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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I was considering employment with WP Engine until I read this post. Thank you very much for sharing your experience!
Matthew thank you for sharing your experience with WPEngine. I found your blog article from WHT https://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1416967 and found the article an eye opener as I always had the impression from the outside that WPEngine were at the top of their game.
No worrys – yeah they look very professional, but my experience is very different
Hi Matt,It seems you can add “Scummy host” to your list…i’m one of their victims, check it out its unbelievablehttp://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1416967&page=2
Looks like they continue to take a tanking!
Following are some cons that I experienced with WPengineI am pretty experience in WordPress, and have tons of experience on Hosting companies… wpengine is just not right hosting company for experience users.- slow ftp upload speed (i am using 11mbps internet upload speed ISP, so i know)- site migration (nightmare and confusing)- not 24/7 customer support- limited control and options in dashboard.- display their ads on people ‘s website without permission…
Yeah the FTP was terrible for me as well, I guess that is partially down to SFTP
lol I did! A few times. Will slow my scanning down and try again.
Hi Matthew,I was looking for a fast host and after your recommendation i went with trafficplanethostingEverything great,speed,support etc.However i am noticing my site to be very slow everyday now about 1h+ around 8 to 9 PM ET.On average my landing pages load in max 2 sec but during this time it takes up to 40 sec for a simple landing page to load.Do you have any related issue?Any suggestion??I was happy with traficplanet hosting ,however with this slow down i can’t continue because i send paid traffic to my landing pages and i see visitors leaving quickly during the slow down.Oh ,another thing to mention , i talked to their live support about this issue and they replied with irony that i am the first person to have problem with their site speed and after 2 messages ,they didn’t respond anymore.
Hey Matt,Sorry if it has already been asked, but where did you migrate to?Do you have a WP managed host you recommend now?Thanks for any insight.
I guess you should read the post 🙂
And thats why I <3 Terry Kyle & his team (shout out to George)!
Trafficplanethosting.com – Outstanding service!! I highly recommend. Thank You!
No worrys 🙂
I just signup with TPH, after complete all the payment can’t access to my Dashboard. After gain back the access its damm slow and keep stated unable to connect. Ha ha ha they unable to managed their own website, how I expect they can handle my website I was on WPEngine never had this problem for last two years. Wanted to try after reading this articles. I guest your articles and comment is not reliable at all. Still unable to access my dashboard after completed writing this comment. Its totally not good for those depending with website to earn money and support the family.
Hi,Have you spoken to support/terry directly?
Have you raised a ticket Anuar with our 24/7 support team? Don’t see any ticket on this issue.
Anuar, your admin panel and website are loading perfectly right now with this Pingdom Tools score: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/cRmqbm/http://www.wegowithanuar.com/ (Faster than 93% of sites tested on Pingdom and a 90 Performance Grade there).
[Update 12 Sept, 2014]After bad first impression experienced, I almost hit Request Cancellation Button on my Dashboard but decided to give a try.Migrating Experience – super easy and efficient compare with WPEngine. All done by Traffic Planet Hosting support staff. Testing Traffic Planet Hosting support staff question regarding SSL and CDN. SURPRISING….1. They reply all the answer less in one hour.2. TPH support staff recommended the priority step to setup SSL and CDN2. They willing to help me setup my WordPress with SSL and CDN (bonus point that I don’t get from my previous hosting. I been forced to buy CDN service from them that much more expensive, upgrade my plan and get a specific SSL certificate. TPH staff personally recommended a good and cheap certificate that works. 3. SSL installation was done less than 45 minutes from the point I purchased the license, provide CRS request code, install the license. I like to do it in Malaysia time to make sure they really 24 hours on standby.4. SSl install problem and troubleshoot done in 30 minutes. The Verdict:If you have very less skill about WordPress technical issue, I really recommended try Traffic Planet Hosting. Their have superb support staff that willing to help in very short time. Surprising my WordPress ranking have some immediately improvement after move to TPH. Not sure the main cause of significant improvement of ranking. I believed because……. read again my comment you will get the hint 🙂
I’m blown away. I was just discussing wpengine with someone and was entertaining the idea of signing up with them to host a new site I’m going to be launching soon. I’m glad I googled till I found this!I’ll be bouncing on over to Terry Kyles place now 🙂
Ahhh well, glad to be of service 🙂
Hi Mathew,You asked me to let you know when we launched so here it is. We have opened our business web hosting services to beta testing at no cost until we launch publicly on Oct 1. And then, we will give 50% off to the beta domains for as long as they remain with us.Beta partners will be migrated to their included staging server which is noindexed and can then go live once everything is nominal. The service. This post is about WP Engine so in that context…It’s similar but there are differences.1. We’ll host other CMS’ besides WP (Joomla, Drupal)2. We offer free migration3. All plans are CDN integrated.4. We use bandwidth instead of visitors. Thanks to your experience in this post we went with bandwidth. Visitors does make for easier marketing though since a number “visitors” is a more tangible thing than a terabyte.5. Only our basic plan is shared hosting. The other 2 are in VPS dedicated environment.6. We will manage WP or hand off to capable customers.7. We don’t yet have an affiliate/reseller program but it will be coming. Other features similar to WPE include daily offsite backups, staging area, malware scan/fix, Git integration, 60-day guarantee.Check us out at growinge.com, there is an long Q&A on the home page. Note: beta slots are limited.Finally, all constructive feedback and questions are welcome.
