When I first moved my WordPress hosting over to WP Engine I was highly impressed. They were very helpful, support took ownership of problems and site speed was incredible.
As someone that has been in the game as long as I have it is rare to find a hosting company that provided the level of support they did.
But over the past 8 months things have started to go downhill in a serious way.
I have gone from singing their praises, to telling everyone to avoid them.
Here is an example of just some of the things they have done-
If I could write a list of things that a web host should never do – WP Engine has done them all. They are no longer the hassle-free wordpress hosting experts they claim to be.
In this post I will share my WPEngine experience across the last 18 months and above all, apologise to all of the readers that moved their sites over to WP-Engine off the back of my advice.
I am truly sorry about all of the problems you guys have had.
So let’s get down to business and why you should avoid WP Engine.
I should also highlight that it’s very difficult to find an honest wpengine review, because they pay ridiculous affiliate commissions compared to other hosting companies.
So with that said, let’s get down to business with the only honest wpengine review on the web.
What Will I Learn?
If you search around, you will find endless WP Engine reviews that cast them in a positive light. And there is good reason for that…
But not because they are a good web host, it’s because they offer affiliates a whopping $200 commission per sale.
In other words so many people give positive reviews of WP Engine – for the money.
If I can get someone to sign up to the $29 per month plan – WPEngine will pay me a $200 commission!
That is a 589% difference between what the customer spends with WPEngine versus what WPEngine payout to an affiliate which is precisely why there are so many positive reviews for WPEngine.
Especially when competing companies usually pay out in the $60-$120 range.
So if you have ever wondered why it’s possible to find so many positive reviews for WPEngine, well – money talks. Literally.
Let’s get into the meat & cheese of the only honest WPEngine review on the web.
When I first moved over to WPEngine 18 months ago the experience was absolutely awesome.
The support team were passionate about Wordpress and it was clear they were experts at what they did. They knew Wordpress inside out and were able to resolve any issue for you whether it was with a theme, plugin or Wordpress core.
I was amazed with everything and I can’t stress enough just how awesome they were.
Unfortunately setting this standard of awesomeness has ultimately led to my continued frustration and disappointment with them for a number of reasons.
Now the support team are clueless, it’s like a bunch of people that don’t really know anything about Wordpress have taken over and are just typing a script back to you.
Some of the responses they give are comical at best.
(I’ll be sharing them throughout this post).
WPEngine pride themselves on how fast they are, so let’s start with that.
When I first moved over to WP Engine my sites load time improved by 27% which was worth an extra $16,609 per year to me.
This was one of the main reasons I moved to WP-Engine, but over time that has seriously degraded-
To put that in perspective to login and approve 1 comment it would take a total of 2 minutes & 38 seconds.
For every comment on the blog I wanted to approve, it took 54 seconds. That is a serious problem when you get as many comments as I do.
Basically whenever the site has to read from or write to the MYSQL database the server cannot handle it. All of this started in the first week of May 2013.
Ps. You can learn to increase website speed yourself without changing hosts.
Continuing with the trend of database problems I started to get 502/504 bad gateway errors on the front end and back end of the site which started in the middle of May 2013.
As the months went on the problems got worse until 5 months later in October 2013 the site was completely unworkable. This was also the period when their support started to seriously degrade.
Instead of taking ownership of issues and fixing them like they used to, they consistently palm you off with irrelevant excuses & finger pointing.
The 502/504 bad gateway errors were causing a number of issues-
First of all it was taking my readers nearly 20 seconds to load posts on the blog. Even with their bespoke front end caching technology – which causes its own set of problems.
If shaving just 1.848 seconds off my load time was worth an extra $16,609 to me a year, imagine how much money I was losing when load times increased 4 times over to 20 seconds.
Even my $0.99 per month host could load the site in 6.620 seconds.
Secondly, anytime I was trying to write or edit a post I was getting the error…
“Connection lost. Saving has been disabled until you’re reconnected. We’re backing up this post in your browser, just in case.”
This means that my local machine was losing connection with the server and timing out completely. This happened every single time I tried to edit, write or publish a post.
My previous $0.99 per month host didn’t have that problem.
On top of all of the above I had noticed that the Time To First Byte (TTFB) had increased to over 1 second.
This is the amount of time it takes to receive the first byte of data from the server after requesting a URL in your browser.
That is before the Wordpress application, theme, plugins or files start to load. Bear that point in mind throughout this post as those are the things they always tried to blame.
This is also one of the key things that Google uses to determine site speed and search rankings.
Now I should point out when it comes to servers & hardware – I know my stuff.
I usually play dumb with most things to see if people are honest and the WP Engine support team have failed that test at every hurdle.
It was clear to me there was a bottleneck with the MYSQL database somewhere and 502/504 errors are usually because the server has run out of resources to process the request.
These are the things the WP Engine team tried to blame for the huge decreases in site speed and huge increases in 502/504 errors.
The first thing was that outdated plugins will slow your site down. Here is the exact quote-
Which is funny, because the site had been using the exact same plugin versions when it was lightning fast.
But apparently because there were updates available to the plugins that slows your entire site down.
The next thing they tried to blame was that a table in the database was too big. The table was only 50MB in size, the size a budget webhost can handle (see my full A2 Hosting review).
This table was part of the OIOPublisher banner advertising plugin that I use to serve ads on the site that would log stats when a reader loaded a page on the front end of the website.
They blamed the size of the table & the plugin itself, even though the plugin wasn’t getting called on the backend where most of the issues were.
I also pointed out to them that other much bigger blogs used the exact same plugin and were still lightning fast so it was unlikely the plugin was the issue.
I had also been running the exact same version of plugin for months without an issue – so on top of the above, it just didn’t make sense that was the issue.
But it was an easy issue for them to blame. So I did what they asked of me and it should come as no surprise that didn’t fix the issue.
It took them nearly 2 weeks to get to that after opening the initial ticket. What happened to all of the Worpdress experts?
One of the things I continued to ask support was how much actual CPU/RAM resource was allocated to each customers site.
