As you may know if you’re a regular reader, about a month ago we decided to switch our hosting from a dedicated server managed by yours truly to the WordPress hosting service WP Engine. Initially, I had expected to discover that it really wasn’t worth the money after the two-week free trial – but that time has well and truly passed, and I’m still with WPEngine. So, here’s a review – given they’re far from cheap, are they, in fact, the best WordPress hosting service ever?
This one’s off-topic for the Melting Pot, but as a lot of us are bloggers here, I figured it would be useful nonetheless. And I imagine you’ll be interested to know why I’ve voluntarily gone from paying $50pm for hosting to paying $249pm for what, at first glance, is the same service.
Quick note: the links to WPEngine here are affiliate links, meaning if you end up using WPEngine after clicking on one, I’ll get a small amount of money from that. However, I’m reviewing WPEngine because I’m impressed with their service, not for the monetary concern – their service has startled me by being well worth the fee, and I figured other bloggers would be interested to hear about it!
First Impressions
I first heard of WP Engine through a post on Kalsumeus, explaining why he made exactly the same move I subsequently would – from self-controlled dedicated server hosting to WP Engine’s managed service. I loved the idea right from the off – a host dedicated to nothing but WordPress, who could solve all the finicky little things that I couldn’t figure out (and with WordPress, there are a lot of finicky things that crop up over the months), and who knew exactly how to tune a site for speed and performance.
However, a quick look at WPEngine’s site made me think we couldn’t afford them. Reading through their prices, the Melting Pot would cost a minimum of $249 a month – and when we had a burst month and hit more than 400,000 visitors, as we do from time to time, it seemed we’d be moved up to the “if you have to ask you can’t afford it” top tier of hosting.
I said as much in the comments, because I can be kind of a dick sometimes. 
A few days later, I wandered back to the same article, and lo and behold, there was a reply to my comment – from the CEO of WPEngine, Jason Cohen. And he made a hell of a lot of sense – and made the key point that unless we stayed above 400,000 visitors/month consistently, they’d charge us at the lower price.
About now, I realised they had a free trial (which has since been replaced by the rather better offer of a 60-day money back offer).
So I figured “what the hell”, and signed up for two weeks – fully expecting that I’d conclude their services were nice, but not worth the money.
Why even move in the first place?
The Melting Pot had started to suffer from a number of problems that lower-traffic WordPress sites don’t encounter.
Notably, WordPress is, to use the technical term, a right bastard to configure for speed under high load. I’m highly technically adept for someone who isn’t a full-time sysadmin, and I’d consulted with my hosts, Bytemark (whom I still highly recommend for non-WP services), who are very good indeed, but still, we couldn’t get load times stable and fast enough for my liking. Research shows that the amount of time a viewer will stay on your site, and the chances of them bookmarking or subscribing to your site, is/are highly affected by page load speed – and at peak times, despite my best efforts, the Pot moved like a hamster towing a truck.
WPEngine promised the fastest WordPress load times known to man. I liked the sound of that.
At the same time, my WordPress installation was starting to get a bit… clunky. We didn’t have automated upgrades installed, because it was a headache to do so, and so an increasing number of my plugins, not to mention my core WP install, were starting to get decidedly out of date. Out of date WordPress servers get hacked. And it was getting to the point where I was worrying about that fact every day, but still wasn’t willing to undergo the pain of a full manual upgrade.
Little things were starting to break, too. I couldn’t drag widgets around for some unfathomable reason, despite spending a day trying to bugfix that problem. I couldn’t Quick Edit posts. Scheduling would occasionally… not.
And I was getting increasingly sick of getting up at 4am to restart servers when my phone beeped to tell me the Pot had burned down, fallen over, and sunk into the swamp.
All of this pain would, in theory, be solved by moving to a managed WordPress solution like WP Engine – whilst still giving me the control of having my own self-installed WordPress.
Hence, the trial.
Migrating to WPEngine and the first few days
Migrating from the Melting Pot to WPEngine was a joy.
No, wait, not a joy. The other thing.
My initial migration was something of a nightmare. Despite having some instructions on the WPEngine site, nothing worked first time. I couldn’t even log in to the bloody site. Then I couldn’t log into the database. Then it wouldn’t import. Then it did import – and the Melting Pot appeared entirely in 64-point text with no images. Then my theme, the usually-excellent Thesis, decided it needed to be upgraded – and then upgraded again, and again, and so on.
I very nearly gave up on WPEngine as a bad job in the first three days.
However, their support was uniformly excellent. Alexander, one of their technicians, responded patiently to email after email after email, and did an excellent job of calming me down as I became increasingly shirty and irritable. It’s safe to say that without his support, I wouldn’t have even made it to Day 3.
And now we hit one of the major reasons I’m still with WPEngine. Their support is bloody marvellous. I’ve pinged them almost every day since I joined up with one problem or another, and in all cases, it’s either been sorted out or is still in the process of being sorted out. Technically, they don’t provide support for plugins, but in practise I’ve found that even with plugin problems they’re willing to pitch in and help out, and usually know more than I do.
(This post is being written with Markdown rather than Textile after I asked a support question about my textile plugin, and Jason, the WPEngine CEO, came back with a super-informed answer. Yes, their CEO often answers support queries.)
Eventually, the Melting Pot was online. And somewhat after eventually, DNS had actually changed, and we were settled in.
Running a Blog On WP-Engine Day To Day
Once you’re up and running, most of the time running a site through WPEngine is similar to running it on a self-hosted blog – although with decidedly less of the irritating niggles that WordPress tends to develop with age.
I log in – first time, now, since moving to WPEngine solved the irritating redirect loop my self-hosted solution had somehow gotten itself into. I edit posts – in an interface which not only works perfectly but also runs noticably faster than it used to. I manage comments – again, seamlessly, with no sudden hangs, slowdowns, or wierd errors.
