Holy cow. $1M for SUCH a simple concept. Offering reliable WP hosting is about as easy as changing batteries in a smoke detector. Not bitter about this, rather, nicely done capitalizing on such a simple thing.
Simplest example off the top of my head: there's an automated system which will kick you emails saying "You're sending MySQL ORDER BY RAND(). Not a great idea. We told MySQL to ignore it. There's a setting you can configure to override this if you're confident you know what you're doing. Site outages caused this year by people flipping that switch: 5."
Please excuse me while I laugh bitterly and slightly hysterically.
The smart thing here was recognizing that it's such an obvious pain point to people in purchase decision advising roles. As a Wordpress dev, do you advise your clients to save a few bucks by using shared GoDaddy Wordpress hosting @ ~$5/month, knowing you'll end up needing to field support calls for GoDaddy problems and spend ongoing time securing and updating the site (and _still_ end up p0wned because some other GoDaddy customer hasn't updated), or do you tell the client "You can have inexpensive hosting, but the support comes at $~100/hr, or you can buy business-grade hosting from wp-engine and you'll almost _never_ have security/uptime/speed problems".
I know what _I've_ advised people recently (especially since the lowest wp-engine plan dropped to $30/month. That's a no-brainer in my opinion!)
Of course, all the power to them if they make their customers happy.
They're offering a reasonably priced service to people who've tried that route and found it enough grief that it's worth a few grand for a decent web design and Wordpress config/integration, and $30/month to host it.
If a business can't justify those sorts of numbers on 20,000 visits a month, they probably need to rethink their whole web strategy.
Well, that was in 2004 when /. was big. Today, I would fear the Reddit frontpage.
The next step up? Going from $29/mo. to $99/mo.
I might just not be their target customer.