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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Hi Kyle,Thanks for your image optimization tip.I’d like to clarify a few points:1) I wasn’t with LiquidWeb before (I was with Pair hosting). I moved from Pair to you to LiquidWeb.2) On average, my site load time was:- Pair: 7 s (with plugins)- TPH / WPX Hosting: 10 s (with plug-ins) – but it also crashed often, leading to your staff blaming my plug-ins.- LiquidWeb: 4 s (with plugins)You say you’re “not sure why I got that false 60 second load time reading on your homepage.” It wasn’t a false positive. I got it while my site was down on your servers. Whenever I’d try to log into my site to update it or post, it would crash, and I’d get those.I got them all day. I wrote to your support many times. But they still took about 48 hours to address the situation, and the best thing they came up with was to turn off my plugins.I haven’t had a single crash on LiquidWeb yet. My site is faster, it runs smoothly, and their support solves everything the same day. No blaming the plugins.Just wanted to clarify that, as you wrote that LiquidWeb “isn’t anything too special.” In my experience last week, it’s actually been the opposite. TPH was slow, offline, and their support didn’t help. On the other hand, Liquid was fast, smooth, and solved all isues the same day. I don’t want to sound like an ad, but that’s the truth.OK, I’m done.Best of luck with your business.
Thanks Matt,
Hi again Etienne,I have looked into your issues on your recent experience with WPX Hosting and here are my findings:[1] According to the ticket transcripts, which I’m happy to publish in full with all logins redacted, the first migration to us went smoothly and it’s obvious from those that you have a sound technical knowledge of hosting fundamentals.As such, you do know that plugins, javascript calls to laggy external servers and themes can be poorly coded and massively impact page load speed (these can be quickly identified in the ‘Waterfall’ areas of Pingdom Tools and GT Metrix.That’s a fact of life that all webmasters, software services and hosting companies working with WordPress have to deal with. That’s exactly why WPEngine have a pretty long list of forbidden plugins, including many very popular ones: https://wpengine.com/support/disallowed-plugins/ However, we don’t want to be that restrictive and instead work on a case-by-case basis.[2] In relation to the migration and performance on musculation-prise-de-masse.com, when we investigated the poor performance after the migration, these 2 plugins in particular were identified as being the culprits: Duplicate Page and Page Expiration Robot PRO Plus!Also, this image, Ectomorph.png, in .png format that loads on the homepage is 2.5Mb and the slowest loading element there e.g. sort the Waterfall by load time on the Pingdom tools test from when we first completed the migration to us on October 6 (http://terrykyle.com/etienne3.jpg):https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/zlesL/https://www.musculation-prise-de-masse.com/In .jpg format, that image would be 190 Kb:http://terrykyle.com/etienne1.png Optimizations like this and identifying resource-hungry plugins (for which there are often much better alternatives) are obviously fast ways to optimize a site like my blog here (also running on PHP 7 which can potentially be an SSD-like speed improvement as well):http://terrykyle.com/etienne4.jpg I’m not sure why you got that false 60 second load time reading on your homepage but a few repeated scans on Pingdom Tools today also produced that same reading on your current host:http://terrykyle.com/etienne5.jpg [3] Now that your site is back at Liquid Web (where I believe we migrated your site from in the first place), the performance still isn’t anything too special as these optimizations are necessary on any hosting platform in the world, including Liquid Web GT Metrix screenshot:http://terrykyle.com/etienne2.jpgThere’s no need to go back and forth on this further Etienne and regrettably we couldn’t find a way forward in this case but we do work very hard here to deliver the best possible experience for each WPX Hosting customer that we can.Sometimes however, unique setups, issues or other factors prevent that.Also if you want us to investigate better alternatives to those problematic plugins – regardless of where your hosting is – then let me know.Best regardsTerry KyleCo-owner, WPX Hosting
You can use something like Google Apps for business
Yes they do, you can read about it on their site
Kinsta looks top notch! Has your speed increased with them?I moved to LiquidWeb. Had some websites there. Now have almost my sites there. Their support is the best I’ve seen since I’m in the business (2007).Here are the images you requested:55 s load time on Pingdom: https://s22.postimg.org/884jiqj9t/55_44s.png60 s load time on GTmetrix: https://s15.postimg.org/4w502e3zf/60_3s.pngGTmetrix time out: https://s15.postimg.org/jq4ly0zi3/GTmetrix_time_out.pngService unavailable: https://s14.postimg.org/ne5ejyaxd/Service_unavailable.pngInternal server error: https://s9.postimg.org/fqdwuvmbz/Internal.pngIt's OK if you want to point TPH’s team here to reply, but I’ll say this right away: I don’t plan to answer back and forth and turn this into a flame war. I’ve got better things to do.Cheers,Etienne