What became noticable after a couple of weeks, though, and what convinced me to stay with WordPress, was what I wasn’t doing. Since I’ve moved, I’ve never had to
- Delete a sudden onrush of spam. WPEngine run some kind of ninja anti-exploit software. I don’t know what it is or how it works, but spam has dropped to close to zero.
- SSH into my server and run “top” to try and figure out why the Melting Pot is running like a dog. It’s always smooth and fast – and I know that if it isn’t, I can just email WPEngine and suddenly that’s their problem, not mine. (They guarantee 99.5% uptime for the server. If they go beyond that, they refund 5% of my monthly hosting PER HOUR.)
- Restart the server because it’s crashed. See above.
- Panic at an attempted hack on the server. Again, it’s their problem, and I know they’ve forgotten more about security than I know. ( Various reports from around the ‘net plus the CEO’s blog verify they’re the real deal.)
- Spend a day trying to figure out why something bizarre isn’t working in WordPress. Again, I just email support and it’s their problem. Right now they’re tracking down the bugs the Melting Pot seems to have with trackbacks – something that I’ve previously and unsuccessfully spent large chunks of a day on.
Speed is definitely faster – not MUCH faster, but Pingdom reports a modest increase. More importantly, since we switched over our site speed has been a lot less spikey – previously, the Melting Pot was often fast but sometimes very, very slow – and that would always be at peak times when a lot of people were trying to access our site. Since the WPEngine shift, our load times don’t change with the number of people hitting us, and I’ve noticed we’re regularly serving 3 figures of simultaneous users. I’m looking forward to seeing how the site handles a real traffic spike.
So why DID I stay with WPEngine as a WordPress host?
It’s not the speed, at the end of the day. I thought it would be that if anything, but I was wrong.
I’ve decided to commit to staying with WPEngine, despite the steep rise in hosting fees, because it turns out to be a cheap way to buy myself a load more hours in the day. Essentially, I’ve outsourced all the WordPress and server maintainance tasks that were previously interrupting me or taking my time up – stuff that was slowing me down, but that I couldn’t have afforded to hire someone to deal with.
In addition, I also buy myself time because everything works. I don’t have to use arcane workarounds to deal with the fact various bits of WordPress aren’t working properly, because, well, they all are. I don’t have to log in 5 times because there’s something screwy with my self-hosted DNS. I estimate that the shift to WPEngine has saved me 10-20 minutes a day of messing around – and that adds up fast.
And I don’t have to spend time learning about stuff that doesn’t directly benefit the Pot. I don’t need to spend hours reading about the difference between Hypercache and WP Total Cache, or whether I should use Memcached, Varnish, a reverse proxied Nginx server, or all of the above. All that stuff’s interesting, but it’s not the best use of my time.
Basically, I’ve decided to stay with WPEngine not because they provide very expensive hosting – although it’s excellent – but because they provide a very cheap, very good, very agreeable full-time dedicated sysadmin for my blog.
Which means I can concentrate on, you know, writing it.
You can find out more about WP Engine here.
{ 84 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the review! I’m still evaluating different wordpress hosting companies.
No worries! Feel free to ask if there’s anything specific you’re concerned about – I may not be able to answer, but I will if I can.
Are you still using them now (this site).
If not, why not?
We are indeed still using WP-Engine, and they’re still doing a damn fine job.
This site is a Wordpress site right? This is hosted with bytemark. So what sites are you hosting with wpengine? Also this comment you made: “I’ve pinged them almost every day since I joined up with one problem or another,” … does not sound very good? Thanks
Been using WP Engine for a month and I love it.
I went down the Varnish + nginx road myself. Got it all set up and then realized I really, really shouldn’t have to bother with any of this. Running a bunch of WP sites on a VPS should not be that difficult to maintain. But the constant upgrading is simply a PITA.
Took a few days to get everything moved over to WP Engine as well, but everything is smoothly now.
And I don’t have to worry about backups, getting hacked, or slowness!
The problem i found with VPS is that they offer different levels and try to get an upgrade anytime there’s a problem.
Interviewed the Co Founder and CEO to find out more.
What i like about WPEngine is they fully disclose exactly how much traffic you can receive on each plan and they fix all the speed and security problems.
VPS providers don’t do this. They blame your plugins and make other excuses trying to force an upgrade.
I completed many speed tests using a huge range of tools and consistent speed improves page views by at least 20%
Did you use or are you considering any Cache service to get the site speeded up?
Did you turn on CDN on your WPengine instal?
One of the sites I was working on used CloudFlare and we had some problems when we turned on Disqus comments. It worked great on WPengine but seemed to lose the DNS on CloudFlare. We have since turned off the cacheservice. But we are exploring putting it back on.
WPEngine handles the caching invisibly, so we’re just not worrying about that. We are indeed using CDN, though.
Can’t comment on Disqus, I’m afraid – we used it a long time ago on the Pot and I was unimpressed with it.
Wow! Thanks for the quick reply Hugh.
I think CDN would be the way to go. I’ve just spoken to the WPEngine people for more info.
Yeah, Disqus creates a bit of a drag with synchronizing comments. We installed it just for the one feature where the moderator can reply to comments via email. He has a large membership site with active comments. That way he doesn’t have to log into Wordpress to reply.
Thanks again!
WPEngine don’t use caching plugins. Not all plans offer CDN but you don’t need it most of the time.
My sites content loads in under 1 second. Its the Google custom search and things like Facebook fan box which slow it down but its still under 2 seconds
You make a compelling case for WP Engine. I’ve found using a cloud server with Varnish, W3 total cache that a CDN made a huge difference. I guess this might not be so useful if you get a lot of comments though.
