Back in August, I migrated my last site from WP Engine.  Why?  It all boils down to having their sales department contact us regarding a critical matter, only to drop the ball.  Keep the word critical in mind as you read this.  It’s never a good sign when the salesperson stands between you and technical support. That is why I left Rackspace.com, which used to host my site, Hosting-Reviews-Exposed.com.  A site that leaves me in a position of never recommending a host, as their failure will reflect on me.  Esspecially since I have yet to stay with any host beyond 5 years.  I feel like a nomad who picks up stakes every few years and moves my sites elsewhere. Someday, I would like to explore all the hosts I have tried and where they are now.

While I will likely never recommend a host, I feel no reservations about sharing bad experiences.  I have been sitting on this write-up since August. Given that Copytrack has motivated me to start sharing my experience, it seems crazy not to share my own experience.

But let’s focus on WP Engine’s ads on Facebook.  One said, ‘Connect to calm‘ where the lead in said:

Make deployments faster and easier with Local Connect and WP Engine. Rest easy knowing your site is better, faster, and more secure

Then there is this ad, which was why I originally signed up with them.

Less site admin more anything

Below is why their ads do not reflect the experience I had and why I will never use WP Engine again.

WP Engine – Money Please!!!

When it comes to emails from a WP Engine sales rep, it always involves upgrading.  One example is a spike in traffic we had in late 2021. He responded on January 11, 2022.

I hope 2022 is treating you well so far!

Reaching out from the account management team. I help oversee the *Redacted* account.  I noticed traffic has been increasing and hit 2.3 Million visits last month (Nov 15 – Dec 14).

While an increase in your traffic from one month to the next is absolutely amazing, your current configuration only supports up to 2M visits which I’m concerned will result in site timeouts and downtime for your sites as we continue to scale.When do you have a few minutes to discuss further? I’ve outlined my availability here.

Thanks!

It had been nearly a month, and no, this rep did not look at current traffic stats as we were down to normal traffic levels.  After calling and emailing me repeatedly, I asked if they had looked at the stats over the last 30 days, and they moved on.  Sometimes, we just need to make simple fixes.  But always, the first solution was to throw money at the problem. This would become a common theme.

March 2023 – WP Engine got us to upgrade.

We were seeing performance issues around the time WP Engine contacted us.

Hello Team,

My name is *redacted*, I am a lead on the Account Management Team here at WP Engine. This account has been escalated to me as we are seeing significant performance issues.

Here is what we are seeing:

We are seeing large spikes in CPU that are as high as 99% which with this high utilization we typically start to see 50X errors, latency, and or downtime. It does seem that we are seeing around 3700+ 50X errors and latency as high as 2 seconds. This is due to an over utilization on the database and we do not have enough hardware to filter through all of the data causing backlogs in requests which leads to latency this will cause the CPU to spike as it attempts to take on some of the load, once the CPU spikes above 80% it will start to send 50X error codes to the remaining backlogs to prevent the CPU from hitting 100% which would bring the server down.

At this time WP Engine would recommend a transition to either the P3 (2000/mo) minimum or the P4 (2900/mo) best as we need to add the right amount of hardware to handle current utilization to avoid these issues in the future.

The P3 would fit current utilization but would have limited headroom for growth. The P4 would be the best recommendation as it has more than we need now and will have scalability for projected growth as well as be more performant with your utilization.

Let me know your thoughts here and how we would like to proceed. Happy to jump on a call and discuss these issues in more detail if needed.

I had wished I had dug deeper; I had been bogged down fixing other issues. Because that spike was caused by WP Engine, and they managed to get me to pay $600 more a month.

That promise of “Less site admin more anything” – never materialized.

WP Engine decided to try to gouge me for more money in July.

During this time, the sales rep and support did next to nothing on anything that did not focus on paying more money.  Not addressing the real problem they had caused.  On top of that, suggested something that would have killed my site.

July 20, 2023 – WP Engine sales rep sends “High Server Usage” email

I hope you’re well.

Our engineering team flagged your account for being at risk. The server is experiencing frequent spikes past capacity which is beginning to cause 504 errors. The longer the server is left in this state, the worse these issues will become.

Are you available to hop on a quick call tomorrow to address this?

My response was that I felt there was some issue that needed to be fixed, as we had lower traffic than before we upgraded, per his recommendations on an earlier period.  I was not as busy as I was back in March.  My business partner also requested a log to back up his claims.