This seems to be a very sticky question for WP Engine – a question I have asked over and over and over again, I even asked the co-founder to his face at Affiliate Summit.
The question either gets completely ignored or answered in a very vague way. If you are a current WP Engine customer ask the question, it’s funny watching them squirm with the answer.
Right from the beginning I had suspected they had overloaded servers and were unable to cope with their rapid growth.
After 2 weeks of going back and to with excuses they finally admitted the server was overloaded and they were going to move my site to a different server to see if that helps.
Problem solved right? Wrong.
When they moved me over to a new server not only was the site still slow, but now I had no access to FTP and users could not login.
Even I was locked out of my own admin area.
This was because when they moved the site to a new server, they proxied over the old IP to the new IP internally so there would be no downtime on the front end which is a fantastic solution – if it worked.
First of all WP Engine installs a plugin called Limit Login. They don’t tell you they have done this, it doesn’t appear in your list of plugins and you can’t change the settings. It is completely invisible to you as the website owner.
So every time a user logged in, because of how they proxied over the IP it appeared that every single user was logging in from the same IP and performing a brute force attack on the site which locked everyone out including me.
Luckily I had the knowledge to get into PHPMyAdmin and manually change the setting in the database to unlock it so at least I could access the admin area of my site.
At the same time I had no FTP access – it took nearly 5 days of going back and to with them to get a resolution. If I didn’t have the knowledge to unblock my admin access myself, I would have also been without admin access for 5 days as well.
As you can see I was starting to lose my patience with them. Even when you told them exactly what was wrong & exactly what needed to change to fix things – they still argued the point.
Until eventually they realised I was spot on with the solution, the first time I told it to them. Never mind the 3rd, 4th & 5th time.
So at this point, the site is on a new server, it is still slow, I had no FTP access for 5 days and if it wasn’t for my manual intervention I wouldn’t have had WP-Admin access for 5 days either.
Then just a few days later-
The blog had just hit the most popular story of the week on Inbound.org which was driving a lot of targeted traffic, if the site was actually online.
It was down for a total of 3 hours during what would of been a record setting day of traffic.
So much for the new server huh!
Less than 10 days later the site was down again reporting the same 502/503 bad gateway issues that were first reported to them over 6 months earlier on May 16th.
Continuing on the trend of excuses, this time they tried to blame the number of comments in the database.
So without my permission the WP Engine team took it upon themselves to clear out all of the spam comments on the live database without taking a backup first.
The problem with that is an awful lot of you guys get flagged as spam when you’re not, so I go through the spam comments manually each month to approve the genuine ones.
Plus after deleting my live data without my prior permission or taking a backup, it didn’t actually fix the problem! I was not a happy bunny.
Then they tried to blame the fact that the site was getting too many spam comments and was slowing the entire server down.
I checked the logs myself and the site was only getting 1-2 spam comments per minute. When I publish a new post I get more genuine comments per minute than that!
Even a budget web host could handle that load!
The solution – install a captcha form to stop all the spammers. Ironically the Wordpress & security experts were unaware I could solve 1,000 captchas for just $1.39 while I’m asleep.
All that adding a captcha form does is inconvenience genuine users, it certainly doesn’t stop spammers.
All they needed to do was put the same time & effort into resolving problems as they put into creating excuses.
At this point over 7 months after opening the first ticket about the speed problems, my patience was exhausted.
I flew half way around the world to Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas to find the WP Engine co-founder Ben Metcalfe and explained all of the issues I have had.
He assured me that he would take control of the problems and resolve them all, not only that but he would give me 6 months of hosting free of charge.
Awesome! I was confident that everything was going to get fixed. Unfortunately the very next morning the site was down for nearly an hour.
After Affiliate Summit was over WPEngine got in touch with me to resolve the issues as quickly as possible.
Here is the full email conversation that we had – notice how they dodge the resource question, again.
At last they had their best guys working on the problem, after 7 months of complaining and flying half way around the world!
I could sit back in confidence knowing that all of my issues would be resolved at long last.
I was wrong.
It turned out that their ‘top guys’ were just as clueless about how servers and Wordpress works as anyone else.
Instead of trying to blame a plugin, this time they tried to blame the .htaccess file
Their top tech guy didn’t understand what basic level .htaccess code did. I don’t think I need to say anything more than that.
During this period I also got a notification they had migrated my site to another server, again.
This time they had identified that the site was using over 50% of the servers resources.
Which is funny because that is precisely what would be causing the 502/504 bad gateway errors I had reported to them 8 months earlier.
And just like the last time they migrated the site to a new server, they failed to check if everything was working properly which it wasn’t.
Giving their top tech guys credit where credit is due, they came back with a list of possible reasons the site was performing so badly.
Well not really, they just installed a free plugin which gives you a basic overview of things.
The same guy that didn’t understand the basics of .htaccess was also trying to blame a plugin called MShots but he couldn’t locate it on my blog.
The reason he couldn’t locate it is because it’s part of Wordpress core functionality straight out of the box.
You would expect a Wordpress expert to know what is a plugin and what is a core Wordpress function.
Anyway we continued to do the dance, but dancing gets very tiring after doing it non-stop for 8 months.
That was the last I heard from support about the speed issues. They didn’t even bother to reply to the ticket after that.
After 6 days had passed and the site continued to be slow and/or unavailable I was getting flocks of complaints from readers. Enough was enough.
I sent this email to the co-founder & the rest of the top brass at WP Engine
Guess what happened next?
Absolutely nothing. Support never replied and neither did the co-founder who had promised to my face that he would resolve all of the issues and give me 6 months free hosting as compensation.
So after 8 months of the same issues, pathetic excuses from support, flying half way around the world and speaking to the co-founder directly the ‘Wordpress Experts’ couldn’t be arsed to reply.
That tells you everything you need to know about the company, the co-founder & how they treat their customers.
Do you trust your business with someone that handles themselves like that?
I noticed a few days later that there was a keyword stuffed link to the WP Engine homepage in my blogs footer.
