My experience with WPEngine • Hacker News Board

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#231

Post by bigiain » Thu, Oct 25, 2012, 1:24 AM UTC

wyck wrote: post #205

smacktoward wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's your business, and advice on the Internet is worth as much as you paid for it. So don't worry, I don't take it personally if you disagree. 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 "Commo…

This is silly, infinite scaling doesn't mean "I can do whatever I want and it better work". Use some common sense.

"infinite scaling" means _exactly_ that. If you don't want people to use accepted dictionary definitions of words like "infinite", you should not use them in your marketing.

A few telcos here in Australia have recently lost court cases about their use of the word "infinite" in their cellphone plans/marketing, and then cutting off or charging extra to customers who "used too much". The court, rightly in my opinion, said that the meaning of the word "infinite" is clear and well known, and any claim that it included "limited, of course, by common sense" is bogus. Be careful of letting your marketing team write too much hyperbole - occasionally you'll be held legally accountable for it.

I suspect if the amount in dispute had been an order of magnitude or two larger, Jacques may well have had a strong enough case to find a no-win/no-fee lawyer to go into bat for him... I know I'd prefer not to have to explain to a judge how those first two boxes in the first column on the WPEngine homepage didn't cover all of Jacques complaints.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#232

Post by WillyF » Thu, Oct 25, 2012, 1:33 AM UTC

alexandros wrote: post #4

For all who are thinking about moving to WPEngine: Your staging server does not use WPE's caching technology, which your production server will use. WPE will not give you details on how their secret-sauce caching works. This means that things that work on staging will break on production. WPE also refuse to turn off their caching on production, but also refuse to turn ON their caching on your staging server. This mea…

I had an issue where an API call was failing for Googlebot and other crawlers. I was worried about this being seen as "cloaking," so I was trying to figure out what was causing. Couldn't be my code. The API provider said it wasn't them. I finally realized that it was WPEngine when I visited my staging server as Googlebot. The content that was supposed to show up showed up!

Part of their caching setup was causing the API request to fail for a select list of bots. The issue was escalated to a Sys Admin who figured out what the problem was. He tweaked my server and fixed the issue for me within a day. I think that is pretty good.

My point... if something is broken and you think it might be WPEngine's caching. Try it on your staging server.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#233

Post by caspar » Thu, Oct 25, 2012, 2:13 AM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #220

cocoflunchy wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. The way I see it, you are not selling the car, but providi…

To stretch the car analogies, perhaps torturously… It seems to me wordpress.com is the "we supply the racing car and driver" solution provider. You don't have to worry about how it gets driven, but you also have only limited say in what car you get and which lines the driver takes through corners. In my version, WPEngine are providing the race track - to which you bring your own car and driver. They go to a bit of ef…

Just a quick note to you and others who seem to be under an incorrect impression: I remember working with Jacques on a university project, and, in my opinion, he did not (and - based on comment history - still doesn't) fall into the "non-technical" bucket.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#234

Post by bigiain » Thu, Oct 25, 2012, 2:53 AM UTC

dotBen wrote: post #178

rdsubhas wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Really? Do you understand just how disingenuous that sounds?

I know Jacques didn't mention that the problem was with the stock installed-with-Wordpress Recent Comments widget until a couple of hour after you posted that comment, but _surely_ someone at WPEngine knew already that this wasn't a "custom code" issue?

From what I'm reading (and please correct me if this is wrong) a stock WP install with no plugins or custom themes, but with several hundred thousand rows in the comments table and the Recent Comments widget running - will crash hard on WPEngine (while running just fine on a "loltastically over provisioned Linode VPS).

In my view - that's a "Wordpress support issue" suitible for diagnosis by a "Wordpress expert", and a long way from "consultancy" for "building custom code".

