I interrupt the regularly scheduled program to give a shout-out to my new hosting company: WP Engine. A blogger-BFF found these folks — they specialize in hosting WordPress sites with “secret sauce” technology uniquely tuned to WordPress’ technology. I moved to WP Engine in desperation. I have become a fan — and want to offer them up as a resource to other bloggers, especially if you are making any level of a living on your blog. What WP Engine aims to provide — again, optimized solely for WordPress sites — is 100% uptime and speed, which is now part of Google’s algorithms. Here’s more about why I moved to WP Engine, and my experience:
Why did I move? When the New York Times told me it was doing a big story about my site, I knew I needed to get to a new host. Like. Yesterday. My old host had really nice and responsive staff, but whenever I had a traffic bump, my site was prone to crash. With the New York Times about to send a lot of fantastic traffic my way, I was sick at the thought of this happening!
I’ve been on WordPress since 2007. My blog has been hosted at two other companies since then — and as it grew, it outgrew both. It kept crashing whenever I had a lot of traffic, and it got slower as it got bigger. These other hosting companies were not specialized to handle Word Press – in fact, I didn’t know of anyone who was. Until BFF, who always has her ear to the buzz, found WP Engine, “the premier, WordPress-only hosting company.”
My site on the New York Times: From 20,000 –> 80,000 pageviews in one day, crash-free
So, once I knew the Times story was coming, I rushed over to WP Engine. They were very helpful in getting me all set up, with just days to spare. I was still worried. BUT: When the Times story hit, the day went off without a single hitch – even though my pageviews quadrupled. Oh, and yes, my site speed is faster, and WP Engine has helped me to identify some other issues I need to watch to keep speed up.
I’m a writer, not a techie, so I don’t really understand WP Engine’s “secret sauce”. But so far, so good – it’s rockin’ my site like never before.
Check it out: WP Engine
Disclosure: WP Engine did not ask me to do this story. But I am a client, and a member of their affiliate program — if you sign up through one of my links, I get a little spiff.
I had trouble getting to your site last night. No trouble this morning. Could be a problem on my end.
I believe there was some maintenance last night – due to some other provider issue. I’m telling you, this stuff is complex!
Congrats on the “New and Improved” RR, Pam! There just might be a pink bathroom out there somewhere which will owe its life to WP Engine.
Good to hear you’re so pleased with the new host. Although I haven’t ever had problems accessing the site, I don’t want to, not to mention you don’t need the headaches!
Coincidentally I’m researching just them, but when I look at your onload speed from The Hague, The Netherlands, being 22.91 seconds…, I really am curious how your site loade previously….
I just ran speed test – we use http://webpagetest.org. I loaded in 17.9 seconds. Slowing down my site are size of my images – something in my control — you can see the data right on webpagetest. Also, those ebay carousels on the homepage are slowing me down. When I don’t have the ebay carousels and am diligent about photo size, I can load in under 10 seconds — and even then, I have an image-heavy homepage. On google’s new pagespeed tool for developers just launched today (I believe) i run faster than 93% of other sites — i just ran the new test this morning. As far as my benchmarks — I have the “befores” somewhere, need to dig them up. I know I’m faster. Moreover, as I said in my post, an even bigger issue was that my site crashed often when I had traffic blips. Now, that seems to be a thing of the past and I made it through 4x traffic when my site was featured in the NYT. I am already a PR5 site — I was probably “okay” speed-wise with Google before — but I am always aiming for continuous improvement. So far so good.
I use the Firefox add on http://getfirebug.com/. Is very handy for coding your own site. I also mesured my site with web page test from Dulles….the outcome is very slow as well. Maybe it has to do with the infamous transatlantic latency…I also use many photos and a 5 full post grid for my blog in stead of abbreviation which could speed it up.
I am a long-time reader, but I don’t think I have ever commented. I just wanted to say you are as cute as a button! That picture of you is great!
Someday maybe I’ll send you some pics of our 1956 daylight ranch. Probably 15 years ago, I bought some great orange, brown and white wallpaper at an estate sale. About 5 years ago my hubby put it up in our kitchen nook. It has been one of best estate sale purchases to date. Everyone thought I was crazy back then, now they see the payoff!
