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My experience with WPEngine

chester.id.au

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Re: My experience with WPEngine

#81

Post by jacques_chester »

andrewf wrote: post #79
jacques_chester wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 battl…

Fascinating, I didn't know that.

So, being in Perth, I've picked the DC that serves me best. Hmm. I guess I will ask my bloggers how noticeable it is.

I tossed up hosting in Australia, but the bandwidth is just so utterly ruinous.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#82

Post by ck2 »

jamesmiller5 wrote: post #72
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.

I don't think you follow that with a local file system, file stat (basically to see if the timestamp has changed or file modified) can be done directly inside the local memory cache.

On NFS/NAS it cannot be done locally, because other devices may have had access to the remote filesystem and changed files. So it has to travel the network to make the query. Even if it doesn't have to touch the disk remotely and can fetch it from a remote cache, it's significantly slower than local. Even if it's only 1ms per file, if there are 300 files, that's 300ms (a third of a second) on the SERVER side, before it can start sending output to the internet.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#83

Post by typicalrunt »

WordPress, like most LAMP apps of its era, makes a series of architectural assumptions that turn out to have horrible impact on non-functional qualities … but that’s another rant for another day.

Until I came to this sentence, I was coming to the conclusion that CMSes fall down fairly quickly once you add in large data, large traffic, or complex installs. For the life of me, I can't see why people continue to use CMSes for large projects anymore, when they could potentially code something up faster in Django/Symfony/Rails and, here's the kicker, know the codebase inside and out.

My client has simple marketing (read: 99% static) websites that are built on Drupal. Sounds good at first, and it almost makes sense... and then you get to the non-functional requirement that it needs to withstand a marketing event that can bring 2k+ concurrent users for over 24 hours. Then you watch Drupal meltdown the server.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#84

Post by csomar »

jacques_chester wrote: post #77
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-

So you are the OP. I won't argue with you much. I'm in the WordPress business for many years. What I meant Page.ly is providing a generous support service to keep its' clients. This is a bad strategy because it makes wrong assumptions of what their main service is.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#85

Post by jacques_chester »

typicalrunt wrote: post #83

WordPress, like most LAMP apps of its era, makes a series of architectural assumptions that turn out to have horrible impact on non-functional qualities … but that’s another rant for another day. Until I came to this sentence, I was coming to the conclusion that CMSes fall down fairly quickly once you add in large data, large traffic, or complex installs. For the life of me, I can't see why people continue to use CMS…

When I applied to do my honours year, I wrote four project proposals. One was to basically turn the architecture of such applications inside out by making the virtual machine the target of deployment. This allows you to get out of a lot of architectural holes that shared hosting forces on you.

Email me if you're interested in reading the proposal, I have it lying around somewhere.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#86

Post by jacques_chester »

csomar wrote: post #84
jacques_chester wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-

So you are the OP. I won't argue with you much. I'm in the WordPress business for many years. What I meant Page.ly is providing a generous support service to keep its' clients. This is a bad strategy because it makes wrong assumptions of what their main service is.

Yes, I guess they should focus more heavily on the terrible customer service market instead.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#87

Post by whyleyc »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #76

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. God…

I'm not sure he's scrambling quite yet:

https://twitter.com/asmartbear/status/261103840231825409

https://twitter.com/asmartbear/status/261103530855784448

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#88

Post by stevenkovar »

jacques_chester wrote: post #3

Of 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. http://ozblogistan.com.au/ Take, for example, this recent extremely intelligent discussio…

Seems a bit distasteful to publicly attack a popular service, then try to siphon the traffic their name generates to your "bloggers."

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#89

Post by jacques_chester »

stevenkovar wrote: post #88
jacques_chester wrote: post #3

Of 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. http://ozblogistan.com.au/ Take, for example, this recent extremely intelligent discussio…

Seems a bit distasteful to publicly attack a popular service, then try to siphon the traffic their name generates to your "bloggers."

I suppose that's one way of looking at it.

But what I said is true. It's a shame that out of all the things that every site on Ozblogistan has ever posted, this is the one that made the HN front page.

There are far better posts than mine in those blogs. Is it wrong for me to be proud of them?

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#90

Post by benatkin »

jacques_chester wrote: post #60
jasonkester wrote: post #56

The 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.…

Multisite networks are not an edge case. It is part of the mainline code for Wordpress. It is present in the base installation. WPEngine specifically advertise that they support it . Also ... since when did we start considering people who expect to get what they were promised by the sales copy to be "toxic customers"?

ZippyKid wins. Hosts of open source software don't have to support every feature, and the right way to omit a feature is to say that it isn't supported in the documentation.
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