Hi Matt,I went with Trafficplanethosting (now WPXHosting) based on your recommendation. However, it’s been horrible. I’m afraid they’re pulling a WPEngine.My blog used to work just fine on my previous host. Fine, but slow (~7s load time according to GTmetrix).After moving to Trafficplanethosting (WPXHosting):- My blog started to load in ~10s, and sometimes up to 50 – 60 s- It was slow, temporary unavailable, or gave 500 / internal server errors- They blamed my Wordpress theme, plug-ins, and even images (?!) and couldn’t fix the situationTheir lower level tech support kept replying with copy and paste answers, seldom really answering my questions. I felt like I was talking to a machine.After 2 days of this, the best answer their senior support gave me was to turn off half of my plug-ins. Of course, this doesn’t make a lot of sense, since my blog was working just fine on my previous host. You’ve pointed out the same logical mistake in your review of WPEngine. I’m now trying to migrate my blog to another (reputable) host. However, we’re having trouble with migration:”Hello, It appears wpxhosting.com has really limited your PHP/WEB request processes time. As a result, I am consistently receiving a timeout 500 error when trying to backup your site. I am attempting to use the updraft backup plugin but this may not work due to the heavy limitations.”I have screenshots of 500 internal server errors and 50-60s load times on Trafficplanethosting (WPXHosting). I could share them if you want. Same for support tickets. The whole thing is pretty appalling.I’m writing this in hopes the next entrepreneur like me who reads your review thinks twice about going with Trafficplanethosting / WPXHosting. I’m leaving as fast as I can.
Hey,Thanks for sharing your experience, please feel free to reply with screenshots and I’ll point the team over to your comment so they can also respond!Last week I actually moved this blog to Kinsta (you can read more about why here https://searchlogistics.com/blogging/income-reports/september-2016/ ) although I still have all my other sites hosted with them such as https://www.searchlogistics.com/ which is rapid fast so I’m sorry to hear of your problems!Have you found a new host yet?
Hi Etienne,As a co-owner of WPX Hosting, I will personally investigate your incident above as that experience is very unusual for our WPX customers.Far from resources and server capability going down, we are continually optimizing in the opposite direction.I don’t want to comment further until I have more information but I will post that once I have fully looked into it.Best regardsTerry KyleBest regardsTerry Kyle
You are not the only one!
I going to use them at the beginning of this year and was warned not to. After reading all the different complaints and your story, I am so glad I didn’t.
WOW! I’ve heard so many horrifying stories from wpengine…but your’s has been the worst.I’ve used several hosting sites and have had horrible experiences. The biggest complaint I have is that they’re all shared and you must use a CDN.For the prices they charge on shared hosting is outrageous. I’ve now been with ecomlane.com now for just over 8 months and I love them. No more shared servers for me!!!
Did you have a bad experience with WPEngine yourself?
No problemo 🙂
I am aware of Yoast and their situation also and I do update often on most of my sites but this led me to believe that I needed BETTER security in all ends. Hence the change of host to make sure that would not be the issue, or at least most likely won’t be the issue next time, if any =)All files on all domains will be checked even though I only myself found it on one site. Better safe than sorry. BTW, some hosts do this for you instead of the need to pay extra for it )
Holy Grail of badmouthing WP-Engine!THANKS to all honest souls out there.Just got my website hacked…And this led me looking for another hosting provider for WP.All of your suggestions were welcomed. After doind a bit of research I found that my needs with a small-medium sized site could do well with shared hosting IF…It is safeAnd I just found out that it is possible to get away with that instead of VPS or dedicated servers. What hosts am I looking at:*NOTE I HAVE NO EXPERIENCE YET WITH THESE HOSTS MYSELF ON A PERSONAL LEVEL*1.Siteground – They seem to really know pro-active steps when it comes to security and also had a kick a** rep so I assume customer satisfaction will be good here. Just what I needed. Kernel level attention.2.GreengeeksSome of the same.3.MDDHosting.4.Imotion Hosting- Will look more tomorrow but all in all for a small site that should do it for a while more. REALLY appreciate the options again guys.By the way. Wordpress owners. Get Anti malware plugins. Firewall plugins. And get some security on your hosting level. Daily backups.Total faceplant to find out that your site has been modified/taken/raped when hours/days/weeks has been spent tweaking that engine to the max. Be PRO-Active Y’all
Hey Rune,I am sorry to hear that – I also learned the hard way about taking regular backups myself, it’s a sucky situation.However you should be aware that it is rarely the host that is at fault in these situations, most security breaches come via poorly coded themes/plugins that get exploited. Even popular plugins like Yoast SEO have had security holes in the past that were fixed.It’s often difficult to workout exactly where the problem lies, so make sure you update all plugins and themes (even if they aren’t enabled) along with the latest version of Wordpress.
