9 ms·

My experience with WPEngine

373 points by lasonrisa 14y ago

Tombar 14y ago
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.
jacques_chester 14y ago
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. So, while I'm here, go look at my very nice bloggers. I regularly submit their stuff. http://ozblogistan.com.au/ http://ozblogistan.com.au/ Take, for example, this recent extremely intelligent discussion of privacy in the current internet: http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/10/19/manners-cost-nothing/ http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/10/19/manners-cost-nothing/ Or this discussion of the roots of order/chaos good/evil dualities in agricultural society: http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/10/16/war-and-peace/ http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/10/16/war-and-peace/ This confronting moral conundrum from the Massacre of Srebrenica: http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/10/24/srebrenica-should-the-soldiers-protecting-the-enclave-have-died/ http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/10/24/srebrenica-should-the-so... This discussion of the deadening effect of media laws upon Australian free speech: http://catallaxyfiles.com/2012/10/24/the-deadening-of-free-speech-in-australia-continues/ http://catallaxyfiles.com/2012/10/24/the-deadening-of-free-s... and so on and so forth. I am enormously proud of all my bloggers.
- aneth4 14y ago
  "my bloggers"? How are these blogs related to you?
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    It's a convenient shorthand for "bloggers whose websites I host at my own expense because I like and admire their sites".
    - krishnakv 14y ago
      @Jacques, the people who host blogs on your network are lucky :-). I wish more businesses emulate the good example you are setting by thinking about your "customers" success...
  - aneth4 14y ago
    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, though still odd.
    - jacques_chester 14y ago
      I thought it was a legitimate question too.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- stevenkovar 14y ago
  Seems a bit distasteful to publicly attack a popular service, then try to siphon the traffic their name generates to your "bloggers."
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    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?
    - kaizendc 14y ago
      If you are so proud of them, continue to submit them as single links to HN.
      - jacques_chester 14y ago
        I do. And I will.
    - rmrfrmrf 14y ago
      You're ignoring the fact that your post on WPEngine is actually relevant to this site, whereas only one of your promoted posts has anything to do with tech. It's not wrong to be proud, but I have to agree that blatant advertising is distasteful no matter which way you slice it.
      - jacques_chester 14y ago
        I don't agree with you, but I can understand why you feel that way. In case you are wondering, I don't make any money from the traffic. Each of the blogs decide for themselves whether to host advertising. I sometimes forget that because I have about 3k advertising servers blocked in my hosts file ...
    - javajosh 14y ago
alexandros 14y ago
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 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. Their solution? Buy another production site to test on. 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. 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.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  > Their solution? Buy another production site to test on. ... wow.
- pwenzel 14y ago
  I've had the opposite experience of WP Engine, and appreciate leaving caching and performance issues to somebody else, given that my company has a somewhat limited staff for supporting servers and CMS upgrades. I am building a semi-complex Multisite installation with multiple domains. So far, it's been pretty decent. Your frustration with their caching "secret sauce" is understandable. However, you can get a rough idea of their caching back-end by poking around in the WP Engine config files and plugins bundled with your installation. They also provide a nice little overview here: http://wpengine.com/our-infrastructure/ http://wpengine.com/our-infrastructure/. If you are staging out anything more complex than a single blog, you will definitely want to have two production instances to test on. For some, this is a raw deal. I personally don't mind. I am also not a huge fan of their CDN feature, which works by rewriting URLs in your page source to point files and assets to NetDNA servers. However, I am hopeful that they will improve upon it. That said, I have enjoyed a platform that keeps my Wordpress installations secure with automatic upgrades. Comparing WPEngine to other hosting providers like Linode or Dreamhost is really unfair. They offer completely different services, and specialize in Wordpress-optimized hosting only. I also have to say that it was really nice to not be part of Amazon/Heroku's outage this week. WP Engine has a control panel hosted on Heroku, but all their sites live in the Linode network, evading downtime.
saltcod 14y ago
All of these sites have fairly standard themes. All could be hosted, worry-free, at WordPress.com.
- dangrossman 14y ago
  Not really. WordPress.com's free hosting has limited space, no custom themes, no plugins except a small preapproved set, no ability to run your own ads, and you have to run WordPress's ads for their benefit.
  - troels 14y ago
    What about the paid plan?
    - dangrossman 14y ago
      You get a little more storage space, a little bit of CSS control, but you still can't bring your own themes and plugins, edit the code, etc. Plus, there's no way to migrate a multi-gigabyte blog network's data over, AFAIK. WordPress.com is an SaaS for blogging like Tumblr or Posterous. It happens to be built on a custom, locked down install of the WordPress multi-site software. It's not a website hosting company.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  My bloggers have several non-standard plugins and non-standard theme tweaks. Edit: and oh yes, 2.5Gb of media. The big kicker is that my migrations can only occur by SQL. Using WXR is fine for any blog that can be turned from XML into PHP objects ... inside the execution-time limit. Otherwise Wordpress thinks it's just hilarious to silently fail to import anything that doesn't make the execution-time cutoff. And I don't think I am a big enough fish for wordpress.com to bother to help me do an SQL migration.
