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My experience with WPEngine

chester.id.au

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Re: My experience with WPEngine

#111

Post by jacques_chester »

rmrfrmrf wrote: post #108
jacques_chester wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You're ignoring the fact that your post on WPEngine is actually relevant to this site, whereas only one of your promoted posts has anything to do with tech. It's not wrong to be proud, but I have to agree that blatant advertising is distasteful no matter which way you slice it.

I don't agree with you, but I can understand why you feel that way.

In case you are wondering, I don't make any money from the traffic. Each of the blogs decide for themselves whether to host advertising.

I sometimes forget that because I have about 3k advertising servers blocked in my hosts file ...

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#112

Post by ryanwaggoner »

dotBen wrote: post #97

Ben, one of the co-founders of WP Engine here and as someone wrote below[1] - yes, this isn't the most wonderful thing to wake up to in the morning and sort out while still in your PJ's ;) Ok, so first and foremost I am incredibly sorry, Jacques, for the experience you had. I can say with confidence that your experience with WP Engine is out of the ordinary, but no excuses. I’m writing this as a way of owning up to m…

While you're looking into this, you really need to jump on your cofounder Jason, who is currently making a complete ass of himself (and WPEngine) with bullshit like this:

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

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

Ben, I really appreciate you taking the time to post this here and demonstrate that you take this seriously, but your cofounder is currently publicly ridiculing customers who have paid good money and been dissatisfied with your service.

As a current customer of WPEngine (who has had issues), nothing makes me want to bail on you guys as much as those two tweets. From the CEO.

Completely disgusting.

EDIT: This is more what I expected to see from Jason, though even this has a weird tone: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4086553

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#113

Post by dbarlett »

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.

Page.ly was awful. When my sites weren't down due to botched infrastructure upgrades, users would get locked out of the admin interface by "FireHost Website Protection" (FireHost was/is their underlying hosting provider). The same sad cycle repeated multiple times:

1. Email FireHost with the event IDs and a request to unblock.

2. FireHost doesn't reply for 24 hours, or if they do it's with "we can't find that event in our logs".

3. I open a Page.ly ticket

4. "El Vaquero Furioso" (yes, that was his name in Zendesk) replies that the issue is fixed and won't happen again.

5. I ask for the root cause and what steps were taken.

6. Crickets, or a snide response from the founder that "we're all on the same team".

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#114

Post by jacques_chester »

macspoofing wrote: post #110
jacques_chester wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, what he means is that Page.ly went above and beyond what is reasonable for the price you're paying them. Yes, it was very nice of them, and most likely they did it because they are a young and hungry company. At the end of if all, I don't really get a sense from what you wrote that WPEngine service was terrible. It sounds like you were a difficult customer with difficult architectural issues that were ultimately…

I don't see how an ordinary multisite installation -- which they specifically namecheck on their website -- is a "difficult architectural issue".

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#115

Post by thaumaturgy »

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.

HN cracks me up sometimes. Above-and-beyond customer service is now "bad strategy"? Hah. :-)

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#116

Post by jacques_chester »

dbarlett wrote: post #113
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.

Page.ly was awful. When my sites weren't down due to botched infrastructure upgrades, users would get locked out of the admin interface by "FireHost Website Protection" (FireHost was/is their underlying hosting provider). The same sad cycle repeated multiple times: 1. Email FireHost with the event IDs and a request to unblock. 2. FireHost doesn't reply for 24 hours, or if they do it's with "we can't find that event i…

That sucks.

I guess it's like how, in this thread, lots of people are saying they've had great experiences with WPEngine and then there's me, suddenly internet-famous as that unhappy WPEngine customer.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#117

Post by neilwillgettoit »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #112
dotBen wrote: post #97

Ben, one of the co-founders of WP Engine here and as someone wrote below[1] - yes, this isn't the most wonderful thing to wake up to in the morning and sort out while still in your PJ's ;) Ok, so first and foremost I am incredibly sorry, Jacques, for the experience you had. I can say with confidence that your experience with WP Engine is out of the ordinary, but no excuses. I’m writing this as a way of owning up to m…

While you're looking into this, you really need to jump on your cofounder Jason, who is currently making a complete ass of himself (and WPEngine) with bullshit like this: https://twitter.com/asmartbear/status/261103840231825409 https://twitter.com/asmartbear/status/261103530855784448 Ben, I really appreciate you taking the time to post this here and demonstrate that you take this seriously, but your cofounder is curr…

Customer service 101: don't publicly shame a negative review. It only helps your ego, not your business.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#118

Post by harrylove »

Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #45

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).

Just write a better, non-link-bait headline.

"Apple.com takes 25 minutes to load" "Wired says Microsoft Surface is Quite the Stunner"

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#119

Post by motoford »

dotBen wrote: post #97

Ben, one of the co-founders of WP Engine here and as someone wrote below[1] - yes, this isn't the most wonderful thing to wake up to in the morning and sort out while still in your PJ's ;) Ok, so first and foremost I am incredibly sorry, Jacques, for the experience you had. I can say with confidence that your experience with WP Engine is out of the ordinary, but no excuses. I’m writing this as a way of owning up to m…

Good, reasonable response, IMO.

Ben, I don't know Jacques and don't pretend to speak for him, but I gather from his post that the scaling issue, and you not being able to accommodate him, would have been no big deal if he had not already been through the nightmare of migrating with bad documentation and support not handling that properly.

I think cascading frustration is what got him.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#120

Post by MattRogish »

jacques_chester wrote: post #100
ashray wrote: post #96

From the article comments: > It’s a quiet backwater. Collectively the sites would have maybe 20k unique visitors a day. 50k is a big day hereabouts. I'm not quite sure why this blog is such a huge problem to host. It appears that the author has some customizations (plugins..) that are really slow. In fact, I would suggest to the author to hire a good developer, fix those core issues (say slow SQL queries, etc.). It m…

> It appears that the author has some customizations (plugins..) that are really slow. The slowest piece of code on the network today is the Recent Comments Widget. That's not a plugin, that's right there in the base install. I worked this out myself, based on preliminary detective work by Page.ly. And then Page.ly went the rest of the way to ask a Wordpress core contributor for their opinion. The key issue is that t…

Partition? Why won't a simple DBMS index help?
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