Why WP Engine has already won | Hacker News Reader

Why WP Engine has already won

williejackson.com

11 pointscwilson13 comments

this sounds like a puff piece without really going into why "WP Engine" is such a good company. Aside from good customer service, and being able to respond quickly to emails, the article doesn't really say anything about the capabilities of their system or how secure it actually is, or even, what are some of the clients running on that system?

Yah I asked him for the details in the comments and he said that WP Engine runs the following on their servers:

NGINX (reverse proxy)

Apache (webserver)

APC (PHP Accelerator)

CDN baked into the architecture

Insanely powerful hardware

Yeah, I thought about letting Cullen address your comment but he specifically mentioned that they'd be making the information available for anyone to use and hopefully build upon.

It's certainly not hard to figure out what they're running of course. http://builtwith.com/wpengine.com and the "Net" tab of the Firebug plugin tell most of the story.

Yup, also hardware security devices on the front end -- things like the obvious script hack signs and DoS protection.

I think that's a fair accusation. I had been putting off the article for a while, but thought my audience (not really technical, but appreciative of product and service recommendations) would be lost if I went into the details of what made it exciting to me as a server geek.

Hmmm, "scaling" WordPress is an incredibly simple thing to do. Caching and a modern stack is all you need. If you view the source of all of their featured clients and scroll to the bottom you'll see that they're all running the free W3 Total Cache plugin. Throw any of those sites on a commodity host like (mt) or even GoDaddy, with the same plugin, and your users will have a nearly identical experience.

I don't doubt that they're offering a good service, but you can achieve this on your own with the a cache plugin and a reliable hosting service. In todays modern VPS world, $49 and $99 (WP Engine pricepoints) will get you a pretty beefy VPS.

This post is indeed a bit vague on the details, and does feel like a post piece. A disclaimer should have been at the bottom :P

Also, I am curious to know if they're using mod_php with Apache, or FastCGI. The latter of which is more secure. At that point, however, I wonder why they just wouldn't use Nginx + FastCGI for everything and eliminate Apache altogether.

At the opposite side of the spectrum, it does look like they have a few other nice features like being able to snapshot your site and modify things in a staging area, separate from visitors. They don't go into too much detail regarding their backup system, but anything is better than nothing. Interesting to see a new service like this in the WP arena.

Hopefully WP is rewritten in fully OOP PHP5 so that developers can be happier, with some elite caching at the core. For now, it's totally burned me out.

Thanks for the good counter-points, but I'd like to disagree. :-)

First, without using an nginx + fastcgi/Apache/whatever front-end it's not true that just running W3TC scales your site. I was doing that for my own blog and whenever I hit the top of HackerNews my site would go down anyway because Apache is still a beast and you need the proxy to move bytes.

Second, getting a sensible configuration of W3TC including e.g. memcached instead of the file cache is not trivial.

Third, it's not true that a "commodity VPS" server will match our speed. We found that hard drive speed and processors (e.g. Intel Xeon not AMD crap you get at some hosting providers, Amazon AWS included) together made a 2x difference in page-load speed in our tests of various VPS providers.

Fourth, none of that helps you with security. You still have to be on top of which plugins are secure, which patches are faulty, file permissions. Among the obvious security measures, we also have HARDWARE security devices (e.g. DoS and obvious hacking signatures) in front of our servers -- something you'd have to pay a lot for at MT (if you can do it at all).

Fifth, we have awesome WordPress-specific tech support from true experts, something that I'm sure you'll admit you don't get at MT or VPS providers like Rackspace and Amazon.

However I DO AGREE WITH YOU that anyone who is technical and wants to do the tests and research absolutely can produce a system reasonably close to ours. However wouldn't YOU agree that most WordPress users either aren't that technical or -- like me -- simply don't want to deal with it?

That's where we come in.

Howdy, I guess I can address some of what you mentioned. The article was intentionally vague on the details about their architecture and the techie bits since I view a lot of things from the lens of a marketer.

What I wanted to highlight wasn't so much the technical underpinnings of the offering and why it's important to engineers and geeks, but rather what impressed me based on my initial reactions.

I haven't had a chance to thoroughly evaluate the service since it's brand new of course, but I plunked down my credit card just like everyone else on the waiting list if you're implying that I have a special relationship with them.

I just appreciate good service, entrepreneurship, and what WP Engine represents.

aha.. with all these spaghetti-coded plugins you will make it scale.. ha ha. WP became good inside, but third-party code is still too bad. The only way to make it scale and work secure - to use limited set of third-party modules and you can't do this is, 'cos people need them.

wp ecosystem is still too young to do this.

You can do this, because there's enough good plugins that it can be supported.

You're right of course that you cannot support 100% of all custom code ever written for WordPress. But it's a bit heavy-handed to conclude that therefore it cannot be done, don't you think?

most of the code written for wp i saw is actual spaghetti-code. including so popular and later blamed thesis theme. there is no enforced standards in coding, no clean versioning between modules and wp.

Though I have no doubt it's a good product, this piece tells me nothing about why. All I learn from this is that Cullen Wilson answers his email, which is polite and all (heck, it's better than Google), but not exactly a "why X has won" kind of thing.

IMHO, most casual WordPress users (even ones with popular websites) know very little about what's required to scale, secure, and optimize a website. I know this because I work with a lot of first-time website owners...and I build their websites. Many are perfectly content to host with GoDaddy or Bluehost without considering the performance and security implications of being with a shared host.

As pet projects grow up and small businesses begin evaluating more robust options, VPSes become more and more attractive. The trouble is that they'd need to hire someone to set it up for them.

WP Engine seems to have taken the headache out of getting started on a robust platform right out of the gate.

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