That was strange because I hadn’t put it there and it wasn’t visible in the footer.php file of my theme.
So how on earth was a link to the WP Engine homepage appearing on my blog?
If you take a look in the very bottom left corner of the screenshot below you can see it for yourself, they did a very good job at hiding it!
How sneaky is that? They were dynamically inserting a keyword stuffed link to their homepage at the server level. I couldn’t manually remove it!
Ben responded pretty quickly and promised to follow up with a call-
I told Ben not to worry and to just give me a call on Monday.
But in true WP Engine style that call never came, even when I followed up via email – that was ignored as well.
What makes this even worse is the fact that genuine businesses that have had their websites penalised or deindexed from Google completely for less than that.
But WP Engine still rank for the target term!
It has taken me over 20 months of hard work to build up my RSS subscribers. It took WP Engine minutes to wipe out 60% of that effort.
That is 12 months hard work building my RSS subscriber base completely wiped out without a blink of an eye from WP Engine.
Around the start of April a reader emailed me to let me know my RSS feed wasn’t working. When I took a look at the source code of the feed I noticed this message-
“The used table type doesn’t support FULLTEXT indexes”
At that time I was actually sat with one of the head developers from the BBC. He took a look at it and told me exactly what was wrong.
Basically WP Engine had changed their MYSQL configuration to disable full text indexing – which my RSS feed relied on to function properly.
They had made this configuration change to the server without any kind of customer notification.
So with that knowledge in mind and confirming that was the issue with a few Google searches I opened a support ticket.
All they needed to do to fix the issue was enable full text indexing on the MYSQL database again. Its a 60 second job for anyone that knows what they are doing.
I told them what the exact issue was and what needed to change for it to be fixed, instead of just fixing it they continued with their usual line of excuses and palming the issue off.
Here is a list of excuses they came up with for that-
The level of stupidity displayed here is beyond what I’m able to put into words. None of those excuses had ANYTHING to do with MYSQL.
They might as well have said your RSS feed is broken because you brushed your teeth this morning.
What they should of said is sorry we changed our server configuration without telling you which broke your RSS feed & wiped out 12 months of your hard work. However we have now re-enabled that for your account.
Here is the full support ticket with them about that issue – which in true WP Engine fashion they just ignored and stopped replying to. At least they are consistent in one thing!
The funny thing is when I eventually moved to my new host and told them about the problem, they fixed it in less than 2 minutes.
Take a guess at what they did to fix it? They enabled fulltext MYSQL indexing on the table. If you don’t know anything about server configs I can’t stress how basic that is.
I wouldn’t like to put a $$$ value on what that specific issue cost me with WP Engine.
It took 20 months to build it to that level and WP Engine wiped out 12 months of that effort without a blink of the eye, which is the WPEngine way apparently!
When I spoke to the WP Engine co-founder at Affiliate Summit he told me they would give me 6 months free hosting as compensation for the problems I have had.
That never actually happened so 4 months after he made that promise I opened a ticket to see what was going on.
Yet again, that ticket went unanswered and was actually marked as solved the next day.
Turns out the co-founders promises are worth nothing. That is the kind of person you are trusting your business with when using WP Engines hosting services.
At the same time I had the ticket open about the RSS feed issue and asking about the co-founder’s promise of 6 months hosting – WP Engine decided to terminate my account.
Instead of taking 2 minutes to fix the problem they created when they changed their server configuration without notification and keeping their promise they decided to just cancel my contract with them.
They didn’t even provide a reason for that. When I asked for the reason they said to see the first communication which didn’t provide a reason. Such is the WP Engine support merry go round.
They did this on the 18th of April with 7 days notice. Except in the UK the 18th-21st was a public bank holiday. They terminated my account with just 3 working days notice.
That was also during a period I was packing and planning to move country. Suddenly I had to drop everything, find a reliable new host and move the entire site.
The knock on effect of that was the time I had planned to spend seeing friends & family for the last time, was spent running around cleaning up their mess.
You would think that once WP Engine terminates your account and your website is no longer hosted by them, that would be the end of the problems.
But they weren’t finished with the clown act just yet!
They terminated my account as promised on the 24th of April 2014. Then on the 25th April they took money from my credit card for the next month of service.
The service they had just terminated. So even though I was no longer a customer with them, they continued to take money directly from my bank account.
Not only that but they actually hijacked the money for 10 days! Given all of the costs of moving to a new host I could have done with that money in my account.
But we have established the WP Engine doesn’t care about their customers or your business so that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
When I was at Affiliate Summit I spoke to a bunch of people about my problems with WP Engine and I was surprised to hear what other people had to say about WP Engine. It wasn’t great!
I also knew that my friend from MyTanFeet was having similar problems with them.
I felt bad because he moved his hosting to WP Engine based on my recommendation.
If you moved your hosting to WP Engine based on my previous advice I can’t stress how truly sorry I am for that!
Here is just some of the feedback I got from my readers about WP Engine when I mentioned the problems in last month’s income report-
As you can see the verdict is pretty much unanimous.
When WP Engine terminated my hosting I was in a desperate situation.
I reached out to some people for advice as I didn’t know which hosting company I could trust and Terry Kyle quite literally saved the day.
Terry Kyle knows his stuff when it comes to SEO & internet marketing.
He also runs WPXHosting which competes directly with WP Engine & his support team took care of everything for me.
Not only did they move the site, they fixed all of the problems that WP Engine couldn’t.
Remember the RSS issue that had the WPEngine team stumped even though I told them exactly how to fix it?
That took them 2 minutes to sort out. They also took care of optimising the blogs load times & setup the CDN for me. It was a truly painless experience during a moment of panic & desperation mid-moving country.
I cannot thank them enough for that! That level of service & support reminds me of the early days of WP-Engine. Take a look at my full WPX Hosting review to learn more.
I’ve also had some amazing experiences with Kinsta lately so I highly recommend you read through my Kinsta review before making any decisions.
So on top of the great service & support that WPXHosting has offered so far, what else do they do offer that WP Engine don’t?
