My experience with WPEngine • Hacker News Board

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#41

Post by krmmalik » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 1:34 PM UTC

I've had a radically different experience with WP Engine and would happily recommend them to others, and have done so.

I went through 3 or 4 different providers, and the only place that i was really happy with setup, infrastructure and support was WPEngine.

As some of the other guys have stated regards the caching and their suitability to vanilla installs, i think that is most likely the case, and yes mine was a pretty vanilla install in the grand scheme of things, but i'd still choose them over anyone else.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#42

Post by ck2 » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 1:37 PM UTC

WPEngine uses NFS/NAS which is a show-stopper. Dreamhost has the same issue, and GoDaddy (still?)

You never, ever, use NFS on something with hundreds of files to load for every page (ie. WordPress).

Every file takes 2-2.5ms to stat/load on NFS (from my tests on WPengine) which seems small but adds up fast.

It means you instantly have 700ms or more of overhead on the SERVER side to render a page (not transmit to the browser, just to render).

You can somewhat get around this by using an opcode cache and turning off file stat but there are still some files that have to be checked like static data read from the disk and turning stat off has other issues when editing code like having to flush the cache.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#43

Post by jacques_chester » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 1:39 PM UTC

ck2 wrote: post #42

WPEngine uses NFS/NAS which is a show-stopper. Dreamhost has the same issue, and GoDaddy (still?) You never, ever, use NFS on something with hundreds of files to load for every page (ie. WordPress). Every file takes 2-2.5ms to stat/load on NFS ( from my tests on WPengine ) which seems small but adds up fast. It means you instantly have 700ms or more of overhead on the SERVER side to render a page (not transmit to the…

When it was working, I found WPEngine snappy.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#44

Post by hippich » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 1:42 PM UTC

For what it worth - they are hiring. Probably to this exact reason - to bump up quality of their service (although their recruiter was not responsive, I guess I did not fit their requirements :))

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#45

Post by Tyrannosaurs » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 1:42 PM UTC

I want a two word tl;dr summary of every article in the title:

How fast is... Apple.com? (tl;dr: not very); Wired's Review of the Microsoft Surface (tl;dr: pretty interesting).

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#46

Post by armandososa » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 1:43 PM UTC

jacques_chester wrote: post #19

pwenzel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

…and they never accepted my credit card.

Just because you have a bad experience it doesn't mean that it sucks. My experience with WPEngine has been fantastic.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#47

Post by jacques_chester » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 1:46 PM UTC

armandososa wrote: post #46

jacques_chester wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then compare it to Page.ly. Same basic proposition: fully managed Wordpress. They cost less. And their service roflstomps WPEngine's.

…and they never accepted my credit card. Just because you have a bad experience it doesn't mean that it sucks. My experience with WPEngine has been fantastic.

I suspect that for 99% of customers, WPEngine is fine. Excellent, even. Certainly better than barrel-bottom shared hosting outfits.

But I wasn't asking for anything exotic. A multisite network, not very large, not much traffic. It says, right there on their site, that they support multisite networks.

So I guess I ... well ... expected that they would be able to support a multisite network.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#48

Post by destraynor » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 1:50 PM UTC

My least favourite part of this type of sharing is when all the competitors come along to now try to pitch their wares. It's not clever, it's not classy, it's just lame.

I don't doubt this was a shit experience, it certainly sounds incredibly infuriating.

Jason & his team work super hard, and have thousands of happy customers, so they're doing lots right. Even the greatest of companies can screw things up now and then, especially in non-straight-forward situations. I'm sure he'll put it right.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#49

Post by jc4p » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 1:53 PM UTC

gozmike wrote: post #33

jacques_chester wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked "one on one" with them for weeks. Weeks . They did not move mountains. It was a parade of apathy. As soon as they could flick pass me to WebSiteMovers, they did. Your positive experience is every bit an emotional one as my negative experience was.

I can totally understand your negative experience, I have email threads between myself and WPEngine as well as between common customers and WPEngine that prove quite the opposite. It really sucks that you went through this. I'm just suggesting that you refrain from the public flogging and find another solution. I'm not affiliated with these guys other than as a client and I can tell you that I respect what they bring…

>I'm just suggesting that you refrain from the public flogging and find another solution.

If you've spent more than a day in any online community you should have already learned that this, although it may not be preferable for the company at fault, is the fastest way to get something fixed or something changed.

It'd be irresponsible for Jacques to stand by silently and suck up all the time and money he wasted days after there was a great PR piece for WPEngine on the front-page of this site because it would lead to others having his issue which he could help prevent.

This is a community. It's not an advertisement source. People vote on things they find interesting and discuss them, it's not a place to only post positive things about up and coming companies and hide all sources of negative news.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#50

Post by gizzlon » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 1:54 PM UTC

ck2 wrote: post #42

WPEngine uses NFS/NAS which is a show-stopper. Dreamhost has the same issue, and GoDaddy (still?) You never, ever, use NFS on something with hundreds of files to load for every page (ie. WordPress). Every file takes 2-2.5ms to stat/load on NFS ( from my tests on WPengine ) which seems small but adds up fast. It means you instantly have 700ms or more of overhead on the SERVER side to render a page (not transmit to the…

I recently removed some code that stat'd 4000 files over NFS. It took ~5 seconds, so it wasn't as bad as you say. Also, I'm pretty sure NFS can do better if you tune it.