I do not use WordPress, but I would stay away from Siteground. (They might be OK for WordPress, but I was non-WordPress, so I saw a different side of them.) Their billing office is in Panama (or was it Bulgaria?) ; this placed a security hold on my credit card when I renewed my services.While I was on a live chat with their help desk, I installed rather than upgraded my site, losing one new user and a couple new posts. I was able to restore from backup.Their help chat window had an automatic resize that would not allow users to escalate the chat to a superior (you could only do that once anyway) ; when I showed it to them, they did not believe me because I was not a developer. They did not see what I was talking about until they logged in as me to their help chat, they sent me a screen shot of the chat window, and I sent back the appropriate part of their screenshot.There were also some issues about the update script not having the new security version available right away. Drupal published it; Softaculous had it about 15 hours later; Siteground made that available to me about 24 hours after that (at about 1:00 am my local time, so another 6-8 hours before I could apply it).[That said, I did like the features Siteground had against incoming spam email. They caught one from someone who recomended a lawyer to help me get back all the money I sent to Nigeria.](And you would not believe how many WordPress hacking attempts there are on my Drupal site. Or maybe you might.)
I’ll give that a try over the weekend and post the result. Thank you kindly for the reply.
Thank you Matthew for your posting. I’ve been having so many problems with a non-profit site it’s not even funny. Basically they asked if I would help and the first thing I want to do is get them away.Can you recommend a tool, or anything, that helps eliminate all this extra garbage code they put in? I’ve been fighting for 2 days trying to clean things up with little success.Any advice would be appreciated.
Sorry to hear that, what you could do is something like this1) Install virgin Wordpress on new host2) Copy over the wp-content folder from wp engine to the new host3) export the database from wp engine and import it into the new hostThat should work out but don’t quote me on it 🙂
I have never used GoDaddy for hosting so I can’t comment
These are better than GoDaddy
HiHonest review . ThanksI wont shift to wpengine now although i am in trial period.Can you tell if amazon is good for our wordpress website. We get 8000 visitors a month
With 8,000 visitors a month you dont need anything special – either shared hosting from Bluehost or the basic package from TrafficPlanetHosting
How is Traffic Planet hosting holding up till now? Still with them? I am looking to move a client site from WPEngine.
Yes I am still with them and highly recommended
I was thinking to move some of our client sites to wpengine, but will seriously re-consider after reading your post. Thanks for the detailed report Matt!
Eeeeek sounds scary! Tread carefully!
I never trust any good reviews. I always look for any article like this. I used several hosting company’s services. Now, Using Linode and i’m happy with it till now. If someone wants suggestion from me, I will say buy a plan from Linode, DO or vultr and install serverpilot. Then start using your own VPS. It is 100 times better than shared hosting or any managed VPS.
Looks like a great combo especially if you aren’t super technical!
Ahhhh yes that will help! Although it’s a difficult task to keep plugin numbers down at times!
We try to run all our WordPress sites as bare bone as possible, so maybe that’s why the site’s go ok.Minimal plugins, minimal everything!Less areas for things to break! WordPress, the temperamental nightmare.
Hiya Matt,Thanks for putting this blog together. I’m a long time follower of yours.Personally I’ve never experienced any issues with WP Engine, so this article and the depth you’ve gone into is pretty surprising to me.Certainly not saying any of it’s not true, inaccurate, just surprising.I’ve called WP Engine tech support numerous times over the last year, and I’ve literally had my questions answered in a few minutes (at most). I’ve never had any clients report any serious down time, or slowness with their sites either.I might start monitoring everyone’s site a bit closer now though to see if there’s anything going on, that we’re missing.Disclaimer: I’m also a partner, I refer clients to them (all of my clients in fact), so I get paid a commission for this too.But I refer people to WP Engine because they cause me less headaches than any other hosts I’ve used over the last 15+ years.Cheers Matt,- Paul.