Not only are they cheaper, they offer a huge range of features that WP Engine don’t.
One of the main ones is email support. If you host your site with WP Engine you need to buy additional hosting just for your email! That is not the case with WPXHosting.
I suggest you take a look at my full WPX Hosting review to learn more.
However price & features aren’t everything – one of my main concerns is site speed, after all website speed optimization is money in the bank!
So who is actually faster – WP Engine or WPXHosting? There is only one way to find out!
UPDATED TEST: >Please read my new fastest Wordpress hosting case study for even more tests!
I ran a series of speed tests before the site was moved from WP Engine & then repeated the same tests after it was moved to WPXHosting.
I tested the home page, my top 100 blog tutorial and loading WP-Admin. I chose these pages because they were either the most visited, the most resource intensive or a combination of both.
I also tested each of these pages from the USA & from Amsterdam to make sure the site loaded quickly on both sides of the pond.
I used Pingdom (P) and WebPageTest (W) to test each of the 3 pages from both locations to be 100% confident in the results.
| Page | USA (P) | Amsterdam (P) | USA (W) | Amsterdam (W) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home | 0.846s | 1.970s | 4.178s | 4.279s |
| Tutorial | 5.470s | 6.270s | 26.112s | 21.088s |
| WP-Admin | 2.420s | 2.700s | 5.596s | 6.889s |
| Page | USA (P) | Amsterdam (P) | USA (W) | Amsterdam (W) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home | 0.740s | 1.270s | 4.022s | 4.058s |
| Tutorial | 4.780s | 5.580s | 21.832s | 16.892s |
| WP-Admin | 1.350s | 1.810s | 5.729s | 4.567s |
Using the WP Engine results as a benchmark, the table below shows if WPXHosting was faster or slower.
So if you see -20% that means WPXHosting was 20% faster. If you see +20% that means WP Engine was 20% faster.
| Page | USA (P) | Amsterdam (P) | USA (W) | Amsterdam (W) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home | -12.52% | -35.53% | -3.73% | -5.16% |
| Tutorial | -12.61% | -11.00% | -16.39% | -19.89% |
| WP-Admin | -44.21% | -32.96% | +2.37% | -33.70% |
As you can see, it is quite clear that WPXHosting is considerably faster than WP Engine.
On average WPXHosting is 18.77% faster than WP Engine.
Not only that but WPXHosting only costs me $24.99 a month compared to WP Engine’s $212.00 in March.
WP Engine has a strange pricing system that changes based on how many visitors you have. I was on their $99 a month plan that allows 100,000 visits per month.
After that you pay $1 per 1,000 visitors so I had to pay an extra $113 in March.
And when they say 100,000 visitors they don’t actually mean 100,000 visitors. What they actually mean is 100,000 page requests, which is open to abuse.
For example I could buy 20,000 visitors from Fiverr for $5 and send them to your website. That would cost you $20 but it only cost me $5. Or I could just load up Scrapebox & have full control over your bill.
Either way WPXHosting is 18% faster & 76% cheaper than WPEngine.
Oh and the support team actually knows what they are doing which helps.
I recently published an updated case study to find the fastest Wordpress hosting that takes both WPEngine & WPXHosting through 7 rigerous tests.
The results might surprise you.
It is a shame to see the demise of WP Engine in this manner. Like I said at the start of the article they were one of the best hosting companies I had ever worked with by quite a stretch.
In my corporate career I have dealt with a range of hosting companies from the likes of RackSpace to HostGator – none of them could stand up to the service & support WP Engine used to offer.
In my opinion when WP Engine first started it was a business founded out of passion & innovation. That was clear from the level of support and knowledge displayed when I first moved over.
However I think they grew too quickly over the past couple of years which has caused them major problems.
Now instead of dealing with actual Wordpress experts, you’re dealing with customer service staff that have had minor Wordpress training & fail to understand the basics.
Last year Heather Brunner became COO which probably led to changes in how the company operates. Is it a coincidence the service & support started to degrade shortly after?
Then you have to consider the $15 million investment by venture capitalist firm North Bridge which pushes the focus towards money & profits rather than passion & innovation.
Investors don’t care about your business or your website, they only care about 1 thing – profit. It is also worth noting the passionate co-founder left the company shortly after that investment.
It feels like they have undergone serious cost cutting exercises to the demise of the service & support. I’ve worked in a number of companies where this has happened and it has never turned out well.
WP Engine need to remind themselves of their own values and if they had just followed their own customer support strategy I wouldn’t be writing this post.
There is a certain irony in that!
My advice is if you are a WP Engine customer – move your business away from them as quickly as possible.
My experience with WPXHosting has been awesome so far – hopefully they don’t follow WP Engines lead.
The WPEngine team have published a couple of responses on their blog this week.
The first one was very disappointing and just the usual marketing/PR propaganda with no actual substance or ownership behind it.
Anyone with any experience in marketing & PR will see straight through that.
The second one had a bit more substance to it but still failed to address the majority of issues highlighted.
For example they continue to dodge questions about-
So all in all, the responses don’t really address any of the issues highlighted. Unless you accept ‘growth’ as a universal answer to all of that.
It would be nice to see them take some level of ownership & responsibility for the damage they have done to their customers businesses – I doubt that is going to happen.
I also asked them to refund all of the money I had paid to them & everyone that I had referred to them as an affiliate – they ignored that as well.
There is something else that they do to your website without your permission or telling you.
When you move your site over to WPEngine they make serious WPEngine specific changes to core Wordpress files.
They don’t tell you what they have changed or which files they have made those changes in.
But what this means is when you try to move your site away from WPEngine, you are going to have a hard time getting it to work properly on another host.
I’m currently investigating this further but I will update in due course with my findings.
Added on 28th May 2014
One of the comments from Joseph pointed out that WPEngine are listed as a client of Linode who are a cloud hosting company.
It appears that WPEngine are just renting out cloud servers from Linode and then reselling them as premium hosting.