  - sgdesign 14y ago
    Any reason you're not hosting media on S3? That makes it a lot easier to move hosts, too.
sgdesign 14y ago
I've been hosting a couple WordPress sites on PHPFog (http://phpfog.com http://phpfog.com) 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. 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…
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  Dreamhost is, like every shared hosting provider, hit-and-miss. I used to host Club Troppo there. When it got slow they basically shrugged and said ... it's shared hosting, what did I expect for $8/month?
  - the_bear 14y ago
    I had the exact same experience, but I was paying for their VPS service. I believe it was over $30/month, and it went down all the time with very little traffic. Dreamhost is a tempting host for a new site because it's so easy to set up, but I think you save time and headaches in the long run starting with someone else.
- mmahemoff 14y ago
  Are you on Dreamhost VPS or plain-old shared hosting? I had to migrate my WordPress off Dreamhost shared hosting as it was too slow and blowing their CPU limits. That was around 2006 and I'm sure a lot has changed.
  - sgdesign 14y ago
    VPS. http://sachagreif.com http://sachagreif.com runs on it and got to the top 5 of HN many times without any trouble (I'm using W3 Total Cache). The only reason I'm thinking about switching away is that their control panel is a little messy, and they don't support Git deployment out of the box (although you can activate it via ssh, which is what I did). It also feels faster than PHPFog for some reason, especially the WordPress admin. So overall, I'd say they're a pretty good option for budget hosting.
_neil 14y ago
+1 for Page.ly. We had a slightly awkward setup (for a multisite blog) but their support was excellent.
m0th87 14y ago
Anyone have experience with ZippyKid? How are they?
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  FWIW, I spoke to ZippyKid. They (perhaps wisely) don't handle multisite installations.
  - zippykid 14y ago
    Thanks for mentioning the email Jacque. And you're correct, currently we don't handle multi site installs due to some issues with MU and our clusters.
- noeltock 14y ago
  Only hear good stuff from ZippyKid, but haven't used them yet. I've tried Page.ly before and just had too much downtime over a number of different months. Have reverted to hosting myself.
gozmike 14y ago
My experience with WPEngine : Jason Cohen saved my ass. 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. 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. 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.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  I worked "one on one" with them for weeks. Weeks. They did not move mountains. It was a parade of apathy. As soon as they could flick pass me to WebSiteMovers, they did. Your positive experience is every bit an emotional one as my negative experience was.
  - gozmike 14y ago
    I can totally understand your negative experience, I have email threads between myself and WPEngine as well as between common customers and WPEngine that prove quite the opposite. It really sucks that you went through this. I'm just suggesting that you refrain from the public flogging and find another solution. I'm not affiliated with these guys other than as a client and I can tell you that I respect what they bring to the market.
    - jacques_chester 14y ago
      I'm sorry, why is it my obligation to be nice to an expensive, specialist business who utterly let me down? Especially given the content and tenor of their marketing.
    - jc4p 14y ago
      >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 after there was a great PR piece for WPEngine on the front-page of this site because it would lead to others having his issue which he could help prevent. This is a community. It's not an advertisement source. People vote on things they find interesting and discuss them, it's not a place to only post positive things about up and coming companies and hide all sources of negative news.
nakodari 14y ago
I am using http://presslabs.com/ http://presslabs.com/ 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.
dugmartin 14y ago
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.
- highace 14y ago
  Pissing off bloggers is probably the worst thing you can do, given that they'll likely blog about it..!
  - dugmartin 14y ago
    I wonder if being proactive and adding a message board on your site where people can vent would mitigate some of this. Here is a great example from a radio personality I used to listen to: http://mb.clarkhoward.com/forumdisplay.php?7-Clark-Stinks http://mb.clarkhoward.com/forumdisplay.php?7-Clark-Stinks!
- dotBen 14y ago
  welcome to my morning ;)
qeorge 14y ago
A hosting company without 24 hour support is not a hosting company. 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". 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.
- killahpriest 14y ago
  I highly doubt it's something that simple, the OP had been self hosting a blog network on Linode. There's no way he made that simple of a mistake.
krmmalik 14y ago
I've had a radically different experience with WP Engine and would happily recommend them to others, and have done so. I went through 3 or 4 different providers, and the only place that i was really happy with setup, infrastructure and support was WPEngine. 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.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  Indeed, another blogger of my acquaintance (Joshua Gans, a really excellent economics blogger) heard about my moving to WPEngine and moved several independent blogs across. He's a fan of theirs.
ck2 14y ago
WPEngine uses NFS/NAS which is a show-stopper. Dreamhost has the same issue, and GoDaddy (still?) You never, ever, use NFS on something with hundreds of files to load for every page (ie. WordPress). Every file takes 2-2.5ms to stat/load on NFS (from my tests on WPengine) which seems small but adds up fast. 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). 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.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  When it was working, I found WPEngine snappy.
- gizzlon 14y ago
