@harry4039 – Sorry to hear about that. I’m sure the client scale makes a difference. I’ll admit, they have made a few mistakes with us as well, but respond quickly and have generally been good in the support department. How do you like Linode?
And yes, Disqus is not ideal if you’re trying to address every commenting location.
EDIT: Also just discovered Linode is an infrastructure partner of WP-Engine. Looks like they are more of the raw hosting and less of the wp-optimization services, which is the specialization of WP-Engine.
@harry4039 – Another useful bit of information for you:
WordPress.com runs on WP-Engine, which is where we are now hosting our membership/lms/e-commerce WordPress site, and we have seen massive improvements in speed at their premium levels.
It is important to note that the level of concurrent users you’re talking about requires serious server scaling, especially when those users have profiles and are interacting constantly. The premium levels at WP-Engine start at $600 a month and go up from there, but since we have an extremely active user base, the non-profit I’m working with is going for it.
The support has been phenomenal, and while we still have some slow action on the backend at times, the front-end is more than twice as fast.
Also, we use Disqus for comments, which also greatly reduces server load since Disqus handles all the comment parsing and data flow. Unfortunately, their theming and customization options are seriously lacking (you can choose light or dark theme, woohoo!).
I’m really into testing the limits of WP and BP right now, and so far they handle well, though lots of development, fixes and customization are needed on a regular basis due to updates and bugs on a big stack of plugins. Good luck with yours!
~AA~
Footnote: I do not work with, nor am I associated with WP-Engine or Disqus in any way. 😉 In fact, I host most of my smaller sites on Dreamhost, and have generally thought $1K per month for hosting to be outrageous before now.