I appreciate the time it took to write this post, even though I can’t help but noticed that it ultimately does end up leading to another monetary opportunity for the author that could end up the same way for people following the new advice. I can support that, though it has to be taken into account because when one is being paid for anything one can never truly be objective, no matter what your intentions [Also, for the record, I love Terry Kyle’s stuff and have been his customer a few times in the past. Top notch guy, but know nothing of his hosting and will leave the vetting of that to other who enjoy being on the front lines lol]Really, all of this is just life in the economic cycle and “character arc” of any successful business, hosting or otherwise.Map your experiences with any band you’ve ever liked, or girlfriend you had that turned into your wife later (or perhaps didn’t). Goes something like this:Phase 1:Host: “Man these guys are awesome. They have it all going on… speed, convenience, customer service, value pricing.. i have finally found Nirvana and they are the one… I am so lucky!”G/F: “Man this girl is smoking hot. She has it all going on.. body that won’t quit, smart, not psycho, can hang with the guys, lets me play golf.. I have finally found chick Nirvana..she is the one I am so lucky!”Band: “These guys are freaking awesome. Awesome guitars, great drummer, unique musical style, intelligent lyrics. So cool that I know about them and no one else does.. I found my ultimate band with whom I can associate myself fully!”Phase 2:Host: “Hmm these guys seem to have some serious flaws. Customer service guys are deleting my data and changing IP addresses without telling me. Tons of downtime lately and my customers are pissed. Seems like everyone and their brother is moving to this host now and the cat’s out of the bag. Maybe it’s just a phase, not gonna stress on it”G/F: “Hmm this chick is kinda psycho sometimes. Wants to hang out all the time and freaks if I don’t call her for like 12 hrs. Not getting friend time like I used to w/the guys. Ah well, probably just a phase, not gonna stress on it.”Band: “Hmm this second album sucks donkey balls. And now everyone knows about them and they seem to be selling out.. not special when I go to see them anymore. What the hell happened to my band? Meh, probably just a sophomore struggle and a phase, gonna keep listening to it and can’t wait for the next album when they get back to their roots”Phase 3:Host: “F_ck this s_it I cannot even run my business anymore. People are freaking out and I am losing money. Customer service doesn’t seem to give a crap and I don’t even recognize these guys anymore. I am f_cking outta here.”G/F: “F_ck this s_it I don’t even have a life anymore. Haven’t had a beer with the guys or played golf in 6 months.. My friends have given up on me and this girl is clearly psycho. Now she wants to move in together and get married, and I’m ready to chew my own arm off to get away from her”Band: “F_ck this band they suck. This 3rd album is even worst than the 2nd. WTF is a pan flute doing on a rock band’s album anyway?? Can’t even get an overpriced ticket to one of their shows as they’re sold out and every 12 year old is humming the lately craptastic tune from this album.”Phase 4: “I’m F_cking outta here!”Phase 5: “Whoa, that new girl/band/host is looking freaking hot/sounding freaking rad/looking freaking perfect..” (insert repeat of cycle here)Anyhow, point being is that IF your hosting company is good, and they have aspirations of financial success, there is a great chance they will follow the VC money / slaves to money / screw the customers cycle that is the death of good quality everywhere. Precious few companies even maintain the “nirvana” state for more than a year or two. I’m not excusing it because it’s always lame and unacceptable and pisses me off, but then again so does the fact that people I love die and my tax bill every year. Some things are just realities of life.It’s hard not to get attached to the awesome years (or months), but it’s probably a better idea to grow up and realize that you’re going to be going through the same growing pains with a host you will with your own biz, your g/f, your wife, your fav band, or any other entity. Sometimes you’ll work it out in the end, sometimes you won’t. Sometimes you’ll get divorced, sometimes you’ll go through therapy together and have the strongest relationship