BuddyPress.org

that’s a great article your blog looks nice as well. i think i’d probably agree with your conclusion but i am curious if you have encountered the issue over there where they are counting about 8 to 10 times the number of visitors GA reports (i believe due to faulty counting methods) it’s definitely giving me pause to refer any more business to them at least until the issue is resolved.

It’s a system wide issue yes in fact i am talking to their “Chief It Guy” about it. The difference you speak of (non-javascript enabled browsers) is typically about 20%. What they are counting as “Visitors” is running at about half of the total hits which typically correlates with files not visitors. The upshot is about 6 to 8 times larger visitor count then what you’re actually getting.

yeah i have basically proved that statement to be incorrect so like i say i’m hoping to resolve this and i will surely keep you posted but i would also pretty much assure you that if you compared your visitor counts today you would see the exact difference i’m talking about i have already confirmed it on two accounts i control and with another buddy who’s client got a nasty shock on their bill i guess.

Nothing good yet but they do seem to be taking the matter seriously (as one should expect) supposed to speak with them again today in fact. They have provided a few suggestions but none of them has done the trick (CDN, custom robots file) The last suggestion was a bit wanting IMO they suggested using a third party service to filter our traffic. If this truly is a system wide issue i’d think that they need to revise either their stated billing policy or their method of counting visitors. Just curious are you also experiencing this issue?

indeed, something tells me that this maybe a common problem amongst the managed wordpress hosts (pure conjecture nothing really to back that up) as they all charged based on visitors. i can say that the service itself has been great and having actual phone support as well as the fact that you don’t have to explain how wordpress works or what buddypress is every time you call in or start a ticket is very nice. there are a few quirks to the system that take a little getting used to but if it weren’t for this one issue i would have no hesitation to fully endorse them. anyway i’ll definitely update the thread once i have some kind of final resolution.

I haven’t experienced the bot / inflated visitor count issue on WP Engine, but I’ll keep an eye out for it. I currently have 2 large sites hosted there. I find WP Engine good for clients who don’t have much in house IT savvy.

If you’re looking to support a smaller shop and get more personalized support, I’ve enjoyed doing business with The Temple Host. I email them at support at thetemplehost dot com with the specs of the client project I’m working on and they always set me up with just the right amount of hosting. Prices don’t ballon each year. Great uptime. So refreshing. Heard about them through a friend. I think word of mouth might be their thing because I don’t understand how they offer such great hosting and support so cheap except for maybe the fact that they don’t have unnecessary bells and whistles on their own website hosting panel. It all works and is easy to navigate, but it’s not cPanel, they don’t offer a knowledge base, beginner tutorials, etc. They just offer solid hosting and support.

Hope that helps.

small update still no final resolution as of yet but they did reiterate that this issue is not normal so they wouldn’t be holding us to the inflated number in terms of billing so that’s definitely good and i do feel somewhat safer in recommending them. i would say that given the fact that i am personally 2 for 2 at this point i would definitely inform a client of the possibility prior to recommending them. i would say they have been very attentive in pretty much every support situation i have had so personally i have faith at this point at least they will turn out to be as i have suspected almost from the beginning the sort of ultimate managed hosting environment at least as it pertains to wordpress.

I don’t mean to take the discussion on a tangent but am curious, what is buddypress.org’s policy regarding affiliate links? The article’s conclusion is an affiliate link which for now I’ll accept is because Ben truly does like WPE and that is why he’s recommending them, not the commissions. So I’d like this clarified by a moderator so we know where the board stands officially (@mercime ?)

Getting back into the discussion, WPengine is unnecessarily expensive.  Buddypress users can get the same (and more) functionality with a few free and very low priced plugins at a fraction of the cost.

For example, using proper speed optimization methods (minify, cache, etc.) as well as free backup plugins and CDNs (1 TB of transfer for $40/year) – I won’t mention names here but you can easily find out the most popular CDN for wordpress and that is its price.

