221–230 of 250 posts
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"my bloggers"? How are these blogs related to you?
It's a convenient shorthand for "bloggers whose websites I host at my own expense because I like and admire their sites".
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"my bloggers"? How are these blogs related to you?
Curious why people are downvoting. This is a legitimate question. He refers to these bloggers paternalistically and seems to take some credit for their work, but doesn't actually specify his relationship. Good for him for sponsoring people, but it's a bit odd to imply he's deserving of any credit for their work simply for hosting a Wordpress instance. If they are paid employees, then that might be more appropriate, t…
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I suppose that's one way of looking at it. But what I said is true. It's a shame that out of all the things that every site on Ozblogistan has ever posted, this is the one that made the HN front page. There are far better posts than mine in those blogs. Is it wrong for me to be proud of them?
But now you are posting off-topic comments to that sensationalist post. This does harm to your credibility as a complaining customer, frankly, because now it seems you have an ulterior motive for complaining so loudly. Personally, I downvoted the comment and suggest you delete it.
The typical customer support process is bad for the complicated edge cases, which sometimes end up in threads like these. But it's good for business. You don't want your engineers attending to one person's problem. That's called consulting. You want them building product. Building perfect software is bad from a business point of view. In WPEngine's case, the takeaway from all this is to add a line to the customer req…
My case was not an edge case. WPEngine explicitly mention that they support Multisite, which has been part of the Wordpress mainline since 3.0. I haven't modified it at all.
Otherwise, I agree with your post. Support is hard.
"After a few hours of copying files, I flip the DNS switches" 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.
Absolutely, why would you ever do this without testing?
I've learnt this lesson well.
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He also didn't describe much of any of his technical requirements. I'd say it's a fair assumption his setup was enough different to cause an issue. Whether or not that's a fireable offense is up to the company.
He did, however describe the eventual problem: his comments table was larger than what Wordpress's out-of-the-box feature (Recent Comments) was able to sort. He had very overpowered hardware in his custom situation. It strikes me that this was an extroardinary but still within band problem that WPEngine should have eaten the cost for solving OR tell him MUCH more swiftly they couldn't.
The weeks of shitty service beforehand are what really did it.
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It's a bog ordinary Wordpress multisite installation. The most exotic thing about it was WP-supercache and WPEngine have clever inbuilt logic to safely disable that when you migrate across.
I'm more curious what VPS package you had powering your stuff at Linode and how much you were spending on it each month? Reason being that 250 USD buys a LOT of server these days and it is surprising you ended up with underpowered hardware if your VPS wasn't giving you any problems. If you're looking to upgrade in the future, you might be much better off throwing a dedicated server at the problem and setting a nightl…
Monthly cost is about $40 ... unless you count my time.
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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.
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> It appears that the author has some customizations (plugins..) that are really slow. The slowest piece of code on the network today is the Recent Comments Widget. That's not a plugin, that's right there in the base install. I worked this out myself, based on preliminary detective work by Page.ly. And then Page.ly went the rest of the way to ask a Wordpress core contributor for their opinion. The key issue is that t…
> The key issue is that this widget performs a query on the wp_comments table which becomes slower and slower as the number of comments rises.. I dont' see why a selective read based on primary key indexes is taking so long. How many rows are we talking about here ? I'm sure it's under a billion rows - right ? Partitioning it may help but I think there's something significantly wrong with the way the lookup is going…
But as I said elsewhere, the performance thing is just the straw that broke the camel's back.
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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…
FWIW, it's clear that you _did_ mislead Jacques.
Whether the assumptions he made were valid or not (and frankly, based on the content of your homepage, it's hard not to have sympathy for his point of view), he clearly expected you guys would do a better job hosting Wordpress that he could do himself on his own Linode VPS. He also clearly expected that if there were problems, your "Expert Wordpress Support" would provide the solutions. Instead he found your support guys effectively saying "we don't know how to do that" and flicking him on to WebSiteMovers, who _also_ end up saying "we don't know how to do that" and charging him $500 for failing.
So I think you did let Jacques down, and I think he has every reason to feel missled.
Constructive advice:
You should probably acknowledge, at least prominently enough that anyone researching your service with a view to becoming a paying customer will find it, that there are possible pathological cases and configurations which WPEngine's technology/infrastructure/service will not solve. If you don't want to feature this on the homepage (and I can understand you not wanting too), I'd suggest a note near the top of the Disallowed Plugins page - and probably re-wording that page to make clear that avoiding everything on the "complete list" of disallowed plugins doesn't guarantee a successful deployment, and also that it's possible for themes with certain code patterns in them to cause a WPEngine deployment to fail to perform as advertised.
Secondly (and I suspect you've already got this one in hand), you need to train your support staff to recognise more quickly installations with pathological performance things going on, and apologise and extricate yourselves and inform the customer as early in the process as practical. I don't know what the tone/implication in Seans message about the ~188k row sort was, but from reading your defence here I can't help but think there was at least a bit of "you're doing it wrong!" - which even when it's true, it's not the wording you want to feed an unhappy customer.
(Note: this is written as a happy WPE user, with some curiosity about exactly what went wrong, and why some guy with a Linode VPS can, in some cases, keep a Wordpress site up better then WPE. I'm suspecting he's got define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '2048M'); or something similar covering up some quickly hacked together "it works for me" not-very-well-though-out-code - which you can get away with on your own hardware/VPS, but not generally on shared hosting...)