you ever dreamed of and be happy. Trick is knowing when to cut bait and fish. Just don’t deceive yourself that the good times are going to last. key thing with hosts and chicks is having good communication to work out the issues, and hopefully some giving of a s_it on their part to work it out. [Btw your band doesn’t give a shit about you and if you try to communicate with them they’ll probably just laugh at you or consider you a stalker ;-)]Oh btw, for full disclosure purposes, I am a 14 month WPEngine customer with a dedicated $500/month account and over 100 sites hosted on their platform. I have twice had total meltdowns with them, both of which involved ridiculous downtime, some annoyances with having our IPs changed without warning and having to edit like 100 DNS zone files to resolve issues, and black eyes with some of my affected customers. In one case I found out they were sharing my supposedly dedicated server for 5 months with other customers! However, they admitted the problem when they found it, and refunded a huge amount of money to me.. I think it was $1500 to $2000 refunded. So, they kept me as a customer. I’ve noticed the downturn in the average skill of a support person but honestly most of the time our s_it just works and works well, which is ABOVE ALL what I want and need from a hosting relationship because I simply don’t have the time to deal with hosting problems. Yes, I pay a lot of money for their service. And frankly, if I didn’t and had a $99/mo account, my guess is I probably wouldn’t be as happy and may not even be with them any more. But yes, I am also happy with them (for now). However, I hear their 3rd album is coming out.. and they’re telling me it might be better for me not to play so much golf during the week.. so I’m also really nervous ;-)PS. For those particularly interested in the finding of a non psycho marriage quality woman, this is required watching: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKWmFWRVLlU
Hi Sean,Yes I agree any service that anyone recommends can always go downhill. Although I wasn’t paid to do that – Terry Kyle literally came to my rescue on a weekend.I like how you break that down with the different scenarios haha you could turn that into a blog post =DIf there is anything I have learnt about hosting, finding a reliable one that stands the test of time is tough, very tough.
Awwww lol
LOL…The incident happened before I read this post. Unfortunately 🙂
A couple of days ago I was chatting with sales at WPengine. I was negotiating prices and when I asked for better pricing, they told me this:”If you just want to save a few bucks you shouldn´t be here”Talking about customer service? ha ha…this guys are a joke!
You should have replied with a link to this post 🙂
I agree that the response could have been delivered better but what exactly were you expecting? Why do you assume a web host is going to negotiate pricing with you? Will Amazon negotiate AWS pricing with you? Will Apple negotiate iCloud pricing with you? I’m the co-founder of a highly successful product and our pricing is what it is, it’s not a negotiation. That is how most web hosts, SaaS and online services work.
Great and thorough article. I think anyone who drinks the marketing koolaid that WP Engine did initially should read thru all the negative reviews as well. I fell for it a while back as well.My biggest complaints – tech support. Its spotty, sometimes they respond quickly, sometimes it takes forever. My questions were always answered with links to the FAQs or whatever, which if the support had actually read my question, would realize its not something listed in any of those docs, and I am not that tech retarded – so bullshit there.Second – their pricing is ridiculous. Its pretty obvious they nickel and dime on bandwidth and only want to host sites that get very little traffic. They have no pricing structure that grows, its either some low use fixed priced or, shudders, sell your newborn child to pay for the month if you get a slightly modest traffic hit which, as you stated, most budget shared hosts seem to handle no problem.Overall, beware of drinking the WP Engine koolaid. I suspect the company experienced very fast growth and was not internally setup to handle it, nor did they know how to manage it properly and are experiencing some kind of company implosion. I’ve seen and worked with companies where this same thing happened and it smells of this.