If you take a look at the price plans you can get an awful lot more bang for your buck than you can with WPEngine.
Not only that but you can have your own dedicated environment that won’t be overloaded with other clients paying a premium price.
After reading about the WPEngine infrastructure you would expect they actually have their own infrastructure.
But it seems that they are nothing but glorified shared hosting resellers with flashy branding and premium pricing rather than the hosting experts they claim to be.
If you want to help, please share this article on your blog
I have taken down the original WPEngine review that I published because it was no longer relevant after publishing this.
However, if you want to check out my original review before all of the problems, just click the link below.
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You hit the nail on the head at the very end of the article. The whole way through reading this article, I figured the most likely cause was a buyout from an investor who saw the profits, but didn’t understand how the company had arrived at them. Unfortunately, this kind of buyout activity is fairly common in the hosting industry.
Its common in every industry I think!
Wow I really can not understand how a company can be so ridiculously bad. I can’t believe how patient you were with them!! Ain’t nobody got time for that 😉
Well the more patient I was, the more rope they had to hang themselves with!
Hey Matt, unfortunately I’ve shelled out some cash for this poor service also. One very interesting thing I noticed about the overage fees, my human traffic has always been like ~25% of what they we’re claiming my traffic was. They claimed it was from bot traffic and search engine spiders. Bots hitting my site 4-5 times as much as actual human visits??!! Nahh, I call bullshit. So here is the reality, and how they are probably pulling down big $$$$s from their user base, big money. It’s from comment spam, good old fashioned comment spam. This wonderful managed wordpress hosting provider have designed their pricing system to bend customers over for comment spam. I looked into my overage fee report which I never noticed the link in the sidebar for. My top page wound up being a page that gets like 100 visits per month, must have been picked up in a AA list or something. Akismet has been catching all the comments but the overage fees just keep on rolling in. Here I mentioned it on Facebook and got the run around about SE bots – http://www.jacobking.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/wpengine-facebook-exchange.pngThen I sent in a ticket after I got hit big one month and it seemed like something they did not want to discuss. I sent this message and waited several days to hear back – http://www.jacobking.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/wpengine-overage-fee-support-ticket.pngThen I resorted to twitter and finally got a response, at last, basically they said sorry and you should use a captcha – http://www.jacobking.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/wpengine-response.pngThanks guys, appreciate all your managed wordpress help, quick to turn a blind eye when comment spam is inflating your profits. Shit maybe they are even running a massive Scrapebox operation themselves spamming the hell out of all their customer blogs, getting crafty with that investor pressure.
Hi Jacob,Long time no speak!To be honest I had my doubts around that as well, as did Yeison from MyTanFeet.com but there is no real way to proove it one way or the other but it is a very very strange pricing structure – I don’t know anyone else that does that.
You know what I hate most, Matt? It’s when my efficiency and productivity is altered by others: like, I’m doing my best to do my sh*t, but others come and just mock everything. And that’s what WP Engine did. I can’t believe them, seriously. And you have proof from the emails. So many “gurus”, “experts” and they can’t even handle the support they state to have. And people are paying for this! If it was free, I’d close an eye, maybe, but it’s a paid service. I’m really wondering, will someone from WP Engine bother to explain, at least out of decency what just happened? Hope the new hosting company will be a better “partner” – cause that’s how I see things when you run a website & blog: your hosting company is like a “partner”, the one that best supports your business. Right? 🙂
Actually I have been in good contact with them behind the scenes the past few weeks, I shot them an email to let them know what was about to happen so they could prepare a response.They even got sent this article 24 hours before it was published to get a heads up!
What a freaking nightmare. There is no excuse for the lack of service that they provided. The list of excuses as to why your RSS subscribers no longer work is just unfathomable. One more company that I know to stay away from.When you add the inserted links into the equation, matters simply get worse. I can never imagine trusting a host with my business to only find out that they are stuffing links into my site. What a shame.
For the me the RSS issue was the one of the more damaging problems
Reading those emails they sent — you have more patience then a flipping saint man lol – i would have been through the roof after a month let alone 7 or 8.
Hahaha patience just allows people to hang themselves, if I flew off the handle in the emails/support the problems would have probably been worse!
While I empathize with your situation Matt, you are being too self righteous. You say all that they care about is profit, well – don’t you?You recommended a service with such a small duration of sample size and earned commission on it. Did you think about the repercussions for your users from it? Are you going to refund the dollars that you earned as a referral? Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan of yours but now you already have affiliate links to a new host, I know Kyle, he is a superb guy but aren’t you doing the same thing again….Well, blah…you get the point.
I just write from my experience, sometimes I have a good experience and sometimes a bad one.Take a look at the amount of effort/time I put into content, I could turn every article I write into a product and profit from it directly but instead I publish it for free. Likewise I could do a lot more to extract profits from readers if I wanted to – but that would be detrimental to the long term success of the blog.
You’re asking him to refund the money he got from affiliate sales?You do know that even if he was able to refund to WPEngine, that money wouldn’t go back to the people who subscribed using his affiliate link. Right?When Matt recommended them, they were doing a good job. No-one knows what the future holds. I recommended a client to WP Engine myself on Matts recommendation, but I certainly don’t blame him. Shit happens.
matthew:i followed your reco to wpengine 1 year ago for my main money site and as you say, good support and service since then.but some weeks ago, i have to buy (based on their reco) a subscription to cloudflare because it seems that my wpress site received too many “hits” and even i am on their 99$ plan, they charged for more hits. so now i am paying for cloudflare and for wpengine… and since 2 days i am getting 524 errors … something have definitively on wpengine. i have also an account on terrykyle hosting… a light account.. not sure if it is a so good hosting.. i already had some exhanges around php html things and it seems to me that the technical is not very quick to answer in agood way… but i have no more solutions to do the change of my site hosted at wpengine now.. grrrr i have to check another wp specialized hosting…
Sorry to hear about that I hope you get your issues resolved. Traffic Planet Hosting has been great so far, but I used to say that about WPEngine – only time will tell 🙂
Oh, this post will cost them a lot! And it should. Honestly, I never liked them for one simple reason – if I can’t install whatever plugin I want on my own site – then go fuck yourself.
