My experience with WPEngine

For all who are thinking about moving to WPEngine:<p>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 means there is no real way to test. Things that work with their staging server, and even work with the standard WP caching plugins, will break in WPE production.<p>Their solution? Buy another production site to test on.<p>That website is now moving from WPEngine after having its launch botched by the aforementioned issues, and after not being able to make a basic paywall work with their caching. Once they realised the use case, WPE simply suggested moving elsewhere without making any further effort to accommodate.<p>I had a similar reaction to the post yesterday by asmartbear as Jaques, but he made the extra effort to actually write the blogpost, so bravo to him. WPE enjoys this sterling reputation that misleads a lot of people into using them, but their comfort zone it seems is limited to vanilla WP installs with little deviation.

Of all the things I've ever written on the blog (and ok, most of the earlier stuff is as tedious as watching the guy who watches the grass grow), it's sorta sad that only the one with the sensationalist title has ever made the front page at HN.<p>So, while I'm here, go look at my very nice bloggers. I regularly submit their stuff.<p><a href="http://ozblogistan.com.au/" rel="nofollow">http://ozblogistan.com.au/</a><p>Take, for example, this recent extremely intelligent discussion of privacy in the current internet:<p><a href="http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/10/19/manners-cost-nothing/" rel="nofollow">http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/10/19/manners-cost-nothing/</a><p>Or this discussion of the roots of order/chaos good/evil dualities in agricultural society: <a href="http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/10/16/war-and-peace/" rel="nofollow">http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/10/16/war-and-peace/</a><p>This confronting moral conundrum from the Massacre of Srebrenica: <a href="http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/10/24/srebrenica-should-the-soldiers-protecting-the-enclave-have-died/" rel="nofollow">http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/10/24/srebrenica-should-the-so...</a><p>This discussion of the deadening effect of media laws upon Australian free speech: <a href="http://catallaxyfiles.com/2012/10/24/the-deadening-of-free-speech-in-australia-continues/" rel="nofollow">http://catallaxyfiles.com/2012/10/24/the-deadening-of-free-s...</a><p>and so on and so forth.<p>I am enormously proud of all my bloggers.

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.<p>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.<p>Godaddy makes an incredible amount of money, but they're still a terrible company from a technical and customer service perspective. But their marketing is so effective that they can get away with that [1].<p>I wonder if Jason Cohen's position in the tech community and general marketing prowess has allowed WPEngine to get ahead of themselves? I know when I read Patrick's blog post about WPEngine, I was really excited and it was a service that I <i>wanted</i> to like. And I do like them, but I'm not excited about them at all anymore.<p>1. Interestingly, Google is the exact opposite, and their customer service makes me want to take a spoon to my own eyes.

This story and comments have been flogged to death a bit already, but I do have a couple questions/concerns here.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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...

WPEngine uses NFS/NAS which is a show-stopper. Dreamhost has the same issue, and GoDaddy (still?)<p>You never, ever, use NFS on something with hundreds of files to load for every page (ie. WordPress).<p>Every file takes 2-2.5ms to stat/load on NFS (<i>from my tests on WPengine</i>) which seems small but adds up fast.<p>It means you instantly have 700ms or more of overhead on the SERVER side to render a page (not transmit to the browser, just to render).<p>You can somewhat get around this by using an opcode cache and turning off file stat but there are still some files that have to be checked like static data read from the disk and turning stat off has other issues when editing code like having to flush the cache.

May as well throw in my own experience with WPEngine...<p>We run a relatively small member site (&#60;1000 active members) that operates on WordPress. We tried migrating the site to WPEngine, but could never get the membership plugin working as expected. Over a course of about 2 months we tried everything possible to get it working, and talked with their support on a near daily basis.<p>Overall, their support team tried to be helpful. They weren't always responsive (sometimes we wouldn't get a response for a day, or we would be waiting on hold for a long time), and we ran into the problem of different support people telling us different things about how their system was setup. Eventually one of the co-founders got involved in the support, but we still were not able to resolve the issue.<p>I managed to find 2 other people using the plugin that had run into the same problem with us on WPEngine. WPEngine claimed that other customers of theirs used the same membership plugin without any issues. I don't feel they lied, but we clearly weren't alone in this problem.<p>In the end, we moved to another WordPress host and were able to get up and running in no time. Unfortunately, WPEngine refused to refund us fully for the 2 months we wasted trying to get our site setup because we went past the 60 day money-back period. (We had paid for the 3rd month already, and they gave us a partial refund of that month only.) It was a relatively small amount of money, but after all the trouble we had with them it would have left a much better impression if they would have refunded the entire cost we paid.<p>I'm sure that WPEngine has thousands of happy customers, and our experience was largely unique, but there are many things I felt they could have done a better job of.

