I MET THE WPENGINE TEAM

It is not often that someone living in Dublin gets invited to a local pub by their web hosting service but that is what happened to me a few days ago when I was contacted by Imran Pervez who invited me to meet the WPEngine CEO and some of the team at 6PM at The Workmans Club in Dublin. I have never been in the Workmans Club, even though I live about five minutes away, so I decide that it would be a good idea to accept the invitation. I got to talk to Heather Brunner [CEO] and some of the team members from London and Texas and I also got to meet some local WPEngine clients.

Since 1999 I have had no end of conflict with companies that describe themselves as ‘Hosting Services’. Usually they promise unlimited storage and bandwidth but unfortunately these offers are based on the assumption that you will not actually use the service. If you do use the service and make the mistake of installing Wordpress you will soon receive an email telling you that you are abusing the service or overloading the CPU and that your account has been terminated.

I think that I have tried almost every hosting service that there is but one really surprised me when they contacted me to tell me that I was not permitted to use their facilities to store photographs despite the fact that they were offering unlimited storage space and despite the fact that the photographs in question were being served from my own servers.

I am not sure as to exactly when I discovered WPEngine but I have hosted ten sites with them for at least two years and I plan to migrate all of my sites over to them during 2016 [‘putting all your eggs in one basket’ might describe this decision but I have thought long and hard about this and it is my only real option going forward and I do have a backup plan in that I have do have my own servers which are more than capable of meeting my requirements].

I should warn you that using WPEngine does, at first sight, appear to be expensive but based on experience I have discovered that I actually saved money by using their services. All my WPEngine sites are very fast and this results in additional traffic. Security is vey good and they, at WPEngine, are very honest and upfront when there are problems.