My experience with WPEngine

While perhaps the issue ended up mostly being due to a Wordpress core issue, I question why this was an issue for a service that someone is expected to pay $250/month for?

The OP was able to, without a team of engineers/admins get the same content running on a VPS with no issue. I then question exactly what one gets when they pay $250/month for this service? To expect to get any sort of scaling capability out of a $8-$30/month shared hosting account is asinine and anyone running more than a small amount of traffic under such circumstances deserves what they get.

Why then if the end service was not capable of sustaining traffic/memory to the same degree that some shared providers are willing to go, would one pay $250/month? I think this is a question the creators of WP Engine genuinely need to answer...

There's a big difference between being infinitely scalable, and being infinitely foolproof. If your PaaS exposes enough power to the user, they'll find a way to shoot themselves in the foot occasionally.

That being said...

No, there's no inference or implication that any WordPress configuration will scale on WP Engine.

I would humbly suggest that your entire Web site is a refutation of this assertion. Even moving beyond the copy on the home page to the fine-print "Common Questions" section of http://wpengine.com/pricing/ , there's no disclaimer or other "are there WordPress configurations that WPEngine can't scale?" fine print.

My point here isn't that you shouldn't promise scaling, it's that it's not hard to see how a mismatch could arise between your expectations (scaling is hard, customer code can make it harder) and customers' expectations (scaling is easy, WPEngine has figured it out).

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'. ?????

Yes. If a customer complains about a lack of 24/7 support, you say "I'm sorry, but we're not in a position to provide that level of support at this time." And nothing else. The reason why you're not in a position to provide it is irrelevant to the customer, and risks sidetracking the conversation into a blind alley about the reasons.

It also feels a little bit like pleading for understanding -- "cut us some slack, this stuff is hard!" -- which is off-putting. Of course it's hard, that's why people pay you to do it for them.

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

As I said, you already do some vetting by disabling plugins you know to be performance-killers. Look at this list: http://support.wpengine.com/disallowed-plugins/ , there's an entire category called "CPU/MySQL Thrashing Plugins."

I'm not suggesting that you need to give your customers a full CIA background check before bringing them on board, but you've already moved beyond just taking whatever code customers throw at you. If there's other things that need to be disallowed to ensure that WP sites work on your platform, the thing to do is to find out what those things are and add them to the blacklist.

Again, just my $0.02, IMHO, YMMV, IANAL, etc.

WAT! Just add the domain to your hosts file with the WPEngine IP and test the site first, it's crazy to change your DNS without checking the site works first.

We recently chose not to go with WpEngine because of the confusing help solutions we could see, a few reviews we saw. We ultimately went with ServInt and have been really happy with the move and support.

And to your point the pricing didn't feel right, it didn't make sense compared to similar options (or what we thought was similar)-- maybe I am off base though, it just what we discussed at the time.