Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My experience with WPEngine

chester.id.au

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 250 posts

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#131

Post by papsosouid »

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…

>As a seasoned WordPress developer

You realize that puts your credibility in the negatives right? Wordpress is infamous for being one of the worst pieces of software ever created. The fact that your software is terrible does not mean a company whose sole purpose is to be experts at making that terrible software run is doing good by failing to make it run.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#132

Post by jessedhillon »

grey-area wrote: post #122
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't see what you think is disgusting about these tweets, they express a personal opinion, here they are in case they are deleted: @billmcneely yup, there's always someone bitter and hateful. Sometimes they even have a point, but choose to make it in a destructive way. @P_Doubleya @gozmike thanks guys. That's also why I ignore HN. There's always haters. That's not ridiculing customers, and it's not disgusting or d…

Why do people always insist on being the devil's advocate on HN? Suppose you went to the supermarket to try and return some spoiled food, and they deny you so you give them a bad Yelp review. A harsh one even.

Would you consider it reasonable to be the subject of the manager's tweet, or open letter or any other kind of public message calling you someone who cannot be pleased, who has an agenda against the store, is disposed toward bitterness, and is communicating destructively.

How is that not disrespectful?

Edit: minor

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#133

Post by thenomad »

graupel wrote: post #58

For sites that are large enough/can afford it, I cannot say enough good things about WordPress VIP - we have 20+ sites on VIP and could not be happier with it. Since they 'are' WordPress they can make pretty much anything that does not modify core, work. It's not for everyone, but for the right sites (high traffic/high availability/generating revenue) it's fantastic.

Interesting, thanks. I suspect we're still too small, but I'm checking the service out anyway.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#134

Post by ohashi »

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…

What doesn't make sense about it?

I can see a lot of scenarios where you start with a CMS because it does a good job of doing what you need. Why reinvent the wheel?

Scaling issues is going to occur in all code, even code you write and know inside and out. It just means you become entirely responsible for debugging and re-architecting to improve its performance.

@Drupal specific comment, you could easily throw nginx as a reverse proxy with a cache in front if everything is static and be done with it.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#135

Post by pixard »

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 don't provide consulting services surely this would fall under "troubleshooting WordPress", no? This is taken straight from your website[1]:

The Most WordPress Experts Per 1000 Customers…

Great support? Many hosting companies claim this. But when you’re hosting WordPress, you need specific support. If a plugin breaks, or a theme file doesn’t work, and you’re hosted with a typical hosting company, they’ll throw up their hands and say “Not responsible! We just provide the server and the bandwidth, buddy.”

Not so at WP Engine. Our staff consists entirely of WordPress experts, so we can help you track down and troubleshoot WordPress issues.

[1] http://wpengine.com/wordpress-experts/

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#136

Post by dotBen »

smacktoward wrote: post #124
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…

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 tim…

"The (strong) implication being that any WordPress configuration will perform better on WPEngine than on an alternative hosting platform."

No, there's no inference or implication that any (ie regardless of how its built) WordPress configuration will scale on WP Engine. As I wrote in my prior comment, scalability is a partnership between infrastructure and code. That's the case irregardless of framework and PaaS provider.

We like car analogies at WP Engine - if I sell you a racing car and you're only a moderately good driver then you're going to crash when you approach the corner at 200mph. There's little I can do about that other than teach you to drive, and I'm in the business of building the cars. There are plenty of folks who can help you improve your race-craft out there.

To say that we've missled someone is an unfair assertion.

If I analyze the suggestions you're making in your comment here...

* Jacques complained about lack of 24/7 support, but I shouldn't have tried to reply and explain the reason for that because 'there's no crying in business'. ?????

* The WP Engine website shouldn't mention scaling WordPress because it's not technically possible to scale all WordPress code regardless of how it's written. (What should our site say? What should any scale-orientated PaaS website say given the same issues apply to anyone in this space)

* WP Engine should vet and screen it's customers so that they must prove their code can scale before we sell them an account? ?????

I'm sorry, but if that's the advice you're offering then, with respect, I don't agree.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#137

Post by grey-area »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #127
grey-area wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see what you think is disgusting about these tweets, they express a personal opinion, here they are in case they are deleted: @billmcneely yup, there's always someone bitter and hateful. Sometimes they even have a point, but choose to make it in a destructive way. @P_Doubleya @gozmike thanks guys. That's also why I ignore HN. There's always haters. That's not ridiculing customers, and it's not disgusting or d…

No, he's basically brushing the OP and everyone in this thread off as being hatful and bitter, and not really worth interacting with. It's incredibly dismissive, especially since multiple people in this thread (myself included) have mentioned that they've had issues and are or were paying customers . I'll grant you that "ridiculing" is probably not the right word...maybe dismissive or condescending would have been mo…

I'm not convinced a public forum is the best place for customer support - witness Ben's very reasonable statement above which is still accruing negative responses, in spite of going well beyond the call of duty in refunding money paid to a completely different service. It's quite hard to interact with a crowd baying for blood - emotions run high, and people tend to pick sides and pick holes in any argument. One response to that is to ignore the crowd and try to deal with the particular customers - that's what I take the tweets to mean.

It's fair to criticise those tweets and I don't feel they are appropriate really, but I don't think they should be classified as disgusting - misguided and inappropriate at this particular time, perhaps, but not disgusting. Isn't it better to deal with situations like this without escalating emotions further and degenerating into both sides insulting each other?

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#138

Post by jacques_chester »

dotBen wrote: post #136
smacktoward wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tim…

"The (strong) implication being that any WordPress configuration will perform better on WPEngine than on an alternative hosting platform." No, there's no inference or implication that any (ie regardless of how its built) WordPress configuration will scale on WP Engine. As I wrote in my prior comment, scalability is a partnership between infrastructure and code. That's the case irregardless of framework and PaaS provi…

In fairness to you, and I said this, the 24/7 thing is on me. I just assumed you had it. I should've checked.

Edit: and Wordpress is a monster. But that's why I wanted to pay you guys in the first place.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#140

Post by jacques_chester »

grey-area wrote: post #137
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he's basically brushing the OP and everyone in this thread off as being hatful and bitter, and not really worth interacting with. It's incredibly dismissive, especially since multiple people in this thread (myself included) have mentioned that they've had issues and are or were paying customers . I'll grant you that "ridiculing" is probably not the right word...maybe dismissive or condescending would have been mo…

I'm not convinced a public forum is the best place for customer support - witness Ben's very reasonable statement above which is still accruing negative responses, in spite of going well beyond the call of duty in refunding money paid to a completely different service . It's quite hard to interact with a crowd baying for blood - emotions run high, and people tend to pick sides and pick holes in any argument. One resp…

OK. This I can't be reasonable about.

The completely different service refund wouldn't be necessary if the not different service had been up to expectation in the first instance.

I feel absolutely justified in being refunded that amount by WPEngine.

Post reply on HN