I don’t suppose you have a coupon code as well do you please? I’ll be signing up this weekend and noticed someone else with affiliate links had a code, but wasn’t sure if you’d still get the referral if I used theirs.
I’ll check and see if my affiliate panel gives me coupon codes!
Cool thanks, no worries if not, just let me know
Thesis has been nothing but a NIGHTMARE on WPEngine for me. From the very first day, the same thing that happened to you, happened to me. They keep blaming it on Thesis or a caching problem. A template update should be easy but not with this company. Files are locked, can’t change permissions…etc.
The restore points are also worthless. If you try to restore your site, the Thesis template properties are locked and you end up without a header, the text is huge…etc.
Each time, you sit there for hours while they try to figure out the solution. One time, they told me that the automatic daily backup did not back up my site for weeks so I scrambled to put the blog posts back up that were missing.
Yes, their support is very good and they are patient while I am blowing a gasket because my site has been down for hours. Eventually, they fixed my site.
I am still with them for the following reasons:
1. They provide a staging area so you can test upgrades and plugin before launching on your live site.
2. Overall, my site loads fast.
3. The techs are very knowledgeable about Wordpress.
4. There is a phone # to call if my site goes down.
I could get by on a much cheaper plan with another hosting company and that is what pisses me off. I pay a premium for my hosting and just want things to work. It’s not like Thesis is some small time theme/framework.
I have confidence that they will get this all under control. If not, I will have to change hosting and I won’t be happy about it.
Has the Thesis theme issue been fixed on WP Engine? I was considering using them with the Thesis theme. Let me know.
I’m going to ask them to comment on the Thesis theme issues right here, so stay tuned.
Personally I find the Thesis theme problems are relatively simple to get around – I just deactivate the Object Cache before making any changes to my theme – but I appreciate I’m not doing a lot of advanced manipulations there, and my experience is still that if it goes wrong, it can be a right pain to fix.
We’ll see what the WP Engine guys have to say on the subject!
Well, I held my breath while trying to update the Thesis theme…and all went well! So, either this was fixed by them or the new Thesis update.
Now, the upgrading instructions did say to change a couple file permissions and I was unable to. I called WPEngine and they assured me that I didn’t need to change them.
I have not tried to restore from a restore point yet…hopefully, I will not have to. Where do you deactivate the content cache?
I highly recommend these guys because this support is rare with other companies and my site is fast.
You can deactivate the Object cache (which is what causes the problems) from the “Clear Caches” section of WP Engine’s controls.
I normally deactivate it, make any necessary changes, and activate it again.
I hear from WP Engine that as of the latest version of Thesis, that might not be necessary, though!
Anyone running a site using genesis on WPEngine? I have several client’s sites I am suggesting they move from (gulp) GoDaddy.
-Jason
I’m not, but I notice that the WP-Engine preferred consultants list includes one group that say they work with Genesis – you could ask them: http://wpengine.com/consultants/
yes i am http://wp.me/p1lTu0-8Ly
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You don’t say? Hmmm…any way we could exchange emails to discuss? I’m frustrated hosting my WP sites at GoDaddy and if you could help me ascertain that it’s from hosting at GoDaddy, I’d happily give WP-Engine a try.
No worries. Brad at wpsites.net
Thanks for this review. I will give them a try. I have a few question which I hope you can answer:
1. Do you have to change your DNS and use there nameservers?
2. What CDN do they use?
Thanks.
No worries!
1) No – in fact, they don’t run their own DNS servers. They recommend using Namecheap, I believe, but you can run your own DNS – that’s what we do with the Melting Pot.
2) I’m honestly not sure – it’s an in-house solution, I think. Seems to work very well. I’ll ask them.
I’ve asked them, and had a response already: they’re using NetDNA, but it’s fully integrated with their hosting so basically it’s a one-form tickybox from the user’s point of view.
I Have hosted with wpengine for half a month, there was some problem with the website which i fixed after, but they have banned my account from wpengine.
and this is the last message which i got from support for re opening the account, i hope they dont do that to every one.
======================
Hi There,
No, we don’t want you to host with us. I can recommend other managed WordPress services, though they don’t have the free account give away like they do: —
Regards,
==============
Director of Customer Happiness
Twitter: ======
WPEngine.com
Hey Altaf,
I’m sorry that you weren’t happy with your initial interaction with us. We’re the first to admit that our #1 priority is for you to have the best hosting experience possible, even if that means you don’t host with WP Engine. Sometimes that is the case if you have external apps that aren’t in WordPress, for example. Part of what we offer as a managed host is some of the best WordPress Hosting on the market, and to do that, we specialize and don’t host things outside of WordPress.
And of course, we have to be careful to keep sites that have malware or viruses off of WP Engine, and the normal routes to protect our current customers. The Internet can be a scary place sometimes, and we go out of our way to protect our customers from evildoers.
I’d appreciate it if you can follow up with me directly via email, austin@wpengine.com, so that we can talk. If there has been a mistake on our part, I’d like to make sure I have the opportunity to apologize to you directly and then offer my fullest efforts to recover.
Thank you for letting us know!
-Austin
Brand Ambassador
WP Engine
Why did they ban you Altaf?
I think many would be interested to know the answer to this.
What was the question you asked them when you got this reply?
I know most of the guys there and they’ve always been very transparent with me.
I don’t want to sound rude, I really hate to, but this really bothers me.
You don’t get 400k visitors a month, nor even close to 250k.
I first noticed your Alexa score, it would be better. Then searched your daily stats and I was right. I’m sorry but I feel in a review you should be honest on all points.
Thanks, Mike
Yes, we do indeed get over 250k visitors a month, and I don’t appreciate being called a liar.
There are well-known problems with Alexa and similar tools – which get worse the further a site’s core audience is away from the core Alexa toolbar userbase. There is, to put it mildly, not a strong correlation between WoW / MMORPG players and Alexa users.