Love the blog, glad I finally de-lurked!
Nancy
Why, thank you, Nancy! You have made my day. I do gotta admit: This photo has me rockin’ the 52. There were others where I did not look nearly so good, or so thin! Moreoever: Welcome out of lurking status. And YES, send me a pic of that nook. YES YES YES! retrorenovation [at] gmail [dot] com xoxo
Pam, I’m so excited to see the Forum back in action. I just noticed the link today, I check your site nearly everyday and thought perhaps it was a goner due to all the spam it had ‘injested’ not long ago. I may have to re-register as I’ve had problems posting comments here too.
Glad to be ‘back to normal’ now. Great to hear about the NYTimes.
You do not need to register. Read the instructions on the right hand side of the page. Please let me know if you have any issues!
You look good baby!! and I’m glad you’re happier in a faster blog land.
The four months my website was hosted with WPE were the worst in its five-year history. It was nothing but nonstop B.S. and headaches.
Yes, I know, there are dozens of glowing testimonials about WPEngine’s awesomeness. I’ve read them too. That’s what lead me to give them a try (I’ve hosted with Media Temple and Rackspace before that). Don’t be fooled. It is because of all these one-sided, glowing reviews that I feel compelled to share my experience.
WPEngine regularly made changes to my website:
- without my permission
- without telling me in advance
- without alerting me to what they did after the fact
- without checking their work
They did this not once… not twice… but on three separate occasions. Each instance resulted in CATASTROPHIC failures, crashing the biggest — and most critical — chunks of my website (e.g., single.php, sidebar.php).
Three separate issues. Three times they made changes. Three times the site crashed.
No warning. No apology. No admission of wrong-doing. Not once.
They are right, you are wrong. 100% of the time. They know everything, you know squadoosh. You are to blame for everything. They are accountable for nothing.
If that’s your idea of “managed hosting,” then go ahead and knock yourself out.
Does WPEngine answer service requests quickly? Absolutely. They are fast, no doubt. But fast isn’t the only thing I care about. I’d rather wait for the right answer tomorrow than have someone crash my website today. WPE got it all wrong — every… single… time — so everything always ended up taking way more time and energy than it should have.
Did they EVER give me the slightest indication they cared? Nope. Their attitude: “It’s our way or the highway, pal.” Share your complaints on Twitter and they’ll say, “We stand by our service 100%.” Ask them for an apology, explanation or to talk with a senior service manager and they’ll just flat out ignore you.
I run my website as my sole source of income.* When my site goes down, I lose money. I can’t afford website crashes. I can’t afford to have my webhost dump one massive admin disaster after another in my lap. If your business is dependent on your WordPress website, you absolutely cannot gamble with WPEngine.
My experience was a net negative, all the way around. Their impositions were exceedingly disruptive. The stress was nearly unbearable. Their incompetence was infuriating. And their incredulity was unfathomable. Worse yet, the “performance features” they tout (CDN, caching) had little- to no impact on my site’s load times.
In a nutshell? WPEngine is an autocratic, arrogant and incapable webhost — an utter nightmare combination. Even if their service didn’t suck, it still wouldn’t be worth half the money they charge.
“It’s not for everyone,” they told me. Sheesh, that’s the understatement of the century. It’s definitely not for me, nor anyone else who takes their website — or customer service — seriously.
Most sincerely,
Jeffry Pilcher, Publisher
TheFinancialBrand.com
(* 50K monthly uniques, 125K monthly pageviews)
P.S. – WPEngine may pop in to point out (yet again) where I’ve got it wrong and what I don’t understand about their “service.” I won’t be checking this thread, as they have expired my patience, and I have absolutely no interest in quibbling with them any further. Question everything they say, because they cannot be trusted. They are the most defensive, self-protectionist company I’ve ever dealt with. If they only cared about their customers as much as their reputation…
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for your comment. As a premiere managed WordPress hosting platform, WP Engine values honest feedback from our customers. Negative feedback is part of our lifeblood, and shows us how we can continue to improve our services, and I always welcome it either via email or publicly.