Sorry to hear your bad experience 🙁
Wow I didn’t have quite the same issues you did w/ WP Engine, but was still left frustrated by some of their systems. The biggest issue was the extra charges for excessive traffic — and I’ll echo what others have said: if they’re targeting a non-technical client-base, our only understanding of “traffic” is what Google Analytics shows us. So when we see 25,000 visits are included, and we have less than that every month in GA, we understand we’re good to go. Then we get sticker shock when they report a figure 4x higher and charge you for it. Their support team was generally good to me — did not have the same issues as you — but in one instance they recommended a plugin that actually rendered the site inaccessible to everyone who wasn’t logged in. Thankfully some people emailed and tweeted me up about it pretty quickly. I just made the transition to TPH last week (w/ your affiliate link so hopefully you get credit for that). Thanks again for the detailed post and recommending an alternative. Will keep an eye on the performance numbers and see how it goes the next few weeks!
Hi,Yeah the traffic thing is a problem and immediately call’s them into question as a new customer! Not sure why they cap it on visits, seems daft to me!Let me know how you get on with TPH will be interesting to hear your feedback!
Was getting ready to fire off a nasty email to WPengine and then I found this post. Figured it be a waste of time. The one thing that pissed me off the most was the way they count “visitors”. It’s not explained on their home page the “bots” are part of the count. Classic Bait-and-Switch if you ask me. Someone needs to start a class action lawsuit. I’m sure that will get there attention. I just don’t have time (or money) to fight WPengine.So, I moved on (after only with them for 3 days). I signed up with TPH last night. Had a few questions and to my surprise they were answered (in less then 15 minutes) before I went to bed (1 a.m. Eastern). I woke up this morning (8 a.m.) and found my site had already been migrated! In fact, it was done in a couple of hours. Just waiting for the site to propagate. WPengine took me 5 days to get it migrated.Again, new questions this morning for TPH. Again, answered in less then 15 minutes! Hope this is how they continue to run their business during the “growing” years.Also, I’m wondering why TPH doesn’t point out the “visitor” count as a benefit? I have very few visitors per month at the moment. On Statcounter.com, I had a total of 1 visitor in 3 days. However, per WPengine I had 178!!! Anyways, I’m looking forward to seeing my site on TPH.Thanks for the info Matt!
Hi Chris,Sorry to hear about your problems with WPEngine but at least you have it all dealt with now and you see why I am trusting TrafficPlanetHosting with my site!
Hi Aaron,Dedicated servers are well, dedicated so you avoid a lot of the problems of shared hosting. However you are fully in charge of managing/maintaining/fixing any problems that came up.Although there are comments on this post that have alluded to some simple solutions with that!
I was curious to your thoughts on dedicated servers. As mentioned, I almost pulled the plug and invested $250 a month for WPEngine to host only two of my niche sites. (I was still talking to the sales rep as I read this post.) They told me if I added a third it would run $600.00 a month due to website traffic. (The first two sites was going to be a test before adding more of my sites.) Now again, I will admit reading your post probably saved me a fortune. I would lose a ton of money if my experiences turned out like yours. Again, thank you. With that being said, I’m thinking of going with dedicated servers instead. I’m getting ready to launch my own product and I know the traffic will increase to the servers I’m already using (shared hosting). This is why I’m on the prowl for new solutions as I do not want to do a product launch only to have servers crash or end up with individuals not knowing Wordpress :P. Your thoughts on dedicated servers? The good, bad and ugly. Thanks again,Aaron
Great Post Matthew, well documented to show the issues. I have a client who wanted to use them about a year ago. When he signed up for their service I checked them out and found that you are so limited in what is allowed that running his site was not possible on their platform. Plus their promised support and speed where not up to the hype at the time. Glad to see someone document and spread the word about poor support ect.. This I am sure this has and still is costing them clients since I only found this article today 3 months after it was posted. I don’t imagine they have done anything to address the issues you raised for any of their clients still with them ..Will continue to spread this news..John OverallWP Plugins A to Z
Hi John,Sorry to hear you had a poor experience with them as well 🙁
WOW! I actually read through this entire post. It’s a damn good thing I did! I was getting ready to purchase a business plan for $249 a month to host some of my sites. Thanks for this honest write up. I’ll look elsewhere now. Aaron
No worrys 🙂
Have you had any additional downtime with TPH since your last update? I cant afford any downtime on my sites so would be interested to hear if you still recommend them….thanks!
If you literally cannot afford any downtime you need to invest a solid 4-5 figures per month in a serious managed host like rackspace with fail overs etc
I will write a post about it this month 🙂
I’ve read a number of items that compare the Synthesis WordPress hosting platform to WPEngine (in a positive way) regarding performance. WebSynthesis is run by the CopyBlogger people. Just curious if you (or anyone else here) have had any experience with them.