All this means that unless you are the admin of this site (you’re not) and have access to our actual Google Analytics account (you don’t), you cannot tell how many visitors we get.
I, however, can.
So, here are accurate stats for mmomeltingpot.com from Google Analytics for March 2012, the month this review was written:
Visits: 458,281
Unique Visitors: 282,710
Pageviews: 644,236
That was far from our busiest month ever.
In conclusion: I’d appreciate an apology.
I was not trying to be rude I said, I apologize if I offended you.
I understand your concerns with Alexa, but understand the toolbar was just a first impression, though Alexa may be labeled as incorrect by a lot of people it would still have a better score. I understand your concerns with realistic analytics as well.
But, I really hate to sound rude, honestly hate it but you just got caught not telling the truth in this mater.
“However, a quick look at WPEngine’s site made me think we couldn’t afford them. Reading through their prices, the Melting Pot would cost a minimum of $249 a month – and when we had a burst month and hit more than 400,000 visitors, as we do from time to time, it seemed we’d be moved up to the “if you have to ask you can’t afford it” top tier of hosting.”
Conflicts with
“Visits: 458,281
Unique Visitors: 282,710
Pageviews: 644,236
That was far from our busiest month ever.”
I’m really not trying to sound rude =(, it’s a curse being a perfectionist and I have to always correct people and make everything right. Surely you can understand this.
On our busiest months, we hit more than 400,000 visitors.
March was not one of our busiest months.
Hence we only saw 282,710 visitors.
I fail to see the contradiction.
You’re posting under a fake email account* and trying to stir trouble, so future comments from you will be deleted, and this particular comment thread is now closed.
* “Mike”‘s email account purports to be @wpengine.com. I have confirmed with WP Engine that they’ve never heard of him. To quote David @ WP Engine, “I think you’d be well within your rights to call him out and ban him from posting”.
Or are you referring to your yearly total traffic?
See above.
I have been with WP Engine for 11 months started on there base now I have a node. I agree & would say there worth twice the cost.
Hey Thomas, thanks for the very kind words. It means a ton to me personally when our customers recommend us publicly. We’ll keep working overtime to keep you happy.
To expand on
“Thanks for this review. I will give them a try. I have a few question which I hope you can answer:
1. Do you have to change your DNS and use there nameservers?
2. What CDN do they use?
Thanks.
REPLY”
WP Engine (I think this is 100% but I might be wrong) uses NetDNA via a manged plugin it works very well. I thought no name servers was strange but I thought about it. I think every host should pick there DNS and let there customers pick there own DNS the person will learn more about DNS WP Engine can do what they do best help customers and make the best Wordpress hosting on earth. I use DYN.com but have had great luck with UltraDNS and AWS Route 53 lastly I hear DNSmadeeasy is great and cheep.
Hope I helped I know if you need to get DNS AWS Route 53 is very very fast and cheep.
Yep, they do use NetDNA – I have that confirmed by David @ WPEngine. The plugin they use does indeed work seamlessly – I’ve never had any problems aside from the usual occasional “oops, forgot to flush the cache” issues.
I agree 100% about the DNS. I’m using Namecheap, as WPEngine recommends, for some of my domains, and Bytemark, my old hosts (who are ace for non-WP stuff) for the rest. Let the DNS people do DNS and the WP people do WP.
“moved like a hamster towing a truck”… awesome imagery
I may have envisioned that being said in a Jeremy Clarkson stylee…
I have been with WP Engine for 2 weeks now and I am extremely happy with their professionalism, quick response times, willingness to help, and the clarity and effectiveness of their instructions when I have submitted a support ticket.
Do you have an affiliate link? I decided to make the move and wanted I’d pass out some credit to your review for helping with the decision.
I sure do! Thanks very much.
Affiliate link
Unfortunately, I am going to have to submit a negative reply for wpengine . After reading all of the positive reviews I had decided to make the jump over from dreamhost. However, I didn’t realize the extent that wpengine block plugins; wpengine has a long list of plugins –74 on a quick unofficial count– they do not allow (http://support.wpengine.com/disallowed-plugins/). I understand this is because they are trying to remain as efficient and as fast as possible; however, if you are in the market as an ultra-premium hosting provider, who charges customers more because they are receiving better quality care, then how do you justify limiting customer freedom? I expected the service to be more accommodating to say the least; when I transferred from dreamhost to wpengine I was expecting more “yes, what can we help you with” and less “nope, you can’t do that-try again”.
To give some context, I use the MyReviewPlugin a great deal on my site. It is far and away the most robust review system out there (and cost me $80…). I also spent another $200 or so on custom coding that pulls reviews in to customer account screens across a multisite setup. This means that wpengine is asking me to accept that $280 bill, as well as pay for a new plugin (reviewengine is $170 for unlimited bringing my grand total to $450 in sunk costs to use a “premium” hosting provider), for their “premium” service. Obviously this isn’t something I am going to do… Myreviewplugin is not a security threat, don’t expect me to pay a premium for hosting and then have you say “only if you use plugins that write the database at our accepted rates”. I am thankful for their 60 day guarantee, which I will be using 2 hours in to opening an account.
Worth noting: I just had a live chat ended on wpengine, after I brought up the points of them forcing me to lose the money invested in the plugin, I received no reply from the representative until the chat window timed out for idleness.
Hey Kyle,
Thanks for weighing in with your experience with WP Engine. I’m glad that you’ve written our your particular use-case that doesn’t work with WP Engine. Had you and I had an opportunity to speak before signing up, or had you taken note of our website which notes the disallowed plugins list, you might not have had to go through the trouble of signing up only to find that we aren’t the right hosting platform for you. We always ask potential customers what plugins they are running before they sign up. As awesome as we ARE for thousands and thousands of customers, we cannot be the right host for everyone, and there are many good choices for WordPress hosting companies. My priority is that everyone have WordPress hosting they are ecstatic about, whether that’s WP Engine’s platform or elsewhere.