  I recently removed some code that stat'd 4000 files over NFS. It took ~5 seconds, so it wasn't as bad as you say. Also, I'm pretty sure NFS can do better if you tune it.
  - ck2 14y ago
    Well obviously every NFS setup is going to perform differently. I personally benchmarked WPengine which is how I got the 2.5ms number. What you are saying is 1.25ms on your network (5000/4000). That's twice as fast but still significant.
    - gizzlon 14y ago
      Yes, I agree.. Found this [1], which might be helpful. The linked python program shows really high numbers for me though. Hopefully it's incorrect or I just misunderstand what the numbers mean. [1] https://communities.netapp.com/thread/13445 https://communities.netapp.com/thread/13445
- jamesmiller5 14y ago
  Since NFS and NAS both have caches I don't believe they would be a bottleneck.
hippich 14y ago
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 :))
Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
I want a two word tl;dr summary of every article in the title: How fast is... Apple.com? (tl;dr: not very); Wired's Review of the Microsoft Surface (tl;dr: pretty interesting).
- bravoyankee 14y ago
  +1 Absolutely.
- harrylove 14y ago
  Just write a better, non-link-bait headline. "Apple.com takes 25 minutes to load" "Wired says Microsoft Surface is Quite the Stunner"
- bdcravens 14y ago
  I tend to agree, but sometimes 140 characters come across as too emotionally charged, so imagine two words. Hence, "WPEngine sucks", which seems a bit harsh. Several recent articles could be summarized as "Founders dumb", "VC stupid", "SV sucks".
- mryan 14y ago
  I sincerely doubt many reasonably interesting articles can be accurately summed up in two words.
  - Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
    I was only being semi-serious but there are certainly a good many titles that could be written in an ambiguous manner. The original author may want to use that title but that's not to say the person who posts it to HN has to.
    - Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
      could be written in a LESS ambiguous manner... Oops.
destraynor 14y ago
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. I don't doubt this was a shit experience, it certainly sounds incredibly infuriating. Jason & 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.
caleywoods 14y ago
Posted by Patrick Mckenzie almost a year ago: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/02/09/why-i-dont-host-my-own-blog-anymore/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/02/09/why-i-dont-host-my-own-b... I haven't tried it but it seems to be a good experience for some people.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  This is the exact blog post that planted the seed of my interest in WPEngine. I read it again before I signed up with them and googled around for reviews. Everyone was very positive.
jasonkester 14y ago
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. 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. 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. 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. I've never met the guys on the WPEngine team. But I feel for them after reading this.
- spindritf 14y ago
  > 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 Then just tell him that the service isn't for him at that price, like Page.ly did.
  - unreal37 14y ago
    Pagely tried to help him. Tried really hard. WPEngine didn't even try - their cust support people just read from the same script over and over. And then charged him $500 for support. If they can't support customers like him, they shouldn't charge him $500 for the time it takes to determine that.
    - jacques_chester 14y ago
      Just to be absolutely clear on the facts here: WPEngine are not billing me the $500. WebSiteMovers are. I approved that work and I will pay that bill, just as soon as they help me out with some technical details. WSM are not in the wrong here. However I do intend to present an invoice to WPEngine for the amount that I have paid to WSM.
graupel 14y ago
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. 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.
- thenomad 14y ago
  Interesting, thanks. I suspect we're still too small, but I'm checking the service out anyway.
csomar 14y ago
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. 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. 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. Page.ly are probably doing this to get more clients. This is the wrong thing to do, 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. tl;dr: The OP is expecting WP consultancy services for signing up to WPEngine.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  > Page.ly are probably doing this to get more clients. ... huh? Edit: are you suggesting that the poor service I got from WPEngine is in fact a cunning conspiracy to boost Page.ly sales? Because ... well at least temporarily, yeah, I guess it worked perfectly. "Cui bono?" -dramatic violin music-
  - csomar 14y ago
    So you are the OP. I won't argue with you much. I'm in the WordPress business for many years. What I meant Page.ly is providing a generous support service to keep its' clients. This is a bad strategy because it makes wrong assumptions of what their main service is.
    - jacques_chester 14y ago
      Yes, I guess they should focus more heavily on the terrible customer service market instead.
ryanwaggoner 14y ago
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. 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]. 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 wanted to like. And I do like them, but I'm not excited about them at all anymore. 1. Interestingly, Google is the exact opposite, and their customer service makes me want to take a spoon to my own eyes.
- whyleyc 14y ago
  I'm not sure he's scrambling quite yet: https://twitter.com/asmartbear/status/261103840231825409 https://twitter.com/asmartbear/status/261103840231825409 https://twitter.com/asmartbear/status/261103530855784448 https://twitter.com/asmartbear/status/261103530855784448
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    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.
  - STRML 14y ago
    It looks as though those tweets were not aimed at this story, but rather at a different story on HN yesterday.
ry0ohki 14y ago
