One of the reasons that your site experienced problems was that there were some aspects of the site development that simply didn't scale. Like any scale-orientated PaaS, we can provide the infrastructure to enable you to scale but your code needs to work in partnership to fully achieve that.As Sean, my head SysAdmin wrote on a ticket to you, some of your pages were performing a sort on 188590 rows in memory each time. That just doesn't scale.
From a customer service perspective, this comment leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
You guys say right on your home page that you're "infinitely scalable." And then if you click through to http://wpengine.com/scale-to-millions-of-hits-a-day-or-hour/ you read that WPEngine features "secret sauce" made of "one of the most scalable WordPress architectures on Earth" that makes you "faster and more scalable all the time." The (strong) implication being that any WordPress configuration will perform better on WPEngine than on an alternative hosting platform.
So if someone comes to you with a WordPress configuration that you can't make "faster and more scalable" by running it on your platform, isn't The Right Thing To Do to say "oops, our bad, sorry we misled you" rather than blaming the customer for having a bad WordPress configuration? Because that's what you're doing here -- blaming the customer.
In fact your comment basically boils down to three parts, only one of which is reassuring:
* Paragraphs 1-4 translate to "we're a growing startup and growing customer support is hard," which frankly if I were a customer I wouldn't care about in the least. Scaling your business is your problem, not my problem. We know it's hard, but it's like Tom Hanks said in A League of Their Own (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPqYnC-SW5w) -- there's no crying in business.
* Paragraphs 5-7 translate to "your web site sucks, no wonder we couldn't scale it, nobody could," which is the blaming the customer part. I don't doubt that that is true (WP can be a real hog, especially if it's hacked up), but if you're advertising yourself as The People Who Can Scale WordPress, you shouldn't be surprised when people start coming to you with funky, hacked-up, hard-to-scale WordPress sites. Who else would someone with a site that can't scale go to but the scaling experts? When that happens it's OK to step back and say "we can't scale this," but it's not their fault for taking your marketing materials at their word.
* It's not till Paragraph 8 that we get to the "let's try to make this right" part, which is where this comment should have started.
I don't say this to be a pain or to make what I'm sure is already a difficult day worse. I'm saying it because I like what you guys are trying to do, and responses like this hurt you as much (if not more) as they help.
I've had to deal with situations like this myself, and no matter how tempting it is to blame the customer -- even when the customer is manifestly at fault -- it never, ever, ever improves the situation. It just makes things worse, first by giving the angry customer something new to be angry about, and second by deflecting you from the more important question of what you can do to prevent the situation from happening again. In this case, for instance, better screening of incoming customers to ensure their sites really can be scaled on the WPEngine platform would filter out problems like this before they become problems. (IIRC you've already started doing this, by blacklisting a small set of known-bad plugins. Maybe that list needs to be beefed up?) But time spent sniping at customers is time not spent making those improvements happen.