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Comment by Aloha | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer WP Engine Customer -

I read the comments from Matt M yesterday, and it felt like a hit piece.

I run a website for a couple scifi like conventions, we need cheap reliable hosting without me having to deal with the vagaries of running wordpress myself.

I would have bought a product like WP Engine directly from Automattic, but AFAIK they dont offer one, this feels like lashing out at a competitor because they failed to enter a market segment, and now feel their lunch is being ate.

I ran websites for a long time without any version control, and would have no problem doing it again, the benefit of WordPress is the semi-WYSIWYG editor and the plugin ecosystem.

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> cheap reliable hosting

I can't speak to the reliability, but it's definitely not cheap

If you had your own iron, had to co-locate it somewhere, keep the OS updated, etc. all that time (and hardware) adds up. Factor in opportunity cost and hosts like WPE are relatively cheap.

Wait what about the middle ground? Give me access to a VPS and I can make your dreams come true, as cheap as possible, using modern CI tools and a lot of.. automation.

Sure, maintaining it has a cost, but to me the alternative feels like trying to build a business by reselling expensive chocolates you bought from the hotel mini bar.

Perhaps. But it still takes time. And a level a of expertise. And what happens when you want to go on vacation? Get hit by a bus, etc.?

Once you do the math it becomes a break even at best. Once you factor in opportunity cost, managed hosting for most WP projects is a better fit.

Could you enlighten me as to what WP Engine does differently from Automattic that you can't buy from them? Looking at the WP Engine, it's the exact same thing, with the numbers filed off, as Automattic offers.

Which particular service of Automattic?

Like Wordpress.com in hindsight seems to offer it, but its not clear to me that I'm their customer target.

Wordpress.com would be the equivalent. That said, they don't exactly offer an unmodified WP experience either at least not without upgrading to the higher tier plans. The base plan has plugins disabled for example. Not even sure how it's different from what Matt is accusing WP Engine of.

WP Engine offers headless WP CMS to static, for one, and it’s pretty slick. I don’t believe Automattic offers that, yet. But I bet Automattic builds it in, in the near future, and that’s probably what this WP Engine beef is really all about: money.

Wordpress.com is very limited and locked down relative to the .org variant hosts like WPE.

They offered many features that wordpress.com copied (staging sites with one-button cloning; easy backup and restores; automated updates of php and wp code; tweaks to prevent security issues; automatic cdn) and others like serious engineers answering support tickets to help you sort out whatever fragile, insecure wordpress crap your marketing team, or their wordpress contractors, installed on your site.

We shouldn't overrate a lot of those features, because I think they were pretty obvious things to want. But WPEngine was, afaik, the first to market with all of the above in a pretty-cheap and seamless package.

Jason Cohen has done a number of talks on the origin of WP engine as being reliable/fast/secure in terms of preferences at the time of launch;

But I think you are right, the features you listed naturally contributed and strengthened those needs.

Wp engine is not cheap at all, instead its expensive, my websites hosted on Namecheap for years, and never touched even 1 second, and everything is stable, the price? I would tell you, around $45 per year hosting price for 3 sites...

You definitely were ripped off.

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