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.<p>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 install in their server. This is your responsibility.<p>Setting up a WordPress blog can be easy (5 minutes) and complicated (Professionals charge up to $350/hour). What you are asking for is someone to move your blog. Fine. You are responsible for that. WPEngine offers you a "6 hours coupon" from another service. That is, they are not responsible for that.<p>Page.ly are probably doing this to get more clients. This is the <i>wrong thing to do</i>, because their support service can't scale this way. I have been doing this to bootstrap my services and it had more negative consequences than positive ones.<p>tl;dr: The OP is expecting WP consultancy services for signing up to WPEngine.

We have a similar experience trying to move a large local newspaper in WP (500k+ posts) from our architecture to WPEngine, after over 1200 U$D spend, sadly we rollback to old setup.

I run one of the largest WP installs outside of WP.com, and we've seriously struggled with performance issues. Sounds like a lot of this complaint is a WP design/performance issue. If you're looking to be create a WP serving platform, it will require a huge amount of custom configuration, a huge amount of hardware (even with the best caching), regular DB maintenance and reconfiguration, and core hacks. Automattic redirects the core dev when they need something, generally only enough to add their hooks, then they write a plugin, release it to the community, but always keep it a few versions back (HyperDB support for 3.4 anyone?)<p>The WP core team doesn't write code with performance, scalability, orthogonal design, good standards or any such thing in mind and you regularly hit gotchas. However... if you sign up to be a WP platform, you're kinda asking for it.<p>Obligatory performance tips: 1. Cache the heck out of it. CDN, varnish, optcode (APC), query caching on MySQL. 2. As has been noted, file stat'ing is massive. You have to have an exclusive install as close to each serving node as possible, even with optcode caching. 3. Core hack - Modify admin comment searching. Does 5 column wildcard lookups across the entire table. Not scalable. (<a href="http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/20487" rel="nofollow">http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/20487</a>) 4. Core hack - Remove content reallocation on user delete. With large user tables, you lose the ability to delete users (core fix pending: <a href="http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/19867" rel="nofollow">http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/19867</a>) 5. Clean and optimize your DB regularly - Old post revisions are a huge gain 6. Add indexes intelligently - WP doesn't include all the indexes you need 7. Horizontally scale your DB (whether through MySQL clustering, or HyperDB + DBs with roles) 8. Tune everything. I've found that NGINX/Apache and Percona/MySQL make little difference, but setting the right config for each daemon makes huge difference.

I want a two word tl;dr summary of every article in the title:<p>How fast is... Apple.com? (tl;dr: not very); Wired's Review of the Microsoft Surface (tl;dr: pretty interesting).

A hosting company without 24 hour support is not a hosting company.<p>Go with Rackspace. They're expensive compared to budget hosts, but they seem to have an army of sysadmins available 24/7/365 that never say "that's your problem" / "not in scope".<p>PS: that redirect bug is probably a mismatch of your site_url setting in either wp_blogs, the wp_options table of your primary blog, or the wp-config.php. If the domain set in any of those 3 places doesn't match you get that endless redirect loop. Could also be htaccess sending you to www or no-www, and your config is set the other way. Its an annoyingly common issue when moving MU sites, and they should have been able to fix it.

For sites that are large enough/can afford it, I cannot say enough good things about WordPress VIP - we have 20+ sites on VIP and could not be happier with it.<p>Since they 'are' WordPress they can make pretty much anything that does not modify core, work. It's not for everyone, but for the right sites (high traffic/high availability/generating revenue) it's fantastic.

<i>WordPress, like most LAMP apps of its era, makes a series of architectural assumptions that turn out to have horrible impact on non-functional qualities … but that’s another rant for another day.</i><p>Until I came to this sentence, I was coming to the conclusion that CMSes fall down fairly quickly once you add in large data, large traffic, or complex installs. For the life of me, I can't see why people continue to use CMSes for large projects anymore, when they could potentially code something up faster in Django/Symfony/Rails and, here's the kicker, know the codebase inside and out.<p>My client has simple marketing (read: 99% static) websites that are built on Drupal. Sounds good at first, and it almost makes sense... and then you get to the non-functional requirement that it needs to withstand a marketing event that can bring 2k+ concurrent users for over 24 hours. Then you watch Drupal meltdown the server.

