I’d like to throw a quick shout out to the new company my buddy co-founded and that is hosting PUBLIC SCHOOL. It is called WP Engine and is a new WordPress hosting platform that is more advanced and configurable than WordPress.com but a hell of a lot cheaper than WordPress’ enterprise solutions. They’re publicly launching and opening up the waiting list for signups this week but over the last two months we’ve been lucky enough to be given some of the first access to the platform.
My buddy Cullen had complained to me for a while that there were no cheap solutions for WordPress hosting that handled backups, security, and scalability for blogs. Your options were limited to WordPress.com which only allows for a tiny bit of customization, a self hosted installation with which you have to handle all of the backups and upgrades, or a full on WordPress enterprise solution which costs several thousands of dollars a month. Faced with that problem he and his partner decided to build a company around solving that problem.
WP Engine is the product and reason why we moved from a self hosted Media Temple installation. With their system, they handle all of the software installation and backups leaving you to work on your site. If you’re an existing blog you can use their custom developed plugin to transfer all of your blog posts, comments and images to their server. They then refine WordPress to make it faster and install caching plugins to help your site handle spikes in traffic. For us, with the amount of images we normally serve up per day, this is important, especially now that Google is taking page load times in to account when calculating search rankings. Our traffic has quadrupled in the last 3 months and yet over that time our load times have decreased.
Aside from not having to deal with backups and issues with WordPress’ security, the main feature I like is the one button staging site plugin they have developed. With the plugin, you can create a staging “mirror” site that is only accessible to you that has all your current posts and images on it. You can then make changes, add plugins, and test the usability before you ever make anything live on the actual site. This has kept me from having to work on the site late at night when traffic lulls. I can now test our updates and changes any time during the day and then implement them on the live site when they’re fully cooked.
Overall they’ve made it a breeze to switch over from Media Temple. Since having switched we haven’t had any down time or issues with the notorious “Failed To Write File To Disk” error that Media Temple has never been able to fix/explain. To me, the best kind of hosting is the kind you don’t have to even think about. You should be able to work on your content and be done with it. Its not in my interest to spend the entire day trying to be an IT department when I should be promoting the growth of PUBLIC SCHOOL. WPEngine has helped me do that immensely over the last couple of months. You should sign up and see what they can do for you.
For more information visit their site and read through the features.