You stated:
“I understand this is because they are trying to remain as efficient and as fast as possible; however, if you are in the market as an ultra-premium hosting provider, who charges customers more because they are receiving better quality care, then how do you justify limiting customer freedom? I expected the service to be more accommodating to say the least; when I transferred from dreamhost to wpengine I was expecting more “yes, what can we help you with” and less “nope, you can’t do that-try again”.”
Part of what WP Engine offers our customers is an incredible amount of experience with WordPress hosting. We serve an incredible amount of data across tens of thousands of domains every single day, and that gives us ample opportunity to troubleshoot and resolve those one-in-a-million exceptions on a regular basis. We troubleshoot problems and then take steps to prevent those problems from ever affecting our customers again. This means that each additional customer who signs up benefits from an increasingly fast, stable, scalable, and secure hosting platform.
For example, we recently disallowed Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, and a few other similar ones (http://wpengine.com/2012/06/fulltext-update/) because those plugins create a FULLTEXT Index which does not scale well. This particular index does things that MySQL wasn’t designed for, and so it will dramatically slow sites down at high traffic levels. In order to provide fast and scalable hosting as promised, we have to require that our customers use substitute plugins such as Nrelate and Wordnik to achieve the same functionality. Both of those are scalable related posts plugins that perform the heavy-lifting off-server and will not slow the server to a crawl or crash it under high traffic.
Your particular plugin is a very similar example. MyReviewPlugin works very well at lower traffic levels, but it writes the database unnecessarily, and can be rather greedy with resources. You’re right that it’s not a security risk, per say, but it is a “speed risk.” I don’t have the exact stats for your website, but a plugin that writes to MySQL too often can make a site load time take as long as 5-10+ seconds for each visitor. That’s an unacceptable level for your site, and WP Engine is a premium host because we are always looking out for ways that you can make your site faster and more scalable. You could pay for the additional resources it would require, but that would likely be the cost of the plugin added to your bill every month. We also have to make sure that there are no sites on our servers that take up too many resources and slow down their neighboring sites. This plugin would not only slow your site down, but also your neighbors. So while I’m sorry that you invested your hard-earned dollars in the plugin, it’s simply not one that we can allow to slow your site, or anyone else’s site down.
Since you haven’t spent much time on our servers, I’m sure you didn’t have it custom-coded for our stack, but most high-performing sites require new development for plugins and themes on a weekly or daily basis. We have a list of amazing developers that I can refer you to who are able to code the very same functionality into your site and have it work incredibly well with WP Engine. The investment would pay off in the traffic increase you would likely see on our fast servers, which would translate into more buyers and ad revenue.
Of course, if you’re set on leaving we will happily refund your money. There are plenty of hosting companies that won’t limit plugins based on scalability or security and will offer you the freedom to run your site exactly the way you want to! My priority is for you to have the right hosting company for your site and give you the best opportunity to run a profitable business!
If you have any questions for me personally, please feel free to email me directly, Austin(at)WPEngine(dot)com.
Thanks Kyle,
-Austin Gunter
Follow-Up: a month and a half later…
I wanted to post a final verdict after a bit more time with WPEngine. Long story short, I am changing from WPEngine to Synthesis, but this was by no means an easy choice.
WPEngine really is a great service: their customer support reps are great and will always get back to you right away, probably the best customer service experience I have ever had. The feature set they offer really can’t be beat either, between built in CDN services, the Staging site (really amazing for development), and other optimization services it really is as good as it gets.
With that said, they lost me on the plugin blacklist, BUT they did put lots of effort in to try and accommodate my request so even with that it is hard to fault them. Austin, who replied to my comments above, contacted me and over the past few weeks we tried to get the plugin ‘up to snuff’ so that it was acceptable for their servers. Unfortunately, we never got there. This also concern me as I go forward on a tight budget — they offer no coverage against blacklisting premium plugins. Now, I suppose I should have dug deeper to findout there was a blacklist before I started using them, but there isn’t exactly a warning that says ‘before using wpengine please check the blacklist to make sure your site can transfer’.
My site relies heavily on reviews and a couple other premium plugins, and as such I have put quite a few hours and dollars into customizing the features for them. Despite all my love for their great service, their hard nosed approach to plugin oversight with no offered coverage in the event of a blacklist proved to be a dealbreaker. Still, if you don’t use many premium plugins, they are an amazing group that offer an amazing service. If I have the chance down the road and am in a different set of circumstances, I would go back to them without hesitation, it just wasn’t in the cards right now.
I rarely I chime in on these types of things happened to have selected to get an e-mail when posts were made. The reason I am speaking right now is for two reasons one I want to thank Austen and WP Engine for not allowing plug-ins that affect the site performance of other users like myself. Not surprisingly apparently dream host really doesn’t take an interest in being sure all their customers get an equal amount of resources from a server. Kyle I hope you understand that is why I don’t use companies like dream host because you get poor quality hosting and unfortunately even though you probably had the best intentions it seems that the plug-in you’re using is the reason anyone sharing a server with the site that you’re on that suffer because you are taking their resources do you honestly believe that’s fair? I would much rather have a host that pays attention to the way the servers running so their customers can have what they’ve come to expect excellent speed, security and service Something WP Engine does do better than anyone.
Secondly you said
“To give some context, I use the MyReviewPlugin a great deal on my site. It is far and away the most robust review system out there (and cost me $80…). I also spent another $200 or so on custom coding that pulls reviews in to customer account screens across a multisite setup. This means that wpengine is asking me to accept that $280 bill, as well as pay for a new plugin (reviewengine is $170 for unlimited bringing my grand total to $450 in sunk costs to use a “premium” hosting provider), for their “premium” service. Obviously this isn’t something I am going to do…
I am thankful for their 60 day guarantee, which I will be using 2 hours in to opening an account.
