My experience with WPEngine
Ben, one of the co-founders of WP Engine here and as someone wrote below[1] - yes, this isn't the most wonderful thing to wake up to in the morning and sort out while still in your PJ's ;)<p>Ok, so first and foremost I am incredibly sorry, Jacques, for the experience you had. I can say with confidence that your experience with WP Engine is out of the ordinary, but no excuses. I’m writing this as a way of owning up to mistakes that were made on behalf of our company, as well as transparently engage the discussion here. There's a couple of points I'd like to make, if I may...<p>We're in the process of moving to complete 24/7 support right now <i>(we do have emergency 'site down' 24/7 cover)</i> - as any entrepreneur on HN will tell you, getting your startup to take off is hard and scaling the human aspect is perhaps even harder.  With mostly US-based business customers it wasn't as much of an issue to begin with but we're now addressing that.<p>Obviously if we'd had that 24/7 support in place we could have addressed this more immediately.<p>However, one of the reasons that your site experienced problems was that there were some aspects of the site development that simply didn't scale.  Like any scale-orientated PaaS, we can provide the infrastructure to enable you to scale but your code needs to work in partnership to fully achieve that.<p>As Sean, my head SysAdmin wrote on a ticket to you, some of your pages were performing a sort on 188590 rows in memory each time.  That just doesn't scale.  From your post, I'm guessing this is the issue that also occurred when you tried Pagely.  While it's awesome that the good folks at Pagely were able to work with you a little to try to address your problem, like most PaaS providers (eg AWS, Heroku) we don't provide consultancy services - there is an amazing WordPress community of consultants and dev shops out there and its just not what we want to get into.  Just like Heroku won't fix your Ruby code.<p>We have many, many clients who are very happy with WP Engine but as a growing business there will always be customers who find that the service isn't right for them, and even occasionally have a bad experience.<p>So lets try to make this right.  I can see that we've already refunded you all the hosting fees you paid for your account, and I'll also make sure we pick up the $500 migration bill that you incurred. If there is anything else we can do please let me know.<p>I will also take time once I've finished my coffee and out of my PJ's to analyze your case further and see what else we can do internally to ensure this doesn't happen again.<p>Bests,<p>Ben, co-founder WP Engine<p>[1] <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4692775" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4692775</a>