Hey Paul,Glad to hear you are having a good time with them, you are not the first person to say that either – it seem’s to be a mixed bag of experiences!
i agree with couple of your points but i am choosing wpengine because of their speed, i tried several different hosting provider none of them even come close to the speed which wpengine provide…so my vote any day goes to wpengine
Well the speed sucked for me with WPEngine but that might not be true for everyone.
Wow! I’m really surprised. I thought WPEngine is one of the top hosts around. I almost chose them when I was deciding on a host. I’m glad I went with StackPress ( https://StackPress.net ) instead. I couldn’t be happier with them.
I’m also looking at https://kinsta.com/ at the moment
WOAH! Are you telling me that a site about affiliate marketing, actually uses real affiliate links!?!? That is CRAZY!
Nice affiliate link right there – this site is nothing but snake oil
How hard it is itis to port your site from WPE to another host? They don’t use cpanel!
You can use a plugin like WPClone or UpdraftPlus BUT WPEngine like to make changes to core wordpress files which can make it difficult to move away from them.If the host you are moving to has a migration service, use it 🙂
This is fun,as today i was thinking of changing from hostgator to wpengine and i got your email that redirected me to this post,man i am glad i opened your email,you just avoided me making a terrible mistake,i will follow your recommendation.Thank you Matthew
No problem, glad to be of service 🙂 Congratulations on needing to move to a new host though, that means you are growing nicely 🙂
these WPengine chaps were at the wordcamplondon earlier today, will avoid them like the plague tomorrow
Ask them about this post, it usually gets some funny responses!
Very good write up… Had to take all day, but probably worth it considering how much time you’d already lost dealing with these issues.I’ve had some bad experiences with them recently as well. They originally told me that I could copy sites using their clone site tool in the dashboard and I wouldn’t get charged as long as the sites were for development and didn’t have a url associated with them. A couple months ago I contacted them asking to upgrade my server because they still had it running on php 5.3 and they told me that if I wanted them to upgrade it I would have to pay for the premium account since I had more than once site (even though all but one were staging/dev sites). They recently came up with a new process called “Transferrable Installs” that you assign your development sites to. This was more of just a term that they coined though for a process they’d more or less implemented for years now. My dev sites were created before this new process came out so basically they’re using this as a way to try and force me to pay $250 a month. I could download the sites and reupload them under the new “Transferrable Installs” setting, but that would be an enormous waste of my time. They could easily change them to “Transferrable Installs” themselves in about 5 seconds, but won’t. Like you mentioned in your article I’ve also find they never own up to anything. Today for example I figured I would harden security a bit after hearing about the “Panama Papers hack”. To my surprise though the first two things I tried, both had issues.First, I tried ensuring the file permissions were set properly:define( ‘FS_CHMOD_DIR’, 0755 );define( ‘FS_CHMOD_FILE’, 0644 );However, it doesn’t do anything. When checking the file permissions they were 0775 0664. I also tried using sftp, as well as all in one wp security, and their own dashboard plugin… When I asked them why I couldn’t set the permissions to the right ones, their response was, that 0775 and 0664 were the right permissions… I said according to wordpress docs they weren’t and they told me that they chose 0775 and 0664 instead for security which makes zero sense to me, but oh well.Next I tried changing the wp-content directory to WP_CONTENT_DIR andWP_CONTENT_URL. I deleted the old “wp-content” folder afterwards and everything worked fine. However, After logging back into sftp an hour later, “wp-content” was back with “advanced-cache.php” and “mysql.sql” inside them. I checked my new WP_CONTENT_DIR and those same files were also there, so clearly this shouldn’t be happening. But when I asked them about this their response was that there was nothing wrong and that it is suppose to work like that “by design” since its “suppose to” be “wp-content”. Really? These are the kind of responses they always give you. I’m assuming it’s either because their support isn’t knowledgeable with wordpress or they are just trying to cover their asses. Either way it’s crazy frustrating that they can’t give straightforward answers. This is what I’d expect from a shared host, but for one that is specific to wordpress, I figured they would know what they were talking about or at least give you straightforward answers that make sense.Anyway, not trying to rant here, but figured I’d add to the list of shitty practices they implement. Thanks for the good writeup. Negative blog posts seem to be the only thing that gets companies attention these days.