I posted my own reason of why they sucked (and WP-Engine responded) the other day http://jamespanderson.tumblr.com/post/34114537491/why-i-cant-recommend-wp-engine http://jamespanderson.tumblr.com/post/34114537491/why-i-cant...
typicalrunt 14y ago
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. 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. 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.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  When I applied to do my honours year, I wrote four project proposals. One was to basically turn the architecture of such applications inside out by making the virtual machine the target of deployment. This allows you to get out of a lot of architectural holes that shared hosting forces on you. Email me if you're interested in reading the proposal, I have it lying around somewhere.
- ohashi 14y ago
  What doesn't make sense about it? I can see a lot of scenarios where you start with a CMS because it does a good job of doing what you need. Why reinvent the wheel? Scaling issues is going to occur in all code, even code you write and know inside and out. It just means you become entirely responsible for debugging and re-architecting to improve its performance. @Drupal specific comment, you could easily throw nginx as a reverse proxy with a cache in front if everything is static and be done with it.
  - typicalrunt 14y ago
    Valid point. What I keyed on in the article is that it is a complex install, and that tells me that maybe his CMS is working against him. In those cases I like to remove the impediment and simplify the data model (which should simplify the code).
Uchikoma 14y ago
Uh uh.
jaequery 14y ago
what an eye opener
ashray 14y ago
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 :)
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  > 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.
  - MattRogish 14y ago
    Partition? Why won't a simple DBMS index help?
    - 14y ago
dotBen 14y ago
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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4692775
- jacques_chester 14y ago
ssharp 14y ago
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.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  Actually, I would characterise WPEngine, Page.ly and ZippyKid as mid-tier. The low end is served by thousands of shared hosts and resellers. Look at the pricing: Wordpress VIP starts at $500; WPEngine is selling a $250 plan.
  - scottscanlon 14y ago
    I agree, but the gap exists for "fully" managed WP hosting for someone who isn't quite there yet but needs more power, etc. We recently chose not to go with WpEngine because of the confusing help solutions we could see, a few reviews we saw. We ultimately went with ServInt and have been really happy with the move and support. And to your point the pricing didn't feel right, it didn't make sense compared to similar options (or what we thought was similar)-- maybe I am off base though, it just what we discussed at the time.
thenomad 14y ago
Worth interjecting a counterpoint here, I think. 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. 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: http://www.mmomeltingpot.com/2012/03/wpengine-review-after-1-month-and-250k-visitors-is-this-the-best-wordpress-hosting-money-can-buy/ http://www.mmomeltingpot.com/2012/03/wpengine-review-after-1... . 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.) (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.) 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%. 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.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
druiid 14y ago
This story and comments have been flogged to death a bit already, but I do have a couple questions/concerns here. 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? 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. 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...
- scribu 14y ago
  That's a very good question.
- STRML 14y ago
  This is absolutely on the mark. It is well understood that scaling Wordpress correctly requires a couple of core hacks (see this excellent comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693924 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693924). Why WPEngine does not incorporate these core hacks is beyond me.
betageek 14y ago
"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.
- STRML 14y ago
  Absolutely, why would you ever do this without testing?
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    Yep. Mea culpa. I've learnt this lesson well.
vampirechicken 14y ago
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.
- bigiain 14y ago
  I was curious about the too. In case you missed it up-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4695810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4695810 two 512mb linodes, one for nginx/php, one for mysql.
  - vampirechicken 14y ago
    Thanks for that!
brokentone 14y ago
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?) 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. 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. (http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/20487 http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/20487) 4. Core hack - Remove content reallocation on user delete. With large user tables, you lose the ability to delete users (core fix pending: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/19867 http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/19867) 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.
cooperadymas 14y ago
May as well throw in my own experience with WPEngine... We run a relatively small member site (<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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
- STRML 14y ago
  Which membership plugin was this? I am on WPEngine running WP-Members, crossing my fingers.
heliodor 14y ago
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. 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. 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. 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? 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.
- 14y ago
tedchs 14y ago
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. 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. 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.
wyck 14y ago
Why did this get so much traction on hackernews? 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.

