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My experience with WPEngine

chester.id.au

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Re: My experience with WPEngine

#71

Post by jacques_chester »

unreal37 wrote: post #65
spindritf wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Just to be absolutely clear on the facts here:

WPEngine are not billing me the $500. WebSiteMovers are.

I approved that work and I will pay that bill, just as soon as they help me out with some technical details. WSM are not in the wrong here.

However I do intend to present an invoice to WPEngine for the amount that I have paid to WSM.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#72

Post by jamesmiller5 »

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…

Since NFS and NAS both have caches I don't believe they would be a bottleneck.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#74

Post by csomar »

As a seasoned WordPress developer and entrepreneur, the OP is making wrong assumptions. If I was the WPEngine owner, I won't be bothered by seeing him go.

WPEngine provides WordPress hosting services. They are professional and they do it for $250/month (which plainly means that their target audience is professional bloggers). For $250/month, they don't provide consultancy service as why your particular setup couldn't install in their server. This is your responsibility.

Setting up a WordPress blog can be easy (5 minutes) and complicated (Professionals charge up to $350/hour). What you are asking for is someone to move your blog. Fine. You are responsible for that. WPEngine offers you a "6 hours coupon" from another service. That is, they are not responsible for that.

Page.ly are probably doing this to get more clients. This is the wrong thing to do, because their support service can't scale this way. I have been doing this to bootstrap my services and it had more negative consequences than positive ones.

tl;dr: The OP is expecting WP consultancy services for signing up to WPEngine.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#75

Post by zippykid »

jacques_chester wrote: post #20
m0th87 wrote: post #17

Anyone have experience with ZippyKid? How are they?

FWIW, I spoke to ZippyKid. They (perhaps wisely) don't handle multisite installations.

Thanks for mentioning the email Jacque. And you're correct, currently we don't handle multi site installs due to some issues with MU and our clusters.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#76

Post by ryanwaggoner »

I host several sites on WPEngine and we've had some relatively minor issues. But we're getting ready to switch to multisite and now I'm nervous. We're generally happy, but we haven't been blown away.

Jason, if you're not scrambling to deal with this mess, you will be soon. And the main message I have is that you need to back off the marketing side a little and let the technical and customer service side catch up.

Godaddy makes an incredible amount of money, but they're still a terrible company from a technical and customer service perspective. But their marketing is so effective that they can get away with that [1].

I wonder if Jason Cohen's position in the tech community and general marketing prowess has allowed WPEngine to get ahead of themselves? I know when I read Patrick's blog post about WPEngine, I was really excited and it was a service that I wanted to like. And I do like them, but I'm not excited about them at all anymore.

1. Interestingly, Google is the exact opposite, and their customer service makes me want to take a spoon to my own eyes.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#77

Post by jacques_chester »

csomar wrote: post #74

As a seasoned WordPress developer and entrepreneur, the OP is making wrong assumptions. If I was the WPEngine owner, I won't be bothered by seeing him go. WPEngine provides WordPress hosting services. They are professional and they do it for $250/month (which plainly means that their target audience is professional bloggers). For $250/month, they don't provide consultancy service as why your particular setup couldn't…

> Page.ly are probably doing this to get more clients.

... huh?

Edit: are you suggesting that the poor service I got from WPEngine is in fact a cunning conspiracy to boost Page.ly sales?

Because ... well at least temporarily, yeah, I guess it worked perfectly.

"Cui bono?"

-dramatic violin music-

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#78

Post by bravoyankee »

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…

This is important information to me (I manage many wordpress sites). The author is just being frank, and that's a rarity in this world of shilling and murketing.

Where else am I going to read this?

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#79

Post by andrewf »

jacques_chester wrote: post #36
sgdesign wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any reason you're not hosting media on S3? That makes it a lot easier to move hosts, too.

Put simply: cost. Collectively it's a few hundred Gb per month of traffic which is completely covered by my Linode plan. These days I've put most of the sites behind Cloudflare, which has the effect that a lot of my media is being mirrored in their Sydney DC, which is nice because most of the readership is Australian -- the same reason I went to the Tokyo centre this time.

The Tokyo DC isn't a universal win for Australia. The results are actually pretty bimodal depending on your ISP.

From Perth, iiNet routes directly to Asia, and it's a big win. But Amnet routes AU -> US -> Asia and it's a big loss.

It's a big enough issue Australia-wide that Blizzard sells a dual-region Starcraft 2 in Australia, because (ping to battle.net Singapore for some) > (ping to battle.net US) > (ping to battle.net Singapore for others) to a significant degree.

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