Hey Bryan,Sorry to hear about your problems, but yes the common thread is the wordpress experts don’t really know much about wordpress at all. It’s just a bunch of people that access an internal knowledge base and regurgitate stuff senselessly.When you combine that with the fact that they have their own propitiatory systems that interfere with the way Wordpress core actually works – it’s a recipe for disaster.This negative post certainly got their attention, but it didn’t change anything. I know the current management have asked other people in the community to put pressure on me to take this post down, rather than actually approaching me to have a direct conversation like grown ups- but that really tells you everything you need to know about how they go about business. I hope you manage to find a resolution to your problems, but honestly – that resolution is probably packing up and moving to a new host.
Hi Matthew,Thanks for sharing your experience…However your loading times for this post is 60 seconds from Dallas…I guess Traffic Planet is not delivering either? http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/XCJYk/https://searchlogistics.com/seo/reviews/wp-engine/
I think Pingdom was having a bad day, run a re-test and you’ll see
Hi Matthew,Do you still recommend TPF? I am going to switch if you do.
Yes I am still using TrafficPlanetHosting for this blog
The wpengine site itself is very slow… In my experience Wordpress is already slow and very hard to speed up. Google suggest a 0.2s response time in Page Speed Insights, I am not sure thats possible in WP. All the WP sites we built, even with caching and other things to speed it up, is much slower than other CMSs we use. So if you are to use a Wordpress hosting specialist, they really really need to be able to speed up a WP site beyond any other hosting company. Their current site loads approx. 3 seconds according to Pingdom, which is amazingly slow. Their page speed insight score is 72 / 100 on Desktop, and 49/100 on mobile. I mean come on! If they claim to provide such great WP hosting they need to show that on their own website. I expect to see < 0,5s loading time, and over 95/100 page speed insight score on Mobile AND Desktop.In the meantime I host my WP sites on my own servers because I can speed them up more than WPEngine's own site.
Page speed insight score is usually down to how something is coded, rather than the hardware that is hosting it.But you are right, nothing is going to beat your own server with some dedicated hardware!
Hi Laurence, using SSD + underloading servers (instead of the industry-standard practice of overloading them) can certainly help – you can check the speed of some of our users’ sites on the homepage at: https://trafficplanethosting.com/
Hi Matthew,Can I ask you, you are in the UK like me, and have a .co.uk, which is the domain I host with WP Engine.I am now looking at using TrafficPlanetHosting (on your recommendation, and spoke them via live chat yesterday), and wanted to ask you how do you think Google will look at hosting in the states, as it is a UK .co.uk, and the website I am going to be hosting is fairly high ranking, and just a little concerned about any knock-on effects from Google for ranking, if I use TrafficPlanetHosting and their US datacentre?Any advice on that would be great.Thanks.Steven
Actually I’m about 6,500 miles away from the UK right now but in answer to your question Google have confirmed directly that server location plays a role.So if you are already hosted in the UK, I wouldn’t recommend moving away from the UK.
Hi Steven, we cover this here: https://trafficplanethosting.com/knowledgebase/article/31/can-my-non-usa-site-be-hosted-in-the-usa—still-rank-in-google-in-my-country-/ and we host many .co.uk sites like http://www.hauntedrooms.co.uk/ and Matt’s blog that rank well in the UK (and still load fast for UK visitors).
I am currently dealing with WP Engine, have been hosting with them for a week after falling for all the sales hype (and false reviews that exist just for an affiliate sale), and already I am seeing MASSIVE red flags.Firstly, the migration did not work.Secondly, they are taking half a day to answer basic tickets.Thirdly, they are also ignoring tickets.Also, their live chat is not working “connection not made”, which makes me wonder if they can redirect to this message from what they deem as a ‘customer that asks awkward questions..’.And finally (for now), they are massively over inflating visitor stats, more than double.Yes, the website speed is a lot faster than it was, but I really dread to think how poor they would be if a server went down, and that is simply not a risk I am willing to take. I will be moving soon, just looking for a reliable host – which as we all know is a task in itself.Basically, when you are paying premium prices, for shared hosting, and $29.99 is a premium price, then you expect a premium support, and service.So far, it has been on a par with a $3 a month shared hosting service.The old UK saying of “all fur coat and no knickers” is currently springing to mind
Sorry to hear you are having so many problems with them Steven!