I haven’t tried them personally!
Hey man sorry to hear this about a hosting company. I do have to ask, WTF did you wait so long to change host? After their first Fup, I would of sh*t canned their butts. Good luck man wow TOM
I’m pretty patient with things and sometimes there are teething problems, then I thought the CEO had control of it and time went on =/
Read the entire post, geez that reminds me of some of the hosting nightmares that I’ve dealt with in the past. One hosting company had 3 days of fucking downtime, totally unacceptable.What has worked out well for me is learning Linux and the command line and setting up my own servers on vendors I found on LowEndBox. I only run Nginx + PHP FPM instead of Apache. Whatever I do, I cannot get fucking Apache to feel very responsive. Nginx on the other hand is the tits!Highly recommend you use a highly rated LowEndBox vendor, Amazon AWS, Linode, Digital Ocean, or something similar. If I ever have any hosting problems I can order a new server, completely set one up from scratch, and transfer my domains in the matter of a few hours (I have 10+ sites).Look up the Tuxlite script for setting up web servers. It’s literally idiot proof (I’m a certified idiot and I learned how to use it). Web hosting is so important to an internet marketers business that it really makes sense to just suck it up and learn how to admin your own servers. All I do now is restart my servers every once in awhile, takes 2 minutes. I’ve been setting up my own servers for 2 or 3 years now and feel like web hosting problems are a thing of the past. Highly suggest people reading this to start watching Youtube videos on SSH, linux commands, etc.. Took me a few weeks to really pick it up. I have a server that can handle 10 million visits per day and it’s less than $20/month
Looks like a cool little script thanks for the advice!
Thanks Matthew for this superb article. I took a chance on Traffic Planet Hosting after reading this post. It has been impressive right from the start. Blazing speed, responsive support desk. I took the 5-sites deal. Value for money really. TPH migration was pain-free and no downtime. At the same time, I signed up with another hosting company to host my private blog network and non-money sites that I’m building. In contrast – that has been a terrible start. My sites are still down after more than 24 hours as I write this post, still no updates. Their complimentary migration service sucks. I would have done it faster armed with nothing else but BackupBuddy plugin and FTP. Sigh.
Sorry to hear about that – it is always hard to find reliable, cheap hosts for blog networks =/
“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.”THIS explains why I had issues when I migrated my personal site from WPE to Pagely… The support team kept me in the loop and kept having to remove WPE remnants before my site performed properly. Honestly, I thought it may have been either incompetence on my part during migration or Pagely’s services, but it makes sense now. Don’t mean to assume here but too many pieces adding up and the evidence is building. We (EF) have been having speed and hosting issues for a while now. Had a site speed pro “audit” our site as well and he hasn’t had 100% positive things to say about WPE either. Hm…
Yeah that sucks, I think it would be helpful to publish a list of what those changes are. I might do something 🙂
But they could be using a common library like timthumb
As far as I remember, when I searched for similar domains on the web, not all of them run WordPress on the main http protocol (the forum was on https).It may be a common exploit, but every infected site I checked was running on Gator.
Hey Matthew,Did you ever tried something like Amazon Web Services? I mean if you spend all this time just because of speed, you might want to give a try to have a custom dedicated system to deliver to your clients the best experience possible.I talk from experience on that field, I had a server with about 400k unique visitors in peak hours, I mean when I got links on http://globo.com/ to the site I was managing.The thing is, the only solution the was able to hold that amount of traffic was AWS with a custom made server.I hope you find your golden gun to solve this problem for sure, because no VPS or single machine hosting will do it the way it should be done.my Best Regards,
Hi,Yes I’ve used AWS before which requires a whole bunch of technical setup/config/management and when things go wrong there isn’t any level of support other than ‘reimage your server’
How do you know the breached servers and not a common plugin/wordpress exploit?
Not exactly. Apart from my site, there were 10s of thousands other domains with the exact spam forum on them. Someone breached the servers, not the individual domains, and then placed the forum under https.
Somehow I’m not surprised at all… Hosting companies are probably among the most shady kinds of businesses of them all.For instance, Host Gator once installed a spam forum on my domain. And they didn’t care to remove it. More info under my name link.
Looks like your site got hacked rather than an issue with hostgator
It’s so commonplace nowadays that the average PC user (and most businesses I see and talk to) think it’s compulsory to type before a domain name.
May you should check out server pilot. It will spin up a VPS and install everything you need…And, if you want you can always SSH into your server if you need to.