Well in some ways they are doing you a favour by not letting you install things they know will slow down your site. It’s good and bad really!
We will definitely post a recap of your review on websiteservers.com
Thanks dropped you an email!
I can’t believe they inserted links into your site. I would’ve been seriously pissed if that happened to me.Terry’s a great guy, no matter what hosting issues I have, he personally emails me back and his team gets it fixed within a few hours… Always!
Yeah I created some new swear words that day!
Nice one Matt, been looking forward to this post!I had to laugh at this line: “They might as well have said your RSS feed is broken because you brushed your teeth this morning.” LOLAs I mentioned on your previous post, I’ve had similar problems with another host recently and switched to Tsohost – they’ve proved to be pretty decent and site speed has improved by about 25% – so happy days!
Haha well thats about how relevant their solutions were!
This story was kinda ridiculous, from one hell to another. Seriously, you read for 1 big problem with small solution, and go straight to the next one…How on earth were you so kind with them? I remember some chats with me and Hostgator support where I was expressing my honest wish to sexually abuse their mothers.. true story.No idea how you kept with this for 20 months!! If I was you I was going to take them to court!!!
Haha well if you are rude people don’t want to help!
Thanks Matt!! Killer write-up man, I was on the verge of transferring a few personal and client sites to WP Engine.No change in that happening now. Really appreciate the level of detail man. I think you are right, their rapid growth has taken them by surprise.I cannot image having money or client sites down for days at a time. Unacceptable no matter their excuse.Andrew
No worrys glad it helped!
Matt,You have put together one of the most intense blog posts I’ve ever read. Your level of detail on the problems presented with WP Engine totally convinced me never to go with them. I had considered it as an option for my clients using WordPress but after your review I will consider your recommendation for Traffic Planet Hosting. Most of my clients are on a tight budget, but for clients who are willing to pay premium prices, I think I can convince them.
Thanks – hope it has helped save you some future problems!
Wow this was thorough, love the transparency and openness you provide. WPengine is going to regret stepping on your toes. I see this post being shared exponentially. Thanks for saving me money Matt, even though it cost you a lot of money and time. I appreciate it 🙂
Wow. First, this was an amazingly detailed post. Great job at pointing all this out. Second, I’m so glad I did not go with WP Engine. I wound up giving Media Temple’s Managed WP Hosting a shot and haven’t had many problems. It’s such a shame someone should have to deal with that despite paying multiples of what a normal shared hosting plan would cost, especially since when the shared hosting plan includes better support. One thing will say about Media Temple is that the support has not been as great as my shared hosting support with Host Gator but hopefully I can say different my next time around with them.
How have you found site speed with them?
Hah, funny to see my comment in there.But yeah, I really need to get around to moving my site. Mainly the issue of not being able to update anything (plugins, versions, anything really) is becoming a very tedious problem.Terry’s hosting certainly looks like it could fit the bill.
What you can’t even just click to update things??
I’m having the same issue with my client… I can’t update the plug-ins from the dashboard. I have to do it though http://FTP.Which also means I have to manually check them, my dashboard isn’t telling me when there are updates. Pain in the butt!
Hi Matthew,I am one of those who signed up for WP engine by your recommendation. The sites are still hosted with them, but I did experience some problems you mentioned. I have had my share of 502 database errors. This issue was resolved once my server died, so they had to move the data to another server. Then I experienced the same problem with Limit Login. They knew what the problem was and gave me a query to run on the database. After that I manually changed .htaccess file so that wp_admin could only be accessed with another set of login credentials. I requested a compensation for significant down time and they gave me free hosting for several months. Also, the speed is still as good as it was when I signed up, so that’s that.
Sorry you had to go through all of that 🙁
Matt – I too had issues with WPEngine last year whom I joined based on your reccomendation. Support, Cost and Support were the biggest problems.I did switch to TPH when they were just weeks old, however after a few server issues I was forced to move on yet again. I do believe Terry is building something great over there and will be rejoining once my current (annual) deal expires.You certainly know how to stick it to those who do you wrong!- Lewis
What sort of problems did you have with TPH?
All I can say is WOW. That link on your site was so F*ing sneaky and really tells you all you need to know about these scammers. Its good you wrote this post, with a well documented chain of events that can completely exposes this company. They used to have a sterling reputation, and that was the only reason why I decided to pay the premium. Not anymore. Internet marketers need to collectively boycott these types of bad actors, else we are individually exploited.
Yeah that really took the biscuit!
I’m surprised that someone at your level even trusts shared hosting.No offense but why not do it yourself and have some dedicated servers
I don’t have the time to manage it all
Another question matt.. which cdn you are using? have you shared any review about it? and also any configuration guide for it?
Its part of the Traffic Planet Hosting system, I think it runs off Amazon S3
What a torrid time you had. I was losing my will to live just reading your story. This shows all of us what good customer care and giving a quick answer can mean to customers of ours. Once lost, that customer is gone forever. Also, if you purport to be an expert, then you had better be one. No room to fake it till you make it here.
I think they will lose more than 1 customer!
Matt,Your experience with web hosting is really not easy. I’ve seen a lot of stories when a formerly great hosting turns into a nightmare. Even such good hosting in the past providers for masses (i.e. not expensive) like BlueHost and HostGator are far not that great as they used to be when they were not that popular (or until they were acquired by EIG).I wish you found the one hosting for a long time now.
Well the only way to truly do that is have your own dedicated server but that takes time to manage and maintain
Yeah my first VPS was with hostgator, major major mistake. Their support are useless tools as well. Blame everything on plugins and such. 1 issue I even new the problem and how to fix it yet quizzed the support anyway. They were so far off the mark I changed host after a lengthy abuse.You’re too nice Matt I would have abuse the shit out of those morons.