Hey Matt,This post is a huge eyes opener for many of those who buy the hype that surrounds WP Engine. I wouldn’t EVER thought that such a seemingly cool-looking company would provide such a terrible service.I can imagine how badly your article must have affected their reputation during the last 1.5 years or so. Has anyone of them got in touch with you regarding this post, or do they just remain silent?
At the time this was written I was in good contact with someone called Tomas who confirmed I was the most hated person at WPEngine but that sort of died off and now the only thing I hear from them is all the smack talk that comes out of their ‘private’ dinners at conferences that some of my clients are invited too (honestly they are THAT stupid).Never have they approached me at a conference to talk about it like big people although I know they have tried to influence people to influence me to take the post down indirectly. Like dealing with children, except they run a company that is responsible for other peoples businesses.
Hi Matthew,That’s some woefully bad hosting experiences with WPEngine. However and sad to say, it’s not an isolated occurrence, there are many other ‘cowboy’ operations out there. Thankfully there are good folk like yourself who aren’t afraid to post the facts, the real truth about dodgy hosting companies, kudos!In reply to your comment, I’m confused by this statement: “Be aware that when you migrate away from them, you will need a developer to fix the install because WPEngine hijack your site by injecting code into core files.”If the WP core files have been tampered with, then download fresh core files, update your config, check your DB and it should spell problem solved. Where this would become an issue, is if the Theme/Child files have been tampered with. Primarily the functions.php of the theme is a good place to start checking. Granted you’d need to know php and what to look for, what’s out of place.I have used WP installers in the past, it saved a lot of time but a couple cost me a lot of time too. These days it’s manual upload and manual install from A to Z. Just as a heads up for anyone using a WP automated installer, these will set ALL your DB User Privileges to ON. WP only needs the following to functions The rest leaves your site open to abuse. These are:AlterCreateCreate Temporary TablesDeleteIndexLock TablesSelectDropInsertUpdate
Hello,I would love to know about the script and other things from you. Very much interested.
Thanks for this post. Most accurate review of WP Engine I have seen. My experience with them has been very similar to yours and I will be moving my site, even though I paid for a year in advance. Support is terrible and blames everything else except WP Engine, even when the site had none of the same problems on its previous server. Downtime, 502 errors on both front and admin end, and restrictions that are supposed to be preventing these things, yet development version of the site on another server has none of the same problems and no restrictions. Staging site on WP Engine has the same problems as the live site. Can’t get away fast enough!
Sorry to hear that Lori – WPEngine pay attractive affiliate commission so its hard to find a real review and a little birdy told me the reason they increased the affiliate commission was to push out reviews like this one but that could just be rumor.I know they have spoken with various people in the industry about how to get this post removed rather than just speaking with me directly so it gives you a good idea of the kind of tactics they are willing to use.Be aware that when you migrate away from them, you will need a developer to fix the install because WPEngine hijack your site by injecting code into core files.
Your site loads very slowly. Perhaps try fewer plugins and get rid of that ugly black thing at the top of the page.Maybe the host wasn’t the problem. Just saying.
Over the past month I have added quite a few new plugins to the blog which are having a considerable impact on the blogs performance, I need to throttle back you are right 🙂
Hi Matthew, this post has been very interesting and revealing to read. I run several sites and Ive been looking to upgrade my webhosting to another hosting provider. One of which was WPEngine. I come from an IT background so I’m not a newbie to WordPress or webservers and I’m pretty shocked by your experience with WPEngine. I will now definitely be staying away. It sounds like the classic corporate mistake that so many businesses make. After building and running a great business, the original owner and founder then sells out, takes the money and runs, and the newcomers take over. Namely corporate investors who can’t see further than the profit and loss account and the balance sheet. Quality and service then get diluted and run down, the assets get sweated and squeezed and the end result: a whole heap of problems and dissatisfied customers. The delays and daft or non-existent answers to the problems and issues you have since had with WPEngine are classic corporate phenomena. No-one wants to stick their neck out, everything has to be “approved” – or else just ignored. Result: the whole business just goes down the pan. It happens so many times.As for ending support at 5pm, that is just plain daft for a hosting provider. You might as well run a restaurant and close for lunch. Hosting is a 24×7 service business.I will be staying with Hostgator, at least for the near future. So far they have been pretty good and they don’t overcharge either.
