I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.

Re:I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching... by traftonesler on Wednesday January 11, 2012 @11:42AM (#3452445)

Trying to reach you via e-mail -- www.wpengine.com can help with your site. We specialize in high traffic!

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Re:I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching... by patio11 on Wednesday January 11, 2012 @11:48AM (#3452477)

I told Trafton and company about this because I'm working on-site at WPEngine this week and this looked very relevant to their interests. They specifically want to rescue your site (gratis) so that they can use it as an example of "Wordpress hosting is hard to do right. You don't want it to blow up on launch day. We're very experienced with not blowing up on launch day."

i.e. He doesn't want to sell you on WPEngine, he wants to save your bacon and use the bacon-saving to sell other people on WPEngine ;)

Jason Cohen (their CEO) says "We'd handle the migration immediately and give him a year of free hosting to get a case study out of this."

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Re:I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching... by larrys on Wednesday January 11, 2012 @12:55PM (#3452811)

You should add to your marketing more info about how you are good in handling traffic and most importantly why. In a way that will make sense with both tech and non tech types. (Non tech has no idea what aws is or a cdn is for example). I've looked at your site a few times (even right now) and that isn't the thing that stuck in my mind from your marketing. The takeaway for me was "expert at WP" not necessarily "expert handling of traffic and here's why". I'm not saying it's not mentioned. I just think that point has to be driven home better.

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Re:I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching... by patio11 on Wednesday January 11, 2012 @01:02PM (#3452836)

We're (literally) working on a website refresh right now, which hits that and other points. Sample factoid: One of the customers was on 20/20 recently and sustained 2,500 requests per second for 15 minutes.

Boring technical details: Varnish caching, automatic load balancing, redundant servers (beefy physical hardware to avoid poor disk performance on virtualized systems), "Death to KeepAlive", etc.

(Ooh, it is live now: http://wpengine.com/our-infrastructure/ )

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Re:I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching... by larrys on Wednesday January 11, 2012 @02:07PM (#3453136)

That's great. I actually read the whole page.

I would add an additional bullet to the home page adapting a key statement from that page where they said "sit back and be happy you're not having to do all this yourself."

Why our engine never stops

-----------------------------

(Hey, why are we so fast, secure and scalable?)

Sit back and be happy that you're not having to do all this yourself

Linked to the "our-infrastructure page".

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Re:I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching... by patio11 on Wednesday January 11, 2012 @02:42PM (#3453291)

Thanks for the suggestions. We're still in the process of updating things, but we'll make "Compelling for non-technical users who just want things to not break, comprehensive for technical people who want to understand we're not snow-jobbing them." a priority.

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Re:I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching... by larrys on Wednesday January 11, 2012 @01:53PM (#3453071)

I just grep'd the log and saw that in the three hours since I posted the screen grab there were 1610 unique IP's. So obviously many more people were not able to reach the site.

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Re:I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching... by Cabal on Wednesday January 11, 2012 @10:20PM (#3454899)

http://twitter.com/#!/cwood/status/154373999382630400

These guys? Can't say it sounds very promising.

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