Even if you are a novice, setting up a few plugins is easy. If it isn’t, you can get someone to set it up for you at fiverrr or similar freelancer sites (freelancer, elancer, odesk, etc.) for very cheap.

The net result is a rock solid buddypress+wordpress install that runs blazingly fast and has daily backup. And the price? a very small fraction of WPengine’s price. I have this on a shared hosting plan with a great quality host found at webhostingtalk and my cost is $14/month at 200 GB bandwidth/month.

PS I just noticed that WPengine prices their plans according to ‘visits’ instead of the hosting industry standard of GB or TB of data transferred per month. This is disingenuous at best and downright sleazy at worst. Yet another reason to stay awaaaay!

well his article is not really on this site he was just promoting the article here and i’ve seen some be far more blatantly self promoting in their posts. Anyway i would say that putting an affiliate link attached to a review/comparison certainly calls into question the objectivity of the author, generally speaking.

Regarding WP Engine i think you over simplifying you analysis of the situation, @synaptic. First off it is standard practice amongst the managed wordpress specialty hosts to charge by visitor count. I would be the first to agree that its probably not he bet way to count usage and lends itself to discrepancy but so far at least they have been more then reasonable with me at least about not holding my customers to the inflated numbers. Also they offer way more then just an optimized platform, all they do is wordpress granted if you are extremely experienced or well staffed you can achieve what they offer for probably less money but if you cannot devote that level of time or resources to your own infrastructure wp engine (as well as the other wp specialty hosts I’m sure) provides a real value. Our site runs quite bit faster and more securely on their platform then it did with a basically whole vps (2 in fact) on dreamhost.

back to @cannedbear ‘s question @ 25K per month you are really talking about 1000 per day or on average about 5 or 10 at any given time during a week day. Even at that level i would not personally recommend any shared hosting for buddypress and in fact i’d say at that level you probably wouldn’t want shared hosting for any wordpress site, remember site/page load time is one of the top factors now in determining your page rank in google search results (at least according to google).

@synaptic as said before i would certainly agree that visitors is not the best way to gauge usage but it is the industry standard for this kind of hosting. These hosts are not simply slapping a few plugins on and calling it “wordpress hosting” at least not wp engine’s case. i know that people love to hate on dreamhost but their vps was fairly decent.

one thing i would say also is that you almost never know with the smaller hosting companies who you are actually buying your hosting from a lot of ‘hosts’ are simply reselling others’ services under their own brand. Oversell is common throughout the hosting world, always has been and just because your host maybe under capacity today doesn’t mean a thing if you outgrow them or they outgrow you. Fact of the matter is if you run buddypress then you are in the top 1% of sites in terms of server resources required to run your site, managed scalable wp hosting is a good solution for many situations, imo.

@bphelp @ubernaut Thanks for your reply!

well it’s an interesting post but it is contrary to my own personal experience with WP Engine i signed up right about the time he gave up. I would note the fact that he states that the CEO issued personal apology and reimbursement for the migration issue, thats seems like at least they took the issue seriously at some point. Also way he closes the post “Where I am today Back at Linode, back to running it myself.” This is exactly the reason it makes sense for people along a spectrum of technical expertise not just novices. Granted the WP managed hosts are not without their drawbacks and even WPE has some quirks that take a little getting used to.

WP Engine is the only company that provides both phone support and specialized wp hosting as far i know. The entire system is built from the ground up only to host WP sites. I cannot tell you how valuable it is when you call into support and you don’t have to explain how wordpress works or what buddypress is every time you are trying to get to the bottom of something. It is also the only hosting company i know that Automattic is financially involved in, to me that means something, i suspect it also means something to WPE.

In my experience the notion of a perfect host is a canard, what may be a great host today could be horrendous two years from now, but WPE aside from any deal killing kind of quirks is the best platform you could be hosted on aside from wordpress vip unless you truly can afford to do everything yourself.