Worth noting: I just had a live chat ended on wpengine, after I brought up the points of them forcing me to lose the money invested in the plugin, I received no reply from the representative until the chat window timed out for idleness.”
Kyle please don’t mention money when you never had to spend any at all. You were not asked to spend a dime and not charged a dime. still you speak like WP engine actually requested that you buy a plug-in and have it custom coded for your site.
that’s like me saying I bought a Porsche GT Porsche makes great cars what do they expect they should know I do not use their proven tires I use brand X that me and my friend made it cost me a lot of money but they only have the speed rating of 150 miles per hour I think as soon as I got to the Porsche track they told me I could not drive on it because it affected my safety and I could hurt others, what’s the big deal my tire exploded going 190 mph on the autobahn so Porsche will not let me on the track without expecting me to pay for new tires? you are essentially saying you should be able to use subpar equipment that could affect others and your mad because it was pointed out to you.
Let’s be honest what I just wrote sounds crazy right if somebody has worked on by a private contractor or the themselves and purchases something that unfortunately is not high quality does not work as well as it should.
Kyle I’m not trying to be rude at all I’m just trying to let you see how you sound.
The fact is WordPress engine just did you a huge favor they told you your plug-in is not coded correctly you should thank them.
I was going to recommend another managed WordPress host however I honestly don’t believe any of them will let you on and I trust WP engine so I wouldn’t want to affect other people being hosted on those other house if they did make the mistake of letting someone on that shared resources with others and took more than others. You could always buy a node with WP engine or other managed WordPress hosts however your probably best off buying a plug-in for your website that does not affect other users that way you won’t be slow wherever you go because regardless of whether you’re on your own dedicated server or not you’re still slowing yourself down. Think of it as paying for a poped tire.
If it makes you feel any better man I just spent $8000 and 4 months getting the website developed unfortunately I am extremely unhappy with the results and truly very angry. I will tell you what I’ve done I was mad because I failed to put in the work with the developer to make it the way I wanted it. I had feelings of I am mad at this developer he failed me. The fact is I let myself down the sooner you can let go of blaming others for things you have control over the sooner you’ll be happier. Not trying to preach to man I’m just telling you think of this as a free inspection you know what’s wrong now it’s a shame that there’s a problem but at least you now know what to do to fix it.
Last but not least as quoted below there are over 16,000 WordPress plug-ins do you honestly believe 74 is too many?
“In fact, with over 16k plugins (currently) in the WordPress plugin repository, we only (at this time) forbid a few dozen”
Kyle I wish you the best with fixing your website hope that’s the choice you make for yourself and others. Hopefully you will do what WP engine suggested & try using them for real then you will be happy to know your host is looking out for your website.
Austin keep up the good work I am happy you guys are always looking out for us customers and educating people so their sites run better on all servers.
Respectfully,
Thomas
The four months my website was hosted with WPE were the worst in its five-year history. It was nothing but nonstop B.S. and headaches.
Yes, I know, there are dozens of glowing testimonials about WPEngine’s awesomeness. I’ve read them too. That’s what lead me to give them a try (I’ve hosted with Media Temple and Rackspace before that). Don’t be fooled. It is because of all these one-sided, glowing reviews that I feel compelled to share my experience.
WPEngine regularly made changes to my website:
- without my permission
- without telling me in advance
- without alerting me to what they did after the fact
- without checking their work
They did this not once… not twice… but on three separate occasions. Each instance resulted in CATASTROPHIC failures, crashing the biggest — and most critical — chunks of my website (e.g., single.php, sidebar.php).
Three separate issues. Three times they made changes. Three times the site crashed.
No warning. No apology. No admission of wrong-doing. Not once.
They are right, you are wrong. 100% of the time. They know everything, you know squadoosh.
If that’s your idea of “managed hosting,” then go ahead and knock yourself out.
Does WPEngine answer service requests quickly? Absolutely. They are fast, no doubt. But fast isn’t the only thing I care about. I’d rather wait for the right answer tomorrow than have someone crash my website today. Being fast only has value if what you get done quickly works. But WPE got it all wrong — every… single… time — so everything always ended up taking way more time and energy than it should have.
I run my website as my sole source of income.* When my site goes down, I lose money. I can’t afford website crashes. I can’t afford to have my webhost dump one massive admin disaster after another in my lap. If your business is dependent on your WordPress website, you absolutely cannot gamble with WPEngine.
My experience was a net negative, all the way around. Their impositions were exceedingly disruptive. The stress was nearly unbearable. Their incompetence was infuriating. And their incredulity was unfathomable.
In a nutshell? WPEngine is an autocratic, arrogant and incapable webhost — an utter nightmare combination.
“It’s not for everyone,” they told me. Sheesh, that’s the understatement of the century. It’s definitely not for me, nor anyone else who takes their website — and customer service — seriously.
Most sincerely,
Jeffry Pilcher, Publisher
TheFinancialBrand.com
(* 50K monthly uniques, 125K monthly pageviews)
Jeffry you are absolutely right. I had very similar experiences with WP Engine. I’ll explain.
Prior to joining WP Engine, I took care of my site entirely meaning I configured the site and backed up the files and database.
After migrating to WP Engine I continued to back up my files and database (since I am relunctant to solely rely on any host including WP Engine).
One day I noticed my database had changed in size from 24 mb to 4 mb! I checked the site and all seemed well. However, I was VERY concerned that my database had shrunk. I searched for an answer and I discovered then that the WP Engine backups weren’t reliable. Their support couldn’t tell me exactly when the database had shrunk. It really bothered me so I continued to look for an answer especially since their tech support didn’t think it was a big deal.
