I'm a software engineer at a media company using WordPress, hosted by WPE. We have been planning to move off WPE for about a year now; WPVIP has been courting us for a long time and their product is now at a place where we think it will be the better option.
I've been advocating for this switch for a number of reasons, but after this recent meltdown, I'm not sure I want to move over to a service controlled by Matt. I've always thought of him as something of a visionary, but in the past couple of days he's revealed himself to be impulsive, petty, and selfish.
Initially, I was on Matt's side, but after seeing the texts he sent WPE (as included in their cease & desist) and his move to bar all WPE customers from updating their plugins, I feel that he can't be trusted. What will happen the next time he freaks out? I wish I could hit an eject button and completely remove him from my job. The open-source nature of WP has always made me feel very confident in its quality, but the moves Matt is making now makes me suddenly aware of how much influence one man can have. Regardless of who is right, I don't want to be closer to someone who would shut out users from doing what they need to do. I don't pay attention to drama usually but he put his personal blog piece on my dashboard, forcing me to become aware of it, and now it's directly blocking my work.
Curious about everyone else's thoughts. I feel completely insane right now!
It’s a pretty dick move to block all WP Engine customers from being able to update plugins & themes. My respect for him and what he’s accomplished has cratered over the past few days.
Please don’t give him your money.
Honestly, the decision shouldn’t be based on the C&D. The bigger question isn’t whether to choose WPEngine, but whether to use WordPress at all. And you’re not the first person to ask about this today.
The fact that WPVIP’s site greets you with “Stop hating your CMS”.
To then see their footer say “An Automattic creation.”
Oh god the irony.
We’ve been using WPVIP for awhile for a couple major enterprise-grade sites. We’ve always kinda been on the fence as to whether or not it’s actually worth it ($$$$). Matt’s actions over the past couple days will almost certainly lead to us reopening that discussion internally.
And as a heads up, if you do switch to WPVIP, a big thing to note is that **you cannot update your plugins or themes from the wp-admin dashboard**. The only way to update is by pushing the actual code for the new plugin version via git to your hosted repository. And it has to be via git, since WPVIP does not give you FTP access. Also you will not ever under any circumstance be allowed access to phpmyadmin or even be given any type of database access at all. So much for Matt’s complaints about WPEngine not offering “pure” wordpress.
You’d be better to just switch off WordPress at this point
I would recommend you avoid WPVIP. Since they’re owned by Automattic, you’re subject to the whims of that coked up boy-king Mullenweg.
I have evaluated WPVIP for an enterprise site and we went with Pantheon instead. It’s been great. I wouldn’t move to VIP during this meltdown either.
Showing ads to WPE customers for free migration to Pressable is shooting yourself in the foot, I think
We’re very happy with Kinsta, we have over 150 websites hosted with them.
We had a conversation today about how to evaluate the risk involved with staying on WPVIP for people who are there currently. Definitely would not recommend starting anything new or migrating anything there.
Was planning to recommend against it *before* all of this went down, but the last few days have elevated that substantially. Previously it was purely technical and value prop reasons, but I’ve now added “not owned by Automattic” to my mental requirements list for hosting evaluation.
WP Engine is still overpriced and their sales tactics are aggressive and annoying. Regardless of what you think of the spat between Automattic and WPE, ditching WPE as a host is going to be a good move all around.
Anyone else feel that half these posts supporting wp engine feel like Astro turfing?
Can’t recommend Nexcess enough, support is awesome and even shitshow sites run pretty decent
Why don’t you host on your own managed server? I’m just catching up to the WPE debacle situation.
I’d NEVER used shared wordpress hosting. I think that you’ve been on the wrong platform for many years. I don’t see MANY platforms that are even 25% as fast as my simple VPS that runs HestiaCP. Get rid of Apache2 and life gets better!
I moved my org from WPE to CloudWays-DigitalOcean recently. [We had a $440/mo bill](https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1ahj71p/wpengine_support_not_what_it_used_to_be_my_bill/) but we still haven’t canceled our service yet. I think I am gonna drag my heels a bit on the canceling thing because I don’t want it to look like we are leaving because Matt’s blocking WPE clients from accessing plugins/theme auto-updates. Its literally not my money and I don’t think anyone in my org will notice or complain if I waited a month or two, can frame it as a “warm backup” or something if anyone asks questions (no one will).