Anyone have experience with ZippyKid? How are they?
Only hear good stuff from ZippyKid, but haven't used them yet. I've tried Page.ly before and just had too much downtime over a number of different months. Have reverted to hosting myself.
My experience with WPEngine
61–70 of 250 posts
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 af…
Fastest != Most appropriate You're advocating revenge. I'd just like discussions to be discussions. Not attacks. The blog post read (to me at least) like an attack on a company with some obvious growing pains. There are ways to write a complaint that doesn't involve pointing out Cohen's self congratulation. The way the post is ended wreaks of jealous hatred. That is not the way you constructively criticize.
I feel that I managed to control myself fairly well, all told. Nobody's parentage was questioned, nobody called "unsound", nobody excluded from the gentlemen's club etc etc.
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 af…
Fastest != Most appropriate You're advocating revenge. I'd just like discussions to be discussions. Not attacks. The blog post read (to me at least) like an attack on a company with some obvious growing pains. There are ways to write a complaint that doesn't involve pointing out Cohen's self congratulation. The way the post is ended wreaks of jealous hatred. That is not the way you constructively criticize.
Are we reading the same thing? I really don't think this post was an attack. It was someone describing a disappointing experience with a service that was supposed to make his side-projects easier to manage and having the exact opposite happen. It's a post about disappointment with a service written on his personal blog, I don't see any pitchfork calling or attacks or jealous hatred. Are you projecting something here?
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#64I'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 pret…
Indeed, another blogger of my acquaintance (Joshua Gans, a really excellent economics blogger) heard about my moving to WPEngine and moved several independent blogs across. He's a fan of theirs.
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#65The important lesson to be learned here is that even though higher price points tend to shield you from the bulk of toxic customers, you'll still find the occasional toxic customer at even the highest price point from time to time. As nice a guy as this blogger probably is, he's the bane of services like WPEngine. There is no way to service the needs of his complex edge case of a system for anything like $250/month.…
> the only hope they have is to convince him to leave the service as rapidly as possible to avoid being sucked into the time sink that dealing with him is going to become Then just tell him that the service isn't for him at that price, like Page.ly did.
Pagely tried to help him. Tried really hard. WPEngine didn't even try - their cust support people just read from the same script over and over. And then charged him $500 for support.
If they can't support customers like him, they shouldn't charge him $500 for the time it takes to determine that.
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#66The important lesson to be learned here is that even though higher price points tend to shield you from the bulk of toxic customers, you'll still find the occasional toxic customer at even the highest price point from time to time. As nice a guy as this blogger probably is, he's the bane of services like WPEngine. There is no way to service the needs of his complex edge case of a system for anything like $250/month.…
I think that's unfair. So if you sign up for a premium service because they say they can help you solve problem X, and then you follow their exact instructions to no avail and get the runaround from customer support, you're a toxic customer?
I don't know what your experience with WPEngine is, but suffice it to say, this post is not the first complaint I've heard, and I've personally had...issues with them as well. And my setup is even more vanilla than the one described in the linked post (which is pretty vanilla, honestly). I love Jason Cohen's contribution to the startup community and I want to love WPEngine, but I am starting to wonder if something is amiss on the technical / customer service side there.
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#67I'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…
I wanted to use PHPFog for an ExpressionEngine site but deploys seemed to take an unreasonably long time. Their pseudo-git (CLI task `pf`) is also kind of silly.
If you're not going to be doing a lot of dev work and making a lot of commits, I'd recommend.
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#68Earlier 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.
I had the opposite experience as well -- I tried Page.ly first but could not import any of my sites (which all use a variety of custom post types). Their import process seemed more attuned to vanilla installs. Closing out my billing with them was also somewhat arduous.
WPE has been great so far -- very responsive support -- and their caching handles about 8 million pageviews a month with 600-800 simultaneous visitors and very little downtime.
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 af…
Fastest != Most appropriate You're advocating revenge. I'd just like discussions to be discussions. Not attacks. The blog post read (to me at least) like an attack on a company with some obvious growing pains. There are ways to write a complaint that doesn't involve pointing out Cohen's self congratulation. The way the post is ended wreaks of jealous hatred. That is not the way you constructively criticize.
Considering how well Jacques presented his arguments and experience, I'd say that this is one of the better examples of public flogging.
It seems like he's spent an extended amount of time complaining to internal channels, and he just needed to let other people know about his experience of not receiving the promised levels of service.
Re: My experience with WPEngine
#70The important lesson to be learned here is that even though higher price points tend to shield you from the bulk of toxic customers, you'll still find the occasional toxic customer at even the highest price point from time to time. As nice a guy as this blogger probably is, he's the bane of services like WPEngine. There is no way to service the needs of his complex edge case of a system for anything like $250/month.…
Jason, what's up with this comment?
Where did you find this 'complex edge case of a system' in his post? This 'unique setup'?
Why do you think 'impossible things were about to become' when he was able to easily move the sites to WP Engine... after paying a 3rd party to do it?
He didn't describe a single special requirement that I can see. Just plain old WordPress with some existing data to move. Not even a large network or a large amount of traffic. This is supposed to be WP Engine's bread-and-butter customer.
All of WP Engine's plans other than "Personal" say "Hey WordPress MultiSite customer, come here! This plan is for you! Hundreds of thousands of visits a month and 20GB+ of storage!" http://wpengine.com/pricing/
Why are you calling him a 'toxic customer'? He's been running this WordPress install himself on an unmanaged VPS. He wasn't wasting their support staff's time on unnecessary questions -- they were wasting his! That's not a 'toxic customer', that's a 'toxic business'.
I'm having a hard time connecting this comment to the HN submission at all.