And on the other side of the equation, positive feedback, such as this blog post and many others, are how we know we’re doing things right and that our hard work is paying off for our customers.
…Though I wonder if I should go looking at the other few dozen reviews of WP Engine that people have written to see if you’re leaving feedback there as well.
As the Brand Ambassador for WP Engine, I have the opportunity to respond directly to customers on a daily basis, and my responsibility is to advocate on behalf of everyone using WP Engine to host their sites and apps. I’ve gone back through the Zendesk support tickets that you filed to ensure that I could own up to any missteps WP Engine may have made in handling your website. Our support staff are all WordPress experts, which means when you file trouble tickets with WP Engine, it’s as if you had a top-notch IT sysadmin on staff.
I believe the tickets in question were from June 26th, the day that WP Engine disallowed certain Related Posts plugins from our hosting platform. http://wpengine.com/2012/06/fulltext-update/ We notified our customers and then removed these plugins proactively as part of our responsibilities as a Managed WordPress Host. The plugins mentioned were running FULLTEXT indexes on MySQL, which is a direct risk to the scalability of sites like yours. As you mentioned in your support ticket, your site is a part of your business, and downtime is costly. We have a large number of customers who run businesses on WordPress, and trust WP Engine with their hosting. Our hosting platform is designed for just such mission-critical websites because of our lack of downtime and high security protocol.
Removing the “related posts” plugins was one more action WP Engine takes to protect customers from costly downtime. It’s our responsibility to keep your site online and scalable, and we maintain lists of plugins that we recommend, as well as those we have disallowed because they aren’t scalable, or they are potential security risks. When we removed the related posts plugins, adding it to the disallowed plugin list, we also made recommendations for replacement plugins that have the same functionality, but scale with your website’s traffic far better.
In your support ticket from June 26th, we explained this and provided a reference to why we were taking the action, as well as how this action was part of our responsibilities to you as your hosting provider. I will remain silent about your response to the ticket. You also had the opportunity to speak with our lead support engineer to voice your concerns, and make sure your site had all the collateral it needed to stay up and running and profitable.
At the end of the day, WP Engine may not be the right host for everyone’s needs. There are plenty of places to host your site, and WP Engine serves a very specific segment of the WordPress hosting market. Most websites out of the 75 million WordPress sites fall *outside* our target market, and my priority is always that folks find the right host for their site and their business, whether that is WP Engine or not. Life is too short to not love your hosting provider. That means being able to forget about them because you never have to think twice about whether your site will be up because of a bad plugin.
Now, I know that you probably won’t be back to respond to any further comments, but all the same, if you have any more thoughts, or anyone has any questions about WP Engine, I’m always happy to talk via email: austin at wpengine.com.
Thanks again for your thoughts here, Jeff. Please let me know if we can help you out in the future.
-Austin
Nice try Austin. You’ve investigated one issue that caused one of the site’s three crashes. To address Austin’s spin on this (one) situation… Here is the correct chronology of events.
I woke up one morning and found my site was broken. No posts would load, period. I spent half a day investigating the cause — what went wrong and where? I hadn’t made any changes, and couldn’t come up with anything, so I submitted a service request to WPEngine. They replied saying that they had deleted (not deactivated, but flat out deleted) a plugin called “Similar Posts.” I asked them when they had planned on letting me know. After all, they have the email address for every single site admin (listed under Users in the WP dashboard). How hard is it to send an email to site admins alerting them to a Major Change, such as a plugin’s deletion?
Did the plugin need to be retired? Yes, and I understand the reasons.
Did WPE need to delete the plugin without any notice or warning? No.
If WPE needed to move quickly to avoid bad neighbor issues, could they have sent an email after the fact? Yes.
Did they apologize for the half day I wasted looking for the cause of the crash? No.
Did they express empathy? No.
Did they appreciate my suggestion that — in the future — WPE alert admins when changes are made to a site? No. They told me I might want to find a new webhost.
So that’s a recap on the first service issue that caused the first crash. It only went downhill from there.