By chance I noticed all of my Post revisions were gone! Apparently after my prodding they admitted that they ran a program which deleted all of my Post revisions. I was livid! How dare they modify my database without even asking my permission! Also, what if I depended on those Post revisions? Why didn’t they inform me so that I could make sure backups of the database were completed before and after the deletion of Post revisions?
I was really pissed off about this but I let it go.
Then about two weeks later my website became very slow. I worked with their tech support who was very good at investigating the problem. However, when they found the problem (I believe it was one of the JetPack modules) they shut off (i.e. they configured) my plugin. Again, I was totally upset since all they had to do was tell me and I (repeat I ) would take care of the problem. I hated the fact that they willy nilly once again went into my Admin panel and made changes.
This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I abruptly left them.
Wow, that’s a pretty alarming story.
WP Engine folks, any comeback on this?
I figured I would post back with an update. Previously, I had problems with restoring from their restore points with Thesis and WPengine. I had a plugin go crazy yesterday and the restore went seamlessly!
We have been with WPEngine for about 10 months now. Worst decision we made was to use them. We had at least 2 dozen outages and many of them lasting for hours. I would not recommend them to anyone.
I had a very similar experience. Switching to WP Engine was seriously THE #1 worst business decision we made for all of 2012. We were only with them for 3 and a half months and we had several website outages that they tried to cover up as “Emergency Maintenance.” When it comes to having a website and a business, having downtime costs you tremendous amounts of money. If you read the comments section of WP Engine reviews, you’ll learn how other disappointed customers switched to more reliable WordPress hosting such as Zippykid, Page.ly, or Web Synthesis.
What I see everywhere is that all these bloggers are heaping praises over this overpriced, overhyped service. Why? Because of $150 affiliate commission?
I’ve been on WP Engine since the beginning of June. Epic speed and service. I’ve got 20/25 of my Business plan slots filled and have gone past breaking even again.
What caught my attention in your post was your experience with Thesis and the migration. I also had a nightmare with one of my own sites and after 4 hours fighting it, I just scrapped it, threw up a good Genesis child theme, and wrote a post apologizing for the sudden change. Everyone has been complimenting me just for the base theme, so it’s been a welcome change.
A cloud is still cheaper
I must the thickest person that ever walked the earth.
I have installed many, many wp installs over the last 5 or 6 years and can do it with my eyes shut. I stick them on various HG plans.
WPEngine has made me literally throw my Apple laptop out the window. Words cannot explain how frustrating it is.
Interesting – which part of the WP Engine setup caused the problems?
Please kill me right now! great review but what’s the story with the annoying panda on the left. can’t concentrate for a sec with this “mists of panda ria secrets” ad blinking my life away.
Sorry about that – and glad you thought the review was good!
This site isn’t a Wordpress developer site by default – we’re actually an MMORPG news site. Hence, WoW and Mists of Pandaria
(Quick tip, though – if you resize your browser window below 1300 width and reload, the left-side banner will go away. A bit of a faff, but may be worth it if it’s really annoying you!)
I tried WPEngine, and not only did I not understand why it was so expensive, but I found the whole platform utterly baffling. I’ve built many wordpress sites, and what I love about Wordpress is that it’s so easy. WPEngine manages to make it oddly complicated, frustrating, and time-consuming. Worse, when you pay $30/month for a website, you expect a dedicated domain name, but as it turns out, you still have to go out and buy your own domain name. So I ended up $120 poorer (I built two sites), lost many hours of my time, and ultimately canceled the sites because the entire process was so frustrating. I find the cheaper services that I’ve been using for years exponentially easier.
Hi !
we are planning to move to fastest wordpress hosting so found your site. Thanks for all the great info and review. I had a query.. i checked on whoishostingthis and it shows the following : mmomeltingpot.com Is Hosted by Linode
Have you switched to this new company now ?
Thanks & Regards,
DBS team
That’s straight-out strange! I’ve been testing a server over on Linode, but we’re still hosted by WP-Engine right now.
The best analogy I can give you guys is if you’re into cars and you see a BMW 335 then you see a BMW M3 or a Mercedes C class or AMG you know or the AMG/M3 is tweaked to go faster it does everything better and let’s a minute and imagine having to host tens of thousands of people that includes data centers incredible expense so think of WP engine as AMG or M is to Mercedes-Benz and BMW legally their separate companies and provide services for manufacturers to make their cars that are a great better. WP engine uses a live node and server Beach to do the actual data center hosting however WP engine like every other manner managed WordPress host uses a another host then supercharges a unique configuration of servers made only for WP engine by server beach or line node. For instance page.ly uses fire host, Zippy kid uses rack space, web synthesis uses media Temple all of these managed WordPress hosts focus on what they do best at providing better customer service than the original post and making the original hosting companies servers something unique to each manage WordPress company it’s not like you could just call up liner note and say I want the same server that I would get with WP engine. If they said yes I’m thinking your monthly bill would be easily in the tens of thousands plus you actually would get the support, you would not really get everything because load balancers cashing 1 billion things going on that you don’t see your have to worry about give you the M/AMG version of the hosting company used I believe all of these companies use bare metal servers as well it’s a ridiculous amount of work and intelligence that made these companies able to serve WordPress at such a fantastic speed and include world-class support, back up, anti-malware, WordPress experts not just some guy getting paid not very much at 3 AM to look at a manual to answer your question my goodness you can call WP engine or go on their site and find someone excellent who build your website they are a niche in a very good one at that I admire what all of these companies have done I host with WP engine they are rocket ship and there is the option on who’s hosting this to select that has made a mistake and WP engine is an option I suggest you do that. Every time I look at the header in my server records its WP engine 1.2
we would like to clarify *on earlier comment..
we are on WPE now and absolutely LOVING it 101%
& whoishostingthis shows us as hosted on linode too
I’m running my site on WP Engine too and can wholeheartedly recommend them, check out my review http://www.wpmayor.com/articles/wp-engine-review/
That “marvelous support” must be a fly by night thing today. I’d say WP Engine is hype. I have little interest in knowing how fast, or reliable (if at all), their hosting is if their pre-sales customer service is non-existent.