Wow what a post, sounds very frustrating Mathew. I bit the bullet a while ago and got my own server after years of issues with other hosts. Best thing I could have done and worth the extra expense. I am by no means a server expert and use seeksadmin for server support ($25-00/month) who have been absolute lifesavers in fixing, tweaking,securing & setting up things to get wordpress humming for me.@devin ditto on wordfence – works great.
Oooo that sounds like a great service might check it out!
Business is about three things as Marcus Lemonis puts it, these are people, product and process. It seems WP Engine has lost some key people recently who were customer focused, their product became or has been crap and the process in place to resolve problems is a complete fail. I will never use them, what really has me is that their CEO is a liar so this really shows me what kind of company they are. Thank you for this.
Nice outlook on things thanks!
wow, that was a long boring shit post. you make money so get a dedicated server and a decent server admin. these things are for nubs.end of story.
I don’t have the time or energy to maintain something like that
Hi Matthew,It’s funny that I was experience that same problems with wpengine for some time now.Thank you for writing this post. I’m now moving to the recommended webhost you’ve provided.Sincerely,CJ
No worrys 🙂
Hi MattGreat post, i love to see this type of company behaviour get its comeuppance, i complained about a host on WHT and the forum removed my complaint! so these companies think they can do what they want with no recourse.As for Terry and his hosting, i cant begin to tell you or anyone reading that Terry absolutely goes out of his way for people that use his services, i cant recommend his services enough. I use Terrys hosting and its faster than a fast thing going fast : ) but as you say the service is awesome!
Yeah Terry his an awesome guy I have had the pleasure of meeting him 🙂
Great Case Study, added them to my shit list.Wonder how long before Ben Metcalf comes grovelling here.
He isn’t involved with WPEngine anymore. I would hazard a guess they got the huge investment and he took a phat payout and left
Matthew,I was one person that noticed your RSS feed was down and reported it to you in April. I read many blogs vis RSS in Outlook and I started getting error messages from your website. I had no idea that you were having such challenging problems behind the scenes. Great report about wpengine. Before moving my website from hostgator to knownhost, I had actually considered using wpengine because they claimed to be faster of the hosting companies. Glad I didn’t make that mistake. I have spent time tweeking my website to get it to the point where it loads in just over 1 second. Jennifer
Hi Jennifer,Yes you were the first one to do so 🙂 Yeah your site is rapid fast my end! Good job on that!
Wow Matt,Been digesting your woes and I must say, whilst I too have been drawn in by their hype, iv always had the thought that my bluehostt pro account has always been rock solid, so would they really offer me much benefit?It seems like a resounding no.Thanks for your incredibly in depth post, I will be keeping an eye here to see if WPengine comment on there shoddy service you hadThanks, Danny
I’ve been in good contact with them the past few weeks and sent them an email to let them know what was going to happen next.Even sent the post over to them a day or two before I published it so they could brace themselves for impact.No response to the actual post yet but I’m sure there will be!
Good to know, looks like i can get better hosting from a 2.00 a month account!You Rock and saved me $$ i was thinking of them for a future host!
Glad I could help!
That’s a pretty wild story, Matt, and it’s a shame you had to put up with such terrible service for so long. Glad to hear you’re in a better place now.Hopefully this post gets lot of shares (I suspect it will), so that others don’t make the same mistake. You did such a great job documenting everything, that I have to believe this post will (rightfully) have an impact on their business. Thanks for taking the time to share this in such depth – you may have gotten screwed here, but you’ve done a great service for everyone else who reads this.Cheers,Eric
Thanks Eric – feel free to share it on your blog, a few backlinks to the post should do the trick (but im not allowed to create them here as per my own rules bah)I knew it would impact them so I gave them a warning a month ago and let them see the post 1-2 days before it was published.Hope it helps!
Getting a good hosting company is always a lottery – you never know exactly infrastructure they are running , or what hardware they havent patched.I had a customer using a host company – whose lost every piece of data they had – and here is a warning to all – the hosting company in question had a massive raid5 array – hot swappable disks etc. They used the same batch of disks from the same manufacturer – I think 3 disks failed within minutes of each other – so the failover / hot swap could not happen – and they lost all their customers data.Took them over a week to get the hardware back in one piece – they then over wrote data – so anyone using ecommerce systems were screwed over again.Cheapy hosting companies will over load their servers to get more bang for there buck. Then when it goes tits up they are clueless because the failover system doesnt not work
Yeah thats true – I always take an independent backup because you never know what can happen! Even a premium host can have failures like that/the data center could catch fire or flood etc etc etc
“Getting a good hosting company is always a lottery…”Amen. You never know until you’re a part of their network.
Sad to see you’ve had these god-awful experiences with WPEngine Matt.I’ve been using MDDHosting for the past 7-8 months on my blog and they’re truly fantastic.They moved my blog from HostGator for free, within 25 minutes of me opening the ticket – Replied to my ticket this Sunday just 17 minutes after I’d made it! They know their sh*t too!Recommend them (without an affiliate link, hehe) all day long!
Can’t knock that level of support. WP Engine support is closed at the weekend I believe.
Thanks for sharing, Matthew! You brought up a lot of things to take note of in the event any web hosting company decides to give its customers the shaft and play the blame game. Glad to hear it worked out for you and also really enjoyed the webinar you did with Tim Paige! Cheers!
The ironic thing is in this post they wrote- http://wpengine.com/2013/06/28/customer-support-strategy-turning-every-customer-experience-into-a-positive-one/Treat every interaction as if the whole world was watchingBecause the whole world could be watching. It’s so simple for a customer to take a screenshot of their support ticket and share it with all their friends on Twitter and Facebook. In fact, it’s so simple that it happens all the time. This is a potential liability that is an easy reminder to be classy, respectful, honest, and patient with every single customer interaction. Always remember that if someone chooses to, they can share their customer experience with the whole world.
What’s worst than being reviewed? Being reviewed by Matthew Woordward! LOL. I suspect they’ll continue to be in contact with you if they care about customer service.
Well if something is awesome, I will share that. If it sucks, I will share that. If you repeatedly test my patience, I will share that.