July 21, 2023: A WP Engine sales rep sent a graph to support his claims; it did the opposite.

He responded back the next day with this:

Sure thing, our engineering team has run an analysis on the site. Looking at the six month charts here and visitors seem a little up and down. That being said, there has been a huge increase in dynamic requests as you can reference below. It’s gone from roughly 50,000 in January to 160,000 currently.

It seems as if the majority of the server usage is directly due to the large increase in dynamic requests to your site.

Our engineering team is recommending scaling up to a P4 to support this increase in usage. If you would like to dive into this more to see if there are any sort of optimizations you can do to lessen the usage, I would highly recommend reaching out to our support team through our 24/7 support chat channel who will be happy to assist.

He also had this image attached.  Which raised more questions.  We upgraded around the first spike in February, and I had fallen for this because we were experiencing performance issues and were bogged down. Again, I would learn was a result of WP Engine.  But also look at May, it was higher than February or July.  They had not contacted us then,

We asked for actual data.. again.  I was troubled by a “Serious” issue being placed in the hands of a sales agent, who I figured was not going to respond to us during the weekend.  So, I opened a ticket. Spoiler: I was right.  He did not respond until July 25th; my issue was so important that I did not get a response til Tuesday.  Support… they would not respond until Thursday.  I also asked why tech support did not open a ticket if this was such a big concern.  Because it was likely an individual sales rep was not likely to be available 5 days a week, let alone 24/7.

July 25, 2023 – Sales Hoopla – No Evidence

Again, he sent screenshots but no actual data to look through to see the causes of the errors.

Hi Benjamin,

Sure thing, for context, it’s our engineering team’s job to inform our accounts when their server is at risk/exceeding capacity and the measures to take to ensure this does not continue to occur.

We provide transparency and the “why” behind it to make sure you have an understanding and that you’re not blindly moving forward with a recommendation. These spikes up to, and past capacity, are being caused by the large increase in dynamic hits to your sites over the last 6 months. Please see the metrics below. When spikes hit above 80%, this is when performance issues inherently start to occur, such as 504 errors, slowed performance and, at worse, brief periods of downtime.

Our engineering team is comprised of tenured, highly educated solution architects with years of experience and expertise in this field who assess what our clients’ need to be successful on our platform. These are precise recommendations based on their deep understanding from a comprehensive evaluation they have performed on your specific sites and what they require to perform successfully, which is why they are recommending scaling up to a P4.

These are our engineering team’s recommendations, however you certainly do not have to abide by these if you wish to stay on the current server in the current condition.

July 27, 2023 – WP Engine has no idea who Pinterest is.

It took 6 days to get this response. To what was supposed to be a critical issue from tech support.

Hello there,

Hope you are keeping well!

Just wanted to reach out since I took a look over the hits happening on the site and it seems like a number of IPs along with user agents are hitting the site a very large amount. I have pasted the highest hitters below, it would be best to see if you know these IPs/user agents and if not you can either block them in web rules (https://wpengine.com/support/web-rules-engine/#Access_Rule_Examples) or add a crawl delay (https://wpengine.com/support/read-use-robots-txt/#Crawl_Delay) since I see on of the user agents is a bot.

If you have any questions please let us know.

Hope you have a great day!

Highest IPs hitting the site:

10215  54.236.1.13
9736   54.236.1.11

Highest User Agents hitting the site:

  111398 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko)
  70440 Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 16_5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/15E148 [Pinterest/iOS]
  55125 Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36
  46747 Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Pinterestbot/1.0; +http://www.pinterest.com/bot.html)

On its face, that might be scary, but this is malpractice on the part of WP Engine because those “highest hitters” are:

1. Pinterest Traffic: The traffic from the Pinterest-associated IP addresses is likely part of Pinterest’s regular activity, such as crawling websites to index images and content. This type of bot traffic is normal for websites that have images or content shared on Pinterest.
2. Other User Agents: The traffic identified by various user agents (Macintosh browsers, an iPhone Pinterest app, and an Android browser) represents normal visitor activity. These user agents are typical of regular visitors accessing our site through different devices and browsers.
3. No Indication of Malicious Activity: There is no clear indication that this traffic was malicious or a threat to our website. It appears to be standard traffic, which includes both human visitors and legitimate bots (like Pinterest’s).