Yeah they got a phat stack of venture capital funding and the owner checked out which only ever goes 1 way.
Awesome thanks!
Mr. Woodward,My company and I are (or were) on the verge of moving our website to WPEngine as we’re experiencing tremendous growth. We just had a conference call with them and, after reading your post, I can definitely see how it all correlates, particularly from reading your correspondence with them.Safe to say, you’ve just saved me from making one of the biggest mistakes I could’ve ever made! THANK YOU FOR THAT!!!Now I’m thinking of seriously looking at DreamHost. I’ve read great things about them but would love to hear any experience you (or anyone else) has had with them.Sincerely,Davey
Thanks Davey – glad it helped you out!Did you ask them about this post?DreamHost are more of a budget/shared host I wouldn’t recommend them but it really depends on your requirements
It is https://www.facebook.com/groups/advancedwp/ and it’s official website http://www.advancedwp.org/
Hi Matthew: Sorry to read about your total nightmare with WPEngine. In fact, I edited an article of mine that featured WPEngine because of your negative experience with them: http://www.rightblogtips.com/2014/07/why-premium-web-hosting-is-the-secret-ingredient.html In it, I now link to this article of yours so my readers can see the stress that WPEngine caused you, not to mention all the lost revenue! In my experience with hosting, one guy you can really rely on is Dave Zhang over at HostAwesome. He has provided me with STELLAR customer service and has NEVER let me down. Btw, even their free hosting account is excellent, which would be ideal for any newbie bloggers who are just starting out and aren’t serious enough yet to spend money on hosting.
Thanks Michael that is very kind of youThey offer a very attractive affiliate commission so the internet is flooded with fake reviews of them!
by Matthew Woodward:”… feature of WPEngine there is no denying that, but again you can do that yourself with a subdomain and a free plugin called WPClone – ok that will take 2 clicks to create the staging area vs WPEngines 1 click but its not difficult.”Mother Facker! Seriously???I just left Traffic Planet to go to Wpengine because of the ‘Lack of a Staging Environment at Traffic Planet Hosting”.I brought this to Traffic Planet hosting as the reason for requesting the balance of the one year hosting refund (aprox 6 months) to them, to which the reply via email was:”Hi Gerry,Sorry to see you going and we appreciate your feedback. 153.04 USD refunded to your PP account.Kind regards,Yuliya Kyle”I’m surprised that they didn’t bring this wpclone solution to my attention in order to retain my account!If you’re in contact with them, bring it to their attention man. Seriously, I loved Traffic Planet, hosting and support.The lack of a staging environment is THE ONLY reason that I left, everthing else over there was to my 100% satisfaction.Now I’m very sad, and will go have a glass of wine to console myself… Knowing that I left Traffic Planet to Wpengine…lolThanks for the great write up Mr. Woodward.Regards,Gerald
Hey Gerry,Oh dear I’m sorry to hear that, good luck with WPEngine – the staging area is not worth the rest of the bullshit and now your site is with them, they have already injected lots of wpengine specific code which means if you want to move it back, your going to have a really hard time.You might want to get a couple of bottles of wine in reserve 🙂
Wow. That’s more than enough time to get things fixed and I am amazed to see your patience. I would never allow that much time to fix a mere database issue which keeps killing my business. I was considering about WP Engine for my next project but thanks to Greg Daniels who shared link to your post in AWP Facebook group which saved me from a possible disaster. I already heard about WP Engine system is not developer friendly but now I can see it’s not user friendly either.
Glad it helped you out :)What is the AWP Facebook group?
While I know that TPH does have nice speeds, I would watch out with them in terms of downtime and malware. I have cleaned up some super ugly hacks with them in the past year.The most absurd thing about WP Engine is that their support cuts out at 5 pm in whatever time zone they are in. Like what, my site is only open during business hours? Had a few clients with teleseminars and such that were going at night, massive problems, and no one there to fix them.I have all my own personal sites on LiquidWeb VPS. They also have a new managed service that is optimized for Wordpress and it’s pretty amazing. Plus their support is so good … man, I could have totally married those guys for the number of times they have saved my bacon lol.
99.9% of malware comes in through vulnerabilities in plugins, every week there is a new emergency zero day exploit – Yoast SEO had one recently as has Visual Composer and a bunch of other big plugins that are used by millions of sites making them all vulnerable regardless of hosting.