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My experience with WPEngine

chester.id.au

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Re: My experience with WPEngine

#91

Post by debacle »

mgkimsal wrote: post #29
millennia wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, any WP hosting company is going to run into issues with non-standard installs, and they're not going to be able to accommodate any setup. If you have a customised WP install, it might not work on this sort of provider, they're optimising for speed, not dealing with, and they probably don't want the headache of trying to support any plugins or modifications that you might bring to WP. It would make sense f…

"and are instead trying to capture the market for hardened WP hosting for mostly vanilla installs." I don't know of any large WP installs that would need the benefit of outsourced WP hosting/experts that use 'vanilla installs'. They may exist, but I can't imagine they're a large portion of the market. Perhaps my scope of experience is too narrow in this respect?

Likely, yes. Most WP installs that I've done use 6-8 of the most supported plugins, a slightly customized theme, and mostly standard server configurations.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#92

Post by kordless »

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…

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.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#94

Post by jacques_chester »

whyleyc wrote: post #87
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #76

I host several sites on WPEngine and we've had some relatively minor issues. But we're getting ready to switch to multisite and now I'm nervous. We're generally happy, but we haven't been blown away. Jason, if you're not scrambling to deal with this mess, you will be soon. And the main message I have is that you need to back off the marketing side a little and let the technical and customer service side catch up. God…

I'm not sure he's scrambling quite yet: https://twitter.com/asmartbear/status/261103840231825409 https://twitter.com/asmartbear/status/261103530855784448

Recently I had an experience on another website where one of the founders basically insulted me personally because I made a sarcastic quip.

Another founder contacted me by email and apologised. It was dignified and mature of them to do that.

And so I consider that matter closed, which is why I am not going to name names here.

The contrast is unflattering and it's a shame.

I really, genuinely, wanted to like WPEngine.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#96

Post by ashray »

From the article comments:

> It’s a quiet backwater. Collectively the sites would have maybe 20k unique visitors a day. 50k is a big day hereabouts.

I'm not quite sure why this blog is such a huge problem to host. It appears that the author has some customizations (plugins..) that are really slow. In fact, I would suggest to the author to hire a good developer, fix those core issues (say slow SQL queries, etc.). It might cost him a few thousand dollars upfront, but he can continue running the site on $20-$60/month hosting.

Paying $250/month for that kind of traffic sounds over the top to me.

I know that Wordpress can be slow but it can also be quick. Why not route your traffic through cloudfront ? Why not leverage full page caching for anonymous users ? These are things worth looking at IMHO :)

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#97

Post by dotBen »

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 mistakes that were made on behalf of our company, as well as transparently engage the discussion here. There's a couple of points I'd like to make, if I may...

We're in the process of moving to complete 24/7 support right now (we do have emergency 'site down' 24/7 cover) - as any entrepreneur on HN will tell you, getting your startup to take off is hard and scaling the human aspect is perhaps even harder. With mostly US-based business customers it wasn't as much of an issue to begin with but we're now addressing that.

Obviously if we'd had that 24/7 support in place we could have addressed this more immediately.

However, 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 time. That just doesn't scale. From your post, I'm guessing this is the issue that also occurred when you tried Pagely. 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. Just like Heroku won't fix your Ruby code.

We have many, many clients who are very happy with WP Engine but as a growing business there will always be customers who find that the service isn't right for them, and even occasionally have a bad experience.

So lets try to make this right. I can see that we've already refunded you all the hosting fees you paid for your account, and I'll also make sure we pick up the $500 migration bill that you incurred. If there is anything else we can do please let me know.

I will also take time once I've finished my coffee and out of my PJ's to analyze your case further and see what else we can do internally to ensure this doesn't happen again.

Bests,

Ben, co-founder WP Engine

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4692775

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#98

Post by jacques_chester »

kordless wrote: post #92
dangrossman wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#99

Post by ssharp »

There appears to be a huge gap (maybe sweet spot?) in WP hosting. The lower end is well covered by companies like WP Engine, Page.ly, and ZippyKid. The high end is covered by Wordpress.com.

Somewhere in the middle, and probably closer to the low end, exists a need for less commoditized services to support more complex installations.

It doesn't appear like WP Engine is really positioned or resourced to actually support these needs and this is not the first time I've heard of these troubles.

Re: My experience with WPEngine

#100

Post by jacques_chester »

ashray wrote: post #96

From the article comments: > It’s a quiet backwater. Collectively the sites would have maybe 20k unique visitors a day. 50k is a big day hereabouts. I'm not quite sure why this blog is such a huge problem to host. It appears that the author has some customizations (plugins..) that are really slow. In fact, I would suggest to the author to hire a good developer, fix those core issues (say slow SQL queries, etc.). It m…

> 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 this widget performs a query on the wp_comments table which becomes slower and slower as the number of comments rises. The only real fixes are either to move to Disqus (my bloggers said "no") or partition the table (Page.ly politely said that this was outside the scope of anything under their enterprise plans).

> Why not route your traffic through cloudfront ?

I do.

> Why not leverage full page caching for anonymous users ?

That too.

I also have memcached for the object cache, I use a tuned copy of PerconaDB and nginx is configured to serve static files and supercache-generated whole pages without ever touching PHP.

The blog post you read was served from a blog on that very blog network, on Linode servers in Tokyo that I once again personally managing.

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