I've had a radically different experience with WP Engine and would happily recommend them to others, and have done so.<p>I went through 3 or 4 different providers, and the only place that i was really happy with setup, infrastructure and support was WPEngine.<p>As some of the other guys have stated regards the caching and their suitability to vanilla installs, i think that is most likely the case, and yes mine was a pretty vanilla install in the grand scheme of things, but i'd still choose them over anyone else.

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 ;)<p>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...<p>We're in the process of moving to complete 24/7 support right now <i>(we do have emergency 'site down' 24/7 cover)</i> - 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.<p>Obviously if we'd had that 24/7 support in place we could have addressed this more immediately.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Bests,<p>Ben, co-founder WP Engine<p>[1] <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4692775" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4692775</a>

Worth interjecting a counterpoint here, I think.<p>I've been running a site about the same size as the OP's (500k-ish visitors a month) with WPEngine for nearly a year now, and so far I'm very impressed. It's smoother and faster than it was before, we've only had one outage of more than an hour (and they responded by crediting me with a full month's hosting!), and I've found their support to be absolutely top-notch.<p>I wrote a review of their service after a month - which I don't think I ever submitted to HN, d'oh - and all the points I make in it still stand: <a href="http://www.mmomeltingpot.com/2012/03/wpengine-review-after-1-month-and-250k-visitors-is-this-the-best-wordpress-hosting-money-can-buy/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mmomeltingpot.com/2012/03/wpengine-review-after-1...</a> . My key point there, which I stand by, was that moving to WPEngine saved me money over an apparently cheaper self-hosted solution, because I no longer had to spend 2-3 days a month faffing around with server problems. (I believe Patio11 had a similar experience.)<p>(Note - there's an affiliate link in there, because I find that with money I can buy goods and services, but I added that after writing the review.)<p>Just recently I've had an extremely helpful dialog with one of their support engineers which ended up troubleshooting a problem I didn't even know my blog had - which subsequently boosted my available ad inventory by about 25%.<p>Overall, WPEngine aren't perfect - and I'm still checking out other options from time to time - but I've found their support and general solid hosting more than worth the admittedly pretty significant cost.

My experience with WPEngine : Jason Cohen saved my ass.<p>We went live on a WebbyNode VPS, thought we had configured our system well and suddenly we hit the top spot on HN. The server was on fire and Jason personally showed up and worked on migrating our site over.<p>Your configuration may have posed problems, you may have had what seems like a shitty support experience, but this public bashing doesn't help anyone in the startup community and reads as if it's motivated by emotions rather than a real problem-focussed attitude.<p>Give these guys a break and work with them one on one to find a solution to your problems. I'm SURE they'll move mountains to make you happy because that's in the team's DNA.

I posted my own reason of why they sucked (and WP-Engine responded) the other day <a href="http://jamespanderson.tumblr.com/post/34114537491/why-i-cant-recommend-wp-engine" rel="nofollow">http://jamespanderson.tumblr.com/post/34114537491/why-i-cant...</a>

This is a bit of a meta comment but it must really suck to wake up on a random morning and find a blog post like this about your service as the top story on HN.

Posted by Patrick Mckenzie almost a year ago:<p><a href="http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/02/09/why-i-dont-host-my-own-blog-anymore/" rel="nofollow">http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/02/09/why-i-dont-host-my-own-b...</a><p>I haven't tried it but it seems to be a good experience for some people.

I've been hosting a couple WordPress sites on PHPFog (<a href="http://phpfog.com" rel="nofollow">http://phpfog.com</a>) as well as DreamHost. For some reason DreamHost is faster, but the PHPFog UI is much nicer. Both have great support (DreamHosts' is 24/7 if I'm not mistaken) and relatively cheap.<p>That being said, once you have the sort of requirements that the original poster seems to have, I don't know if any of those companies would be suitable…

