My experience with WPEngine • Hacker News Board

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#171

Post by grey-area » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 6:12 PM UTC

jacques_chester wrote: post #114

macspoofing wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

It it really an ordinary multisite install though? Do you have 188590 comments? Wouldn't you have trouble with any hosted providers if you are doing operations on that many records in memory (whether that is the fault of WP, or custom plugin code, it doesn't really matter)? If that's the case, it looks like your site just isn't a good fit for this type of service, but millions of others (including multi-sites) with say a few hundred posts and a few hundred or perhaps thousand comments are.

It's a shame that you had to go through all of this trauma to discover this, and there are obvious support failings here, but it does seem that your site is out of the ordinary in some respects, just because of the number of comments on one WP instance.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#172

Post by grey-area » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 6:14 PM UTC

jessedhillon wrote: post #169

grey-area wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not convinced a public forum is the best place for customer support ... I think a great heuristic here is this: your customers can be publicly negative, but you cannot. If you publicly flame a customer then, no matter how deserving the customer was, some future potential customers will look at that and say "That could be me." Most businesses, I think, can't afford to risk that. There are some notable counterexamp…

I think a great heuristic here is this: your customers can be publicly negative, but you cannot.

I agree 100%, the tweets are not helpful, but I disagree with the "disgusting" description and felt it was a little over the top.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#173

Post by nnq » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 6:16 PM UTC

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…

...you've just built a business which promises things like "infinite scalability" on top of WordPress ...expect 1000x more of situations like this!

...if I were in your place I'd drop the "solving this while yawning in my PJs" relaxed attitude and prepare to bring a sleeping bag to work and stack a fridge full of red-bull (or whatever makes you "fly") ...or try and hire someone like Ledorf ...'cause all the other "PHP gurus" are at Facebook now ...tough luck. I'd hate to be in your place, but no matter how much I hate the "PHP ecosystem" I hope you guys manage to make this work

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#174

Post by ashray » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 6:18 PM UTC

aoe wrote: post #168

jacques_chester wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From memory, the relevant fields are already indexed.

I'm guessing the recent comments widget is just doing an ORDER BY date DESC LIMIT 10 or something? With an index on date, I don't see how this could be slow. How long does the query take? How many rows do you have?

Appears that he has 188590 rows. It definitely sounds like a configuration issue. Maybe the mysql table cache might be bogged down or the query cache is full or malfunctioning. Could be a lot of things.

Sorting that into a temp table, and caching that in memory would be really fast on a server with reasonable RAM and proper indexes.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#175

Post by csomar » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 6:18 PM UTC

papsosouid wrote: post #131

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.

I don't understand the correlation between the two. From your perspective, since the financial market is terrible, all people working on finance are terrible.

WordPress is a bad piece of software. But there is a lot of money there, and you'll find lots of smart people working on it.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#176

Post by webwright » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 6:19 PM UTC

papsosouid wrote: post #131

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.

Yeah, WordPress powers (by some estimations) 18-20% of the freakin' Internet. It's not flawless, but it's a great piece of software that makes millions of people (and developers) happy.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#177

Post by csomar » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 6:19 PM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #115

csomar wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :-)

Yes, it is. Because it creates bad assumptions. Now, you'll have a ton of noobs assuming that you do that and that for free because you already did it.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#178

Post by dotBen » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 6:23 PM UTC

rdsubhas wrote: post #159

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 it's awesome that the good folks at Pagely were able to work with you a little to try to address your problem, like most PaaS providers (eg AWS, Heroku) we don't provide consultancy services - there is an amazing WordPress community of consultants and dev shops out there and its just not what we want to get into Which is fine, but then you website says this: - http://wpengine.com/wordpress-experts/ Not so at WP…

To address this point raised by many... you're glazing over the difference between support and consultancy. Many companies provide both but charge extra for the latter.

You quote 'we can help you track down and troubleshoot WordPress issues.' - that's exactly what the support team helps customers with all day long.

But we don't get into consultancy around helping to build custom code, etc.

There's always going to be a point where a hosting provider will not be able to support you further. Many dedicated providers and VPS providers will ensure that the machine is powered up and has connectivity and leave you at that. What we're trying to communicate is we go a lot further into supporting your use and configuration of WordPress - but not into consultancy.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#179

Post by drumdance » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 6:24 PM UTC

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…

I get what you're doing and why, but you could've avoided some of the pushback that's happening just by not pointing a finger or mentioning Heroku. So instead of "we can only run good code and yours isn't," make it more like "gee whiz, you have it doing an in-memory sort of 189k rows! Is that what you intended? Because that's really an edge case in our world?"

A friend of mine once said, "a customer will defend his bad decision to the death if you point it out to him."

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#180

Post by ryanwaggoner » Wed, Oct 24, 2012, 6:25 PM UTC

grey-area wrote: post #172

jessedhillon wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced a public forum is the best place for customer support ... I think a great heuristic here is this: your customers can be publicly negative, but you cannot. If you publicly flame a customer then, no matter how deserving the customer was, some future potential customers will look at that and say "That could be me." Most businesses, I think, can't afford to risk that. There are some notable counterexamp…

I think a great heuristic here is this: your customers can be publicly negative, but you cannot. I agree 100%, the tweets are not helpful, but I disagree with the "disgusting" description and felt it was a little over the top.

Sorry, it's just my personal opinion as a WPEngine customer, and I stand by it. I don't want to see the CEO of a service that I pay money to publicly behaving this way towards those customers and others who have had issues. It's the opposite of good customer service, and a great example of biting the hand that feeds you.