WP Engine / WordPress, Briefly

In the early days of this weblog, I was on MediaTemple using MoveableType for a good long time. Three things happened during these many years:

MoveableType was mostly abandoned during this time. I’m sure well-intentioned folks were working on it (and it appears they still are), but the vibrancy of development had faded from my perspective at the time.

MediaTemple (now GoDaddy) was similarly abandoned. They were happy to take my money, but the level of service had a marked decrease by the simple measure of the amount of time from when I asked a question about the service to when I felt the question was sufficiently answered.

I became increasingly busy. The amount of time I could devote to the care and feeding of the site and hosting significantly decreased. While this made me sad as I have a deep desire to understand how things work, if I was devoting time to the site, it was writing.

Late in my tenure on MediaTemple, a good friend and noted WordPress enthusiast, Alex King, volunteered to move the site to WordPress. At the time, I was concerned about performance with a dynamically generated site — WordPress had an unclear performance reputation — but Alex convinced me. We agreed on a new design and moved to WordPress, and everything was fine. It was instantly obvious that WordPress had a vibrant development community, with the core software constantly being updated, unlike MoveableType. Publishing platform. Solved.

MediaTemple was the next issue. Without warning, MediaTemple shut down my site because the now unused MoveableType site had been hacked in a manner I still don’t understand. No warning, and they blocked my access so that I couldn’t debug the issue. Worse, the only way to unlock the site was to pay MediaTemple money for a site cleansing, which I eventually did, during which they found nothing.

I started looking for a new service provider, and WP Engine showed up as a credible vendor after I spoke with WordPress knowledgable humans. I don’t remember what I was paying for MediaTemple, but WP Engine felt like quite a bit more. I went back and forth with myself and finally decided, “I am willing to pay for good service so I can just write.”

I vividly remember the migration to WP Engine not because it was flawless, but because when I had issues, I pinged WP Engine tech support, and they responded almost instantly and competently and the chat was not over until I told them that we’d resolved the issue1. This professional, high-quality tech support level has remained unchanged for many years, and I’ve remained on WP Engine.

Since my move to WP Engine:

I can’t recall a single outage. I have been sitting here staring out the window of this train for twenty minutes and can’t recall a single outage.

I’ve added several new paid services to my account.

I am mostly unaware of what is going on with maintaining my site. I upgrade WordPress and plugins when upgrades are available, but mostly I write and publish content, which is — ya’know — where I want to spend my time.

WP Engine. Not cheap. I don’t care. As a lifelong user of online services, I have a hard-earned and well-defined rubric regarding what I’ll pay, which reads, “I will pay a premium if you are doing what you say you are going to do — all the time.”

I can’t comment on the WordPress v. WP Engine kerfuffle. It seems like a long time coming; it is super complex and increasingly heated. Drama usually means profound misunderstanding.

I can confidently say:

I appreciate the hard work of many humans who invest unfathomable hours into WordPress and the vibrant WordPress plugin ecosystem. I eagerly pay for many of these services.

WP Engine provides a valuable and essential service, delivering WordPress to me and my readers, for which I also happily pay. I pay for many online services and would rank WP Engine’s quality, reliability, and support in the top 10%.

As an eager user of the software and the services, I hope they’ll find a fair and symbiotic resolution.

One issue I had during migration was that WP Engine did not allow a few plug-ins that I was using on MediaTemple. One was an old link checker that would go through old posts and find old links. WP Engine’s justification for disablement was, “This is resource intensive,” which made sense at the time. ↩