Looks pretty handy thanks!
My original comment is below. I thankfully copied it to my clipboard before clicking to post since I had been on your page awhile, otherwise it would have been lost… as unfortunately, your website was down. As I tried to comment or reload the page, I kept getting the “Failed to open page” saying the server is down. (Terry, can you speak to this? I was considering up with your company after reading this post… the first time I noticed the site was down tonight was 5:41pm US/Central Time; it was still down an hour later as I updated this draft offline. Not a great first impression, but willing to ask to see if I should move forward anyway, knowing no hosting company is perfect. Thanks.)—–First, just want to chime in with my thanks. I was about to sign-up with WPE (my first shared hosting company) when I launch a new site in June, but while reading their blog yesterday I noticed someone in the comments mentioned you by name as having a bad experience. Entered your name in Google and thankfully I found this comprehensive post and will now find a new provider instead. Since finding your site, I’ve spent hours reading your posts, and appreciate the wealth of information. The only thing that didn’t sit well with me as a potential subscriber here is that when you asked WPEngine to refund your affiliates, I thought the next sentence might be you stating that you were asking them to follow your lead as you might be giving your WPE commissions away, perhaps to a charity of your choice, a giveaway, or some creative way to give back the profits made during the time period you were experiencing bad service but your blog continued to recommend their services. With the nature of affiliate marketing it is hard to trust your profiting off them during the entire 8-month ordeal knowing they were not the awesomeness that was published on the blog at that time. Unlike the commenter above, I understand the new affiliate link as you partner with Terry as the nature of marketing and your blog. It’s just at some point during the 8-month period, there reached a point when things were unraveling but you were continuing to profit by recommending a company you knew to be dysfunctional – that is what is a little hard to fully trust as a new reader. I like to give back to bloggers with my click (in this case by clicking on to Terry’s company as thanks for your time and efforts in sparing my making a mistake with WPE), but having some pause given the circumstances. [Update: And now having a lot of pause when I tried to publish this comment but your website server was down for over an hour.] All that said, you do have my thanks for helping readers avoid issues with WPE. I am not as tech savvy as you (by a long shot) so such mistakes on their end would be even more difficult for me to manage. I wish you all the best with the new host and I look forward to reading about your experience with them.
Hi,Sorry about that but nice to see im not the only person that copies form content before submitting it ‘just in case’ lol The data center had a power failure which led to a bunch of corrupt databases, I have updated the post.While I was having problems with them during that period lots of other people didn’t, it really is only since publishing this post it has come to light just how wide spread the problems are. Plus I had truly put my faith into them after speaking to them directly at affiliate summit but you have to give people a chance to investigate and resolve issues before hanging them.They just used that chance to hang themselves =/
We moved on trafficplanet recently.The support is fast and reliable. Today the server went done for several hours. We hope this will not happen again.NOTE: phpSOAP seems not activated by default
Yeah the entire data centre went out =/Just drop them a mail!
especially to Ryan, from the above post,no matter what commission you get from any affiliate links a subscriber list or site daily traffic of 100-150 thousand people is worth 1000 times more than crappy affiliate payments, its worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, even though Yoast was offered 150 dollars per hosting sign up, he refused because he knew each visitor is probably worth around 10-20 thousand over the customer life cycle, just cause you have some link doesn’t mean they can deliberately and on purpose ruin your business, there to lazy and don’t want real customers , i had same problem with https://ventraip.com.au/ in Australia, but they closed the account and stole all my content and files without warning, so now the police are involved and the owner is being charged with theft. Mathew should bill them for the link on his site im sure its worth at least 10k
Actaully its an affiliate link I take commission on
I read the full post when you published it and come back to read the comments.Fortunately I didn’t move to WPE when you made your first review and I’m still with the Gator (CloudFare improved dramatically the pages speed but the TTFB is still high).I ‘know’ Terry for years and I’m quite confident about his integrity. When he launched TPH a few months I could not believe such features so I decided to ‘wait and see’.The Alexa rank of TPH is still high so I guess he doesn’t have much clients but this should be changing with your post.I read somewhere in the post or in the comments that you were using Amazon Cloudfront CDN.Doest it mean the CDN is included in TPH so no need to use another one?My biz and clients are based in Asia so I would prefer an IP there.The only thing for which I am reluctant to move to Terry’s solution for my M websites is his background in the SEO industry. Do you remember the ads here ‘the man who… Mat Cutts’?It’s nice to have a SEO expert at the head but you see what I mean…mediatemple and siteground look interesting too… I should take my decision shortly.
