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Re:WP Engine: How A Startup Reached $1M In Sales In Less Tha... by whalesalad on Wednesday April 11, 2012 @06:44PM (#3830021)
Holy cow. $1M for SUCH a simple concept. Offering reliable WP hosting is about as easy as changing batteries in a smoke detector. Not bitter about this, rather, nicely done capitalizing on such a simple thing.
Re:WP Engine: How A Startup Reached $1M In Sales In Less Tha... by patio11 on Wednesday April 11, 2012 @08:28PM (#3830349)
There is some serious infrastructure ensuring that that smoke detector is not overwhelmed by the roaring pyroclastic cataclysm that is having lots of Wordpress sites with arbitrarily well-coded PHP running in themes/addons/etc

Simplest example off the top of my head: there's an automated system which will kick you emails saying "You're sending MySQL ORDER BY RAND(). Not a great idea. We told MySQL to ignore it. There's a setting you can configure to override this if you're confident you know what you're doing. Site outages caused this year by people flipping that switch: 5."

Re:WP Engine: How A Startup Reached $1M In Sales In Less Tha... by jacques_chester on Wednesday April 11, 2012 @07:22PM (#3830151)
> Offering reliable WP hosting is about as easy as changing batteries in a smoke detector.

Please excuse me while I laugh bitterly and slightly hysterically.

Re:WP Engine: How A Startup Reached $1M In Sales In Less Tha... by sedev on Wednesday April 11, 2012 @08:16PM (#3830316)
I was just thinking something similar. Did we all learn nothing from the recent spate of PHP critiques? Wordpress has several delightful qualities, but "runs easily and smoothly with minimal maintenance required" is not among them unless you are among the least demanding possible users of it.
Re:WP Engine: How A Startup Reached $1M In Sales In Less Tha... by bigiain on Wednesday April 11, 2012 @07:49PM (#3830239)
True.

The smart thing here was recognizing that it's such an obvious pain point to people in purchase decision advising roles. As a Wordpress dev, do you advise your clients to save a few bucks by using shared GoDaddy Wordpress hosting @ ~$5/month, knowing you'll end up needing to field support calls for GoDaddy problems and spend ongoing time securing and updating the site (and _still_ end up p0wned because some other GoDaddy customer hasn't updated), or do you tell the client "You can have inexpensive hosting, but the support comes at $~100/hr, or you can buy business-grade hosting from wp-engine and you'll almost _never_ have security/uptime/speed problems".

I know what _I've_ advised people recently (especially since the lowest wp-engine plan dropped to $30/month. That's a no-brainer in my opinion!)

Re:WP Engine: How A Startup Reached $1M In Sales In Less Tha... by mhp on Wednesday April 11, 2012 @07:02PM (#3830074)
Do they say anywhere whether they mean $1MM in total sales or that they are now doing $1MM per month in sales? Those are two totally different concepts and I'm not sure which hurdle WPEngine has crossed.
Re:WP Engine: How A Startup Reached $1M In Sales In Less Tha... by dotBen on Wednesday April 11, 2012 @09:31PM (#3830553)
It's $1MM year (although we're now way past that milestone)
Re:WP Engine: How A Startup Reached $1M In Sales In Less Tha... by ezequiel-garzon on Wednesday April 11, 2012 @07:23PM (#3830158)
And they are rather pricey: $29/mo. for 1 domain and up to 25000 visits... I would expect personalized design in addition to hosting for that kind of money.

Of course, all the power to them if they make their customers happy.

Re:WP Engine: How A Startup Reached $1M In Sales In Less Tha... by bigiain on Wednesday April 11, 2012 @07:56PM (#3830258)
That's the thing - they're not trying to compete with GoDaddy hosting and offshore WP stock template design firms, or to sell to personal bloggers with a cpanel account and "Teach yourself Wordpress in 21 days" books.

They're offering a reasonably priced service to people who've tried that route and found it enough grief that it's worth a few grand for a decent web design and Wordpress config/integration, and $30/month to host it.

If a business can't justify those sorts of numbers on 20,000 visits a month, they probably need to rethink their whole web strategy.

Re:WP Engine: How A Startup Reached $1M In Sales In Less Tha... by dotBen on Wednesday April 11, 2012 @09:32PM (#3830556)
If I may answer that with a link, this is why we start at $29/mo (and most people pay us more), and why we're not trying to compete with the $5-$10/mo type hosts:

http://wpengine.com/special/

Re:WP Engine: How A Startup Reached $1M In Sales In Less Tha... by larholm on Thursday April 12, 2012 @04:19AM (#3831509)
25,000 might sound like a lot of visits, but I have been beyond that in mere hours with a single slashdotting.

Well, that was in 2004 when /. was big. Today, I would fear the Reddit frontpage.

The next step up? Going from $29/mo. to $99/mo.

I might just not be their target customer.

Re:WP Engine: How A Startup Reached $1M In Sales In Less Tha... by smartbear on Friday April 13, 2012 @10:53AM (#3836983)
If you spike, we don't care and we don't charge you extra. We only care if you're consistently significantly over the limit month over month.