The only thing that surprises me is you thought a shared hosting company’s level 1 tech support was going to help you diagnose a site speed problem. You sound like a man who needs his own server.That said, I have worked with those dudes and they have a pretty funny attitude – the beauty of wordpress is the ability to use it like a swiss army knife, and they have turned it into Blogspot. it’s only a matter of time before their conceptually ‘bulletproof’ wordpress platform fell apart. their mistake was thinking they could actually lock down Wordpress and turn it into a foolproof platform for corporate blogs. basically by turning off features until the features are all gone.they treated you pretty shabby though. i dunno, do the comments add that much to your blog?
Wow. I also use WP Engine but never had the problems that you had thankfully, although I did have the spam issue which I was advised to install a CAPTCHA plugin also. This is one epic post! I do plan to leave WP Engine when my full year is up in a few months.
Man get rid of the captcha plugin, all that does is inconvenience real users. Thats like a 2005 solution to stop spam (which doesn’t actually stop spam, I have software that solves that for me while I’m asleep) try a honeypot type solution instead.
I would make this blog post rank for “WP engine” if I was you… 😉
Hahaha I would do but – https://searchlogistics.com/seo/link-building/zero-links/So if anyone wants to share this on their blog, please do so!
Funny that in some of the conversations it seems that YOU are the tech guy – and not the person who actually is 😀
Hahaha yeah, well I am a tech guy they just treated me like a dumb idiot but at the same I play dumb with most situations in life. It’s an easy way to see who talks the talk and who walks the walk. WP Engine fell hook, line & sinker.
Hey Matt – great post. Considering what WP Engine charges, this is really an amazingly poor way to treat a customer, especially one who could have helped them grow through referrals.And, unfortunately, WP engine isn’t the only hosting company that is not treating it’s customers as it should.
Yeah I worked with them on a competition, sent a bunch of business their way and well, I feel sorry for the average joe customer.Who else are you having problems with? Perhaps they need testing ^^
Hey Matt. I like the article. Read it all. The start of it, their support seemed reasonable, as I have my own hosting company too as well as manage multiple sites for people. A lot of their initial response (i.e. starting with plugins) is a correct place to begin troubleshooting. Out dated plugins can eefect a sites performance, including speed. Coding advances over time and thier are instances where old coding becomes defunct and no longer supported by wp cms. I recently had an issue with one of my sites like that.As I read more it is apparent their support was certainly lost as more information was supplied. Their server was apparently overloaded and even proxying over your site through the old ip is standard until a users DNS records are updated they should have at least notified you to do so immediately to the new dns settings and then removed the proxy. It also sounds like they were having an issue with their own dns glue. This will affect all the sites on a hosts server since relays get confused and can also cause those gateway errors you are seeing.Anyways, sorry to hear about all of your problems, and glad to hear you are getting things back on track.
While I agree coding advances over time and plugins can get better in new versions, you have to consider the site was lighning fast with the same versions of plugins that now had an update available. So the plugin versions never changed, but the site speed did.But if it was fast with the current version before, that is entirely irrelevant.Feel free to share/link the post from your blog ^^
I have had issues like this with a few different companies. I have a blog which has anywhere between 10 and 100 concurrent users at one time so the need for a good host is crucial.I tried all the big names in “reliable” hosting and found issues with most. I now have a small cluster of servers (VPS) with digital ocean which i set up with load balancers based on geographic location of the user etc. My bill is about £5 more but the speed test are out of the world compared to all the shared hosting.
Wow sounds like you know your stuff – would love to see a tutorial/guest post on that!
DigitalOcean is also my choice 🙂 $5 is a steal for the possibilities, but requires some knowledge.
Do allmost the same for my sites. No geo thing yet though since all visits are from europe anyway.Made an ansible scripts that configures everything for me. Just adding new ips for the servers. run link and I got a new setup (dedicated web server, mysql server, redis, but can be all on single droplet as well) overkill but fast as heck. They now have private network support so can connect to the mysql server using the local network. Adding new sites to a setup is just adding another site config and run deploy script it setups a staging and production site for each domain. Uses Bedrock for the site setups. Aint using capistrano since I do it using Ansible.When time allows Ive been thinking of integrating the scripts with the DO API so it setups up everything. Ansible has support for the DO API.When I first came to DO they managed to corrupt a node in their datacenter and corrupting the VPS (lost files and all file perms were changed and what not on the server, no clue how they managed that). Server was down for hours so I just created a new droplet, added its IP to the ansible script and ran it and everything was working fine again. But was annoyed with the node corruption.
Matthew we are facing similar issues with WP Engine. They way their system has been set up it is really not transparent at all and we’ve seen how they dodge that particular question every time.I am also amazed by the amount of time you’ve had to spend on the hosting issue, feeling bad for you 🙂
Yeah they really don’t like that question, which speaks for itself!
TL;DRlol. I actually read the bulk of it. It looks like you gave them a fair shot at making it right. I almost signed up for them, but I would have hit their traffic limits pretty quickly. Been waiting for a good write up on Traffic-Planet’s service. Thanks for doing that! Still have a couple of bum sites sitting on Hostgator. Need to move them over to Traffic Planet, me thinks. It’s been a sucky month for hosting, hasn’t it? Truvahalla had problems, you had problems, I had problems…
I got 99 problems but WP Engine ain’t one!
A few days back I also got some issues with my reseller hosting.Even company deleted my clients site back up without telling me.After a much hard work I got it back.Bad hosting is just like fu*k you and your sites SEO.
Thats why you should always take your own backups 🙂
I hope you won’t get sued for the most honest review ever written ^^
Now that would make for an awesome blog post!
WPEngine staff have been caught deleting content from blogs who write about WordPress, They do is in support or thier keyword competitors from the U.S. They only delete posts from sites owned by non Americans because they know they can get away with it.
@Matthew If they’re smart, they’ll offer you some money deal + paid vacation to remove this post… wonder how many potential leads they lost so far haha!