I can’t believe after all the time you spent being patient and communicating, they terminated your account and charged you the next day. Your experience just sounds unbelievable. At one point, I thought about moving over to WP Engine, but now I know.
Yeah that was rookie
Hi,Terry only launched the hosting a few months back and we were working on a case study cloning the site over to http://mattwoodwardblogtest.com/ and speed testing it, but then I had to shelve that because moving country took up a bunch more time than I expected.Then WPEngine forced my hand and I had no option but to find time & move immediately.I will continue to use affiliate links where I can, that’s what affiliate marketing is. The same as poker players play poker and basketball players use basket balls.
And I’m learning this with more experience. My support experiences with Media Temple continue to be a huge disappointment. I recently had a problem with my site being down due to syntax error and, for whatever reason, the network I was working on could not connect to my site via SFTP and I was stuck with a broke site and no way to connect. I got in touch with the support people to see if they could just wipe the file empty to I could replace the code and get the site back up. To my amazement, they refused! Here I am with a “WordPress hosting plan” and the support team was refusing to get my site back up and running at a time when I was unable to. The fix ultimately took my about 20 seconds to complete and wasn’t a big deal but it was the fact that they refused to grant such a simple request and would rather let my site remain broke is what was really fucked up. I’ve decided to cancel my plan with them and am now looking into new hosts. While Media Temple has good performance (in my experience), their support is total shit.
My point is still valid. You made money off the last link, you’ll make money off the new one. My point with Terry is if his product was so much better then WP Engine (by close to 20% faster) and you knew him for so long from years ago, why not try him in the beginning….probably cause the affiliate money from WP Engine is better is my guess.The fact is your credibility is only as good as the amount of money you get from the affiliate link. Then, when shit hits the fan, jump to a new one.Which of course you have a nice new affiliate link for Traffic Planet or whatever it is called.
Wow! Unreal that everyone here is acting as if your the victim. Does anyone see this racket?? This is one of the reasons why you can not trust blogs that do affiliate marketing. Matt jumped on board something that looked good and paid big money for him to endorse it, then while he waits 8 months to “fix” this problem with WP Engine, did he stop recommending people to WP Engine? Nope he kept on profiting. from readers.Now as WP Engine crashes and burns and leave Matt with only 3 days to get his site on a new site, his buddy Terry save the day, who of course he has looked up to for years. Well if he was so great why didn’t Matt talk to him in the first place and go with someone who you had looked up to for such a long period of time.Then the final kicker, all you readers kiss Matt’s ass about how amazing of a post this is (and it was well written) and then click on his NEW affiliate link to all jump on that train and pay him more money.No one else going to see this for what it is? Matt FUCKED up and then wants you to jump ship to his new affiliate site, join them and make money.I am not saying that Matt planned this to happen. But jesus guys, he isn’t a martyr he fucked up and profited handsomely off of it!Good job Matt! I’m unsubscribing.
Hi,Actually I was under the impression this was an isolated case rather than a global issue with the company, it was only when I spoke to other people and published this post I saw how wide spread it was.Yes I have looked up to Terry for years, ever since he did the forum profile link building case study on WarriorForm, then I was a very active member on his backlinksforum which then turned into the traffic planet forum. Go and take a look at some of my first income reports.Do your research before you talk 🙂
What other wordpress optimized hosts do people use? I’m looking for someone else. I’ve had enough of WPengine’s games and lies!
Have a read through the comments, personally im using TrafficPlanetHosting
Hi Matthew,This is Tony, I came to your Wpengine review literally 6 months ago and bought the professional Wpengine Vps hosting (like the one you had). I have been getting a lot of downtime without notices & slow customer support. I’m making the move as typing this commentDon’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming you or anything, I just like to let you know that We’re on the same page and I understand you pain dealing with Wpengine service & support!Best,Tony
Yeah sorry about that, they were awesome when I first started using them but well =/
i was with wpengine, but didnt renew past the 3 month period myself, I do have a server with linode, cheaper than wpengine, im a sys admin myself, so its not hard to maintain/keepup.I usally stay away from shared hosting because one person on a server could ruin it for someone else with insecure scripts, etc, but I wanted to give wpengine a go.Siteground is another host worth looking at.
I suppose if your happy with Linode that’s all you need!