Blocking these”highest hitters” would have had devastating consequences.  These were legitimate activities; no tech worth their salt would have brought up blocking them. Blocking legitimate traffic sources can have several unintended consequences, including reduced referral traffic, potential SEO impacts, loss of legitimate visitors, skewed analytics, reduced social media interaction, and overreaction to normal traffic patterns.

Oh, but there was a problem, and we are getting to it.

July 31, 2023 – FFS – they had disconnected Cloudflare.

After analyzing the logs, another hosting provider we worked with discovered we were not connected to our CBN and recommended several problematic plugins to be removed or replaced. We could not proxy traffic via CloudFlare under current configurations.  My business partner emailed them what was discovered, reminding them we had been customers since 2018.  But we were already in the process of migrating.

August 1, 2023 – Sales Rep did not bother to respond to why Cloudflare was disconnected.

The sales rep sent this response, not addressing why Cloudflare was disconnected. Which was caused on their end.

Our engineering team is largely still seeing the same picture here, dynamic requests or processing hours haven’t dropped, if anything they’ve continued to rise [See Below]. This is why they’re recommending moving to a larger server as this is typically something that inherently cannot be optimized because it is growth in visitor requests. Our engineering team would be happy to hop on a call to further explain this if that is helpful. Please let us know.

Fixing the Cloudflare connection would have fixed everything.  We never had to upgrade.  Throwing money at the problem was the only solution the sales rep wanted us to take. Efficiency did not factor in our service.

August 8, 2023 – We canceled service.

August 9, 2023 – Despite an embarrassing failure, WP Engine wanted to enforce its 30-day cancelation period.

I made it clear after getting a notice that we were being billed beyond our next billing period that we did not authorize any further payments to our card.  This was their ‘Order-to-Cash Operations’ Rep’s response:

Thank you for submitting your cancellation request.  Your account is scheduled to be canceled on September 7th.

Please note your scheduled cancellation date may be up to 30-days per our Terms of Service, section 5bii.

You’ll receive another email in this thread once the cancellation has been processed.  Let us know if you have any questions in the meantime!

Never mind the critical failure in support. They wanted to bill me for 30 days of use after my cancellation, and they did not read my reasons for canceling.

So, I wrote them back, explaining why it was a bad idea to enforce their TOS after they tried to fleece me. The email is rather long, and what it covers is outlined in this post. So, I am just going to post some snippets that I felt were key to what happened next.

“I see clearly that you did no leg work into finding out why we left, like read the feedback we left in the cancelation form.  It seems the criteria for working at WP Engine is not reading a customer’s response.” Because no one at WP Engie likes to read or find solutions.

“I was pointed to Pinterest as the problem and given instructions on how to block them. Might I add a really fucking brilliant idea (sarcasm in case you missed it). ”  Leaving out that we would also be blocking legitimate visitors as well.

“So, in short, WPEngine tried to get me to upgrade under false pretenses and wanted to block Pinterest, a significant source of traffic. Not the level of support that I was expecting when I paid $2,000 a month.  If this was such an issue, it should never have been handled by a sales rep, and it certainly would not have taken a week to address and confirm with real data.

Again, you are not authorized to bill the card on file. ”

In my frustration, I forgot to mention we never should have had to upgrade back in March, which I feel was a theft of $3,000. That does not factor in that I did not get the support their ads claim to offer.

August 10, 2023 – The end of a business relationship with  WP Engine

WP Engine’s Customer Success Manager response to my email:

I want to first start by apologizing for the frustrating experience you’ve had. This is not the experience we want customers to have on WP Engine, so please know that we are taking this seriously and will be following up with all parties involved.

I have instructed our Billing team to cancel this account immediately. A member of their team will be following up shortly to confirm this.

While we are sad to see you go, we understand needing to choose the best solution for your business. We thank you for your partnership and we hope you will consider us again in the future.

Please let me know if there is anything else I can do to help you.

Which lead to another response from WP Engine’s Order to Cash Lead rep

As scheduled, we have closed your account, halting any further billing. The account will be removed from our platform shortly.

A refund has been issued for the remaining period of your subscription in the amount of $292.06. Please allow up to 10 business days for the funds to be issued back to the card.

The refund should have been more, but I was too busy to dispute and too exhausted to deal with them further.

If the only option is to upgrade or cancel legitimate traffic, it’s time to find a new host.  Just don’t let it be WP engine.