373 points by lasonrisa 14y ago

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.

jacques_chester 14y ago

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. So, while I'm here, go look at my very nice bloggers. I regularly submit their stuff. http://ozblogistan.com.au/ http://ozblogistan.com.au/ Take, for example, this recent extremely intelligent discussion of privacy in the current internet: http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/10/19/manners-cost-nothing/ http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/10/19/manners-cost-nothing/ Or this discussion of the roots of order/chaos good/evil dualities in agricultural society: http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/10/16/war-and-peace/ http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/10/16/war-and-peace/ This confronting moral conundrum from the Massacre of Srebrenica: http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/10/24/srebrenica-should-the-soldiers-protecting-the-enclave-have-died/ http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/10/24/srebrenica-should-the-so... This discussion of the deadening effect of media laws upon Australian free speech: http://catallaxyfiles.com/2012/10/24/the-deadening-of-free-speech-in-australia-continues/ http://catallaxyfiles.com/2012/10/24/the-deadening-of-free-s... and so on and so forth. I am enormously proud of all my bloggers.

aneth4 14y ago
"my bloggers"? How are these blogs related to you?
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  It's a convenient shorthand for "bloggers whose websites I host at my own expense because I like and admire their sites".
  - krishnakv 14y ago
    @Jacques, the people who host blogs on your network are lucky :-). I wish more businesses emulate the good example you are setting by thinking about your "customers" success...
- aneth4 14y ago
  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, though still odd.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    I thought it was a legitimate question too.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
stevenkovar 14y ago
Seems a bit distasteful to publicly attack a popular service, then try to siphon the traffic their name generates to your "bloggers."
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  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?
  - kaizendc 14y ago
    If you are so proud of them, continue to submit them as single links to HN.
    - jacques_chester 14y ago
      I do. And I will.
  - rmrfrmrf 14y ago
    You're ignoring the fact that your post on WPEngine is actually relevant to this site, whereas only one of your promoted posts has anything to do with tech. It's not wrong to be proud, but I have to agree that blatant advertising is distasteful no matter which way you slice it.
    - jacques_chester 14y ago
      I don't agree with you, but I can understand why you feel that way. In case you are wondering, I don't make any money from the traffic. Each of the blogs decide for themselves whether to host advertising. I sometimes forget that because I have about 3k advertising servers blocked in my hosts file ...
  - javajosh 14y ago

alexandros 14y ago

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 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. Their solution? Buy another production site to test on. 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. 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.

jacques_chester 14y ago
> Their solution? Buy another production site to test on. ... wow.
pwenzel 14y ago
I've had the opposite experience of WP Engine, and appreciate leaving caching and performance issues to somebody else, given that my company has a somewhat limited staff for supporting servers and CMS upgrades. I am building a semi-complex Multisite installation with multiple domains. So far, it's been pretty decent. Your frustration with their caching "secret sauce" is understandable. However, you can get a rough idea of their caching back-end by poking around in the WP Engine config files and plugins bundled with your installation. They also provide a nice little overview here: http://wpengine.com/our-infrastructure/ http://wpengine.com/our-infrastructure/. If you are staging out anything more complex than a single blog, you will definitely want to have two production instances to test on. For some, this is a raw deal. I personally don't mind. I am also not a huge fan of their CDN feature, which works by rewriting URLs in your page source to point files and assets to NetDNA servers. However, I am hopeful that they will improve upon it. That said, I have enjoyed a platform that keeps my Wordpress installations secure with automatic upgrades. Comparing WPEngine to other hosting providers like Linode or Dreamhost is really unfair. They offer completely different services, and specialize in Wordpress-optimized hosting only. I also have to say that it was really nice to not be part of Amazon/Heroku's outage this week. WP Engine has a control panel hosted on Heroku, but all their sites live in the Linode network, evading downtime.