It's true there needs to be a limit to what customers expect from hosting companies, but like it or not, you've set the expectation bar _very_ high with the marketing copy on your homepage, and you've got a wonderful social media reputation based on those expectations. At some stage, you need to suck it up and dedicate the time/expense to live up to that reputation, or inevitably social media will bring your reputation back down in line with your business behaviour/policies - and the wider the gap between the expectations you've set and the service you deliver, the more ammunition you're handing over to "the haters" to shoot you with.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#235

Post by bigiain » Thu, Oct 25, 2012, 2:58 AM UTC

caspar wrote: post #233

bigiain wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To stretch the car analogies, perhaps torturously… It seems to me wordpress.com is the "we supply the racing car and driver" solution provider. You don't have to worry about how it gets driven, but you also have only limited say in what car you get and which lines the driver takes through corners. In my version, WPEngine are providing the race track - to which you bring your own car and driver. They go to a bit of ef…

Just a quick note to you and others who seem to be under an incorrect impression: I remember working with Jacques on a university project, and, in my opinion, he did not (and - based on comment history - still doesn't) fall into the "non-technical" bucket.

Good point. By "non-technical", I intended to mean "not interested in being a Wordpress scaling/management expert". If my poor choice of words lead anyone to think I was claiming he was not technically skilled in other areas, my apologies...

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#236

Post by bigiain » Thu, Oct 25, 2012, 3:12 AM UTC

vampirechicken wrote: post #152

I'm curious for a side-by-side comparison of your linode vs the wpengine host: cpu, ram, etc. If you can perform the comment sort in memory without hassle, what is is about the size of RAM provisioned by wpengine that makes this impossible? My opinion, but for for $3000 per year, you should have been provisioned with as much ram as a linode VPS.

I was curious about the too.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#237

Post by wyck » Thu, Oct 25, 2012, 3:51 AM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #231

wyck wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is silly, infinite scaling doesn't mean "I can do whatever I want and it better work". Use some common sense.

"infinite scaling" means _exactly_ that. If you don't want people to use accepted dictionary definitions of words like "infinite", you should not use them in your marketing. A few telcos here in Australia have recently lost court cases about their use of the word "infinite" in their cellphone plans/marketing, and then cutting off or charging extra to customers who "used too much". The court, rightly in my opinion, sa…

The part where I said common sense is meant to be used, it implies context.

I can create an infinitely scalable server and you can come in and drop a sledge hammer on it...does that mean I shouldn't use the word.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#238

Post by wyck » Thu, Oct 25, 2012, 4:02 AM UTC

dangrossman wrote: post #70

jasonkester wrote: post #56

The important lesson to be learned here is that even though higher price points tend to shield you from the bulk of toxic customers, you'll still find the occasional toxic customer at even the highest price point from time to time. As nice a guy as this blogger probably is, he's the bane of services like WPEngine. There is no way to service the needs of his complex edge case of a system for anything like $250/month.…

Jason, what's up with this comment? Where did you find this 'complex edge case of a system' in his post? This 'unique setup'? Why do you think 'impossible things were about to become' when he was able to easily move the sites to WP Engine... after paying a 3rd party to do it? He didn't describe a single special requirement that I can see. Just plain old WordPress with some existing data to move. Not even a large netw…

Do you not read the part about him having over 400k comments? Don't you think that is a bit outside the regular scope?

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#239

Post by Karunamon » Thu, Oct 25, 2012, 4:27 AM UTC

gozmike wrote: post #57

jc4p wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm just suggesting that you refrain from the public flogging and find another solution. If you've spent more than a day in any online community you should have already learned that this, although it may not be preferable for the company at fault, is the fastest way to get something fixed or something changed. It'd be irresponsible for Jacques to stand by silently and suck up all the time and money he wasted days af…

Fastest != Most appropriate You're advocating revenge. I'd just like discussions to be discussions. Not attacks. The blog post read (to me at least) like an attack on a company with some obvious growing pains. There are ways to write a complaint that doesn't involve pointing out Cohen's self congratulation. The way the post is ended wreaks of jealous hatred. That is not the way you constructively criticize.

>You're advocating revenge.

Wait, what? Where? I saw nothing in that entire diatribe that sounded like a call to arms.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#240

Post by jacques_chester » Thu, Oct 25, 2012, 4:35 AM UTC

blueben wrote: post #218

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…

Just curious. Does your legal agreement allow you to share details about a customer's technical implementation, support tickets, and billing history to Hacker News?

I think it's fair that they can refer to the helpdesk discussions obliquely; I already have in my post.