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 requirements list on their website (useful for filtering out the undesirable bottom 5% of customers) that says they will not accept any of the few potential customers that use the native WP commenting system because it's poorly built.<p>I'm not sure if it's true, but based on the poster's description of WPEngine's customer support experience, it sounds like their customer service is the typical poorly structured (from the customer's point of view) customer service experience I've encountered and/or witnessed many times from companies both large and small.<p>Some startups don't provide phone support. It's nice to see WPEngine does. Sometimes you just have to talk with someone to beat it into their heads that you have a complicated problem. They can't email email you back a link to some topic-related doc page and move on. They're on the phone with you and they have to make meaningful progress before hanging up.<p>In the case of email support, 95% of the tickets are answered with a link to a doc page and that's the end of the case. The metrics are excellent and every pats themselves on the back. 95%! And the volume was soooo high! Acknowledging positives is necessary, but measuring failure requires different metrics and 95% success does not necessarily imply 5% failure because each one uses different metrics. You think the the metrics on their dashboard will take into account this thread, for example?<p>The system breaks down when the customer has a more serious problem. It takes support a few emails back and forth to realize it. The case is handled by random folks based on availability, further degrading the experience. The person who'll pick up your latest reply to the thread isn't going to thoroughly read the whole thread, and by this point you've interacted with five support staff already. Finally, they realize it's outside their control and pass it off to Engineering, where it languishes for a month. Creating a system where the engineer is not allowed to reply directly to the customer but instead has to reply to support who then replies to the customer only removes the stress off the engineer, so they can care less and not solve the problem. Meanwhile, the support staff learn to drop lines like "Sorry for the delay. We appreciate your patience. The engineers are still looking into it." without any second thoughts.

My least favourite part of this type of sharing is when all the competitors come along to now try to pitch their wares. It's not clever, it's not classy, it's just lame.<p>I don't doubt this was a shit experience, it certainly sounds incredibly infuriating.<p>Jason &#38; his team work super hard, and have thousands of happy customers, so they're doing lots right. Even the greatest of companies can screw things up now and then, especially in non-straight-forward situations. I'm sure he'll put it right.

+1 for Page.ly. We had a slightly awkward setup (for a multisite blog) but their support was excellent.

"After a few hours of copying files, I flip the DNS switches"<p>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.

I'm curious for a side-by-side comparison of your linode vs the wpengine host: cpu, ram, etc.<p>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?<p>My opinion, but for for $3000 per year, you should have been provisioned with as much ram as a linode VPS.

From the article comments:<p><i>&#62; It’s a quiet backwater. Collectively the sites would have maybe 20k unique visitors a day. 50k is a big day hereabouts.</i><p>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.<p>Paying $250/month for that kind of traffic sounds over the top to me.<p>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 :)

As my two cents, although I am a Linux engineer, I don't want to manage a Web cluster just for Wordpress, so I use WPEngine in production for about 10 sites and it has worked very well and support has been sufficiently responsive.<p>Reading about this, I get concerned when people conflate "performance" and "scalability". Performance is about time-based metrics such a requests-per-second. Scalability is about the question of whether I can add more hardware proportionately to my request load and continue to perform. WPEngine's marketing claims are about scalability, not performance.<p>This guy's WPEngine code was apparently doing a 189k row sort when serving certain requests, which is not going to perform well on any hosting platform, including DIY.

All of these sites have fairly standard themes. All could be hosted, worry-free, at WordPress.com.

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

For what it worth - they are hiring. Probably to this exact reason - to bump up quality of their service (although their recruiter was not responsive, I guess I did not fit their requirements :))

Anyone have experience with ZippyKid? How are they?

I am using <a href="http://presslabs.com/" rel="nofollow">http://presslabs.com/</a> to host two of my blogs, one of them is a tech blog that gets a high amount of traffic every day and there has been no migration or downtime problems so far. I couldn't be happier.

what an eye opener

Uh uh.

Why did this get so much traction on hackernews?<p>This was posted on Reddit and killed with one comment the tl;dr of it : The client was incompetent and irresponsible and likes to blame people when things go wrong.

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.<p>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. They are guaranteed to lose money on him, and the only hope they have is to convince him to leave the service as rapidly as possible to avoid being sucked into the time sink that dealing with him is going to become.<p>This is the reason you have a "refund" button on the customer page of your admin console. A quick email apologizing for not being able to meet the needs of his unique setup and a refund of his payment, as soon as it became apparent just how impossible things were about to become would have solved this completely.<p>Or at least one hopes so. The tough thing about dealing with toxic customers is that they grow on you slowly and you don't notice at first. Then one day you realize you've spent four hours just digging into issues and writing emails to this one person who you're probably going to have refund eventually anyway.<p>I've never met the guys on the WPEngine team. But I feel for them after reading this.