saltcod 14y ago

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

dangrossman 14y ago
Not really. WordPress.com's free hosting has limited space, no custom themes, no plugins except a small preapproved set, no ability to run your own ads, and you have to run WordPress's ads for their benefit.
- troels 14y ago
  What about the paid plan?
  - dangrossman 14y ago
    You get a little more storage space, a little bit of CSS control, but you still can't bring your own themes and plugins, edit the code, etc. Plus, there's no way to migrate a multi-gigabyte blog network's data over, AFAIK. WordPress.com is an SaaS for blogging like Tumblr or Posterous. It happens to be built on a custom, locked down install of the WordPress multi-site software. It's not a website hosting company.
jacques_chester 14y ago
My bloggers have several non-standard plugins and non-standard theme tweaks. Edit: and oh yes, 2.5Gb of media. The big kicker is that my migrations can only occur by SQL. Using WXR is fine for any blog that can be turned from XML into PHP objects ... inside the execution-time limit. Otherwise Wordpress thinks it's just hilarious to silently fail to import anything that doesn't make the execution-time cutoff. And I don't think I am a big enough fish for wordpress.com to bother to help me do an SQL migration.
- sgdesign 14y ago
  Any reason you're not hosting media on S3? That makes it a lot easier to move hosts, too.

sgdesign 14y ago

I've been hosting a couple WordPress sites on PHPFog (http://phpfog.com http://phpfog.com) 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. 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…

jacques_chester 14y ago
Dreamhost is, like every shared hosting provider, hit-and-miss. I used to host Club Troppo there. When it got slow they basically shrugged and said ... it's shared hosting, what did I expect for $8/month?
- the_bear 14y ago
  I had the exact same experience, but I was paying for their VPS service. I believe it was over $30/month, and it went down all the time with very little traffic. Dreamhost is a tempting host for a new site because it's so easy to set up, but I think you save time and headaches in the long run starting with someone else.
mmahemoff 14y ago
Are you on Dreamhost VPS or plain-old shared hosting? I had to migrate my WordPress off Dreamhost shared hosting as it was too slow and blowing their CPU limits. That was around 2006 and I'm sure a lot has changed.
- sgdesign 14y ago
  VPS. http://sachagreif.com http://sachagreif.com runs on it and got to the top 5 of HN many times without any trouble (I'm using W3 Total Cache). The only reason I'm thinking about switching away is that their control panel is a little messy, and they don't support Git deployment out of the box (although you can activate it via ssh, which is what I did). It also feels faster than PHPFog for some reason, especially the WordPress admin. So overall, I'd say they're a pretty good option for budget hosting.

_neil 14y ago

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

m0th87 14y ago

Anyone have experience with ZippyKid? How are they?

jacques_chester 14y ago
FWIW, I spoke to ZippyKid. They (perhaps wisely) don't handle multisite installations.
- zippykid 14y ago
  Thanks for mentioning the email Jacque. And you're correct, currently we don't handle multi site installs due to some issues with MU and our clusters.
noeltock 14y ago
Only hear good stuff from ZippyKid, but haven't used them yet. I've tried Page.ly before and just had too much downtime over a number of different months. Have reverted to hosting myself.

gozmike 14y ago

My experience with WPEngine : Jason Cohen saved my ass. 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. 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. 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.

jacques_chester 14y ago
I worked "one on one" with them for weeks. Weeks. They did not move mountains. It was a parade of apathy. As soon as they could flick pass me to WebSiteMovers, they did. Your positive experience is every bit an emotional one as my negative experience was.
- gozmike 14y ago
  I can totally understand your negative experience, I have email threads between myself and WPEngine as well as between common customers and WPEngine that prove quite the opposite. It really sucks that you went through this. I'm just suggesting that you refrain from the public flogging and find another solution. I'm not affiliated with these guys other than as a client and I can tell you that I respect what they bring to the market.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    I'm sorry, why is it my obligation to be nice to an expensive, specialist business who utterly let me down? Especially given the content and tenor of their marketing.
  - jc4p 14y ago
    >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 after there was a great PR piece for WPEngine on the front-page of this site because it would lead to others having his issue which he could help prevent. This is a community. It's not an advertisement source. People vote on things they find interesting and discuss them, it's not a place to only post positive things about up and coming companies and hide all sources of negative news.

nakodari 14y ago

I am using http://presslabs.com/ http://presslabs.com/ 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.

dugmartin 14y ago

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.

highace 14y ago
Pissing off bloggers is probably the worst thing you can do, given that they'll likely blog about it..!
- dugmartin 14y ago
  I wonder if being proactive and adding a message board on your site where people can vent would mitigate some of this. Here is a great example from a radio personality I used to listen to: http://mb.clarkhoward.com/forumdisplay.php?7-Clark-Stinks http://mb.clarkhoward.com/forumdisplay.php?7-Clark-Stinks!
dotBen 14y ago
welcome to my morning ;)

qeorge 14y ago

A hosting company without 24 hour support is not a hosting company. 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". 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.

