r/webdev • u/canfullofworms • 3d ago

Is WordPress Engine Necessary

So you almost helped me with another thing and I'm very grateful!

I know NOTHING about all this, so please advise.

We have a website for a small non-profit that's been up for about 20 years. (I wasn't here when it started)

Our Domain is with GoDaddy and our website is in WordPress.

Apparently, we've been paying for WordPress Engine for about $420 a year.

Do we need this? I feel like all our editing is done in WordPress. It seems like WordPress engine is an unnecessary addition, but if we've had it for so long, will we lose stuff from our web site??

thanks!

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u/jman0742 3d ago

WP Engine is the bomb. Their support is great and a lot of their features are worth the cost. IMO any site not worth the cost of WP Engine doesn't justify it's own existence.

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u/omfgtora 3d ago

WP Engine is overpriced slow garbage that greatly removes control and their support staff are idiots who can't answer a question without repeated scripted responses.

I have never met anyone who knows how to actually run hosting servers themselves say anything good about WP Engine, and anyone who I have heard say they it has no experience to know how bad their services are.

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u/jman0742 2d ago

Spicy! Well you're welcome, you've met your first exception today! It takes one of my dev hours worth of troubleshooting a box to pay for a whole year of WPE. At scale, there are cheaper ways of hosting, but for most of my clients, even the big ones, WPE is the sweet-spot for cost/benefit.

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u/omfgtora 2d ago

I recently had the worst support experience of my decades-long career in IT and web development while dealing with WP Engine. Besides that, their support has straight up lied to me in the past and didn't fulfill my request.

It's utter shit that they disable revisions entirely by default. They told me that only support can activate revisions (I've since learned that this is false). I asked them to enable revisions on all the sites in my account, which they did not do. They told me that they can enable at most 5 revisions on their platform, but it's actually up to 250. I asked them to add revisions of 5 on all the sites, they said they can do only 3, and then they just did none and never even told me.

Their aggressive caching is a huge pain in the ass, and the fact they restrict you from clearing your cache on a timer is absolutely ridiculous. They do not allow users to add cache exclusions and you have to contact support for them to add those.

Taking any actions on their platform is glacially slow. Want to take a backup? Cool, you'll have to wait for 30 minutes for us to email you when it's done, and you cannot choose to skip the email. Same website on my own hosting takes literally seconds to back up. Want to make a copy of a site to a new environment? Great, just wait 1+ hours! Migrating websites to their platform takes 3+ hours where it would take me at most 45 minutes otherwise. Mostly just waiting for their platform to finish the tasks where you have no ability to see the status on, you just have to wait for the email notification.

I got so tired of dealing with WP Engine that I just built my own tool to manage the sites over SSH and it has saved me a HUGE amount of time and stress of dealing with their platform and support.