I’m going to give some serious consideration to testing you guys out, I think. The server I’m on currently has been creaking a bit anyway, so now would be a good time to do so.

Thanks for all the replies – most impressed.

Except we’re not that way. Our explicit policy is that if you go over the limit once or twice we don’t care — bully for you! If you’re consistently there, month after month, then it’s not a spike.

And we’ve NEVER ONCE turned off a site due to traffic or capped a site because they were paying $29/mo.

In fact just today someone moved to us and got a massive traffic spike with over 200 pageviews/second. We made sure the site stayed up — even moving him to dedicated hardware temporarily — and never talked about raising his rates.

You’re right that we publish hard boundaries, and those are useful in communication and establishing expectations. But it would be wrong — even if very understandable! — to assume that just because we define tiers on our website that we’re completely inflexible.

I’m running a games site, so the CPM isn’t even as high as your modest example – as you probably know, not all verticals run CPMs as high as even $4 reliably. So whilst I’d love to make $4k reliably a month, even on months where we do hit 400k uniques, I’m not making that much – instead I’m making something that’s less than 10x your hosting charges.

But worse than that, traffic is seasonal. Some months I’m going to be looking at 200k uniques, some months I’m going to be looking at 450k. As far as I can tell from your website, if we EVER go over 400k, though, you’ll “work with you directly to help you upgrade to a larger hosting plan”.

Which, as far as I can tell, means that at any time, I could spike some traffic, and promptly have a choice between getting straight off your servers again or paying $bignum for my hosting from then on.

Frankly, the low limit for maximum visitors is the major thing that ensures I’ll not be using your service. It sounds great, and I’d love to have all my tech needs for WP catered for by experts, not to mention never having to worry about uptime, but financially the setup you’ve got just scares the crap out of me.

Why is better to have Nginx and Apache and Nginx alone as the web server? Thanks.

I did not move to WP Engine because I expected sudden large volumes of traffic, I moved because I felt that a hosting provider that specializes in wordpress made more sense as I’m only using wordpress for my clients’ sites.

Since I moved to WP Engine my page load speeds reduced significantly.

What I like about WP Engine is the pro-active elements they introduced since I joined:
– they introduced a ‘Restore and Checkpoint’ feature where one could easily restore a site to a previous version.
– they improved their staging feature which allows me to run tests on a non-live exact copy of my sites.
– offsite error log
– proprietary caching, which meant that I did not need to spend time on setting up caching plugins and checking for conflicts with other plugins.

I feel that even on low traffic sites one should optimise the experience of each particular visitor.

They do burst the CPU, however if other nodes on the same hardware are also using, you’ll see a ton of “steal” in your CPU, meaning you’re not getting all 4 CPUs.

What we’ve seen (and their tech support has confirmed) is that on the lower end boxes this happens constantly, whereas on the higher end boxes it doesn’t. Why?

Because for a size S instance they load N of them onto one physical machine, where S*N == a constant. So every time you double the price and capacity, you’re on hardware with half the number of those instances.

And so at higher levels there’s far fewer other instances to contend with and you really get the CPUs.

Personally I think this is an interesting and generally fair trade-off which allows the lower end boxes to burst if possible, but rewards the more expensive users with more reliable CPU.

If you go over occasionally, we don’t worry about it.

Only if you’re consistently over the limit for months do we ask you to upgrade, and at that point — especially considering the cost of time and/or consultants — moving up to $99/mo isn’t outrageous.

I think a lot of service-oriented businesses are like that. That is, you have some people who happen to hit everything perfectly during the process, and they’re fanboys for life. Then others happen to hit several bumps and have a bad experience and say “meh.” And most are in the middle.

And none of them are “right.” It’s just what happens.

Of course it would be nice to get to the bottom of it regardless, but I’m sensing that you’d rather not bother at this point! Which is probably how I’d feel too, especially if the point is to not have to think about maintaining your blog!

But, if you change your mind and want to give another go, perhaps we could try again and dig deeper, and credit you a few months for the trouble.

After all, we’d like to learn and grow too.

Many of the tools you list we use as well, so of course we agree!

It’s not necessarily that a person cannot build a scalable stack — of course you can! But 99.9% of bloggers in the world don’t have the skills, or prefer doing other things with their time.

Of course I DO prefer doing that with my time, so there you go. :-)