killahpriest 14y ago
I highly doubt it's something that simple, the OP had been self hosting a blog network on Linode. There's no way he made that simple of a mistake.

krmmalik 14y ago

I've had a radically different experience with WP Engine and would happily recommend them to others, and have done so. I went through 3 or 4 different providers, and the only place that i was really happy with setup, infrastructure and support was WPEngine. 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.

jacques_chester 14y ago
Indeed, another blogger of my acquaintance (Joshua Gans, a really excellent economics blogger) heard about my moving to WPEngine and moved several independent blogs across. He's a fan of theirs.

ck2 14y ago

WPEngine uses NFS/NAS which is a show-stopper. Dreamhost has the same issue, and GoDaddy (still?) You never, ever, use NFS on something with hundreds of files to load for every page (ie. WordPress). Every file takes 2-2.5ms to stat/load on NFS (from my tests on WPengine) which seems small but adds up fast. 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). 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.

jacques_chester 14y ago
When it was working, I found WPEngine snappy.
gizzlon 14y ago
I recently removed some code that stat'd 4000 files over NFS. It took ~5 seconds, so it wasn't as bad as you say. Also, I'm pretty sure NFS can do better if you tune it.
- ck2 14y ago
  Well obviously every NFS setup is going to perform differently. I personally benchmarked WPengine which is how I got the 2.5ms number. What you are saying is 1.25ms on your network (5000/4000). That's twice as fast but still significant.
  - gizzlon 14y ago
    Yes, I agree.. Found this [1], which might be helpful. The linked python program shows really high numbers for me though. Hopefully it's incorrect or I just misunderstand what the numbers mean. [1] https://communities.netapp.com/thread/13445 https://communities.netapp.com/thread/13445
jamesmiller5 14y ago
Since NFS and NAS both have caches I don't believe they would be a bottleneck.

hippich 14y ago

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 :))

Tyrannosaurs 14y ago

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

bravoyankee 14y ago
+1 Absolutely.
harrylove 14y ago
Just write a better, non-link-bait headline. "Apple.com takes 25 minutes to load" "Wired says Microsoft Surface is Quite the Stunner"
bdcravens 14y ago
I tend to agree, but sometimes 140 characters come across as too emotionally charged, so imagine two words. Hence, "WPEngine sucks", which seems a bit harsh. Several recent articles could be summarized as "Founders dumb", "VC stupid", "SV sucks".
mryan 14y ago
I sincerely doubt many reasonably interesting articles can be accurately summed up in two words.
- Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
  I was only being semi-serious but there are certainly a good many titles that could be written in an ambiguous manner. The original author may want to use that title but that's not to say the person who posts it to HN has to.
  - Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
    could be written in a LESS ambiguous manner... Oops.

destraynor 14y ago

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. I don't doubt this was a shit experience, it certainly sounds incredibly infuriating. Jason & 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.

caleywoods 14y ago

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

jacques_chester 14y ago
This is the exact blog post that planted the seed of my interest in WPEngine. I read it again before I signed up with them and googled around for reviews. Everyone was very positive.

jasonkester 14y ago

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. 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. 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. 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. I've never met the guys on the WPEngine team. But I feel for them after reading this.

spindritf 14y ago
> 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 Then just tell him that the service isn't for him at that price, like Page.ly did.
- unreal37 14y ago
  Pagely tried to help him. Tried really hard. WPEngine didn't even try - their cust support people just read from the same script over and over. And then charged him $500 for support. If they can't support customers like him, they shouldn't charge him $500 for the time it takes to determine that.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    Just to be absolutely clear on the facts here: WPEngine are not billing me the $500. WebSiteMovers are. I approved that work and I will pay that bill, just as soon as they help me out with some technical details. WSM are not in the wrong here. However I do intend to present an invoice to WPEngine for the amount that I have paid to WSM.

graupel 14y ago

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. 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.

thenomad 14y ago
Interesting, thanks. I suspect we're still too small, but I'm checking the service out anyway.

csomar 14y ago

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. 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. 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. Page.ly are probably doing this to get more clients. This is the wrong thing to do, 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. tl;dr: The OP is expecting WP consultancy services for signing up to WPEngine.

jacques_chester 14y ago
> Page.ly are probably doing this to get more clients. ... huh? Edit: are you suggesting that the poor service I got from WPEngine is in fact a cunning conspiracy to boost Page.ly sales? Because ... well at least temporarily, yeah, I guess it worked perfectly. "Cui bono?" -dramatic violin music-
- csomar 14y ago
  So you are the OP. I won't argue with you much. I'm in the WordPress business for many years. What I meant Page.ly is providing a generous support service to keep its' clients. This is a bad strategy because it makes wrong assumptions of what their main service is.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    Yes, I guess they should focus more heavily on the terrible customer service market instead.

