still can't bring your own themes and plugins, edit the code, etc. Plus, there's no way to migrate a multi-gigabyte blog network's data over, AFAIK.

WordPress.com is an SaaS for blogging like Tumblr or Posterous. It happens to be built on a custom, locked down install of the WordPress multi-site software. It's not a website hosting company.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#16

Post by pwenzel »

alexandros wrote: post #4

For 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…

I've had the opposite experience of WP Engine, and appreciate leaving caching and performance issues to somebody else, given that my company has a somewhat limited staff for supporting servers and CMS upgrades. I am building a semi-complex Multisite installation with multiple domains. So far, it's been pretty decent.

Your frustration with their caching "secret sauce" is understandable. However, you can get a rough idea of their caching back-end by poking around in the WP Engine config files and plugins bundled with your installation. They also provide a nice little overview here: http://wpengine.com/our-infrastructure/.

If you are staging out anything more complex than a single blog, you will definitely want to have two production instances to test on. For some, this is a raw deal. I personally don't mind.

I am also not a huge fan of their CDN feature, which works by rewriting URLs in your page source to point files and assets to NetDNA servers. However, I am hopeful that they will improve upon it.

That said, I have enjoyed a platform that keeps my Wordpress installations secure with automatic upgrades.

Comparing WPEngine to other hosting providers like Linode or Dreamhost is really unfair. They offer completely different services, and specialize in Wordpress-optimized hosting only.

I also have to say that it was really nice to not be part of Amazon/Heroku's outage this week. WP Engine has a control panel hosted on Heroku, but all their sites live in the Linode network, evading downtime.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#18

Post by sgdesign »

mmahemoff wrote: post #12
sgdesign wrote: post #7

I'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…

Are you on Dreamhost VPS or plain-old shared hosting? I had to migrate my WordPress off Dreamhost shared hosting as it was too slow and blowing their CPU limits. That was around 2006 and I'm sure a lot has changed.

VPS. http://sachagreif.com runs on it and got to the top 5 of HN many times without any trouble (I'm using W3 Total Cache).

The only reason I'm thinking about switching away is that their control panel is a little messy, and they don't support Git deployment out of the box (although you can activate it via ssh, which is what I did).

It also feels faster than PHPFog for some reason, especially the WordPress admin. So overall, I'd say they're a pretty good option for budget hosting.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#19

Post by jacques_chester »

pwenzel wrote: post #16
alexandros wrote: post #4

For 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…

I've had the opposite experience of WP Engine, and appreciate leaving caching and performance issues to somebody else, given that my company has a somewhat limited staff for supporting servers and CMS upgrades. I am building a semi-complex Multisite installation with multiple domains. So far, it's been pretty decent. Your frustration with their caching "secret sauce" is understandable. However, you can get a rough id…

Then compare it to Page.ly.

Same basic proposition: fully managed Wordpress.

They cost less.

And their service roflstomps WPEngine's.

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