This is 100% my experience, the staff really do tell tall tales too.

Thanks for sharing this guide. I really loved using WPEngine myself and it’s blazing fast for me 😉

WP technology is no longer novel, with alternatives currently available that exceed the offerings of WP Engine, with the added advantage of LIVE customer support.

With WP, tech support is no more than a few email exchanges and a day or two away. Did that sound acceptable? Then maybe WP is for you. For those who like to fix their problems immediately, without excuses or scapegoating, DON’T choose WP.

Their service is comparatively expensive…meaning their value is poor. Their service agents are arrogant, and negative feedback will cause them to non-stop email you in an attempt to compensate for the poor service their company offers.

Lastly the “speed” they offer you is a pipedream. My site had a D rating for speed, despite having paid extra for their apparently useless CDN software. I was advised to add a plugin. Couldn’t I have done that on a shared server? Did I really need to pay a premium price for 18 months for you to tell me the speed I was paying for was ultimately determined by a 3rd party plugin?!

As I started to see the poor value that I was getting from WP, I asked them to outline what exactly I was getting from WP. What I discovered is that they do not manage anything at all. In fact, they don’t even do DNS. (You’ll have to get your DNS from a third-party.) They’ll keep your WordPress software updated, and keep a daily backup of your site. But that is it. For what they charge, I’d assume they would offer services that are beyond what the free plugins would accomplish. Guess I was mistaken.

When directly confronted with WHAT they had actually done for me, they balked. I requested, in writing, a rundown of the services they offered. He copied the text from their webpage into an email. Clearly, he had no respect for me…or apparently customers of WP in general.

Lastly, the same web development professional that introduced me to WP acknowledged that the company has gone downhill significantly as it pertained to customer service in the time I’d been with them. (Going on two years). That same web development professional recommended I get the same product for less money at any number of outlets.

So let’s see, WP is comparatively expensive and a notably poor value. WP’s customer service is somewhere between poor and none. WP doesn’t live up to hype or expectations that they themselves promoted. And everything they offer is available from their competitors for equal or less money. In short, there’s no longer anything special about WP…except its poor value.

https://varnish-cache.org/

Torvalds – not Travolta

Hey Michele, I’d love to see some proof (maybe an example / article). Though, they did follow some questionable practices in past, one of them was including links in the homepage without asking permission of user.

Plus there were some privacy and SEO concerns as well. But I think most of that was addressed last year.

Wow, really? Are there links to articles about this, or examples where they’ve been caught?

They do is in support or thier keyword competitors in the U.S.

They only delete posts from sites owned by non Americans because they know they can get away with it.

Oh, for sure, and for many folks, it’s fine – but for those of us who don’t want that level of “interference” (for want of a better word), it’s not worth giving up the control.

Perhaps micro-managed WordPress would be a better name for it. 😉