ryanwaggoner 14y ago

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. 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]. 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 wanted to like. And I do like them, but I'm not excited about them at all anymore. 1. Interestingly, Google is the exact opposite, and their customer service makes me want to take a spoon to my own eyes.

whyleyc 14y ago
I'm not sure he's scrambling quite yet: https://twitter.com/asmartbear/status/261103840231825409 https://twitter.com/asmartbear/status/261103840231825409 https://twitter.com/asmartbear/status/261103530855784448 https://twitter.com/asmartbear/status/261103530855784448
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  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.
- STRML 14y ago
  It looks as though those tweets were not aimed at this story, but rather at a different story on HN yesterday.

ry0ohki 14y ago

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

typicalrunt 14y ago

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. 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. 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.

jacques_chester 14y ago
When I applied to do my honours year, I wrote four project proposals. One was to basically turn the architecture of such applications inside out by making the virtual machine the target of deployment. This allows you to get out of a lot of architectural holes that shared hosting forces on you. Email me if you're interested in reading the proposal, I have it lying around somewhere.
ohashi 14y ago
What doesn't make sense about it? I can see a lot of scenarios where you start with a CMS because it does a good job of doing what you need. Why reinvent the wheel? Scaling issues is going to occur in all code, even code you write and know inside and out. It just means you become entirely responsible for debugging and re-architecting to improve its performance. @Drupal specific comment, you could easily throw nginx as a reverse proxy with a cache in front if everything is static and be done with it.
- typicalrunt 14y ago
  Valid point. What I keyed on in the article is that it is a complex install, and that tells me that maybe his CMS is working against him. In those cases I like to remove the impediment and simplify the data model (which should simplify the code).

Uchikoma 14y ago

Uh uh.

jaequery 14y ago

what an eye opener

ashray 14y ago

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 :)

jacques_chester 14y ago
> 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.
- MattRogish 14y ago
  Partition? Why won't a simple DBMS index help?
  - 14y ago

dotBen 14y ago

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

jacques_chester 14y ago

ssharp 14y ago

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.

jacques_chester 14y ago
Actually, I would characterise WPEngine, Page.ly and ZippyKid as mid-tier. The low end is served by thousands of shared hosts and resellers. Look at the pricing: Wordpress VIP starts at $500; WPEngine is selling a $250 plan.
- scottscanlon 14y ago
  I agree, but the gap exists for "fully" managed WP hosting for someone who isn't quite there yet but needs more power, etc. We recently chose not to go with WpEngine because of the confusing help solutions we could see, a few reviews we saw. We ultimately went with ServInt and have been really happy with the move and support. And to your point the pricing didn't feel right, it didn't make sense compared to similar options (or what we thought was similar)-- maybe I am off base though, it just what we discussed at the time.

thenomad 14y ago

Worth interjecting a counterpoint here, I think. 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. 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: http://www.mmomeltingpot.com/2012/03/wpengine-review-after-1-month-and-250k-visitors-is-this-the-best-wordpress-hosting-money-can-buy/ http://www.mmomeltingpot.com/2012/03/wpengine-review-after-1... . 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.) (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.) 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%. 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.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

druiid 14y ago

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

scribu 14y ago
That's a very good question.
STRML 14y ago
This is absolutely on the mark. It is well understood that scaling Wordpress correctly requires a couple of core hacks (see this excellent comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693924 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693924). Why WPEngine does not incorporate these core hacks is beyond me.

betageek 14y ago

"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.

STRML 14y ago
Absolutely, why would you ever do this without testing?
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  Yep. Mea culpa. I've learnt this lesson well.

vampirechicken 14y ago

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.

bigiain 14y ago
I was curious about the too. In case you missed it up-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4695810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4695810 two 512mb linodes, one for nginx/php, one for mysql.
- vampirechicken 14y ago
  Thanks for that!

brokentone 14y ago

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?) 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. 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. (http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/20487 http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/20487) 4. Core hack - Remove content reallocation on user delete. With large user tables, you lose the ability to delete users (core fix pending: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/19867 http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/19867) 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.

cooperadymas 14y ago

May as well throw in my own experience with WPEngine... We run a relatively small member site (<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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

STRML 14y ago
Which membership plugin was this? I am on WPEngine running WP-Members, crossing my fingers.

heliodor 14y ago

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. 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. 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. 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? 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.

14y ago

tedchs 14y ago

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. 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. 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.

wyck 14y ago

Why did this get so much traction on hackernews? 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.