I have tried multiple times to ask them a basic question on their contact form, and have never received a reply. The question? It was, “Can I have a WP Multisite setup”? Tough, eh? Even for the “experts”. They must be still pondering their response…
True, I could have called the phone number, but that’s not my way of communication. And, it’s a basic customer service test that they failed miserably!
If you pride (hype) yourself in serving the customer well, you should at least speak their language and respond to their questions, no?
Two words. Overpriced Hype.
I must say I’ve never experienced that. My support queries (and I had one about a month ago) continue to be answered within an hour or so.
I read this article but wpengine’s Evercache system, isn’t any more special than the page.ly system. This article is a year old, and the source code at the bottom shows w3 total cache and linode.com reference. So maybe the site moved?
Sad really, that he’s paying $249.00 per month @ 250 visitors. You can run one cloud server and do the same thing for $40.00 per month. You can load balance two 4GB cloud servers @ digitalocean.com and handle over a million visitors monthly for less than $100..
Everyone jumps on the bandwagon.. But sooner or later, the wheels will fall off..
The Melting Pot doesn’t run on WP Engine any more, as it’s not as active a priority for me. Other sites I run – generally the ones I really care about – do run on WP Engine.
I could, can and have done all the things you’re suggesting.
But if you’re actually planning to run a business rather than just mess around with tech, is running your own WP server, updating, patching, fixing bugs, and getting up at 3am to restart the server really the best use of your time?
“Their support is bloody marvellous.”
You cracked me up. I am still laughing. Oh! You were serious?
The oh so busy support of WP Engine doesn’t bother to reply in 24 hours. No matter what happens to your site, they have a set of default answer and they will just copy paste it.
That’s not been my experience. I’ve had excellent support from them on multiple occasions – even when I was reducing my plan, they helped me do it and seemed very happy to do so!
Thanks Hugh! Your post on WPEngine was one that influenced me to move our ecommerce site to WPEngine recently. However, we’ve been getting 502 errors and now 504 errors =( I’m sure they’re trying their best, but am not sure if we should go the way of DigitalOcean/Linode and CDN?
Spoke to the customer service and was told that we had too many WooCommerce plugins running (about 40 odd), which was causing the problem. But when I spoke to Woo, Coen mentioned that it shouldn’t be a problem.
Appreciate your advice =) And yes, keep up the awesome posts!
Oh, dear!
WP Engine does occasionally have problems with plugins. I’d get back to WP Engine’s support and get a DETAILED answer about what’s causing the problem, referring back to Woo if necessary. Then you can make decisions from there.
It’s remarkable to pay a quick visit this web site and reading the views of all colleagues concerning this post, while I am also zealous of getting familiarity.
They seem to be a good service. Do they used dedicated hosting? I was also looking at some of the plugins that they don’t allow and they have a few of them. One that I was interested in was the Related Posts Plugin. Do they prevent you from using all of those similar plugins? Also do they charge you for migrations meaning that if I signed up with them, will they move the site for free or do I have to pay?
I’ve been hearing a bit about Wp Engine lately and thought I’d search around the internet to see what others were saying.
If anything, I think this article basically sums up what I thought in the first place–WP Engine is all hype.
Hugh, I don’t think you’re really getting anything at all from WP Engine. It’s just that whatever the hell you were doing previously was a disaster.
I’ve owned WordPress sites getting about a million visits per month and have never dealt with all of these problems you’re presenting (e.g. constantly having to restart servers, dealing with spam, etc.). Those problems don’t make WPE great, it just makes your previous setup extremely bad.
If I decided to join WPE, I’d likely be paying over $500/month. For what?
Get a level 1 DV server from Media Temple, use Google PageSpeed Service, and then get a VaultPress subscription . . . none of which requires much technical knowledge (aside from the few small steps it takes to set the nameservers, add a domain, and auto-install WordPress). With these three services, you’d be getting everything WPE is claiming to offer. Total cost for such a setup? Less than $100/month.
I realize this article is over a year old and that you’ve moved on since then. But for anyone else like me who’s searching for a good review, I thought I’d clear a few things up.
*Shrug* I’ve been running professional blogs since five years before the word “blog” was coined, so I’m not exactly new at this. However, there are definitely more technical people out there.
I find WP-Engine to be worth the money for peace of mind if nothing else. Whether you will definitely depends on your own level of technical expertise and, importantly, whether time spent configuring your server (however much that is) is the most valuable way for you to spend your time.
Firstly – no, this site isn’t hosted with Bytemark, not sure where you got that idea! I do like Bytemark, but this isn’t one of the sites I host with them.
Secondly – bear in mind, this review was written a month after I joined WP Engine, and as usual, there were some teething problems, mostly on my end as I failed to understand things! Since then, I don’t have to contact support much at all – indeed, I don’t think I have done so since about February this year.
WHOIS information for mmomeltingpot.com:***
[Querying whois.verisign-grs.com]
[whois.verisign-grs.com]
Whois Server Version 2.0
Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.
Domain Name: MMOMELTINGPOT.COM
Registrar: TUCOWS DOMAINS INC.
Whois Server: whois.tucows.com
Referral URL: http://domainhelp.opensrs.net
Name Server: A.NS.BYTEMARK.CO.UK
Name Server: B.NS.BYTEMARK.CO.UK
Name Server: C.NS.BYTEMARK.CO.UK
Yup, that’s where our name servers are. Name servers != web servers, though.
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